The next morning, Jonathan Klein stood with Laurie and me in the gloom of the Thorndike Street garage as we armored ourselves against the reporters gathered at the courthouse door, just down the street. Klein wore a gray suit with his usual black turtleneck. No tie today, even for court. The suit, particularly the pants, hung loosely off him. He must have been a tailor’s nightmare, with his thin, assless body. Reading glasses hung from an Indian-bead lanyard around his neck. He carried his ancient cowhide briefcase, worn slick as an old saddle. To an outsider, no doubt, Klein would have seemed inadequate to the job. Too small, too meek. But something about him was reassuring to me. With his backswept white hair, white goatee, and benevolent smile, I thought there was a magical quality about him. A sense of calm surrounded him. Lord knows, we needed it.
Klein peeked down the block at the reporters, who loafed and chatted, a wolf pack sniffing about for something to do. “All right,” he said. “Andy, I know you’ve been through this before, but never from this side. Laurie, this will all be new to you. So I’m going to read you the catechism, both of you.”
He extended his hand to touch Laurie’s sleeve. She looked devastated by the double shocks of the day before, Jacob’s arrest and the Barber curse. We had spoken very little in the morning as we ate, dressed, and got ready for court. It crossed my mind for the first time that we were headed for divorce. However the trial turned out, Laurie would leave me when it was over. I could tell she was eyeing me, making up her mind. What did it mean to find out that she had been tricked into marrying me? Should she feel betrayed? Or acknowledge that her uneasiness meant I was right all along: girls like her don’t marry boys like me. In any event, Jonathan’s touch seemed to comfort her. She manufactured a brief little smile for him, then a bleary look returned to her face.
Klein: “From this moment on, from the time we arrive at the courthouse until you get back home tonight and close the door of your house, I want you to show nothing. No emotion at all. Keep a poker face. Got it?”
Laurie did not respond. She seemed dazed.
“I’m a potted plant,” I assured him.
“Good. Because every expression, every reaction, every flicker of emotion will be interpreted against you. Laugh, and they’ll say you don’t take the proceedings seriously. Scowl, and they’ll say you’re surly, you’re not contrite, you resent being hauled into court. Cry, and you’re faking.”
He looked at Laurie.
“Okay,” she said, less sure of herself, particularly of this last item.
“Don’t answer any questions. You don’t have to. On TV only the pictures matter; it is impossible to tell whether you heard a question that someone shouted at you. Most important—and I’ll speak to Jacob about this when I get to the lockup—any sign of anger, from Jacob in particular, will confirm people’s worst suspicions. You have to remember: in their eyes, in everybody’s eyes, Jacob is guilty. You all are. They only want something to confirm what they already know. Any little scrap will do.”
Laurie said, “It’s a little late to be worried about our public image, isn’t it?”
That morning the Globe had run a page-one headline: DA’s TEEN SON CHARGED IN NEWTON KILLING. The Herald was sensational but, to its credit, forthright. Its tabloid cover showed a background photo of what appeared to be the murder scene, an empty slope in a forest, with a snapshot of Jacob that they must have culled from the Web, and the word MONSTER. There was a teaser at the bottom: “Prosecutor benched amid allegations of cover-up as his own teenage son is unmasked in Newton knife murder.”
Laurie had a point: after that, maintaining a poker face as we walked into court did seem a little inadequate.
But Klein only shrugged. The rules were beyond question. They might as well have been written on stone tablets by the finger of God. He said, in his quiet, commonsense way, “We’ll do the most we can with what we have.”
So we did as we were told. We kept our feet moving through the proxy mob of reporters waiting for us in front of the courthouse. We showed no emotion, answered no questions, pretended we did not hear the questions as they were yelled in our ears. They kept on shouting questions anyway. Microphones bristled and probed around us. “How are you doing?” “What do you say to all the people who trusted you?” “Anything to say to the victim’s family?” “Did Jacob do it?” “We just want to hear your side.” “Will he testify?” One, trying to provoke, said, “Mr. Barber, how does it feel to be on the other side?”
