Snake Eater

by William G. Tapply

  “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.”

  “He seemed pretty miserable when I saw him in jail.”

  She nodded. “That’s because he didn’t have his medicine. It’s worst at night. When he’s sleeping he moans and thrashes around as if he was having one continuous nightmare.” She looked up at me. “We don’t sleep together. I mean, we’re together, we… we’re lovers, we make love… but he can’t sleep with anybody else in the room, and I can’t sleep with him anyway, because he’s so restless. I sleep in my studio. It’s down there.” She gestured off to the left toward the river. I glimpsed the reflection of sun off glass through the trees. “It’s got a bedroom, kitchen, living room, bath, and the whole top floor’s a studio. Great light. I do watercolors, mostly, and—Oh, hi.”

  I turned. Daniel was standing there. He had shaved and changed his clothes.

  Cammie smiled at me. “He’s always doing that. Sneaking up on me.” To him she said, “I suppose you were eavesdropping.”

  He twitched his shoulder. “I heard most of it.”

  “Okay?” she said.

  Another shrug. “Brady’s got to know.”

  “I’ve got a question,” I said to Cammie.

  “What?”

  “Were you ever arrested?”

  “Me?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh,” she said. “I get it. If they knew I was a hooker, that I was a drug addict, it could go against Daniel.”

  “Unlikely,” I said, “but it’s possible.”

  She stared off toward the river for a moment, then said, “Twice. They pulled me in twice. Boomer got me off both times.”

  “Boomer?”

  “Her pimp,” said Daniel.

  “There’ll be a record of it, if it occurs to them to check,” I said.

  “It would be ironic as hell,” said Cammie. “I mean, it was Daniel who got me out of that life.”

  “Well,” I said, “one of the things Daniel has going for him is that he’s a good citizen. But…”

  “But living with me makes it look different,” she finished.

  I nodded. “If you look at it that way. Which is possibly the way the prosecution could try to make a jury look at it.” I sighed. “Anyway, this is all a little premature. We’ve got the probable-cause hearing first, and we can try to make some good things happen there.”

  “Like what?” said Daniel.

  “Like tainted evidence, improper warrant. Maybe all they got from your garden was tomato plants. If they ended up with less than fifty pounds of marijuana plants, they’ll have to drop the trafficking charge, and that would be a very good thing.”

  Daniel smiled. “It was a big garden, and the crop was getting ripe. It was supposed to be my year’s supply. That’s probably why they waited until now to do it. So they got their fifty pounds.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “For now, the ball’s in their court.”

  “In that case,” said Daniel, “let’s go fishing.”

  I started to object that I had to get back to the office. But I caught myself. Hell, it was my office.

  So I found a rumpled change of clothes in the trunk of my car, and Daniel and I strolled down to the river. We did it Daniel’s way. No fly rods, delicate hand-tied flies, English reels, neoprene waders, bulging vests. We cut birch poles, captured some crickets for bait, and hauled a mess of panfish out of the sluggishly flowing Connecticut River. It was barefoot-boy-with-canepole fishing, and it harkened me back to the days when time was my most abundant resource and I squandered most of it aimlessly on the ba
nks of muddy ponds.

  We stopped and sat and smoked frequently, me my Winstons and Daniel his hand-rolled joints. We talked a little, gazed upon the river, and watched the birds. And we became friends.

  When we had enough bluegills and perch for a meal, Daniel filleted them all with a wicked little blade that he kept sheathed against his calf.

  Afterward, Daniel fried the panfish fillets, and he and Cammie and I ate them with steamed brown rice and sliced tomatoes and a bottle of what even I recognized as an excellent Chardonnay.

  Later we sat out on the big deck behind Daniel’s house to watch the sky grow dark. We sipped coffee and listened to Daniel’s collection of blues tapes. Sonny Terry. John Lee Hooker. Brownie McGhee. Son House. Muddy Waters. Doc Reese. Mississippi John Hurt. Skip James. Lightnin’ Hopkins. Howlin’ Wolf Jimmy Reed. Daniel and Cammie and I tapped our feet and made harmonica noises, and it was nearly midnight when the three of us walked around front to my car.

