“Inside and out?”
“Sure.”
“When did you learn that his father is a murderer?” Boom.
Jonathan and I both shot out of our seats, jostling the table. “Objection!”
“Sustained! The witness is instructed not to answer that question and the jury is to disregard it! Give it no weight. Treat the question as if it was never asked.” Judge French turned to the lawyers. “I’ll see counsel at sidebar right now.”
I did not go with Jonathan to the sidebar conference so, again, I am quoting the judge’s whispered comments from the trial transcript. But I did watch the judge as he spoke, and I can tell you he was obviously furious. Red- faced, he put his hands on the edge of the judge’s bench and leaned over to hiss at Logiudice.
“I am shocked, I’m stunned you did that. I explicitly told you in no uncertain terms not to go there or I would declare a mistrial. What do you have to say, Mr. Logiudice?”
“It was defense counsel who chose to cross on this question of the character of the defendant’s father and the integrity of the investigation. If he chooses to make that an issue, the prosecution is perfectly entitled to argue its side of the case. I was just following up on Mr. Klein’s line of questioning. He specifically raised the issue of whether the defendant’s father had any reason to suspect his son.”
“Mr. Klein, I presume you are going to move for a mistrial.”
“Yup.”
“Step back.”
The lawyers went back to their respective tables.
Judge French remained standing to address the jury, as was his habit. He even unzipped his robe a bit and gripped the edge of its collar as if he were posing for a statue. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am instructing you to ignore that last question. Strike it from your minds entirely. There is a saying in the law that ‘you cannot unring the bell,’ but I’m going to ask you to do just that. The question was improper and the prosecutor should not have asked it, and I want you to be aware of that. Now, I am going to dismiss you for the day while the court attends to other business. The sequestration order remains in place. I remind you not to talk about this case with anybody at all. Do not listen to media reports about it or read about it in the newspapers. Turn off your radios and TVs. Block yourself off from it entirely. All right, the jury is dismissed. We’ll see you tomorrow morning, nine o’clock sharp.”
The jury filed out, exchanging looks with each other. A few of them stole glances at Logiudice.
When they were gone, the judge said, “Mr. Klein.”
Jonathan stood. “Your Honor, the defendant moves for a mistrial. This issue was the subject of extensive pretrial discussion, the upshot of which was that the issue is so volatile and so prejudicial that mentioning it would result in a mistrial. This was the third rail that the prosecution was explicitly told not to touch. Now he has.”
The judge massaged his forehead.
Jonathan continued, “If the court is not inclined to declare a mistrial, the defendant will move to expand its witness list by two: Leonard Patz and William Barber.”
“William Barber is the defendant’s grandfather?”
“Correct. I may need a governor’s warrant to get him transported here. But if the prosecution insists on this bizarre insinuation that the defendant somehow is guilty by inheritance, that he is a member of a criminal family, born a murderer, then we have a right to rebut that.”
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
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
