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.”
“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 that when she did, she would be gone.
It took a week. One Thursday night we were in her car, doing what we always did, when she announced that she felt something missing. “Is it your blouse?” I said. She laughed and drew close to me, but in drawing close she pulled away for good. She was giving me a farewell gift. The next evening, she left early. “I’m going out with friends,” she said. “See you Monday.” It put me in a black mood that permitted me to see everything else all the clearer, as a man in a darkened room at night has full vantage of the sky outside.
My situation, at any rate, was trivial compared to what happened to that little world I had inhabited. It had been teetering, I now saw, and before I could truly understand what that meant, it fell. Schiff and Mortenson were through with each other. It happened very quickly: one shouting match in the conference room in which the model was mentioned as proof of incompetence, withdrawn, and then thrust forward again with a stabbing motion. Mortenson stormed out and did not return, not the next day or the day after that. When he did, it was with a stack of papers that he said were for the purpose of dissolving the partnership. None of us could believe it, and we believed it less when they began to sign the documents. Schiff’s signature on top, Mortenson’s on the bottom: It was difficult to understand this togetherness in the service of separation.
Mortenson was the one who left, which was predictable. He was mobile. In fact, he could not stop moving, and the minute he was gone it seemed like a small miracle that he had ever been there at all. Schiff never regained his balance, morally speaking. After he parted ways with Mortenson, he became sullen and capricious. He would not come out of his house except to go to his office, and vice versa. Two weeks after Mortenson’s departure, Lisa left to return to school. That was how my summer ended, and how the things in it ended, too. I went back to school. I graduated, aged, did my best not to let time do its worst to me. I wrote Lisa one long letter that I never mailed and eventually threw away, keeping only the envelope, which was addressed to her but not stamped. Years later, I drove by the building, checked the nameplate, relived that summer. Then I returned the car to the airport and flew back home.