As the trial approached, I felt a familiar battlefield euphoria. It never crossed my mind that we would lose. I was energized, optimistic, confident, pugnacious. All of it in hindsight seems strangely disconnected from reality. But it is not so strange, if you think about it. Treat a man like an anvil and he will long to hit back.
The trial began in mid-October 2007, at the height of leaf season. Soon the trees would release their leaves all at once, but for the moment the foliage was in its final brilliant efflorescence of red, orange, and mustard.
On the eve of the trial, a Tuesday night, the air was unseasonably warm. The overnight temperature did not fall much below sixty degrees, and the air was dense, humid, agitated. I woke up in the middle of the night, sensing something wrong in the atmosphere, as I always do when Laurie cannot sleep.
She was lying on her side, up on one elbow, head propped in her hand.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered to her.
“Listen.”
“To what?”
“Sh. Just wait, listen.”
Outside, the night rustled.
There was a loud screech. It began as an animal’s yelp then quickly rose into a piercing high-pitched shriek, like the screel of a train’s brakes.
“What on earth is that?” she said.
“I don’t know. A cat? A bird maybe? Something is killing it.”
“What would be killing a cat?”
“A fox, a coyote. Raccoon, maybe.”
“It’s like we live in the woods, all of a sudden. This is the city! I’ve lived here all my life. We never had foxes and coyotes. And those huge wild turkeys we get in the yard? We never had any of that.”
“There’s a lot of new development. The town’s getting built up. Their natural habitats are disappearing. They’re getting flushed out into the open.”
“Listen to that sound, Andy. I can’t even tell what direction it’s coming from or how far away it is. It’s like it’s right next to us. It must be one of the neighbors’ cats.”
We listened. It came again. This time the dying animal’s screeches definitely sounded like a cat. The cry began recognizably as a cat’s mewling before the wild, electrified shrieks began.
“Why is it taking so long?”
“Maybe it’s toying with its prey. Cats do that with mice, I know.”
“It’s awful.”
“It’s nature.”
“To be cruel? To torture your prey before you kill it? How is that natural? What evolutionary advantage does cruelty give?”
“I don’t know, Laurie. It’s just the way it is. Whatever would attack a cat like that-some starving coyote or wild dog or whatever-I’m sure it’s desperate. It can’t be easy to hunt around here.”
“If he’s desperate, then he should kill it and eat it already.”
“Why don’t we try to get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“How can I sleep with that?”
“You want one of my Ambien?”
“No. They knock me out all the next morning. I want to be alert tomorrow. I don’t know how you take those things.”
“Are you kidding? I eat them like Tic Tacs. They don’t knock me out enough.”
“I don’t need pills, Andy. I just want that sound to stop.”
“Come on, lie down.”
She let her head down. I folded my body against her back, and she seated herself against me.
“You’re just nervous, Laurie. It’s understandable.”
“I don’t know if I can do this, Andy. Really, I don’t have the strength.”
“We’ll get through it.”
“It’s easier for you. You’ve seen the whole process before. And you’re not a mother. Not that this is easy for you. I know it’s not. But it’s different for me. I just can’t do it. I’m not going to make it.”
“I wish I could make it go away for you, Laurie, but I can’t.”
“No. This helps, anyway, what you’re doing now. We’ll just lie here. It has to stop soon.”
The shrieks went on for another fifteen minutes or so. Neither of us slept much even after they stopped.
When we emerged from our house at eight o’clock the next morning, a Fox 25 news van idled across the street, smoke wisping from the tailpipe. A cameraman filmed us as we walked to the car. He was faceless behind his shoulder-held camera. Or rather, the camera was his face, his one-eyed insect head.
Outside the courthouse in Cambridge, we made our way to the front entrance on Thorndike Street, where reporters swarmed. Again they bumbled against one another as we came up the block. Again the cameras jostled for a clear shot, again the microphones probed the air in front of us. The crush of reporters was much easier to deal with this time, having been through it once before at the arraignment. Jacob’s presence excited them most, but I was oddly thankful that Jacob had to run this gauntlet. I had a theory that it was always better for a defendant to be bailed and out on the street than to be held in the pretrial lockup, as most of my own murder defendants had been. Defendants who did not make bail seemed to leave the building only one way, via the prisoners’ exit-heading for Concord, not home. Those prisoner-defendants moved down through the courthouse, like meat through a grinder or like the steel balls that bounce down a pachinko machine: from the jail on the top floors, down through the various courtrooms, finally out through the basement-level garage, where the sheriff’s vans carted them off to the various prisons. Better that Jacob walk in through the front door, better that he retain his freedom and dignity as long as possible. Once this building caught you in its gears, it did not like to let go.
25
I n Middlesex County, judges were ostensibly assigned to trials at random. No one actually believed such a lottery existed. The same few judges were assigned high-profile cases over and over, and the judges who kept drawing the winning lottery tickets tended to be prima donnas-just the sort who would lobby for the gig behind the scenes. But no one ever complained. Bucking the entrenched routines of that courthouse was generally an exercise in pissing upwind, and anyway the self-selection of egomaniacal judges probably was for the best. It takes a healthy dose of ego to keep command of a contentious courtroom. That and it made for a better show: big cases need big personalities.
So it came as no surprise that the judge assigned to Jacob’s trial was Burton French. Everyone knew he would be. The hairnetted cafeteria ladies, the mental-patient janitors, even the mice that scratched around behind the ceiling tiles all knew that, if a TV camera was going to be in the courtroom, the judge on the bench would be Burt French. He was very likely the only judge whose face the public recognized, as he appeared often on the local news shows to dilate on matters legal. The camera loved him. In person he had a slightly laughable Colonel Blimp appearance-a wine-cask body supported uncertainly by two wiry legs-but as a talking head on the TV screen he projected the sort of reassuring gravity we like to see in our judges. He spoke in definitive declarations, none of the “on the one hand, on the other hand” that journalists rely on. At the same time he was never bombastic; he never seemed to be faking or provoking, manufacturing the “heat” that TV loves. Rather, he had a way of using his square, serious face, of tucking in his chin and leveling his eyes at the camera and saying things like “The Law does not permit [this or that].” You could hardly blame viewers for thinking, If The Law could talk, this is what it would sound like.
What made all this so unbearable to the lawyers who gathered to gossip before the First Session every morning or over lunch at the Cinnabon in the Galleria food court was that Judge French’s gruff no-bullshit attitude was itself pure bullshit. The man who presented himself in public as the embodiment of The Law, they thought, was
