Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller

by Clifford Irving

  The dog lay in the sand near a clump of sawgrass.

  William cut through the barbed wire with the clippers. They made their way up through more dunes and then along a boardwalk, past sea grape and a line of palm trees, ebony fronds against a suddenly cloudy sky. Off to the right, through the fog, the swimming pool and the tennis courts began to show their shapes.

  “Don’t shine that light,” Darryl whispered.

  “Why I need to,” William grumbled, “when this place lit up like it Christmas?”

  Orange insect lamps glowed on the lawn and by the pool. Lights burned on all three floors of the house, which was as big as a monastery. Wings and covered walks arrowed out in different directions. Look like a haunted house, Darryl thought. With William following, he moved across the soft springy lawn, along a line of hibiscus, onto the terrace. They cut across the ultraviolet beam of a security lamp. It blazed swirling yellow light across their path.

  They heard voices. Both youths crouched against a fluted marble column. Darryl rested his hand on it and felt the chill of the stone right up to his wrist. William started to hiss at him, and Darryl growled, “Shut up, fool. …”

  The voices rose in pitch. Downstairs in the house, people were arguing.

  A man’s voice snarled in rage. A light snapped on upstairs. Then the Lhasa apso puppies sprinted down the terrace toward Darryl and William, yipping and baying like baby wolves from hell.

  They knew Darryl and liked him, and they had smelled him. Tails wagging furiously, they skidded to a stop on the tiles. They rose on their hind legs, clawing at his jeans.

  Wearing a billowing white bathrobe, Connie Zide stepped suddenly out of the house through French doors. She was about thirty feet away from Darryl when he saw her. She looked pale enough to be an apparition from an old black-and-white horror movie. She stopped and stared at him.

  Instantly Darryl jumped from his crouch, bellowed like an elephant whose young were threatened, and ran. William followed, crouched low and weaving, emulating the fighting men they had seen in the movie.

  The puppies believed it to be a fine game, and they pursued. William kicked a puppy out of his path. He had killed a dog; what did a puppy matter? The puppy, striking against a marble column, screamed.

  Darryl pounded across the grass toward the beach gate, tripping another light beam; it blazed in his eyes. He heard a crash behind him, as of pottery smashing, but when he flung his head around to look, he saw through the swirling mist only William’s long-jawed face bobbing up and down in stride, the lips, bathed by the harsh light of the tennis court security lamp, drawn back over white teeth in a rictus of terror.

  I raised a palm, meaning “Stop right there.”

  Darryl nodded, adjusted himself against the cool wall of the cell. He moved the waist chain, flexed his wrists.

  “I have a few questions,” I said.

  This story of Darryl’s hadn’t come out at trial. Bits and pieces had been alluded to during Gary Oliver’s direct examination of his client, but never in a narrative. For the most part, in that testimony long ago, Darryl’s lawyer had allowed him only to deny what the state’s witnesses had sworn to. In that, if only in that, I thought, Oliver had been wise.

  If Darryl had told this tale then, I would have ripped it apart. Because who were you going to believe—the wife and son of the murdered man, or the hulking black youth who had admitted being there on the terrace and confessed the murder to a homicide detective and later in the presence of a cellmate? If someone else had shot Solomon Zide that night, how could Connie and Neil have made such a firm identification of Darryl Morgan? Darryl was not someone you forgot, not someone you easily mistook for another man.

  The two guards appeared at the door to the cell. “Sir?”

  I turned.

  “It’s time for this prisoner to exercise.”

  I asked if it wasn’t possible for him to do that later, when I had gone.

  “No, sir. It’s supervised, and we have a schedule. This is his time.”

  I turned to Darryl, slumped against the wall of the cell. “Can you skip your exercise today?”

  “We get up on that roof twice a week,” Darryl said. “For one hour, man. I skip it today, I got to wait three days. It rains three days from now, they tell you, ‘Bad luck.’ Which you think I rather do—rap with you or breathe fresh air and stretch my bones? You don’t believe me, nohow. You think I kill that old Jew. You was a scumbag then and you a scumbag now. Day you say to me, ‘Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you telling the truth,’ then we talk. If I don’t be dead by then. That happen, I talk to you from the grave, motherfucker.” He chuckled. “Yeah. I haunt you. See how you like it.”

