What He's Poised to Do

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 just like him. Black. Let’s not forget that. White officers.”

“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.”