Defending Jacob(56)
“Can I just—is Matthew Magrath here? That’s your son, I assume?”
“You sure you’re not a cop?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“Probation officer?”
“No.”
She put a hand on her hip, tucking it under the little skirt of fat that circled her waist.
“I’d like to ask him about Leonard Patz.”
“I know.”
The woman’s behavior was so strange—not just her cryptic answers but the oddball way she looked up at me—that I was slow to grasp what she was saying about Patz.
“Is Matt here?” I repeated, anxious to be rid of her.
“Yeah.” She swung the door open. “Matt! There’s someone here to see you.”
She shuffled back into the apartment as if she had lost interest in the whole thing. The apartment was small and cluttered. Posh a suburb as Newton is, there are still corners that working people can afford. The Magraths lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in a white vinyl-sided house subdivided into four units. It was early evening, and the light inside was dim. A Red Sox game played on an enormous, ancient rear-projection TV. Facing the TV was a mottled, mustard-colored plush armchair, into which Mrs. Magrath dropped herself.
“You like baseball?” she said over her shoulder. “ ’Cuz I do.”
“Sure.”
“You know who they’re playing?”
“No.”
“I thought you said you liked baseball.”
“I’ve had some other things on my mind.”
“It’s the Blue Jays.”
“Ah. The Blue Jays. How could I forget?”
“Matt!” she blasted. Then, to me: “He’s in there with his girlfriend doing God knows what. Kristin, that’s the girlfriend. Kid hasn’t said two words to me all the times she’s been over here. Treats me like I’m a piece of shit. Just wants to go running off with Matt like I don’t even exist. Matt too. He only wants to be with Kristin. They got no time for me, the both of them.”
I nodded. “Oh.”
“How’d you get our name? I thought sex victims are supposed to be confidential.”
“I used to be with the DA’s office.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right, I knew that. You’re the one. I read about you in the papers. So you seen the whole file?”
“Yeah.”
“So you know about this guy Leonard Patz? What he did to Matt?”
“Yeah. Sounds like he groped him in the library.”
“He groped him in the balls.”
“Well, the—okay, there too.”
“Matt!”
“If this is a bad time …”
“No. You’re lucky he’s here. Usually he goes off with the girlfriend and I don’t even see him. His curfew’s eight-thirty but he doesn’t care. He just goes off. His probation officer knows all about it. I guess I can tell you that, can’t I, he’s got a probation officer? I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know what to tell anyone anymore, you know? DYS had him for a while, then they sent him back. I moved here from Quincy so he wouldn’t be around his friends, who were no good. So I came here ’cuz I thought it would help him, you know? You ever try to find a section-eight apartment in this town? Pfft. Me, I don’t care where I live. It doesn’t matter to me. So you know what? You know what he says to me now? After I do all this for him? He says, ‘Oh, you’ve changed, Ma. Now you moved to Newton, you think you’re fancy. You wear your fancy glasses, your fancy clothes, you think you’re like these Newton people.’ You know why I wear these glasses?” She picked up a pair of glasses from a table beside the armrest. “ ’Cuz I can’t see! Only now he’s got me so crazy I don’t even wear them in my own house. I wore these same glasses in Quincy and he didn’t say a thing. It’s like, no matter what I do for him, it’s never enough.”
“It’s not easy being a mother,” I ventured.
“Oh, well, he says he doesn’t want me to be his mother anymore. He says that all the time. You know why? I think it’s because I’m overweight, it’s because I’m not attractive. I don’t have a skinny body like Kristin and I don’t go to the gym and I don’t have nice hair. I can’t help it! This is what I am! I’m still his mother! You know what he calls me when he gets mad? He calls me a fat shit. Imagine saying something like that to your mother, calling her a fat shit. I do everything for this kid, everything. Does he ever thank me? Does he ever say, ‘Oh, I love you, Ma, thank you’? No. He just tells me, ‘I need money.’ He asks me for money and I tell him, ‘I don’t have any money to give you, Matty.’ And he says, ‘Come on, Ma, not even a couple a bucks?’ And I tell him I need that money to buy him all these things he likes, like this Celtics jacket he had to have, for a hundred fifty bucks, and like a fool I go and buy it for him, just to make him happy.”
The bedroom door opened and Matt Magrath came out, barefoot, wearing only Adidas gym shorts and a T-shirt. “Ma, give it a rest, would you? You’re freaking the guy out.”
The police reports in Leonard Patz’s indecent A&B case described the victim as fourteen years old, but Matt Magrath seemed a few years older than that. He was handsome, square-jawed, with a slouchy, wised-up manner.