Defending Jacob

by William Landay

  Mr. Logiudice: But Hope Connors never did come back.

  Witness: No.

  Mr. Logiudice: In fact, her body was not found for several weeks, isn’t that right?

  Witness: Seven weeks.

  Mr. Logiudice: And when it was found?

  Witness: The body was washed up on the shore several miles away from the resort. She drowned, apparently.

  Mr. Logiudice: Apparently?

  Witness: When a body is in the water that long—It had deteriorated. My understanding is that it had also been fed on by marine life. I don’t know for certain; I was not privy to that investigation. Suffice it to say, the body did not yield much evidence.

  Mr. Logiudice: The case is considered an unsolved homicide?

  Witness: I don’t know. It shouldn’t be. There’s no evidence to support that. The evidence suggests only that she went swimming and drowned.

  Mr. Logiudice: Well, that’s not quite true, is it? There is some evidence that Hope Connors’s windpipe was crushed before she went into the water.

  Witness: That inference is not supported by the evidence. The body was badly degraded. The cops down there—there was so much pressure, so much media. That investigation was not conducted properly.

  Mr. Logiudice: That happened quite a bit around Jacob, didn’t it? A murder, a botched investigation. He must have been the unluckiest boy.

  Witness: Is that a question?

  Mr. Logiudice: We’ll move on. Your son’s name has been widely linked to the case, hasn’t it?

  Witness: In the tabloids and some sleazy websites. They’ll say anything for money. There’s no profit in saying Jacob was innocent.

  Mr. Logiudice: How did Jacob react to the girl’s disappearance?

  Witness: He was concerned, of course. Hope was someone he cared about.

  Mr. Logiudice: And your wife?

  Witness: She was also very, very concerned.

  Mr. Logiudice: That’s all, “very, very concerned”?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: Isn’t it fair to say she concluded Jacob had something to do with that girl’s disappearance?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: Was there anything in particular that convinced her of this?

  Witness: There was something that happened at the beach. It was the day the girl disappeared. Jacob got there—this was late afternoon, to watch the sunset—and he sat on my right. Laurie was on my left. We said, “Where’s Hope?” Jacob said, “With her family, I guess. I haven’t seen her.” So we made some kind of joke—I think it was Laurie who asked—if everything was all right between them, if they’d had a fight. He said no, he just hadn’t seen her for a few hours. I—

  Mr. Logiudice: Andy? Are you all right?

  Witness: Yeah. Sorry, yes. Jake—he had these spots on his bathing suit, these little red spots.

  Mr. Logiudice: Describe the spots.

  Witness: They were spatters.

  Mr. Logiudice: What color?

  Witness: Brownish red.

  Mr. Logiudice: Blood spatters?

  Witness: I don’t know. I didn’t think so. I asked him what it was, what did he do to his bathing suit? He said he must have dripped something he’d been eating, ketchup or something.

  Mr. Logiudice: And your wife? What did she think of the red spatters?

  Witness: She didn’t think anything at the time. It was nothing, because we didn’t know the girl was missing yet. I told him to just go jump in the water and swim around until the bathing suit was clean.

  Mr. Logiudice: And how did Jacob react?

  Witness: He didn’t react at all. He just got up and he walked out on the dock—it was an H-shaped dock; he walked out the right-hand dock—and he dove in.

  Mr. Logiudice: Interesting that it was you who told him to wash the bloodstains off his bathing suit.

  Witness: I had no idea if they were bloodstains. I still don’t know if that’s true.

  Mr. Logiudice: You still don’t know? Really? Then why were you so quick to tell him to jump in the water?

  Witness: Laurie said something to him about how the bathing suit was expensive and Jacob should take better care of his things. He was so careless, such a slob. I didn’t want him to get in trouble with his mother. We were all having such a good time. That’s all it was.

  Mr. Logiudice: But this was why Laurie was upset when Hope Connors first went missing?

