Laurie stood at the top of the stairs in flannel pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt with her arms crossed. She said nothing.
Duffy said, “Hi, Laurie.”
She turned away, went back to bed.
“Hi, Jacob.”
“Hi,” Jacob said, constrained by manners and habit from expressing any sense of anger or betrayal.
In the kitchen I asked what he had been doing outside our house.
“Your lawyer called me. He said he wasn’t getting any traction in Newton or Cambridge.”
“So he called you? I thought you were in public relations now.”
“Yeah, well, I did this as kind of a personal project.”
I nodded. I don’t know how I felt about Paul Duffy at that moment. I suppose I understood that he did what he had to do in testifying against Jacob. I could not think of him as my enemy. But we would never be friends again either. If my kid wound up in Walpole doing life without parole, it would be Duffy who put him there. We both knew that. Neither of us had the words to address any of this directly, so we ignored it. This is the best thing about men’s friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.
“So who is he?”
“His name is James O’Leary. They call him Father O’Leary. Born February 1943, so sixty-four years old.”
“Grandfather O’Leary, more like.”
“He’s no joke. He’s an old gangster. His record goes back fifty years and it reads like a statute book. It’s all there. Weapons, drugs, violence. The feds had him up on a RICO charge with a bunch of other guys back in the eighties but he beat it. He used to be a muscle guy, that’s what I was told. A leg-breaker. Now he’s too old for that.”
“So what does he do now?”
“He’s a fixer. Hires himself out, but it’s just small-time stuff. He makes problems go away. Whatever you need, collections, evictions, shutting people up.”
“Father O’Leary. So what’s he got against Jacob?”
“Nothing, I’m sure. The question is who is paying him and for what.”
“And?”
Duffy shrugged. “I have no idea. Must be somebody who’s got a beef with Jacob. That’s a big group at the moment: anybody who knew Ben Rifkin, anybody who’s ticked off about this case-hell, anybody with basic cable.”
“Great. So what do I do if I see him again?”
“Cross the street. Then call me.”
“You’ll send the public relations department?”
“I’ll send the Eighty-Second Airborne if I have to.”
I smiled.
“I still got a few friends,” he assured me.
“Are they going to let you go back to CPAC?”
“Depends. We’ll see if Rasputin lets them when he becomes DA.”
“He still needs one big hook before he runs for DA.”
“Yeah, that’s the other thing: he’s not going to get it.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve been looking into your friend Patz.”
“Because you got crossed on it?”
“That and I remember you asking about Patz and Logiudice and whether there was any connection between them. Why would Logiudice not want to look at him for this murder?”
“And?”
“Well, maybe it’s nothing but there is a connection there. Logiudice had a case with him when he was in the Child Abuse Unit. It was a rape. Logiudice broke it down to indecent A amp;B and pleaded it out.”
“So?”
“It might be nothing. Maybe the victim was reluctant or could not go through with it for whatever reason, and Logiudice did the right thing. Or maybe he dumped the wrong case, and Patz went off and committed a murder. Not the kind of thing you put on a campaign poster.” He shrugged. “I don’t have access to the DA’s files. That’s as far as I could get without calling attention to what I was doing. Hey, it’s not much, but it’s something.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, we’ll see,” he murmured. “It kind of doesn’t matter if it’s true, does it? If you just mention something like that in court, kick up a little dust in people’s eyes, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean, Perry Mason.”
“And if Logiudice takes it on the chin, that’s just a bonus, right?”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
“Andy, I am sorry, you know.”
“I know you are.”
“This job sucks sometimes.”
We stood looking at each other a few seconds.
“All right,” he said, “well, I’ll let you get to sleep. Big day tomorrow. You want me to sit out there awhile in case your friend comes back?”
“No. Thanks. We’ll be okay, I think.”
“Okay. So, see you later, I guess.”
Before I got into bed twenty minutes later, I raised the bedroom shade to peek out at the street. The black cruiser was still there, as I knew it would be.
34
Trial day six.
Father O’Leary was in the audience at the back of the courtroom when the trial resumed next morning.
Laurie, looking gray and depleted, was at her lonely post in the front row of the gallery.
Logiudice, his confidence buoyed by the performances of a series of professional witnesses, moved with a little strut. It is a peculiarity of trials that, though the witness is ostensibly the star, the lawyer who is asking the questions is the only one in the courtroom who is free to move around as he pleases. Good lawyers tend not to move much, since they want the jurors’ eyes to remain on the witness. But Logiudice could not seem to find a comfortable perch as he flitted from the witness stand to the jury box to the prosecution table and various points in between before finally coming to roost at the lectern. I suspect he was on edge about the day’s slate of civilian witnesses, Jacob’s classmates, determined not to let these amateur witnesses run away with his case the way the last ones had.
On the stand was Derek Yoo. Derek who had eaten in our kitchen a thousand times. Who had lounged on our couch watching football games and scattering Doritos on the carpet. Derek who had jumped around the living room playing GameCube and Wii with Jacob. Derek who had blissfully nodded his head for hours, probably stoned, to the pounding bass beat of his iPod while Jacob did the same beside him-the music so loud we could hear it murmuring in his headphones; it was like hearing their thoughts. Now, seeing this same Derek Yoo on the stand, I would happily have skinned him alive, with his limp brush-proof garage-band hair and sleepy slacker expression, who now threatened to send my son to Walpole forever. For the event, Derek wore a tweed sport coat that hung off his narrow shoulders. His shirt collar was too big. Cinched under his tie, it bunched and twisted, and dangled from his skinny neck like a waiting noose.
“How long have you known the defendant, Derek?”
