Defending Jacob(102)

The judge stood there a moment, grinding his molars. “I’ll take it under advisement. I’ll give you my decision in the morning. Court is adjourned till nine o’clock tomorrow.”

Mr. Logiudice: Before we move on, Mr. Barber, about that knife, the one that was thrown in the lake to throw off the investigators. Do you have any idea who might have planted that knife?

Witness: Of course. I knew from the start.

Mr. Logiudice: Did you? And how’s that?

Witness: The knife was missing from our kitchen.

Mr. Logiudice: An identical knife?

Witness: A knife that matched the description I’d been given. I’ve since seen the knife that was recovered from the pond, when we were shown the state’s evidence. It’s our knife. It was old, pretty distinctive. It did not match the set. I recognized it.

Mr. Logiudice: Then it was thrown in the pond by someone in your family?

Witness: Of course.

Mr. Logiudice: Jacob? To deflect any inference of guilt from the actual knife he owned?

Witness: No. Jake was too smart for that. And I was too. I knew what the wounds looked like; I’d talked to the forensics people. I knew that knife couldn’t have made Ben Rifkin’s wounds.

Mr. Logiudice: Laurie, then? Why?

Witness: Because we believed in our son. He told us he didn’t do it. We didn’t want to see his life ruined just because he’d been foolish enough to buy a knife. We knew people would see that knife and jump to the wrong conclusion. We talked about the danger of it. So Laurie decided to give the cops another knife. The only problem was, she was the least sophisticated among the three of us about these things and she was also the most upset. She was not careful enough. She chose the wrong sort of knife. She left a loose end.

Mr. Logiudice: Did she talk to you before she did this?

Witness: Before, no.

Mr. Logiudice: After, then?

Witness: I confronted her. She did not deny it.

Mr. Logiudice: And what did you say to this person who’d just interfered with a homicide investigation?

Witness: What did I say? I said I wished she’d talked to me first. I would have given her the right knife to throw.

Mr. Logiudice: Is that really how you feel now, Andy? That this is all a joke? Do you really have so little respect for what we do here?

Witness: When I said that to my wife, I assure you I wasn’t joking. Let’s leave it at that.

Mr. Logiudice: All right. Continue with your story.



When we got back to our car in the garage a block from the courthouse, there was a white piece of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. It was quarter-folded. Opening it, I read,

JUDGMENT DAY IS COMING

MURDERER, YOU DIE



Jonathan was still with us, making it a group of four. He frowned at the note and slipped it into his briefcase. “I’ll take care of this. I’ll file a report with the Cambridge police. You all go home.”

Laurie said, “That’s all we can do?”

“We should let the Newton police know too, just in case,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s time we had a cruiser camped out by our house. The world’s full of lunatics.”

I was distracted by a figure standing in the corner of the garage, quite a distance away but obviously watching us. He was an older man, near seventy probably. He wore a jacket, golf shirt, and scally cap. Looked like a million guys around Boston. Some old mick tough. He was lighting a cigarette—it was the flare of his lighter that caught my eye—and the glowing tip of the cigarette linked him with the car that had been parked outside our house a few nights before, the interior blacked out except for the little glowing firefly of a cigarette tip in the car window. And wasn’t he just the sort of dinosaur to drive a Lincoln frickin’ Town Car?

Our eyes met for a moment. He thrust his lighter into his pants pocket and continued walking, out through a doorway to a staircase, and he was gone. Had he been walking before I saw him? He seemed to have been standing and staring, but I had only just glanced over. Maybe he had just stopped a moment before to light the cigarette.

“Did you see that guy?”

Jonathan: “What guy?”

“That guy who was just over there looking at us.”

“Didn’t see him. Who was he?”

“I don’t know. Never seen him before.”

“You think he had something to do with the note?”

“Don’t know. I don’t even know if he was looking at us. But he seemed to be, you know?”

“Come on,” Jonathan encouraged us toward the car, “there are a lot of people looking at us lately. It’ll be over soon.”





31 | Hanging Up


Around six that night, as the three of us finished our dinner—Jacob and I indulging ourselves in a little cautious optimism, spitting on Logiudice and his desperate tactics; Laurie trying to keep up the appearance of confidence and normalcy, even as she had become vaguely suspicious of the both of us—the phone rang.

I answered. An operator informed me that she had a collect call. Would I accept the charges? It came as a surprise that people still made collect calls. Was this a prank? Were there any phone booths left to make a collect call from? Only in prisons.

“Collect call from who?”

“Bill Barber.”

“Jesus. No, I won’t accept. Wait a minute, hang on.” I held the phone against my chest, as if my heart would speak to him directly. Then: “All right, I’ll accept the charges.”