Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (7 page)

In junior high, however, and at home, when I used such cracker language, eyebrows were raised. And Rhoda, eager for revenge, laughed at me. I hated her for that.

I had a secret relationship with Rhoda. When we were younger and traveled in the back seat of the family Chrysler, Rhoda often complained, “He’s
touching
me.” Neither of our parents saw evidence of this, but it was true. I don’t believe there was anything sexual in what I did to her; I was just trying to annoy her. I was not innocent, not truly good. I knew I had to work at being good, and it often seemed like too much trouble. Rhoda would get up from the TV and say, “He’s making noises at me. He’s breathing funny.” She didn’t whine these complaints, which lent some credence to them; but no one except me understood what she meant. I was being driven by forces just a hair beyond my control.

Eventually the tormented Rhoda would go upstairs to her room and read. As a result she was better educated than I and later was offered several graduate scholarships when she left FSU cum laude as a psychology major. She moved to La Jolla, California, became a psychotherapist, and married a man in the bagel business.

Her relationship with me now was friendly but distant. She, more than anyone, suspected that I wasn’t truly good. She would not have been surprised by what happened between me and Connie Zide.

I first met Connie Zide almost a year before the night of the musicale and the murder of her husband. Driving home from work one afternoon, I decided to stop at the Regency Plaza Mall to buy a tie. The dark-red foulard I had bought two years before at Dillard’s was my favorite to wear in court, but I had spilled turkey gravy on it at lunch a few days earlier. The stain refused to come out.

I nosed the Honda toward an empty slot in the mall parking lot, and at that moment a tall, tawny-haired woman emerged from Dillard’s, moving from cool shade into the glare of sun. She wore a tailored gray suit. She was not young. That woman, I thought, can’t be as beautiful and as elegant as I believe she is—there’s no one like that in Jacksonville. There may be no one like that in North Florida. Palm Beach, New York, the cover of
Vogue,
that’s possible. Shadow and artifice were ganging up to trick the senses of an overworked man.

A young fellow in blue jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt stepped from behind a Datsun. Gold chains jangled around his neck and glittered in the slant of hot light. Quickly, with peppy strides, he closed the distance between himself and the elegant woman. I hit the brake and threw the car into Park. I wanted to yell, “Watch out!” but I was too far away.

Alejandro Ortega, born in Santiago de Cuba nineteen years earlier, son of a
marielito,
expert broad-daylight jewelry thief, got rapidly to where he was headed—face-to-face with Doña Constancia—and slipped his hand through the big gold necklace dangling from her white throat. He yanked hard. As he expected, the connecting link snapped.

Connie Zide gave a tremulous cry. A bone at the back of the neck, a cervical vertebra, was bruised.

Alejandro clutched the necklace in his hand and wheeled, ready to sprint through the parking lot to his souped-up Trans Am, which faced the exit in the shade of a royal palm, driver’s door open a few inches, motor idling.

Connie Zide owned a lot of jewelry. Most of it was expensive. She’d once filed a claim with her insurance company for a two-and- a-quarter-carat white diamond that had slipped out of its setting. It took more than a year to collect, and even then it wasn’t payment in full. After that she had copies made of her best jewelry, and she wore the copies on shopping trips or to luncheons where there wasn’t tight security. So what Alejandro Ortega snatched from her lovely white neck was fake.

She was wearing low black heels. She took one quick step, and as

Alejandro started to bolt, with her red-tipped fingers she tore one of the gold necklaces from his neck.

Later she said, “Why did I do that? Because I felt violated, Ted. People think they can do anything they want with a woman who’s on her own. And most of the time they’re right. But I hate that feeling. You’re just a target for these little shits.”

“You weren’t frightened?”

“There wasn’t time.”

“Did you mean to yank the chain off his neck?”

“I didn’t
mean
anything, for heaven’s sake. It was all adrenaline.”

“And weren’t you frightened that he’d retaliate? They do that, Connie.”

“I had a pistol in my handbag. And a license to carry it.”

“You’d have used it?”

“If I had to …
quien sabe?”

