Defending Jacob
- Description
- Product Details
- About the Author
- Read an Excerpt
- Reading Group Guide
ISBN-13: 9780345533661
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication Date: 09-03-2013
Pages: 464
Product Dimensions: 5.36(w) x 7.84(h) x 1.20(d)
William Landay is the author of The Strangler, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Crime Book of the Year, and Mission Flats, winner of the Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel and a Barry Award nominee. A former district attorney who holds degrees from Yale and Boston College Law School, Landay lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next novel of suspense.
Chapter 1Read an Excerpt
In the Grand Jury
Mr. Logiudice: State your name, please.
Witness: Andrew Barber.
Mr. Logiudice: What do you do for work, Mr. Barber?
Witness: I was an assistant district attorney in this county for 22 years.
Mr. Logiudice: "Was." What do you do for work now?
Witness: I suppose you'd say I'm unemployed.
In April 2008, Neal Logiudice finally subpoenaed me to appear before the grand jury. By then it was too late. Too late for his case, certainly, but also too late for Logiudice. His reputation was already damaged beyond repair, and his career along with it. A prosecutor can limp along with a damaged reputation for a while, but his colleagues will watch him like wolves and eventually he will be forced out, for the good of the pack. I have seen it many times: an ADA is irreplaceable one day, forgotten the next.
I have always had a soft spot for Neal Logiudice (pronounced la-JOO-dis). He came to the DA's office a dozen years before this, right out of law school. He was twenty-nine then, short, with thinning hair and a little potbelly. His mouth was overstuffed with teeth; he had to force it shut, like a full suitcase, which left him with a sour, pucker-mouthed expression. I used to get after him not to make this face in front of juries-nobody likes a scold-but he did it unconsciously. He would get up in front of the jury box shaking his head and pursing his lips like a schoolmarm or a priest, and in every juror there stirred a secret desire to vote against him. Inside the office, Logiudice was a bit of an operator and a kiss-ass. He got a lot of teasing. Other ADAs tooled on him endlessly, but he got it from everyone, even people who worked with the office at arm's length-cops, clerks, secretaries, people who did not usually make their contempt for a prosecutor quite so obvious. They called him Milhouse, after a dweeby character on The Simpsons, and they came up with a thousand variations on his name: LoFoolish, LoDoofus, Sid Vicious, Judicious, on and on. But to me, Logiudice was okay. He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people's lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That is the Prosecutor's Fallacy-They are bad guys because I am prosecuting them-and Logiudice was not the first to be fooled by it, so I forgave him for being righteous. I even liked him. I rooted for him precisely because of his oddities, the unpronounceable name, the snaggled teeth-which any of his peers would have had straightened with expensive braces, paid for by Mummy and Daddy-even his naked ambition. I saw something in the guy. An air of sturdiness in the way he bore up under so much rejection, how he just took it and took it. He was obviously a working-class kid determined to get for himself what so many others had simply been handed. In that way, and only in that way, I suppose, he was just like me.
Now, a dozen years after he arrived in the office, despite all his quirks, he had made it, or nearly made it. Neal Logiudice was First Assistant, the number two man in the Middlesex District Attorney's Office, the DA's right hand and chief trial attorney. He took over the job from me-this kid who once said to me, "Andy, you're exactly what I want to be someday." I should have seen it coming. In the grand jury room that morning, the jurors were in a sullen, defeated mood. They sat, thirty-odd men and women who had not been clever enough to find a way out of serving, all crammed into those school chairs with teardrop-shaped desks for chair arms. They understood their jobs well enough by now. Grand juries serve for months, and they figure out pretty quickly what the gig is all about: accuse, point your finger, name the wicked one.
A grand jury proceeding is not a trial. There is no judge in the room and no defense lawyer. The prosecutor runs the show. It is an investigation and in theory a check on the prosecutor's power, since the grand jury decides whether the prosecutor has enough evidence to haul a suspect into court for trial. If there is enough evidence, the grand jury grants the prosecutor an indictment, his ticket to Superior Court. If not, they return a "no bill" and the case is over before it begins. In practice, no bills are rare. Most grand juries indict. Why not? They only see one side of the case.
