Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (5 page)

This case, for many reasons, was not for me.

“Tell me about Gary Oliver,” I said.

“Used to be a good private investigator. Then he got uppity and went to law school, like some other dickheads we know. But he’s got a problem the others don’t have. Down in St. Augustine last winter he was so shitfaced he was pulled over for drunk driving, and he hands the cop his fishing license. Guy’s favorite drink is the next one.”

“Why didn’t Darryl Morgan go to the public defender?”

“He did, and Kenny assigned a white woman lawyer. Morgan didn’t trust her—he fired her. She didn’t protest too much: I heard she didn’t like him or the case. So his mother managed to come up with whatever it took to hire Gary Oliver. Actually, I heard that Oliver’s doing it for just his expenses.”

Not that it mattered, Beldon explained. Forty-eight hours after his
Miranda
rights had been read to him, Darryl Morgan confessed the murder to Sergeant Floyd Nickerson of Homicide. A few nights later he repeated the confession in front of his cellmate at the Duval County Jail. And Connie Zide identified him positively as the man who had shot her husband during the attempted burglary. Neil Zide confirmed the ID at a police lineup.

“This Morgan kid’s six foot six,” Beldon said. “A fucking giant. Hard to mistake him for anyone else.”

“So the jury will convict.”

“You can bet the family jewels on it. But not on part two.”

In Florida a murder trial was divided in two parts. In the first part the jury heard evidence, then voted as to guilt or innocence. If the verdict was Guilty, in part two of the proceedings the same jury voted on a recommendation for sentencing. The final decision was up to the judge.

“Let me tell you what I’m feeling,” I said. “Until ‘72 you did all the death penalty cases. That suited me fine. I’ve never done one, and this doesn’t strike me as the time to start.”

“So you’d want someone defending Morgan who’ll give you a decent battle when it comes to sentencing.”

“If I had the case, yes.”

“You’re asking me is Oliver capable of doing that, the answer is fuck no.”

I hadn’t asked him a damn thing. “Well, there’s my answer too.” “It won’t come to that, Ted. Take the case. Handle the media people. Cut a deal up front with Oliver.”

“Why can’t Settels do that?”

Beldon studied me for a few moments. “Is there some other reason you don’t want to prosecute?”

“No,” I said hurriedly, fiddling with the lock on my briefcase. I looked up. “If I cut a deal, you’ll approve it?”

“Hey, white boy, you think I want blood? A twenty-year-old dumbass black boy’s blood? We got a white cop who got trigger- happy, and some unhappy black folks out there all over the county and the state. I don’t want a riot. I don’t even want a trial. I want it smooth, Ted. That’s your specialty. Do it as a personal favor to your old Uncle Beldon.”

He had me where he wanted me, and I nodded. “For you,” I said, puckering my lips.

“Bless your little cotton socks,” he said. He threw me a kiss and handed me the case file.

When the grandfather clock in my office chimed the morning hour of seven, I settled behind my state-issue metal desk and read the rap sheet on Darryl Morgan, who for a month prior to the murder had been an assistant handyman on the Zide estate. (Mowing that stadium-size lawn was a day’s work for a man on a Toro, and it was done twice a week.) He was the third of five illegitimate children born to Marguerite Little, who cleaned white people’s homes in Jacksonville Beach. His biological father was unknown. Marguerite’s common-law husband, A.J. Morgan, was a groundskeeper at the Palmetto Country Club and a part-time Baptist preacher, who had been heard to cry, “I’m here to do God’s work, whatever the hell it is.”

Marguerite’s other living children were Dwight, a heroin addict who had left home at seventeen and was doing time in Illinois for armed robbery; and Gull, twenty-two, illiterate, churchgoing, narcoleptic, the mother of four children by various fathers. After two abortions, she had been sterilized by a local midwife. Gull made a living as a prostitute, charging ten dollars, singing Christian hymns, and sometimes falling asleep while she worked. The family lived in a four-room wooden shack on the edge of a rat-infested palm grove west of San Pablo Road, half a dozen miles from the beach. No cooling Atlantic breezes reached that grove.

