Defending Jacob

by William Landay

  “Jacob never had a dog,” I said.

  Derek nodded at me with that same sad expression, as if it was his duty to explain this to Jacob’s poor, clueless father. He seemed to know, finally, how oblivious parents can be, and it disappointed him.

  “I saw him later and I asked him about the dog, and Jake was like, ‘I had to bury it.’ So I was like, ‘You mean, it died?’ And he wouldn’t really answer. He was just like, ‘Dude, I had to bury it.’ I didn’t see Jake for a while after that, ’cause I sort of knew, you know? Like I knew it was bad. And there were these posters. Like the family that owned the dog, they put up these posters all over the place, like stapled on phone poles and trees, you know? Like with pictures of this dog? And I never said anything about it, and finally the family stopped putting up the posters, and I just kind of tried to forget about it.”

  A moment passed in silence. When I was sure he had nothing more to add, I said, “Derek, if you knew all this, how could you and Jacob still be friends?”

  “We’re not friends like we used to be, like when we were kids. We’re just kind of old friends, you know? It’s different.”

  “Old friends but still friends?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s like he was never my real friend, you know? He was just kind of this kid I knew from school. I don’t think he ever, like, cared about me. Not that he didn’t like me or anything. He just didn’t care either way, most of the time.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  Derek shrugged. His answer was a bit of a non sequitur but I’ll put it down here just as he said it. “I always figured he’d get into trouble someday. I just figured it would be when we were grown up.”

  We sat there awhile, Derek and I, not saying anything. We both understood, I think, that there was no going back, no un-saying the things he had just said.

  I drove home slowly through the town center, savoring the ride. Maybe it is only an error of hindsight, but it seems to me now that I knew what was coming, I knew this was the end of something, and it was a tiny pleasure to prolong the car ride, to be “normal” awhile longer.

  At home, I continued to move in that deliberate way, up the stairs to my son’s room.

  His iPod Touch was on the bureau, a sleek glassy little slab that came alive in my hand. The iPod was password-protected, but Jacob had surrendered the password to us as a condition of keeping the iPod. I entered the four-digit password and opened the Web browser. Jacob kept only a handful of obvious sites bookmarked: Facebook, Gmail, a few blogs he liked about technology and video games and music. There was no trace of a site called the Cutting Room. I had to do a Google search to find it.

  The Cutting Room was a message board, a place where visitors could post plain-text messages for others to read. The site was filled with stories that were essentially what Derek had described: extended sexual fantasies involving bondage and sadism, even mutilation, rape, murder. Some—a tiny fraction—seemed to have no sexual element; they described torture for its own sake, rather like the ultra-gory spatter-horror movies that fill the theaters now. The site had no images or video, only text, and even that was unformatted. From the stripped-down browser on the iPod, it was impossible to tell which of these stories Jacob had read or how long he had spent on the site. But the page did show that Jacob was a member of this message board: his screen name, Job, was displayed at the top of the page. I presume “Job” was a play on his first name or his initials (though Jacob’s middle initial was not O), or maybe it was a sly reference to the trials he was enduring.

  I clicked on the user name “Job” and a link took me to a page where Job’s favorite stories on the site were saved. A dozen stories were listed. At the top of the list was a story called “A Walk in the Woods.” It was dated April 19, over three months earlier. The fields for the author and uploader both were blank.

  It began, “Jason Fears took a knife into the woods that morning because he figured he might need it. He kept the knife in his sweatshirt pocket and as he walked he curled his fingers around the grip and the knife in his fist sent a surge up his arm and through his shoulder and into his brain and lit up his solar plexus like a firework going off in the sky.”

  The story went on in long, unfurling, purple sentences like that one. It was a lurid, barely fictionalized account of the murder of Ben Rifkin in Cold Spring Park. In the story the park was renamed “Rock River Park.” Newton was called “Brooktown.” Ben Rifkin became a shifty, villainous bully called “Brent Mallis.”

  I assumed Jacob wrote it, but there was no way to be certain. There was nothing in the story that gave away the writer’s identity. The voice did sound like an adolescent, and Jacob was a bookish boy who had been lurking in the Cutting Room long enough to learn the genre. The author had at least a passing knowledge of Cold Spring Park, which was described pretty accurately. Still, the most I could say with certainty was that Jacob had read the story, which proved nothing, really.

  So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.

  The story was no confession. There was nothing in it that I recognized as nonpublic information. The whole thing might have been pieced together out of newspaper clippings and a vivid imagination. Even the most chilling detail, when Ben—or “Brent Mallis”—cried, “Stop, you’re hurting me,” had been widely reported in the newspapers. As for the nonpublic information, how accurate was any of it? Even the investigators had no way of knowing whether Ben Rifkin really said “Hey, faggot” when he saw his killer in the woods that morning, as “Brent Mallis” said to “Jason Fears.” Or whether, when the killer stabbed Ben in the chest, the knife slipped in with no resistance, no bump of bone, no sticking on skin or rubbery organs, “like he was stabbing into the air.” These things were unwitnessed, unconfirmable.

