The Legal Limit Read online

  “Well, I’ve heard—”

  “I don’t give a damn what you’ve heard, Gates. It’s not true.”

  “Then you are just goin’ to have to come up with some lawyer tricks. You can do that, right? Clever as you are, you can get one over on these hicks any day of the week. ‘Lawyers, guns and money,’ like the song says. I need your help, Mason. I do. And I swear—I swear to God—I’ve learned my lesson. After this, I’m a changed man—nine-to-five, no drugs, no drinkin’, church, the whole kit and caboodle.”

  “Peace Corps?”

  “Say what?”

  “What about the Peace Corps? Signing up to do your bit in impoverished countries?”

  “Why’re you being a dick, Mason? Huh? I’m facin’ a world of hurt and you’re crackin’ jokes?” He’d started pacing.

  “Gates, there comes a day when you’ve cashed all your chits and flat worn everybody out. You hit that mark a long time ago.”

  “I’m not arguing with you, okay? I’ve screwed up again, and I know I’ve promised to do better before, I know that, but you can’t leave me danglin’ in the wind. I swear on our mother’s health this is it for me. If you’ll just pull some legal strings and keep me out of jail, I…” He paused, swallowed. “I’ve truly learned my lesson. With God as my witness, I’ll never cause you or anybody else a problem if you can please get me clear of this.”

  “Most people,” Mason said solemnly, “would have learned their lesson years ago.” He cut his eyes at his brother. “You catch my drift?”

  “Yeah.” Gates stood still, his breathing erratic, almost a pant. “At least help me fight it, Mason. Please. You’re a lawyer—that’s what you guys do, work the system and find loopholes. Twist words to make them different. There has to be a way. Somethin’.” Sweat droplets were gathering at his hairline and dribbling down across his forehead.

  “Gates, I’m not a criminal lawyer, but this much I can promise you: about the only people who could extricate you from this would be Sherman and Mr. Peabody operating the Wayback Machine. Lawyers aren’t wizards or shamans. This isn’t Tolkien—there’s no spell we can cast to erase your voice from the tape or incantation we can recite to strike these police officers dumb. You need to come to terms with what you’ve done. The more you lie and caterwaul, the more you’ll piss off the police and the commonwealth’s attorney. I’ll see what I can do, but your best hope is to plead guilty, tell the truth and walk into court meek, humble and hat in hand.”

  They studied each other for a moment, the room silent and stuffy. Above them was the antiquated county jail, and a thud and whooping curse penetrated the ceiling and dawdled there with them in the thick air. Gates closed his eyes and rocked back against the dingy green wall. A chunk of plaster was missing near his head, a white scab, and the wall’s weak hue made him appear pale and watery, like he was dissolving. “How in the world did I wind up here?” he said, his voice faltering, his eyes still shut.

  “I’ll do my best,” Mason offered. He went around the table to his brother and laid his hand on his shoulder, squeezed him through the rough cloth and then left him, didn’t turn back even though—striding out of the room—he heard Gates call after him to please, please, please wait a minute.

  Mason hadn’t spent much time in Stuart since finishing law school and accepting a job in Richmond, and he wandered the roads without any purpose after departing the jail, listening to the local radio station and making a willy-nilly tour of the area: the elementary school, the bridge across the Mayo River where he and Gates usually fished on the opening day of trout season, the Staples house where they’d all—teenagers—smoked cigarettes in the basement and pored over a stolen Playboy and played pool until Eddie Staples died of leukemia and his parents moved to Norfolk, the ramshackle Chevrolet dealership, Gypsy Boaz’s tobacco fields filled with row upon row of sticky green leaves, a Ford tractor and a flatbed trailer parked catty-corner to the curing barn.

