Chapter 24: The Signature
The written statement of the defendant is document fifty-eight of sixty-one.
Two pages. Page one and page two, in the file, numbered by me in pencil in the top right corner.
I had been reading for five hours and thirty-five minutes, across two nights.
I have described this document in filings since, and I have had to be precise about it more times than I can count.
It is typed.
Not handwritten. Typed, on a word processor, in a twelve-point serif face.
One and a half spacing, justified left, on plain paper with no letterhead.
There is a title line, centered, in capitals.
There is a body of nine paragraphs.
At the end of the body there is a paragraph in slightly different wording from the rest, the way there always is, which says that the statement is given freely and voluntarily and without promise or coercion.
Then white space.
Then a signature line, ruled, with my printed name under it.
Then, to the right of it, a second line, ruled, shorter.
Then a notary block at the bottom of page two, with a stamp, a commission number, and a commission expiration.
I read the nine paragraphs.
They say what I said they said. They are in the first person.
They are in my voice in the sense that somebody listened to me and then wrote it properly.
There is one phrase in paragraph four I would not use. I noticed that at twenty-four, in a hallway, and signed it anyway, because a person I trusted said it was standard.
That is what I was checking for, at a card table, at 1:15 in the morning.
I was checking the way I had been trained to check.
Signature. Present, in blue ink.
My full name including the middle initial, which is how I signed everything until I was twenty-six and stopped.
Pen pressure heavy on the downstroke of the C. That is a thing you look for.
Printed name under the line. Correct spelling.
Initials at the foot of page one, which some offices require and some do not. Present.
Notary stamp. Legible. Commission number complete.
Expiration after the acknowledgment, which is the most common defect in a notarized document in this country, and I have found it four hundred times since.
Not defective. Fine. Clean.
Witness line. Signed.
The staple hole in page one lines up with the staple hole in page two.
I checked all of that.
I checked it the way you check a stranger's paperwork on a Thursday with forty folders left.
Which is to say I checked the parts that make a document good, and I found that it was a good document, and I moved on.
Every mark on those two pages is exactly where it belongs.
That is the whole trouble with them.
I put page two face down on the pile at 1:26 in the morning and squared it.
There were thirty-nine pages left. Fee schedules, certificates of service, three copies of a notice of appeal rights.
I read every one of them, because you read every one of them.
I finished at 2:11.
Four hundred and twelve pages. Nine hours and forty minutes across three nights. Eleven pages of notes on a two-dollar legal pad.
Then I made a summary list of everything I had found wrong with my own case file.
That list has one entry on it. I still have the pad.
Entry one. Photograph 14 is logged as passenger-side windshield and appears to be the same frame as photograph 13.
That is it. That is the entire product of nine hours and forty minutes.
A duplicate photograph in a log. A clerical nothing. It happens in one file out of nine.
I put the bands back around the stack, and they would not hold, so I used a shoelace.
I put it in the bottom drawer, flat, and put the towel over it, and shut the drawer.
Then I washed my hands, because toner comes off on your hands, and I have washed my hands after paper my whole life.
At 2:20 in the morning on the twenty-third of October I sat on the edge of the bed and felt something I had not expected.
Relief.
It was clean. It was complete. It was correct.
Every form filed, every box checked, every signature where a signature goes. The woman in the caption had done it and had said so out loud on page thirty-one.
I had gone looking for a crack. There was no crack. A part of me put down something that night that I had carried since the gate.
I slept six hours, which was the most I had slept since March.
I was thirty years old and I had read the entire record of the worst thing that ever happened, front to back, with a pencil.
I had held it in my hands for nine hours and forty minutes.
It was on the page under my thumb, and I did not see it.