  Anyway, Jacob would have realized it was idiotic to write this trash whether or not he was actually guilty. Yes, he had posted the Psycho photo on Facebook, but surely he would not go this far.

  Even if he had written it, or just read it, what did it prove? It would be stupid, yes, but kids do stupid things. The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever; this was just a case of Stupid winning a battle. Considering the pressure Jake was under and the fact he’d been practically locked up in the house for months, and now the growing clamor as the trial approached, it was understandable. Could you really hold the kid responsible for every tasteless, tactless, brainless thing he said? What kid would not begin to act a little crazy in Jacob’s situation? Anyway, who among us would be judged by the dumbest things we did as teenagers?

  I told myself these things, I marshaled my arguments as I’d been trained to do, but I could not get that boy’s cry out of my head: “Stop, you’re hurting me.” And something in me tore open. I don’t know how else to put it. I still would not admit doubt into my thinking. I still believed in Jacob and, God knows, I still loved him, and there was no evidence—no real proof—of anything. The lawyer in me understood all this. But the part of me that was Jacob’s father felt cut, wounded. An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion—you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind. That is how this little heartbreak felt: like a physical injury, deep inside my body, an internal bleeding, a nick that would continue to seep.

  I read the story again, then I cleared it from the browser’s memory. I put the iPod back on Jacob’s bureau and I would have left it there and never said anything to him about it, certainly never would have said anything to Laurie either, but I worried there might be danger in the iPod. I was familiar enough with the Internet and with police work to know that digital footprints are not easily erased. Every click on the Web creates a record, on servers out in the ether and also on the hard drives of individual computers, and these records persist no matter how you try to delete them. What if the DA somehow found Jacob’s iPod and sco
ured it for evidence? The iPod was dangerous in another way too, as a portal to the Web for Jacob that I could not police as easily as the family computers. The iPod was small and phonelike, and Jacob used it with the same expectation of privacy that he would if it were a phone. He was careless with it, and maybe sneaky too. The iPod was a leak. It was a danger.

  I brought it down to the basement and laid it on my little worktable, glass side up, and I got a hammer and smashed it.

  20 | One Son Was Here, the Other Was Gone

  The market closest to our house was a Whole Foods, and we loathed it. The wastefulness of all those pyramids of immaculate fruit and vegetables which, we knew, could only be created by throwing away enormous amounts of cosmetically imperfect food. The bogus earthiness, an elaborate pretense that Whole Foods was something other than a luxury store. And of course the prices. We had always avoided shopping there because of the high prices. Now, with Jacob’s case threatening to bankrupt us, the thought of it seemed particularly ludicrous. We had no business shopping there.

  We were already ruined financially. We were not rich people to begin with. We had been able to live in this town only because we had bought in when prices were low and because we were leveraged up to our eyeballs. Now Jonathan’s fee was already into six figures. We had spent all of Jacob’s college money on it and begun dipping into retirement savings. Before the case was over, I was sure, we would be wiped out, borrowing against the house to pay the bills. I knew, also, that my career as a prosecutor was over. Even if the verdict was “not guilty,” I would never be able to walk into a courtroom without trailing the stink of the accusation. Maybe after the case was ended Lynn Canavan would do the right thing and offer to keep me on the payroll, but I could not stay there, not as a charity case. Laurie might be able to go back to teaching, but we would not be able to pay the bills on her income alone. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

  There was another reason for us to avoid Whole Foods as well. I was determined not to be seen around town, certainly not to do anything that might suggest we were taking the case lightly. It was a question of image. I wanted people to see our family as shattered, because we were shattered. When the jury pool filed into the courtroom, I did not want any of them to harbor some vague memory of the Barbers luxuriating in pricey shops while the Rifkin boy lay buried in the ground. An unflattering mention in the newspaper, a fanciful rumor, a baseless impression—these things could easily tip the jury against us.

  But we went to Whole Foods one evening, all three of us, when time was short and we were sick of all the wariness and waiting, and we were hungry. It was just before Labor Day. The town had emptied out for the holiday.

  And what a relief it was to be there. We were lulled by the wonderful, narcotic ordinariness of shopping at the market. We were so like our old selves—Laurie the competent shopper and meal-planner, me the bumbling husband grabbing the odd item here or there on a whim, Jacob the kid whimpering for something to eat right away, before we reached the register—that we forgot ourselves. We strolled up and down the aisles. We enjoyed the packages banked up around us, made little jokes about the organic foods on the shelves. At the cheese section Jacob made a joke about the smell of a potent Gruyère that they were offering customers to taste and the possible gastric consequences of eating too much of it, and we all laughed, all three of us, not because the joke was especially funny (though I am not above a good fart joke) but because Jacob had made a joke at all. Over the summer he had become so silent, such an enigma to us, that we celebrated just to see our little boy peeking out at us again. He smiled and it was impossible to believe he was the monster everyone seemed to think he was.

