Defending Jacob

by William Landay

  “I used to be with the DA’s office.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right, I knew that. You’re the one. I read about you in the papers. So you seen the whole file?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you know about this guy Leonard Patz? What he did to Matt?”

  “Yeah. Sounds like he groped him in the library.”

  “He groped him in the balls.”

  “Well, the—okay, there too.”

  “Matt!”

  “If this is a bad time …”

  “No. You’re lucky he’s here. Usually he goes off with the girlfriend and I don’t even see him. His curfew’s eight-thirty but he doesn’t care. He just goes off. His probation officer knows all about it. I guess I can tell you that, can’t I, he’s got a probation officer? I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know what to tell anyone anymore, you know? DYS had him for a while, then they sent him back. I moved here from Quincy so he wouldn’t be around his friends, who were no good. So I came here ’cuz I thought it would help him, you know? You ever try to find a section-eight apartment in this town? Pfft. Me, I don’t care where I live. It doesn’t matter to me. So you know what? You know what he says to me now? After I do all this for him? He says, ‘Oh, you’ve changed, Ma. Now you moved to Newton, you think you’re fancy. You wear your fancy glasses, your fancy clothes, you think you’re like these Newton people.’ You know why I wear these glasses?” She picked up a pair of glasses from a table beside the armrest. “ ’Cuz I can’t see! Only now he’s got me so crazy I don’t even wear them in my own house. I wore these same glasses in Quincy and he didn’t say a thing. It’s like, no matter what I do for him, it’s never enough.”

  “It’s not easy being a mother,” I ventured.

  “Oh, well, he says he doesn’t want me to be his mother anymore. He says that all the time. You know why? I think it’s because I’m overweight, it’s because I’m not attractive. I don’t have a skinny body like Kristin and I don’t go to the gym and I don’t have nice hair. I can’t help it! This is what I am! I’m still his mother! You know what he calls me when he gets mad? He calls me a fat shit. Imagine saying something like that to your mother, calling her a fat shit. I do everything for this kid, everything. Does he ever thank me? Does he ever say, ‘Oh, I love you, Ma, thank you’? No. He just tells me, ‘I need money.’ He asks me for money and I tell him, ‘I don’t have any money to give you, Matty.’ And he says, ‘Come on, Ma, not even a couple a bucks?’ And I tell him I need that money to buy him all these things he likes, like this Celtics jacket he had to have, for a hundred fifty bucks, and like a fool I go and buy it for him, just to make him happy.”

  The bedroom door opened and Matt Magrath came out, barefoot, wearing only Adidas gym shorts and a T-shirt. “Ma, give it a rest, would you? You’re freaking the guy out.”

  The police reports in Leonard Patz’s indecent A&B case described the victim as fourteen years old, but Matt Magrath seemed a few years older than that. He was handsome, square-jawed, with a slouchy, wised-up manner.

  The girlfriend, Kristin, followed him out of the bedroom door. She was not as pretty as Matt. She had a thin face, small mouth, freckles, flat chest. She wore a wide-necked shirt that hung off one side, exposing a milky shoulder and a vampy lavender bra strap. I knew instantly that this boy did not care about her. He would break her heart, probably very soon. I felt sorry for her before she even got all the way out of the bedroom door. She looked about thirteen or fourteen. How many men would break her heart before she was through?

  “You’re Matthew Magrath?”

  “Yeah. Why? Who are you?”

  “How old are you, Matthew? What’s your birth date?”

  “August 17, 1992.”

  I was distracted momentarily by the thought of it: 1992. How recent it sounded, how far along in my life I was already. In 1992 I had already been a lawyer for eight years. Laurie and I were trying to conceive Jacob, in both senses.

  “You’re not even fifteen years old yet.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing.” I glanced at Kristin, who was watching me with a lidded expression like a proper bad girl. “I came to ask you about Leonard Patz.”

  “Len? What do you want to know?”

