The Company You Keep Read Free Page A

years.
    Ostensibly, in 1996, he ran a fleet of six small trucks delivering to New York City greenmarkets for a dozen or so Hudson Valley organic farms. In fact, he made his living the way he had since the mid-sixties: by growing pure, hybridized, state-of-the-art marijuana in an underground Sea of Green.
    Yes, Isabel, marijuana, a substance to which I’m sure you are an utter stranger, right? Well, as you’re going to see throughout this story, I’m emphatically not, so if that shocks you, just think of it as another way I was a bad parent.
    Anyway it was from this career path, you may have guessed, that stemmed Billy’s need for my services as a lawyer.
    There are policy mistakes in the world of criminals, and performance ones. Nine times out of ten, surprisingly, what causes a criminal to be caught is not in fact performance, but policy. Billy’s policy mistake happened the autumn before, and consisted of not letting one of his drivers know that under a truckload of sweet corn bound for the Union Square market he was carrying a late summer harvest: thirty kilos of cured, hybridized, hydroponic marijuana, so seedless it could never be reproduced, so resinous that your fingers got dirty rolling a joint, and so strong that a hit had you spending the next three hours staring, ego shattered, at the cat.
    The upside of this policy was that the driver could neither rip you off nor turn you in, and besides only cost a fraction of what Billy’s real mules—the ones who moved bud across state lines and who knew the risk they were running—got paid.
    The downside was that because he knew nothing about his cargo, the driver was smoking a joint while heading downstate at 80 miles an hour, all the while listening, get this, to the Grateful Dead.
    Which, in turn, gave the state police probable cause to shovel the entire load of corn onto the side of the road, where the gophers feasted on it for a week. The joint, I mean. Gave them probable cause. Not the Grateful Dead, who, contrary to what people like your grandfather thinks, were still legal.
    Now, despite what a bad parent I was and a bad person I am—you need a refresher course on that, Izzy, hop up to London and my ex-father-in-law will be glad to oblige—the fact that I had even taken on a criminal client like Billy may just seem to you like another of the many lousy things I did that summer. In fact, it did look pretty odd to a lot of people at the time. See, James Marshal Grant did not soil his hands by defending criminals. James Grant, it was well known in the little world of Albany law, worked only for principle.
    What you have to understand, though, is that in the summer of 1996 my little moral universe was changing pretty radically, and what was changing it was that I had to earn a living. And to understand that, you have to know that when your mother and I got married, it was clearlyunderstood—check with her, Izzy, she won’t deny it—that I was going to practice law exclusively in the public interest, given that the Montgomery fortune needed some kind of expiation.
    It did make sense at the time: we were in love, and the fortune was enormous. Your mother inherited from her grandfather, as you will inherit from yours, and even at the time of our marriage she was so rich that any thought of doing anything other than public-interest work was absurd.
    When I left your mother, of course, I also left the Montgomery fortune. The reputation of the most idealistic lawyer between Miami and Montreal, however, remained mine, as did a full docket of pro bono clients, many of whom had no hope of a decent defense except for my services. On the other hand, your grandfather’s lawyers had ensured that I had no income from the family, none at all, despite the fact that I had a little girl to take care of.
    Billy Cusimano, in the summer of 1996, therefore looked like a very good client to me: an old hippie with closets full of cash, and in fact he constituted my entire source of