  The sights failed to stir Mason or set much loose in him. He was years removed from his hometown, and his recollections of Stuart had been refined into stylized, formal renderings, a scattershot collection of snippets and images without juice or vitality, like a series of petrified butterflies skull-pinned to a collector’s board, far more husk than heart. Everything was familiar, nothing intimate. He was at arm’s length with his brother as well, distant and low on empathy, and he switched the radio to an NPR broadcast, trying to find a distraction. A second-rate pair of sunglasses was in the glove compartment, and he put them on. He raised the air-conditioning fan a notch. He sprayed the windshield with blue cleaner and watched the wipers beat it away. He loosened his tie, went to work on a pack of gum. Adjusted his seat belt before releasing it altogether.

  When he returned to his mother’s house, she was sitting in the den, a square electric fan blowing on her, her hair gathered atop her head. A TV show was hopping from scene to scene, but she hadn’t turned up the volume. Mason offered to treat her to the whitefish and popcorn shrimp plate at the seafood restaurant, but she claimed to be under the weather, not feeling so great, and said she’d rather slice a garden tomato and warm some corn bread and leftovers.

  “Mom, you have to face people sooner or later,” Mason encouraged her. “This isn’t about you. Everybody understands that. No one could’ve asked more from a parent. Gates should be ashamed.”

  “I suppose you’re right, honey. Gates is Gates. But I’d just like to take me a day off, you know?” Her lips quivered and she drew them determinedly taut and thin. “Just have one day when I don’t feel like I’m drownin’.”

  Gates sulked and pouted and berated his mother and Mason when they refused to hire a private attorney for him and recommended he take advantage of the public defender’s office. “Gates, there’s nothing anyone can do,” Mason insisted. “I’ve told you over and over.” He and Sadie Grace were visiting on a Sunday, talking to Gates through the bars. “And I’ll be with you every step of the way. I promise.”

  “Yeah, thanks. You and a guy the state’s paying. You’ve never even done a criminal case, Mason. I’m real confident of my chances.” Gates had been in jail for three weeks and continued to pretend he was entrapped. He’d called his mother and begged her to approach the commonwealth’s attorney about a bond, written Mason a long, rambling letter to posit fantastical legal strategies, sent notes to his buddies asking for canteen cash and done his best to get in touch with Sandra, who’d already abandoned the trailer and wasn’t responding to the messages and threats he’d left at her sister’s. “Ya’ll are just turnin’ your backs on me.”

  Their mother rarely talked much during visitation, normally sat silently after she said hello and asked a question or two, occasionally smiling wanly at one of Mason’s corny stories or mumbling a thank-you when Gates complimented her appearance. Every Sunday, after the same nonsensical diatribe, she would agree to help find Sandra so Gates could have his leather jacket and “valuable” personal items returned, although it seemed obvious his girlfriend had skedaddled for good, not at all anxious to be on the margins of a felony drug trial. When Gates accused Mason and Sadie Grace of deserting him, her neck and face flushed, and she aimed a finger at Gates and jabbed him hard in the chest. “I wish I could reach my hands inside those bars and get at you. I do. You need to grow up and act like a man. I’m sick and tired of hearin’ you complain. I’m the one who ought to be feelin’ put upon, not you.” Her voice was loud enough that another family halted their conversation to see what was causing the commotion. “You better watch what you say to me. I’m about fed up.” She left after saying her piece, the low heels of her church pumps clacking on the concrete floor as she went, and she skipped two Sundays before resuming her visits.

  Gates’s court-appointed lawyer turned out to be a very capable man named Gary Cardwell. Cardwell was a former prosecutor, middle-aged, who’d quit the commonwealth attorney’s office for the other side of the street. The senior public defender, he was bright, experienced in co
urt, jolly, and from all accounts a fierce advocate for his clients. Mason was pleased when they met and reviewed Gates’s case. Cardwell seemed both realistic and eager to do what he could, assuring Mason his brother was like a lot of other defendants who were reluctant to accept that they were in a legal bind and on the brink of a nasty prison stretch. “You don’t try to force the unpleasant truth down their throats,” he told Mason. “Nope. No more than a doctor would stroll in and announce to a patient, ‘You’re dying, there’s nothing we can do and we’re not planning to try.’ They have to come to it in their own time. You listen to them, take them seriously and explain their prospects. Guys like your brother have to know they’ve tried every exit and exhausted every option. Most of them will see the light, usually when the trial gets close. It’s not immediate enough for some people until they actually sit at the defendant’s table or hear the indictment read. I’ve taken this case apart, and they have him cold. We’ll try to swing a deal, and if we can’t, we’ll plead guilty and put on the dog for his sentencing.”

