Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (4 page)

Solomon Zide had been shot twice in the chest with a .38-caliber revolver. A third bullet had been found lodged in the Swedish oak paneling on the far side of the room. Connie Zide had been slashed twice, once in the upper arm and once in the face. Neither weapon was ever found; they were presumed to have been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean or the Intracoastal Waterway. Minutes later young Neil Zide, unhurt but close to hysteria, called the Jacksonville Beach police and then a man named Victor Gambrel, the head of security for Zide Industries. When Gambrel and the law and the paramedics all came storming up the driveway and into the house, Neil had recovered and was able to describe the murderer of his father. “Young, black, wearing sneakers, jeans, and I seem to remember a dark T-shirt. There were two of them. I didn’t get a decent look at the other one who cut my mother. They were obviously clumsy, they didn’t expect anyone to be awake at that hour… . My father surprised them, and they panicked. No, I don’t know how they got onto the property. They ran off that way.” He pointed in the direction of the beach.

By the time the JSO Homicide team arrived on the scene, the entire estate was locked in the hard yellow glare of its own floodlights. Detective Tanagra found the dead Doberman—poisoned by a piece of meat. She also found imprints of two pairs of sneakers in the wet sand near the beach cabanas. From the spacing and the gouges in the dunes, it looked to her as if two men had been running. One of them wore size fourteen or fifteen shoes.

“Let’s cruise around,” Floyd Nickerson said to her. “Pair of bayou coons, where can they go? Feet like that you can’t hide.”

The team of detectives drove off in their unmarked Plymouth and left the tech squad to do its work. Tanagra, at the wheel, headed south on A1A, then veered off to Marsh Landing before taking Roscoe Boulevard along the Intracoastal, while Nickerson broadcast an APB throughout the county. The detectives stopped at various bars and icehouses, then angled west and then north on Southern Boulevard. Over the mossy bayous and highways hovered a jungle darkness. They stopped at bars with pickup trucks out in front, talked to bartenders and waitresses. Black men drinking beer and rye whiskey peered at them with stoic dread. Nickerson, in his late thirties, was burly, mustached, his pockmarked white skin shiny with sweat; he was made instantly as a cop. Carmen Tanagra was thin, flat-chested, good-looking, often taken for a junkie.

The detectives turned east on Atlantic Boulevard, back toward the beaches and in the direction of the naval air station. They passed gas stations and car dealerships and pizza joints, empty lots overgrown with weeds, supermarkets, a Discount Auto Parts, intermittent Lil’ Champ food stores. A big sign on an abandoned warehouse said GO GATORS. At nearly 5:00 A.M. the air was cool but still humid.

Nickerson had a nose for finding people. “Turn in there… .” He pointed across the highway to a Lil’ Champ, with its plastic statue of a kid standing with one gloved fist raised.

Tanagra slowed the Plymouth. “You need something?”

“Smokes.”

They both smoked red Marlboros. “I’ve got an extra pack,” she said.

With a blunt finger, Nickerson pointed again. “Just turn in, Carmen.”

A blue, salt-pitted ‘68 Ford pickup, which had been smacked in the rear and had a caved-in panel behind the passenger’s side door, stood isolated in one of the parking slots. A Pink Panther hung from the rearview mirror. The front bumper was broken. A small puddle of leaking oil glistened in the blurry glow of a streetlamp.

“Nigger truck,” Floyd Nickerson said.

Two young men came out of the Lil’ Champ, carrying a carton of milk, a six-pack of Miller High Life, and several bags of potato chips. One of them, William Smith, was lean and tall. He wore a gray sweatshirt and sported an Afro. The other youth, Darryl Morgan, wore faded jeans and a black Nike T-shirt. He was huge, probably six feet six, could have been a basketball player from U. of North Florida, except that as he ducked his skullcap of black crinkly hair to move through the door, he moved awkwardly, not the way an athlete would move. Nickerson glanced down at Darryl Morgan’s sneakers. Feet like boats.

By the time the detectives stepped forth to be seen, William Smith

had climbed behind the wheel of the pickup and slammed the door behind him. Darryl Morgan, the big-footed one, moved more slowly.

