Chapter 22: The Photographs
Photographs in a plain copy of a court file are not photographs.
They are photocopies of photocopies, run through a machine that does not know what it is looking at.
Faces go to grey. Sky goes to white. Anything dark goes to a solid black shape with no information in it. Detail is the first thing a copier throws away.
There were twenty-two pages of them, four to a page on some, one to a page on others.
Each one has a log entry: number, description, photographer, date, time.
The log is on the first two pages and it is typed, and the descriptions are eleven words or less.
Photograph 1. Roadway northbound, approach.
Photograph 2. Roadway northbound, at point of impact.
Photograph 4. Fog line and shoulder, looking north, measuring tape in frame.
Photograph 7. Tire marks, southern origin.
Photograph 11. Vehicle at final rest, driver side.
Photograph 12. Vehicle at final rest, front.
Photograph 14. Windshield, passenger side.
Photograph 17. Bicycle, as found.
Photograph 18. Bicycle, rear lamp, illuminated.
I want to tell you about eighteen.
On the page it is a grey rectangle about two inches across with a small white blur in the lower third of it.
That is all it is. That is what a working red bicycle lamp looks like after two generations of a copier.
A white blur, in the dark, at the side of a road, at midnight, doing exactly what it was bought to do.
I looked at that one longer than I looked at any other page in the file.
Then I turned it over, because I always turn them over, and the back was blank, and I wrote 218 in the corner in pencil and went on.
The vehicle photographs told me nothing, because they were black shapes on white.
I understand now what was in those photographs. I have seen the originals since, at a resolution that meant something, and there is a great deal in them.
At a card table in a rented room in October I had grey rectangles and eleven-word descriptions.
That is not anybody hiding anything. That is what ten cents a page buys you.
I want that said plainly, because people have wanted me to say the county buried it, and the county did not bury it.
The county photocopied it, and a photocopy of a photograph is a rumor.
After the photograph log come the property and evidence receipts. Four pages.
This is the part of a file that people skip and I have never once skipped it.
A property receipt is an inventory of what a person had on them, and it is the only document in the whole apparatus that treats a human being as a person with things.
Item one. One bicycle, step-through frame, green, damaged.
Item two. One bicycle helmet, white, damaged.
Item three. One reflective ankle band, yellow.
Item four. One jacket, navy, size M.
Item five. One pair scrubs, blue.
Item six. One canvas bag, containing: one plastic food container, empty; one paperback book; one set of keys, four keys, on a ring with a plastic tag.
Item seven. One wristwatch, functioning.
Item eight. One employee identification card, Barrow Street facility, in the name of N. Okoro.
Item nine. One mobile telephone, screen cracked, powered on at time of recovery, recovered eleven feet from the bicycle.
Under item nine, in the notes column, the deputy wrote one line.
Multiple incoming calls observed during scene processing.
Eleven of them. That number is not on the receipt. I got it out of a newspaper six years later at a public library.
Then the release section at the bottom of the fourth page.
Property released to next of kin. Date. Time. Receiving party, printed.
T. Okoro.
And then the signature line, and on the signature line, a signature.
Blue ballpoint.
Leaning slightly backward, the way left-handed people write when nobody ever corrected them.
I had a metal locker for six years with six envelopes at the bottom of it and I knew that handwriting the way you know a face.
He was sixteen. There is a box on that form for the age of the receiving party when the receiving party is a minor, and it is filled in. Somebody wrote 16 in it with the same pen.
I sat at that card table with page two hundred and thirty-one in my hand and I did not move for a while.
Then I put it face down on the finished pile, and I squared the pile, because the pile has to stay square.
That is not coldness. That is the only thing I had that worked.
I went to the sink and ran the water and stood there with both hands under it until it went cold.
Then I came back and picked up the next document, which was forty-one pages long and had my own voice in it.