Defending Jacob
Page 35
“Objection, relevance.”
“Sustained.”
“Derek, would you tell the court what happened when the defendant found a stray dog?”
“Objection, relevance.”
“Sustained. Move on, Mr. Logiudice.”
Logiudice puckered his mouth. He flipped a page of his yellow pad, a page of questions he would set aside. Like a bird rustled from his perch, he began to move nervously around the courtroom again as he asked his questions until, at length, he settled back into his place at the lectern near the jury box.
“For whatever reason, in the days after Ben Rifkin’s murder, you became concerned about your friend Jacob’s role in it?”
“Objection.”
“Overruled.”
“You can answer, Derek.”
“Yes.”
“Was there anything in particular, besides his temper, that made you suspicious of Jacob?”
“Yes. He had a knife. It was like kind of an army knife, like a combat knife. It had this really really sharp blade with all these … teeth. It was a really scary knife.”
“You saw this knife yourself?”
“Yeah. Jake showed it to me. He even brought it to school once.”
“Why did he bring it to school?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
“Did he show you the knife once at school?”
“Yeah, he showed me.”
“Did he say why he was showing it to you?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you why he wanted a knife at all?”
“I think he just thought it was cool.”
“And how did you react when you saw the knife?”
“I was like, ‘Dude, that’s cool.’ ”
“You weren’t bothered by it?”
“No.”
“Concerned?”
“No, not then.”
“Was Ben Rifkin around when Jacob produced the knife that day?”
“No. Nobody knew Jake had the knife. That’s the thing. He was just walking around with it. It was like Jake had this secret.”
“Where did he carry the knife?”
“In his backpack or his pocket.”
“Did he ever show it to anyone else or threaten anyone with it?”
“No.”
“All right, so Jacob had a knife. Was there anything else that made you suspicious of your friend Jacob in the hours and days after Ben Rifkin was murdered?”
“Well, like I said, at the very beginning nobody knew what happened. Then it kind of came out that Ben got killed with a knife in Cold Spring Park, and I just kind of knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Knew—I mean, I felt like he probably did it.”
“Objection.”
“Sustained. The jury will disregard the last answer.”
“How did you know Jacob—”
“Objection.”
“Sustained. Move on, Mr. Logiudice.”
Logiudice pursed his lips, regrouped. “Did Jacob ever talk about a website called the Cutting Room?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell the jury, what is the Cutting Room?”
“It’s like a porn site, kind of, only it’s just stories and anyone can write stories and post them there.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Like S&M, I guess. I don’t really know. It’s, like, sex and violence.”
“Did Jacob talk about the site often?”
“Yeah. He liked it, I guess. He used to go there a lot.”
“Did you go there?”
Sheepish, blushing. “No. I didn’t like it.”
“Did it bother you that Jacob went there?”
“No. It’s his business.”
“Did Jacob ever show you a story on the Cutting Room that described Ben Rifkin’s murder?”
“Yes.”
“When did Jacob show you this story?”
“Like late April, I think.”
“After the murder?”
“Yeah, a few days after.”
“What did he tell you about it?”
“He just said he had this story he wrote and he posted it on this message board.”
“You mean he posted it online for other people to read?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you read the story?”
“Yes.”
“How did you find it?”
“Jacob sent me a link.”
“How? Email? Facebook?”
“Facebook? No! Anyone could have seen it. I think it was email. So I went to the site and I read it.”
“And what did you think of the story when you read it the first time?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was weird that he wrote it, but it was kind of interesting, I guess. Jacob was always a really good writer.”
“Did he write other stories like this one?”
“No, not exactly. He wrote some that were, like—”
“Objection.”
“Sustained. Next question.”
Logiudice produced a document, laser-printed, thick with text on both sides. He laid it on the witness stand in front of Derek.
“Is that the story the defendant told you he wrote?”
“Yes.”
“Is that printout an accurate record of the story precisely as you read it that day?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Move the document be admitted in evidence.”
“The document is admitted and marked Commonwealth’s Exhibit … Mary?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Commonwealth’s exhibit twenty-six.”
“How do you know for sure that the defendant wrote this story?”
“Why would he say it if it wasn’t true?”
“And what was it about the story that made you so concerned about Jacob and the Rifkin murder?”
“It was just, like, a total description, every little detail. He described the knife, the stabs in the chest, the whole thing. Even the character, the kid that got stabbed—in the story Jake calls him ‘Brent Mallis,’ but it’s obviously Ben Rifkin. Anyone who knew Ben would know. It wasn’t like totally fiction. It was just obvious.”
