36 | Helluva Show
The phone rang at five-thirty the next morning, my cell phone, and I answered it automatically, conditioned over the years to receive these emergency calls at crazy hours. I even answered in my old commanding voice, “Andy Barber!,” to convince people that I had not actually been sleeping, no matter what the hour.
When I hung up, Laurie said, “Who was that?”
“Jonathan.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“So what was it?”
I felt a grin spread over my face and a dreamy, bewildered happiness embraced me.
“Andy?”
“It’s over.”
“What do you mean, it’s over?”
“He confessed.”
“What? Who confessed?”
“Patz.”
“What!”
“Jonathan did what he said he would in court: he had him served. Patz got the subpoena and last night he killed himself. He left a note with a full confession. Jonathan said they’ve been at his apartment all night. They confirmed the handwriting; the note is legit. Patz confessed.”
“He confessed? Just like that? Is that possible?”
“It doesn’t seem real, does it?”
“How did he kill himself?”
“Hung himself.”
“Oh my God.”
“Jonathan says he’s going to move for dismissal as soon as court opens.”
Laurie’s hands covered her mouth. She was already crying. We embraced, then we ran into Jacob’s room as if it were Christmas morning—or Easter, given that this miracle was more in the nature of a resurrection—and we shook him awake and hugged him and shared the incredible news.
And everything was different. Just like that, everything was different. We got dressed in our trial clothes and we bided our time till we could drive to the courthouse. We watched the news on TV and checked Boston.com for mention of Patz’s suicide but there was none, so we sat there grinning at one another and shaking our heads in disbelief.
It was better than a not-guilty from the jury. We kept saying this: not guilty is merely a failure of proof. Jacob had actually been proven innocent. It was as if the entire horrific episode was erased. I do not believe in God or miracles, but this was a miracle. I cannot explain the feeling any other way. It felt as if we had been saved by some sort of divine intervention—by a real miracle. The only limit on our joy was the fact we could not quite believe it and we did not want to celebrate until the case was officially dismissed. It was at least conceivable, after all, that Logiudice would continue his prosecution even in the face of Patz’s confession.
In the event, Jonathan did not get the chance to move for dismissal. Before the judge even took the bench, Logiudice filed a nol pros—a nolle prosequi, which announced the government’s decision to drop the charges.
At nine sharp, the judge bounded out to the bench with a little grin. He read over the nol pros with a theatrical flourish and, with a palm-up motion of his hand, he asked Jacob to stand. “Mr. Barber, I see from your face and from your dad’s face that you’ve already heard the news. So let me be the first to tell you the words I’m sure you’ve longed to hear: Jacob Barber, you are a free man.” There was a cheer—a cheer!—and Jacob and I hugged.
The judge banged his gavel but he did so with an indulgent smile. When the courtroom was relatively quiet again, he gestured to the clerk, who read in a monotone—apparently only she was not happy for the result—“Jacob Michael Barber, in the matter of indictment number oh-eight-dash-four-four-oh-seven, the Commonwealth having nolle prosequi the within indictment, it is ordered by the court that you be discharged of this indictment and go without day insofar as this indictment is concerned. The bail previously posted may be returned to the surety. Case dismissed.”
Go without day. The awkward legal formulation that is the defendant’s ticket out. It means, You may go without any more court days scheduled—go and not come back.
Mary rubber-stamped the indictment, slipped the paper into her file, and tossed the file into her out-box with such bureaucratic efficiency that you might have thought she had a stack of cases to get through before lunch.
And it was over.
Or almost over. We made our way through the crowd of reporters, jostling now to congratulate us and get their video in time for the morning shows, and we wound up literally running down Thorndike Street to the garage where we were parked. Running, laughing—free!
We made it to our car and for an awkward moment we were preoccupied with trying to find the words to thank Jonathan, who graciously declined the credit because, he said, truthfully, he had not actually done anything. We thanked him anyway. Thanked him and thanked him. I pumped his arm up and down, and Laurie hugged him. “You would have won,” I told him. “I’m sure of it.”
In all of this, it was Jacob who saw them coming. “Uh-oh,” he said.
There were two of them. Dan Rifkin came first. He was wearing a tan trench coat, fancier than most, over-designed, with a profusion of buttons, pockets, and epaulettes. He still had that doll-like immobile face, so it was impossible to know exactly what he intended. Apologizing to us, perhaps?
A few feet behind him was Father O’Leary, a giant by comparison with Rifkin, ambling along with his hands in his pockets and his scally cap pulled low over his eyes.
We turned slowly to meet them. We must all have had the same expression, puzzled but pleased to see this man who should naturally have been our friend now, despite the pain he had been through, graciously coming to welcome us back into his world, into the real world. But his expression was strange. Hard.