Since his fourteenth birthday Darryl Morgan hadn’t known two straight years of freedom. Banished to reform school for breaking school windows and hoisting a tape deck from a parked car, he had then done time on a penal farm for jackrolling drunks and in Clay County Jail for grabbing money from a Burger King cash register. Finally he had been sentenced to a branch of FSP for burglarizing an auto parts warehouse. He was eighteen then. He did nineteen months on that seven-year bit, then was released, because in the crowded Florida prisons a man usually served less than a fifth of his sentence.

Gary Oliver, his knight in the lists, arrived at my office at 8:00 A.M.

I poured coffee from the Silex into two chipped mugs. We both took it black without sugar, a coincidence that seemed to please Oliver, for he beamed and made comment. Lifting a pack of Winston Lights from the pocket of his suit, he offered one to me. I shook my head.

“You a nonsmoker, Mr. Jaffe?”

“No, sir, I’m an addict who quit.” I didn’t mention that I still puffed at the occasional Havana smuggled in by friends flying back from London or Mexico City.

Oliver clucked his tongue. “That tells me you’re a man of character.

“At times, yes.”

There it was, the raw truth. I was proud of myself. I could have accepted Oliver’s compliment without comment and probably gotten away with it.

My portly visitor got right to the point; he said to me, “Mr. Jaffe, I’m from Georgia. Why are you people in Florida so in love with killing black folks?”

He may have been my adversary, but he deserved a straightforward answer.

I told him that all over the country people were fed up with the way the prisons let men loose before they’d served their full term of punishment. These men went back into the community, took drugs, and did the crimes all over again. And most of these men were black. Down here in Florida, retired white folks were fleeing not just the wind-chill factor but the specter of drug-crazed primitive Afro- American men invading their old neighborhoods. They wanted safety in the sun. Get rid of the scum … especially the black scum.

Kill them.

Oliver seemed shocked that I would lay things out so bluntly. He would have been happier, I thought, as a country lawyer in some small Georgia town.

“You believe in the death penalty, Mr. Jaffe?” This was not a challenge; he was more probing than Beldon had implied.

“What I believe,” I said, “is beside the point. I believe in upholding my oath as a state attorney, and that requires me to apply the appropriate law. However”—I eased up—”I have some leeway. If you convince your client to plead out to first-degree murder, the State of Florida will accept a life sentence.”

“With a mandatory twenty-five years?”

“That’s the law. You know that.”

But maybe that wasn’t true. I was constantly dismayed at how many things lawyers
didn’t
know, how ill-prepared they arrived for trial. What did you call the man or woman who graduated last in the class at medical school?
Doctor.
The same held true for lawyers.

Oliver’s large moist eyes narrowed. “I’ll put it to him,” he promised.

The following week, on a warm February morning, he returned to my office. Settling into a chair, he wiped his forehead with a damp handkerchief.

“This Morgan boy’s crazy as an outhouse rat. Wants to take it to a jury. Claims he’s innocent.”

“I’m sure he does. But you’ve seen the evidence.”

“Evidence don’t mean a damn when you’re young and full of piss and vinegar.”

“You know a jury will find him guilty, Mr. Oliver. There are two eyewitnesses and two separate confessions. He’s got a prior criminal record that includes violence. Morgan’s black and the murdered man was white. That alone could kill him. I’m giving him a good deal. I’m giving him air to breathe.”

Oliver sighed. “He says black folks will see he didn’t do it.”

“No,” I said sharply. “Black or white won’t matter. And you can’t tell a Baptist juror that your client reads a chapter of the Bible every day. When she sees what Morgan and Smith did to Mrs. Zide’s face, she’ll get mean. Your responsibility, sir, in a case like this, where the evidence is strong, is to keep your client alive.”

Oliver said, “I don’t think this particular client has both oars in the water.”

I shifted position, swiveling to look at the river. I wished I were out there sailing—it was difficult to kill anyone at the helm of a sailboat.

