Defending Jacob (14 page)

I knelt in front of her, rested my arms on her lap, on her warm legs. “Laurie, I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry I didn’t tell you. But I can’t undo that now. The important thing is, I need to know you understand: my father, my grandfather—I’m not them. I need to know you believe that.”

“I do. I mean, I guess I do—
of course
I do. I don’t know, Andy, it’s late. I have to get some sleep. I can’t do this now. I’m too tired.”

“Laurie, you know me. Look at me. You know me.”

She studied my face.

From this close I was surprised to discover she looked rather old and exhausted, and I thought it had been selfish of me and a little cruel to unload this on her now, in the middle of the night after the worst day of her life, just to get it off my chest, to ease my own mind. And I remembered her. I remembered the girl with brown legs sitting on a beach towel on Old Campus freshman year, the girl so far out of my league that she was actually easy to talk to because there was nothing to lose. At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven’t. I felt changed by her, physically. Not sexually, though we had sex everywhere, like minks, in the library stacks, in an empty classroom, her car, her family’s beach house, even a cemetery. It was more: I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after—my family, my home, our entire life together—was a gift she gave me. The spell lasted thirty-four years. Now, at fifty-one, I saw her as she actually was, finally. It came as a surprise: no longer the shining girl, she was just a woman after all.

“That murder might be any business of the state is a relatively modern idea. For most of human history, homicide has been a purely private affair. In traditional societies, a killing was simply the occasion for a dispute between two clans. The killer’s family or tribe was expected to resolve the dispute equitably by some sort of offering to the victim’s family or tribe. The restitution varied from society to society. It might involve anything from a fine to the death of the murderer (or a stand-in). If the victim’s kin was unsatisfied, a blood feud might ensue. This pattern endured across many centuries and many societies.… Current practice notwithstanding, by long tradition murder has been strictly a family matter.”

—
JOSEPH
EISEN
,
Murder: A History
(1949)

T
he next morning, Jonathan Klein stood with Laurie and me in the gloom of the Thorndike Street garage as we armored ourselves against the reporters gathered at the courthouse door, just down the street. Klein wore a gray suit with his usual black turtleneck. No tie today, even for court. The suit, particularly the pants, hung loosely off him. He must have been a tailor’s nightmare, with his thin, assless body. Reading glasses hung from an Indian-bead lanyard around his neck. He carried his ancient cowhide briefcase, worn slick as an old saddle. To an outsider, no doubt, Klein would have seemed inadequate to the job. Too small, too meek. But something about him was reassuring to me. With his backswept white hair, white goatee, and benevolent smile, I thought there was a magical quality about him. A sense of calm surrounded him. Lord knows, we needed it.

Klein peeked down the block at the reporters, who loafed and chatted, a wolf pack sniffing about for something to do. “All right,” he said. “Andy, I know you’ve been through this before, but never from this side. Laurie, this will all be new to you. So I’m going to read you the catechism, both of you.”

He extended his hand to touch Laurie’s sleeve. She looked devastated by the double shocks of the day before, Jacob’s arrest and the Barber curse. We had spoken very little in the morning as we ate, dressed, and got ready for court. It crossed my mind for the first time that we were headed for divorce. However the trial turned out, Laurie would leave me when it was over. I could tell she was eyeing me, making up her mind. What did it mean to find out that she had been tricked into marrying me? Should she feel betrayed? Or acknowledge that her uneasiness meant I was right all along: girls like her don’t marry boys like me. In any event, Jonathan’s touch seemed to comfort her. She manufactured a brief little smile for him, then a bleary look returned to her face.

Klein: “From this moment on, from the time we arrive at the courthouse until you get back home tonight and close the door of your house, I want you to show nothing. No emotion at all. Keep a poker face. Got it?”

Laurie did not respond. She seemed dazed.

“I’m a potted plant,” I assured him.

“Good. Because every expression, every reaction, every flicker of emotion will be interpreted against you. Laugh, and they’ll say you don’t take the proceedings seriously. Scowl, and they’ll say you’re surly, you’re not contrite, you resent being hauled into court. Cry, and you’re faking.”

