Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 159 : No Anomalies

The noodle shop below the Zhengping Firm didn't empty out until after two.

Morning court ran until 12:02. Back at the office, He Xiufen locked the case file in the cabinet and said the remaining half-day was for one thing only: sorting out everything noted in court. Shen Zhixia got three lines into her write-up when her stomach growled.

"Go down and eat." He Xiufen didn't look up. "I won't miscount your bill."

Only the table against the wall was occupied. A bowl of noodles sat there, chopsticks resting across the rim, a thin skin congealed over the broth, the pickled radish untouched. The man wore the suit from this morning's hearing, jacket draped over the chairback, shirt cuffs rolled once. The rolled-up Notice of Court Appearance still lay on the table, tucked under the vinegar bottle.

She stood at the doorway a moment, ordered a bowl from the owner, then walked over and sat down across from him.

"You haven't touched a thing," she said.

"Then take it I didn't come here for the noodles." He pulled the rolled paper out from under the vinegar bottle and set it aside. "This place goes heavy on the chili oil. You eat spicy?"

"I do."

The owner brought her bowl over, steam rising into her face. She was genuinely hungry, and only looked up after two mouthfuls. "Director He says you have to go back and write a self-criticism."

"Statement," he said. "Submitted to the court tomorrow morning."

"What will it say?"

"Exactly what I said in court today. Who submitted it, who handled it, three spots checked in person and no answer anywhere. I can't keep arguing on evidence I know to be false." He paused. "Word for word."

"Just those two sentences won't go down well at the firm."

"Those two sentences were what I said. The firm's version, I'll write separately."

The noodles in his bowl were still clumping. She noticed a shallow indentation on the back of his hand—pressed there this morning when he pushed the file folder toward Director Xu, the plastic clip edge leaving its mark, still not faded.

"Lin Qi's disciplinary action," he said suddenly. "Where is the district on it?"

"Materials are complete. Waiting for the bureau to convene."

"Then it's going where it needs to go."

She ate two more bites and set down her chopsticks. "You're not sitting downstairs today to ask about that."

"I'm just sitting a while."

"Those three spots this morning—you asked about them three times yourself." She looked at him. "When did you start wanting to pull back?"

He rolled his sleeve up another half-turn, then smoothed it down again.

"The twenty-fourth. They sent the materials over. I reviewed them. The signature on the last page was fresh. At the time I thought the department had done a retroactive sign-off—everyone assumed that."

"And then?"

"The twenty-sixth. The original went to the hospital." He said it evenly. "In my file I have their draft defense from the eighteenth. The draft says 'verified by the on-duty physician.' That line on the original—it was added later. In my own materials, I saw two different dates."

"You saw it, and you still wrote the January twenty-sixth Legal Opinion Letter."

"I did." He didn't look away. "That document wasn't just three pages. The hospital gave me a one-page Explanatory Statement, four paragraphs. First paragraph: the medical record changes were internal departmental organization. Second: the treatment process complied with standards. Third: the family had been informed of the autopsy procedures—"

"There's half a sentence in the second paragraph."

"Night-shift handover followed the department shift schedule. No anomalies." He recited the sentence itself, character by character. "That's what they put on paper. I copied it."

Someone in the kitchen was chopping scallions, the knife hitting the board in steady beats. She stared at him for several seconds.

"Before you copied it, did you look at that shift schedule?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"At the time, it felt like the hospital's matter." He straightened his cuff. "Not mine."

She didn't respond to that. This morning, when he'd lined up the two dates from the defendant's bench, his finger had been pressed to the edge of the paper. And earlier—much earlier—at the convenience store below Hengzheng, he'd told her that her father had once believed evidence would speak for itself.

"I should have done this sooner," he said.

"Which part?"

He didn't answer. He picked up his chopsticks and tried to lift a bite of noodles. They were too stuck together to separate. He set them down again.

"Those three pages," he said. "Bring them to the next hearing. Don't ask me. Ask who wrote that half-sentence."

"Can't you write it?"

"What's on paper stays there until someone's willing to say it on paper again." He glanced at her. "I don't want you going back to write materials today and having to calculate first: who told me this."

[Thud. Words spoken outside court don't enter the record. To enter the record, someone has to write them down again.]

She lowered her head and ate. The soup had already gone lukewarm.

"How did you find this place?"

"I've been here before."

"When?"

"When you weren't around."

She didn't push further. He stood, took his jacket from the chairback and draped it over his arm, slipped the rolled Notice of Court Appearance into his inner pocket, and walked to the counter. He set money on the surface—for his bowl and hers both.

"Put it on my tab."

"Director He's noodles are on account. You should keep your own money." The owner counted the bills, then called casually toward the door. "Last time you came it was winter. Sat at that same table."

He was already at the door and didn't look back. She sat watching through the table's edge as he stepped outside and stood by the curb, waiting for the light. When it turned green, he didn't cross. He waited for the next cycle. She looked up again and the street was empty.

Back upstairs, Lin Qi was there. She hung her down jacket behind the door, holding a printed receipt.

"Medical Administration Division accepted it." She handed the paper to He Xiufen. "Section Chief Zou said once the bureau finishes the process, the earliest it goes to committee is mid-March."

"Keep the receipt safe." He Xiufen glanced at it. "Did they ask anything?"

"One thing: whether the hospital's three-business-day explanation had been delivered."