I held Laurie’s hand and we pushed through into the lobby. Things were surprisingly quiet, even normal inside. Reporters were barred here. At the lobby security station, people stood back to let us pass. The sheriff’s officers who used to wave me through with a smile now wanded me and inspected the change from my pocket.
We were alone again, briefly, in the elevator. As we rode to the sixth floor, where the first-session courtroom was, I reached for Laurie’s hand, my fingers scrabbling against hers to find a fit. My wife was a good deal shorter than I, so in order to hold her hand I had to haul it up to the level of my hip. She was left with her elbow bent, as if she were checking her watch. A look of distaste crossed her face—her eyelids fluttered, her lips tightened. It was barely perceptible, a micro-movement, but I noticed and released her hand. The elevator doors shivered as the box was lifted. Klein kept his eyes on the panel of ranked buttons, tactfully.
When the doors rattled open, we marched through the crowded lobby to courtroom 6B, there to wait on the front center bench until our case was called.
An awkward interval passed before the judge took the bench. We had been told our case would be called promptly at ten so the court could deal with us—and the circus of reporters and gawkers—then quickly get back to business. We arrived at the courtroom around quarter of. Time dragged while we waited. It felt like a lot more than fifteen minutes. The crowds of lawyers, most of whom I knew well, stood back as if there were a magnetic field around us.
Paul Duffy was there, standing against the far wall with Logiudice and a couple of the CPAC guys. Duffy—who was essentially an uncle to Jacob—glanced at me once as we sat down, then turned away. I was not offended. I did not feel shunned. There was an etiquette to these things, that’s all. Duffy had to support the home team. That was his job. Maybe we would become friends again after Jacob was cleared, maybe we wouldn’t. For now, the friendship was suspended. No hard feelings, but that was the way it had to be. I know that Laurie was not so bloodless about Duffy’s snubs or anyone else’s. To her, it was awful to see friendships snapped off this way. We were the same people after that we had been before, and because we had not changed, it was easy for her to forget that others saw us—all of us, not just Jacob—in a completely new way. At a minimum, Laurie felt, people ought to see that, whatever Jacob may have done, she and I were certainly innocent. It was a delusion I never shared.
Courtroom 6B had an extra jury box to accommodate large jury pools, and that morning in the empty extra jury box a TV camera was set up to provide a shared video feed to all the local stations. While we waited, the cameraman kept the lens pointed at us. We wore our defendants’ blank masks, said nothing to each other, barely even blinked. It is not an easy thing to be watched for so long. I began to notice little things, as one does during extended downtimes. I studied my own hands, which were big and pale, with prominent scuffed knuckles. Not a lawyer’s hands, I thought. Strange to see them appended to my own coat sleeves. That quarter hour of waiting and being stared at in the courtroom—a courtroom I once owned, a room as comfortable to me as my own kitchen—was even worse than what followed.
At ten, the first-session judge swept in wearing her black robe. Judge Rivera, a terrible judge but a good break for us. You must understand: Courtroom 6B, the first-session court, was a hardship post for judges; they rotated in and out of it every few months. It was the job of the first-session judge to make the trains run on time—to assign cases to the other courtrooms in such a way that the workload was spread evenly, to winnow the docket by cajoling plea bargains out of reluctant ADAs and defendants, and to sort through the remaining administrative busywork on the daily docket as efficiently as possible. It was a hectic job—delegate, dump, defer. Lourdes Rivera was fiftyish, with a frazzled demeanor, and magnificently miscast as the judge to make the trains run on time. It was all she could do to get herself to court on time with her robe zipped up and her cell phone turned off. The lawyers scorned her. They grumbled about how she got the job because of her good looks or her opportune marriage to a politically connected lawyer or to plump up the number of Latinos on the bench. They called her Lard-Ass Rivera. But we could hardly have picked a better judge that morning. Judge Rivera had been on the Superior Court bench less than five years but already she had a towering reputation in the district attorney’s office as a defendant’s judge. Most of the judges in Cambridge had the same reputation: soft, unrealistic, liberal. Now it seemed perfectly appropriate to load the dice that way. A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.