He looked at Laurie.

“Okay,” she said, less sure of herself, particularly of this last item.

“Don’t answer any questions. You don’t have to. On TV only the pictures matter; it is impossible to tell whether you heard a question that someone shouted at you. Most important—and I’ll speak to Jacob about this when I get to the lockup—any sign of anger, from Jacob in particular, will confirm people’s worst suspicions. You have to remember: in their eyes, in
everybody’s
eyes, Jacob is guilty. You
all
are. They only want something to confirm what they already know. Any little scrap will do.”

Laurie said, “It’s a little late to be worried about our public image, isn’t it?”

That morning the
Globe
had run a page-one headline: DA’s
TEEN
SON
CHARGED
IN
NEWTON
KILLING
. The
Herald
was sensational but, to its credit, forthright. Its tabloid cover showed a background photo of what appeared to be the murder scene, an empty slope in a forest, with a snapshot of Jacob that they must have culled from the Web, and the word
MONSTER
. There was a teaser at the bottom: “Prosecutor benched amid allegations of cover-up as his own teenage son is unmasked in Newton knife murder.”

Laurie had a point: after that, maintaining a poker face as we walked into court did seem a little inadequate.

But Klein only shrugged. The rules were beyond question. They might as well have been written on stone tablets by the finger of God. He said, in his quiet, commonsense way, “We’ll do the most we can with what we have.”

So we did as we were told. We kept our feet moving through the proxy mob of reporters waiting for us in front of the courthouse. We showed no emotion, answered no questions, pretended we did not hear the questions as they were yelled in our ears. They kept on shouting questions anyway. Microphones bristled and probed around us. “How are you doing?” “What do you say to all the people who trusted you?” “Anything to say to the victim’s family?” “Did Jacob do it?” “We just want to hear your side.” “Will he testify?” One, trying to provoke, said, “Mr. Barber, how does it feel to be on the other side?”

I held Laurie’s hand and we pushed through into the lobby. Things were surprisingly quiet, even normal inside. Reporters were barred here. At the lobby security station, people stood back to let us pass. The sheriff’s officers who used to wave me through with a smile now wanded me and inspected the change from my pocket.

We were alone again, briefly, in the elevator. As we rode to the sixth floor, where the first-session courtroom was, I reached for Laurie’s hand, my fingers scrabbling against hers to find a fit. My wife was a good deal shorter than I, so in order to hold her hand I had to haul it up to the level of my hip. She was left with her elbow bent, as if she were checking her watch. A look of distaste crossed her face—her eyelids fluttered, her lips tightened. It was barely perceptible, a micro-movement, but I noticed and released her hand. The elevator doors shivered as the box was lifted. Klein kept his eyes on the panel of ranked buttons, tactfully.

When the doors rattled open, we marched through the crowded lobby to courtroom 6B, there to wait on the front center bench until our case was called.

An awkward interval passed before the judge took the bench. We had been told our case would be called promptly at ten so the court could deal with us—and the circus of reporters and gawkers—then quickly get back to business. We arrived at the courtroom around quarter of. Time dragged while we waited. It felt like a lot more than fifteen minutes. The crowds of lawyers, most of whom I knew well, stood back as if there were a magnetic field around us.

Paul Duffy was there, standing against the far wall with Logiudice and a couple of the
CPAC
guys. Duffy—who was essentially an uncle to Jacob—glanced at me once as we sat down, then turned away. I was not offended. I did not feel shunned. There was an etiquette to these things, that’s all. Duffy had to support the home team. That was his job. Maybe we would become friends again after Jacob was cleared, maybe we wouldn’t. For now, the friendship was suspended. No hard feelings, but that was the way it had to be. I know that Laurie was not so bloodless about Duffy’s snubs or anyone else’s. To her, it was awful to see friendships snapped off this way. We were the same people
after
that we had been
before
, and because we had not changed, it was easy for her to forget that others saw us—all of us, not just Jacob—in a completely new way. At a minimum, Laurie felt, people ought to see that, whatever Jacob may have done, she and I were certainly innocent. It was a delusion I never shared.

