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

by Clifford Irving

  In North Florida the county commissioners met to consider the propositions. Cash changed hands in manila envelopes, shoe boxes, suitcases. Stock options were courier-delivered to corporations in Liechtenstein, Grand Cayman, Mexico. Permissions were granted. Neil Zide, who had been rich, became very rich. He let his hair grow down to his shoulders in unruly brown waves, shaved only when the whim took him, went to work in Levi’s and Italian silk shirts with flowing d’Artagnan sleeves, and wore only scuffed basketball shoes with the laces loose and dragging on the parquet floor of his office. He looked like a young Hollywood producer. He was thirty- four years old now. He no longer needed to live in a wing of his mother’s house but had built his own white Moorish fantasy down at Ponte Vedra and bought a flat on the lie de la Cité in Paris, an office-apartment on Central Park South in Manhattan, and a vacation home on Red Mountain in Aspen. Photographs of all these places, signed on the mats by Neil, lined the black walls of his office.

  “You ski?” he asked me.

  “Used to. Now I don’t have the time.”

  “I often hear that excuse. I’ve got two guest cottages on that Red Mountain property. You’re certainly welcome to come out. Great skiing, greater partying, and the greatest air. Now that they’ve got the gondola, you get to the top of Ajax in fifteen minutes.”

  “Sounds like progress of a sort. How’s your mother?”

  “Very well indeed. Thank you for asking. I’m pleased it’s not a subject that has to be avoided.”

  I leaned back in my chair and decided to do just that: avoid it. Neil was not the right person to discuss it with, if there was such a thing as a right person.

  Neil was quick. He could hear what was being said by silence. Sitting behind his glass desk, he glanced at his watch to make sure I realized his time was valuable and limited. He looked up. In the past twelve years the eyes had gained no warmth.

  “You’re here in your capacity as an attorney, I take it. How can I help you?”

  Beyond his desk, through a half-open doorway, I could see a bed with a golden bedspread, gold-colored sheets, and a gold headboard.

  “I’m representing Darryl Morgan,” I said, “to see if I can win a new trial for him.”

  The flesh was still slack around Neil Zide’s jawline. It seemed to go even slacker.

  “Did I hear you correctly?”

  “I think so.”

  He studied me carefully, waiting. He was a bright man despite his foppishness. He knew when to shut up.

  So I fired from the hip. “There are a few questions I’d like to ask you about Floyd Nickerson and Victor Gambrel.”

  Neil exhaled quietly, then inhaled deeply. But the blue eyes told me nothing. He said nothing. I waited, and so did he.

  He ended the uncomfortable silence. “Go ahead.”

  “I’ll refresh your memory. Nickerson was with Homicide. He investigated your father’s death.”

  “I remember that.”

  “And until some five or six years ago Victor Gambrel was head of security for Zide Industries, the main Jacksonville office. Right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Nickerson took a confession from Darryl Morgan—do you recall?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And Nickerson also dug up a cellmate who heard Darryl Morgan confess. Does that ring a bell?”

  “I remember that too,” Neil said. He shook his head as if to free it from a web; the long brown locks waved and settled back into place.

  “Jerry Lee Elroy.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That was the name of the cellmate.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I’m not cross-examining you, Neil.” But in fact that’s exactly what I’d been doing.

  “You still haven’t told me how I can help you.”

  “You can satisfy my curiosity about a few things. I’d like to find out what happened to Floyd Nickerson. If you know.”

  “I’m not sure.” Neil scratched his nose, then his unshaven cheeks, and blinked a few times.

  “Well, I didn’t mean I didn’t know where he was,” I said easily. “He’s over at Orange Meadow Estates in Gainesville. What I meant to say was, I wondered how he got there.”

  Neil shrugged.

  “He’s chief of security there,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a ZiDevco project.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Do you recall how Nickerson got that job?”

  “I’d have to ask someone to check the personnel records,” Neil said, starting to work on his stubble again. “Would you like me to do that?”

  “You don’t recall giving him the job?”

