Snake Eater (3 page)

That Daniel did in fact grow marijuana in his garden, that he was therefore a guilty man by every definition except the one that counted—the due process of the law—did not affect my attitude toward his case. The presumption of innocence and the right to counsel—only those things were relevant.

If he’d been selling the stuff—not something the state needed to prove—I’d have felt differently about it. But, having agreed to take his case, I still would have done my best to get him off. That’s the system, and it’s not a bad one.

I flicked away my cigarette butt and went back into the courthouse. As I shouldered my way through the crowded lobby I felt a hand on my arm. I turned. It was the ADA who had unsuccessfully prosecuted the bricklayer. “You’re Mr. McCloud’s counsel?” she said.

I nodded. “Brady Coyne.”

“Joan Redlich. Here.” She handed me a sheet of paper.

“What’s this?”

“The police report. You’re entitled to it.”

“Yes. Thanks. I’ll want a copy of the warrant, too.”

She smiled quickly. “You’ll have it, Mr. Coyne.”

She turned and headed into the courtroom. I followed her in and resumed my seat. I skimmed through the police report. It was written in the peculiarly stilted language policemen insist on using, on their theory, I assume, that it makes them sound highly educated.

To me, it always sounds like somebody trying to sound highly educated.

The report was signed by Sgt. Richard Oakley, Wilson Falls P.D.

Sergeant Oakley had written that the Wilson Falls police, acting upon a proper warrant, did on the afternoon of seven July confiscate an estimated fifty pounds or more of marijuana from the backyard garden of one Daniel McCloud, citizen of Wilson Falls. They did, pursuant to a search of the premises, also confiscate cigarette papers, a scale, a box of plastic bags, fifteen smoking pipes of various manufacture, and a cigarette rolling machine. They did consequently place the suspect, said Daniel McCloud, under arrest, recite to him his Miranda rights, handcuff him, and escort him to the jailhouse, where they did fingerprint and book him.

It was all pretty much the way Daniel had told it, except less eloquent.

A few minutes later the side door opened and Judge Ropek reentered. We all rose briefly, and then sat.

“Daniel McCloud,” intoned the clerk.

Daniel stood, and the officer opened the swinging door to let him out of the dock. I went down front and Daniel met me there.

“You okay?” I whispered.

“No,” he said. He glanced around, then muttered, “Bastard.”

I followed his gaze. Standing stiffly against the side wall was a large uniformed policeman. He was staring at Daniel. He stood six-three or -four with the bulk to match. He had the bristly haircut and sunburned neck of a marine drill instructor. “Oakley?” I whispered to Daniel.

“Aye. Him.”

“He’s interested in his case,” I said.

“He’s interested in me,” said Daniel.

The clerk read the charges. Possession of Class D marijuana, possession with intent to distribute, and trafficking.

The judge arched his eyebrows, then looked toward the prosecution table. “Trafficking, Ms. Redlich?”

Joan Redlich stood up and stepped toward the prosecutor’s table. Her black hair was twisted up into a bun. I guessed it would fall halfway down her back when it was unpinned. She wore dark-rimmed tinted glasses low on her nose, a gray suit that disguised her figure, and low heels. She was slim and young and, in spite of her best efforts, pretty.

Female lawyers have told me that they dress for the judge. They have different wardrobes, different hairstyles, different cosmetics, which they adapt to the situation. Some judges—His Dirty Old Honors, the lawyers call them—like to see a little leg, a hint of cleavage, eye makeup. It disposes them favorably to the client’s case. Others—especially female judges—resent it if the lawyers don’t look as shapeless and sexless as they do in their black gowns.

Female lawyers resent the hell out of this kind of patent sexism. But they don’t ignore it. It’s an edge, if you read it right, they tell me.

Redlich tucked a stray strand of hair over her ear. She leaned toward the microphone that was wired to the tape recorder that preserved the proceedings and rendered obsolete the court stenographer. “Cultivation, Your Honor,” she said. “He was growing it in his garden. The estimate is seventy pounds.”

Ropek frowned, then nodded. I didn’t like the looks of that frown. “Recommendation?”

She asked for a half-million-dollar surety bond. Not unexpected. Since Reagan, all the courts have been trying to convert the drug cases that come before them into moral lessons.

