Chapter 53: Three Innocent Explanations
I went to work at eight the next morning.
I scanned four hundred and eleven pages. I know because the job log says 411.
I told nobody anything.
Here is what I had.
A certified photocopy of a typed one-page statement, my signature on it, and the numbers 03/09 beside the signature in my own hand.
That is all. That is the entire thing.
I want to be clear about how little that is. For four days I thought it was a lot, and being wrong cost me time.
A photocopy is not a document. It is a picture of a document.
You cannot examine ink on a photocopy. You cannot see the pressure groove.
You cannot tell whether the date was written with the same pen as the signature, only that both came out dark.
And a date written by hand can be wrong.
People write the wrong date constantly. Every January the whole country writes the wrong year for three weeks.
On the Thursday I took the legal pad and wrote a heading: INNOCENT EXPLANATIONS.
I made myself fill it before I let myself think about anything else. That is the only discipline I have, and I got it in a prison library.
One. I wrote it wrong.
This is the strongest one and I will not pretend otherwise.
I was twenty-four. I had been awake about thirty hours.
Somebody held a clipboard up to me.
Against it: a 9 is not a slip for an 11. They are not adjacent on a keypad and not similar shapes.
A wrong-year error I would believe. A wrong-day error two days backward is not a common hand slip.
Two. The crash report date is wrong.
I could test that one, so I tested it.
The date 03/11 appears on five documents made by five different offices.
The crash report. The medical examiner's report, examination performed 03/11 at 0900.
The ambulance run sheet, dispatched 0008, on scene 0017. The county 911 call detail record. A newspaper item four hundred words long, published the twelfth.
Five sources, none of which talk to each other, all saying the eleventh.
That date is not moving. Nothing I ever did shook it.
Three. It was signed on the ninth as a draft, signed again later, and they kept the wrong copy.
This is the explanation a prosecutor gives, and it is not stupid.
Against it: there is only one signature on the page, and one date.
A re-executed document shows both. Lawyers do not throw away the first one. They staple it behind.
I wrote all three down and sat with them for an hour.
Then I wrote a fourth line, and it was not an explanation. It was the thing the three did not touch.
The page is typed.
Not handwritten by me under supervision. Not a transcript of questions and answers. Not a form with blanks filled in.
It is eleven typed sentences in the first person, on a sheet with a law firm's footer in six-point type along the bottom edge.
My hand appears on it twice. Once for the signature. Once for the date.
That is a document somebody wrote about me before I read it.
The witness block at the bottom is empty. Both lines. WITNESSED BY: blank. TITLE: blank.
I have handled over two hundred thousand pages of criminal paperwork in that office.
I have never seen a defendant's sworn statement with an empty witness block.
That proves nothing. A signature does not require a witness to be valid.
But an office that runs a Bates stamp and marks eleven exhibits on a case that never went to trial fills in blanks.
That blank was left on purpose or in a hurry.
On the Friday I did something I am not proud of.
I got the phone book from under the counter, which Marisol keeps because half her clients cannot use a phone, and looked up Loomis.
Loomis, Gerald R. — Attorney at Law. The number was disconnected. The firm name did not match the footer on page 118.
I called the state bar's licensee line.
A recording told me that Gerald R. Loomis, bar number 019344, had been on inactive status for four years, and that his last address of record was a post office box in another county.
I wrote the box number down.
Then I put the phone book back under the counter.
I scanned the afternoon batch, ninety-six pages of a domestic case, without a single error, because the machine does not care what you have just learned.
That night I added a fifth line to the pad.
It said: A person who typed that page on the ninth knew there would be something to confess to.
I looked at that sentence for a long time and crossed it out, because it was a conclusion and I had not earned it.
Then I wrote it again underneath, smaller.