  I told Daniel I’d see him in ten days for the probable-cause hearing.

  “You’ve got to keep him out of prison,” said Cammie.

  “Our chances are excellent,” I said.

  Daniel shrugged. “They got my garden,” he said. “Either way, I’m screwed.”

  I looked at him. “You can always buy some grass,” I said.

  “No,” said Daniel. “I wouldn’t do that. Sweeney might, but not me.”

  “I told you,” said Cammie. “Daniel’s death on drugs.”

  I called Charlie McDevitt the next morning from my office. “Daniel McCloud is quite amazing,” I told him.

  I heard Charlie chuckle. “I knew you’d like him.”

  “We went fishing, and it took me right back to when I was about eight,” I said. “Him, too, I think. We were like a pair of kids. Except Daniel is about the most resourceful man in the woods that I’ve ever known.”

  “He survived six years in the jungle, you know,” said Charlie.

  “Well, he’d never survive prison. When I saw him in jail, he was like a caged animal, and I don’t think it was just the fact that he didn’t have his… his medicine. I mean, the marijuana eases his pain. But freedom nourishes him.”

  “He’s a very complicated man,” said Charlie. “Even though he doesn’t like to show it.”

  “A little paranoid, though. He thinks it’s personal with the cop who arrested him.”

  “Maybe it is,” said Charlie. “Cops aren’t immune from personal motives.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “Anyway, I like him a lot. He’s very stoic. But it’s pretty clear that he suffers a lot.”

  “I can imagine,” said Charlie. “So what do you think? Have they got the goods on him?”

  “It looks bad, truthfully. I’m not sure what I can do for him.”

  “You’ve gotta keep him out of prison, Brady,” said Charlie. “It would kill him.”

  “What worries me,” I said, “is that not having his medicine could kill him no matter where he is.”

  4

  TEN DAYS LATER, DANIEL, Cammie Russell, and I were sitting in Judge Anthony Ropek’s courtroom while he and his clerk worked their way through the morning’s probation cases. Sergeant Oakley was there, too, standing stiffly in the back, staring in our direction.

  It was a little after ten when the clerk intoned, “Daniel McCloud.”

  Daniel followed me through the gate to the defense table. Joan Redlich, the same ADA who had handled the arraignment for the state, moved to the prosecutor’s table.

  The judge peered down at her. “Is the Commonwealth ready?”

  She glanced in our direction, then turned to the judge. She cleared her throat, leaned to the microphone, then said, “The Commonwealth moves to dismiss, Your Honor.”

  Judge Ropek frowned for an instant, then turned to me. “Mr. Coyne?”

  “May I have a moment, Your Honor?”

  He nodded. “Go ahead.”

  I hadn’t expected the state to move for dismissal. It was more than I’d dared hope for. But I didn’t have the luxury of exulting in our good luck. I needed to decide whether to move for a dismissal with prejudice. If prejudice was granted, it would prevent the state from ever reopening its case against Daniel. With a simple dismissal, they could try it again. The problem was, I’d have to convince Judge Ropek that there had actually been prejudice in Daniel’s arrest. Daniel thought it had been personal with Sergeant Oakley. I doubted that I could convert Daniel’s paranoia into an argument for prejudice that would convince the judge.

  The other factor to consider was Joan Redlich’s failure to request a continuance, which would have indicated simply that the state needed more time to prepare its case. She had asked for a dismissal, not a continuance. I guessed that they didn’t have the evidence to prosecute the case.

  I had no grounds for prejudice.

  I looked up at Judge Ropek. “Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “No argument with the motion.”

  He looked back to Redlich and beckoned her with a crooked forefinger. “Approach,” he growled.

  She went up to the bench. I sidled up next to her.

  “What the hell is going on?” said the judge to her in a harsh whisper.

  “Apparently there’s a problem with the evidence, Judge,” she said.

  “Apparently?”

  She shrugged.

  He looked at me. “You know anything about this?”

  “No, Your Honor. But we’ll take it.”

  “Don’t blame you, Mr. Coyne.” He shooed us away with the back of his hand.