  Chapter 17

  WE HAD JUST finished our weekly partners’ meeting, and Harvey Royal asked to see me alone. He slid an antacid pill into his mouth, leaned back in the leather chair and said, “Ted, just what the hell are you doing up in Jacksonville?”

  “I explained it last week, Harvey.”

  His bony head with its thin mat of gray hair bobbed up and down. “There’s an entire organization in Tallahassee devoted to these appeals, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, it’s called CCR.”

  “An organization far more suited to do this important work than our little provincial firm here in Sarasota, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not necessarily. Darryl Morgan’s run out his string. He’s been on death row for twelve years. He’s due to be executed four weeks from today.”

  Harvey knew, of course, that the winning of the case hinged on the testimony of the firm’s new client, Jerry Lee Elroy. But what I didn’t dare tell him, or anyone, was that all hope of Elroy’s testifying would go down the drain if I turned the case over to CCR. The CCR lawyers wouldn’t lie to Elroy and pretend that his recantation was part of the deal to get out of the drug charge. And if they didn’t lie, Elroy would never testify. If he didn’t testify, Darryl Morgan died.

  Harvey peered at me over his reading glasses. “I am not unsympathetic to what you’re feeling,” he said. “But at the meeting today we discussed several cases in which you’re involved. Barry and Marian have filled in while you were up north trying to play the role of good Samaritan. I have to ask you, Ted—are you ready to pull your load once again with this law firm?”

  “I’ve got to put out the biggest fire,” I said. “And I don’t need to apologize for that. If this firm won’t accept my doing that, then I don’t want to be a lawyer here. I’m flying up north again in a few days. I’m going to take over the defense of Darryl Morgan.”

  The phone beeped in the conference room. Harvey picked it up and told his secretary to hold all his calls. He turned back to me.

  “Let me be cruel, Ted. From everything I’ve learned, you stand no chance of winning. You’ll be drawing out this man Morgan’s agony for an undetermined period of time before he receives the coup de grace. Can you justify that?”

  Darryl Morgan had said, Every day go round, it come in my mind, “When all this be over with?” Feeding me to Mama, they ending my hurt… .

  “There’s an old saw,” Harvey said, relentless now, “that applies to all capital cases: the better the lawyer, the longer it takes.”

  “I know.” He was too smart for me to pretend to optimism. “I’m trying to convince the system that it made a mistake. And that’s like trying to piss up a rope.”

  “Those aren’t the words I’d have chosen, but they may be apt. Ted, we need your billing and your visibility here, not in Jacksonville.”

  “Then we have a conflict.”

  “How do you propose to resolve it?”

  “By doing what I have to do,” I said.

  And I kept working. I drove up to Bradenton with Barry Wellmet for a meeting with the firm’s cocounsel on the milk price-fixing case. I met with local ZiDevco executives to discuss the witness list for the real estate lawsuit. The next day I interviewed five subcontractors whom we were considering as witnesses and began to prepare a deta
iled report on what they might say under both direct and crossexamination at trial. I edited Barry Wellmet’s brief in the S & L case, then met with Harvey Royal and worked on another revision. Work. The word sounded so clean, so meaty. So righteous.

  So fucking absurd too, because all I was doing was battling and scheming so that people could wring money out of other people or keep others from wringing it out of them, while at the same time piling up my hourly fee. What did that have to do with something so rare as justice?

  I hurried downtown one afternoon to meet Elroy at Buddy Capra’s office on the fourth floor of the Criminal Justice Building. While Charlie Waldorf sat on the couch in the corner of the room, filing his fingernails with an emery board that looked as if he’d used it since he got out of law school, Capra laid out the state’s deal. It hinged on Elroy testifying against his suppliers, Alfonso Ramos and Marty Palomino.

  Elroy asked where this would take place.

