Defending Jacob (2 page)

People stared with curious expressions. Someone said, “That’s him, that’s Andy Barber,” but I did not stop. We were four days past the murder now, and everyone knew I was handling the case. They wanted to ask about it, naturally, about suspects and clues and all that, but they did not dare. For the moment, the details of the investigation did not matter, only the raw fact that an innocent kid was dead.

Murdered!
The news sucker-punched them. Newton had no crime to speak of. What the locals knew about violence necessarily came from news reports and TV shows. They had supposed that violent crime was limited to the city, to an underclass of urban hillbillies. They were wrong about that, of course, but they were not fools and they would not have been so shocked by the murder of an adult. What made the Rifkin murder so profane was that it involved one of the town’s children. It was a violation of Newton’s self-image. For a while a sign had stood in Newton Centre declaring the place “A Community of Families, A Family of Communities,” and you often heard it repeated that Newton was “a good place to raise kids.” Which indeed it was. It brimmed with test-prep centers and after-school tutors, karate dojos and Saturday soccer leagues. The town’s young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child’s paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To these ambivalent residents, the whole suburban project made sense only because it was “a good place to raise kids.” They had staked everything on it.

Moving from room to room, I passed one tribe after another. The kids, the dead boy’s friends, had crowded into a small den at the front of the house. They talked softly, stared. One girl’s mascara was smeared with tears. My own son, Jacob, sat in a low chair, lank and gangly, apart from the others. He gazed into his cell phone screen, uninterested in the conversations around him.

The grief-stunned family was next door in the living room, old grandmas, baby cousins.

In the kitchen, finally, were the parents of the kids who’d gone through the Newton schools with Ben Rifkin. This was our crowd. We had known one another since our kids showed up for the first day of kindergarten eight years earlier. We had stood together at a thousand morning drop-offs and afternoon pickups, endless soccer games and school fund-raisers and one memorable production of
Twelve Angry Men
. Still, a few close friendships aside, we did not know one another all that well. There was a camaraderie among us, certainly, but no real connection. Most of these acquaintanceships would not survive our kids’ graduation from high school. But in those first few days after Ben Rifkin’s murder, we felt an illusion of closeness. It was as if we had all suddenly been revealed to one another.

In the Rifkins’ vast kitchen—Wolf cooktop, Sub-Zero fridge, granite counters, English-white cabinets—the school parents huddled in clusters of three or four and made intimate confessions about insomnia, sadness, unshakeable dread. They talked over and over about Columbine and 9/11 and how Ben’s death made them cling to their own children while they could. The extravagant emotions of that evening were heightened by the warm light in the kitchen, cast by hanging fixtures with burnt-orange globes. In that firelight, as I entered the room, the parents were indulging one another in the luxury of confessing secrets.

At the kitchen island one of the moms, Toby Lanzman, was arranging hors d’oeuvres on a serving platter as I came into the room. A dish towel was slung over her shoulder. The sinews in her forearms stood out as she worked. Toby was my wife Laurie’s best friend, one of the few enduring connections we had made here. She saw me searching for my wife, and she pointed across the room.

“She’s mothering the mothers,” Toby said.

“I see that.”

“Well, we can all use a little mothering at the moment.”

I grunted, gave her a puzzled look, and moved off. Toby was an incitement. My only defense against her was a tactical retreat.

Laurie stood with a small circle of moms. Her hair, which has always been thick and unruly, was swept up in a loose bun at the back of her head and held there by a big tortoiseshell hair clip. She rubbed a friend’s upper arm in a consoling way. Her friend inclined toward Laurie visibly, like a cat being stroked.

When I reached her, Laurie put her left arm around my waist. “Hi, sweetie.”

“It’s time to go.”

“Andy, you’ve been saying that since the second we got here.”

“Not true. I’ve been thinking it, not saying it.”

“Well, it’s been written all over your face.” She sighed. “I knew we should have come in separate cars.”