“Mr. McCloud?” said the judge, looking from Daniel to me.

“Brady Coyne, Your Honor,” I said into my microphone.

“Welcome, Mr. Coyne. Go ahead.”

“I ask the court to release Mr. McCloud on personal recognizance, Your Honor. He has roots deep in the community. He’s resided in Wilson Falls for the past twenty years. He owns property and runs a business there. He’s a Vietnam veteran, Special Forces, and he’s in poor health.”

The judge peered at me for a moment, then nodded. He looked to the probation table. “Probation?” he said.

“One prior, Judge,” said one of the officers. He stood and went to the bench, where he handed a folder to the judge. Judge Ropek glanced at it, then handed it back.

Then he looked at Daniel. “Two hundred thousand dollars surety bond,” he said.

Daniel grabbed my arm. “I don’t have that kind of money,” he whispered.

“You need twenty thousand cash,” I told him. “Can you raise it?”

He nodded. “Twenty grand. Okay. Yes.”

We then argued about the date for the probable-cause hearing. Redlich asked for a month to give them time to process all the evidence. I asked for a week, citing the stress of waiting on Daniel’s health. Judge Ropek set it for ten days hence, a small victory for the good guys.

Before the court officer took Daniel away, he gave me a phone number and told me to talk to Cammie Russell. She’d get the money.

And as I turned to head out of the courtroom, Joan Redlich handed me a copy of the search warrant. I thanked her and stuffed it into my attaché case along with the police report.

I called Cammie Russell from one of the pay phones in the courthouse lobby. She had a soft voice with a hint of the Smoky Mountains in it. She said she’d be there in an hour. I told her I’d meet her outside the front door.

She actually arrived in about forty minutes. She was tall and slim in her white jeans and orange blouse. She had cocoa butter skin and black eyes. Her hair hung in a long, loose braid down the middle of her back. Her high cheekbones and small nose reminded me of a young Lena Home. There was a Cherokee Indian somewhere in her ancestry. I guessed her age at twenty-five, but I figured she had looked the same way since she turned thirteen and would still look as good at fifty.

Then she smiled, and I amended my first impression. She looked
better
than a young Lena Home.

She held her hand to me. “Cammie Russell,” she said.

“Brady Coyne.”

“How is Daniel?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know how he usually is. I’d say confinement doesn’t suit him.”

“I can see you’re a master of understatement, Mr. Coyne. He must be climbing the walls. Can we get him now?”

“If you brought enough money we can.”

She held up the briefcase she was carrying and nodded.

An hour later Cammie Russell and I were eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches and sipping coffee on the deck behind Daniel’s house in Wilson Falls. Daniel was slouched in a deck chair with his eyes closed, sucking steadily on a stick of cannabis. His leg no longer jiggled.

T
HE DECK ACROSS THE
back of Daniel’s house looked out over a meadow that stretched toward a bluff above the Connecticut River. It had once been a tobacco farm, he told me, and he’d lived there since ’73, when he retired from the Army. He rented a trailer and ran a bait and tackle shop for the ten years or so that it took him to realize that he’d never have to go back to the jungles. Finally he managed to accumulate some money, so he bought the land and the shop and built his house and, a few years later, Cammie’s studio down next to the river.

Daniel’s house featured angled cedar sheathing and glass and brick on the outside, and skylights and fireplaces and vaulted ceilings and massive beams on the inside. He told me he designed it himself, and he and some of his old army buddies did most of the work. It took them a couple of years to complete. The entire back was floor-to-ceiling glass that opened onto the big deck and overlooked the river.

The house was elegant and modern. It could have been a
Better Homes and Gardens
model. It contradicted every impression I had formed of Daniel McCloud.

After Daniel had sucked his second joint down to a quarter-inch nub, he stood up and said he needed a shower. He walked into the house.

“Is he stoned?” I said to Cammie.

She laughed. “He never gets stoned. It just eases his pain. It’s the only thing that will.” She was sitting up on the deck rail. “Daniel’s death on drugs. That’s why this business is so unfair. He saw a lot of men get killed over there because they were wasted and forgot to be afraid. It wasn’t until he got back and tried every legal medicine they prescribed that he came to grass. Brian Sweeney put him on to it. The two of them have been trying to get help from the government. Mainly, they’d like to get the law to allow them to have marijuana legally.”