Alejandro’s necklace was a gift from his girlfriend Luisa, who brokered a little three-card monte game down in Coral Gables, where Alejandro lived most of the time when he wasn’t touring the better shopping malls of the southern United States. He got four or five quick running steps away from his mark before he realized that the feeling he’d experienced of something wrenched from his skin was genuine; it had signaled the disappearance of the 24K gold chain draped with much affection about his neck by the beloved Luisa. Inscribed too, with tender sentiments. He whirled in the air like a basketball guard about to launch the ball to the hoop. The bitch had scoffed his necklace!

He snaked toward her, lips curled in a smile of acknowledgment, the way a torero contemplates a bull who’s made a thrust of his horns into the torero’s territory. He extended his hand in mute, eloquent demand. At that point he became aware of a presence growing larger by the millisecond, but it was too late to do anything about it. That presence was me.

I’d decided that if this unknown beautiful woman could do what she’d done, then I, the male of the species, could get off my butt and lend a hand. I weighed one hundred and sixty-seven pounds and hit that fellow broadside, on the run, with a bent shoulder. One hundred fifty pounds of Alejandro flew backward, striking the radiator of the Datsun with such force that the wind left his lungs. He wound up on his knees, visibly amazed, huffing. I had twisted his right arm high up behind his back.

I looked up at the woman in the gray suit and said, “Would you mind, ma’am, going back into Dillard’s? Ask someone to call 911. Don’t take too long.”

And to Alejandro I said, “Don’t even think about fighting back. I’ll snap your arm like a twig. Then I’ll break your neck. I’m a karate black belt.
Cinturon negro, comprendes?”

There wasn’t a word of truth in any of that.

Pale but thrilled, Connie Zide said, “My hero.” It didn’t sound at all sarcastic.

I’m almost positive that the serious expression on my face didn’t alter, but some other sea change took place in me, some upheaval of the senses in keeping with my braggadocio. Latin people have a name for it, which translates into English as the “thunderbolt.” You cannot evade its effects.

After the cops arrived and wrote down Mrs. Solomon Zide’s name, address, and telephone number, and bundled Ortega off to the Duval County Jail, Connie slumped against the side of her car and said, “My God, what a thing to happen! I need a drink. Can you indulge me just a bit more than you already have?”

We went to the first bar we could find on Atlantic Boulevard: a quietly lit place called Ruffino’s Kitchen, which served thin-crust pizza. She ordered a double Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks with a twist.

We talked, but there was a roaring in my ears, and half the time I wasn’t able to listen with the required concentration. I had known a few beautiful women before. Toba, when she was in her twenties, would have been considered beautiful, or close to it. A young assistant public defender who had been Miss Florida and had an M.A. in penology hit on me for an entire winter, and I patted her cheek and said, “You’re lovely, Angie, and I’ll bet it would be great fun, but I don’t need the complication.”

Connie Zide’s blue-green eyes, set in the perfect oval of her face, were large and clear, her lips ruddy and full, her teeth even and white. Her body was richly sculpted, with a slender neck, round breasts, and long legs. All of this was topped by an affluence of silky light-brown hair that fell halfway down her back unless she piled it on top of her head, which is what she normally did in public. (Most southern women then, I’d observed, had hair that looked fried and dyed.) If you got past the dazzle you noticed that she was deep into her forties but looked ten years younger. That was because her bones were prominent and also because she’d had periodic work done on the skin and musculature by a world-class cosmetic surgeon in Atlanta. The sea-colored eyes were veiled from time to time by melancholy light, and her smile had that same underlying worry. Her raucous laugh came as a welcome surprise; sometimes it seemed to surprise even Connie Zide.

“Well, Mr. Jaffe, what happens next?”

A question wild with meaning. I held her gaze as steadily as I dared. It wasn’t possible, I decided, that she was reacting to me the way I was reacting to her. Such things didn’t happen—not to me.

“You have to go down to the courthouse first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “File a complaint. Make a statement. Otherwise they can’t hold this guy.”

“He’ll get sprung?”

“You watch cop shows?”

She laughed wickedly. “Good heavens, Mr. Prosecutor, everyone knows
sprung
.”

