The first time I saw David Prum, he was dancing. Surrounded by seven lithe and muscular modern dancers, Prum was noticeably out of place in their slender company—he had the roundness of a jolly Chinese Buddha and the red-gold hair and ruddy face of an Irish cop. Barefoot, wearing beige khakis and a light blue button-down shirt, he was, according to the cast notes in the program, providing “ordinary motion.” The program also said he was a regular performer with the troupe. He conducted himself on the floor with quiet composure, making serene, fluid turns, an arm occasionally outstretched, while all around him the other dancers made fabulous leaps.
I was in my mid-twenties at the time, working at a small coffeeshop near Harvard Square. I had finished up the last semesters of college after dropping out twice to travel and live abroad in Scotland and Costa Rica. I still had the mindset of living from adventure to adventure and was planning to save up tips and wages at the coffeeshop until I could finance the next adventure, whatever that would be.
A week or so after seeing him dance, I bumped into Prum at the coffeeshop and complimented him on his performance. We struck up a friendship. He was about ten years older than me, worked as a private investigator, and made his own hours. He spent a lot of mornings at the café and quickly became one of my favorite regulars. It was always a pleasure to see him benignly holding his own over a mug of dark brew, engaging a tattooed twenty-something about their latest art project, talking politics with the guys from the ice delivery company, or listening gently to old Billy, a grey haired, semi-coherent guy we gave free cups of coffee. This was before laptops and cell phones, and I loved the conversations and laughter rising from the tables there, the gentle, steamy hiss of the espresso machine, the earthy smells of dark coffee and bread, and the sunshine pouring in from the big windows by the door.
As I got to know Prum better while wiping down a table or hanging out after a shift, I tried to press him for stories of danger and mayhem from his working life, but he laughed me off. “People think of violence as this chaotic, random thing,” he told me. “But unless you’re, you know, dealing with someone totally whacked out on drugs, there’s a story there. The story they’re acting out might not be a story that makes sense to you. In some ways, a lot of crime is just bad performance art. But when I go out looking for witnesses, I’m not part of the story. People don’t care about me. They’ve got no reason to be interested in me, to get caught up. I’m a non-combatant.” He laughed. “I’m like the Red Cross.”
“Do you ever carry a gun?” I asked once, trying to sound casual.
“No, no. No. A file folder is probably a better defense.”
“A file folder?”
“Yeah, you know those things, a manila file folder. If I’m walking around a neighborhood where there’s a lot of poverty, people assume that I’m a social worker, that the folder is my case file, and nobody bothers me.”
About eight months into our friendship, Prum was fired by his mentor, an Irish ex-cop, over a surveillance that went wrong. Now out on his own and looking for company, Prum started inviting me to join him on some of his jobs—a surveillance of an alcoholic lawyer wasting billable hours at a strip club, a frenzied day of government record research into a corrupt land deal. After a couple months of occasionally accompanying Prum for fun, I decided to take the plunge and actually work for him.
I was interested in the bulk of his work, his investigations for public defense attorneys who were providing representation for people too poor to pay for a lawyer. Prum spoke with the same gentle good humor about the people involved in his cases as he did about the members of his dance troupe. He called the work “being a friend to the friendless.”
I decided my next adventure was to enter Prum’s working world to see if I could be as open and warm with people caught in brutal criminal situations as he was. I wanted to be able to look at poverty and crime without shying away, without judging. I didn’t want my sense of happiness in the world—my love of the cozy, bohemian atmosphere of the coffeeshop—to depend on turning a blind eye to the world’s harsher realities.
I was challenging myself because I had grown up with my father’s grim view of human nature, his social-Darwinist belief that people are, at the core, violent—an outlook common to his Cold War generation. Kindness, gentleness, and beauty were, to my father, just frivolous and irrelevant hothouse flowers that would perish at the slightest brush with the real world. Growing up with him left me with a reservoir of fear about strangers, and an anxiety that the qualities I valued were fragile and made me weak. Yet here was Prum, investigating violent crimes every day with a steady kindness and love of beauty at the core of who he was, and a steady sense that most people are not fundamentally dangerous. With his help, I wanted to step outside my father’s worldview and become less afraid.
