Chapter 50: Exhibit Numbers
The next night I started with stamps, not with words.
There is a reason for that order and it is not dramatic. Words are written by people trying to say something. Stamps are put on by people trying to finish a shift.
Stamps do not lie, because nobody is paying attention to them.
The file had four different kinds of marking on it and I spent two nights learning them.
One. The blue Bates stamp, MERCER-000001 through MERCER-000412, hand-applied, crooked, put on by the clerk's office when I paid my forty dollars.
That numbering is worthless. It was put on last year. It tells me only what order somebody stacked the pages in at the copier.
Two. A round red DATE RECEIVED stamp from the Clerk of the Circuit Court, with rotating bands for day, month, and year. Those bands wear. On our file the 9 prints with a broken shoulder.
Three. Exhibit stickers. Small, orange-bordered, printed with STATE'S EXHIBIT and a hand-written number in the middle in black marker.
Four. Handwritten initials in the top corner of certain pages, in a fine blue pen, always in the same place, one inch from the top and one inch from the right.
I made a chart on the legal pad.
Down the left side, page numbers. Across the top, the four kinds of marking.
Then I went through four hundred and twelve pages and filled in every cell.
It took three nights, about a hundred and forty pages a night, which is slower than I scan, because scanning is feeding and this was looking.
Marisol found me at it on the second night. She had come back for her cigarettes.
“You sleeping?” she said.
“Six hours.”
“You're lying to me by about two.”
She stood behind me and looked at the chart. She is forty-four, has written bail bonds since she was twenty-six, and has seen more case files than most attorneys.
“What's that column,” she said.
“Exhibit stickers.”
“On a plea case.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a second, which for Marisol is a long time.
“There shouldn't be many,” she said.
“There are eleven.”
“On a case that never went to trial.”
“Yes.”
She took her cigarettes off the filing cabinet and left, and at the door she said, “Lock up,” which she says every night, and then she said, “Chart's good,” which she had never said.
Here is what the exhibit stickers meant, and I want to explain it slowly because this is the machinery of the whole thing.
If a case goes to trial, exhibits get marked and admitted, and there are dozens.
If a case ends in a plea, there is usually one hearing, and almost nothing is marked.
Eleven marked exhibits means somebody prepared. Somebody sat down with this file and organized it for a proceeding that never happened.
That is not sinister by itself. Lawyers prepare for trials that do not occur. That is most of what a trial lawyer does.
But it told me somebody had handled this file carefully, early, and with intent. And careful handling leaves a trail.
The eleven stickers were numbered 1 through 11 in black marker in the same handwriting.
Exhibit 1 was the Uniform Traffic Crash Report.
Exhibit 2 was the scene diagram.
Exhibits 3 through 7 were photographs. I did not look at them for another month and I am not going to pretend I did.
Exhibit 8 was the toxicology request form.
Exhibits 9 and 10 were the two supplemental narratives.
Exhibit 11 was page 118.
My statement. My confession. The thing with my name on the bottom of it.
Exhibit eleven of eleven. Last.
I wrote that on the pad and looked at it.
In a well-organized file, the confession is usually early, because it is the spine of the case. Everything else supports it.
Ours was last, like something added.
I did not conclude anything from that. You cannot conclude anything from stacking order. Somebody could have marked it last because it arrived last on the desk. Somebody could have been interrupted.
But I wrote it down, because you write down everything that is slightly wrong, and then later you look at the list and see whether the slightly wrong things point the same direction.
That is the entire job. That is all a paralegal is. Somebody who writes down the slightly wrong things.
At 11:20 I checked the handwritten initials, the fine blue pen, one inch from the top and one inch from the right.
They appeared on sixty-one pages.
The initials were G.R.L.
Gerald R. Loomis. The attorney who represented me.
The attorney I did not hire, did not choose, and did not pay.
I turned the page over and held it up to the lamp, and the ink had not gone through, and I put it down and looked at the wall for a while.
Sixty-one pages initialed in the same hand, and not one of them was a letter to me.