Chapter 39: A Spreadsheet and a Crime
Detective Renata Ferreira took my statement on the fifteenth of September in a room with a poster about seatbelts.
On the second of October I went back and asked for her by name at a desk behind glass, and spelled it twice.
She came down after twenty minutes and took me into the same room, and the poster was still crooked.
She is somewhere in her forties, and she has the particular attention of a person who has decided in advance not to be moved by anything and is not entirely succeeding.
I put the graph paper on the table and turned it round so it faced her, and then took my hands off it, because I had decided on the bus not to explain it while she was reading.
She read it for a long time.
She read the innocent column too, which I did not expect, and she read it first.
“You did this yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Nobody helped you set it out.”
“Nobody. There isn’t anybody.”
“Where did the household nights come from?”
I told her about the ledger. She wrote down Roz’s name and then looked at it and drew a box round it.
“Does she know you gave me her name?”
I said she did not, and I felt sick, and Detective Ferreira saw it.
“That’s the job,” she said. “Everybody you bring me becomes somebody I have to go and see.”
Then she sat back.
“Miss Carter, I’m going to say some things you won’t like, and I’d rather you heard them from me than from a defense lawyer in fourteen months.”
I said I would rather have it now.
“One. This is good work. I mean that. I’ve been handed shoeboxes of evidence by people who were absolutely certain, and this is the first spreadsheet I’ve been given that has a column arguing against itself.”
“Two. It isn’t a crime.”
I said nothing, because I had known that since the twenty-fourth and had come anyway.
I said seventeen of nineteen.
“Seventeen of nineteen is a pattern. A pattern isn’t an offense. There is no statute in this state against a coincidence, however unpleasant.”
“Three. I can’t take a report on it. There is no complainant, there is no identified act, there is no substance, and the child has no injury that anybody has attributed to anything.”
“He has a fractured forearm.”
“He has a fractured forearm from the fourteenth of September, and that is a separate matter, and that matter is with the State’s Attorney and it is not going well.”
I asked what not going well meant, and she considered for a moment whether she was allowed to tell me.
She turned her pen over twice.
“It means one adult witness who is an employee, one child who cannot speak, one housemaid who says something happened before but can’t date it, and a foyer camera that was off.”
“And the recording.”
“And the recording,” she said, and put the pen down. “Let’s talk about the recording.”
That was the first time anybody used the word eavesdropping in front of me.
I had been in that house thirteen months and I had never once wondered whether the thing on the nursery shelf was legal.
She did not accuse me of anything. She was careful about it in a way I did not appreciate for a month.
“Illinois is an all-party consent state. Do you know what that means?”
“I record his breathing. For a doctor.”
“I believe you. I believe you completely, and if it goes anywhere it will be argued that the foyer conversation is a private conversation and that you recorded it without consent.”
“It was in a hall. There are eleven staff.”
“That is the argument you would make. It is not a bad argument.”
“Then it’s fine.”
“Do you have three thousand dollars to make it?”
I did not answer. I had nine hundred and forty dollars on the fifteenth of September and I had six hundred and thirty on the second of October.
“Four,” she said. “And this is the one I want you to hear.”
She turned my sheet round so it was facing me.
“Look at column twelve.”
Recorded by: L. Carter. Nineteen times.
“Now read it as somebody who doesn’t like you. Seventeen nights when the father was out of the house. Who else was in that nursery on all seventeen?”
I sat there and looked at my own handwriting.
Seventeen nights when the father was away. One nanny, eleven feet from the cot, with a recorder.
“You were,” she said. “You’re in every row of your own evidence.”
I said I understood.
“I don’t think you do yet, but you will. The strongest thing about your document and the worst thing about your document are the same thing.”
She slid it back across the table and squared it with two fingers.
“Keep going,” she said. “Don’t stop writing it down. And get the doctor to order something, because a machine’s data has no motive.”