When the clerk called Jacob’s case—“Indictment number oh-eight-dash-four-four-oh-seven, Commonwealth v. Jacob Michael Barber, one count of murder in the first degree”—my son was ushered in by two court officers from the lockup and made to stand in the middle of the courtroom, in front of the jury box. He scanned the crowd, saw us, and immediately dropped his eyes to the floor. Embarrassed and awkward, he began to fuss with his suit and tie, which Laurie had picked out for him and Klein had delivered. Jacob was not used to wearing a suit and he seemed to feel both dapper and straitjacketed. He had already begun to outgrow the coat. Laurie used to joke that he was growing so fast that, at night when the house was quiet, she could hear his bones stretching. Now he fidgeted to make the coat sit properly on his shoulders but it would not stretch that far. From all this fidgeting, reporters would later say that Jacob was vain, that he even enjoyed his moment in the spotlight, a slur we would hear over and over when the trial actually began. The truth was, he was an awkward boy and so thoroughly terrified that he did not know where to put his hands. The wonder was that he managed to stand there with as much composure as he did.
Jonathan passed through the swinging gate in the bar, laid his briefcase on the defense table, and took a position beside Jacob. He put his hand on Jacob’s back, not for Jacob’s benefit but to make a point: This boy is no monster, I am not afraid to touch him. And more: I am not simply a hired gun doing my professional duty for a distasteful client. I believe in this kid. I am his friend.
“Commonwealth,” Lard-Ass Rivera said, “I’ll hear you.”
Logiudice stood up at the prosecutor’s table. He ran his palm down the length of his tie then reached around to give the back hem of his coat a little tug. “Your Honor,” he began mournfully, “this is a heinous case.” He pronounced the word hay-eenus, and I understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them. Logiudice recited the facts of the case, already familiar to everyone from the last twenty-four hours of news reports, retold now with a minimum of embellishment for the torches-and-pitchforks mob beyond the camera. There was even a little singsong in his voice, as if we had all heard these facts often enough to be bored by them.
But when he reached his bail argument, Logiudice’s tone became somber. “Your Honor, we all know and have fond feelings for the defendant’s father, who is in the courtroom today. I personally have known this man. Respected and admired him. I have great affection for this man, and compassion, as we all do, I’m sure. Always the smartest man in the room. Things came so easily to him. But. But.”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
Logiudice turned to look at me, not by twisting his body but by snaking his neck around his own shoulder.
Things came so easily to him. Could he really have believed that?
“Mr. Logiudice,” Lard-Ass said, “I presume you know Andrew Barber is not accused of anything.”
Logiudice faced front again. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Let’s get to the bail, then.”
“Your Honor, the Commonwealth is seeking a very high bail: five hundred thousand cash, five million surety. The Commonwealth would argue that, because of the unusual circumstances of his family situation, this defendant poses a particular risk of flight in light of the savagery of the crime, the overwhelming likelihood of conviction, and the unusual sophistication of this defendant, who has grown up in a home where criminal law is the family business.”
Logiudice went on with this horseshit for a few minutes. He seemed to have memorized his lines and was delivering them now without any particular feeling.
In my head the odd mention of me went right on playing like a countermelody. I have great affection for this man, and compassion. Always the smartest man in the room. Things came so easily to him. In the courtroom it seemed to have been received almost as a slip of the tongue, a sniffly little tribute blurted out on the spur of the moment. They were touched. They had watched this scene before: the disillusioned young apprentice sees his mentor revealed as an ordinary man or otherwise brought low, the scales fall from his eyes, etc., etc. Bullshit. Logiudice was not the type to make extemporaneous speeches, not with the camera running. I imagine he practiced this line before a mirror. The only question was what he expected to get out of it, how exactly he meant to sink the knife into Jacob.