  Witness: Partly, yes. It was the whole situation, everything we’d been through.

  Mr. Logiudice: Laurie wanted to go home immediately, isn’t that right?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: But you refused.

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: Why?

  Witness: Because I knew what people would say: that Jacob was guilty and he was running away before the cops could pick him up. They would call him a killer. I wasn’t going to let anyone say that about him.

  Mr. Logiudice: In fact, the authorities in Jamaica did question Jacob, didn’t they?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: But they never arrested him?

  Witness: No. There was no reason to arrest him. He didn’t do anything.

  Mr. Logiudice: Jesus, Andy, how can you be so damn sure? How can you be sure of that?

  Witness: How can anyone be sure of anything? I trust my kid. I have to.

  Mr. Logiudice: You have to why?

  Witness: Because I’m his father. I owe him that.

  Mr. Logiudice: That’s it?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: What about Hope Connors? What did you owe her?

  Witness: Jacob did not kill that girl.

  Mr. Logiudice: Kids just kept dying around him, is that it?

  Witness: That’s an improper question.

  Mr. Logiudice: I’ll withdraw it. Andy, do you honestly think you’re a reliable witness? Do you honestly think you see your son right?

  Witness: I think I’m reliable, yes, generally. I don’t think any parent can be completely objective about his kid, I’ll concede that.

  Mr. Logiudice: And yet Laurie had no trouble seeing Jacob for what he was, did she?

  Witness: You’ll have to ask her.

  Mr. Logiudice: Laurie had no trouble believing Jacob had something to do with that girl’s vanishing?

  Witness: As I said, Laurie was very shaken by the whole thing. She was not herself. She came to her own conclusions.

  Mr. Logiudice: Did she ever discuss her suspicions with you?

  Witness: No.

  Mr. Logiudice: I’ll repeat the question. Did your wife ever discuss her suspicions about Jacob?

  Witness: No, she did not.

  Mr. Logiudice: Your own wife never confided in you?

  Witness: She did not feel that she could. Not about this. We’d talked about the Rifkin case, of course. I think she knew there were some things I just could not discuss; there were some places I just could not go. Those things she would just have to handle by herself.

  Mr. Logiudice: So after two weeks in Jamaica?

  Witness: We came home.

  Mr. Logiudice: And when you got home, at that point did Laurie finally voice her suspicions about Jacob?

  Witness: Not really.

  Mr. Logiudice: “Not really”—what does that mean?

  Witness: When we got home from Jamaica, Laurie was very, very quiet. She wouldn’t discuss anything at all with me, really. She was very wary, very upset. She was scared. I tried to talk to her, draw her out, but she didn’t trust me, I think.

  Mr. Logiudice: Did she ever discuss what you two ought to do, morally, as parents?

  Witness: No.

  Mr. Logiudice: If she had asked you, what would you have said? What do you think your moral obligation was as parents of a murderer?

  Witness: It’s a hypothetical question. I don’t believe we were parents of a murderer.

  Mr. Logiudice: All right, hypothetically then: If Jacob was guilty, what should you and your wife h
ave done about it?

  Witness: You can ask the question as many ways as you like, Neal. I won’t answer it. It never happened.

  What happened then I can honestly say was the most genuine, spontaneous reaction I ever saw out of Neal Logiudice. He flung his yellow pad in frustration. It fluttered like a shotgunned bird tumbling out of the sky, settling in the far corner of the room.

  An older woman on the grand jury gasped.

  I thought for a moment it was one of Logiudice’s phony gestures—a cue to the jury: Can’t you see he’s lying?—the better because it would not show up in the transcript. But Logiudice just stood there, hands on hips, looking at his shoes, faintly shaking his head.

  After a moment he collected himself. He folded his arms and took a deep breath. Back to it. Lure, trap, fuck.

  He raised his eyes to me and saw—what? A criminal? A victim? In any event, a disappointment. I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law’s little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

  Mr. Logiudice: You understand this grand jury is investigating your wife, Laurie Barber?

