In the second crate, beneath a layer of yellowed newspapers from 1963, I found a brown leather briefcase with the initials H.W.V. stamped in gold on the flap, and I knelt on the attic floor of my house in Toledo with the crowbar still in my hand and my breath coming short. I am Gail Brzezinski, seventy years old, the daughter of a courthouse janitor, and I opened that briefcase on my knees. Inside lay a ledger bound in green cloth, a stack of envelopes tied with twine, and a single reel of recording tape in a metal tin, labeled in the neat hand of my father. Judge Voss, Evidence. Keep Safe.
I read the ledger by the light of a bare bulb until my eyes burned. Judge Harold Voss had kept a careful record of every payment made in 1962 and 1963 to officials of Lucas County, a county commissioner, a prosecutor, two police captains, and a labor boss, all of them dates and amounts and initials. The last entry was in the hand of the judge, three days before he vanished. If this book is found, I did not leave of my own accord. My father had gone into the chambers to empty the wastebasket that night, and he had found the briefcase, and he had hidden it for sixty years.
The next morning, the man in the nice suit came back up my driveway, exactly as I had expected, but he did not come alone. Three more men followed him in a gray sedan, older, in sport coats, and one of them used a cane. I sat on my front porch with a glass of tea, and the briefcase stood locked in the trunk of the car of my neighbor across the street. “Mrs. Brzezinski,” the first man said, with a tight smile, “I am prepared to raise my offer to fifty thousand dollars. For everything in the attic.”
A brass lamp bought for five dollars at a garage sale gave one retired woman the length of a long night in the attic to bring a stranger in a suit back to the truth in Toledo.
I gave my terms from my porch rocker, quietly, with the glass of tea in my hand. “Gentlemen, my name is Gail, and my father cleaned the chambers of Judge Voss for forty years. I will not sell the crates. I will hand them to the Lucas County prosecutor and to the Toledo newspaper, today, at noon. If any of you has something to tell them about what happened to the judge, I suggest you come along. If not, you may get off my lawn, and take your offer with you.”
The man with the cane sagged onto my porch rail. “Mrs. Brzezinski, I am Raymond Kessler,” he said, and the nice suit beside him looked startled. “My father was Captain Kessler of the Toledo police. I was twelve years old. I have carried his name all my life. A year ago, a lawyer told my son that there might be proof in the family of the courthouse janitor. My son wanted to protect the family name. I only wanted to know.” He looked at me with wet eyes. “If it is true, I want to be the one to say it aloud.”
But the man in the nice suit, his grandson, a hard faced lawyer named Brent, was not ready. He suddenly leaped up the porch steps, tore the leather satchel I had set by my chair, the one that held copies of the first pages, out of my hands, and ran for the gray sedan with the papers flapping against his chest. He crossed the lawn. My neighbor, a retired reporter named Mr. Dunphy, stepped out of his house with a camera. Two squad cars turned the corner. And the dog next door began to howl.
Brent stopped at the bumper of the sedan with the satchel in his arms and the whole street of Toledo watching, the sprinklers hissing and the cicadas buzzing in the maples. His grandfather came down the walk slowly on his cane. “Brent,” the old man said, in a tired voice, “I have waited sixty years to hear the truth said out loud. Do not take it away from me now.” Brent looked at his grandfather. The color drained from his face. He lowered the satchel, and he handed it to Mr. Dunphy.
The consequences took many months. The briefcase was authenticated by the state, and the tape, played in a courtroom, carried the voice of the judge naming the men who had threatened him. Most of those men had long since passed, but the county reopened the file, and a monument to Judge Voss was unveiled at the courthouse. Raymond Kessler gave a statement on the steps, and the newspaper printed it on the front page. The name of my father was inscribed on a bronze plaque in the lobby, as the janitor who kept the truth.
In the name of my father Walter, who passed in 1998, I started the Walter Brzezinski Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of courthouse and school custodians and for legal aid and archival help for families seeking the truth about a lost relative, in Lucas, Wood and Fulton counties. In the first year we sent twenty seven students to college and helped fifty one families open old files. One was a seventy three year old woman from Maumee who held a folded telegram from 1966, and who said she could finally rest.
On a bright Saturday in September, I stood in the lobby of the Lucas County courthouse in my best navy suit, with Raymond Kessler beside me on his cane, and a crowd of reporters and old friends around us. The brass lamp stood on a pedestal under glass, polished to a shine, with a small card at its base. Donated by Walter Brzezinski, Custodian. Raymond put his arm through mine. “Your father,” he said, “was the bravest man in the building.” I looked at the lamp and wept, and the lights of the lobby glowed.
