“I hope you do, son,” his father said with great conviction as he watched his boy leave.
Ed shook his head as he thought of how far his sons had drifted apart and his being unable to do anything about it. “Damn,” was all he could think of to say before sitting down on the toolbox to finish his beer.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
It was early in the morning as Michael Fiske quietly hummed his way through the broad, high-ceilinged hallway toward the clerks’ mail room. As he entered the room, a clerk looked up. “You picked a good time, Michael. We just got in a shipment.”
“Any con mail?” Michael asked, referring to the ever-growing number of petitions from prisoners. Most of them were filed in forma pauperis, meaning, literally, in the form of a pauper. There was a separate docket kept for these petitions, and it was so large that one clerk was specially designated to manage the filings. The IFPs, as they were termed by Court personnel, were usually a place to discover either humor over some ridiculous claim or occasionally a case worthy of the Court’s attention. Michael knew that some of the most important Court decisions ever had resulted from IFP cases — thus his early morning ritual of panning for appellate gold in the paper piles.
“From the hand scribblings I’ve tried to decipher so far, I’d say that was a good bet,” the clerk responded.
Michael dragged a box over to one corner. Within its confines was an array of complaints, penned miseries, a procession of claimed injustice of varying content and description. But none of them could be simply shrugged off. Many were from death row inmates; for them, the Supreme Court represented the last hope before legal extermination.
For the next two hours Michael dug through the box. He was very accomplished at this now. It was like expertly shucking corn, his mind scanning the lengthy documents with ease, effortlessly probing through the legalese to the important points, comparing them to pending cases as well as precedents from fifty years ago pulled from his encyclopedic memory; then filing them away and moving on. However, at the end of two hours he had not found much of great interest.
He was thinking of heading up to his office when his hand closed around the plain manila envelope. The address label was typewritten, but the envelope had no return address. That was strange, Michael thought. People seeking to plead their case before the Court normally wanted the justices to know where to find them in the rare event that their plea was answered. There was, however, the left side of a postal return receipt card affixed to it. He slid open the envelope and removed the two sheets of paper. One of the functions of the clerks’mail room was to ensure that all filings met the strict standards of the Court. For parties claiming indigent status, if their petitions were granted, the Court would waive certain filing requirements and fees, and even engage and pick up some of the expenses of counsel, although the attorney would not bill for his or her time. It was an honor simply to stand before the Court as an advocate. Two of the forms required to achieve indigent status were a motion for leave to file as a pauper, and an affidavit signed by the prisoner, basically swearing to the person’s impoverished status. Neither was in the envelope, Michael quickly noted. The appeal would have to be kicked back.
When Michael started reading what was in the envelope, all thoughts of any filing deficiencies vanished. After he finished, he could see the sweat from his palms leach onto the paper. At first Michael wanted to put the pages back in the envelope and forget he had ever seen them. But, as though he had now witnessed a crime himself, he felt he had to do something.
“Hey, Michael, Murphy’s chambers just called down for you,” the clerk said. When Michael didn’t answer, the clerk said again, “Michael? Justice Murphy is looking for you.”
Michael nodded, finally managing to focus on something other than the papers in his hand. When the clerk turned back to his work, Michael put the pages back in the manila envelope. He hesitated an instant. His entire legal career, his entire life, could be decided in the next second or so. Finally, as though his hands were acting independently from his thoughts, he slipped the envelope into his briefcase. By doing so before the petition had been officially processed with the Court, he had just committed, among other crimes, theft of federal property, a felony.