Chapter 95: Papering
In the first week of October I did what Marisol had told me to do in the first week of April, which was to send the whole thing again.
She had said: send it again in June, and in September.
I sent it in June. I missed September, because in September I was in a scrapyard counting nine cars.
So I sent it in October, and this time it was five items instead of four.
One through four were the same as before, word for word.
That is deliberate. Identical requests build a paper record of an agency's own inconsistency.
Item five was new and I want to explain where it came from, because it did not come from me.
It came from Marisol, on a Thursday, while she was signing a bond for a man whose sister was crying in the client chair.
She said, without looking up, “You know they have to log you, right?”
I said, “Log me.”
“Every request that comes into that office gets an entry. Date received, requester, subject, disposition, fee collected.”
“It's a management tool. The supervisor gets a report off it every month.”
“And the log itself—”
“Is a public record,” Marisol said. “It's a record made in the course of agency business.”
“There's no exemption for a list of who asked for things.”
I did not scan anything for about a minute.
“I've been in this business nineteen years,” she said, still not looking up.
“The log is the only document nobody thinks about, because it isn't about the case. It's about the office.”
She stamped the bond.
“And it's got everybody on it.”
So item five read as follows.
A copy of the agency's public records request log for the preceding twelve months, limited to entries referencing incident number 22-0339, or the vehicle identification number ending 8802, or the license plate ending 4471.
I wrote it in that form on purpose. Not “give me the log.” Not “who else asked.”
A reasonably described request, limited by date, limited by subject, phrased so a clerk can search one field and be finished in ninety seconds.
On the fee line I checked the box authorising up to $25.
Then I wrote NO FEES OVER $25 WITHOUT PRIOR APPROVAL in capitals beneath it, because a $180 estimate is how they make a request go away.
I mailed it certified on the seventh of October. $8.15 at the window. The green card came back nine days later with the same signature that looks like Hoyt.
The same clerk asked if I wanted insurance.
She has asked me that eleven times. I have said no eleven times. Eleven is not an estimate.
Then I waited, and while I waited I did the boring half of the work, which is the half nobody writes about.
I built an index of everything I had.
Ninety-one pages in the blue folder, plus the tow file, plus the correspondence, plus the letters.
Two hundred and six documents.
Each with a number, a date, a source, and a line saying how I got it and who could confirm that.
That last column is the entire thing.
A document with no provenance is a rumour with a staple in it.
I typed it at the office after hours with Marisol's permission, in exchange for cleaning the scanner glass every Friday, which I would have done anyway.
Twenty-two evenings. Four hundred and eleven lines.
Theo came in twice during those weeks and read over my shoulder and did not offer to help.
On the third visit he sat down and started reading the correspondence pages out loud to me while I typed, which is faster.
He did that for four hours without complaining once.
At about ten o'clock he stopped in the middle of a line.
“There's a lot of insurance in here,” he said.
“There's always a lot of insurance in a fatal.”
“No, I mean — the letters from the carrier aren't about the car. Some of them are, but there's three that don't have a plate number on them at all.”
I said, “Put those three in a separate pile and don't lose them.”
He put them in a separate pile.
I did not look at them that night. I want that on the record.
They were eighteen inches from my left hand for four hours and I did not look, because I was indexing in sequence and I had made a rule about not jumping ahead, and I kept my rule.
There are two or three moments in this whole account where I did the disciplined thing and it cost me months.
That was one of them.
On the twenty-ninth of October, twenty-two days after I mailed it, the response came back. It arrived in a window envelope with the agency seal printed, not embossed.
Four items denied or previously addressed.
Item five: granted in part.
Two pages.