But in this case, I suspect the jurors knew Logiudice did not have a case. Not today. The truth was not going to be found, not with evidence this stale and tainted, not after everything that had happened. It had been over a year already-over twelve months since the body of a fourteen-year-old boy was found in the woods with three stab wounds arranged in a line across the chest as if he'd been forked with a trident. But it was not the time, so much. It was everything else. Too late, and the grand jury knew it.
I knew it too.
Only Logiudice was undeterred. He pursed his lips in that odd way of his. He reviewed his notes on a yellow legal pad, considered his next question. He was doing just what I'd taught him. The voice in his head was mine: Never mind how weak your case is. Stick to the system. Play the game the same way it's been played the last five-hundred-odd years, use the same gutter tactic that has always governed cross-examination-lure, trap, fuck.
He said, "Do you recall when you first heard about the Rifkin boy's murder?"
"Yes."
"Describe it."
"I got a call, I think, first from CPAC-that's thes tate police. Then two more came in right away, one from the Newton police, one from the duty DA. I may have the order wrong, but basically the phone started ringing off the hook."
"When was this?"
"Thursday, April 12, 2007, around nine A.M., right after the body was discovered."
"Why were you called?"
"I was the First Assistant. I was notified of every murder in the county. It was standard procedure."
"But you did not keep every case, did you? You did not personally investigate and try every homicide that came in?"
"No, of course not. I didn't have that kind of time. I kept very few homicides. Most I assigned to other ADAs."
"But this one you kept."
"Yes."
"Did you decide immediately that you were going to keep it for yourself, or did you only decide that later?"
"I decided almost immediately."
"Why? Why did you want this case in particular?"
"I had an understanding with the district attorney, Lynn Canavan: certain cases I would try personally."
"What sort of cases?"
"High-priority cases."
"Why you?"
"I was the senior trial lawyer in the office. She wanted to be sure that important cases were handled properly."
"Who decided if a case was high priority?"
"Me, in the first instance. In consultation with the district attorney, of course, but things tend to move pretty fast at the beginning. There isn't usually time for a meeting."
"So you decided the Rifkin murder was a high-priority case?"
"Of course."
"Why?"
"Because it involved the murder of a child. I think we also had an idea it might blow up, catch the media's attention. It was that kind of case. It happened in a wealthy town, with a wealthy victim. We'd already had a few cases like that. At the beginning we did not know exactly what it was, either. In some ways it looked like a schoolhouse killing, a Columbine thing. Basically, we didn't know what the hell it was, but it smelled like a big case. If it had turned out to be a smaller thing, I would have passed it off later, but in those first few hours I had to be sure everything was done right."
"Did you inform the district attorney that you had a conflict of interest?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I didn't have one."
"Wasn't your son, Jacob, a classmate of the dead boy?"
"Yes, but I didn't know the victim. Jacob didn't know him either, as far as I was aware. I'd never even heard the dead boy's name."
"You did not know the kid. All right. But you did know that he and your son were in the same grade at the same middle school in the same town?"
"Yes."
"And you still didn't think you were conflicted out? You didn't think your objectivity might be called into question?"
"No. Of course not."
"Even in hindsight? You insist, you- Even in hindsight, you still don't feel the circumstances gave even the appearance of a conflict?"
"No, there was nothing improper about it. There was nothing even unusual about it. The fact that I lived in the town where the murder happened? That was a good thing. In smaller counties, the prosecutor often lives in the community where a crime happens, he often knows the people affected by it. So what? So he wants to catch the murderer even more? That's not a conflict of interest. Look, the bottom line is, I have a conflict with all murderers. That's my job. This was a horrible, horrible crime; it was my job to do something about it. I was determined to do just that."
"Okay." Logiudice lowered his eyes to his pad. No sense attacking the witness so early in his testimony. He would come back to this point later in the day, no doubt, when I was tired. For now, best to keep the temperature down.
"You understand your Fifth Amendment rights?"
"Of course."
"And you have waived them?"
"Apparently. I'm here. I'm talking."
Titters from the grand jury.