Laurie said, “Dan?”
He did not respond. He took from one of the deep pockets of his trench coat a knife, an ordinary kitchen knife, which I recognized, absurd as this sounds, as a Wüsthof Classic steak knife because we have the same set of knives in a knife block on our kitchen counter. But I did not have time to fully fathom the sublime weirdness of being stabbed with such a knife because almost immediately, before Dan Rifkin got within a few feet of us, Father O’Leary grabbed Rifkin by the arm. He banged Rifkin’s hand once on the hood of the car, which caused the knife to clatter down to the concrete garage floor. Then he flipped Rifkin’s arm behind the little man’s back and easily—so easily he might have been manipulating a mannequin—he bent him over the hood of the car. He said to Rifkin, “Easy there, champ.”
He did all this with expert, graceful professionalism. The whole transaction could not have lasted more than a few seconds, and we were left gaping at the two men.
“Who are you?” I said finally.
“Friend of your father’s. He asked me to look out for you.”
“My father? How do you know my father? No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“What do you want me to do with this guy?”
“Let him go! What’s wrong with you?”
He did.
Rifkin straightened himself up. He had tears in his eyes. He looked at us with helpless impotence—apparently he still believed Jacob had killed his son, but he could not do anything about it—and he staggered off, to what torments I cannot imagine.
Father O’Leary went to Jacob and extended his hand. “Congratulations, kid. That was something in there this morning. Did you see the expression on that asshole DA’s face? Priceless!”
Jacob shook his hand with a bewildered expression.
“Helluva show,” Father O’Leary said. “Helluva show.” He laughed. “And you’re Billy Barber’s kid?”
“Yeah.” I had never been proud to say that. I’m not sure I had ever actually said it out loud in public before. But it gave me a connection to Father O’Leary and it seemed to amuse him, so we both smiled at it.
“You’re bigger than him, that’s for sure. You could fit two of that little shit inside a you.”
I did not know what to do with that comment so I just stood there.
“Tell your old man I said hello, all right?” Father O’Leary said. “Jesus, I could tell you stories about him.”
“Don’t. Please.”
Finally to Jacob: “It’s your lucky day, kid.” He laughed again and ambled away and I have never seen Father O’Leary again to this day.
Part
FOUR
“Precisely how the electrical signals and chemical reactions occurring second by second in the human body make the leap to thought, motivation, impulse—where the physical machinery of man stops and the ghost in the machine, consciousness, begins—is not truly a scientific question, for the simple reason that we cannot design an experiment to capture, measure or duplicate it. For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.”
—PAUL HEITZ,
“Neurocriminology and Its Discontents,”
American Journal of Criminology and Public
Policy, Fall 2008
37 | After-Life
Life goes on, probably too long if we’re being honest about it. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories, as I am doing here. But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and “The End” is never the end.
The day Jacob was exonerated, of course, was a Big Day. But after it, remarkably, the little days just kept on coming.
We did not return to “normal”; we had, all three of us, forgotten what normal was. At least, we had no illusions that we would ever get back to it. But in the days and weeks after Jacob’s release, as the euphoria of our vindication receded, we did fall into a routine, if a barren one. We went out very little. Never to restaurants or other public places where we felt leered at. I took over the grocery shopping, since Laurie would not risk running into the Rifkins at the market again, and I picked up the wifely habit of planning the week’s dinner menus in my head as I shopped (pasta Monday, chicken Tuesday, hamburgers Wednesday …). We went to a few movies, usually midweek when the theaters were less crowded, and even then we made a point of slipping in just as the lights went down. Mostly we loafed around the house. We surfed the Web incessantly, entranced, glassy-eyed. We exercised on the treadmill in the basement rather than jog outside. We upped our Netflix plan so that we had as many DVDs on hand as possible. It sounds dismal, looking back on it, but at the time it felt wonderful. We were free, or something like it.
We considered moving—not to Buenos Aires, alas, but to more prosaic places where we might start again: Florida, California, Wyoming, anywhere we imagined people went to reinvent themselves. For a while I was preoccupied with the little town of Bisbee, Arizona, where I was told it is easy to get lost and stay lost. There was always the possibility of leaving the country too, which had a certain glamor. We got into interminable discussions about all this. Laurie doubted we could outrun the publicity the case had received, no matter how far we moved. Anyway, she said, her whole life was in Boston. For my part, I was eager to move somewhere else. I did not belong to any place to begin with; my home was wherever Laurie was. But I never was able to make much headway with her.
