By seven the next morning, the taco sketch had been shared more times than anything Harmon Eleven had ever aired. That included the weather segment where the anchor sneezed on a map of the county and the map fell over.
Someone had made a page called Sock Watch. It had eleven thousand followers by breakfast. Its only post was my sketch, zoomed in so far the ducks looked like modern art.
Marcus texted me four times before I reached the courthouse.
NATIONAL PICKUP.
JUDGE. TACOS. EVERYWHERE.
Morning show wants you. Live. 7:40.
Why not answering. Fame. Waiting.
I didn't answer. I was standing in the courthouse lobby holding a single orange pastel. I felt like someone summoned to the principal's office and asked to bring the evidence.
The button man was already set up by the elevator. Overnight he had diversified. He still had FREE BARNABY and BARNABY OUT, but now there was a third tray, and those buttons said TACO LEFT, DUCK RIGHT.
"You're the artist," he said, as I passed.
"I'm just going upstairs."
"She's the artist," he told the woman behind me, pointing. She bought two.
Teddy Okonkwo was sitting on the bench outside the elevator with his briefcase on his knees. He looked like he had slept in a car, possibly while driving it. When he saw me, he stood up so fast he dropped his pen.
"Ms. Sutter. I saw the news." He picked up the pen. "Is he going to be angry? He's going to be angry. Is he going to take it out on the defense?"
"I don't think it works like that."
"Nothing works like anything," Teddy said. "I've been a lawyer for four years. I have never once been in a room where anyone knew what the judge was thinking." He swallowed. "Did you really see tacos?"
"I really did."
He looked at me for a second with an expression I couldn't quite read. If I'd had to draw it, I'd have called it hope.
"Huh," he said, and sat back down.
Deb was waiting outside Chambers 4 with her crossword folded into quarters. She looked at me over her reading glasses. Then she looked at the pastel in my hand.
"'Summoned,' six letters," she said.
"Called."
"Sent for." She tapped the door with her pen. "He's been in there since six-fifteen. He's had two coffees and he hasn't touched either one."
"Is that bad?"
"Hon, I've worked for that man for fourteen years. I have never once known what anything means."
She opened the door. "Good luck. Don't sit in the green chair. It tips."
Chambers 4 was smaller than I expected. Law books lined three walls, all the same height, as if they had been ranked. There was a window over a parking lot, a desk with nothing on it, and a green chair that leaned visibly to the left.
Judge Achterberg sat behind the desk without his robe. He wore a white shirt and a gray tie. It was the first time I had seen him as an ordinary man in ordinary clothes. He looked exactly as frightening.
On the desk, squared to the corners, was a printout of my sketch.
"Ms. Sutter," he said. "Sit."
I sat in the other chair. It did not tip, which felt like the only good news available.
"You were in Seat One yesterday," he said.
"Yes, Your Honor."
"You can see under the bench from Seat One."
"Since 2019. The carpenter never came back."
He made a note of that, on a small pad I hadn't noticed. Then he looked at me for a while. Most judges look at me like furniture. This felt more like being proofread.
"Did you add anything?" he said.
"No."
"Exaggerate anything?"
"No, Your Honor."
"Remove anything?"
"There was a gum wrapper by the leg of the bench," I said. "I left it out. It wasn't in focus."
He nodded slowly. Then he held out one hand, palm up.
It took me a second to understand. I put the orange pastel in his palm. He held it up beside the sketch, turning both toward the window, and studied them for about as long as he had studied me.
"This is wrong," he said.
My stomach dropped through the floor of the building. "The drawing?"
"The color." He set the pastel down. "They're tangerine. This is closer to a traffic cone."
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
"The tacos themselves are excellent," he added. "The proportions of the ducks are correct. But the base color is off by at least two shades."
He tapped the printout once. "If you are going to put my socks on the six o'clock news, Ms. Sutter, I would prefer them accurate."
I had prepared for many versions of this meeting. A lecture. A complaint to the station. My press pass on the desk in two pieces.
I had not prepared for a color correction.
"I'll fix it," I heard myself say.
"Thank you."
"Your Honor, can I ask why..."
"No," he said, pleasantly. It was the most pleasant "no" I had ever heard. It closed the subject like a vault door.
He turned the sketch face down and squared it to the corners again.
"You drew what you saw," he said. "That is your job, and you did it well. I won't ask you to stop doing it."
He paused. "But this trial belongs to Mrs. Pemberton and Mr. Halloran. It is not going to become about my socks."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Good." He stood, which meant I stood. "You can keep the orange."
Leon was waiting at the end of the hallway, pretending to read a fire evacuation map. He had been pretending to read it for some time. He knew the exits by heart, and so did I.
"Well?" he said.
"He gave me a note."
Leon's eyebrows went up into his hairline, which was a long trip. "A reprimand?"
"A color correction. The tacos are on a tangerine background. Apparently I went traffic cone."
Leon considered this with the seriousness of a man who has spent forty years arguing about the difference between ivory and eggshell.
"He's right," he said at last. "I noticed it on the broadcast. I didn't want to say anything."
"Leon."
"Kindness," he said, "is also a line."
Then he took a small tin out of his jacket and opened it. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was one stub of pastel, worn almost to nothing.
"Tangerine," he said. "From 1994. Bring it back."
The gallery was full again at nine. It was, if possible, fuller. And something had happened to it overnight.
A woman in the second row had pulled her trouser cuffs up two inches. One of her socks was red with white polka dots. The other was green with stripes.
Beside her, a man in a suit wore one argyle sock and one with cartoon cats. Behind them sat three law students who had coordinated their mismatching. Pineapples, lightning bolts, and a brown sock with a single embroidered hot dog.
Everywhere I looked, people sat with their legs crossed and their hems lifted. It looked like a very strange wedding where the dress code had been sent out by a toddler.
Leon slid into the bench behind the press row and opened his sketchbook. He was wearing a plaid sock and a purple one.
"Leon."
"When in Rome," he said, with tremendous dignity.
At the counsel tables, everyone was tense in a fresh way. Priscilla had added a fifth easel. Teddy had brought three spare pens and lined them up beside his legal pad, like surgical instruments.
Dolores sat with her hands folded and her eyes forward. Gil was wearing a FREE BARNABY button, which Teddy kept quietly trying to unpin.
Deb looked out at the gallery. She took in the cuffs and the polka dots and the hot dog. Then she looked down at her crossword.
"'Forthcoming,' eight letters," she muttered. "Imminent."
Then she stood. "All rise."
Every person in the room rose. More than a few of them glanced down at their own socks on the way up, as if checking they were still there.
Judge Achterberg came through the door at the usual speed, along the usual route. He climbed to the bench, sat, and arranged his papers. He looked out at the gallery once, with no expression at all.
Then he crossed his legs.
I didn't want to look. I looked anyway, because looking is my job.
Through the gap at the side of the bench, between the robe and the shoe, there was nothing to see.
Plain black. Both of them.
All around me, a hundred and forty people in polka dots and pineapples craned toward a bench they couldn't see under. Only I knew what was there. For the first time in nine years, I had nothing to draw.
Up next: Plain Black
Continue to Part 3 →