Chapter 20: Page One
I opened it on the twenty-first of October, a Tuesday, at 6:40 in the evening.
There was no reason. I have looked for one for years and there is not one.
I came in, hung my coat on the back of the door, and ate a sandwich standing up.
Then I took the towel off the bottom drawer.
The table in that room was a card table with a vinyl top and one leg that folded wrong.
I put a book under that leg.
Then I put the four hundred and twelve pages on the table and turned on the lamp.
The paper bands were gummed and had gone hard.
I cut both of them with the box cutter, one stroke each, away from myself.
That is the only thing the box cutter was ever used for.
Then I did what I had been trained to do, which is not to read.
You do not read a file first. Anybody who reads a file first is going to be told a story by whoever assembled it.
You inventory it first.
I squared the stack. I put it on my left.
I took a pencil out of my coat.
Then I went through all four hundred and twelve pages, one at a time, front to back, and I did four things to each one.
One. Look at the top.
Every document in a court file has a caption or a header or a stamp, and it tells you what it is before you read a word.
Two. Number it. Top right corner, in pencil, light, one through four hundred and twelve.
They came to me with no numbering of their own, which is normal for plain copies, and a file with no numbers is a file that can lose a page and never tell you.
Three. Note it. I had a legal pad, two dollars, ruled, and I wrote a line for each document.
Page range, document type, number of pages, anything stamped on it.
Four. Look at the back of the page. Always.
Copy clerks miss two-sided documents constantly, and a blank back is not the same as no back.
That pass took two hours and forty minutes, and I did not read one sentence of narrative in it, which is harder than it sounds when your own name is in the caption.
It came out to sixty-one documents, which is a small file for a felony and an enormous one for a case that never went to trial.
Here is the top of my list, in the order the county gave them to me.
Cover sheet. One page. Case number, caption, date of reproduction, PAGES: 412. The caption reads the State against me, in that order, which is the order it is always in and which I had never once seen printed on paper of my own.
Docket sheet. Eleven pages. Every entry the clerk made from the day it opened to the day it closed.
Information charging the offense. Three pages.
Arrest report. Two pages. Booking sheet. One page, with the photograph on it.
Incident report, county sheriff, with continuation narrative and a scene diagram. Nine pages.
Chemical test documentation. Six pages.
Photograph log and reproduced photographs. Twenty-two pages.
Property and evidence receipts. Four pages.
Witness statements. Three of them. Eleven pages total.
Waiver of preliminary hearing. One page, signed.
Plea agreement. Six pages, initialed at the bottom of each.
Written statement of the defendant. Two pages.
Transcript of plea hearing. Forty-one pages.
Presentence investigation report. Thirty-eight pages.
Victim impact statement. Four pages.
Judgment and sentence. Five pages.
And then a hundred and ninety-odd pages of the ordinary machinery. Notices of hearing. Certificates of service. Continuances. Transport orders. Fee assessments. Restitution schedules. Three separate copies of the same notice of appeal rights, because three different offices each filed one.
Sixty-one documents. Four hundred and twelve pages. Nothing missing against the docket.
I checked that. That is the whole point of the docket sheet and it is the first thing anybody with my training does.
You take the eleven pages of docket entries and go down them with a pencil.
Every entry that says a document was filed, you find that document in the stack, and you tick it.
I did that at 9:20 at night at a card table with a book under one leg.
Every entry ticked. Nothing filed that was not in the stack. Nothing in the stack that was not on the docket.
It was a complete file.
I sat back and looked at eleven pages of ticks.
There is a feeling that goes with a clean inventory, and I had it, and I want to be honest that I had it.
It is the feeling of a job done properly.
For about ninety seconds on the twenty-first of October I was pleased with myself, in a rented room, over a file that had my own name in the caption.
Then I turned to page one of the incident report and started reading.