  “The grand jury is sitting now in Miami. They’d like to indict this spring. Your presence is requested,” Capra said, making a graceful gesture with his hand. “After you testify, we’ll drop the cocaine possession charge here. You’ll walk away, Mr. Elroy, under the federal witness protection program.”

  “To where?”

  “I’m told your preference is California.”

  “But not up in the mountains,” Elroy snarled, “with a fucking grizzly bear for company.”

  “California has held a lottery,” Capra said, “and you’ve been won by the city of San Diego. They’re thrilled that you’re coming.”

  “What do I live on?”

  Finished with his nails, Charlie Waldorf said gruffly, “The government will provide you with a new identity and pay six months rent on an apartment. We give you walking-around money for ninety days. After that, Mr. Elroy, you’re on your own.”

  We rode down in the elevator, which piped a Vivaldi flute concerto to its passengers. You got to listen to it on the telephone too, when you were put on hold. That was Charlie Waldorf’s style; he was a Sarasotan.

  Elroy and I walked west on Main Street in the afternoon heat. “You couldn’t have made a better deal,” I said. “And there’s the other part of it, which I hope you didn’t forget.”

  “What was that exactly, Counselor?”

  “Jacksonville. Testifying about that fake confession in the Morgan case. You recall?”

  Elroy scratched the stubble on his chin. “Capra and the other guy didn’t mention that.”

  I said firmly, “They didn’t mention it because they didn’t need to. But you have to do it. We start with a sworn affidavit. Now. Up at my office.”

  “Can we get it done by seven? I got some nice pussy waiting at the motel.” He smiled, showing the gap in his teeth. I didn’t know whether he believed me completely; but he wasn’t about to test me, not with San Diego in the offing instead of Raiford.

  When I surfaced from the pool that evening, Toba frowned and said, “I have to tell you, trivial as it may seem to you, a man came to the door today and served me with a notice of deposition.”

  I shook water out of my ears. “For what?”

  “That crazy woman who called me in the middle of the night from her bed with the thing sitting on her tits. The wolf spider.”

  “Some lawyer actually wants to take your deposition about a bug?”

  “Yes!”

  I broke into laughter, then saw the look on my wife’s face and said, “Well, words fail me. And that’s probably for the best.”

  After dinner I asked Alan into the den. I sat in an easy chair, wearing a black sweatshirt, old jeans, running shoes without socks —my I’m-mature-but-still-young look. Alan sprawled on one of the sofas, allowing himself room to twist his legs, stretch his muscular arms, and generally keep in constant wriggly motion. A thatch of black hair curled out of the throat of his sport shirt. Adjusting my horn-rimmed glasses, I felt old.

  “I won’t smoke, Dad, I know it annoys you and I know all about the smell in the air-conditioning ducts. But can I keep an unlit cigarette in my hand?”

  I leaned across from the easy chair and placed a hand on his shoulder. I was trying to communicate my concern, which was deep. “Alan, you talked to your mother about suicide. I have to take that seriously, and it frightens me. I’m sure it’s hard to elaborate, but can you tell me what depresses you? I need to know.”

  “I just feel useless. You said it—I’m a fuck-up. A failure.”

  I’d never called him a failure, and the worst I might have said on other occasions was: “I think you’re fucking up your life.” But I didn’t contradict. This wasn’t court.

  “I’d like you to go into therapy. Do you have anything against that idea?”

  “No,” Alan said.

  There was more, and I had to get through it; I remembered Elston’s mother in Newtown. “You can stay in the drug program or not,” I said to Alan. “That’s up to you. But I won’t house a practicing addict. If I find out that you’re doing any drugs at all, it’ll be like a fucking hurricane around here without a hurricane warning. You can get down on your knees and beg and weep—I’ll still kick your druggie ass right out of here.”

  Toba hunted down a recommended therapist in the high school system who took patients on a private basis for sixty-five dollars an hour. Her name was Dorothy Buford.

