"Go ahead, Sergeant."
"This morning, in your lobby," he said, "about an hour before this hearing, I walked up to Ms. Reddick while she was sitting in a chair minding her own business, and I took out my badge and held it in front of her face, and I demanded to know who she was and what she was doing here. I asked for her identification and she gave it to me. I had no reason. I'd seen her take a picture of the docket. That was the reason. That, and—" He stopped. He made himself go on. "And what she looked like. I'd like the board to know I did that. Your officer at the desk saw it. I'd like it in the record."
The court reporter's fingers moved. Nobody else did.
"My son told you a while ago that he said my name because it always worked," Neal said. "I'd like to tell you why it always worked. It worked because I made it work. When he was seventeen and got picked up at the Garden, I made a phone call. When he was eighteen and got pulled over on 24, I didn't make the call, somebody made it for me, and I said thank you. I said thank you, and I went upstairs, and I stood in the door of his room, and I didn't wake him up." His voice did something there, and he waited until it stopped. "He learned it from me. Not from anything I said. From what I did. I'd been showing a badge to people in hallways his whole life. He just didn't have a badge. So he used my name, and when that ran out he used a knife. And a boy with his hands up is dead."
He looked across the aisle then. He had not meant to. Sheila Galvin was looking back at him. It was the first time in fifteen years.
"I've been sitting in the second row," he said, to her as much as to the board, "waiting to tell you my son's changed. He has. Ms. Reddick told you how. I'm the one who hasn't, I found out this morning. I came in this building like I was walking into one of those apartments. I'm sixty-one. I've got eleven months till I can retire at full pension. I don't know what I'm going to do with the eleven months. But I'd like the board to know that whatever you decide about my son, it should be about him. Not about me. Not about my name. He's spent fifteen years getting out from under it." He put his hands on either side of the podium. "That's all. I'm sorry, Mrs. Galvin. I'm sorry I never said it to you before."
He went back to his seat. Maureen did not take his hand. She put her palm flat on the middle of his back, between the shoulder blades, and left it there, and he felt the warmth of it through his shirt and his jacket for the rest of the hour.
Rosado thanked him. She said, "We'll now hear from those in opposition," and the DA's man stood, and his name was Kearns, and he spoke for twelve minutes in the even, unhurried voice of a man who had done this many times and believed in it every time. He said that the Commonwealth did not doubt Mr. Dwyer's progress. He said the Commonwealth commended it. He said that the Commonwealth nonetheless asked the board to consider that Mr. Dwyer had carried a knife every day that summer by his own admission, that he had used it on an unarmed young man with his hands raised, and that fifteen years, in the Commonwealth's view, measured against the whole of a life that Elijah Galvin did not get to live, was not yet enough. He asked for a denial with a review in five years. He sat down.
Then the victim witness advocate stood and helped Sheila Galvin to the podium, and adjusted the microphone down for her, and stepped back.