Logiudice laid down his pad, and with it he seemed to set aside his game plan for a moment. "Mr. Barber-Andy-could I just ask you something: why not invoke them? Why not remain silent?" The next sentence he left unsaid: That's what I would do.
I thought for a moment that this was a tactic, a bit of play acting. But Logiudice seemed to mean it. He was worried I was up to something. He did not want to be tricked, to look like a fool.
I said, "I have no desire to remain silent. I want the truth to come out."
"No matter what?"
"I believe in the system, same as you, same as everyone here."
Now, this was not exactly true. I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess-a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.
Of course, Logiudice did not go in for that sort of solemn bullshit. He lived in the lawyer's binary world, guilty or not guilty, and he was determined to keep me pinned there.
"You believe in the system, do you?" he sniffed. "All right, Andy, let's get back to it, then. We'll let the system do its work." He gave the jury a knowing, smart-ass look.
Attaboy, Neal. Don't let the witness jump into bed with the jury-you jump into bed with the jury. Jump in there and snuggle right up beside them under the blanket and leave the witness out in the cold. I smirked. I would have stood up and applauded if I'd been allowed to, because I taught him to do precisely this. Why deny myself a little fatherly pride? I must not have been all bad-I turned Neal Logiudice into a half-decent lawyer, after all.
"So go on already," I said, nuzzling the jury's neck. "Stop screwing around and get on with it, Neal."
He gave me a look, then picked up his yellow pad again and scanned it, looking for his place. I could practically read the thought spelled out across his forehead: Lure, trap, fuck. "Okay," he said, "let's pick it up at the aftermath of the murder."
2 |
Our Crowd
April 2007: twelve months earlier.
When the Rifkins opened their home for the shiva, the Jewish period of mourning, it seemed the whole town came. The family would not be allowed to mourn in private. The boy's murder was a public event; the grieving would be as well. The house was so full that when the murmur of conversation occasionally swelled, the whole thing began to feel awkwardly like a party, until the crowd lowered its voice as one, as if an invisible volume knob were being turned.
I made apologetic faces as I moved through this crowd, repeating "Excuse me," turning this way and that to shuffle by.
People stared with curious expressions. Someone said, "That's him, that's Andy Barber," but I did not stop. We were four days past the murder now, and everyone knew I was handling the case. They wanted to ask about it, naturally, about suspects and clues and all that, but they did not dare. For the moment, the details of the investigation did not matter, only the raw fact that an innocent kid was dead.
Murdered! The news sucker-punched them. Newton had no crime to speak of. What the locals knew about violence necessarily came from news reports and TV shows. They had supposed that violent crime was limited to the city, to an underclass of urban hillbillies. They were wrong about that, of course, but they were not fools and they would not have been so shocked by the murder of an adult. What made the Rifkin murder so profane was that it involved one of the town's children. It was a violation of Newton's self-image. For awhile a sign had stood in Newton Centre declaring the place "A Community of Families, A Family of Communities," and you often heard it repeated that Newton was "a good place to raise kids." Which indeed it was. It brimmed with test-prep centers and after-school tutors, karate dojos and Saturday soccer leagues. The town's young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child's paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To these ambivalent residents, the whole suburban project made sense only because it was "a good place to raise kids." They had staked everything on it.
A Conversation with William LandayReading Group Guide
Random House Readers Circle: What was the seed of this novel? What drove you to write it? When did you first realize that this was the story you wanted to tell?
William Landay: There was no single “seed,” honestly. I have never been the visionary sort of writer who conceives an entire novel in a lightning flash of inspiration. I am more of a plodder, an experimenter. I develop my ideas slowly, by trial and error, teasing them out in draft after draft. It is a slow, tentative process, and it is filled with worry because I am never quite sure what I’m after. That is how Defending Jacob was born.
