38 | The Policeman’s Dilemma
Northern Correctional Institution,
Somers, Connecticut.
In the visiting booth again. Sealed up in my white-walled compartment, thick glass window in front of me. Steady background noise: murmuring in the adjacent booths, in the distance muted shouts and prison racket, announcements over an intercom.
Bloody Billy shuffled into the window frame, his hands cuffed to a waist chain, a second chain running from his waist down to his cuffed ankles. No matter: he came into the room like a tyrannical king, chin thrust forward, badass sneer, gray hair combed back over his head in a crazy-old-man pompadour.
Two guards piloted him to the chair but without laying a hand on him. One of them released the handcuffs from his waist while the other watched, then they both backed away, out of the window frame.
My father picked up the phone and, with his hands joined at his chin as if in prayer, he said, “Junior!” His tone said, What a pleasant surprise!
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Patz.”
His eyes traveled from my face to the phone on the wall and back, reminding me to watch what I said on a monitored line.
“Junior, what are you talking about? I’ve been here the whole time. Maybe you haven’t heard: I don’t get out much.”
I unfolded a Triple-I record, a multistate criminal record. It was several pages long. I palmed it smooth and pressed the front page against the glass with five fingertips for him to read the name: James Michael O’Leary, a.k.a. Jimmy, Jimmy-O, Father O’Leary, DOB 2/18/43.
He leaned forward and squinted at the document. “Never heard of him.”
“Never heard of him? Really?”
“Never heard of him.”
“You did a bid with him right here.”
“A lot of guys come through here.”
“Six years you were here together. Six years!”
He shrugged. “I don’t socialize. It’s jail, not Yale. Maybe if you had a picture or something?” Mischievous wink. “But I never heard of this guy.”
“Well, he’s heard of you.”
Shrug. “Lot of people have heard of me. I’m a legend.”
“He said you asked him to look out for us, to look out for Jacob.”
“Bullshit.”
“To protect us.”
“Bullshit.”
“You sent someone to protect us? You think I need you to protect my kid?”
“Hey, I never said any of that. This is all you talkin’. Like I said, I never heard of this guy. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Now, spend enough time in a courthouse and you become a connoisseur of lying. You learn to recognize the various types of bullshit, as Eskimos are said to distinguish different types of snow. The sort of winking denial Billy was indulging here—in which the words I didn’t do it were delivered in a way that announced Of course I did it, but we both know you can’t prove it—must be every criminal’s special delight. To laugh in a cop’s face! Certainly my dirtbag father was enjoying the hell out of it. From the cop’s point of view, there is no sense fighting this sort of confession-denial. You learn to accept this situation. It is part of the game. It is the policeman’s dilemma: sometimes you can’t prove the case without a confession, but you can’t get a confession unless you already have proof.
So I just took the paper down from the glass and dropped it on the little melamine counter in front of me. I sat back and rubbed my forehead. “You fool. You stupid old fool. Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Fool? What are you, calling me a fool? I didn’t do shit.”
“Jacob was innocent! You stupid, stupid old man.”
“Watch your mouth, junior. I don’t have to stay here talking to you.”
“We didn’t need your help.”
“No? Could’ve fooled me.”
“We would have won.”
“And if you didn’t? What then? You want the kid to rot in a place like this? You know what this place is, junior? This is a grave. It’s a garbage dump. It’s a big hole in the ground where they throw the trash nobody wants to see anymore. Anyways, you’re the one who told me that night on the phone, you were going to lose.”
“Look, you can’t—you can’t just—”
“Jesus, junior, keep your dress on, would you? This is fuckin’ embarrassing. Look, I’m not saying anything about what happened, okay? ’Cause I don’t know. Whatever happened to this guy—what’s his name? Patz?—whatever happened to this guy, I don’t know. I’m stuck here in this pit. What the hell do I know? But if you’re asking me to boohoo because some kiddy-raper child-molester piece of shit got killed, or killed himself, or whatever? Forget about it. Good riddance. One less piece of shit in the world. Fuck him. He’s gone.” He held a fist to his mouth and blew into it then blossomed open his fingers, like a magician making a coin disappear. Gone. “One less asshole in the world, that’s all it is. Guy like that, the world’s a better place without him.”
“But with you?”
He glared. “Hey, I’m still here.” He puffed his chest. “It don’t matter what you think of me. I’m still here, junior, whether you like it or not. You can’t get rid of me.”
“Like cockroaches.”
“That’s right, I’m a tough old cockroach. Proud of it.”
“So what did you do? Call in a favor? Or just reach out to an old friend?”
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know, the thing is, it actually took me a while to figure it out. I’ve got a cop friend who told me this guy Father O’Leary was an old leg-breaker and he was still working as a fixer, and when I asked what that meant, a ‘fixer,’ he said, ‘He makes problems go away.’ So that’s what you did, isn’t it? You called an old friend and you made the problem go away.”