  “I told him exactly the same thing,” Mason said.

  “He’ll reach that point. It’s the only choice he’ll have in the end. If he pleads not guilty, the commonwealth will demand a jury, and he’d be a damn fool to take his chances there. They’d eat him alive.”

  The jury trial began on a frigid January Tuesday, three days after an insistent snowstorm had pushed over the mountains and covered the county with five white inches that would linger for a week. Mason gripped his mother at the bend of her arm as they climbed the steep stone steps that rose to the courtroom, on guard for ice or a slick spot that hadn’t been completely shoveled. The commonwealth’s attorney had offered five years on the dope case, ninety days total for assaulting the police officers and a dismissal of the disorderly conduct charge, and after seating Sadie Grace, Mason met with his brother in the interview room and tried yet again to reason with him about his plea. A cig pinched between his thumb and forefinger, Gates sat there beside his lawyer and sneered and snorted and arrogantly, pigheadedly, rejected the deal, which both Mason and Gary Cardwell assured him was fair as could be.

  “Fuck the commonwealth’s attorney,” Gates snarled. “I’ll take time served and probation.”

  “You’ll take what they suggest,” Mason said. “You have no bargaining power.”

  “How about I tell them where the stuff came from?”

  “They already know,” Cardwell said. “They arrested your friend Kong the day after they caught you. We’ve been through that in detail. You’re one slot too low in the pecking order because of it. They had his whole network in their sights. In fact, I’m pretty sure the cops followed you down to Greensboro a couple times when you were, shall we say, visiting him. So it’s a no-go for any kind of cooperation arrangement.”

  “Damn,” Gates carped. “There has to be something better than five years.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cardwell told him. “But five and ninety is a pretty good outcome, given what we’re facing. And if you plead on this, they’re going to forget the other sales to Barry. Those cases are still possibilities.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Gates said.

  “Suit yourself,” Cardwell replied. He removed his glasses and placed them on a table. Permanent red impressions from the plastic pads marked each side of his nose. “You’re exposing yourself to a lot worse, okay? You understand? I’d take the deal. I wouldn’t want to go in front of a Patrick County jury on a drug case.”

  “I’d accept the offer as well,” Mason warned him.

  “I can’t” was all Gates said.

  The jury listened attentively to the lawyers’ opening remarks, and it seemed to Mason, watching with his mom from the first row of the gallery, they were an evenhanded group, committed to giving both sides a fair hearing. He saw their moods shift after the undercover cop described how Gates had eagerly sold an ounce of cocaine and another officer played a surveillance tape that ended with Gates hotfooting it away from the Chevette. They went from curious to convinced to angry, and by the time the commonwealth rested its case at two thirty, they were quietly livid, insulted because Gates had brought them to town and wasted their day when he was so remarkably guilty. And while they all had been sincere in taking the oath and declaring themselves objective and willing to decide the case on the courtroom evidence alone, this was Patrick County, and several panel members knew Gates or knew of him, and one man, Otis Cooper, had worked with Sadie Grace before retiring from the plant, and he realized that the clean-cut, coat-and-tie fellow at the defense table was an outright fraud—underneath the fancy suit was a boy who had leeched off his mama forever and was so lazy he wouldn’t hit a tap at a snake.

  The awakening that Cardwell had predicted never came for Gates. Cardwell did the best he could, chipping and scratching and finessing, but the facts incriminating Gates were powerfully simple. The brothers and the lawyer met in a side room after the commonwealth concluded its case, and Mason once again explained the wisdom of a guilty plea.

  “Listen,” he said. “I sat there and dispassionately heard the evidence and took stock of the people on the jury. They’re going to set your ass on fire. You have to know that, Gates. You’ve got to plead and allow the judge to sentence you or let Mr. Cardwell see what the commonwealth’s willing to offer. I’m telling you, don’t do this to yourself.”

