Andre wrote his request on a Sunday night, at the kitchen table, with the bylaws open beside him to the section that described the records of the association and the right of a homeowner to see them.
He kept the letter short. He asked for the complaint log for the month of his cookout, and for any noise complaints filed that Saturday concerning any address on Juniper Lane. He asked for copies and offered to pay the cost of making them. He kept a copy for the folder before he sealed the original, because a paper you cannot produce is a paper you may as well never have held.
He addressed it to the board as a whole and delivered a copy by hand to Rosa Jimenez, the secretary, whose name sat at the bottom of every letter he had received. He chose a weekday morning. He did not bring his folder. He brought only the request, folded once, and his patience, which he had decided was a tool and should be carried like one.
Rosa answered the door in an apron with flour on one sleeve, and when she saw who it was, something crossed her face that was not hostility. It was the expression of a person who has been expecting a knock for some time and has used the wait to argue with herself.
She read the request standing in her doorway while a radio played low in the kitchen behind her. She read it twice. Then she asked him, in a voice that did not carry past the step, whether he was planning to make trouble.
Andre told her the truth as plainly as he could manage. He said he was planning to find out whether the trouble that had been made already existed on paper, and that if it did not, he wanted the paper to show that too.
That answer seemed to cost her something and relieve her of something at the same time. She asked him to wait on the step, not inside, and he honored the distinction without comment. Through the screen he heard a drawer, then pages.
When she returned, she carried a ledger with a cloth cover, held as if its weight were greater than paper allowed.
The log was simpler than Andre had expected. That was its power. Columns for the date, the address, the kind of complaint, the name of the person reporting, and the action taken. Rosa turned to the month he had asked for, laid the ledger open on the small table by her door, and together they went down the entries line by line.
There were complaints in that month, and seeing them steadied him, because a log with nothing in it would have been a log someone had cleaned. A fence repair left unfinished two streets over. A car parked on grass after a storm. A dog, entered twice, with the second entry noting the owner had been spoken to and the matter closed.
He reached the Saturday of his cookout and read the date carefully, then again. The lines for that day concerned other streets and other small matters.
There was no noise complaint for that Saturday. Not under his address. Not under his name. Not filed by Marjorie Whitcomb, and not filed by anyone else on Juniper Lane. The afternoon that had brought two officers into his backyard had left no trace in the one record where a genuine disturbance would have had to live.
Andre asked whether complaints could be made by phone or in person without entering the log. She answered without looking up. Every complaint goes in the book, she said. That was Harold Finch's rule before it was anyone's. If it is not in the book, it was not brought to the board.
He thanked her and asked for a copy of those pages, and she made it on a small machine in her hallway while he waited on the step. She handed him the warm pages and, after a pause, told him she had not written the letters about his lawn. She stamped what she was given. She said it as if her part were a machine she operated and not a choice she made, and Andre heard both the excuse and the confession inside it.
He walked home with the copies held flat against his folder. At his kitchen table he placed the log beside the notebook and the letters, three kinds of paper now, each saying its piece of the same thing.
On Saturday there had been no complaint. There had only been a woman outside a fence, and a call that bypassed every record her own board kept, because a record can be checked.
Andre wrote the date in his notebook. Then he turned to a fresh page and wrote that it was time to ask for the dispatch recording, and for a meeting where paper could be laid in front of everyone at once.
Chapter 16: The 911 Audio