“Here’s how it works, Mrs. Zide. In most states, this kid would have to be indicted by a grand jury. In Florida, to speed things up, we do it differently. One of the people in my office will be there at the jail to hear what the cops have to say. They’ll file a probable cause affidavit, and the assistant state attorney will file what’s called an information. Unless the kid wants to hire his own lawyer, someone from the public defender will be there to represent him. The point is, nothing will happen from then on if you don’t go down to the courthouse and make a sworn statement. I’ll have to do it too. I was a witness.”

She sighed. I had heard that kind of sigh before.

“I know,” I said. “But if we let him get away with it, he’ll be at another mall in a few days. Hit on some other woman. The cops found a switchblade knife in his pocket. You don’t know what he might have done to you if I hadn’t been here.”

She thought that over and then asked, “Who do I make the statement to?”

“The assistant state attorney who gets the case.”

“Won’t that be you?”

“It’ll be someone who works for me. I’m chief assistant state attorney.” I shrugged, meaning: that’s a big deal in my world, not yours.

“Would you be able to handle this personally?”

“Why?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

She looked at me calmly. She could have said: Because I feel comfortable with you. Or even: Because you were here. But she had said, Do
I have to tell you?
What was she telling me? I felt guilty already, and nothing had happened.

“I’m a witness,” I said. “I’ll have to bow out at a certain time. But until such time comes, yes, of course I’ll handle it.”

It will be difficult to justify that, I thought. And absurd. And I’ll kill anyone who tries to stop me.

“Are you married?” she asked.

My heart pounded; her bluntness frightened and captured me. “Happily married. With two kids.”

“And one more dumb question. Are you Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. Something in your voice. Old World warmth. My goodness, you’re blushing. A bashful Jewish prosecutor. There aren’t many, are there?”

She didn’t have a southern accent, and I asked where she was from. Scranton, Pennsylvania, she told me. I asked more questions; it seemed safer than answering them. She had done a little modeling after high school, she said, then gone out to L.A to become an actress. But there were too many actresses, and some of them—this was a shock to her—could really act. In five years a few bit parts were all she managed to land. Then she got married and was brought by her husband to Jacksonville.

“What name did you use on the screen?”

“Constance Clark. My real name.”

“So you’re not Jewish.” ‘

“I converted.”

“Why?”

“Out of respect for my husband.”

I liked that answer. It gave her a weight and depth that she hadn’t had. It also implied that she was involved in her husband’s life, cared for him, could fend off anything alien and potentially damaging. I had never met Solomon Zide, although you could not live in Jacksonville without knowing Zide Industries. Not just the conglomerate, that statewide octopus, but Solly’s local projects. ZiDevco, the real estate development subsidiary, was changing the bulkhead line of Duval County, buying up mud flats and bay bottom and then, with the approval of the county commissioners, converting them to golf courses, yacht harbors, and home sites, from the low 80s to the 200s, as the ZiDevco billboards proclaimed. Progress, Florida style—full speed ahead, and damn the ecologists.

“May I call you Edward?”

“Ted will do it.”

“I know you’re a prosecutor and a happily married man, which on both counts I find interesting, but what else?”

“What do you want to know?”

An intense, clear light seemed to pour through her eyes. Much later, looking at some wallpaper samples in a department store, I identified their color as Copenhagen Blue. The color illuminated my dreams for a long time.

She said calmly, “If I said ‘everything,’ would you feel I was rushing things?”

I felt a sensation in my spine and fingertips: that spiraling high again. But I couldn’t help wondering: why me? She’s rich, beautiful, intelligent, and she’s courageous to boot. And what am I?

I believed then that I was a man of value, but other than in the courtroom, I had never seen myself as a star. A good lover, good thinker, good father: all that. But not great, and I did not aspire to greatness. That was too narrow and rocky a path. I aspired to harmony, to ease of conscience, to well-being for myself and those under my wing.

Now I saw myself capable of losing all that. A great chasm, what I would soon think of as the Grand Canyon of my life—that wide, that colorful, that glorious—had appeared directly in my path. And I was stumbling toward it.

I didn’t answer Connie Zide’s question, just moved my hand toward hers; she clasped it, squeezing it as hard as I reckoned she could. Her fingers were thin and cool. Her eyes were knowing.