  “Ted”—smiling now, trying to appear friendly, worldly—”that’s a long time ago. How could I remember that? One forgets a great many things. In fact, prefers to forget them.”

  “And there’s no way that your mother could have given him the job? Or recommended him?”

  “Of course not. Con had nothing to do with the business. Didn’t then, doesn’t now.”

  “Then I would like to see those personnel records. That would be kind of you. If you could arrange to have a copy sent down to me, care of Kenny Buckram at the public defender’s office here in Jacksonville?”

  “I’ll try.” Neil scratched a note on a desk calendar. “If they still exist, that is. We may not keep records like that for as long as nine years.”

  I was silent for a moment. “And Gambrel. What do you remember about Victor Gambrel?”

  “Victor … well, I remember him, of course. He came to an unfortunate end.”

  “He was shot and killed in his car at the parking lot of the Regency Square Mall in July of 1985. Yes, you could definitely call that an unfortunate end.”

  “A real whodunit,” Neil said. “Might turn up one of these days on that TV show—what is it? Unsolved Mysteries.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I heard recently, and this is between you and me, that the Bongiorno people were behind it. But I’m still not sure why Gambrel would be a target for organized crime. Doesn’t make sense. Does it to you?”

  Neil seemed to consider that for a few beats. “Are you implying that the investigation is ongoing?”

  “I wasn’t implying anything at all. I didn’t know Gambrel. You did, though. You knew him well.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “The night that Darryl Morgan broke into your house and you panicked him so that he shot your father, you called the police and then you called Gambrel. That’s what you told me, and that’s what you told the court. Didn’t you testify to that when I had you as my witness on the stand?”

  Neil cleared his throat. “Ted, the truth is, I don’t remember what I said on the witness stand about Victor Gambrel. That was an exceedingly traumatic time for me—not that I was in mourning for my father, as you well know, but simply that I was deeply concerned about my mother. She had no one else to lean on but me. I called Victor that ghastly night because he was chief of security at what was then my father’s company, and it seemed appropriate to do so.”

  “What’s your theory as to why he was murdered?”

  “What I heard was … gambling debts. Large sums. To the wrong people.”

  “Such as Bongiorno?”

  “Might well have been. May I ask you a question now?”

  “Fire away, Neil.”

  “Why are you getting involved again, and on the other side? Why are you handling Morgan’s case?”

  “Everyone asks me that,” I said, shaking my head sorrowfully. “My wife, my law partners, my friends, the state attorney … and I don’t seem to be able to give a very satisfactory answer. I was never happy with what Judge Eglin did—that’s one reason. So I suppose it’s because I don’t think Darryl Morgan received a fair trial and therefore doesn’t deserve to die. I’ve learned something that’s fact- specific along those lines. Nothing earth-shaking, but it’s of some significance.”

  �
�Which is?”

  I sighed and said, “It’s confidential. Something a client told me. Sorry.”

  Neil looked at me steadily. “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all—and thanks, Neil. My best regards to Connie, and I appreciate your taking all this time.”

  We shook hands; then, at the door, I turned. The night before, I’d watched a few minutes of Columbo, with Peter Falk. I said, “Oh, by the way, there’s just one more thing I wanted to ask you … may I? It’s okay?”

  “Yes, it’s okay,” Neil said.

  “I asked you how Floyd Nickerson got that job over at Orange Meadow, and you said you didn’t know. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “ You didn’t give him the job.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Because you had no reason to.”

  “Correct. I had no reason.”

  “And a few minutes ago when I asked you for the personnel records, which you very kindly said you’d provide, you said you didn’t know if your office kept those kinds of records for as long as nine years. You did say that, didn’t you?”

  “I believe I did.”

  “Well… I don’t believe I told you when it was that Floyd Nickerson quit JSO and went to work for ZiDevco. So how did you know it was nine years ago?”

  Neil stared at me calmly. But he was upset. I could see that. You can’t control certain bodily functions, and the body never lies.

  “I was guessing,” he said.

