Chapter 72: March Ninth, March Eleventh
I locked the front door at 6:40 and turned the sign, because what I was about to do is not something you do with the street coming in.
I told him I was locking it and why, and I put the key on the counter in front of him so he could open it himself.
He looked at the key and left it lying there.
Then I took him into the back room and I turned on the lamp.
Before I put anything under it I said three things, and I had rehearsed them, and I would say them again.
I said, “This helps me. Everything I am about to show you helps me. Weigh it.”
I said, “I am going to show you two documents and I am going to tell you the three ordinary explanations for them before I tell you what I think.”
I said, “If you want to stop, we stop, and I will not write to you and I will not come to you.”
He said, “Show me.”
I put the crash report on the left, squared to the edge of the desk.
I put page 118 on the right, top edges level.
I turned the shade so it lit both.
Then I stood back, because a person needs to be at least two feet away from me while they read something that matters.
I said, “Left-hand document, top band. Read the date of crash and the date the report was completed.”
He read them out loud. “March eleven. March eleven.”
I said, “Right-hand document. Bottom fifth. The signature line and the short line beside it.”
He read the name. Then he stopped.
He said, “March nine.”
I said, “Yes.”
He did not say anything for a while. I did not either.
Then he said, “That's two days before.”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Before it happened.”
I said, “Yes.”
Then I did the thing I had promised, which was to argue against myself, out loud, in order.
I said, “One. I wrote it wrong. I was twenty-four and I had been awake thirty hours and people write wrong dates. That is the strongest explanation and I cannot rule it out with a photocopy.”
I said, “Two. The crash date is wrong. It is not. Five separate offices put the eleventh on five documents.”
I said, “Three. There were two signings and the file kept the wrong page. There is one signature and one date on that sheet, and a lawyer who re-executes a document staples the first one behind.”
I said, “That is everything against me that I know of. If you find a fourth one, I want to hear it.”
He said, “Why are you telling me the ones that hurt you.”
I said, “Because you'll find them anyway, and if you find them on your own you'll stop believing the rest.”
He stood over that desk with his hands in his jacket pockets for a long time.
He did not say he believed me.
He did not say he forgave me. He has never said that and I have never asked and I never will.
What he said was, “Who typed it.”
I said, “I don't know.”
He said, “Who paid for the lawyer who typed it.”
I said, “I don't know that either. It's the only question I've been asked twice by people who know what they're doing.”
Then he took a notebook out of his inside pocket.
It is a small black one with an elastic band around it, about four inches by six, and the elastic had gone loose the way they do.
He opened it and I saw, upside down, that it was full. Years of it. Dated entries in that small forward hand, the same hand as the bus times on the back of the card.
He turned to the first blank page and clicked a pen.
He wrote two lines and I could read them upside down because I read upside down for a living.
MARCH 9.
MARCH 11.
Then he said, “Case number.”
I said, “Nineteen dash oh four four seven seven.”
He wrote it under the dates.
Then he closed the notebook, put the elastic back around it, and put it in his inside pocket.
He said, “I'm going to check all of this myself. Every piece.”
I said, “Good.”
He said, “If it's a mistake, I'm coming back here to tell you it's a mistake.”
I said, “Come back either way.”
He picked the key up off the counter, unlocked the front door himself, and went out into Charter Street, and he left the key in the lock.
It was the twenty-fifth of May, at twenty past seven in the evening.
For six years and eleven months I had been the only person on earth who was looking at that file.
As of that evening, there were two.