  “ ‘Len’? Is that what you call him?”

  “Sometimes. Who are you again?”

  “I’m Jacob Barber’s father. The boy who’s accused in the Cold Spring Park murder.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I figured you were something like that. I figured you might be a cop or something. The way you were looking at me. Like I done something wrong.”

  “Do you think you’ve done something wrong, Matt?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, do you? Doesn’t matter if I’m a cop or not.”

  “What about her?” He inclined his head toward the girl.

  “What about her?”

  “Isn’t it a crime if you have sex with a kid and she’s, like, too young—so it’s like, what do they call it?”

  “Statutory rape.”

  “Right. Only it doesn’t count if I’m too young too, does it? Like, if two kids have sex, you know, with each other, and they’re both under the age and they’re boning each other—”

  His mother gasped, “Matt!”

  “The age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen. If two fourteen-year-olds have sex, they’re both committing rape.”

  “You mean they’re raping each other?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  He gave Kristin a conspiratorial look. “How old are you, girl?”

  “Sixteen,” she said.

  “My lucky day.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, son. The day’s not over yet.”

  “You know what? I don’t think I better talk to you, about Len or anything else.”

  “Matt, I’m not a cop. I don’t care how old your girlfriend is, I don’t care what you do. I’m only concerned with Leonard Patz.”

  “You’re that kid’s father?” Touch of a Boston accent: fatha.

  “Yeah.”

  “Your kid didn’t do it, you know.”

  I waited. My heart began to pound.

  “Len did.”

  “How do you know that, Matt?”

  “I just know.”

  “You know how? I thought you were the victim in an indecent A&B. I didn’t think you knew … Len.”

  “Well, it’s complicated.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah. Lenny and me are friends, kind of.”

  “He’s the kind of friend you report to the cops for indecent A&B?”

  “I’ll be honest with you. What I reported him for? Lenny never did that.”

  “No? So why’d you report him?”

  A little grin. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

  “Did he grab you or not?”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “So what’s complicated?”

  “Hey, you know what? I’m not really comfortable with this. I don’t think I should be talking to you. I have a right to remain silent. I think I’ll go ahead and take that, a’ight?”

  “You have a right to remain silent with the cops. I’m not a cop. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t apply to me. In this room right now, there is no Fifth Amendment.”

  “I could get in trouble.”

  “Matt—son. Listen to me. I’m a very patient man. But you’re beginning to try my patience. I’m starting to feel”—deep breath—“angry, Matt, okay? That’s not something I like to feel. So let’s stop playing games here, all right?”

  I felt the enormity of the body that houses me. How much bigger I was than this kid. I had the sense I was expanding, I was becoming too big for the room to hold me.

  “If you know something about that murder in Cold Spring Park, Matt, you’re going to give it to me. Because, son, you have no idea what I’ve been through.”

  “I don’t want to talk in front of them.”

&n
bsp; “Fine.”

  I clamped my fist around the kid’s right upper arm and twisted it—but not twisting it anywhere near the limits of my strength at that moment, because I felt how easily I could separate that arm from his body with just a little torque, how I could tear it off him, skin, muscle, and bone—and I led him into his mother’s bedroom, which was furnished, memorably, with a night table comprised of two Hood milk crates stacked and turned upside down and a collage of photos of male movie stars carefully cut out of magazines and Scotch-taped to the wall. I closed the door and stood in front of it, arms crossed. As quickly as it had formed, the adrenaline was already receding from my arms and shoulders, as if my body sensed the crisis had passed its peak, the kid had already folded.

  “Tell me about Leonard. How do you know him?”

