Chapter 94: 2027 P 000414
Harriet Doyle has done probate litigation for twenty-two years out of four rooms on LaSalle Street and does not talk to newspapers.
She had never once worked for Constance Blackwood, which I understood much later was the whole reason she took it.
Victor went to her on the second of February.
I was there because he asked me to carry the file, and because Doyle wanted a look at me before she decided anything.
She looked at me for about six seconds and then ignored me for an hour, which is the correct order.
She read the medical letter, the certificate, the case file, and Achterberg’s nine numbered points, which I had typed out.
She read for fifty minutes and took no notes at all.
That frightened me until I understood what it meant, which is that she was not going to be quoting anybody.
Then she laid her pen across the top of the stack and told him not to do it.
She gave five reasons. I wrote down all five.
One. Opening an estate makes a court file, and a court file is public.
Anybody in this county can walk into a record room and read every page of it for nothing.
Two. A petition to disinter must state its grounds. The grounds are the medical letter.
So the letter goes in the file, and the file is the thing anybody can read.
Three. The child appears in it. Initials only, but a newspaper can count backwards from a birth date in four minutes.
Four. There is a woman under indictment for what happened in that foyer.
Her lawyer will read the docket the morning it appears, and she will use it.
“Use it how,” Victor said.
“To say the house was doing something to that child before her client ever set foot in it.”
“It is a good argument,” Doyle said. “I would make it.”
Five. Once an estate is open, the household is a subject.
Accounts, contracts, payments, staff, every dollar that went in and out of that address.
“You would be handing everybody a door,” she said, “and you would not get to choose who walks through it.”
Then she gave him the money, because she is thorough.
A hundred and fifty thousand on retainer.
Cemetery and vault costs, a licensed funeral director required by statute, transport, the supplemental examination, re-interment.
Forty to sixty thousand on top of that, she thought, and she said the money was the least of it, and she was right.
I have never watched anybody talk a client out of something so competently or so unsuccessfully.
Then she leaned back and looked at him properly for the first time.
“Mr. Blackwood. The most likely outcome of everything you are about to spend is a report that says nothing.”
“Achterberg told me that,” Victor said.
“Then tell me why.”
He did not answer her.
He picked the retainer agreement up off her conference table and signed it standing, using his own forearm as the desk.
The way people sign for a package.
Then he wrote the date, and got it right the first time, which I noticed and have never known what to do with.
We filed on the ninth of February 2027.
I went because somebody had to carry the second copy, and because I wanted to see it happen with my own eyes.
The probate division is on the eighteenth floor of the Daley Center and the line moves at the speed of a post office.
The man ahead of us was opening a small estate for a father who had left a car and eleven thousand dollars.
He talked to me about the car the entire time.
I have thought about that man more often since than about most of the lawyers.
Two petitions went across that counter. Letters of administration. Authority to disinter.
The clerk read the second one, looked up once, and said nothing at all.
That was the only reaction anybody had all day.
Then the stamp came down twice, and a number went on the top right corner of the first page in ballpoint.
2027 P 000414.
Two petitions, one number, one morning in February.
Victor put his copy inside his coat and shook the clerk’s hand, which nobody does, and went to the lift.
Doyle and I came out onto Washington Street and she stopped on the steps to put her gloves on, one finger at a time.
“There is no motion to unfile a thing,” she said. “I want you to understand what he has just done.”
“He opened his wife’s estate.”
“He opened his own house,” she said. “As of this morning it is a room with the door off.”
I wrote the number in the notebook on the train.
Blue pen, right-hand page, under the date, the way I write everything.
Fifteen months after a woman died in a house I had been asleep in, she had a case number.
That evening Ethan hid a plastic giraffe in my shoe and stood in front of me waiting to be told.