The Company You Keep (3 page)

When we came in, I took off my jacket and opened my shirt, sweat breaking out on my chest in the moist air, then sat back in a vinyl string lawn chair, briefcase in lap, at the side of the Sea of Green while Billy pinched off a hairy bud from one of the plants and dried it in a little toaster oven hardwired—like the computer—into a circuit breaker, and rolled it into a joint. Then Billy joined me in the second deck chair, and we passed the J back and forth while I told him where his criminal case was at.

Now, if you wonder how I remember the conversation that ensued so exactly, it’s not a mystery. The fact is, virtually the entirety of Billy Cusimano’s life was bugged that year—the FBI turned out to know all about the Sea of Green—and virtually every conversation he had—in his car, in his kitchen, in his bed—was recorded. That, for the record, is how Billy was ultimately acquitted: all of the wiretaps were ruled illegal, and made inadmissible the existing evidence. To that extent, the bugs were very useful to us. And they were useful to me again, when I started putting together this story. Which is all by way of saying that my reconstruction, I assure you, is pretty good.

In any case, call it fact or call it fiction, but what you have to picture is the pair of us sitting there and talking to each other, going over business, neither of us with any idea about what was about to happen.

“So, Billy boy, I filed for a continuance Friday, with luck we don’t come up again till Sonny Carver’s in. If not, fuck Evans, that dickhead. We’ll appeal before he’s done ruling, and there’s not a damn thing he can do. The only immediate risk—immediate, right?—you face is sitting right here under these gro-lights, friend. Sign here.”

Signing off on some court documents, Billy answered in one of those tight little voices, holding smoke in his lungs.

“I swear, Jimmy, in three weeks I harvest. This load sells, I’ll even be able to afford you.”

“Get out of this business, boyo, you won’t need me.”

“Hey, counselor, I’m not only sending my four kids to Steiner school, I’m sending your Izzy too. So don’t be in any hurry getting me out of the game.”

It was reasoning that had to make a certain sense to me, I admit. And so, rightly or wrongly, I shrugged off the fact that my client was about to harvest and sell what looked to be twenty keys of marijuana. I drew on the J myself, leafing through some papers, then blew the smoke, a hanging cloud, into the wet air, talking all the while.

“Good God, man, maybe this shit
should
be illegal. It’s like you hybridized this poor little plant to produce LSD instead of THC.”

That got me a withering look: I was smoking the joint like a cigarette, wastefully, and Billy knew the value of his product. He picked the roach
out of my fingers, took a long last hit, and flicked it into the hydroponic bed, exhaling while he spoke. But his pride showed even through his concern. “Know where I’m selling this? California. Hardest market in the country—that’s how good it is. And, by the way, why they aren’t going to catch me. Last place in the world they’d expect me to be shipping East Coast product.”

Then Billy changed the subject, and this—these precise words—was where it all started.

“Hey, Jim? You know who Sharon Solarz is? Or you too young?”

4.

It wasn’t the first time that my lives had, so to speak, met. Once I’d run into Jeff Jones in the Albany State building, I taking a deposition from a state senator, he, in his role as environmental lobbyist, on his way to buttonhole another one. He’d looked at me with that piercing eye, and for a moment my heart tumbled. Then he’d walked on. Other things like that happened. I met Bernardine at a conference on juvenile justice. I ran into Brian Flanagan at a bar. I even once sat in the Bedford Hills visiting room with a client while Kathy Boudin was in there with a visitor. It was inevitable.

Still, in retrospect, Billy’s voice that day is imbued, for me, with the sense of an augury.

I answered, watching him close, “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

That stopped me. “What?”

“Yes, you know who Sharon is? Or yes, you’re too young?”

“Both, of course.”

For a moment we watched each other in confusion. Then, for a long time, and to my surprise, Billy began to laugh—the easy laugh of the stoned, comfortable, happy, like someone who is used to laughing and someone who is used to being stoned, an infectious laugh that even I could not completely resist. And while he laughed, I understood how to respond. Smiling too, I rose.

“You know, I recognize an exit line when I hear it.”

Billy looked up with surprise. “What’s that mean?”

