Chapter 49: The Lamp
Marisol gave me a key on the ninth of November.
She said it was because I opened earlier than she did. That was true. It was not the whole reason.
The whole reason was that in twenty-two months I had never once been late.
The office is at 1130 Charter Street. Two rooms and a bathroom with a window that does not open.
Front room: the counter, two vinyl chairs, a rack of forms, a sign about what we do not take as collateral.
Back room: the scanner, the shredder, four filing cabinets, and the desk.
The desk has a lamp on it.
It is an architect's lamp, brass-colored, spring arm, shade the size of a coffee can, clamped to the desk with a thumbscrew. Marisol's father used it for thirty years. She has told me twice.
The bulb is sixty watts. It is the most light in that building.
On the eleventh of December I stayed after we closed and put a piece of paper under it.
The paper was page 118.
My room above the laundromat has one ceiling fixture, a forty-watt bulb in a globe with thirty years of dust baked inside. I had been trying to read my case file under it for twenty-two months.
That is not the reason I had not read it.
I want to be accurate here, because I have spent a long time being inaccurate about myself.
The light was bad. That is true and it is not why.
I did not read my file because I already knew what was in it. I had signed it. Nothing is more boring than being told a thing you did.
That is what I told myself.
Page 118 is titled STATEMENT OF DEFENDANT. In the bottom right corner is a Bates stamp: MERCER-000118, blue, tilted about four degrees, which means it was put on by hand and not by machine.
I know that because I scan four hundred pages a day.
I put the page square under the lamp, top edge against the pencil groove, and then I did not read it.
I got a legal pad instead.
Here is a thing the paralegal course teaches and never explains, because it assumes somebody senior will correct you later.
You never read one document.
One document tells you what it wants to tell you. Two documents tell you the truth, because two people made them for different reasons, and they will not agree about something.
Your whole job is finding the something.
So the first night I did not read page 118. I built the comparison.
I brought the box from my room in two trips, on the bus, in a dollar-store canvas bag with a cat on it.
Four hundred and twelve pages.
I laid them on the floor of the back room. The desk is thirty inches by sixty.
I sorted them into nine piles.
Charging documents. Police reports. Medical and autopsy. Photographs and scene diagrams. Statements. Court transcripts. Plea paperwork. Correspondence. Junk.
The junk pile is the biggest in any file. Cover sheets, fax confirmations, blank versos, duplicates nobody checked.
Junk is where things hide. Not because anybody hid them. Because nobody looked.
I numbered the piles on sticky notes with the page ranges. When I finished it was 9:40 and the radiator had come on twice.
Then I did what I had come to do.
I took a clean sheet and wrote a heading on it: WHAT TO COMPARE.
Under the heading I wrote four items.
Item one: DATES.
Item two: STAMPS AND CASE NUMBERS.
Item three: SIGNATURES — MINE, WHOSE ELSE.
Item four: WHO TYPED IT.
Then I sat back in Marisol's father's chair, which leans left because one caster is the wrong brand, and looked at the list.
Twenty-two months.
Six hundred and seventy days between the night I first took page 118 out of the box and the night I put it under a good lamp.
In those days I scanned, by the machine's job log, one hundred and eighty-four thousand pages of other people's paperwork.
Arrest reports. Bond conditions. Promises to appear.
I could read all of those.
I could tell in ten seconds whether a bond form had been altered after signing, because a ballpoint leaves a groove and the groove gives you the order.
I did that for strangers, four hundred pages a day, for eleven dollars an hour.
And I could not look at my own.
I want that on the record too.
At 10:05 I turned the shade straight down, put page 118 back under it, put the crash report beside it, and lined the top edges up with a ruler.
Then I turned the lamp off, locked the door, and went home, because I was not ready.
But I left the two pages side by side on the desk, squared, under the dark lamp.
They were still there in the morning. Marisol looked at them for a second and did not ask.