“
Poh
-lice! Hold it right there!” Nickerson flipped his gold shield, which said JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF’S OFFICE. He made sure the crackling fluorescent light above the Lil’ Champ shone on it. “Let’s see some ID, boys.”

No one moved. Moths struck and sizzled on the fluorescent tubes.

“He over twenty-one,” Morgan said, indicating Smith in the truck. Smith had carried the beer. “I jus’ along for the ride.”

Nickerson said, “If I wanted to hear from an asshole, I’d have farted.”

Smith turned the ignition key, starting the engine so that the pickup rattled violently.

Nickerson tugged at the Saturday Night Special in his waistband.

Tanagra yelled at Smith, “Hold it, hold it right there, hold it!” She reached for her own pistol. “You hear me? Right there!”

Morgan backed his huge frame against the building. His eyes were wide as eggs.

Nickerson dropped to one knee and fired what he would later describe in the official police report as “two warning shots when the suspect Smith attempted to escape.” One of the shots struck a nut on the front left wheel of the pickup, flinging sparks into the night like angry fireflies. The other passed through the old metal of the driver’s door and into William Smith’s left thigh. Smith yelped in pain and fell forward. His left foot lifted off the clutch; the weight of his right leg was thrown onto the accelerator.

The pickup hurtled backward in a screeching curve. Before Smith could shift his weight and lift himself up, the rear end of the truck smashed into a pair of concrete posts on the edge of the highway. The pickup tilted over, as if a dozen men had shoved it, and fell on its side with the sound of a thousand nails being dropped on a counter. Then it bounced and settled. The engine died. A shower of glass fell.

Silence slowly filled the damp air outside the Lil’ Champ. Metal creaked for a minute or so. Until Darryl Morgan, his back still pressed flat against the building, said, “Lord Jesus …”

“Go take a look, Carmen,” Nickerson told his partner.

After a couple of minutes, Carmen Tanagra walked back from the wreck. The way she walked, hips undulating in tight slacks, a distinct space between her upper thighs, often made men stare and calculate. She was not unaware of it.

“Boy seems to have a bullet in his leg. Definitely has a sliver of windshield in his throat, and it’s sticking out the back of his neck. He’s looking poorly.”

“You gonna stand around talking, Carmen? Or call an ambulance?”

“No rush for that, Nick.”

“What are you saying?”

“Graveyard dead, that’s what I’m saying.”

Nickerson’s eyes rolled in his head. He wheeled on Darryl Morgan, who towered over him but looked as frightened as a rabbit dumped into a swamp teeming with alligators.

Nickerson said angrily, “You and your dead pal been out to the beach tonight, right? Looking to score a few TV sets, or maybe better. Got caught in the act and lost your cool, and you shot a man. Big fella, don’t pop my cork by telling me it ain’t so! Let’s just hear about it. And then I’ll tell you how you got the right to remain silent, and all that other shit.”

Chapter 3

TEN DAYS AFTER the murder of Solly Zide I accepted the job with the Sarasota law firm. Then it was called Royal, Kelly, Green & Wellmet—Green was the one leaving, and Jaffe was about to insinuate himself into the letterhead. I gave three months notice to the state attorney’s office in Jacksonville and celebrated by buying a case of chateau-bottled Bordeaux.

But I was basically a sober fellow and still had work to do. One of the places to do it was the Lawyers Lounge on the fourth floor of the Duval County Courthouse. The voices drifting through its smoky blue air might have been those of men and women chattering in a singles bar, except that the subject was time served, deals offered, the hairpin curves of criminal law.

One morning I sat on the sofa there with a young assistant public defender, plea-bargaining a drug case. She said gravely, “Mr. Jaffe, the last offer you made was a straight eighteen. Would you consider coming down to maybe twelve years, with a substantial fine?”

I swallowed more coffee; I knew this was going to be a long day. “Eighteen is bottom line,” I said, “and if your client had the brains of a pissant, she’d take it. Better yet, she’d hightail it back to Colombia.”

“But I can’t tell her to do that, can I?”

That was true. That would break the canons of ethics. But it would certainly simplify matters. Sometimes I wished that lawyers could do what any other practical person would do—like, in this case, tell the client to jump on the next plane and go home.