“It means, I got enough problems without taking a walk down memory lane with an aging, fat old hippie.”

“Jimmy. She needs a lawyer to negotiate her surrender. I—”

But I interrupted, speaking in a voice that quieted Billy down right away. “Billy. Call Lenny Weinglass. Or Michael Kennedy. Or Ron Kuby. Or Gillian Morrealle. Call anyone the fuck you like. But anything you know about Sharon Solarz, keep it away from me.”

Billy hesitated, thinking. “Mind telling me why?”

“I do mind, Billy.” I looked at him directly, no longer enjoying being stoned. “I mind because I shouldn’t have to tell you. Christ sake, you know that Julia’s suing me for custody of Izzy.”

“Sure.” Speaking slowly, as if trying to understand. “I also know Julia was a terrible mother before she got into a drug and alcohol problem as big as the Catskill State Park. And I know you’re as good a father and as stand-up a guy as exists in the country. She’s not getting custody of anyone.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to say so, but if you’ll pardon me, you’re a babe in the fucking woods. You think me being a stand-up guy will counterweigh Julia’s father being an ex-U.S. senator and the current ambassador to the Court of St. James? Not to mention that I am supported exclusively by an overweight, unrepentant dope seller, and the Montgomerys have most, if not all, of the money in the world?”

Billy nodded stoned agreement. “I’d say that more or less evens the score. I mean, Julia’s shitty history, on one hand; her father’s money on the other. I think you’re still coming out ahead.”

“Okay.” Sounding like a lawyer now, I went on. “Now, what do you think it does to that balance if I start defending a cop killer who’s been running from the law for twenty-five years?”

There was something cold in Billy’s response. “You tell me, counselor.”

“With pleasure. It gives Montgomery and his lawyer a public relations boost so massive, I might as well just avoid the trauma and send Izzy off to England today. That’s what it does.”

“Jim. So you let Sharon twist in the wind? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Bill. You’re talking about my daughter. You’re talking about letting Julia Montgomery raise my daughter. Remember? Julia Montgomery’s the one who forgot Izzy in a car overnight while she was smoking crack. On Warren Street. In Hudson. An open
convertible
.”

I was kind of shouting at this point. But when Billy didn’t answer, I went on in a quieter tone. “Tell Sharon to call Gillian Morrealle at Stockard Dyson, Boston. I’ll give Gilly a call. And forget we ever had this conversation, okay? Ever ever ever.”

Slowly, laboriously, Billy rose. “Okay, man. If you’re sure.” But his voice was quiet—disappointed, in a way that actually hurt. Remember, dope wasn’t a business for people like Billy Cusimano, it was a political cause—one in a spectrum that included Sharon Solarz. And he was silent while he followed me up the ladder and into the kitchen, then out the kitchen door to where two cars and a truck were parked at the top of a dirt road.

See, Isabel? I can’t ever do anything to make myself, in your memory, into a good parent. But I can stop lying. And I can try to ensure that no one else does so, either. If that conversation with Billy had not been tapped by the FBI, everything would have been fine. Sharon would have found a lawyer, I would have defended my custody of you on the grounds of your mother’s addiction, and life would have gone on.

But the FBI did listen to that conversation. And on the basis of it, before it was even over, they had gotten a warrant on Billy’s premises, and were activating a surveillance plan long since developed. And even worse than that, worst thing of all, they let the story be known outside of their own agency, which meant that, later that night, it would all be told to the press. The press, that is, in the person of one Benjamin Schulberg, a beat reporter at the
Albany Times
, barely older, then, than you are now.

And Benny, as we’ve all come to expect from him, would proceed neatly and directly to fucking everything—everything—up.

And now I think you see, Isabel, why I started my story, which is your story, that day in the early summer of 1996, when you were seven, in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green.

That your daddy, Isabel, still retains the ability to accuse anyone else of messing everything up, I admire him. Larger than life, he and his peers. At least in their capacity for self-delusion.

