Chapter 42: Retainer
The free legal clinic runs on Wednesday evenings in the basement of a church on Ashland, from six until eight.
It is not a queue. It is a ticket.
I took number thirty-one at ten past five.
At two minutes past eight a woman with a folder called twenty-four.
Then she apologized to the room, and thirty-one of us put our coats on.
The man beside me had been coming for three weeks about a security deposit.
He told me the trick was to arrive at four.
I thanked him and wrote it down, and I never did go back, because by the following Wednesday I had run out of Wednesdays.
On Thursday morning I used the library computer on Lincoln and made a list of eleven attorneys.
I wrote the same four sentences to all of them, because if you cannot pay you must at least be brief.
Two replied. One offered a consultation at one hundred and fifty dollars for thirty minutes.
The other telephoned me at half past four and gave me twenty minutes for nothing.
I want her name in this account. Karin Doyle, of a two-attorney office on Wells.
She said she was doing it on the phone because it was quicker to tell me the bad thing free than to charge me for it.
“You are an employee. Are you being paid?”
“No. Suspended without pay since the sixteenth of September.”
“Then you’re not even that. What do you want to happen?”
I said I wanted a doctor to be allowed to test a child.
“That’s not a legal question. That’s a consent question, and consent belongs to the father.”
I said I wanted somebody with authority to look at the pattern.
“Who has standing here is a very short list,” she said.
“The father. The state. A guardian appointed by a court. In some circumstances a hospital.”
“And me.”
“You are not on the list. You are not a parent, not a relative, not a guardian. You have no legally recognized interest in that child at all. I know how that sounds. I’m not going to soften it.”
I asked whether I could petition for anything.
“You can petition a court to hear from a person with no standing. It will take nine months and four thousand dollars and it will fail.”
“And while it is failing you will be a litigant, which is a much worse thing to be than a witness.”
I asked about the recording.
She wanted the facts and I gave them in order.
A small recorder, on a nursery shelf, running since the eleventh of March, for a physician, catching a conversation in a marble hall on the fourteenth of September.
“Illinois eavesdropping,” she said. “The statute was rewritten in 2014.”
“It turns on a reasonable expectation of privacy. A hall with staff in it is a decent argument for you.”
“So I’m fine.”
“You are probably fine. Probably fine is a thing you buy. Do you have three thousand five hundred dollars?”
I said I had six hundred and thirty on the second of October and rather less now.
“Then you are not fine. You are undefended, which is a different condition with the same symptoms.”
I asked what she would do.
“I’d make no recording in that house of anything that isn’t a child breathing, and I’d be able to say that under oath.”
Then she gave me the only useful thing anybody gave me free that autumn.
“Put everything in writing to the household. Every request, every refusal, every hour you’re allowed and every hour you’re not.”
“They won’t answer.”
“They don’t have to answer. That isn’t what it’s for.”
“What is it for?”
“It dates you,” she said. “In fourteen months somebody will say you invented all of this after you were dismissed. A letter with a date on it is the only thing that stops that sentence.”
I wrote it on the back of my hand and copied it onto paper before it smudged.
On Friday I paid one hundred and fifty dollars for thirty minutes with a man in an office with a view of the river.
He was courteous. He told me the same things Karin Doyle had told me in twenty minutes. At the end he said that if I came into money he would be glad to hear from me.
That took me to four hundred and eighty dollars.
I have never regretted spending it, because I needed to hear it twice.
There is a kind of hope that only dies on the second telling.
Before she hung up, Karin Doyle asked me one more question.
“Who pays your wages at the moment?”
“Nobody.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Third floor. Over the laundry.”
There was a pause, and I could hear her stop doing whatever else she was doing.
“Then you’re not an employee in a dispute,” she said. “You’re a witness living in the house.”