Marcus returned to the briefcase and drew out the next tab — a sheaf of papers, signatures marching down the pages in neat, obedient rows.
"Your Honor," he said, "the city also claims my grandmother's neighbors consented to this taking. They did not. And I can prove it."
The clock read 9:49. Four minutes remained.
Chapter 14
The Forged Names
The petition was a handsome document. That was Marcus's first thought when the city had filed it — handsome, official, bound with a blue backing sheet, its pages of signatures arranged in tidy columns like a show of hands. "Consent of the affected neighborhood," the cover memorandum called it. Forty-seven signatures, the memorandum said, of residents supporting the condemnation and the park.
Marcus carried it to the lectern in both hands. It was heavy. Lies, he had learned, often are.
"Your Honor," he said, "the city rests part of its case on the claim that the neighborhood wanted this. That the people of the Old Cedar District consented — asked for — the taking of my grandmother's home." He set the petition down and opened it to a flagged page. "This petition contains forty-seven signatures. But a signature is a promise that a particular hand made a particular mark. I examined them. And I compared them against exemplars — known, verified signatures of the same residents, collected from voter registrations, deeds, and sworn affidavits."
Victor Crane rose, and there was a new note in his voice now, less polish and more urgency. "Your Honor, counsel is not a handwriting expert. He cannot —"
"I'm not offering expert testimony, Your Honor," Marcus said calmly. "I'm offering the Court's own eyes. Exhibit twelve is the petition. Exhibit thirteen is a set of exemplars, each authenticated by affidavit. The Court can compare them itself. I ask only that the Court look."
Judge Langston's mouth tightened. But he took the two exhibits, set them side by side on the bench, and looked. The courtroom held its breath. The wall clock ticked — 9:50 — and the second hand seemed suddenly loud.
"Direct the Court's attention," Marcus said quietly, "to the signature of Mrs. Adaeze Okafor, on page six of the petition."
In the gallery, a woman in a deep blue headwrap sat up straighter. Mrs. Adaeze Okafor, sixty-eight, a neighbor who had refused to sell, who had stood on her own porch and told the developer's men to leave her property. Her hands were folded in her lap, and they were trembling.
"The exemplar," Marcus said, "is Mrs. Okafor's signature from her voter registration, filed eleven years ago, and from the affidavit she signed for this proceeding last week. In both, her hand is the same — the tall loop on the A, the long crossing of the z, the careful, unhurried letters of a woman who learned penmanship in a Nigerian mission school and never abandoned it."
He paused.
"The signature on the petition is not that hand. It is a different hand entirely — hurried, cramped, the letters crowded together as though the writer were afraid of being watched. It is," Marcus said, "a forgery. Mrs. Okafor never signed this petition. She told the developer's canvassers, in words I will not repeat in this courtroom, exactly what they could do with their petition."
A gasp moved through the gallery like wind through dry leaves. Mrs. Okafor covered her mouth with one hand, and her shoulders shook — not with grief, with something fiercer, something like vindication arriving years late and all at once. Mr. Clarence Boyd reached over and took her other hand and held it, and did not let go.
"And she is not alone." Marcus turned the pages, and his finger found the marks he'd made in red. "Signatures nine, fourteen, twenty-two, thirty-one, and forty-four show the same pattern — hands that do not match their exemplars, hands that share, notably, the same hurried characteristics, as though written by one or two people working quickly through a list." He looked up at the bench. "Six forged signatures, Your Honor. On a petition the city offered this Court as the voice of the neighborhood."
Crane was standing, but for a moment he seemed to have forgotten what he meant to say. "Your Honor — this is — the petition was gathered by volunteers — the city cannot vouch for every —"
"Counsel," the judge said, and his voice had gone very quiet, the particular quiet of a courtroom when something has crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed, "are you telling this Court that your client submitted a petition containing forged signatures?"
"Your Honor, I — the city received the petition from the developer's community-outreach contractor —"
"Who forged them, counsel?"
"I don't — that is not established —"
"What is established," Judge Langston said, "is that a document filed with this Court, in support of the taking of a citizen's home, contains signatures that are not what they purport to be." He looked down at the two exhibits side by side, at the tall looped A of the real hand and the cramped imitation beside it, and something in his face changed — the last of the amusement draining out of it, replaced by the cold attention of a judge who had just understood the size of what was in front of him. "The Court is referring this matter to the district attorney for investigation of forgery and fraud upon the court."
The words landed like hammer blows. In the front row, Samuel Whitmore's gala smile vanished completely, and for the first time that morning he looked like what he was: a man watching his plan come apart in public.
Marcus checked the clock. 9:51. Two minutes remained.
He reached into the briefcase for the last tab — the thinnest, the oldest, the one wrapped in an archivist's sleeve. Yellowed paper, seventy-one years old, that smelled faintly of his grandmother's Bible, where it had been pressed between the pages for most of his life.
"Your Honor," he said, and his voice was softer now, the way it got when he was speaking of family, "there is one more thing. And it is the oldest thing in this case."