Next: I understand you to be, now, seventeen. In June of 1996, I would like you to know, I was, despite your father’s recollection, twenty-seven. I had been working at the
Albany Times
for three years, was a beat reporter, had a master’s in journalism from Northwestern, and was soon going to be offered a Porter Fellowship at Yale. So let’s just bear in mind that all parents might be bad parents, but your father, in particular, is also an asshole.

Now then. It seems to be my turn to pick up the thread of this little narrative, so let me clue you in to one important thing: when, on that June day in 1996, your father and Billy Cusimano came out of their little rabbit hole, I was a busy and happy person and had no need of either of them in my productive and useful existence. Or at least, to stick a little closer to the facts—yes, yes, J, I see the irony—I was busy. General Electric was getting their ass sued for dumping a planet worth of dioxides into the Hudson, Empire-Besicort was trying to divert millions of gallons of water out of the Esopus River, and some bozo had come up with a plan to get a few Native Americans to file a federal claim and turn the Rondout Valley watershed into a casino. In 1996 there was plenty of important work in the Hudson Valley, and I didn’t know either your father or Billy Cusimano but by reputation, which was just fine with me. My time of innocence, though, was dwindling fast: by the night of June 14
I would be part of this story, and in the weeks to come I would learn more about the pair of them than I had ever wanted to. And one thing I would learn was exactly what happened as they walked out onto Billy’s lawn—as exactly, in fact, as if it had been videotaped by hidden surveillance cameras and, later, shown to me.

Which, of course, it was.

I can watch it whenever I want, right here on my computer screen, as I write to you. In the video of the lawn, brilliant spring light is angling in from a pure blue sky. Big clouds are rolling in from the north, throwing a shadow that runs from the peaks of the Blackheads, over North and South Lake, across the valley of the Katterskill and then over the plateau of Platte Clove. On Billy’s lawn they stood a couple of minutes, watching the clouds on the wind: two old-timers, too stoned to talk, almost comically various: Billy with his ponytail and massive stomach in an old T-shirt; your father slim, bald, and in a suit and tie.

James Grant, at forty-six. I can freeze the frame and zoom in, close enough to see his eyes, pupils huge with Billy’s weed, focusing on distance. It is a clean-shaven face I’m watching, still showing a few freckles, a rounded nose bent remarkably to the left, a funnily winning smile, winning enough to support the fact that his still faintly red hair had thinned to just this side of the vanishing point. Nonetheless, there was still enough of it to make it something of a surprise when you saw his eyes. The freckles, the red hair, the round face and broken nose: clearly, what you had to do with, here, was a mick. The eyes, however, were brown: a big, dark maroon that had nothing Irish in it at all, as if his mother had really been raped by a dago, as he liked to say. In a white shirt, open now to reveal the red hair of his chest, which had not thinned, he stood most of six feet, and while his body did not have much left of the nervous, infectious energy that had characterized James Grant for most of his life, it was beginning to have the slim solidity that was going to be the mark of his middle age.

After a moment, the camera followed him to his car, a Subaru Outback, not new, and after exchanging a few words that the camera didn’t pick up, your father drove away.

Billy went back into the house once your father was gone. He emerged some minutes later, accompanied by a dark-haired, middle-aged
woman, angular of face and wearing a gray skirt suit. The pair climbed into the remaining car and drove away.

Next, and last, to emerge from the house were two Mexican workers, perhaps a quarter hour later, carrying mason’s tools. Presumably they had closed the Sea of Green to finish its growing cycle, and now they cleaned their mason’s tools under an outside tap, then climbed into the cab of the truck and in turn drove down the dirt road, leaving the house locked and empty until, in an hour’s time, Ruth Cusimano was to return from the Steiner school in Woodstock with her four children.

Or almost empty. Because, after a stage wait, a Greene County Telephone Company van came up the drive and parked.

As such, it was the first of several extremely serious things that were going to happen that night to Billy Cusimano, your father, and by extension, you.

2.

We now know that while your father was driving down the mountain to pick you up from Molly Sackler, who was baby-sitting you; and while Billy Cusimano was driving down the other side of the mountain toward Rosendale with his mystery guest; and while, in fact, Ruth Cusimano was picking up her children from the Steiner school in Woodstock, each and every one of them was being followed by a vehicle containing FBI agents.