Chapter 91: Nineteen Days
He did not call for nineteen days.
I did not call him either. I want to say that plainly.
I did not call because I did not know what to say to him, and the not-knowing was easier to sit with than the saying of it.
In those nineteen days I did four useful things and I will list them, because the list is all there was.
One. I made three copies of the blue folder at the library at ten cents a page. Ninety-one pages. $9.10 each.
One copy went in a padded envelope to Sirko, who had the original anyway, as a proof that I had not altered mine.
One copy went to Marisol, who put it in the bond safe without opening it and gave me a receipt that said, in her handwriting, “One sealed envelope. Not opened. M.V.” and the date.
One copy I kept.
I kept it flat in a plastic sleeve inside a box of blank forms at the office, because rooms at the halfway house get searched.
Two. I wrote out a timeline. Twenty-two entries, each with a source document number.
Every entry that had no document behind it I wrote in pencil, so that the difference would be visible from across a table.
Three. I read the statute on actual-innocence petitions eleven times and made a list of what it requires.
Newly discovered evidence, not discoverable at trial through due diligence, that would probably have produced a different result.
Every one of those five words is a wall.
Newly discovered. Not discoverable through due diligence. Probably. Different. Result.
The module data was not newly discovered. It existed on the ninth of March. It had been read by a trooper and printed and put in a file and destroyed on a schedule.
Which means the question is not whether it is new. The question is whether it was available to me, and I pleaded guilty, and a person who pleads guilty is presumed to have had no reason to look.
That is a paragraph I read four times and understood on the third.
Four. I did not go near Kelvin Street.
I want that on the record because it was the hardest of the four and because nobody would ever be able to verify it except me.
On the twentieth day Theo came into the office at twenty past four.
He put a paper cup of coffee on the counter, the two-dollar drip kind from the place on Wilmot, and he did not say anything about the nineteen days and neither did I.
“I went and looked at the house,” he said.
I stopped the feeder.
“Which house.”
“Yours. Kelvin Street.”
“Theo.”
“I didn't do anything. I parked at the end of the block and I sat there and I looked at it.”
“How long.”
“Two hours.”
“Did anybody see you.”
“A woman came out at 6:40 and drove off and came back at 7:15 with a bag of groceries,” he said.
“She's small. I hadn't understood how small until I saw her stand next to the car.”
I put both hands on the edge of the desk.
“Theo, listen to me. If she saw a car she doesn't know parked twice—”
“It wasn't twice.”
“How many times.”
He looked at the floor.
“Four,” he said. “Over the nineteen days.”
I did not shout at him. I have thought about that since, and I think I should have.
What I did was take the sheet of paper off the top of my desk, turn it over, and draw a rectangle on the back of it.
“This is the case,” I said. “Everything inside the rectangle is a document that exists whether or not anybody believes us.”
I wrote inside it: module report, field notes, photograph 37, scaled measurement, retention schedule, tow file, nine pages, bill of sale, affidavit.
Then I drew a line outside the rectangle and wrote on it: everything they can say about us.
“Right now that line is empty,” I said. “The day you park on that street a fifth time, it says: the victim's son surveilled my client's home. And then every single thing inside the rectangle gets read in the light of that sentence, forever.”
I have drawn that rectangle for three different people since. It works every time.
He looked at it for a long time.
“That's why you're not angry,” he said.
“I'm angry.”
“You don't do anything with it.”
“I do everything with it,” I said. “I just do it slowly and it looks like nothing.”
He drank about a third of the coffee.
“I'm not going back there,” he said.
“Say it again.”
“I'm not going back there.”
“All right.”
Then he said, “She has a plant on the porch. It's dead. It's been dead a while.”
I said, “That was my plant.”