“Do you and your friends sometimes exchange messages on Facebook?”
“Sure.”
“And three days after Ben Rifkin was murdered, on April 15, 2007, did you post a message on Facebook saying, ‘Jake, everyone knows you did it. You have a knife. I’ve seen it.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Why did you post that message?”
“I just didn’t want to be the only one who knew about the knife. It was like, I didn’t want to be alone knowing that.”
“When you posted that message on Facebook accusing your friend of the murder, did he ever respond?”
“I wasn’t really accusing him. It was just something I wanted to say.”
“Did the defendant respond in any way?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. I mean, he posted on Facebook, but not really responding to that.”
“Well, did he ever deny that he murdered Ben Rifkin?”
“No.”
“After you published your accusation on Facebook in front of his whole class?”
“I didn’t publish it. I just put it on Facebook.”
“Did he ever deny the accusation?”
“No.”
“Did you ever accuse him directly, to his face?”
“No.”
“Before you saw that story on the Cutting Room, did you ever report your suspicions about Jacob to the police?”
“Not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t totally sure. Plus, the cop in charge of the case was Jacob’s dad.”
“And what did you think when you realized that it was Jacob’s dad who was running the case?”
“Ob-jec-tion.” Jonathan’s voice was disgusted.
“Sustained.”
“Derek, one l
ast question. It was you that sought out the police to share this information, isn’t that right? Nobody had to come ask you?”
“That’s right.”
“You felt you had to turn in your own best friend?”
“Yeah.”
“No further questions.”
Jonathan stood up. He seemed for all the world to be unfazed by what he had just heard. And he would conduct a gallant cross, I knew. But something had obviously changed in the courtroom. The atmosphere was electric. It was as if we had all just decided something. You could read it in the faces of the jurors and Judge French, you could hear it in the supreme quiet of the crowd: Jacob was not going to walk out of that courtroom, not out the front door anyway. The excitement was a mix of relief—everyone’s doubts were resolved at last, about whether Jacob did it and whether he would get away with it—and palpable eagerness for revenge. The rest of the trial would be only details, formalities, tying up loose ends. Even my friend Ernie the court officer looked at Jacob with a wary eye, assessing how he would react to the handcuffs. But Jonathan seemed not to notice the drop in air pressure. He moved to the lectern and slipped on the half-glasses he wore on a chain around his neck and began to take it apart piece by piece.
“These things you’ve told us about, they bothered you, but not so much that you broke off your friendship with Jacob?”
“No.”
“In fact, you two continued to be friends for days and even weeks after the murder, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it true that you even went to Jacob’s house after the murder?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s fair to say that you weren’t too sure at the time that Jacob really was the murderer?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to remain friends with a murderer, of course?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Even after you posted that message on Facebook where you accused Jacob of the murder, you still remained friends with him? You still remained in contact, still hung around?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever afraid of Jacob?”
“No.”
“Did he ever threaten or intimidate you in any way? Or lose his temper at you?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it true that it was your parents who told you you couldn’t stay with friends with Jacob, that you never decided to stop being friends with Jacob?”
“Kind of.”
Jonathan backed off, sensing Derek beginning to hedge, and he moved to a new topic. “The day of the murder, you said you saw Jacob before school and again in English class right after school started?”
“Yes.”
“But there was no indication that he had been involved in any kind of struggle?”
“No.”
“No blood?”
“Just the little spot on his hand.”
“No scratches, no torn clothes, nothing like that? No mud?”
“No.”
“In fact, it never even occurred to you, looking at Jacob in English class that morning, that he might have been involved in anything on the way to school?”
“No.”
“When you later came to the conclusion that Jacob might have committed the murder, as you’ve suggested here, did you take that into account? That after a bloody, fatal knife attack, Jacob somehow emerged without a drop of blood on him, without so much as a scratch? Did you think about that, Derek?”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“Yes.”
“You said Ben Rifkin was a bigger kid than Jacob, bigger and tougher?”
“Yes.”
“But still Jacob came out of this struggle without a mark on him?”
Derek did not answer.
“Now, you said something about Jacob grinning when the lockdown was announced. Did other kids grin? Is it natural enough for a kid to grin when there’s excitement, when you’re nervous?”
“Probably.”
“It’s just something kids do sometimes.”
“I guess.”
“Now, the knife you saw, Jacob’s knife. Just to be clear, you have no idea whether that was the knife that was used in the murder?”
“No.”
“And Jacob never said anything to you about intending to use the knife on Ben Rifkin, because of the bullying?”
“Intending? No, he didn’t say that.”