  Witness: Of course.

  Mr. Logiudice: We’ve been here all day talking about her, about why she did this.

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: I don’t give a damn about Jacob.

  Witness: If you say so.

  Mr. Logiudice: And you know that you’re not under any suspicion, of anything at all?

  Witness: If you say so.

  Mr. Logiudice: But you are under oath. I don’t need to remind you of that?

  Witness: Yes, I know the rules, Neal.

  Mr. Logiudice: What your wife did, Andy—I don’t understand why you won’t help us. This was your family.

  Witness: Pose a question, Neal. Don’t make speeches.

  Mr. Logiudice: What Laurie did—doesn’t it bother y—

  Witness: Objection! Pose a proper question!

  Mr. Logiudice: She should be indicted!

  Witness: Next question.

  Mr. Logiudice: She should be indicted and brought to trial and locked up, and you know it!

  Witness: Next question!

  Mr. Logiudice: On the date of offense, March 19, 2008, did you receive news about the defendant, Laurie Barber?

  Witness: Yes.

  Mr. Logiudice: How?

  Witness: Around nine A.M. the doorbell rang. It was Paul Duffy.

  Mr. Logiudice: What did Lieutenant Duffy say?

  Witness: He asked if he could come inside and sit down. He said he had terrible news. I told him, Just say it, whatever it was, just tell me right there at the door. He said there’d been an accident. Laurie and Jacob were in the car, on the pike, and it went off the road. He said Jacob was dead. Laurie was banged up pretty bad but she would make it.

  Mr. Logiudice: Go on.

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: What happened next, Mr. Barber?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: Andy?

  Witness: I, um—I felt my knees begin to buckle, I started to fall straight down. Paul reached out to grab me. He held me up. He helped me into the living room to a chair.

  Mr. Logiudice: What else did he tell you?

  Witness: He said—

  Mr. Logiudice: Do you need to take a break?

  Witness: No. Sorry. I’m all right.

  Mr. Logiudice: What else did Lieutenant Duffy tell you?

  Witness: He said there were no other cars involved. There were witnesses, other drivers, who saw the car aim directly at a bridge abutment. She did not put on the brakes or try to steer away from it. The witnesses said she accelerated as she headed for the collision. She actually accelerated. The witnesses thought the driver must have passed out or had a heart attack or something.

  Mr. Logiudice: It was murder, Andy. She murdered your son.

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: This grand jury wants to indict her. Look at them. They want to do the right thing. We all do. But you have to help us. You have to tell us the truth. What happened to your son?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: What happened to Jacob?

  [The witness did not respond.]

  Mr. Logiudice: This can still come out right, Andy.

  Witness: Can it?

  Outside the courthouse, a hard wind jetted down Thorndike Street. Another architectural flaw: the high, flat walls on all four sides created a tornado wind around the base of the building. On a raw April evening like this, with the wind swirling around it, the courthouse could be hard even to reach. There might as well have been a moat around it. I pulled my coat around me and made my way down Thorndike toward the garage with the wind jostling my back. It was the last time I was ever in that courthouse. I leaned back against the wind like a man holding a door closed.

  Of course, some things are impossible to put behind you. I have imagined those last moments over and over. I relive the last few seconds of Jacob’s life every day, and when I sleep I dream of it. It does not matter that I was not there. I cannot keep my mind from seeing it.

  With less than one minute remaining in his life, Jacob lolled in the middle row of the minivan with his long legs stretched out in front of him. He always sat in the second row, like a little kid, even when he and his mom were the only ones in the car. He was not wearing his seat belt. He was often careless about it. Ordinarily Laurie would have hassled him to put it on. That morning she did not.

