The administrative hearing opened in the second week of November in a hearing room in the Portland Building that had been chosen for its neutrality, which in practice meant it had no windows, no character, and a flag in the corner that stood, all five days, in a slight and somehow reproachful slump. The hearing officer was a retired administrative law judge from Salem named Ruth Castellanos, brought in from outside the city precisely so that no one could say the fix was structural, and she ran her room the way Naomi ran hers: on time, on the record, and without a detectable flicker of interest in anyone's public relations.
Naomi testified on the first day. She had declined the option, offered by the city with an eagerness that told its own story, of submitting her complaint in writing in lieu of appearance. "They would love me not to sit in that chair," she told Diane. "A complainant who appears is a witness. A complainant who submits paper is a file. I have spent this entire year refusing to be a file." She took the stand in a dark suit, was sworn, gave her name and address for the record — Ashbury Lane, stated without emphasis, which in that room was emphasis enough — and she recounted the morning in the same order she had recounted it for Sergeant Vasquez at her kitchen table in June, with the same careful distinctions between what she had seen, what she had heard, and what she had concluded. She described the offer to fetch her identification. She described the hand on her arm. She described the water, and her voice, describing the water, did the only thing it did all day: it slowed, very slightly, on the words bare feet, because she had decided in advance to say them and to own the humiliation in them rather than let the city's attorney discover them.
The city's attorney, a sleek, able man named Jonathan Pryce who was representing the bureau's interests in the proceeding and who privately believed the bureau should have settled the entire matter in July with an apology and a check, cross-examined her with the caution of a man disarming something in his own house. He established that she was a sophisticated complainant. He established that she had legal training, a lawyer from law school, and a command of the applicable constitutional standards. He established, patiently and at length, that no physical injury requiring treatment had resulted from the encounter. Then he arrived at the destination toward which all of it had been aimed.
"Judge Greer, isn't it true that your complaint, your public statement, and this litigation seek not merely to address an individual encounter, but to use that encounter — an encounter you have described as lasting, at its worst, roughly ninety seconds — to impose a wholesale restructuring of the Portland Police Bureau's complaint process, a process in which you, as a federal judge, have a professional interest?"
"Mr. Pryce," Naomi said, "I have no professional interest in your client's complaint process. My interest in it is that of a citizen whose complaint is the twenty-seventh filed against a single officer. I did not arrange to be the twenty-seventh. I arranged nothing at all. I watered my roses. If ninety seconds in my garden has exposed a twenty-six-file failure in your client's systems, the proportion of the exposure to the ninety seconds is your client's arithmetic to explain, not mine. I am not using the encounter. Your client manufactured the encounter's significance, over fifteen years, one closed file at a time. I merely survived it in public."
Castellanos sustained no objection because none was attempted, Pryce having discovered, mid-answer, the same thing that everyone who had questioned Naomi Greer for a living had eventually discovered, which was that the cross-examination of a meticulous witness is a staircase that goes in only one direction.
Evelyn Porter testified on the second day, and the hearing room, which had survived Naomi's discipline intact, had no defenses against Evelyn at all. She was sworn with her reading glasses on a chain and her doorbell camera footage admitted as an exhibit, and she identified herself for the record as eighty-four years old, a resident of Ashbury Lane for fifty-two years, and in her youth a court reporter, a biographical detail that had escaped everyone and that caused the hearing officer, the attorneys, and both court reporters in attendance to sit up as a class.
"Young man," she said to Pryce, who had made the error of addressing her as Mrs. Porter in the tone reserved for the very old and the very young, "I took down testimony for a living for thirty-one years, including, in 1974, the testimony of a police chief explaining a raid that never should have occurred, which I mention only to tell you that I recognize the genre. Now. Ask me what I saw, and I will tell you what I saw, and I will not be adopting anyone's summary of it, including, with respect, the one in your questions."