  We were still smiling when we came out of this last aisle into the cash register area at the front of the store. All the aisles drained here, and the shoppers eddied around, sorting themselves into checkout lines. We took our place at the end of a short line with just a couple of people in front of us. Laurie stood with her hand on the push-bar of the cart. I stood beside her. Jacob was behind us.

  Dan Rifkin guided his cart into the checkout line beside ours. He was five feet away, if that. For a moment he did not see us. His sunglasses rested on the top of his head, pillowed in his hair. He wore neatly pressed khaki shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt. His belt was canvas with a blue band on which was embroidered a pattern of little ships’ anchors. He wore thin-soled loafers without socks. It was the sort of country-club-casual style that I have always thought looks ridiculous on a grown man. A naturally formal person often looks odd when he tries to dress down, just as a natural slob looks out of place in a suit. Dan Rifkin was not the sort of guy who looked at home in short pants.

  I turned my back to him and whispered to Laurie that he was beside us.

  Her hand went over her mouth. “Where?”

  “Right behind me. Don’t look.”

  She looked.

  I turned back to find Rifkin’s wife, Joan, had appeared beside him. She had some of her husband’s miniature, doll-like quality. She was small and slim and had a lovely face. Her frosted blond hair was cut in a pixie. She must have been very beautiful once—she still had the vivacious, actressy manner of a woman who knows how to use her looks—but she was fading now. Her face was gaunt and her eyes bugged slightly, with years, with stress, with grief. I had met her several times over the years, before all this happened; she never remembered who I was.

  Now the two of them stared at us. Dan hardly moved. His keys dangled from his hooked index finger without jangling. His consternation or surprise or whatever he was feeling barely registered on his face.

  Joan’s face was more animated. She glared, offended by our presence here. No one had to say anything. It was a matter of numbers. We were three, they were two. One son was here, the other gone. The simple fact of Jacob’s continued existence must have seemed profane to them.

  It was all so painfully obvious and awkward that the five of us stood there dumbstruck for a moment, gaping at each other while the commotion of the market went on around us.

  I told Jacob, “Why don’t you go wait in the car.”

  “Okay.”

  He began to move off.

  The Rifkins still stared.

  I had decided immediately not to say anything unless they initiated the conversation. It was impossible to imagine what I could say that would not be painful or tactless or provocative.

  But Laurie wanted to speak. Her desire to walk over to them was palpable. With great effort, she was restraining herself. I find it touching and almost naive how complete is my wife’s faith in communication and connection. To her, there is virtually no problem that does not benefit from a little talk-talk-talk. What is more, she genuinely believed that the case was somehow a shared misfortune, that our family was suffering also, that it was no easy thing to see your son wrongly accused of murder, to see his life ruined for no good reason. The tragedy of Ben Rifkin’s murder did not lessen the tragedy of Jake’s own victimization. I don’t think Laurie meant to say any of this. She is much too empathetic. I think she just wanted to communicate her sympathy somehow, to connect, with the usual banality of “I’m so sorry for your loss” or some such.

  Laurie said, “I—”

  “Laurie,” I cut her off, “go wait in the car with Jacob. I’ll pay for the stuff.”

  It did not cross my mind simply to leave. We had a right to be there. We had a right to eat, surely.

  Laurie moved past me toward Joan Rifkin. I made a halfhearted effort to stop her but there was never any way to talk my wife out of something once she decided to do it. She was a mule. A sweet, empathetic, brilliant, sensitive, lovely woman, but a mule just the same.

  She walked right up to them and made a gesture with her hands, extending them palms up as if she wanted to take Joan’s hands in
hers, or maybe just signaling that she did not know exactly what to say, or that she carried no weapons.

  Joan met this gesture by crossing her arms.

  Dan raised his own arm slightly. He looked like he was getting ready to hold Laurie off if for some reason she attacked.

  Laurie said, “Joan—”

  Joan spat in her face. She did it very suddenly, without bothering to work up the saliva in her mouth, and not much came out. It was more of a gesture, perhaps the gesture she thought was appropriate in the circumstances—but then, who could ever be prepared for circumstances like these?

  Laurie covered her face with both hands, wiped the spit with her fingers.

  “Murderers,” Joan said.

  I went to Laurie and put my hand on her shoulder. She was as still as stone.

  Joan glowered up at me. If she were a man or if she was less genteel, maybe she would have gone after me. She quivered with hatred like a tuning fork. I could not hate her back. I could not be angry with her, could not find much feeling at all for her except sadness, sadness for all of us.

  I said to Dan, “Sorry,” as if there was no point in talking to Joan and it was up to us men to handle the emotions that our wives could not.

  I took Laurie’s hand and led her out of the store with elaborate politeness, saying softly over and over “Excuse us … sorry … excuse us” as we squeezed past the other shoppers and their carts and out into the parking lot where no one recognized us and we were returned to the semi-anonymity that we still enjoyed in those last few weeks before the trial, before the deluge.

  “We didn’t get our things,” Laurie said.

  “It’s okay. We don’t need them.”

  21 | Beware the Fury of a Patient Man