delivering them now without any particular feeling.
In my head the odd mention of me went right on playing like a countermelody. I have great affection for this man, and compassion. Always the smartest man in the room. Things came so easily to him. In the courtroom it seemed to have been received almost as a slip of the tongue, a sniffly little tribute blurted out on the spur of the moment. They were touched. They had watched this scene before: the disillusioned young apprentice sees his mentor revealed as an ordinary man or otherwise brought low, the scales fall from his eyes, etc., etc. Bullshit. Logiudice was not the type to make extemporaneous speeches, not with the camera running. I imagine he practiced this line before a mirror. The only question was what he expected to get out of it, how exactly he meant to sink the knife into Jacob.
In the end, Lard-Ass Rivera was unmoved by Logiudice’s bail argument. She set the bail where it had been since the day he was arrested, at a measly ten grand, a token number reflecting the fact that Jacob had nowhere to run and, after all, his family was known to the court.
Logiudice shrugged off the defeat. His bail argument was nothing but grandstanding anyway. “Your Honor,” he barreled on, “the Commonwealth would also raise an objection to the entry of an appearance by Mr. Klein as defense counsel in this case. Mr. Klein was previously engaged as attorney for another suspect in this homicide, a man whose name I will not mention in open court. To represent a second defendant in the same case creates a clear conflict of interest. Defense counsel would surely have been privy to confidential information from this other suspect that might impact the defense in this case. I can only imagine that the defendant is planting the seed for an appeal based on ineffective assistance if he is convicted.”
The suggestion of a sneaky trick pulled Jonathan to his feet. It was exceptionally rare for one lawyer to attack another so openly. Even in the scrum of a bitter trial, in court a formal, clubby politeness was always maintained. Jonathan was genuinely insulted. “Your Honor, if the Commonwealth had taken the time to ascertain the actual facts, he would never have made that accusation. The fact is, I was never retained by the other suspect in this case nor did I ever have any conversation with him about it. This was a client I represented years ago on an unrelated matter who called me out of the blue to come to the Newton police station where he was being questioned. My sole involvement with him in this case was to advise that he not answer any questions. As he was never accused, I never spoke to him again. I was not privy to any information, confidential or otherwise, now or in any previous matter, that bears on this case even remotely. There is no conflict of interest at all.”
“Your Honor,” Logiudice said with an unctuous shrug, “as an officer of the court, it is my duty to report an issue like this. If Mr. Klein is offended…”
“Is it your duty to deny the defendant the counsel of his choosing? Or to call him a liar before the case even begins?”
“All right,” Lard-Ass said, “both of you. Mr. Logiudice, the Commonwealth’s objection to the entry of Mr. Klein’s appearance as counsel is noted and overruled.” She glanced up from her papers and eyed him over the top of the judge’s bench. “Don’t get carried away.”
Logiudice limited his response to a pantomime of disagreement-a tip of the head, eyebrows raised-so as not to provoke the judge. But in the shadow trial of public opinion, he had probably scored a point. In the next day’s papers, on talk radio, on the Internet chat boards that dissected the case, they would be discussing whether Jacob Barber was trying to pull a fast one. Anyway, it was never Logiudice’s intention to be liked.
“I’m sending this case out to Judge French for trial,” Lard-Ass Rivera said with finality. She flipped the file toward the clerk. “We’ll recess for ten minutes.” She frowned at the cameraman and the reporters in the back and-I may have imagined this-at Logiudice.
The bail was arranged quickly, and Jacob was released to us. Together we left the courthouse through a gauntlet of reporters that seemed to have grown since we arrived. Grown more aggressive too: out on Thorndike Street, they tried to stop us by standing in our path. Somebody-it may have been a reporter, though no one saw him-pushed Jacob in the chest, knocking him back a few steps, trying to elicit a response. Jacob gave none. His blank face never wavered. Even the more polite ones had a slippery tactic to get us to stop and talk: they asked, “Can you just tell us what happened in there?” as if they did not know, as if the whole thing had not been broadcast to them via the live video feed and text messages from their colleagues.
By the time we rounded the corner and drove up to our home, we were exhausted. Laurie in particular looked wrung out. Her hair was beginning to craze in the humidity. Her face looked drawn. Since the catastrophe, she had been losing weight steadily and her lovely heart-shaped face was becoming gaunt. As I began to turn the car into the driveway, Laurie gasped, “Oh my God,” and clapped her hand over her mouth.
There was graffiti on the front of our house, drawn with a thick black marker. MURDERER WE HATE YOU ROT IN HELL
The letters were big, blocky, and neat, written in no particular haste. Our house was faced with tan shingles, and the edges of these shingles caused the pen to skip as it crossed from one to the next. Otherwise it had been done carefully, in broad daylight, while we were gone. The graffiti had not been there when we left that morning, I am sure of that.
I looked up and down the street. The sidewalks were empty. Down the block a gardening crew had parked a truck, and their mowers and leaf blowers buzzed loudly. No sign of neighbors. No people at all. Just neat green lawns, rhododendrons blooming pink and purple, a cordon of big old maples running the length of the block, shading the street.
Laurie jumped out and ran into the house, leaving Jacob and me to stare at the graffiti.
“Don’t let them get to you, Jake. They’re just trying to scare you.”
“I know.”
“This is just one idiot. That’s all it takes is one idiot. It’s not everyone. It’s not how people feel.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Not everyone.”
“Of course it is. It’s okay, Dad. I don’t really care.”
I twisted to look at him in the back seat. “Really? This doesn’t bother you?”
“No.” He sat with his arms crossed, eyes narrow, lips tight.
“If it did, you’d tell me, right?”
“I guess.”
“Because it’s okay to feel… hurt. You know that?”
He frowned disdainfully and shook his head, like an emperor declining to grant an indulgence. They can’t hurt me.
“So tell me. What are you feeling inside, Jake, right now, this minute?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? That’s not possible.”
“Like you said, it’s just one asshole. One idiot, whatever. I mean, it’s not like kids have never said anything bad about me, Dad. They do it to my face. What do you think school is? This”-he gestured with his chin toward the graffiti on the house-“this is just a different platform.”
I gazed at him a moment. He did not move, except that his eyes traveled from me to the passenger window. I patted his knee, though it was awkward to reach and the best I could manage was to tap my fingertip against the hard bone of his kneecap. It occurred to me that I had given him the wrong advice the night before, when I had told him to “be strong.” I was telling him, in so many words, to be like me. But now that I saw he had taken my words to heart and swaddled himself in theatrical toughness, like an adolescent Clint Eastwood, I regretted the comment. I wanted the other Jacob, my goofy, awkward son, to show his face again. But it was too late. Anyway, his tough- guy act was oddly moving to me.
“You’re a great kid, Jake. I’m proud of you. I mean, the way you stood up there today, now this. You’re a good kid.”
He snorted. “Yeah, okay, Dad.”
Inside I found Laurie on her hands and knees rummaging through the cleaning supplies in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. She was still wearing the navy skirt she wore to court.
“Just leave it, Laurie. I’ll take care of it. You go rest.”
“You’ll take care of it when?”
“Whenever you want.”
“You say you’ll take care of things and then you don’t. I don’t want that thing on my house. Not for one more