  “You just picked a number, like out of a hat?”

  “Yes.”

  “And hit it right on the button. That’s remarkable. Can I ask you one more question?”

  “If you must.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. “I can’t believe this. I forgot what I was going to say. It’s just gone. Does that ever happen to you?”

  “Sometimes,” Neil said quietly.

  “If I remember,” I said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  I went to see a judge again and secured a court order. Then I bought two decks of playing cards and put them in my briefcase. The next day I drove down to Raiford. After I’d presented the court order to Raymond Wright, I waited an hour and a half on a bench in a hallway until I was escorted to the cell on death row. Today Darryl wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and bluejeans. He was shackled and chained, and the two correctional officers sat outside again, at the proper distance.

  “I’m going to file a petition for a retrial,” I told him. “There may be a hearing. Will you cooperate with me?”

  Darryl asked, “Where there gonna be a hearing?”

  “Jacksonville. With a different judge than before.”

  “Do I get to go?”

  “You have to go.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Just keep quiet, listen to what goes on, don’t try to strangle anybody. If it’s overnight, you stay in the Duval County Jail.”

  “You say may be this hearing. You don’t say going to be.”

  “That’s right. No promises.”

  “You promise, I don’t believe you nohow. What you want me to do for you?”

  “I want you first of all to agree that I represent you. That I’m your lawyer, your attorney, your counselor.”

  “Lot of weird things happen in my life,” Darryl said. “This got to be near the top of the list.”

  I gave him the two decks of playing cards.

  Just after 5:00 P.M., from the deep shadow of the gun tower at the main gate, I stepped forward onto the gravel. Two men were waiting for me. I noticed how their boots shone in the slanting sunlight. They wore the pale blue-gray uniforms of Bradford County deputy sheriffs.

  “Edward M. Jaffe, sir?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “We have a warrant for your arrest for aggravated battery.”

  “You have what?”

  But I had heard him clearly, and he really didn’t have to repeat it. “Look”—I tried to smile and be nonchalant—”I’m a lawyer, and I’m here to see a prisoner, a client. My home is down in Sarasota. I’m a former chief assistant state attorney from Jacksonville. I’ll be glad to show you all the ID I’ve got and give you some numbers to call.”

  They read me my Miranda rights and asked me to place my hands behind my back in order to be handcuffed.

  It would be tempting, but inaccurate, to say that I didn’t believe this was happening to me. I understood the process all too well—I had been part of it many times. But I’d never played this role. I may have been in shock.

  One of the deputies took my briefcase from me. Cold steel cuffs clicked into place on my wrists. I was stuffed into the caged back seat of a patrol car.

  It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Clive Crocker had filed a complaining affidavit that I had hit him and broken his nose. He had sworn that he hadn’t provoked me, and undoubtedly he produced witnesses who filed other affidavits, including a doctor’s statement.

  But I recalled that the law stated that unless the injury was permanent or disfiguring, it was simple battery, a mere first-degree misdemeanor. Normally I would have been asked to stop off at the sheriff’s office and tell my side of it. That would not have been a custodial interrogation.

  “It’s simple battery, not aggravated battery,” I explained to the deputy sheriffs who were driving me to jail. “I’m a lawyer. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “You can explain it to Judge Burchell.”

  We reached the sheriff’s office in the courthouse on the main street of Starke. A red ribbon stretched across the courthouse door, proclaiming that WE ARE NEIGHBORS DRUG-FREE AND PROUD. But we didn’t stop there for me to see the judge; we stopped so that one of the deputies could pick up his coffee thermos, which he’d left on a chair. From the courthouse we drove to the Bradford County Jail, a two-story red-brick building on a side street.

  “I can’t get out of this car,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “My knees are stuck.”

  “Try,” the deputy with the thermos said.

  It was important to stay calm. I asked if I could make a telephone call to a lawyer.

  “After you’ve been booked,” the deputy said.

  Was that how the law worked? That didn’t seem fair. There was a great deal, I realized, that lawyers didn’t know.

