I am not a natural runner. Too heavy-legged, too big and bulky. I am built like a butcher. And honestly I derive little pleasure from running. I do it because I have to. If I don’t, I get fat, an unhappy tendency I inherited from my mother’s side, all stout-bodied peasant stock from eastern Europe, Scotland, and points unknown. So most mornings around six or six-thirty I galumphed through the streets and the jogging paths in Cold Spring Park until I had pounded out my daily three miles.
I was determined to keep on doing it even after Jacob was indicted. No doubt the neighbors would have preferred that we Barbers not show our faces, particularly in Cold Spring Park. I did accommodate them somewhat. I ran early in the morning, I kept my distance from others, I bowed my head like a fugitive when passing a jogger going the opposite direction. And of course I never ran near the murder site. But I decided from the start that, for my own sanity, I would hold on to this aspect of before-life.
The morning after our initial conference with Jonathan, I experienced that elusive, oxymoronic thing, a “good run.” I felt light and fast. For once, running was not a series of leaps and thuds, but—and I don’t mean to be too poetic about this—like flying. I felt my body rush forward with a kind of natural ease and predatory speed, as if I had always been meant to feel like this. I don’t know why it happened, exactly, though I suspect the added anxiety of the case flooded my system with adrenaline. I moved quickly through Cold Spring Park in the damp chill, around the loop that follows the perimeter of the park, hopping over tree roots and rocks, leaping the little pools of rainwater and the squelching mud patches that dot the park in spring. I felt so good, in fact, that I ran past my usual park exit and went on through the woods a little farther, to the front of the park where, with only the vaguest intention or design in my head, but a conviction—fast growing into a certainty—that Leonard Patz was the one, I came out into the parking lot of the Windsor Apartments.
I padded around the parking lot a bit. I did not have the vaguest idea where Patz’s apartment was. The buildings were plain blocks of red brick, three stories high.
I found Patz’s car, a rusting plum-colored late-nineties Ford Probe whose description I remembered from Patz’s file, among the details Paul Duffy had begun to gather. It was just the sort of car a child molester ought to drive. The vehicular embodiment of a pedophile is precisely a plum-colored late-nineties Ford Probe. Short of flying the NAMBLA flag from the antenna, the car could not have suited the man better. Patz had adorned his pedo-mobile with various disarming badges: a “Teach Children” Massachusetts vanity plate, bumper stickers for the Red Sox and the World Wildlife Fund, with its cuddly panda logo. Both doors were locked. I cupped my hands over the driver’s window to peer inside. The interior was immaculate, if worn.
At the entrance to the nearest apartment building, I found the buzzer for his apartment, “PATZ, L.”
The apartment complex was beginning to stir. A few residents straggled out to their cars or to make the short walk to Dunkin’ Donuts just down the street. Most wore business clothes. One woman coming out of Patz’s building held the door open for me politely—there is no better disguise for a stalker in the suburbs than to present oneself as a clean-shaven Caucasian in jogging clothes—but I declined with a thankful expression. What would I do inside the building? Knock on Patz’s door? No. Not yet, at least.
The idea was only just forming in my head that Jonathan’s approach was too timid. He was thinking too much like a defense lawyer, content to put the Commonwealth to its burden, win it on cross, poke a few holes in Logiudice’s case then argue to the jury that, yes, there was some evidence against Jacob but it wasn’t enough. I preferred to attack, always. To be fair, this was a misinterpretation of what Jonathan had said and badly underestimated him. But I knew—and Jonathan surely did as well—that the better strategy is to offer the jury an alternate narrative. The jurors would want to know, naturally, if Jacob did not do it, who did? We had to offer them a story to satisfy that craving. We humans are swayed more by stories than by abstract concepts like “burden of proof” or “presumed innocent.” We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls. Patz would be our story. That sounds calculating and dishonest, I realize, as if the whole thing was a matter of trial tactics, so let me add that in this case the counternarrative happened to be true: Patz actually did do it. I knew it. It was only a matter of showing the jury the truth. That was all I ever wanted with respect to Patz: to follow the evidence, play it straight, as I always had. You will say I am protesting too much, making myself sound too virtuous—arguing my own case to a jury. Well, I acknowledge the illogic: Patz did it because Jacob did not. But the illogic was not apparent to me then. I was the boy’s father. And the fact is, I was right to suspect Patz.