Hardy deadpanned. "I've got to read it."
"In the end," Andrew said, "that's why I didn't send out the story anyplace. It was too derivative. I mean, a really really bright guy who's basically insane. It's been done a million times now. Plus, I don't think the ending worked really well. I wanted Trevor to find a really unique way to commit these murders, but in the end, I fell back on the gun."
Hardy had to fight a disorienting sense of surrealism. Here's a client up for murder and what he wants to discuss are plot points in a story that might hang him. "Have you published before?" he asked.
"No. But I've sent out a bunch. I did get a nice note back from McSweeney's on one of them, not a straight rejection."
"I'm happy for you." Hardy finally moved up to the table, pulled around a chair and sat in it. "Listen, Andrew, whether or not you made this up, we've got to work on some kind of spin for this story. You've got to see that it casts you in the worst possible light."
"It wasn't that bad," Andrew said.
"No, it's peachy," Hardy said. "But I'm not talking about its literary quality. I'm talking about the events and motive around these two murders that have actually taken place and that you're charged with committing and that you pretty much exactly mirrored in the story you wrote two months earlier. Two murders- your teacher and your girlfriend. Your dad's gun. Even down to your alibi."
"Don't forget my favorite moment," Amy said. She'd printed the thing out at the office, and now had found the page, and read aloud. "Talking about the gun now. Here's your narrator. But what if I get rid of it after? Then, even if they can recover the slugs, they won't be able to compare the ballistics marks. I double-check and make sure the gun isn't made in Israel, where they shoot their guns before they sell them. Then the ballistic readouts are computerized and matched with the weapon's buyer, so even if the gun itself is unavailable, they can identify its owner."
"That's true," Andrew objected. "That's what they do. I found it in my research."
"Good for you," Hardy said. "But not the point. Here, Amy, let me."
She handed the pages across to him. He flipped to the end. "How about this part, Andrew? How do you think a jury would feel about you if the prosecutor got this admitted, which he will, and reads it out loud? I come back and find the bodies. I call nine one one. They're going to think there's no way I'd come back and do that if I'd done the shooting.
"Will the cops suspect me? Yeah. But I've gotten rid of the gun and the gloves. The night I do it, I pack a change of clothes just like the ones I was wearing in a plastic bag in my trunk. Shoes, too. I adios the whole package before I come back and discover the carnage.
"The cops look, but I'm clean. And Mike and Laura are gone."
"No! That's wrong." Andrew came halfway out of his chair. "I didn't write Mike and Laura. I wrote Julie and Miles. The characters."
"Oh, that's right, you did. I guess it seemed like you meant Mike and Laura, so that's what I read. Honest mistake." Hardy turned the pages facedown, looked across the room at his client. "Listen, Andrew. Not only is this pretty much exactly what happened, it shows premeditation and planning. It's also sophisticated stuff. You may remember that as another one of the criteria we're supposed to avoid- criminal sophistication."
Andrew slumped back into his chair, crossed his arms over his chest. Given the magnitude of disaster he was looking at, his expression was almost serene. "Look," he said. "You start with my character in the story, remember, not me. You put him in a situation that you know something about. That's what they tell you, to write what you know."
"That's what you say in the story, too. So all right, you picked jealousy."
"I hadn't ever felt anything like it before. It was just… overpowering. Laura would get to going on about Mike, and after a while I just couldn't listen to it anymore. I suppose I started acting like a jerk…"
Wu jumped on it. "How?"
"Every way I could, really. Coming on to other girls around her. Cutting her down in front of other people. Dissing Mike…"
"But nothing physical?" she asked.
"No."
"Nothing?" Hardy repeated. This was the kind of fact about which you wanted no ambiguity. "You never hit her? Nobody ever saw you hit her?"
"I never hit her," he said. "I would never hit her. I loved her."
"Okay." Hardy thrummed his fingers on the table. "Let's go back to the story. Do you have any idea how we deal with it, or get around it?"
Andrew sighed. "It's fiction. I don't know what else I can say. The character isn't me. Julie isn't Laura, Miles isn't Mike. There's tons of stuff in the story that didn't really happen."
"Name me something important," Hardy said. "Something that will make any difference to a judge or jury."
"Well, the main thing, in the story, Trevor had had a lot of sex with other girls. That wasn't me."
"You're a virgin?" Hardy asked. "That didn't read like a virgin wrote it."
"I was then," Andrew said, a hint of pride in the admission. "I imagined what a guy like Trevor would have felt and done."
"All right." Hardy wasn't giving him much. "But it's a stretch to call that the main thing, Andrew. Maybe you could tell us something about the crime that's different in the story from real life."
The boy looked to Wu for help, but she, too, was waiting for what he'd say. "Okay," he said finally. "Okay. In the story, I have Trevor almost decide not to use his father's gun, right? He understands that if he does that, the cops have got to see that he's tied to the crime. So if I understood that clearly enough to write about it four or five months ago, would it make sense that I'd just go ahead and use Hal's gun?"
Hardy shrugged. "Maybe you figured out some way you could make it work?"
"But I didn't. It wouldn't have worked. So I wouldn't have done it. Not in real life."
Wu came forward. "But Hal's gun was there, Andrew."
"But that was- I mean, look, I got the idea from writing the story- we have the gun there on stage…"
Hardy butted in. "We've already done this. Let's go to something a little more personal. Your best friend- Lanny is it?- Lanny has testified that you thought Mooney and Laura were intimate. That's why you brought the gun to school in the first place, and…"
"That's another one!" Andrew's expression was alight with triumph. "My character Trevor never would have showed the gun to anybody at school. I wouldn't have shown it to Lanny if I'd been planning to use it. I mean, think about it, would that make any sense? Would a guy smart enough to write the Trevor character be dumb enough to show the gun around?"
"Smart guys do dumb things all the time," Hardy said. "The question is did you believe that Laura and Mooney were having sex?"
Deflated, Andrew sat back. "I thought maybe. That's why I wrote the story. But then we got back together…"
"You and Laura?" Hardy asked. Between the fiction and the reality, he almost felt he needed a scorecard. "I guess I missed the breakup. What was the timing on that?"
"Before Christmas. A couple of weeks after we got on the play."
"And why did you break up again?"
"She broke up with me. Over me being so jealous."
"But then after Christmas, you got back together?"
"Right."
"How did that happen?"
Again, the lick of pride. "She convinced me there was no reason for me to be jealous."
"In other words," Wu put in, "you started having sex."
Andrew nodded.