Defending Jacob(69)

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


It is the happy lot of defense lawyers to see the good in people. No matter how wicked or incomprehensible the crime, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt, the defense lawyer never forgets his client is a human being like the rest of us. That, of course, is what makes every defendant worth defending. I cannot tell you how many times a lawyer has suggested to me that his baby-shaker or wife-beater “really isn’t a bad guy.” Even the swaggering mercenaries with their gold Rolexes and alligator briefcases harbor this tiny redeeming fleck of humanism: every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy. To cops and prosecutors, things are not so sunny. We have the opposite impulse. We are quick to see the stain, the worm, the latent criminality in even the best people. Experience tells us the nice man next door is capable of anything. The priest may be a pedophile, the cop a crook; the loving husband and father may harbor a filthy secret. Of course, we believe these things for the same reason the defender believes as he does: people are only human.