architecture classes and I’m sure she knows people.”
“That’s a good idea,” he said. When he turned, I saw a phone number on the paper. It was hers. He was already planning on calling. I did not even know if he was going to give me credit for the idea. I had parleyed and gained nothing.
Lisa went directly in to speak to Mortenson. I sat outside at her desk. I tried to see the office from her perspective, but it was difficult, since I could see her in the scene. Mortenson laughed and rubbed his bald head. She sat down and made her case: an architecture student would benefit the firm in this regard. A model was precisely what a student was trained to produce. She knew good people. Whatever they paid for the model, could they pay her as well for organizing it? There was something in her expression that was so strong it was almost a scent. Mortenson laughed again, and I had the sudden sense that it was all beyond me.
Mortenson buzzed the desk and asked me in. I entered the conference room and stood there wrapped in the sense that I had intruded. “There’s one guy I think would be especially good,” Lisa said. “His name is Jeff. I don’t know him all that well, but he’s the best model-builder in the class. He could do cutaway views, maybe even put some little lightbulbs in to show where the different people were. He has little kids and he’s always talking about how he needs more money. I think he’d do it for cheap.”
“Hi, there,” Mortenson said to me. And to Lisa: “Lightbulbs. That’s a great idea.” And back to me: “Do you need her for something?”
“Something’s wrong with the printer,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right there.” She was quick to the door.
JEFF LELAND WORE HIGH-TOP SNEAKERS and a sweatshirt and his hair was held back in a ponytail. He sat so nervously that he should have stood: he jiggled his knee, fretted his wedding ring. I went to get him. “Hello,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. “Jeff. You must be Jim.” I didn’t like the way he said my name, or even his own. He was too easy by half, and that intimidated me. Now it seems comical, to have been intimidated by a man who was at most twenty-four or twenty-five.
“Follow me,” I said. “Mr. Schiff and Mr. Mortenson are waiting.”
I dropped Leland off. As I was leaving, Schiff called to me. “Stay,” he said. I listened with professional interest, possibly for the first time in my life, as Schiff and Mortenson explained the case. The next day, when I told Lisa about the conversation, I found that I could replay a few notes but not reproduce the whole tune. Mortenson had drawn Jeff in by talking about his outfit. “Say that the cops see a guy dressed like you,” he said, “and they assume he’s up to no good. Is that just cause? And assume that this guy, the guy dressed like you, takes off at a clip, because he’s afraid of what’s going to happen to him, to his girlfriend. Do the cops call out to him? Do they order him to stop? Or do they just draw their weapons and fire at this guy who’s like you?”
Schiff seemed disappointed that Mortenson would not bring himself to the facts. “But not
“Right,” Mortenson said. “Young guy. Black guy. Prime of his youth. Suddenly, his life as he knows it is over.”
“He’s not the jury,” Schiff said.
“He might be,” Mortenson said. “Or someone just like him.”
“We just need you to make a model,” Schiff said. “To show us how the apartment complex is laid out, to help us help a jury decide whether or not a man could have jumped from the landing to the middle of a stairwell without injuring himself.”
“So what’s the procedure?”
“Procedure’s a grand way of saying it. We send you up there to that same motel. You stay there. You spend your time taking photographs and measuring, and then you make us a scale model of the place.”
“How long will it take?”
Schiff paused judgmentally. “As long as you need for it to take.” He turned to me. “Do you think he’s up to the job?”
“He asked you that?” Lisa said as I told her the story.
“He did,” I said.
“And what did you say?”
I was silent, just as I had been in the meeting. Lisa fell silent, too, and her face grew very serious, as a joke, and soon we were both too deep in the silence, and neither of us felt like smiling.
JEFF TOOK THE TRIP to make the model. Lisa called in sick while he was away. “I’m nervous,” she said. “Maybe I gave them a bum steer.” I told her she had nothing to worry about, secretly hoping I might be wrong. A week after Jeff returned, he brought in his model. He dropped it off, shaking hands with Schiff and Mortenson, and left without saying hello to either me or Lisa.
When I went into the conference room, Schiff and Mortenson were standing next to the model. “Do you notice anything about this?” Mortenson said.
I did: it was beautiful, but it was not big enough to be seen clearly in court. “No,” I said.
“Artists,” Schiff said, “always prefer injustice to justice, whether they know it or not.”
“He even put little handrails next to the stairwells,” I said, trying to praise everything that was wrong about it.
Mortenson stood and came around the table. “The thing is, it proves our point.” One of his fingers stabbed down into the courtyard. “There were echoes when the cop yelled. The sound bounced from place to place, repeating itself, but also erasing the first noise. There was no way for Francis to know where to look. He never had a chance.” He shook his head with effort. “I’m sorry this kid screwed up the model. It may cost us a victory.”
That night, Lisa agreed to drive me home. “I just don’t understand,” she said.
“What don’t you understand? He botched it.”
“There’s no way to salvage it?” Her tone was pained. “I feel like I’m on the line.” That night, trying hard not to help Jeff, I helped Lisa. I knew how to rescue the model, and came in early the next morning to explain the solution to Mortenson. He was instantly alive with the idea. “We put a camera right up against the model and give the jury a projection? This could work. This could work. Beautiful.”
We took it to Schiff, who was in the conference room with the model. “I don’t think it works,” he said. “I think it’s wrong to take to a jury.”
“What do you mean?”
He wasn’t the sort of man who was accustomed to explaining himself, but it was not for lack of skill. “It’s just wrong. Putting a little camera in there and projecting the image on a screen would turn it into a show. The jury will feel it was made with a kind of pleasure, and that’s the wrong message to send.”
“I disagree,” Mortenson said. “I think it’s great.”
“Do you talk so much so that you don’t have to listen to me,” Schiff said, “or to yourself?”
Ordinarily, Mortenson would have returned fire, and the volley would have gone on. But he just picked up the model and walked past Schiff silently. To ignore him outright was one of the most final things he could have done.
I WAS GLAD I HAD NO GRASP of the practical details of my plan, because it gave me a justification for involving Lisa again. She was good with those kinds of things, and she helped rig the camera and test the projection. The effect, the white model on the white screen, was both alienating and intimate. Mortenson was immensely pleased.
But Schiff was right. Schiff was always right. Whatever magic there had been in the idea—and in the office there had been a considerable amount—came off as legerdemain in the courtroom. I did not know this firsthand. I did not go to court. I could tell from the stormy look on Mortenson’s face as he entered the office the day of the verdict. Schiff followed, triumphantly defeated. They had Stacy cut a check to Jeff and send it off and that was the last of him. Lisa began to work hard again in all things, convinced that she needed to prove her worth again. She also began to allow me more latitude in romantic matters, but it was the concession of a defeated woman. I accepted it nonetheless.
Over the next few weeks, Schiff and Mortenson grew apart. Lisa noticed first, and reported the breach in an aggrieved tone. I nodded sadly. But perpetrators always think of victims: though Lisa had suggested Jeff, I had suggested Lisa, and when Jeff had failed the first time, I had rescued him so that he could fail a second time, more profoundly, and by doing so bring down the entire house. I knew that Lisa would figure this out soon enough, and
