innocent boy wrongly accused, who had stood up to The Man, or whatever. But it was a little late in the day to be switching sides. I was not sure I could bring myself to defend the same scumbags I had spent a lifetime locking up. Where that left me I had no idea. In limbo, I suppose, like the rest of my family.
Of the three of us, Laurie was the most beaten up by the trial. In the weeks that followed she did recover a little, but she never did return to what she was Before. She never put back on the weight she had lost, and her face would always look drawn to me. It was as if she’d aged ten years in just a few months. But the real change was inside. In those first weeks after Jacob’s trouble, there was a cool, guarded quality about Laurie. She was wary. To me, this new, more cautious manner was understandable. She had been victimized, and she responded the way victims do. It did alter the dynamics of our family-no more Mom warmly imploring Jacob and me, the family involutes, to share our feelings and jabber about our problems and generally turn ourselves inside out for her. She had withdrawn from all that, for a while at least. She watched us from a distance now. I could hardly begrudge her any of this. Damaged at last, my wife had become a little like me, a little harder. Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you-and it will find you.
38
Northern Correctional Institution,
Somers, Connecticut.
In the visiting booth again. Sealed up in my white-walled compartment, thick glass window in front of me. Steady background noise: murmuring in the adjacent booths, in the distance muted shouts and prison racket, announcements over an intercom.
Bloody Billy shuffled into the window frame, his hands cuffed to a waist chain, a second chain running from his waist down to his cuffed ankles. No matter: he came into the room like a tyrannical king, chin thrust forward, badass sneer, gray hair combed back over his head in a crazy-old-man pompadour.
Two guards piloted him to the chair but without laying a hand on him. One of them released the handcuffs from his waist while the other watched, then they both backed away, out of the window frame.
My father picked up the phone and, with his hands joined at his chin as if in prayer, he said, “Junior!” His tone said, What a pleasant surprise!
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Patz.”
His eyes traveled from my face to the phone on the wall and back, reminding me to watch what I said on a monitored line.
“Junior, what are you talking about? I’ve been here the whole time. Maybe you haven’t heard: I don’t get out much.”
I unfolded a Triple-I record, a multistate criminal record. It was several pages long. I palmed it smooth and pressed the front page against the glass with five fingertips for him to read the name: James Michael O’Leary, a.k.a. Jimmy, Jimmy-O, Father O’Leary, DOB 2/18/43.
He leaned forward and squinted at the document. “Never heard of him.”
“Never heard of him? Really?”
“Never heard of him.”
“You did a bid with him right here.”
“A lot of guys come through here.”
“Six years you were here together. Six years!”
He shrugged. “I don’t socialize. It’s jail, not Yale. Maybe if you had a picture or something?” Mischievous wink. “But I never heard of this guy.”
“Well, he’s heard of you.”
Shrug. “Lot of people have heard of me. I’m a legend.”
“He said you asked him to look out for us, to look out for Jacob.”
“Bullshit.”
“To protect us.”
“Bullshit.”
“You sent someone to protect us? You think I need you to protect my kid?”
“Hey, I never said any of that. This is all you talkin’. Like I said, I never heard of this guy. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Now, spend enough time in a courthouse and you become a connoisseur of lying. You learn to recognize the various types of bullshit, as Eskimos are said to distinguish different types of snow. The sort of winking denial Billy was indulging here-in which the words I didn’t do it were delivered in a way that announced Of course I did it, but we both know you can’t prove it — must be every criminal’s special delight. To laugh in a cop’s face! Certainly my dirtbag father was enjoying the hell out of it. From the cop’s point of view, there is no sense fighting this sort of confession-denial. You learn to accept this situation. It is part of the game. It is the policeman’s dilemma: sometimes you can’t prove the case without a confession, but you can’t get a confession unless you already have proof.
So I just took the paper down from the glass and dropped it on the little melamine counter in front of me. I sat back and rubbed my forehead. “You fool. You stupid old fool. Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Fool? What are you, calling me a fool? I didn’t do shit.”
“Jacob was innocent! You stupid, stupid old man.”
“Watch your mouth, junior. I don’t have to stay here talking to you.”
“We didn’t need your help.”
“No? Could’ve fooled me.”
“We would have won.”
“And if you didn’t? What then? You want the kid to rot in a place like this? You know what this place is, junior? This is a grave. It’s a garbage dump. It’s a big hole in the ground where they throw the trash nobody wants to see anymore. Anyways, you’re the one who told me that night on the phone, you were going to lose.”
“Look, you can’t-you can’t just-”
“Jesus, junior, keep your dress on, would you? This is fuckin’ embarrassing. Look, I’m not saying anything about what happened, okay? ’Cause I don’t know. Whatever happened to this guy-what’s his name? Patz? — whatever happened to this guy, I don’t know. I’m stuck here in this pit. What the hell do I know? But if you’re asking me to boohoo because some kiddy-raper child-molester piece of shit got killed, or killed himself, or whatever? Forget about it. Good riddance. One less piece of shit in the world. Fuck him. He’s gone.” He held a fist to his mouth and blew into it then blossomed open his fingers, like a magician making a coin disappear. Gone. “One less asshole in the world, that’s all it is. Guy like that, the world’s a better place without him.”
“But with you?”
He glared. “Hey, I’m still here.” He puffed his chest. “It don’t matter what you think of me. I’m still here, junior, whether you like it or not. You can’t get rid of me.”
“Like cockroaches.”
“That’s right, I’m a tough old cockroach. Proud of it.”
“So what did you do? Call in a favor? Or just reach out to an old friend?”
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know, the thing is, it actually took me a while to figure it out. I’ve got a cop friend who told me this guy Father O’Leary was an old leg-breaker and he was still working as a fixer, and when I asked what that meant, a ‘fixer,’ he said, ‘He makes problems go away.’ So that’s what you did, isn’t it? You called an old friend and you made the problem go away.”
No answer. Why should he help me by talking? Bloody Billy understood the policeman’s dilemma as well as I did. No confession, no case; no case, no confession.