To understand where the book came from, it helps to understand where I was at the time. I had written two novels that were tradi- tional crime stories in the sense that they were set in the street-corner world of cops and hoods. I had been an assistant DA for most of the 1990s, and crime fascinated me. I felt that, as a writer, I had found my subject. But by the time I began to imagine Defending Jacob, I was thinking of crime in a different way—and thinking of crime novels in a different way too. By then, I had left the DA’s office to become a full-time writer, and I had started my own family. Crime had been an everyday reality when I was a courtroom prosecutor; now it was just a memory, an abstract idea, the stuff I made stories out of. As I thought about crime now, from the perspective of a writer and a young father, it seemed to me that the questions that haunt us as parents were not so different from the questions that animate criminal law: Why do people do what they do? How do we encourage good behavior and punish bad? How do we understand one another? How, for example, do we respond to the fact that good people do bad things, or that good people are victimized? Above all, what does crime tell us about ourselves? That last question, of course, is the reason crime has always fascinated storytellers and audiences: we read (and watch) crime stories not for what they tell us about criminals, but for what they tell us about ourselves. The criminal we read about is us—at least, he is a little, wicked part of us, all of us.
RHRC: How do you feel about the concept of the “murder gene”?
WL: I think it is fashionable now to use DNA as an explanation for all sorts of behaviors. Genomics is a new and fast-developing—and seductive—science, and we tend to think of it in an overly determinative way, as if it explains everything about us. But we humans are unfathomably complex. None of us is simply our DNA. So I think we have to be careful when we encounter a new idea and a new science like behavioral genetics. We have to be careful about terms like “murder gene” and “warrior gene,” lest we think of these things, inaccurately, as simple triggers. The truth is, we are still talking about a gene-environment interaction, still talking about nature versus nurture, as we always have. The difference is that now we have a window into the “nature” side of the equation.
In some ways, the effect of our physical construction—the chemicals and electrical impulses, the bones and meat we are made of—on our behavior and character is a revolutionary idea, a completely new way to think about ourselves. But in other ways, it is merely a very old idea that has simply been detailed a bit by science. We have always understood that we all have certain innate, “hardwired” tendencies and temperaments; now we understand the precise mecha- nisms of that physical hard wiring a little better. The interesting question for readers and novelists is what this new science means.
How should we think about ourselves in light of these new discoveries? What should society do with the knowledge that some of our neighbors bear genes predisposing them to violence or disease or a thousand other human traits? These are rich topics for novelists.
RHRC: Which character in Defending Jacob do you identify with most strongly? Who is your least favorite character?
WL: The truth is that all the main characters are fragments of myself. We are all many things in the course of our lives, and at various times I have been sullen and withdrawn like Jacob, warm and sensi- tive like Laurie, steely and loyal like Andy. When you write a novel, at least a novel as deeply felt as Defending Jacob was to me, you find yourself excavating all these various aspects of your own personality. On the other hand, I do not believe the simplistic assumption that all characters in all novels are reflections of the novelist. I have created many characters that have felt external to me—real and credible characters, I hope, but not reflections of me at all, not family. The Barbers were the first kind, the sort of characters that are slivers of me. So I find it hard to see them with any objectivity or distance, let alone to choose a favorite. Maybe I will, in time.
With that said, I confess I have a soft spot for Andy, for his stead- fast devotion to his child even in the darkest times. Andy is not perfect, of course. But to me, even his flaws do him credit. Who would not want a father so unshakable, who would stand by you, right or wrong, right to the end?
RHRC: Do you see any of yourself in Andy?
WL: A little bit, yes. I am stubborn and doggedly loyal, as Andy is. And my emotions can cloud my perceptions, though I think everyone is vulnerable to that.
But I can’t quite see myself in Andy because I see so many others in him too. When I was a young lawyer, there were several older, respected prosecutors like Andy Barber who were role models for the younger lawyers coming up. At least they ought to have been. Andy is an amalgam of those older lawyers whom I admired as a young man. He is the prosecutor I might have become if I’d stuck with it for an entire career. I like to think so, at least.
RHRC: What has been the most surprising aspect of the huge reader response to Defending Jacob?
WL: Well, to borrow your word, the sheer hugeness of it. I am still stunned. No writer would dare imagine that sort of commercial success. No sane writer, anyway. The odds are so long. So many things have to go right, including a good deal of luck. It is humbling.
