Chapter 55: Marisol's Terms
I told Marisol on a Tuesday, at 5:40, after the last client left.
The last client was a woman posting for her nephew and she had counted out four hundred dollars in tens and it took a while.
Marisol counted it twice and did not hurry her, because that is how she keeps clients.
When the door shut I said, “I need eight minutes.”
Marisol looked at the clock and sat down on the corner of the counter.
I put two pages in front of her. The crash report header, and page 118.
She has reading glasses she keeps on a lanyard and refuses to wear in front of clients. She put them on.
She read the header. Then she read the statement.
Then she took both pages to the window, where the streetlight is, and held them up separately, one and then the other, at arm's length.
She stood there for maybe ninety seconds.
Then she said, “Say it out loud.”
I said, “The confession is dated two days before the accident.”
She said, “Again.”
I said it again.
She came back and put the pages on the counter and squared them, which she does not normally do. That is my habit and she had picked it up.
“Who paid Loomis,” she said.
Second person in three weeks to ask that. I said I did not know.
“You never got a bill.”
“No.”
“You never signed a fee agreement.”
“No.”
She took her glasses off and let them drop on the lanyard.
Then she gave me the speech, and it was ninety seconds long, and I have thought about it every week since.
She said: “I have been in this business eighteen years. Here is what happens to you if you walk into any office in this county with that page.”
She said: “You are a convicted felon with a story. That is a category. There is a shelf for it.”
She said: “Every third person who comes through that door has a story about why the file is wrong.”
She said: “Most of them are lying and some of them are not, and nobody has time to sort them, so the whole shelf gets treated as lying.”
She said: “You will not get out of that category by being sincere. Sincere is what liars are.”
Then she said the thing I wrote on the pad that night and have not needed to look at since.
“Nobody opens a file because you are sad. Bring them a date.”
I said I had a date.
She said, “You have a photocopy of a date. Get the original.”
Then we did terms, and I want to be exact, because she was exact.
One. She would not be a witness to anything and she would not have her name in a filing.
Her surety license is her whole life, and there are four people in this county who would enjoy taking it.
Two. I could use the office after six on any night. Lamp, desk, copier, phone, scanner.
Not the client files. Never the client files.
Three. If I ever used a client's information for my own matter, she would fire me that hour and she would not explain to anybody why.
Four. She would make one phone call for me. One. And I would have to tell her when I wanted to spend it.
I said that was fair. It was more than fair and we both knew it.
She did not ask me whether I did it. She has never once asked me that.
Then she went to the drawer where the bond receipts are.
She tore one off the bottom of the pad and wrote on the back of it.
She wrote: R. AHEARN. And under it a phone number, and under that: “owes me from 2017.”
I told her I had already called Ruth Ahearn and been turned down.
Marisol said, “You called her. That's different from me calling her.”
I said I would save the call. She said that was the right answer.
She put the receipt in my shirt pocket herself, and then she picked up her coat and her cigarettes.
At the door she said, “Lock up.”
Then she said, “You want to know the part that bothers me?”
I said yes.
She said, “Eleven exhibits. Nobody preps eleven exhibits for a plea.”
She said, “Somebody was getting ready to fight a case they knew they would win, and then they didn't have to fight it.”
She said, “Ask yourself who stopped fighting.”
Then she left, and the door has a hydraulic closer that takes four seconds, and I stood there for all four of them.
That night I did not open the file.
I wrote one line on the pad and went home at 6:20, which is the earliest I had left that office in fourteen months.
The line was: WHO PAID.