As he raced out of the mail room, he almost collided head-on with Sara Evans.
She smiled at first, but the look changed quickly when she saw his face. “Michael, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
She gripped his arm. “You’re not fine. You’re shaking and your face is white as a sheet.”
“I think I’m coming down with something.”
“Well, then you should go home.”
“I’ll grab some aspirin from the nurse. I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sara, I really have to go.” He pulled away, leaving her staring worriedly after him.
The rest of the day moved at a glacial pace for Michael and he repeatedly found himself staring at his briefcase, thinking of the contents. Late that night, his day’s work at the Court finally completed, he furiously rode his bike back to his apartment on Capitol Hill. He locked the door behind him and took out the envelope once more. He grabbed a yellow legal pad from his briefcase and carried everything over to the small dinette table.
An hour later he sat back and stared at the numerous notes he had made. He opened his laptop and rewrote these notes onto his hard drive, changing, tinkering, rethinking as he did so, a longtime habit of his. He had decided to attack this problem as he would any other. He would check out the information in the petition as carefully as he could. Most important, he would have to confirm that the names listed on the petition were actually the people he thought they were. If it seemed legitimate, he would return the appeal to the clerks’mail room. If it was clearly frivolous, the work of an unbalanced mind or a prisoner blindly lashing out, he had made up his mind to destroy it.
Michael looked out the window and across the street at the cluttered line of row houses that had been converted into apartments just like his. Young disciples of government were honeycombed in this neighborhood. Half were still at work, the rest in bed, nightmaring through a list of uncompleted tasks of national importance, at least until the five A.M. awakening. The darkness Michael stared into was interrupted only by the wash of a corner streetlight. The wind had gained strength, and the temperature had dropped, in readiness for an advancing storm. The boiler in the old building was not yet engaged, and a sudden chill hit Michael through the window. He pulled a sweatshirt from his closet, threw it on, and returned to stare out to the street.
He had never heard of Rufus Harms. According to the dates in the letter, the man had been incarcerated when Michael was only five years old. The spelling in the letter was abysmal, the formation of the letters and words clumsy, resembling a child’s humorous first attempts at penmanship. The typewritten letter explained some of the background of the case and was obviously composed by a far better educated person. A lawyer, perhaps, Michael thought. The language had a legal air to it, although it was as though the person typing it had intended his professional — together with his personal — identity, to remain unknown. The notice from the Army, according to the typewritten letter, had requested certain information from Rufus Harms. However, Rufus Harms denied ever being in the program the Army’s records apparently indicated he was in. It had been a cover, Harms was alleging, for a crime that had resulted in a horrific miscarriage of justice — a legal fiasco that had caused a quarter century of his life to disappear.
Suddenly warm, Michael pressed his face into the coolness of the window and took a deep breath, the air frosting the glass. What he was doing amounted to blatant interference with a party’s right to seek his day in court. All of his life Michael had believed in a person’s inalienable franchise to have access to the law, no matter how rich or poor. It was not scrip that could be revoked or declared worthless. He comforted himself somewhat with the knowledge that the appeal would have been defeated via a host of technical deficiencies.
But this case was different. Even if false, it could still do terrible damage to the reputations of some very important people. If it was true? He closed his eyes. Please, God, do not let it be, he prayed.