“And when he showed the knife to you, it never occurred to you that he planned to kill Ben Rifkin? Because if it did, you would have done something about it, right?”
“I guess.”
“So, as far as you knew, Jacob never had a plan to kill Ben Rifkin?”
“A plan? No.”
“Never talked about when or how he was going to kill Ben Rifkin?”
“No.”
“Then, later, he just sent you the story?”
“Yeah.”
“He sent you a link by email, you said?”
“Yes.”
“Did you save that email?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It didn’t seem smart. I mean, for Jake—from Jacob’s point of view.”
“So you deleted the email because you were protecting him?”
“I guess.”
“Can you tell me, of all the details in that story, was there anything that was new to you, anything you didn’t already know either from the Web or from news stories or from other kids talking?”
“No, not really.”
“The knife, the park, the three stab wounds—that was all well known by then, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Hardly a confession, then, is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“And did he say in the email that he’d written the story? Or just found it?”
“I don’t remember exactly what the email said. I think it was just, like, ‘Dude, check this out’ or something like that.”
“But you’re sure Jacob told you he wrote the story, not that he just read it?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
Jonathan went on in this way for some time, doing what he could, shaving away and shaving away at Derek Yoo’s testimony, scoring what points he could. Who knows what the jurors were really making of it. All I can tell you is that the half dozen jurors who were furiously taking notes during Derek’s direct testimony had put down their pens now. Some were no longer even looking at him; they had dropped their eyes to their laps. Maybe Jonathan had won the day and they had decided to discount Derek’s testimony entirely. But it did not seem that way. It seemed like I had been fooling myself, and for the first time I began to imagine in realistic terms what it would be like when Jacob was in Concord prison.
35 | Argentina
Driving home from court that day I was morose, and my sadness infected Jacob and Laurie. From the start, I had been the steady one. It upset them, I think, to see me lose hope. I tried to lie for them. I said all the usual things about not feeling too up on a good day or too down on a bad day; about how the prosecution’s evidence always looks worse on first sight than it does later, in the context of the whole case; about how juries are impossible to anticipate and we should not read too much into their every little gesture. But my tone gave me away. I thought we had probably lost the case that day. At a minimum, the damage was enough that we would have to present a real defense. It would be foolish to rely on “reasonable doubt” at this point: the story Jacob had written about the murder read like a confession, and try as he might, Jonathan could not disprove Derek’s testimony that Jacob wrote it. I did not admit any of this. There was nothing to gain by telling the truth, so I didn’t. All I said to them was that “It wasn’t a good day.” But that was enough.
Father O’Leary did not appear to watch over us that night, or anyone else. We Barbers were left in complete
isolation. If we had been shot out into space, we could not have felt more alone. We ordered Chinese food, as we had a thousand times the last few months, because China City delivers and the driver speaks so little English that we did not have to feel self-conscious opening the door for him. We ate our boneless spare ribs and General Gao’s chicken in near silence, then slunk off to opposite corners of the house for the evening. We were too sick of the case to talk about it anymore but too obsessed with it to talk about anything else. We were too gloomy for the idiocies of TV—suddenly our lives seemed finite, and much too short to waste—and too distracted to read.
Around ten, I went into Jacob’s room to check on him. He lay on his back on the bed.
“You okay, Jacob?”
“Not really.”
I went over and sat on the side of the bed. He hoisted his butt over to make room, but Jake was getting so big there was hardly enough space for both of us. (He used to lie right on my chest for naps when he was a baby. He had been no bigger than a loaf of bread.)
He rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “Dad, can I ask you something? If you thought things were looking bad, like the case was about to go the wrong way, would you tell me?”
“Why?”
“No, not ‘why’; just, would you tell me?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Because it wouldn’t make sense to—well, if I took off, what would happen to you and Mom?”
“We’d lose all our money.”
“They’d take away the house?”
“Eventually. We put it up as security on your bail.”
He considered this.
“It’s just a house,” I told him. “I wouldn’t miss it. It doesn’t matter as much as you.”
“Yeah, but still. Where would you guys live?”
“Is this what you’ve been lying here thinking about?”
“A little bit.”
Laurie came to the door. She folded her arms and leaned on the doorpost.
I said, “Where would you go?”
“Buenos Aires.”
“Buenos Aires? Why there?”
“It just sounds like a cool place.”
“Says who?”
“There was an article about it in the Times. It’s the Paris of South America.”
“Hm. I didn’t know South America had a Paris.”
“It is in South America, right?”
“Yeah, it’s in Argentina. You may want to do a little more research before you run off there.”