In the end, Lard-Ass Rivera was unmoved by Logiudice’s bail argument. She set the bail where it had been since the day he was arrested, at a measly ten grand, a token number reflecting the fact that Jacob had nowhere to run and, after all, his family was known to the court.
Logiudice shrugged off the defeat. His bail argument was nothing but grandstanding anyway. “Your Honor,” he barreled on, “the Commonwealth would also raise an objection to the entry of an appearance by Mr. Klein as defense counsel in this case. Mr. Klein was previously engaged as attorney for another suspect in this homicide, a man whose name I will not mention in open court. To represent a second defendant in the same case creates a clear conflict of interest. Defense counsel would surely have been privy to confidential information from this other suspect that might impact the defense in this case. I can only imagine that the defendant is planting the seed for an appeal based on ineffective assistance if he is convicted.”
The suggestion of a sneaky trick pulled Jonathan to his feet. It was exceptionally rare for one lawyer to attack another so openly. Even in the scrum of a bitter trial, in court a formal, clubby politeness was always maintained. Jonathan was genuinely insulted. “Your Honor, if the Commonwealth had taken the time to ascertain the actual facts, he would never have made that accusation. The fact is, I was never retained by the other suspect in this case nor did I ever have any conversation with him about it. This was a client I represented years ago on an unrelated matter who called me out of the blue to come to the Newton police station where he was being questioned. My sole involvement with him in this case was to advise that he not answer any questions. As he was never accused, I never spoke to him again. I was not privy to any information, confidential or otherwise, now or in any previous matter, that bears on this case even remotely. There is no conflict of interest at all.”
“Your Honor,” Logiudice said with an unctuous shrug, “as an officer of the court, it is my duty to report an issue like this. If Mr. Klein is offended …”
“Is it your duty to deny the defendant the counsel of his choosing? Or to call him a liar before the case even begins?”
“All right,” Lard-Ass said, “both of you. Mr. Logiudice, the Commonwealth’s objection to the entry of Mr. Klein’s appearance as counsel is noted and overruled.” She glanced up from her papers and eyed him over the top of the judge’s bench. “Don’t get carried away.”
Logiudice limited his response to a pantomime of disagreement—a tip of the head, eyebrows raised—so as not to provoke the judge. But in the shadow trial of public opinion, he had probably scored a point. In the next day’s papers, on talk radio, on the Internet chat boards that dissected the case, they would be discussing whether Jacob Barber was trying to pull a fast one. Anyway, it was never Logiudice’s intention to be liked.
“I’m sending this case out to Judge French for trial,” Lard-Ass Rivera said with finality. She flipped the file toward the clerk. “We’ll recess for ten minutes.” She frowned at the cameraman and the reporters in the back and—I may have imagined this—at Logiudice.
The bail was arranged quickly, and Jacob was released to us. Together we left the courthouse through a gauntlet of reporters that seemed to have grown since we arrived. Grown more aggressive too: out on Thorndike Street, they tried to stop us by standing in our path. Somebody—it may have been a reporter, though no one saw him—pushed Jacob in the chest, knocking him back a few steps, trying to elicit a response. Jacob gave none. His blank face never wavered. Even the more polite ones had a slippery tactic to get us to stop and talk: they asked, “Can you just tell us what happened in there?” as if they did not know, as if the whole thing had not been broadcast to them via the live video feed and text messages from their colleagues.
By the time we rounded the corner and drove up to our home, we were exhausted. Laurie in particular looked wrung out. Her hair was beginning to craze in the humidity. Her face looked drawn. Since the catastrophe, she had been losing weight steadily and her lovely heart-shaped face was becoming gaunt. As I began to turn the car into the driveway, Laurie gasped, “Oh my God,” and clapped her hand over her mouth.
There was graffiti on the front of our house, drawn with a thick black marker.