Turning back, I said, “Tell him this. If he goes to trial and he’s found guilty, I’ll do my best to put him in a coffin. He panicked that night at the Zides’—I can grasp that. But he had a weapon in his hand. He was prepared to use it, and he used it. A jury could reach up and bite off his big black dick. Tell him that’ll hurt.”

Oliver looked glum. “You think that boy’s quiet and repentant,” he said. “I’m here to tell you he’s got a mouth on hinges. He’d argue with a signpost, he doesn’t know ‘Sic ‘em’ from ‘Come here.’ He says to me, ‘Fuck you, and fuck this Ted Jaffe. Whup his Jew-boy ass.’ “

Oliver wasn’t bargaining; he was turning me down. No smooth road.

Still I didn’t quite believe it was going to happen. I waited a week. It had to be that Darryl Morgan’s nerve would break first, and he would cop out and take the offer of life.

I called Gary Oliver at his run-down office over on Poinciana Boulevard.

“Has he changed his mind yet?”

“No, he wants a trial.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Believe it, sir.”

That was how I was trapped into going to trial in a capital murder case—my last case as a prosecutor in Jacksonville. I wondered if Beldon had known all along that it was going to happen, but it took me twelve years before I gathered up enough anger to ask.

Chapter 4

“RUBY,” I YELLED, flying by her desk on the way out. “I’m going to the beach.”

“Are you serious?”

But she knew I wasn’t. In Sarasota, at the time when Jerry Lee Elroy called me from the jail, I was working on four cases. All seemed headed for trial unless the parties could agree to settle out of court.

In one, a Longboat Key real estate developer was suing a contractor for major construction errors and failure to deliver on time. In another, a pro football player with the Tampa Bay team had become involved in a dispute with a local transvestite hooker—”Man, she was wearing a bikini, she had tits, and down in the crotch you couldn’t see any bulge at all!”—and he had cut her up so badly she required forty-five stitches. In the third case, after a local savings and loan had been taken over by the government, its former CEO was being sued in a class action for fifty million dollars. The last case involved alleged price-fixing by Manatee County milk distributors.

I drove across the causeway for lunch at the Colony Beach & Tennis Club with Harvey Royal, senior partner of our firm, and our client, the condo developer who was suing the contractor. A few yards from the Gulf, while a fresh sea breeze rustled the palm fronds, we discussed trial strategy and a list of witnesses to subpoena. The food was gourmet, the air unpolluted. I lived five minutes away. This was definitely the good life, recession or not.

When the client left, Harvey and I spent another half hour over coffee, continuing to develop a theory of defense in the S
&c
L case. We discussed nonperforming commercial loans,
quid pro quo
transactions, FDIC pleadings, the appearance of growth at the expense of long-term health.

Harvey called for the check. “Any new business coming in?”

“Two-bit stuff.”

“We can’t afford two-bit stuff these days, Ted.”

“Keeps me off the streets,” I said.

Harvey offered a watery smile.

I drove back across the causeway that spanned the calm blue waters of Sarasota Bay, thinking about Jerry Lee Elroy.

A state’s witness had lied. Common enough. We lawyers lived in a jungle of lies. I couldn’t recall any case that had gone to trial in which some surprise revelation hadn’t popped because of a damning fact that a client had overlooked, or conveniently misremembered, or lied about. But this was different. Elroy, my witness, had lied because he’d made a deal with a cop, Floyd Nickerson.

I finally remembered the name.. ..

Darryl Morgan had confessed to Nickerson, who had shored up his position by suborning false testimony from a jailhouse snitch. If that had come to light during the proceedings, Nickerson would have been booted out of the sheriff’s office and Elroy would have been charged with a felony. There would have been a retrial.

Dumb, because the case was good enough already. In fact, airtight. So why had Nickerson done that?

I had no satisfactory answer.

For the last dozen years I had banished from my conscious mind the murder of Solomon Zide and the memory of Darryl Morgan. My unconscious mind was a different story. I had had nightmares. Those nightmares were of a man’s head bursting into flames. But they never visited me more than twice a year, and I had learned to live with them.