Courtroom 6B had an extra jury box to accommodate large jury pools, and that morning in the empty extra jury box a TV camera was set up to provide a shared video feed to all the local stations. While we waited, the cameraman kept the lens pointed at us. We wore our defendants’ blank masks, said nothing to each other, barely even blinked. It is not an easy thing to be watched for so long. I began to notice little things, as one does during extended downtimes. I studied my own hands, which were big and pale, with prominent scuffed knuckles. Not a lawyer’s hands, I thought. Strange to see them appended to my own coat sleeves. That quarter hour of waiting and being stared at in the courtroom—a courtroom I once owned, a room as comfortable to me as my own kitchen—was even worse than what followed.

At ten, the first-session judge swept in wearing her black robe. Judge Rivera, a terrible judge but a good break for us. You must understand: Courtroom 6B, the first-session court, was a hardship post for judges; they rotated in and out of it every few months. It was the job of the first-session judge to make the trains run on time—to assign cases to the other courtrooms in such a way that the workload was spread evenly, to winnow the docket by cajoling plea bargains out of reluctant ADAs and defendants, and to sort through the remaining administrative busywork on the daily docket as efficiently as possible. It was a hectic job—delegate, dump, defer. Lourdes Rivera was fiftyish, with a frazzled demeanor, and magnificently miscast as the judge to make the trains run on time. It was all she could do to get herself to court on time with her robe zipped up and her cell phone turned off. The lawyers scorned her. They grumbled about how she got the job because of her good looks or her opportune marriage to a politically connected lawyer or to plump up the number of Latinos on the bench. They called her Lard-Ass Rivera. But we could hardly have picked a better judge that morning. Judge Rivera had been on the Superior Court bench less than five years but already she had a towering reputation in the district attorney’s office as a defendant’s judge. Most of the judges in Cambridge had the same reputation: soft, unrealistic, liberal. Now it seemed perfectly appropriate to load the dice that way. A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.

When the clerk called Jacob’s case—“Indictment number oh-eight-dash-four-four-oh-seven, Commonwealth v. Jacob Michael Barber, one count of murder in the first degree”—my son was ushered in by two court officers from the lockup and made to stand in the middle of the courtroom, in front of the jury box. He scanned the crowd, saw us, and immediately dropped his eyes to the floor. Embarrassed and awkward, he began to fuss with his suit and tie, which Laurie had picked out for him and Klein had delivered. Jacob was not used to wearing a suit and he seemed to feel both dapper and straitjacketed. He had already begun to outgrow the coat. Laurie used to joke that he was growing so fast that, at night when the house was quiet, she could hear his bones stretching. Now he fidgeted to make the coat sit properly on his shoulders but it would not stretch that far. From all this fidgeting, reporters would later say that Jacob was vain, that he even enjoyed his moment in the spotlight, a slur we would hear over and over when the trial actually began. The truth was, he was an awkward boy and so thoroughly terrified that he did not know where to put his hands. The wonder was that he managed to stand there with as much composure as he did.

Jonathan passed through the swinging gate in the bar, laid his briefcase on the defense table, and took a position beside Jacob. He put his hand on Jacob’s back, not for Jacob’s benefit but to make a point:
This boy is no monster, I am not afraid to touch him
. And more:
I am not simply a hired gun doing my professional duty for a distasteful client. I believe in this kid. I am his friend
.

“Commonwealth,” Lard-Ass Rivera said, “I’ll hear you.”

Logiudice stood up at the prosecutor’s table. He ran his palm down the length of his tie then reached around to give the back hem of his coat a little tug. “Your Honor,” he began mournfully, “this is a heinous case.” He pronounced the word
hay-eenus
, and I understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them. Logiudice recited the facts of the case, already familiar to everyone from the last twenty-four hours of news reports, retold now with a minimum of embellishment for the torches-and-pitchforks mob beyond the camera. There was even a little singsong in his voice, as if we had all heard these facts often enough to be bored by them.