I have also been amazed at the intensity of readers’ reactions. Even now, more than a year after the book was published, I get email every day from readers who tell me how deeply moved they were by Defending Jacob. Most write to tell me how much they enjoyed the book. A few write because they are outraged at Laurie’s or Andy’s behavior—which is to say, they are outraged at me for making them misbehave this way. But for good and bad, the emails keep pouring in, often beginning with “I have never written to an author before, but I just had to tell you . . .”
It has been a wonderful, bewildering experience to see my book hit a nerve that way. Writing is a lonely business. A writer’s days are filled with silence and solitude (if he’s doing it right). Inside that bubble, while writing, it is easy to believe that the book is a purely private experience, written only for the writer himself. It sounds silly, but you can forget that other people will actually read your story, let alone that they might be deeply touched by it. Books are essentially a private medium, for both the artist and audience— imagined by a writer in a lonely room, then reimagined by a reader in the quiet of her own thoughts. The public life of books—the brief moment when they show up in book reviews (for those lucky enough to be reviewed), bookstores (increasingly rare), or advertisements (rarer still)—has more to do with bookselling than reading. A book’s essential purpose is to be opened by a single reader and read in silence, to slip into her thoughts quietly. So it has been shocking— I don’t know what else to call it—to see my book become such a public hit. I am very, very grateful for it, for all the readers who have enjoyed the book and written to let me know. I would like to thank every last one of them, if I could.
RHRC: What are the one or two things readers have said to you about Defending Jacob that you treasure most?
WL: The other day, I heard from a woman whose teenage son was convicted of murder. The boy served eight and a half years in prison, then took his own life. This grieving mother wrote to tell me that Defending Jacob had actually helped her to process what she had been through, that the book captured her own feelings and experiences accurately (“spot-on” was the phrase she used), and that she wanted to thank me for writing it. As a parent, it is staggering to imagine that sort of pain. As a novelist, it is humbling even to imagine that your book might help someone that way.
Of course, that sort of dramatic email is rare. More often, I hear from readers with the ordinary, everyday worries of parents: children who communicate too little, stare into their smartphones too much, and wander into all sorts of trouble. Defending Jacob seems to speak to them too. Jacob Barber is not so different from a lot of teenagers, really. And Laurie and Andy’s worry about Jacob and even their fear of him are emotions every parent will recognize, if only in a small way.
RHRC: Both Andy and Laurie Barber are strong presences in this novel. What do you find are the difficulties in tackling male and female characters? Is one more difficult than the other?
WL: The expected answer, I suppose, is that male authors must find women more difficult to write, and female authors must struggle to create men. It is a logical assumption: the closer one’s own experience is to any subject, the less guesswork must be required. But I am not sure it actually works that way. Personally—and I don’t pretend to speak for other writers—I don’t find my female characters any more mysterious or elusive than my male characters, at least not as a rule. There are difficult people to create, certainly, but I don’t think the difficulty correlates to gender.
That must sound odd from a writer who has just written a novel in the voice of a man very like himself. And it is true that I have written more male characters than female. But that has mostly been a result of the topics I have chosen. I have written mostly about the worlds of cops and criminals, and these are dominated by men, still. But I would love to center a novel on a woman—a novel not just with a female protagonist, but actually told from a woman’s point of view, with her sensibility and her voice. Maybe that is foolish, maybe I will find it more difficult than I expected to write credibly from a woman’s perspective at novel length. But I think one of the worst bits of advice writers hear is “write what you know.” If writers did not feel free to break that rule and imagine worlds beyond their personal experience, we would not have so many of our favorite stories and characters, from Harry Potter to Humbert Humbert. Anyway, if I wanted to do things the easy way, I probably would not have become a writer in the first place.
RHRC: One of the powerful emotional arcs in this book is the evolution of Laurie and Andy’s marriage/relationship. Was this very complicated and intense relationship difficult to write?
WL: It was difficult in the sense that it was painful to watch these characters suffer so. I like Andy and Laurie. They are my friends, or would be but for the fact they are fictional. I like them as a couple too, how they complement each other, how they fit together. And the fact that their lives—Andy’s work, the town they live in, the stage of life