In Newton bad feelings lingered. Most of our neighbors had reached their own verdict: not guilty, but not exactly innocent either. Jacob may not have murdered Ben Rifkin, but they had heard enough to be disturbed by him. His knife, his violent fantasies, his wicked bloodline. To some, the abrupt end of the trial seemed fishy too. The kid’s continued presence in town worried and irritated people. Even the kind ones were not anxious to have Jacob in their children’s lives. Why take a chance? Even if they were ninety-nine percent sure of his innocence, who would risk being wrong when the stakes were so high? And who would risk the stigma of being seen with him? He was a pariah, whether he was actually guilty or not.
With all this, we did not dare send Jacob back to school in Newton. When he had first been indicted and promptly suspended from school, the town had been obliged to hire a home tutor for him, Mrs. McGowan, and we rehired her now to continue homeschooling him. Mrs. McGowan was the only regular visitor to our house, virtually the only one who ever saw the way we actually lived. When she walked in, a bit dowdy and heavy-hipped, her eyes would dance around, taking in the piles of dirty laundry, the unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, Jacob’s dirty hair. We must have seemed a little crazy to her. But she continued to show up every morning at nine to sit with Jacob at the kitchen table, reviewing his lessons, drubbing him for not doing his homework. “No one’s going to feel sorry for you,” she told him forthrightly. Laurie took an active part in Jacob’s lessons too. She was a remarkable teacher, I thought, patient, kind. I had never actually seen her teach before, but watching her work with Jacob, I thought: she should go back to teaching. She should have been doing it all along.
As the weeks went by, Jacob was quite content in his new solitary life. He was a natural hermit. He did not miss school or his friends, he said. In fact, homeschooling might have suited him best from the start. It gave him the best part of school, the “content” (his word), without the myriad complications of girls, sex, sports, bullies, peer pressure, cliques—the complication of other kids, basically. Jake was just happier alone. After what he’d been through, who could blame him? When we discussed moving, it was always Jacob who was most enthusiastically in favor. The farther, the remoter, the better. Bisbee, Arizona, would suit him fine, he thought. That was Jacob—that equanimity, that poise, half serene, half oblivious. It will sound weird, I know, but Jacob, who always had the most at stake in this case, never broke down and cried, never lost it. Sometimes he would get angry or sullen or introverted, occasionally self-pitying, as all kids do, but he never came apart. Now that the case was over, he was that same even-tempered kid. It was not hard to imagine why his classmates might find his eerie composure a little off-putting. Personally, I found it admirable.
I did not have to work, at least for a while. I was still technically on paid leave from the district attorney’s office. My full salary continued to be direct-deposited to my checking account, as it had been throughout this entire episode. No doubt this was a tricky problem for Lynn Canavan. She had backed the wrong horse. Now she had no excuse to fire me since I had done nothing wrong, but she could not very well bring me back as First Assistant either. Eventually she would have to offer me a position and I would have to refuse it, and that would be the end of it. But in the near term she seemed willing to keep me on the payroll in return for my keeping my mouth shut, which seemed like a small price to pay. I would have kept my mouth shut anyway; I liked her.
Meanwhile, Canavan had bigger fish to fry. She had to figure out what to do about Logiudice, the Rasputin in her court, whose professional implosion had surely ended his own political hopes and, if she was not careful, might end hers too. But, again, she could not fire a prosecutor merely for losing a case, otherwise who would ever be willing to go to work for her? The general view was that Canavan would run for attorney general or even governor soon and leave the whole mess behind for the next DA to clean up. But for the time being, all she could do was watch and wait. Maybe Logiudice could resurrect his reputation somehow. Hey, you never know.
I did not worry much about my own career for the time being. Certainly I was done as a prosecutor. The snickering would have been too much. I suppose I might have gone on as some other kind of lawyer. There was always criminal defense, where the link to Jacob’s case might even have been a badge of honor—the drama of an innocent boy wrongly accused, who had stood up to The Man, or whatever. But it was a little late in the day to be switching sides. I was not sure I could bring myself to defend the same scumbags I had spent a lifetime locking up. Where that left me I had no idea. In limbo, I suppose, like the rest of my family.
Of the three of us, Laurie was the most beaten up by the trial. In the weeks that followed she did recover a little, but she never did return to what she was Before. She never put back on the weight she had lost, and her face would always look drawn to me. It was as if she’d aged ten years in just a few months. But the real change was inside. In those first weeks after Jacob’s trouble, there was a cool, guarded quality about Laurie. She was wary. To me, this new, more cautious manner was understandable. She had been victimized, and she responded the way victims do. It did alter the dynamics of our family—no more Mom warmly imploring Jacob and me, the family involutes, to share our feelings and jabber about our problems and generally turn ourselves inside out for her. She had withdrawn from all that, for a while at least. She watched us from a distance now. I could hardly begrudge her any of this. Damaged at last, my wife had become a little like me, a little harder. Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.