I drew them anyway. That is the thing about my rule. It doesn't care whether the room is interesting.
Two black socks, plain, in the lower right corner of the day-two sketch. I made them the exact size of the tacos the day before. Charcoal, no color. They looked like two small closed doors.
Marcus called at 4:16, as if we had a standing appointment.
"Socks," he said.
"Black."
"Black?"
"Both of them. Plain."
There was a pause long enough for me to hear the newsroom behind him. Nobody was laughing today.
"Wren," he said. "Viewers. Expectations. Ducks."
"There were no ducks, Marcus."
"A little duck," he said. "One. Small. Corner."
"I draw what's in the room."
"The room," Marcus said, with deep feeling, "is letting us down."
The city took the black socks personally.
By nine that night, Sock Watch had posted my day-two sketch with a single caption: What did we do? It got more comments than the tacos.
Some people were sad. Some were angry. One man wrote a four-paragraph theory that the black socks were a coded message about the gnome.
By morning the button man had a fourth tray. Those buttons said BRING BACK THE DUCKS.
"Bestseller," he told me, as I went past. "People like a cause."
"Last week you sold both sides of a gnome."
"And now," he said, "I sell justice."
Marcus was right about the room, though not in the way he meant.
Something had gone wrong in Courtroom 4B, and it wasn't the socks. On day one the judge had been cold, but it was a steady cold, like a good refrigerator. On day two he was a different appliance.
He spoke a little faster. He cut Priscilla off twice in the first hour. In nine years I had never seen him interrupt anyone.
On day three it got worse. Dolores took the stand and described her tulip bed in loving, exhaustive detail. She covered the bulbs and the soil. She covered a variety called Velvet Duchess that she had ordered from a catalog in 1998.
Priscilla moved each easel a quarter-inch as she spoke, like a stagehand who cared too much.
Then Teddy stood to cross-examine.
He made it as far as "Mrs. Pemberton, isn't it true that..." before his mind visibly left the building. I watched it go. His mouth stayed open, and his hand went to his legal pad and found nothing there.
He picked up a spare pen and dropped it. Then another. Then the third.
"Mr. Okonkwo," said the judge.
"Yes. Sorry. Your Honor. Sorry."
"Take your time."
It was the right thing to say. But he said it in the voice of a glacier with all the time in the world. Teddy went the color of printer paper. He asked three questions, two of them the same question, and sat down.
Gil patted his arm. Dolores looked straight ahead. Neither of them had glanced at the other in three days, and I had the sketches to prove it.
I drew all of it. Teddy's empty hand. Dolores's folded ones. The judge's plain black socks behind the panel, two more closed doors.
I found Teddy afterward in the stairwell between the third and fourth floors. He was sitting on a step with his tie loosened, eating a granola bar like it had personally let him down.
"That was bad," he said, before I could say anything.
"It wasn't great."
"Day one was fine. Day one I was terrified, but it was fine." He frowned at the granola bar. "Can I tell you something weird?"
"Sure."
"On day one, he seemed different. Not nicer. He was just as scary. But it was like somebody had left a window open in there. You could breathe." He shrugged. "And now somebody closed it."
I thought about the tangerine and the ducks, and about the black socks. I didn't say anything. It wasn't mine to say.
"Maybe it's me," Teddy said. "Maybe I just got worse."
"You dropped three pens on day one too."
"I know," he said, cheering slightly. "I was consistent."
At the lunch recess, Leon found me at the vending machine on the third floor. It sold one kind of cracker and something that was only technically coffee.
"How are the doors?" he asked. He had seen my day-two sketch.
"Still closed."
He fed a dollar into the machine and studied the crackers as if they had wronged him. "I could do it, you know," he said. "If it would help."
"Do what?"
"A little flourish. A little color. The Courier would run it on the front page. The man is entitled to a little joy under that robe."
He cleared his throat. "Hypothetically."
"Leon. That's lying."
"It's kindness," he said. "Which is also a line."
"It's a line I don't draw," I said. He laughed, because he'd walked straight into that one.
He took his crackers and looked at me with his sad, coin-making eyes. "You know what's in the room this week, Wren? A man who got embarrassed. And four hundred thousand people who think it's the best thing to happen to this city in years."
He opened the crackers. "Somewhere between those two things is a picture. I just don't know how to draw it."
I didn't either.
Day four was Barnaby day.
Over Priscilla's objection, Teddy had won a motion to bring the defendant's gnome into court as an exhibit. He had argued that the jury deserved to see "the actual scale of the alleged trespass." I think he mostly wanted company.
Barnaby arrived on a hand truck, pushed by two county maintenance workers and supervised by Gil's cousin. He was wrapped in moving blankets. They unwrapped him in front of the jury box.
The gallery made a sound like a hundred and forty people inhaling a sneeze.
Gil had dressed him for court.
Barnaby wore a tiny black robe, hand-stitched. A pair of rimless glasses made from wire had been glued to his concrete nose. His painted face was as stern and blank as Gil could make it.
The gnome had come as the judge.
Priscilla was up before the blankets hit the floor. "Objection. Your Honor, this is a mockery of the court."
"Sustained," said Judge Achterberg, without looking at the gnome. "Mr. Okonkwo, please remove the robe from your exhibit."
Teddy removed the robe. His hands shook so badly that it took him four tries. Underneath, Barnaby was wearing a waistcoat and what appeared to be a tiny tie.
"And the glasses."
Teddy removed the glasses. Barnaby looked out at the jury, smug as ever, eleven inches of tulip bed on his conscience.
Nobody laughed. Two days earlier, I think everybody would have. Gil looked at the floor. Dolores looked at the ceiling.
Deb wrote something in her crossword, very hard. Later I saw what it was. 'Glum,' four letters. She had written DOUR.
Through the gap at the side of the bench, two black socks sat perfectly still.
I drew the gnome. I drew the robe folded on the defense table and the wire glasses beside it. I drew Teddy's hands.
Sometimes you know a drawing is going wrong three lines before you can see it. I knew it now. This trial had stopped being about a property line.
That afternoon, at a quarter to five, a clerk walked down the press row handing out photocopies. I took one. Leon took one. A reporter from the Courier took one and said a word that Deb would have found a clue for.
It was a motion from Priscilla Vandermeer. She asked the court to declare a mistrial.
The grounds were "extraordinary public attention, prejudicial to the plaintiff, arising from conduct unrelated to the merits." There were three exhibits attached. Exhibit A was a printout of the Sock Watch page. Exhibit B was a photograph of the button man's fourth tray.
Exhibit C was my sketch.
The taco one. With the orange off by two shades, exactly as the judge had said.
At the bottom of the motion, beneath Priscilla's signature, was a list of people the plaintiff intended to call at the hearing. There were two names.
The first was the Honorable Raymond Achterberg.
The second was me.
Up next: Exhibit C
Continue to Part 4 →