No answer. Why should he help me by talking? Bloody Billy understood the policeman’s dilemma as well as I did. No confession, no case; no case, no confession.
But we both knew what went down. We were thinking the exact same thing, I’m sure: Father O’Leary goes over there one night, after a particularly bad day for Jacob in court, and he puts a scare into this fat kid, waves a gun in his face, makes him sign a confession. The kid probably shit his pants before Father O’Leary strung him up.
“Do you know what you’ve done to Jacob?”
“Yeah, I saved his life.”
“No. You took away his day in court. You took away his chance to hear the jury say ‘not guilty.’ From now on, there’ll always be a little doubt. There’ll always be people convinced Jacob is a murderer.”
He laughed. Not a little laugh but a roar. “His day in court? And I’m the fool? Junior, you know what? You’re not as smart as I thought you were.” He laughed some more. Big, crazy, gusting belly laughs. He mimicked me in a high, prissy voice, “ ‘Oh, his day in court!’ Jesus, junior! It’s a wonder you’re out there and I’m in here. How the fuck does that happen? You dumb gavoon.”
“It’s a crazy world. Imagine, them putting a guy like you in prison.”
He ignored me. He leaned forward as if he meant to whisper a secret in my ear through the inch-thick slab of glass. “Listen,” he confided, “you want to get all Dudley Do-Right here? You want to throw your kid back in the shit? Is that what you want, junior? Call the cops. Go ahead, call the cops and tell them this whole crazy story you’ve got about Patz and this guy O’Leary I supposedly know. What do I give a shit? I’m in here for life anyway. You won’t be hurting me. Go on. He’s your kid. Do what you want with him. Like you said, maybe the kid’ll get off. Take your chances.”
“They can’t try Jacob again anyway. Jeopardy’s attached.”
“So? Even better. Sounds like you think this guy O’Leary committed a murder. If I was you, I’d go report it right away. Is that what you’re going to do, Mr. DA Man? Or maybe that won’t look so good for the kid, will it?”
He looked me square in the eyes for a few seconds until I became aware of my own blinking.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t think so. We through here?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Hey, guard! Guard!”
Two guards ambled over with skeptical faces.
“Me and my son are all done visiting. You guys ever met my son?”
The guards did not answer, did not even glance at me. They seemed to think it was a trick to get them to look away for a second and they were not about to fall for it. Their job was to get the wild animal back into its cage. That was dangerous enough. There was no percentage in breaking protocol.
“All right,” my father said as one of the guards fished around for the key to reattach the cuffs to his harness. “You come back soon, junior. Remember, I’m still your father. I’ll always be your father.” The guards began to rustle him out of the chair but he went right on talking. “Hey,” he said to the guards, “you should get to know this guy. He’s a lawyer. Maybe you guys’ll need a lawyer somed—”
One of the guards pulled the phone from his hand and hung it up. He stood the prisoner up, reattached the handcuffs to his waist chain, then tugged the whole arrangement of chains to make sure he was properly trussed. Billy’s eyes were on me the whole time, even as the guards jostled him. What he saw when he looked at me is anybody’s guess. Probably just a stranger in a window frame.
Mr. Logiudice: I’m going to ask you again. And I’m going to remind you, Mr. Barber, you are under oath.
Witness: I’m aware of that.
Mr. Logiudice: And you are aware we are talking about a murder here.
Witness: The M.E. ruled it a suicide.
Mr. Logiudice: Leonard Patz was murdered and you know it!
Witness: I don’t know how anyone could know that.
Mr. Logiudice: And you have nothing to add?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: You have no idea what happened to Leonard Patz on October 25, 2007?
Witness: None.
Mr. Logiudice: Any theories?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: Do you know anything at all about James Michael O’Leary, also known as Father O’Leary?
Witness: Never heard of him.
Mr. Logiudice: Really? You’ve never even heard the name.
Witness: Never heard of him.
I remember Neal Logiudice standing there with his arms crossed, smoldering. Once upon a time, I might have patted him on the back, told him, “Witnesses lie. Nothing you can do. Go have a beer, just let it go. All crime is local, Neal—these guys all come back sooner or later.” But Logiudice was not the type to shrug off an insolent witness. Probably he did not give a shit about the Patz murder, anyway. This was not about Leonard Patz.
It was already late afternoon when Logiudice finally forced me into a little harmless perjury. I had been testifying all day, and I was tired. It was April. The days were beginning to get longer. The daylight was just beginning to dim when I said, “Never heard of him.”
By then Logiudice must have known he was not going to restore his own reputation here, least of all by asking for my help. He resigned from the DA’s office soon after. He is a defense lawyer in Boston now. I have no doubt he will make a great defense lawyer too, right up until the day he is disbarred. But for now, I console myself with that image of him in the grand jury room doing a slow burn as his case, and his career, collapsed before his eyes. I like to think of it as the last lesson I ever taught him, my former protégé. It’s the policeman’s dilemma, Neal. After a while you get used to it.