She took a moment to appraise me. She did not want to go but understood that I was uneasy, that I felt spotlighted here, that I was not much of a talker to begin with—chitchat in crowded rooms always left me exhausted—and these things all had to be weighed. A family had to be managed, like any other organization.

“You go,” she decided. “I’ll get a ride home with Toby.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Why not? Take Jacob with you.”

“You’re sure?” I leaned down—Laurie is almost a foot shorter than me—to stage-whisper, “Because I’d
love
to stay.”

She laughed. “Go. Before I change my mind.”

The funereal women stared.

“Go on. Your coat’s in the bedroom upstairs.”

I went upstairs and found myself in a long corridor. The noise was muted here, which came as a relief. The echo of the crowd still murmured in my ears. I began searching for the coats. In one bedroom, which apparently belonged to the dead boy’s little sister, there was a pile of coats on the bed, but mine was not in the pile.

The door to the next room was closed. I knocked, opened it, poked my head in to peek around.

The room was gloomy. The only light came from a brass floor lamp in the far corner. The dead boy’s father sat in a wing chair under this light. Dan Rifkin was small, trim, delicate. As always, his hair was sprayed in place. He wore an expensive-looking dark suit. There was a rough two-inch tear in his lapel to symbolize his broken heart—a waste of an expensive suit, I thought. In the dim light, his eyes were sunken, rimmed in bluish circles like a raccoon’s eye-mask.

“Hello, Andy,” he said.

“Sorry. Just looking for my coat. Didn’t mean to bother you.”

“No, come sit a minute.”

“Nah. I don’t want to intrude.”

“Please, sit, sit. There’s something I want to ask you.”

My heart sank. I have seen the writhing of survivors of murder victims. My job forces me to watch it. Parents of murdered children have it worst, and to me the fathers have it even worse than the mothers because they are taught to be stoic, to “act like a man.” Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief. At some point a prosecutor realizes he cannot survive that kind of heartbreak either. He cannot follow the fathers down. So he focuses instead on the technical aspects of the job. He turns it into a craft like any other. The trick is to keep the suffering at a distance.

But Dan Rifkin insisted. He waved his arm like a cop directing cars to move ahead, and seeing there was no choice, I closed the door gently and took the chair next to his.

“Drink?” He held up a tumbler of coppery whiskey, neat.

“No.”

“Is there any news, Andy?”

“No. Afraid not.”

He nodded, looked off toward the corner of the room, disappointed. “I’ve always loved this room. This is where I come to think. When something like this happens, you spend a lot of time thinking.” He made a tight little smile:
Don’t worry, I’m all right
.

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“The thing I can’t get past is: why did this guy do it?”

“Dan, you really shouldn’t—”

“No, hear me out. Just—I don’t—I don’t need hand-holding. I’m a rational person, that’s all. I have questions. Not about the details. When we’ve talked, you and I, it’s always about the details: the evidence, the court procedures. But I’m a rational person, okay? I’m a rational person and I have questions. Other questions.”

I sank in my seat, felt my shoulders relax, acquiescing.

“Okay. So here it is: Ben was so
good
. That’s the first thing. Of course no kid deserves this, anyway. I know that. But Ben really was a good boy. He was
so
good. And just a kid. He was fourteen years old, for God’s sake! Never made any trouble. Never. Never, never, never. So why? What was the motive? I don’t mean anger, greed, jealousy, that kind of motive, because there
can’t
be an ordinary motive in this case, there can’t, it just doesn’t make sense. Who could feel that kind of, of
rage
against Ben, against any little kid? It just doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense.” Rifkin put the four fingertips of his right hand on his forehead and worked the skin in slow circles. “What I mean is: what
separates
these people? Because I’ve felt those things, of course, those
motives
—angry, greedy, jealous—you’ve felt them, everybody’s felt them. But we’ve never killed anyone. You see? We never
could
kill anyone. But some people do, some people
can
. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have some sense of these things.”

