The Summons (Page 39)

"Yeah, it was years ago. She had a little dough at one point, not much. I’d hit the bottom, and it was back when she cared. It was a nice place, though, and some of the counselors were those Florida chicks with short skirts and long legs."

"I’ll have to check it out."

"Kiss my ass."

‘Just kidding."

"There’s this place out West where all the stars go, the Hacienda, and it’s the Ritz. Plush rooms, spas, daily massages, chefs who can fix great meals at one thousand calories a day. And the counselors are the best in the world. That’s what I need, Bro, six months at the Hacienda."

"Why six months?"

"Because I need six months. I’ve tried two months, one month, three weeks, two weeks, it’s not enough. For me, it’s six months of total lockdown, total brainwashing, total therapy, plus my own masseuse." . .

"What’s the cost?"

Forrest whistled and rolled his eyes. "Pick a number. I don’t know. You gotta have a zillion bucks and two recommendations to get in. Imagine that, a letter of recommendation. ‘To the Fine Folks at the Hacienda: I hereby heartily recommend my friend Doofus Smith as a patient in your wonderful facility. Doofus drinks vodka for breakfast, snorts coke for lunch, snacks on heroin, and is usually comatose by dinner. His brain is fried, his veins are lacerated, his liver is shot to hell. Doofus is your kind of person and his old man owns Idaho.’ "

"Do they keep people for six months?"

"You’re clueless, aren’t you?"

"I guess."

"A lot of cokeheads need a year. Even more for heroin addicts."

And which is your current poison? Ray wanted to ask. But then he didn’t want to. "A year?" he said.

"Yep, total lockdown. And then the addict has to do it himself. I know guys who’ve been to prison for three years with no coke, no crack, no drugs at all, and when they were released they called a dealer before they called their wives or girlfriends."

"What happens to them?"

"It’s not pretty." He threw the last of the peanuts into his mouth, slapped his hands together, and sent salt flying.

THERE WERE no signs directing traffic to Alcorn Village. They followed Oscar’s directions until they were certain they were lost deep in the hills, then saw a gate in the distance. Down a tree-lined drive, a complex spread before them. It was peaceful and secluded, and Forrest gave it good marks for first impressions.

Oscar Meave arrived in the lobby of the administration building and guided them to an intake office, where he handled the initial paperwork himself. He was a counselor, an administrator, a psychologist, an ex-addict who’d cleaned himself up years ago and received two Ph.D.’s. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt, sneakers, a goatee, and two earrings, and had the wrinkles and chipped tooth of a rough prior life. But his voice was soft and friendly. He exuded the tough compassion of one who’d been where Forrest was now.

The cost was $325 a day and Oscar was recommending a minimum of four weeks. "After that, we’ll see where he is. I’ll need to ask some pretty rough questions about what Forrest has been doing."

"I don’t want to hear that conversation," Ray said.

"You won’t," Forrest said. He was resigned to the flogging that was coming.

"And we require half the money up front," Oscar said. "The other half before his treatment is complete."

Ray flinched and tried to remember the balance in his checking account back in Virginia. He had plenty of cash, but this was not the time to use it.

"The money is coming out of my father’s estate," Forrest said. "It might take a few days."

Oscar was shaking his head. "No exceptions. Our policy is half now."

"No problem," said Ray. "I’ll write a check for it."

"I want it to come out of’ the estate," Forrest said. "You’re not paying for it."

"The estate can reimburse me. It’ll work." Ray wasn’t sure how it would work, but he’d let Harry Rex worry about that. He signed the forms as guarantor of payment. Forrest signed at the bottom of a page listing all the do’s and don’ts.

"You can’t leave for twenty-eight days," Oscar said. "If you do, you forfeit all monies paid and you’re never welcome back. Understand?"

"I understand," Forrest said. How many times had he been through this?

"You’re here because you want to be here, right?"

"Right."

"And no one is forcing you?"

"No one."

Now that the flogging was on, it was time for Ray to leave. He thanked Oscar and hugged Forrest and sped away much faster than he’d arrived.

Chapter 25

Ray was now certain that the cash had been collected since 1991, the year the Judge was voted out of office. Claudia was around until the year before, and she knew nothing of the money. It had not come from graft and it had not come gambling.

Nor had it come from skillful investing on the sly, because Ray found not a single record of the Judge ever buying or selling a stock or a bond. The accountant hired by Harry Rex to reconstruct the records and put together the final tax return had found nothing either. He said that the Judge’s trail was easy to follow because everything had been run through the First National Bank of Clanton.

That’s what you think, Ray thought to himself.

There were almost forty boxes of old, useless files scattered throughout the house. The cleaning service had gathered and stacked them in the Judge’s study and in the dining room. It took a few hours but he finally found what he was looking for. Two of the boxes held the notes and research – the "trial files" as the Judge had always referred to them – of the cases he’d heard as a special chancellor since his defeat in 1991.

During a trial the Judge wrote nonstop on yellow legal pads. He noted dates, times, relevant facts, anything that would aid him in reaching a final opinion in the case. Often he would interject a question to a witness and he frequently used his notes to correct the attorneys. Ray had heard him quip more than once, in chambers of course, that the notetaking helped him stay awake. During a lengthy trial, he would fill twenty legal pads with his notes.

Because he was a lawyer before he was a judge, he had acquired the lifelong habit of filing and keeping everything. A trial file consisted of his notes, copies of cases the attorneys relied on, copies of code sections, statutes, even pleadings that were not put with the official court file. As the years passed, the trial files became even more useless, and now they filled forty boxes.

According to his tax returns, since 1993, he had picked up income trying cases as a special chancellor, cases no one else wanted to hear. It was not uncommon in the rural areas to have a dispute too hot for an elected judge. One side would file a motion asking the judge to recuse himself, and he would go through the routine of grappling with the issue while proclaiming his ability to be fair and impartial regardless of the facts or litigants, then reluctantly step down and hand it off to an old pal from another part of the state. The special chancellor would ride in without the baggage of any prior knowledge and without one eye on reelection and hear the case.

In some jurisdictions, special chancellors were used to relieve crowded dockets. Occasionally, they would sit in for an ailing judge.

Almost all were retired themselves. The state paid them fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses.

In 1992, the year after his defeat, Judge Atlee had earned nothing extra. In 1993, he’d been paid $5,800. The busiest year – 1996 – he’d reported $16,300. Last year, 1999, he was paid $8,760, but he’d been ill most of the time.