  We returned to our tables.

  “Mr. McCloud, you are free to go,” said Judge Ropek to Daniel. “The Commonwealth apologizes for your inconvenience.”

  Daniel blinked at him and nodded.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. I picked up my briefcase. “Come on,” I said to Daniel.

  I walked up the aisle and out of the courtroom. Daniel followed behind me. Cammie had grabbed his arm. We stopped in the lobby.

  “What happened?” said Daniel.

  I shrugged. “Somebody must’ve screwed up the evidence. You sure they didn’t just get tomato plants or something?”

  He smiled. “They got some damn good weed, Brady.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s peculiar. But let’s not complain. I only—”

  I felt a hand on my arm. I turned and saw Joan Redlich. “Can I speak to you for a second, Mr. Coyne?” she said.

  “Sure.” I turned to Daniel and Cammie. “Be with you in a minute.”

  “We’ll wait outside,” said Daniel.

  I turned to the ADA. “What’s up?” I said.

  “You tell me.”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “Surprised me as much as it did you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sure.”

  “Look,” I said. “If you think I pulled a string, you’re giving me more credit than I deserve.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I figured, a fancy Boston lawyer…”

  “You figured wrong. I’m not that fancy, and I thought you had a decent case, to tell you the truth.” I smiled at her. “I was looking forward to it.”

  She did not smile. “Decent, yeah. I had a helluva good case. There were sixty-two pounds of marijuana plants in those trash bags they pulled out of that garden, according to the lab report. The warrant was okay and the search followed it perfectly. Look,” she said. “I’ve got nothing against Mr. McCloud, okay? There’s no evidence that he was dealing the stuff I know he’s sick. I mean, I’ve got plenty of bad guys to prosecute. I doubt if Daniel McCloud is a bad guy.” She cocked her head and arched her eyebrows at me.

  “He’s actually a pretty good guy,” I said.

  “Regardless, there was no way we would’ve lost that trial. No matter how good you are.”

  “I’m pretty good. It would’ve been interesting.”

  “I don’t think Daniel McCloud belongs in prison,” she said. “I would have argued my ass off for a guilty verdict, Mr.
Coyne. And I would’ve got it. And you probably would’ve requested a suspended sentence with a long probation, community service, and proper health care, and, between the two of us, I might not’ve objected too strenuously. The poor bastard deserves some help, and I think a lot of our vets’ve been getting screwed. But, dammit, I just don’t like having the rug pulled out from under me, and I was wondering if you could help me out.”

  I held up both hands. “This discussion isn’t really appropriate, Ms. Redlich,” I said with a smile.

  “Ah, come off it. We’re just a couple of lawyers here.”

  “Well, as one lawyer to another, I haven’t got the foggiest idea of what happened.”

  “You’ve got friends in high places, though, huh?”

  I thought of Charlie. “Don’t we all?”

  “I busted my butt on this case, okay?” she said. “And they wait till yesterday to tell me to dump it?”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t blame you for being upset. But I can’t help you. I don’t know what happened.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?”

  I nodded. “Maybe.”

  She peered quizzically at me for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, it was fun being your adversary, and if I didn’t have a caseload that’d choke a hippo I’d get to the bottom of this. But, screw it. I do, so I guess I won’t.” She smiled and held her hand to me, and I grasped it.

  “If it’s any consolation,” I said, “I think justice was done in there this morning.”

  She grinned crookedly. “Yeah. Whatever that means.”

  She turned and strode back into the courtroom and I went out into the summer heat.

  I squinted into the sunlight as I tapped a Winston from my pack and lit it. Daniel and Cammie were sitting on a bench by the front entrance. I went over and sat with them.

  “I could use a smoke,” said Daniel, jerking his head at my cigarette.

  “Not here you couldn’t,” I said.

  “Just kidding.”

  “From now on, you’ve got to be careful,” I told him.

  “I can’t live without my medicine,” he said.

  “I understand.”

  “What happened in there?” said Cammie.

  “I don’t know. The ADA didn’t know, either. I gather her boss ordered her to dump the case.”