“No. I don’t, really.”

“But you talk to them, you meet them. What do they say, the killers?”

“They don’t talk much, most of them.”

“Do you ever ask? Not why they did it, but what makes them capable of it in the first place.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because they wouldn’t answer. Their lawyers wouldn’t let them answer.”

“Lawyers!” He tossed his hand.

“They wouldn’t know how to answer, anyway, most of them. These philosophical murderers—Chianti and fava beans and all that stuff—it’s bullshit. It’s just the movies. Anyway, they’re full of shit, these guys. If they had to answer, they’d probably tell you about their rough childhoods or something. They’d make themselves the victims. That’s the usual story.”

He nodded once, to urge me on.

“Dan, the thing is, you can’t torture yourself looking for reasons. There are none. It’s not logical. Not the part you’re talking about.”

Rifkin slid down in his chair a little, concentrating, as if he would need to give the whole thing more thought. His eyes glistened but his voice was even, controlled. “Do other parents ask these sorts of things?”

“They ask all kinds of things.”

“Do you see them after the case is over? The parents?”

“Sometimes.”

“I mean long after, years.”

“Sometimes.”

“And do they—how do they seem? Are they all right?”

“Some of them are all right.”

“But some of them aren’t.”

“Some of them aren’t.”

“What do they do, the ones who make it? What are the key things? There must be a pattern. What’s the strategy, what are the best practices? What’s worked for them?”

“They get help. They rely on their families, the people around them. There are groups out there for survivors; they use those. We can put you in touch. You should talk to the victim advocate. She’ll set you up with a support group. It’s very helpful. You can’t do it alone, that’s the thing. You have to remember there are other people out there who have gone through it, who know what you’re going through.”

“And the other ones, the parents who don’t make it, what happens to them? The ones who never recover?”

“You’re not going to be one of those.”

“But if I am? What happens to me, to us?”

“We’re not going to let that happen. We’re not even going to think that way.”

“But it does happen. It does happen, doesn’t it? It does.”

“Not to you. Ben wouldn’t want it to happen to you.”

Silence.

“I know your son,” Rifkin said. “Jacob.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen him around the school. He seems like a good kid. Big handsome boy. You must be proud.”

“I am.”

“He looks like you, I think.”

“Yeah, I’ve been told.”

He took a deep breath. “You know, I find myself thinking about these kids from Ben’s class. I feel attached. I want to see them succeed, you know? I’ve watched them grow up, I feel close to them. Is that unusual? Am I feeling that because it makes me feel closer to Ben? Is that why I’m latching onto these other kids? Because that’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it? It looks weird.”

“Dan, don’t worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. The hell with ’em. You can’t worry about it.”

He massaged his forehead some more. His agony could not have been more obvious if he had been bleeding on the floor. I wanted to help him. At the same time, I wanted to get away from him.

“It would help me if I
knew
, if, if the case was resolved. It will help me when you resolve the case. Because the uncertainty—it’s draining. It’ll help when the case is resolved, won’t it? In other cases you’ve seen, that helps the parents, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I don’t mean to pressure you. I don’t mean to sound that way. It’s just, I think it will help me when the case is resolved and I know this guy is—when he’s
locked up
and
put away
. I know you’ll do that. I have faith in you, of course. I mean,
of course
. I’m not doubting you, Andy. I’m just saying it will help me. Me, my wife, everyone. That’s what we need, I think. Closure. That’s what we’re looking to you for.”

That night Laurie and I lay in bed reading.

“I still think they’re making a mistake opening the school so soon.”

“Laurie, we’ve been all through this.” My voice had a bored tone.
Been there, done that
. “Jacob will be perfectly safe. We’ll take him there ourselves, we’ll walk him right up to the door. There’ll be cops all over. He’ll be safer in school than anywhere else.”

“Safer. You can’t know that. How could you know that? Nobody has any idea who this guy is or where he is or what he intends to do next.”