  “Leonard came up to me once at McDonald’s, like all greasy and pathetic, and he asked me if I wanted anything, like a burger or anything. He said he’d buy me whatever I wanted if I’d just eat it with him, like just sit at the table with him. I knew he was a fag, but if he wanted to buy me a Big Mac, what did I care? I know I’m not gay, so what does it matter to me? So I said okay, and we’re eating and he’s trying to be all beast, like he’s this cool dude, like he’s my buddy, and he asks me if I want to come see his apartment. He says he’s got a bunch of DVDs there and we can watch a movie or whatever. So I knew what he was after. So I told him straight up I wasn’t going to do anything with him, but if he had some money maybe we could work something out. So he says he’ll give me fifty bucks if he can, like, touch my package or whatever, like over my pants. I told him he could do it if he gave me a hundred bucks. So he did.”

  “He gave you a hundred bucks?”

  “Yeah. Just, like, to touch my ass and stuff.” The kid snorted at the price he had extorted for such a small thing.

  “Go on.”

  “So after that he kept saying he wanted to keep doing it. So he’d give me a hundred bucks every time.”

  “And what did you do for him?”

  “Nothing. I swear.”

  “Come on, Matt. A hundred bucks?”

  “Really. Alls I ever did was let him touch my ass and, like … my front.”

  “Did you take anything off?”

  “No. My clothes were on the whole time.”

  “Every time?”

  “Every time.”

  “How many times were there?”

  “Five.”

  “Five hundred bucks?”

  “That’s right.” The kid sniggered again. Easy money.

  “Did he reach inside your pants?”

  Hesitation. “Once.”

  “Once?”

  “Really. Once.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “A few weeks. He said it was all he could afford.”

  “So what happened at the library?”

  “Nothing. I’ve never even been to the library. I don’t even know where it is.”

  “So why’d you report him?”

  “He said he didn’t want to pay me anymore. He said he didn’t like paying, he shouldn’t have to pay if we were, like, friends. I told him if he didn’t pay me, I’d report him. I knew he was on probation, I knew he was on the sex offender list. If he got violated on his probation, he was going away. Even he knew that.”

  “And he wouldn’t pay?”

  “He paid some. He comes to me all like, ‘I’ll pay you half.’ So I told him, ‘You’ll pay me all.’ He had it. He’s got lots of it. Anyway, it wasn’t like I wanted to. But I need money, you know? I mean, look at this place. You know what it’s like to have no money? It’s like you can’t do anything.”

  “So you were shaking him down for money. So what? What’s this got to do with Cold Spring Park?”

  “That was his whole reason, like, for dropping me. He said there was this other kid he liked, some kid who walked through the park in the morning near his apartment.”

  “What kid?”

  “The one who got killed.”

  “How do you know it’s the same kid?”

  “ ’Cuz Leonard said he was going to try and meet him. He was, like, scouting him out. Like, walking through the park in the morning trying to meet him. He even knew the kid’s name. He heard his friends say it. It was Ben. He said he was going to try to talk to him. This was all before it happened he’s saying these things. I didn’t even think anything about it until the kid got killed.”

  “What did Leonard say about him?”

  “He said he was beautiful. That was the word he used, beautiful.”

  “What makes you think he could be violent? Did he ever threaten you?”

  “No. Are you kidding? I’d fuck him up. That’s just it. Lenny’s kind of a pussy. That’s why he likes kids, I think, because he’s a big guy but he figures kids are smaller.”

  “So why would he be violent with Ben Rifkin if he met him in the park?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But I know Lenny had a knife and he took it with him when he thought he might be meeting people, because he said sometimes, you know, if you’re like a fag and you go up to the wrong guy, it can be bad.”

  “You saw the knife?”

  “Yeah, he had it with him the day I met him.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Just, I don’t know, it was a knife.”

  “Like a kitchen knife?”

  “No, more like a fighting knife, I guess. It had, like, teeth. I almost took it from him. It was pretty cool.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone about this? You knew that kid got murdered.”

  “I’m on probation too. I couldn’t really tell anyone I was, like, getting money out of him or, like, that I lied about him grabbing me in the library. That’s like a crime.”