  Cardwell was sitting in a chair by a large window. The room was chilly, heated by a rattling steam radiator that had been painted the same color as the walls. “Gates, son, I did all I knew how to,” he remarked, “but I have to side with your brother. This is a calamity waiting to happen.”

  “Easy for you guys to say,” Gates complained. “Easy for you to deal away over five years of my life. I can pull this off. I can. I thought of somethin’ when the undercover guy was testifyin’.”

  “Pardon?” Cardwell asked, incredulous. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “You just follow my lead, okay? Put me on the stand and ask me what happened. I’ll take it from there. And don’t forget to mention the stuff about football, where I was all-state and my scholarship to Tech. People still respect me because of that, no matter what.”

  “You’ll take it from there?” Mason mocked him. “Have you lost your mind? Have you? This isn’t workshop day at the community college drama class. What’re you planning to say?”

  Gates was loud when he answered. “You don’t have to be such a prick, Mason. Anyway, I’m old enough to make my own decisions without help from you. You think you can waltz in here from Richmond and tell me how to run my life, but you can’t. I don’t need you around if all you’re gonna do is criticize me, okay? You’re either with me or against me, and right now you seem mostly against me.” He glanced at the floor for a moment and softened his tone. “Guys, five years or five hundred—it’s all the same to me. I can’t do it. That’s what you two aren’t understandin’. There comes a point where you get so screwed up and stir-crazy there’s no chance of recoverin’. Any more time in here’s gonna ruin me, if it doesn’t kill me first. I know you think I’m bein’ stubborn, but it’s a chance I’ve got to take, even if it probably won’t pan out.” Another hesitation. “And I’m sorry I’ve been so short with you both. I truly am.”

  Mason drew a bead on him but didn’t answer. He finally glanced at Cardwell. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Cardwell. Good luck.” He left the room, not bothering to shut the door behind him, and took a seat beside his mother.

  Cardwell brought Gates to the judge’s office and explained, on the record, that his client wished to testify, against counsel’s advice. “Unfortunately, Judge, I’m hearing certain details for the first time today and that puts me and my client at a disadvantage. I’ve told Mr. Hunt it’s a bad idea.” Cardwell cleared his throat. “So no one gets the wrong impression, his new statement is consistent with what I’ve been hearing all along. It’s just an amplification, sort of an expansion, and while I believe him, I’ve wa
rned him against presenting it to this jury.”

  Worried and nervous as he faced twelve men and women who anticipated he was about to tell them a fanciful lie, Gates still managed a certain amount of cheap charisma on the stand. He was large and handsome and seemed to know, at least initially, what to do with his hands, where to look, how to sit, when to say “sir.” Cardwell led him through a series of basic questions and then approached the heart of the case, the cocaine sale at the fairgrounds. One of the jurors, a wiry woman from Meadows of Dan, inched forward and cocked her head. A man who’d been taking notes wrote something on his yellow sheet of paper. The courtroom was cavernously silent, sealed off by double walls of meticulously mortared red and brownish brick.

  Cardwell walked to the witness stand and actually turned toward the jury, not Gates, when he asked his first question about the charge. “Mr. Hunt, did you in fact meet a man you knew as Barry at the fairgrounds?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “How did you know Barry?”

  “We were close friends, or so I thought. We were introduced by Hank Lawless, Jr.”

  “Of course, you realize as you sit here today he’s an undercover police officer?” Cardwell was now focusing on Gates. The lawyer had both hands in his pockets, his suit coat open.

  “Yes, sir. Obviously I didn’t know it at the time.” Gates bent the wire neck of the witness stand microphone, positioning it closer to him. “I truly believed he was a friend. Him and Hank both.”

  “Well, let’s get to the question the jury wants answered. Did you give that cocaine to Barry for a thousand dollars, as the commonwealth’s attorney is alleging?”

  Gates bit his lip, dipped his head, playacted remorse. “I did, sir. Heck, it’s on tape. I don’t deny it. Everything the police have said is true.”