Chapter 16: Forty Dollars
The clerk's office for Carrow County Superior Court is in the basement of the courthouse on Third Street.
Forty-one steps down from the lobby. I counted them on the way down and again on the way up.
There is a counter with three windows and a sign that says two of them are closed.
On the wall to the left of the counter, in a black frame, is the fee schedule.
I read the whole thing standing up, twice, the way you read a menu when you cannot afford the menu.
Copies, plain, per page: ten cents.
Certification, per document: five dollars. Exemplification: fifteen dollars.
Records retrieval from off-site archive: twenty-five dollars.
Reproduction of full case file: forty dollar deposit, balance due at pickup.
There it was, in a frame, in a basement, in a building I had walked past four days a week for three months.
Forty dollars.
I had nineteen.
The clerk at window one was maybe twenty-four. Short-sleeved shirt, tie, a name tag that said BENNIE.
He slid the form across without looking up. Request for Copies of Court Record. One page, both sides.
Line one, case number.
I wrote it from memory.
I have never had to look up my own case number. I could write it right now, on any surface, and I have tested that on myself.
Line two, party name. I wrote mine. Line three, are you a party to this case.
Yes.
Line four, if yes, which party. There is a box for plaintiff, a box for defendant, and a box for other.
I checked defendant. It is a small box. It took about a second.
That second was worse than the aisle in the Foodway and worse than the mailbox on Pell Street.
In the Foodway I was a woman who had done six years, looking at a woman in a striped shirt. At that counter I was a line item. Defendant. Checked box. Ten cents a page.
Line five, describe the records requested.
I wrote: entire case file, all documents, all exhibits, all transcripts, plain copies, no certification.
Bennie read it upside down and then turned it around. “Whole file?”
“Yes.”
“That's going to be a lot.”
“I know.”
“You want transcripts? Those come from the reporter. Different form, by the page, and it's not ten cents.”
“Whatever's in the court file. If the transcript is in the file, I want it.”
He typed the case number in and read the screen for eleven or twelve seconds. Then he did a thing with his face that I have seen a hundred times since, on clerks, on paralegals, on one judge.
He read the charge line and his face went flat on purpose.
“It's archived off-site,” he said. “Retrieval's part of the deposit. Forty dollars, and then you settle the balance when you pick it up.”
“How long.”
“Four to six weeks. They do a run every other Tuesday.”
“And the deposit's due today.”
“Deposit's due when you file the request. The request isn't filed till the deposit's paid.”
I had nineteen dollars in a sock in a metal locker at 41 Anselm Street and four dollars and eighty cents in my pocket.
“Can I file it and pay in three weeks.”
“No, ma'am.”
He was not being cruel. He was reading a rule off a screen that somebody else wrote in a room he has never been in. I have been that person since. I have said no to people at a counter because a screen said no.
“Can I keep the form,” I said.
That surprised him. He looked up for the first time. “It's a form,” he said. “There's a stack of them.”
He turned the stack so it faced me. I took two, because I have never trusted myself with one copy of anything.
I folded them in half and put them inside my shirt against my back, because it was raining and I had no bag.
Forty-one steps up.
Out through the lobby, past the metal detector, past the bench where people wait for public defenders, and out onto Third Street.
Vega Bail Bonds is directly across that street. I could see the neon from the courthouse steps.
I had been scanning other people's files, four hundred pages a day, thirty feet from a basement that had four hundred and twelve pages of mine in it.
I did not know the number yet. I want to be accurate. That night the number was still just the word whole.
I signed the book at 5:14, destination column blank, because I had left it blank on the way out too.
Then I put both copies of the form flat in the bottom of the metal locker, under the certificate, on top of the six envelopes.
Forty dollars.
Nineteen in a sock.
I sat on the edge of the bunk and did the arithmetic four separate ways and every way came out to the same answer, which was three weeks.