“No way,” I said.

She nodded. “‘No farkin’ way,’ as Daniel would say. So he grows his own.”

“Except they ripped up his garden,” I said. “What’ll he do?”

She shrugged. “He’s got a little stashed away. Not much. I don’t know how long it’ll last him. I don’t think he could make it without his medicine. In or out of prison.”

“He can always buy it,” I said.

Cammie’s head jerked up. “Daniel?” She smiled. “You don’t know Daniel. He would never—
never
—give money to a drug dealer.”

“He’s obviously a sick man.”

“Wouldn’t matter.” She shrugged. “Can you get him off?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There are plenty of mitigating circumstances in this case. But unless the prosecution screws it up, the facts will be hard to challenge. I mean, they don’t have to prove he was selling it, and he
was
growing the stuff. So far the police appear to have gone by the book. If it goes to trial we’ll probably have to give them a guilty plea. That’ll be our only chance of keeping Daniel out of prison.”

“If?”

“The next step is the probable-cause hearing,” I said. “The prosecutor will have to demonstrate that she has enough evidence to justify a trial. If it gets to trial, I’ll ask a friend of mine, a lawyer with a lot of experience at this sort of thing, to come aboard.”

“You’re not going to abandon him?” said Cammie.

I shook my head.

“Because,” she continued, “I can tell he trusts you. He doesn’t trust many people.”

“I won’t abandon him.”

She cocked her head at me. “You were probably wondering about us.”

I shrugged. “None of my business.”

“Maybe it is,” she said. “Maybe it relates to Daniel’s case. Maybe you can use it. I mean, he really does hate drugs. What they do to people. Despises drug dealers. You should probably know, so you can judge. I doubt Daniel would tell you.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

She nodded and stared off toward the river. The Connecticut’s a big broad river out there in the valley. It flows slow and deep through the old tobacco bottom land. It’s not a trout stream, but bass and pike live there, and shad push up from the ocean every spring to spawn, and just looking at it gave me the urge to go fishing.

“He saved my life,” said Cammie softly.

“Daniel?”

“Yes. I was this overachiever from a little mountain town outside of Knoxville. The youngest of eight. I had four sisters and three brothers, two of whom got killed in Vietnam. My momma sang choir in the Baptist church. So did I. One of my teachers got me into Smith College on a scholarship. I was going to be a great artist.” She glanced at me and smiled softly. “I wasn’t ready. I was homesick, I was over my head academically, I had no friends. I made some bad acquaintances.” She shrugged. “Three months after I started my freshman year I was hooking in Springfield for coke money, living with a pimp, scared to death. Daniel found me and brought me here. I was eighteen. He got me straightened out. We lived in a trailer for a while. Eventually Daniel built me a studio and told me to just paint and cherish my life.”

“What happened to the pimp?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “This all happened years ago. I used to wake up from dreaming that he’d come for me. I haven’t had that dream in a while.”

“What about that policeman?”

“Oakley?”

I nodded.

“Well, he was the one who arrested Daniel, of course. Oakley’s had it in for us from the start.”

“How do you mean?”

Cammie gazed out at the river. “Small things,” she said. “A ticket for parking in a handicapped zone, when the tire was barely touching the line. He stopped Daniel once in the middle of the afternoon, made him get out of the car and go through a bunch of drunk-driving exercises right beside the road, with all our neighbors driving by to watch. Oakley keeps showing up in the supermarket or the post office or the drugstore when I’m there, just kind of watching me with this spooky smile on his face. I’ll turn around, and he’ll be there, looking at me.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s no one thing. Maybe we’re just paranoid about Oakley. It’s a small town…”

“Are you afraid of him?”

Cammie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she turned to look at me and said, “Yes. I guess I am. Daniel’s not afraid of him. But he worries about me. And now this…”

“The arrest.”

She nodded.

We fell silent for a minute. Then I said, “Was Daniel growing marijuana when you met him?”

“Yes. He has this terrible raw, weeping rash on his back. From the Agent Orange. He doesn’t talk about his pain, and when you’re with him you’d never know how miserable he is.”