Chapter 98: Screening
The Project wrote back in eleven weeks. The envelope was thinner than a rejection usually is.
My file had passed initial review and was assigned for telephone screening.
A date, a time, and a warning that the call came from a blocked number and came once. Wednesday, 2:15 in the afternoon.
I asked Marisol for an hour. She gave me ninety minutes and docked me two. That is how she says yes.
I took the call standing in the file room. Sitting makes my voice go quiet.
Her name was Delphine Kroll. Third-year law student. She said that before hello was finished.
“I'm not a lawyer. I can't give advice. I ask questions and write down answers.” I said I understood. She said some of them would sound rude and were not. I told her to ask them.
She had my file open. I could hear pages going over, one at a time, near the phone.
The call ran forty-three minutes. I timed it against the wall clock. I time things.
She started with the plea. They always start with the plea. That is where these die.
“Did anyone threaten you?” No. “Did anyone hurt you, or say that they would?” No again, and I said it the same way both times.
“Did anyone promise you anything?”
“Yes.”
The typing stopped. “What were you promised.”
“Two years.”
“By whom.”
“My aunt. Renata Halloway. My mother's sister.”
“Is she an attorney?” No, I said. She sells insurance. That went down on the keyboard, and at the time it meant nothing at all to either of us.
“Was an attorney present when she said it?”
“No. One came later. He drafted the document. Grover Lisle.”
She typed for eleven seconds and did not tell me what came up on her screen.
I knew what came up. He surrendered his licence in 2021 with three complaints pending.
Then she asked me to explain the date discrepancy without looking at the file.
She said she would know if I looked. I did it in ninety seconds. I had said it to myself in a cell often enough to have it smooth.
“You have a paralegal certificate. Correspondence, from inside.”
“The prison library ran the proctoring. It's a real certificate. It is just worth nothing.”
“So you knew what a notarial date was when you signed.”
“No. I knew what it was six years later.”
“That is a hard answer to give me.”
“It's the true one. I signed without reading the top of the page, and nobody made me do that.”
She let that sit and then went on, and she did not soften anything afterward.
She asked what I did. Scanning, bail bonds, nine forty an hour.
She asked how many pages a day. Four hundred. Six hundred at month end.
She wrote it down. I did not understand why for a long time.
Brandt told me later it was the first line in my file that made me a person who handles records rather than one who is one.
Then she read me the numbers. They make everyone read the numbers.
“Last year we received one thousand nine hundred and forty applications. We opened sixty-one files. We filed pleadings in nine.”
“I can do the percentage,” I said.
“Most people ask me to do it for them.”
“I know what nine over one thousand nine hundred and forty is. I have had the time.”
There was a pause. Then she asked the question that actually had weight in it.
“Do you have a document nobody has looked at? Not one you read differently. One no lawyer, no judge and no reporter has ever had in front of them.”
I said I had four hundred and twelve pages a court had seen, and one page with a name nobody had ever explained.
“Whose name.”
“Renata Halloway. A claim reference. It came out of the tow yard's file, not the court's.”
More typing, longer this time, and she did not read any of it back to me.
“Send me a copy. Legible. Flatbed. Not a photograph off your phone.”
“I have a scanner. That is the one thing I have.”
“That helps more than you would think it does.”
The file would go to a screening committee that meets on the second Thursday of the month. Close it, hold it, or refer it out. Most of them close.
She said I would hear in six to eight months. I said that was fine, and it was fine.
Then I asked the only question I asked in the whole call.
“How long does this take. Start to finish. The ones that work.”
“Intake to filing, a little over four years. Then the litigation on top of that.”
“I did six,” I said.
“That's not the same thing,” she said, and she was right, and she did not apologise for it.
She hung up at 2:58. I was back at the scanner at 3:04.
I ran two hundred and ninety pages before close and did not misfeed one.