“Yes,” I said, “she’s got to be smart enough to figure that out for herself. What’s her bond?”

“Fifteen thousand dollars.”

“She’s a mother, right? She’s got two children down there in Medellin?”

“You’re telling me . ..”

“I wouldn’t think of such a thing. You do whatever melts your butter. Just remember how poor the State of Florida is, and that we could use the bail money.”

Most prosecutors, if they hadn’t chosen the law, might have opted for law enforcement or the church. I wasn’t one of that majority.

The telephone by the coffee urn rang, and one of the hovering defense attorneys snatched it up. “Your lord and master,” he said, waving the receiver in my direction.

A moment later the gruff voice of Beldon Ruth said in my ear, “Get your ass upstairs, Ted, if you’re not too busy and you’re still working for me.”

I took the stairs two at a time to the fifth floor and soon sat squeezed between two potted purple azaleas on the window ledge of the state attorney’s office, the only space available for any visitor to sit down. Beldon’s legal files for current cases were spread on the floor in semicircles in front of his desk. They were also piled on the sofa and on three chairs.

“What a fucking mess,” I said. “How are you going to survive when I’m gone?”

“I’ll do just fine. It’s you I’m worried about.” Beldon rocked back and forth in his creaky swivel chair. “I know Sarasota—I took a vacation there once with Laurette. Lost my watch in the sand and didn’t give a rat’s ass. Screwed a lot, drank a lot of Tennessee sour mash, walked into a lot of art galleries, watched a buncha beautiful sunsets. I was sure glad to get home and go to work again. But come to think of it, I guess that was the good life.”

“I’m betting that it still is,” I explained.

Beldon laughed, the deep rumble of a man twice his size.

“What’s Toba going to do while you pace the wall-to-wall carpet of your office, wondering whether to trade your Honda for a Porsche or a Mercedes?”

How well he had come to know me. I wondered if he liked what he now saw.

“Real estate. She may be the one winds up driving the Porsche. You going to hang out here for the rest of your life, Beldon?”

He sighed theatrically. “Bare work and poor pay sort of suits me.”

“I won’t be doing just civil law,” I said, feeling a little defensive. “There’ll be criminal cases.”

“Hell, yes! You’re gonna argue for leniency when rich folks’ kids get drunk at the wheel or buy dope from a lady cop. You’re gonna rack up thousands of hours of community-service sentences. But meanwhile you still work for the State of Florida. So listen up for a bit.”

He picked up the bulkiest of the brown accordion folders piled on his desk.

“The Zide case,” he said.

I had assigned it to Dale Settels, an eager young prosecutor who had moved last year from Boston to Jacksonville.

“A slam-dunk for the state,” I told Beldon.

“It’s for sure a slam-dunk for the newspapers and the TV,” he grumbled. “Could go national, and sure as hell it’ll go southern. Two black perps, and one gets shot by a trigger-happy JSO Homicide asshole while the kid’s trying to escape.”

“Or so the asshole says,” I pointed out.

“Got the ACLU poking their nose into that, and more power to ‘em. So we’re left with one live black defendant in a big murder trial, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s come up with a black lawyer.”

I hadn’t heard about that. “Who is it?”

“Guy named Gary Oliver.”

“I don’t know him.”

“But you see where I’m heading? Constance Zide knows you, likes you, seems to trust you, and she’s asked me if you’ll prosecute.”

I made no comment. This was quicksand.

“An old dog for a hard road,” Beldon said. “You’re not old, and you’re on your way out the door to greener pastures. But you’re the man for the job. Will you do it, Ted?”

My affair with Connie Zide was defunct—Beldon didn’t know about it; no one did—but it was still something for me to consider. Beyond that, however, was an even more worrisome factor. Seven years earlier, in
Furman v. Georgia,
the Supreme Court had declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Florida’s state legislature in Tallahassee was the first to fashion new law to get around that edict. Now in 1979, first-degree murder carried with it the possibility of electrocution, a spectacle that seemed to grip Floridians almost as much as that of a man jerking at the end of the hangman’s noose had once excited the English. Schoolchildren in our state built model electric chairs. The governor had already earned the nickname “Barbecue Bob.”