"You see." He Xiufen slipped the receipt into the case file. "They're also waiting to see exactly who wrote those characters. Don't rush. Paper walks by itself."

Lin Qi stayed standing. She glanced at the hard-shell folder on Shen Zhixia's desk.

"In court today, when he checked those three places," she said, "he didn't look my way once."

"What he said had nothing to do with you," Shen Zhixia said.

"I know." Lin Qi's voice dropped. "I just feel like when he scattered this case, what he scattered was himself."

"He can't break that easily." He Xiufen closed the folder and pressed her hand over the right-hand slot. "Zhixia, remember this: what he's withdrawing from is the retainer his own firm signed. Back at Hengzheng, he has to submit a written statement stepping away from the case. Once he submits it, he's saying in front of the whole firm: Hengzheng took this case, and there's one page we can no longer argue from. What he's built his career on from day one until now—you know better than I do."

"Never losing."

"Never losing." He Xiufen nodded. "Today in court, he lost once—to a piece of paper he signed himself. This step of his wasn't far. But what he's staked is everything behind him. He's staked it on your side."

"And if he's staked it wrong?"

"That's his affair." He Xiufen stood and closed the window halfway. "You only need to remember one thing: everything he says to you now is an off-the-record conversation. To use it, you wait until he's willing to write it down again himself. No one else speaking for him counts."

She reached over, took the three pages from the right slot of the hard-shell folder, spread them on the desk and read two lines, then handed them back to Shen Zhixia. "Put them away. Too early to take them to a lawyer. Just right to take them to the hospital."

The next morning, nine o'clock. Third floor of the courthouse.

Shen Zhixia was barely up the stairs when she spotted Director Xu standing by the window outside the clerk's office. Beside him was someone she'd never met: early forties, short hair, briefcase clutched in both hands, collared shirt buttoned to the top, and a stack of documents so neat it looked straight off a printing press.

"Lawyer Shen." Director Xu spoke first, in his usual tone. "This is Lawyer Song. The firm has assigned him to take over the case."

"Song Qiming, Hengzheng." The man shifted his materials to his left hand. "I'll be handling this case from here on."

"Shen Zhixia."

"I know." Song Qiming continued. "I've reviewed yesterday's transcript. I'm not withdrawing any of the earlier documents. What needs verifying gets verified, what needs supplementing gets supplemented, and anything objectionable gets objected to according to procedure."

He spoke at an unhurried pace, laying one sentence down after another, like reading off a checklist. When he finished, he simply stopped and waited for her.

"What about that page?" she asked.

"Which page?"

"The one you're planning to raise an objection about."

"The defendant is submitting no new opinion today." He said it evenly. "In court I will state: the defendant offers no explanation for the source of the page." A pause. "Lawyer Shen, I only work with what's in the record."

"The three-day explanation—you're submitting it," she said. "Who goes in the author column?"

"I report what the record shows."

Director Xu cleared his throat beside them. Footsteps moved on the stairs. A door opened and closed.

The clerk called her in and pulled two sheets from the file. "The defendant filed a change application yesterday at 2:50 p.m. Then at 3:40 they filed this—'Opinion on the Materials Submitted for Appraisal.' This one was faxed to Ningchuan Qiushi last evening. Copy for you."

She took both sheets and walked to the empty table by the stairwell, reading the second one through. Three lines of heading, seven lines of body text. Signature: "Chengbei Hospital." Submission time: February 17, 15:40. One sentence in the body she read twice:

The authenticity of the medical records is in question, which is a matter of evidence determination for the People's Court to decide first; before a handwriting examination conclusion is reached, please suspend organizing the medical damage appraisal.

3:40. At that exact time, she'd been sitting across a noodle-shop table downstairs, listening to someone tell her that phrase "no anomalies" was something he'd copied off a page the hospital gave him.

She dialed Ningchuan Qiushi Judicial Appraisal Office—the institution selected in the January 30 random draw, one of the two outside firms the court had added to the roster. Two transfers later, appraiser Lu Zhicheng picked up, voice clipped.

"The Chengbei Hospital maternal case, the medical damage volume—"

"Arrived." Lu Zhicheng cut in. "And then went back."

"Who sent it back?"

"Not me."

"Back where?"

"When appraisal materials are in dispute, they go back to the commissioning court first. The dispute gets resolved, then we take them." He paused. "The draft acceptance—we'd only just reviewed it day before yesterday. The moment this paper came in, it got shelved. If you want to know exactly which day it landed on my desk, the receipt register says. I'll read it to you."

"Read it."

The receiver was set down. The sound of pages turning came through the line, going on for a long while before stopping.

He found the entry and read down column by column, and she wrote down column by column at the empty table by the stairwell. The entry showed the submitting unit, the number of items, the intake officer's name. The far-right column was blank, waiting for a case number. In the remarks column, a line of small characters: one written opinion from a party attached, signed Chengbei Hospital, dated February 17.

"That intake column, I'm leaving it blank." Lu Zhicheng's voice came through flat. "This volume gets a number when the matter of that page gets explained."

She slipped the entry she'd copied into the left slot of her hard-shell folder and closed it. The stairwell window was open a crack, wind threading through the gap between the two buildings. In that register over in Ningchuan, the far-right column was still blank.

[Thud. Some people won't lose in court, so they make you wait in line somewhere else.]