Prum began by feeding me small district court cases. Many of our investigations were just checking to see if the police had been honest in handling the case. After about five months of interviewing witnesses—to assaults, robberies, drug busts, bar fights—I was doing a pretty good job of managing my fear of the neighborhoods where the crimes had happened. None of the witnesses whose doors I knocked on were obligated to talk to me, but I was finding out that a little friendliness opened most of the time into a friendly conversation.
Then Prum decided it was time to try me on a more serious superior court case: a drug murder at an abandoned job site. The victim was a teenager who had allegedly stolen some crack from a man named Jose. A few days after the theft, according to the interviews, Jose saw the victim coming out of an AA meeting, gathered some friends, and followed him into the vacant lot. The murder involved a knife, two planks, and a shovel. Reading through the case binder, a six-inch thick stack of police reports and depositions, the whole situation had a tragic Lord of the Flies feel. Children squabbling in a wasteland, hide-and-go-seek turned brutal, turned irreversible. One of the accused was fourteen.
I was nervous about the case and convinced Prum to come along for the first interviews. It was a brutally cold day, with windchill at -10º. Traffic lights were bouncing around in the wind and the sidewalks were empty. Our plan was to talk to the girlfriends; initially they had covered for the young men but by the time the police came around again, they’d decided they wanted no part of the trouble.
On the highway out to Framingham, where we hoped to find and interview one of the girlfriends, I turned on my tape recorder and Prum and I began to talk over the case. At some point, sucked into the drama of the theft and murder, I asked him if he thought someone like Jose was evil.
“Oh, Jesus. No, I don’t think Jose is evil. How about, I don’t know…vile.” Then, more seriously, “But not, you know, finally vile. It’s a vile act. But a guy like Jose, he’s been waiting for something like this to happen.”
“Waiting for it?”
“Yeah. For a guy like Jose, what are his options in his life? What seems real to him? I mean, like I’ve said to you before, a really underappreciated aspect of crime is its narrative quality, it’s performative quality. There’s a story here. This murder—in some ways it’s a role that’s been waiting for Jose. It makes sense to him. I mean it’s not that he’s necessarily a bad guy, but this kind of trouble, people have probably been expecting it of him, at school, on the streets. So there’s a kind of narrative resolution to his life when it finally happens.”
“So…you’re saying the desire for life to make sense…is stronger than the desire for it to be good or bad?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, pursing his lips. “Right. Everybody’s looking for that narrative arc for their life.”
“And that’s the story for Jose?”
“Yeah. For you and me, you know, we had the whole middle-class story. Go to college, get a job, contribute to the world. This is a guy with no education, probably surrounded by people expecting him to fuck something up at some point. To go to jail.
“Think about it this way—the whole hysterical way we treat crime in this society makes criminal roles really potent, really appealing. They become a desirable good, in of themselves. Say you’re a teenager, barely educated, haven’t really been to school. Your options in the world are to be a peon at McDonald’s or to get into crime, and not only probably make more money but become one of society’s demons. What’s more attractive, being a peon, or being a demon?
“People like to talk about crimes like this being senseless. What’s senseless is sitting in your suburban home with your SUV parked out front, and pretending that you’re not part of the dog-eat-dog aspect of the world. Now that’s fucking senseless.”
We pulled up in Prum’s rusty old silver Cadillac on a Framingham street lined with rundown triple-decker houses. Windows boarded up with graffitied plywood, sidewalks cracked with dead weeds, a screen door hanging open and flapping in the wind. It was not inviting. Prum turned the engine off and busily began tying his tie. In the passenger’s seat, I was nervously thumbing through the case file. The murder, with its gruesome details, had me spooked. Across the street, a couple of tall, skinny teenagers wearing only jeans and sweatshirts were leaning in an open doorway, their breath pluming into the frigid air.