  “Stop saying ‘like.’ It’s not like a crime. It is a crime.”

  “Right. Exactly.”

  “Matt, how long were you going to go before you told anyone this? Were you going to let my son get convicted of a murder he didn’t commit just so you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed you were letting some guy grab your nuts every week? Were you going to just keep your mouth shut while they sent my son off to Walpole?”

  The kid did not answer.

  The anger I felt was of an old, familiar kind now. A simple, righteous, soothing anger I knew like an old friend. I was not angry at this smart-ass punk. Life tends to punish fools like Matt Magrath anyway, sooner or later. No, I was angry at Patz himself, because he was a murderer—and the worst kind of murderer, a child murderer, a category for which cops and prosecutors reserve a special contempt.

  “I figured no one would believe me. ’Cuz my whole problem was, like, I couldn’t tell about the kid that got killed because I already lied about the thing in the library. So if I told the truth, they were just going to say, ‘Well, you already lied once. Why should we believe you now?’ So what would be the point?”

  He was right, of course. Matt Magrath was about as bad a witness as you could dream up. An admitted liar, no jury would ever trust him. The only trouble was, like the boy who cried wolf, he happened to be telling the truth this time.

  17 | Nothing’s Wrong with Me!

  Facebook froze Jacob’s account, probably because of a subpoena compelling the production of everything he had ever posted. But with suicidal persistence, he opened a new Facebook account under the name “Marvin Glasscock” and began friending his inner circle again. He made no secret of this, and I roared about it. To my surprise, Laurie took Jacob’s side. “He’s all alone,” she said. “He needs people.” Everything Laurie did—everything she ever did—was to help her son. She insisted that Jacob was completely isolated now and his “online life” was such a necessary, integral, “natural” part of how kids socialize that it would be cruel to deny him even this minimal human contact. I reminded her that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts intended to deprive him of a hell of a lot more than that, and we agreed at least to place some limits on
the new account. Jacob was not to change the password, which would deny us access and the ability to edit him; he was not to post anything that touched on the case even remotely; and he was strictly forbidden to post photos or video, which were impossible to keep from squirting around the Internet once they got loose and which could easily be misconstrued. Thus began a cat-and-mouse game in which an otherwise intelligent child endeavored to make jokes about his own situation in terms just vague enough that his father would not censor what he wrote.

  I made it a part of my morning rounds on the Internet to check what Marvin Glasscock had written on Facebook the night before. Every morning: first stop Gmail, second Facebook. Then Google “Jacob Barber” for news of the case. Then, if all was clear, I would disappear down the rabbit hole of the Internet for a few minutes to forget the raging shit-storm I was standing in.

  What I found most amazing about my son’s reincarnation on Facebook was that anyone was willing to “friend” him at all. In the real world, he had no friends. He was now utterly alone. No one ever called him or visited. He had been suspended from school and, come September, the town would be obliged to hire a tutor for him. The law required it. Laurie had been negotiating with the school department for weeks, haggling over how much in-home tutoring Jake was entitled to. In the meantime, he seemed to be utterly friendless. The same kids who were willing to link to Jacob online refused to acknowledge him in person. Granted, there were only a handful who accepted “Marvin Glasscock” into their online circle. Before the Rifkin murder, Jacob’s Facebook network—the number of kids who read Jacob’s dashed-off comments and whose comments Jacob followed in turn—numbered 474, mostly classmates, mostly kids I had never heard of. After the murder, he had only four, one of whom was Derek Yoo. I wonder if those four, or Jacob, ever quite understood that their every move online created a record, every keyboard click was recorded and stored on a server somewhere. Nothing they did on the Web—nothing—was private. And unlike a phone call, this was a written form of communication: they were generating a transcript of every conversation. The Web is a prosecutor’s fantasy, a monitoring and recording device that hears the most intimate, lurid secrets, even those never spoken out loud. It is better than a wire. It is a wire planted inside everyone’s head.