  Jacob and Laurie had not spoken much during the ride. There was not much to say. Jacob’s mom had been quiet and saturnine since we had come back from Jamaica a few weeks earlier. He was smart enough to give her some space. Deep down, he must have known he had lost his mother—lost her trust, not her love. It was hard for them to be together. So, after exchanging a few labored words as they drove up Route 128, they both fell silent once they reached the turnpike, heading west off the ramp. The minivan merged into traffic and picked up speed, and mother and son settled in for the long dull ride.

  There was another reason for Jacob’s silence. He was going to an interview at a private school in Natick. We did not think any school would admit him, honestly. What school would risk the legal liability, even if it was willing to brave the notoriety of having bloody Jacob Barber on campus? We expected Jacob would be homeschooled for the rest of his high school years. But we had been instructed that the town would not cover the costs of homeschooling under a special-ed plan unless we had exhausted all other options, so a few perfunctory interviews had been arranged. The whole process was difficult for Jacob—he had to prove he was not wanted by being rejected over and over—and this morning the need for another pointless interview made him sullen. The schools granted him interviews, he thought, just to get a glimpse of him, to see what the monster looked like up close.

  He asked his mom to turn on the radio. She put on WBUR, the NPR news station, but turned it off quickly. It was painful to be reminded that the great world continued to turn, unnoticing.

  After a few minutes on the highway, there were tears on Laurie’s face. She clenched the wheel.

  Jacob did not notice. He was lost in his own thoughts. His eyes were fixed on the view ahead of him, between the two front seats. Through the windshield: the crowd of cars speeding in formation down the track.

  Laurie signaled and moved into the right lane, where the traffic was sparse, and she began to pick up speed, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80. She unclipped her seat belt and handed it back over her left shoulder.

  Jacob would have grown, of course. In a couple of years his voice would have deepened. There would have been new friends. In his twenties he would have looked more and more like his father. His dark stare would have relaxed, with time, into a gentler expression as he set down the worries and sorrows of adolescence. His rawboned frame would have filled out. He wo
uld not have been as big as his hulking father, just a little taller, a little broader in the shoulders than most. He would have considered law school. All kids imagine themselves in their parents’ occupations, however briefly, however uncomfortably. But he would not have become a lawyer. He would have considered the work too extroverted, too theatrical, too pedantic for his reticent personality. He would have spent a long time searching, a long time laboring in jobs that did not suit him.

  As the minivan crossed 85 miles per hour, Jacob said, without any real concern, “Going a little fast there, aren’t you, Mom?”

  “Am I?”

  He would have met his grandfather. He was curious already. And given his own legal problems, he would have wanted to confront the whole issue of his patrimony, of what it meant to be the grandson of Bloody Billy Barber. He would have gone to meet the man and been disappointed. The legend—the nickname, the fearsome reputation, the murder that was literally unspeakable to so many—was much bigger than the withered old man behind it, who in the end was just a thug, albeit a well-bred thug. Jacob would have come to terms with it somehow. He would not have done it the way I did, by erasing it, ignoring it, willing it away. He was too thoughtful to fool himself that way. But he would have made his peace with it. He would have passed from son to father, and only then would he have seen how little the whole thing really meant.

  Later, after some wandering, he would have settled somewhere far away, somewhere no one had ever heard of the Barbers, or at least where no one knew enough about the story to bother with it. Somewhere out west, I think. Bisbee, Arizona, maybe. Or California. Who knows? And in one of those places, one day he would have held his own son in his arms and looked down into that baby’s eyes—as I did with Jacob many times—and wondered, Who are you? What are you thinking?

  “Are you all right, Mom?”

  “Of course.”

  “What are you doing? This is dangerous.”

  88, 89, 90. The minivan, a Honda Odyssey, was actually quite heavy—not mini at all, its name notwithstanding—and had a powerful engine. It was easy to speed. It felt very stable at high speeds. Driving it, I was often surprised to glance down at the speedometer and discover I was doing 80 or 85 miles an hour. But above 90, it began to shudder a little and the wheels began to lose contact with the road.