Tie tied, Prum got out of the car and, with me following, crossed the street. At the curb was an empty Camaro, idling, its windows rolled down. As we walked past the car and the teens leaning in the doorway, Prum gave a friendly nod; they stared back impassively. Two houses down, he opened a chain link gate and we picked our way around the ice on the walkway and up the sagging, paint-worn steps to the front porch. I stood a step behind Prum, hunched against the wind and bitter cold. He knocked.
The door swung slowly open. Inside, his hand stretching up to grab the doorknob, was a little boy holding a ravioli can with a red-smeared spoon sticking out of it. The boy turned silently and led us into the hallway. A couple of men were leaning against the wall by a plywood door with the number “2” written on it in black magic marker. The child stopped by the men at the door. All of them stared at us.
Stepping back so he had everyone in view, a move as graceful and calm as his turns on the dance floor, Prum smiled—a big smile, generous, playful, and sheepish all at the same time—and said, “How ya doin’?”
The men visibly relaxed, and a conversation began. They ended up inviting us into the apartment, where the mother of one of the girlfriends lived. The home was vibrant and warm, full of children’s toys and framed photographs of smiling people.
It turned out that the girlfriend was away; no one knew where or for how long. As we walked back out of the dark hallway and headed down the road to the car, I felt a surge of relief. We were on our way home.
The teens in the sweatshirts were gone, but the Camaro was still at the curb, windows still open. Now there was a man sitting in it, a dark wool hat pulled down over his ears.
Back in the car with the engine warming up, Prum was looking back through the case file when we heard shouting from the house next to us. We looked up. A heavyset guy in a grey sweatshirt and blue jeans was staggering off the front porch and down onto his knees. My first whirling thought was, he’s a carpenter, he’s working on the porch, he’s shouting to his buddy for his tools. Then I saw the blood spouting from his head into the snow.
Prum shoved the case files onto my lap, threw the door open, and as the wind came blasting into the car, sprinted across the snowy lawn—his arms pumping, his big belly heaving—toward the fallen man. I sat terrified, wondering if we had stumbled into another drug deal gone bad.
At the foot of the porch, Prum bent over to check the guy, who was now lying full length in the snow. Then he went up the stairs and slowly, carefully disappeared through the open door. The only thing I could think to contribute was to slide into the driver’s seat and pull the car forward, closer to the porch, in case Prum came running back out.
A few minutes later, Prum reappeared with a dishcloth in his hand. He kneeled down in the snow and applied it to the guy’s head, then impatiently waved me over. I stared for a moment, turned the engine off, and got out, leaving the doors unlocked for quick reentry. Down the street, the driver of the Camaro was now leaning against his car, watching.
When I got to the porch, Prum told me to keep the cloth pressed tight to the guy’s head while he called an ambulance. The guy’s eyes were closed, but he was groaning steadily. He was doughy white, and there was blood all through his stubble and moustache and down the back of his neck onto his sweatshirt. Behind me, I heard scrabbling in the dark hallway, and a pit-bull came bolting past us onto to the lawn. Out on the blood-spattered snow, it stopped, and then started to run in tight circles, occasionally glancing up at us, panting heavily. The guy opened his eyes and called feebly, “Princess! Princess! C’meah! C’meah Princess!”
Prum got off the phone and took over the dishcloth again. The guy drifted into silence while Princess kept running in nervous circles. I stayed out of her way.
A few minutes later, the street was full of flashing lights, and I noticed that the Camaro was gone. A couple of EMTs carefully bundled the guy onto a stretcher and took him away in an ambulance. A cop eventually calmed down Princess and loaded her into a van. It was now dark. While Prum talked to the two remaining police officers, I picked up some snow and rubbed my hands clean.
There hadn’t been anyone in the house. After some discussion, the police pulled the front door shut and said they would look into it. Prum’s take was that either the guy had been drunk and had just fallen down, or had been fighting with his wife, and that she went off through the back. He was wearing a wedding ring.