  We went one evening to see her in her office at home; it was full of porcelain and ivory knickknacks and reminded me of my grandmother’s house. Dorothy Buford was in her early thirties. “I don’t really want to talk to you two,” she said. “I’d rather not have preconceived ideas. Have your son call me.”

  “We’d like to tell you what the problem is,” I said.

  “What you’ll tell me, Mr. Jaffe, will be what your problem is. Tell that to your own therapist. Have your son call me. He’ll tell me what his problem is.”

  In the car on the way home, I laughed. “You know, she’s absolutely right. I like her.”

  “I don’t,” Toba said. “I thought that was smartass.”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, unhooking her bra under her blouse and not looking at me, she said, “Ted, I wish you weren’t going on Monday.”

  “I’ll try to be back for the weekend.”

  “Have you got a girlfriend up there in Jacksonville?”

  “For God’s sake, no.” Nevertheless, a picture of Muriel Suarez flashed into my mind unbidden. Well, what the hell. You can’t be indicted for your fantasies, which is why they’re so much fun.

  “If you do,” Toba said, “I’ll break your knees with a sledgehammer and cut off an inch of your cock while you’re asleep in bed.”

  “You and the Mafia could do business,” I said.

  “Just how long are you going to keep this up? This running off to Jacksonville?”

  “As long as I need to, Toba.”

  “Our son told us he was suicidal. What if he dies,” she said, “while you’re off trying to save some murderer’s lousy life?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. There was no answer. She walked across the room, and I realized she had brought up a bottle of Chablis, which now stood on her makeup table. She poured some of the wine into a bell-shaped glass.

  “It helps me to sleep.”

  “Let’s fool around,” I said brightly. “That used to do the job pretty well.”

  “After I’ve had some wine. Don’t worry, I’ll brush my teeth.”

  “You’ve had enough this evening to knock out a moose.”

  She glared at me. “Up yours, Ted. You do what you want to do. I’ll do the same, thank you very much.”

  Sheets of rain swept down on Longboat Key. On such nights Toba and I—often without knowing it—took comfort from the boats that bobbed at anchor in the bay, blinking friendly signal lights into our bedroom, our sanctuary. Tonight the waves crashed on the beach with force enough so that the land seemed to shudder.

  We didn’t fool around. A few minutes after turning out her light
, Toba began to snore lightly. Funny, I thought. At the beginning of a marriage, if you were told your wife was going to become a serious snorer, you might think twice about taking the marriage vows. But once it became a fait accompli, it was endearing. It was proof of her vulnerability. It was her. You almost loved her for it—not in spite of it but for it. And of course it gave you the freedom to practice your own antisocial habits, which in turn were you.

  Soon I drifted toward sleep.

  That time in the Gambrel murder, the snitch I had was for real… .

  I sat up in bed in the semidarkness. Thunder growled from far away in the night, like a vicious dog giving fair warning. I was awake, focused on a name, hearing it in the reedy voice of Carmen Tanagra.

  I remembered that name from twelve years ago. And the man himself: Victor Gambrel. In his early forties, reminding everyone of Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. A former Jacksonville cop, and at that time chief of security for Zide Industries. Nickerson’s police report had quoted Gambrel as stating that following Neil Zide’s telephone call, he’d arrived at the estate a scant few minutes before the Homicide team. Gambrel had seen nothing. I had interviewed him at the state attorney’s office then but decided not to use him as a witness.

  Five years ago, according to the casual recounting by Kenny Buckram and Carmen Tanagra, Gambrel had been murdered. But why? And by whom? Organized crime, they thought. And what else had Tanagra said? I hunted in the debris of memory and found it:

  … Bongiorno had real good friends in Tallahassee. Money and political clout is what it came down to. The snitch changed his story, and I got shitcanned… .

  Even a blind dog finds a bone once in a while. I had a new vision, one that staggered me. I slipped out of bed and padded swiftly down the stairs to the living room. The sky crackled with lightning. From my briefcase I fished out a legal pad and a ballpoint pen.

  Hours later, when I slept again, I dreamed of a woman who resembled Connie Zide. She held a knife to the throat of Darryl Morgan.

  Chapter 18