But we both knew what went down. We were thinking the exact same thing, I’m sure: Father O’Leary goes over there one night, after a particularly bad day for Jacob in court, and he puts a scare into this fat kid, waves a gun in his face, makes him sign a confession. The kid probably shit his pants before Father O’Leary strung him up.
“Do you know what you’ve done to Jacob?”
“Yeah, I saved his life.”
“No. You took away his day in court. You took away his chance to hear the jury say ‘not guilty.’ From now on, there’ll always be a little doubt. There’ll always be people convinced Jacob is a murderer.”
He laughed. Not a little laugh but a roar. “His day in court? And I’m the fool? Junior, you know what? You’re not as smart as I thought you were.” He laughed some more. Big, crazy, gusting belly laughs. He mimicked me in a high, prissy voice, “ ‘Oh, his day in court!’ Jesus, junior! It’s a wonder you’re out there and I’m in here. How the fuck does that happen? You dumb gavoon.”
“It’s a crazy world. Imagine, them putting a guy like you in prison.”
He ignored me. He leaned forward as if he meant to whisper a secret in my ear through the inch-thick slab of glass. “Listen,” he confided, “you want to get all Dudley Do-Right here? You want to throw your kid back in the shit? Is that what you want, junior? Call the cops. Go ahead, call the cops and tell them this whole crazy story you’ve got about Patz and this guy O’Leary I supposedly know. What do I give a shit? I’m in here for life anyway. You won’t be hurting me. Go on. He’s your kid. Do what you want with him. Like you said, maybe the kid’ll get off. Take your chances.”
“They can’t try Jacob again anyway. Jeopardy’s attached.”
“So? Even better. Sounds like you think this guy O’Leary committed a murder. If I was you, I’d go report it right away. Is that what you’re going to do, Mr. DA Man? Or maybe that won’t look so good for the kid, will it?”
He looked me square in the eyes for a few seconds until I became aware of my own blinking.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t think so. We through here?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Hey, guard! Guard!”
Two guards ambled over with skeptical faces.
“Me and my son are all done visiting. You guys ever met my son?”
The guards did not answer, did not even glance at me. They seemed to think it was a trick to get them to look away for a second and they were not about to fall for it. Their job was to get the wild animal back into its cage. That was dangerous enough. There was no percentage in breaking protocol.
“All right,” my father said as one of the guards fished around for the key to reattach the cuffs to his harness. “You come back soon, junior. Remember, I’m still your father. I’ll always be your father.” The guards began to rustle him out of the chair but he went right on talking. “Hey,” he said to the guards, “you should get to know this guy. He’s a lawyer. Maybe you guys’ll need a lawyer somed-”
One of the guards pulled the phone from his hand and hung it up. He stood the prisoner up, reattached the handcuffs to his waist chain, then tugged the whole arrangement of chains to make sure he was properly trussed. Billy’s eyes were on me the whole time, even as the guards jostled him. What he saw when he looked at me is anybody’s guess. Probably just a stranger in a window frame. Mr. Logiudice: I’m going to ask you again. And I’m going to remind you, Mr. Barber, you are under oath. Witness: I’m aware of that. Mr. Logiudice: And you are aware we are talking about a murder here. Witness: The M.E. ruled it a suicide. Mr. Logiudice: Leonard Patz was murdered and you know it! Witness: I don’t know how anyone could know that. Mr. Logiudice: And you have nothing to add? Witness: No. Mr. Logiudice: You have no idea what happened to Leonard Patz on October 25, 2007? Witness: None. Mr. Logiudice: Any theories? Witness: No. Mr. Logiudice: Do you know anything at all about James Michael O’Leary, also known as Father O’Leary? Witness: Never heard of him. Mr. Logiudice: Really? You’ve never even heard the name. Witness: Never heard of him.
I remember Neal Logiudice standing there with his arms crossed, smoldering. Once upon a time, I might have patted him on the back, told him, “Witnesses lie. Nothing you can do. Go have a beer, just let it go. All crime is local, Neal-these guys all come back sooner or later.” But Logiudice was not the type to shrug off an insolent witness. Probably he did not give a shit about the Patz murder, anyway. This was not about Leonard Patz.
It was already late afternoon when Logiudice finally forced me into a little harmless perjury. I had been testifying all day, and I was tired. It was April. The days were beginning to get longer. The daylight was just beginning to dim when I said, “Never heard of him.”
By then Logiudice must have known he was not going to restore his own reputation here, least of all by asking for my help. He resigned from the DA’s office soon after. He is a defense lawyer in Boston now. I have no doubt he will make a great defense lawyer too, right up until the day he is disbarred. But for now, I console myself with that image of him in the grand jury room doing a slow burn as his case, and his career, collapsed before his eyes. I like to think of it as the last lesson I ever taught him, my former protege. It’s the policeman’s dilemma, Neal. After a while you get used to it.
39
It turns out, you can get used to most anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.
As those first few months passed, the insult of Jacob’s trial gradually lost its power to enrage us. We had done all we could. This grotesque thing had happened to our family. We would always be known for it. It would be the first sentence in all our obituaries. And we would always be shaped by the experience, in ways we could not guess at the time. All this began to seem normal, permanent, hardly worth commenting on. And when it did-when we started to get used to our new life as a notorious family, when we finally began to look forward, not back-our family gradually reemerged.
Laurie was the first of us to reawaken. She renewed her friendship with Toby Lanzman. Toby had not reached out to us during the trial, but she was the first of our Newton friends to reconnect with us afterward. Still her old fit, commanding self-same lean runner’s face, same springy, high-rumped body-Toby guided Laurie in a fearsome exercise program that included long, cold jogs along Commonwealth Avenue. Laurie wanted to get stronger, she said. Soon Laurie was driving herself through grueling workouts even without Toby. She would come back from increasingly long runs, red-faced and glistening with sweat in the dead of winter. “Have to get stronger.”
Recovering her role as family captain, Laurie threw herself into the great project of reviving Jacob and me as well. She cooked tremendous breakfasts of waffles or omelettes or hot cereal, and now that we had no jobs to rush off to, we lingered over the newspapers, which Jacob read on his MacBook while Laurie and I shared the newsprint versions of the Globe and the Times. She organized family movie nights and even allowed me to pick the gangster pictures I love, then she suffered good-naturedly as Jacob and I repeated our favorite lines over and over: “Say hello to my leetle friend” and “I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.” She said that my Brando sounded like Elmer Fudd, which required a trip to YouTube to show Jacob who Elmer Fudd was. How strange to hear ourselves laughing again.
And when all this was not working fast enough, when Jacob and I could not seem to shake the gloom of the last year, Laurie decided that stronger medicine was needed.
“Why don’t we go away for a while?” she said brightly at dinner one night. “We could take a family vacation like we used to.”
It was one of those blindingly obvious ideas that hits you like a revelation. Of course! The moment she suggested it, we knew that of course we had to go. Why had it taken us so long to think of it? Just talking about the idea made us a little giddy.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Clear our heads!”
“Push the reset button!” Jacob.
Laurie raised her fists and wiggled them, she was so excited. “I am so sick of all this. I hate this house. I