We walked back to the car in silence, drove to a nearby pizza place and in the tiny bathroom sink, scrubbed at the stains of blood on our jackets. Prum kept reassuring me that this was the first time in fifteen years he’d ever seen blood while out on a job, but I was in shock. That it was probably a drunken accident didn’t lessen the painful messiness of the situation, exacerbated by the hostility of the freezing weather and the hovering reality of the brutal murder we were investigating.
With me still in a daze, we got a couple slices and sat down. I dragged Prum into a conversation about how to make sense of the ugly social realities. How did he live with stuff like this—the story Jose was stuck with, the ongoing crack deals, the drinking, the neglected neighborhood, the indifferent neighbors, the indifferent cops, the whole thing? Slowly eating his pizza, Prum ran through various ways to disentangle the strands of personal and communal responsibility. I can’t remember the details, just the sense of trying to get out of him some outlook to help face the case work every day. When I’d exhausted myself, he ended the conversation by saying, “Look, I don’t want to be melodramatic or anything, but—it’s depressing.”
~
After the bloody encounter in Framingham, I started feeling spooked in a new way when I went out knocking on doors. What if I’d been alone out there? Would I have run to that guy’s aid? So unhesitatingly? At all? Prum continued to assure me that it was the first time he’d ever seen violence out on the job, but I’d been shaken out of the sense that I might be able to face the investigations for years and years as he had. After several months of letting my cases pile up, I had to admit that I couldn’t keep working for Prum. I was almost out of money and was going to have to break my apartment lease.
The adventurous side of me had always wanted to trust fall onto the world, to toss aside possessions and job prospects, and see what or who would catch me. It was Prum who caught me. My father would have condemned my desertion of the job as weakness, but Prum didn’t judge me any more than he judged anyone else. He let me stash my stuff in his basement and sleep in his office all that summer while I took on some shifts back at the coffeehouse and figured out what to do next. I felt strangely relieved to have hit my personal rock bottom, which wasn’t far down after all, thanks to Prum.
His office was just across the street from the Middlesex courthouse and jail. For most of the time I was staying there, I went undetected, though there were a couple embarrassing morning run-ins with lawyers who shared the lobby. Prum was letting me take showers at his house and was generous about having me over for dinner with his family.
Walking to the coffeehouse for a shift, I would pass through a crowd of scattered groups in front of the courthouse—cops, lawyers, families of the accused or the accusing—milling around in little knots all united by drifting coils of cigarette smoke. Around back, I might see a group of prisoners dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, washing down one of the squad cars. A few blocks in the other direction was the CambridgeSide Galleria, a big shopping mall with a fountain and a food court. A lot of people went down to the mall from the courthouse; it was cheap and entertaining in a somewhat depressing, casino-like way. At night, lying on the floor of the office in my sleeping bag, I could see the red lights blinking on the jailhouse tower across the street. I was a little frightened about my future but relieved not to be working cases, and being back at the coffeeshop again was grounding.
Eventually, I decided on another adventure. I applied to divinity school, was accepted, and the program seemed like my best option. I spent an afternoon at their loan office and decided to go for it. I figured I could add the monthly payment to whatever career I was able to weave together after I finished the program. I wasn’t looking to become a priest or minister but to study the influence of Christian theology on western literature, and maybe become a high school teacher. As I was getting ready to move into a new apartment with some friends and start classes, I picked up freelance writing work for a travel marketing company and suddenly was making more money than I ever had. I was hopeful again about my future.
In the meantime, Prum continued to be a beloved presence at the coffeehouse, as relaxed there as he was fearless that day in Framingham. In his good humored way, Prum embodied a masculinity that was brave and gentle, clear eyed and creative, strong and open. He freed me from my father’s unforgiving judgment, of me and of human nature. Though I had learned I wasn’t cut out for a daily diet of criminal investigations, I had come out of the experience less scared of people. I was absorbing Prum’s perspective that most people caught in violent situations are not, in fact, violent at the core—that kindness, gentleness, and beauty can not only survive harsh realities but can also help heal inflicted trauma.
