Chapter 68: Eleven Minutes
I stood behind that counter for eleven minutes without moving anything except my eyes.
I know it was eleven because the fax machine prints a status report at six o'clock.
It printed while I was standing there, and I looked at the wall clock after.
Then I crouched down and picked up the three envelopes off the floor.
One had a boot mark on it.
Half a tread, from the wet toe of a work boot, on the corner of the first letter, the one from when he was sixteen.
I did not wipe it off. I have not wiped it off since.
I put all six back in the shoe box, in order.
The box went on the shelf in the back room, which is where it has lived ever since.
Then I sat down at the desk, turned on the lamp, and wrote a memorandum of conversation.
I want to describe this because it is the least attractive thing I did that year.
It is also the thing that saved the whole case eighteen months later.
Date, time, place, persons present.
Then what was said, in order, marked as verbatim where I was sure and as substance where I was not.
I wrote it while it was fresh.
Memory rewrites itself inside six hours and there is nothing you can do about that except get to the paper first.
It took me forty minutes and it ran to two and a half pages in my own hand.
At the end I wrote down the two things I got wrong, because a memo that only records the other person is worthless as evidence and worse as a habit.
One. When he said “say what you did,” I answered with a list of facts about my sentence and my payments.
That was a defense in the shape of an answer. He heard it as one and he was right to.
Two. I said “I don't know yet.”
The word yet is a promise. I do not get to make him promises.
Then I signed it and dated it and put it in the folder.
I got home at 8:20 and did not sleep well, and I am not going to make anything out of that.
In the morning Marisol looked at the counter.
There is a scuff on the laminate about eight inches long where the envelopes went across it. It is still there and I have never cleaned it.
She said, “Somebody came.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Him.”
I said, “Yes.”
She poured her coffee and stood with her back to the machine and looked at me for a while.
She said, “Are you all right.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Are you all right, Cass.”
I said, “He asked me to say I killed her.”
She said, “And?”
I said, “I didn't say it.”
Marisol put her cup down on the counter, on the scuff, and said one thing and then went and opened the mail.
She said, “Good. That's the first time in two years you've had something to lose.”
Then nothing happened for nine days.
I am going to put those nine days down properly.
A shorter version of this would skip them, and the skipping is a lie.
Day one, a Saturday. I worked a half day at the office. Four hundred and two pages, which is a lot for four hours.
Day two. I did laundry in the machines downstairs. I keep four dollars in quarters in a jar for it and it costs three seventy-five.
Day three. My officer, at the county building, fourteen minutes.
She asked whether I had any contact with the victim's family. I said yes. She wrote it down.
I want to be clear that I reported it. Voluntarily, first thing, before she asked the follow-up.
A person in my position who conceals a contact with a victim's family is a person going back inside.
She asked who initiated it. I said I sent one letter and that he came to my place of employment nine days later.
She asked if I wanted a no-contact order put in place for my protection.
I said no.
She said, “You understand it goes both ways.”
I said, “That's why no.”
Day four. Nothing.
Nothing is a category. In my file it means I got up, worked, ate, slept, and reported nothing to anybody.
Day five. I wrote to the county attorney's records custodian again, because the twenty days on my second request had run out and nobody had answered a word of it.
Day six, seven, eight. Work. Work. Work.
Day nine was a Tuesday, the fifteenth of May, and at 4:50 in the afternoon I looked up from the scanner and there was a man standing on the far side of Charter Street with his hands in his jacket pockets, not crossing.