Chapter 100: Costs
I had one thousand one hundred and forty dollars and sixty-six cents in a credit union account.
Seven months of skipping lunch, plus a tax refund I had not expected and had not spent.
I needed eight thousand seven hundred, inside twenty-two weeks.
I made a sheet. Three columns. Owed, earned, gap. I updated it on Sunday nights in pencil, and I never once used a pen on it.
I taped it inside my locker door, where nobody but me would open it.
Then I went to Marisol, which I had put off for nine days and rehearsed twice.
She was in the back running a skip trace on a man who had missed two court dates and one surgery.
“I need more hours,” I said.
“There aren't more hours. You've seen the board.” I told her I needed different ones, then.
She turned around in the chair. She has a way of looking at you that costs something.
“How much.”
“Eight thousand seven hundred. By March.”
“For lawyers?”
“For an engineer. The lawyers are free. The engineer is four hundred an hour.”
She said nothing about my case. She has never once, in all the years since, said anything about my case.
“Thirty-one boxes in the storage unit on Reddish Road. Ninety-four to twenty-eleven. Paper.”
“How many pages.”
“I don't know. Forty thousand. Fifty. My father never threw anything out, and neither did I after him.”
“What do you want done.”
“Indexed and scanned. Searchable. Names, case numbers, disposition dates. Flag anything still open.”
“That's not scanning. That's abstracting.”
“That's why it pays eighteen an hour and not nine forty.”
I did the arithmetic on the whiteboard in front of her, because I did not trust myself to do it silently and stay honest about it.
Four hundred and eighty-four hours. Sixteen a week on top of my forty. Thirty weeks.
“That's past March.”
“Then do more than sixteen.”
“I have curfew until October. Ten p.m. They call the landline.”
“Then work here until curfew, log every hour, and if you steal from me I'll drive you back to the gate myself.”
“You know I won't.”
“I know nothing of the sort. That's why I said it out loud.”
I took the key. A Schlage with green electrical tape wrapped round the head so I could find it by feel in a pocket.
I started that Saturday at 7:10 in the morning with the first six boxes and a pot of coffee that was not mine.
Thirty-one boxes. Fourteen inches of paper each. I measured one with a ruler.
I did not scan first. I sorted first. The hours are all in the sorting and none of them are in the glass.
Bail applications. Indemnity agreements. Forfeiture notices. Discharge orders. Correspondence that should have been shredded in 2003.
In box nine I found four bonds forfeited and never discharged after the case was dismissed.
I flagged them and left them on her chair with a note.
She got two reversed and one refunded four thousand two hundred dollars.
She did not thank me. She moved me to nineteen fifty on the next check and said nothing about why.
I said nothing either.
By December I had five thousand two hundred and eleven dollars.
By February I had seven thousand four hundred, and the engineer agreed to bill in three stages.
I paid him three thousand up front on the eighth. He cashed it on the ninth. I checked.
What I could not solve was the fifty dollars.
Every month the state took fifty dollars out of my wages and called it restitution.
It was a term of the judgment. The judgment was not vacated. I was petitioning, and petitioning is not winning.
So the deduction ran the whole time I was paying an engineer to prove I never owed it.
I had paid it since my first month inside, out of prison wages of nineteen cents an hour, and then out of the scanning job.
One night in the storage unit I stopped in the middle of box twenty-two and worked out the total.
Sixty-eight months. Two missed in my first year, made up later in installments.
Three thousand four hundred and twelve dollars.
I sat down on the closed lid of box twenty-two with the calculator in my hand.
Restitution in a homicide case goes to the estate of the deceased. That is not discretionary. That is the statute.
The estate of Nadine Okoro had one beneficiary. He was sixteen when it was opened.
Every dollar, every month, for six years, had gone to Theo Okoro.
I had been sending money to the boy who wrote me six letters telling me what I was.
He would have had to cash them. He was sixteen, then nineteen, then twenty-two.
I put the calculator down, finished box twenty-two, and started box twenty-three at ten past nine.
I did not think about it again until March, when Brandt asked me a question about restitution and I had to say the number out loud in a room with three law students in it.