Chapter 75: Standing
The file at Ardmore Recovery was nine pages and the man who had it was named Curtis Dagg. He would not give it to me.
Not out of malice. Out of a policy printed on a laminated card taped to the counter, which said that vehicle records were released only to the registered owner, a lienholder, an insurer, or a law enforcement agency.
I had been the registered owner. I was not the registered owner now. The car had been sold at lien auction and titled three more times since.
I stood in that office for eleven minutes. It smelled like coffee and rubber. There was a calendar on the wall two years out of date.
I asked him what he would need.
“Court order,” he said. “Or the owner. Or the insurance company that paid the claim.”
“There was a fatality.”
“I know,” he said. “I towed it.” He said it the way you say a fact about weather.
Then he said the thing that changed my whole approach, and he did not know he was saying anything.
“Family could probably get it. Family gets things.”
I drove back in Marisol's cousin's truck and thought about nothing else for sixty-one miles.
Family gets things.
In this state there is a victims' rights statute. Article 24. I had read it in the prison library.
It gives the family of a homicide victim a set of rights that attach to the case, not to the defendant.
Notice of proceedings. The right to be present. The right to confer with the prosecutor. The right, on written request, to a copy of the presentence report, the autopsy, the final investigative report. Not a discretionary request. A right.
Theo Okoro is the son of Nadine Okoro. I am the woman who signed a paper saying I killed her.
One of us can walk into the District Attorney's Office and ask for the file, and the clerk has to say yes.
It is not me.
I sat in the truck outside the halfway house for twenty minutes, working out how to say it to him.
Because it was what it was. I wanted to use him.
I had opened his six letters in October. He had come to see me in December. He had listened, which is not the same as believing.
Now I was going to ask him to sign his mother's name onto a form so that I could get paperwork.
I did not have a way to make that clean. So I did not try.
I met him on a Thursday at the coffee place on Wilmot.
He came in wearing his work shirt with the store's name over the pocket. He has his mother's jaw. I know that from a newspaper photograph.
He sat down and did not take his jacket off, which is how he tells me he might leave.
I put the laminated policy language on the table first, then the retention schedule, then Article 24 with the relevant subsection marked in pencil.
I explained it in order. Four minutes.
Then I said the sentence I had worked out in the truck.
“I can't get any of it. You can get all of it.”
He looked at the pages for a while.
“So I'm the key,” he said.
“You're the standing.”
“What's the difference?”
“A key's a thing,” I said. “Standing is a person the law is willing to listen to.”
He turned Article 24 around and read the marked subsection himself, which I liked. It meant he did not trust me.
Then he said, “And if I do this, and it turns out you did it. Then what.”
“Then you'll have the file that proves it,” I said. “And you'll have it faster than anyone else ever would.”
That was true. I had thought about whether to say it. I said it.
He drank about a third of the coffee.
“My mother was on a bike,” he said. “She had a light on the back. She was two hundred meters from the turn onto our street.”
“I know.”
“You don't know. You read it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I read it.”
He put the cup down.
“I'm not signing anything today.”
“All right.”
“I want to know what's on the list. All of it. Everything you'd ask for. Written down.”
I took out the index card I had already written and slid it across, because I had known he would ask.
He read the card. Nine items.
“You had this ready,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That's cold.”
“It's prepared,” I said. “I've been prepared for six years about the wrong thing.”
He put the card in his shirt pocket, behind the store's name.
“I'll tell you Monday,” he said, and left, and did not pay for the coffee, and I did not expect him to.
On Monday he did not call.
On Tuesday he came into Marisol's office at four in the afternoon, which I had never told him the address of.