MURDERER
WE HATE YOU
ROT IN HELL
The letters were big, blocky, and neat, written in no particular haste. Our house was faced with tan shingles, and the edges of these shingles caused the pen to skip as it crossed from one to the next. Otherwise it had been done carefully, in broad daylight, while we were gone. The graffiti had not been there when we left that morning, I am sure of that.
I looked up and down the street. The sidewalks were empty. Down the block a gardening crew had parked a truck, and their mowers and leaf blowers buzzed loudly. No sign of neighbors. No people at all. Just neat green lawns, rhododendrons blooming pink and purple, a cordon of big old maples running the length of the block, shading the street.
Laurie jumped out and ran into the house, leaving Jacob and me to stare at the graffiti.
“Don’t let them get to you, Jake. They’re just trying to scare you.”
“I know.”
“This is just one idiot. That’s all it takes is one idiot. It’s not everyone. It’s not how people feel.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Not everyone.”
“Of course it is. It’s okay, Dad. I don’t really care.”
I twisted to look at him in the back seat. “Really? This doesn’t bother you?”
“No.” He sat with his arms crossed, eyes narrow, lips tight.
“If it did, you’d tell me, right?”
“I guess.”
“Because it’s okay to feel … hurt. You know that?”
He frowned disdainfully and shook his head, like an emperor declining to grant an indulgence. They can’t hurt me.
“So tell me. What are you feeling inside, Jake, right now, this minute?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? That’s not possible.”
“Like you said, it’s just one asshole. One idiot, whatever. I mean, it’s not like kids have never said anything bad about me, Dad. They do it to my face. What do you think school is? This”—he gestured with his chin toward the graffiti on the house—“this is just a different platform.”
I gazed at him a moment. He did not move, except that his eyes traveled from me to the passenger window. I patted his knee, though it was awkward to reach and the best I could manage was to tap my fingertip against the hard bone of his kneecap. It occurred to me that I had given him the wrong advice the night before, when I had told him to “be strong.” I was telling him, in so many words, to be like me. But now that I saw he had taken my words to heart and swaddled himself in theatrical toughness, like an adolescent Clint Eastwood, I regretted the comment. I wanted the other Jacob, my goofy, awkward son, to show his face again. But it was too late. Anyway, his tough-guy act was oddly moving to me.
“You’re a great kid, Jake. I’m proud of you. I mean, the way you stood up there today, now this. You’re a good kid.”
He snorted. “Yeah, okay, Dad.”
Inside I found Laurie on her hands and knees rummaging through the cleaning supplies in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. She was still wearing the navy skirt she wore to court.
“Just leave it, Laurie. I’ll take care of it. You go rest.”
“You’ll take care of it when?”
“You say you’ll take care of things and then you don’t. I don’t want that thing on my house. Not for one more minute. I’m not going to just leave it there.”
“I said I’ll take care of it. Please. Go rest.”
“How can I rest, Andy, with that thing? Honestly. Did you see what they wrote? On our home! On our home, Andy, and you want me to just go rest? Great. This is just great. They walk right up and write on our house and nobody says anything, nobody lifts a finger, not one of our fucking neighbors.” She enunciated the expletive meticulously, right down to the final G, as people who are not used to swearing often do. “We should call the cops. It’s a crime, isn’t it? It is a crime, I know it is. It’s vandalism. Should we call the cops?”
“No. We’re not calling the cops.”
“No. Of course not.”
She came up with a bottle of Fantastik, then snatched up a dish towel and soaked it under the faucet.
“Laurie, please, let me do this. Let me help you, at least.”
“Would you just stop? I said I’ll do it.”
She had taken off her shoes and she marched out like that, barefoot in her nylons, and she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.
I went out with her, but there was nothing for me to do except watch.
Her hair bounced to the vigorous movements of her arm. Her eyes were wet and her face flushed.
“Can I help, Laurie?”
“No. I’ll do it.”
At length, I gave up watching and went back in. I heard her scruffing against the side of the house for a long time. She succeeded in rubbing out the words, but the ink left a gray cloud on the paint. It is still there today.