  In a small room downstairs I was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed. I was stripped of my belt, wristwatch, shoelaces, wallet, and keys. A deputy placed me in a green-walled cell upstairs with a single frosted window that opened on a hallway. The deputy left. I heard the downstairs door clang. I heard a car engine start.

  I had seen no one in the other cells. They weren’t doing a very good business here. Starke, understandably, wasn’t the crime capital of North Florida.

  My cell had a toilet with no seat, two double-decker metal bunks, a fire extinguisher, and a black telephone on the wall. But when I picked up the telephone and put the receiver to my ear, there was no dial tone.

  “This phone doesn’t work!” I yelled.

  But there was nobody there to hear me.

  “Goddammit!” I yelled. “What’s going on? Who’s here? Isn’t there anybody here?”

  It began to grow dark. I shook the bars, hoping to rattle them. But they were solid. They made no sound.

  Chapter 20

  AT SIX-THIRTY in the evening another prisoner arrived, to be placed in the cell with me. With him came spaghetti and meatballs and two slices of white bread on a yellow plastic tray, as well as a deputy I’d not seen before.

  “This phone’s broken,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I haven’t made a phone call yet to a lawyer. Can I do that from another cell?”

  “Phone doesn’t work after five o’clock,” the deputy said.

  “None of them?”

  “You want Coke or Sprite?”

  “None of these telephones work after five o’clock in the afternoon? Is that what you’re telling me? I don’t b
elieve it! How is that possible?”

  “Mister,” he said, “you don’t look like a kid. You should know that anything is possible.”

  I knew it. Had always known it. And there was no sense whatever in my asking him why.

  “When do they start working again?”

  “Seven o'clock in the A.M.”

  “And when does the judge start work? When does he hold bail hearings at the courthouse?”

  “Nine, ten o’clock. Depends.”

  I didn’t dare ask on what.

  The deputy escaped, and I sank down on the cot like a man who’s been told he has a fatal disease. My fellow prisoner—a drunken white man in his thirties, unshaven and red-eyed—lit a cigarette from a new pack of Kents. He saw me staring at him.

  “You want one?” he asked.

  “Yes. Please.”

  By eleven o’clock the following morning, when I went before Judge Burchell, I had smoked five of my cellmate’s Kents plus two Marlboro Lights that I’d managed to bum from the morning deputy. The mattress I’d been given was two inches thick and positioned above a steel slab. I slept in my underwear and socks, and at one point, in the blackest part of the night, had to piss. But my sodden cellmate had been there before me, on unsteady feet, and had missed the bowl, so that after a moment or two I realized the uncomfortable feeling in my feet combined with the rising odor indicated that I stood in a pool of his stale urine. My cotton socks were quickly wet through. I had to yank them off, toss them in a far corner, and sleep without them. The cold reached up from the steel bed into my ankles and the bones of my feet and the joints of my toes, chilling them as if they rested on the polar icecap. I slept a total of two hours.

  At a few minutes past seven I called collect to Kenny Buckram’s office. He wasn’t in his office yet, and the machine couldn’t accept the charges. Then I called his home at Neptune Beach. Same problem. Kenny was probably out fucking. How dare a lawyer do that when his client needs him? By ten o’clock, when I’d been brought to the Bradford County Courthouse—unshaven, gritty-eyed, smelly, sockless, without having brushed my teeth—I was still alone.

  “Your Honor,” I said, looking up, as I had looked up many times before on behalf of other men (and, in the dark past, on behalf of the State of Florida), “I probably don’t look it, but I’m an attorney, a former chief assistant state attorney in the Fourth Circuit. It hadn’t been my plan to do this, but now I’m here representing myself. And so I’d like to begin by asking the court, why is this an aggravated battery charge? It’s my understanding that unless the injury is permanent or disfiguring, it’s simple battery. A misdemeanor, not a felony. I believe that Mr. Crocker has accused me of striking him and breaking his nose. For the sake of argument, even if that’s true …”