The argument began over a public account of the undercover work, passed from hand to hand in the staff room on June 8. Someone said there could not be an honest person left in the courts if this was what had been going on. Ellis, rinsing his cup, said that was exactly what people outside wanted to believe. I had been reading the account when the voices rose, and I kept a finger on the passage that complicated both claims.
"Honest judges and lawyers helped," I said. "It says that too."
A coworker shrugged. "Maybe they knew where the wind was blowing."
"You don't know that." I surprised myself with the force of it. I knew what it felt like to have the whole building treated as one guilty body. I also knew how useful that unfairness had become to me. "People doing their jobs honestly aren't responsible for somebody else taking payments. And people helping expose it aren't the same as the people being exposed."
The account described undercover payments to Conn to influence state cases. I did not know the people involved, and the printed account did not entitle me to imagine their private conversations. What it did establish was narrower and worse than office carelessness: payments intended to affect cases. It also established that cooperation had come from inside the court world, not only from people standing safely outside it.
Ellis dried his cup with a paper towel until it squeaked. "Try explaining distinctions to somebody who's already decided what your paycheck means," he said. Nobody answered. Lunch was nearly over, and the room emptied in the ordinary way, chairs nudged back under the table, wrappers gathered, the paper left with its corners curling beside a damp ring.
I waited until Ellis and I were alone. "We need to make our own distinction," I said.
"We just did."
"No. You keep saying people might confuse our problem with that one. I'm not willing to keep using that as the reason nothing changes."
He put the cup down. "Nobody took a bribe over six service complaints, Marlene."
"I know."
"Nobody bought an outcome. Nobody fixed a case. We had a backlog and a bad summary."
"And then we knew about them and kept the summary." I pulled out a chair but did not sit. "Not being bribery doesn't make it harmless. The woman who came back lost wages. My initials told Celia I checked something I hadn't checked. Those are our facts. We don't need to borrow somebody else's crime to make them serious."
He said I was making ordinary mistakes sound deliberate. I reminded him that he had told me why he held the packet. His mouth closed, then opened again, but he did not deny the conversation. Instead he asked whether I thought Celia would separate one error from a year's work when everyone was frightened of being the next person whose name went upstairs.
"She gave me a correction route," I said. I explained the requirement to preserve the original and identify the particular error. Saying it aloud made my failure to use it harder to conceal from myself. Ellis asked why I had not brought it in already, and I had no answer that did not include the acting assignment.
"Because I'm afraid too," I said. "That doesn't get us out of it."
He sat down. For the first time that afternoon he looked tired rather than offended. He said he needed to assemble the dates and an explanation that would not imply the complaints themselves proved every alleged service failure. I agreed with that. A complaint deserved review, not automatic acceptance. But I told him that reviewing its merits was different from acknowledging it had not been forwarded.
"Give me until the end of June," he said.
I asked him to say what would happen then. He looked annoyed, but he answered: the correction and the complaints would go to Celia. I repeated the date, and he nodded. It was more definite than our lunch agreement, but it still depended on what I would do afterward. I did not tell him that part because I had not made myself decide it.
Back at the counter, I moved the calendar so the last working day of June faced me instead of the wall. A visitor asked where to leave a request, and I showed him the tray, then checked that it belonged there. Ellis worked beside me without speaking. We had separated our conduct from bribery, which was necessary. It had not separated either of us from the things we had done.