Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (6 page)

At three o’clock I appeared once again at the Sarasota County Jail. With Jerry Lee Elroy, I stood before the judge who had drawn bond duty. Elroy handed me a certified check drawn on a Miami bank, and I passed it along to the bondsman.

By 4:00 P.M. my new client was a free man. While I waited by the wire cage, he collected his red nylon windbreaker, gold wedding ring, asthma inhaler, money, and Miami Dolphins key ring. He wore a baseball cap that said DAMN FLORIDA SEAGULLS and had fake bird droppings all over the top.

“Lookit here.” Elroy waved a bulging wallet made of alligator hide. “They never give it back to you in the same currency. I had three hunnerd-dollar bills and three twennies—now I got enough fives and ones you can stuff a turkey. Suppose some guy with AIDS had all this shoved up his asshole? You mind waiting while I try and get my hunnerds back?”

“Yes. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said. I grabbed his arm, more roughly than I’d intended. But he got the point. That was a language he understood.

In my office, seated in a Florentine green leather chair and looking out at the bay through the tinted plate glass, Elroy was more subdued. He was impressed by the opulence. (And so he should be; it had cost more to furnish that office than most men make in a year.) It promised staying power and clout, which were usually more desirable than justice. Except that now a fly had managed to sneak into the office, buzzing not around Elroy, who stank, but around me.

I leaned forward across the expanse of polished desk and said, “What you told me before about what happened up in Jacksonville. I can chew it, Elroy, but I can’t swallow it. You follow?”

The damned fly landed on my nose. I brushed it away.

“Hey, it was a long time ago,” Elroy said. “Maybe nine, ten years.”

“Nearly twelve. And the first thing I want to know is, back then, did you think I
knew}”

Elroy just shrugged.

The fly was back, droning around my left ear. This was not adding to my dignity. “Listen to me carefully,” I said. “I would never have let you testify in the Zide case if I’d known you were lying.”

Elroy said, “Oh, sure. Well, I mean, how’m I supposed to know who knew what? I only knew what the cop and the other lawyer told me.” He was watching the fly. “I’m talking about that state chick who was out to get me on the battery charge.”

“She and Floyd Nickerson came to you and made the proposition?”

“Who? Oh, yeah, right, the cop. I told you, he talked to me on the roof and asked me to do him this favor. Then later the state chick says, ‘Okay, we’re waiving the bail bond, we’ll cut you loose on your own …’ What’s it called?”

“Your own recognizance.”

“Right. On my own … on that. ‘All you gotta do is show up in this other court, repeat what you told this detective. If not, your nuts’ll wind up in a sling.’ “

“You ever talk to Morgan about the shooting?”

“The fuck is Morgan?”

I kept my tone even. “Darryl Morgan was the man in your cell, the one you swore confessed in your presence that he’d murdered Solomon Zide.”

Elroy smiled shrewdly. “Yeah, he talked to me. Four guys in a cell, hard not to talk to the next guy. And these other two, they was real swamp rats from over in Columbia County. Morgan was a tree nigger, know what I’m saying? He goes, Ts in here for a bad reason, ‘cause I don’t kill no one and they says I do. I’s in deep shit.’ And I go, ‘Hey, man, tell me about it.’ So he did—like he thought I really meant
tell
me about it. So he does it. He
told
me.”

“What exactly did he tell you?”

“Like how he and his dumb-assed pal tried to rob this fancy house, and they make a real mess of it. Someone comes running after them, so they run away. I go, ‘Hey, dude, you’re up for first-degree murder, that story ain’t worth a milk bucket under a bull. You gotta turn it into: they try to shoot you, you shoot back—like it’s self-defense, see?’ He goes, ‘I never had no gun. That don’t be true.’ “

Elroy stopped, rose from the leather chair, took a manila folder from a pile, and swatted the fly against the lemon-smelling teak surface of my desk. With one blackened thumbnail he flicked it to the carpet. He smiled thinly, then sat down again.

“Counselor, I ain’t learning nothing when I’m doing all the talking. When are we gonna discuss
my
case?”

There was no way out of it; that was my job. And it was a way to get where I had to go.

“Tell me everything that happened.”

He had run a stoplight, he said, at Route 41 and Beach Avenue. He had an outstanding warrant for failure to pay traffic tickets, and when the traffic cops flashed him over he’d cut through a bank parking lot and tried to lose them on the back roads before you get to the interstate. But then he took the wrong turn down a dirt road and came up against a chain-link fence at the end of a cul-de-sac. They nailed him.

In the back seat of the car they spotted a triple-beam balance scale. Probable cause. They held him by the side of the road and radioed in for a drug dog. A cocker spaniel jumped straight to the trunk of the Cutlass and went nuts.

“They’re going to want to know who you got the cocaine from,” I said. “If you decide to be a stand-up guy and keep your mouth shut, you can forget about the five years I was talking about yesterday. You’re looking at ten to fifteen.”

“You mean if I get convicted.”

“Pay attention, Elroy. If you go to trial and get convicted, the judge will classify you as a habitual offender, stick it to you on three separate counts, and run the sentences back-to-back. That could add up to half your life. I’m talking about getting it down to ten to fifteen if you make a deal.”

“That’s what you call a
deal
? Where are we, Red China?”

“It’s the best you can get unless you snitch.”

Elroy wasn’t the kind of man who had to think that over for more than a few seconds. “What do I get if I snitch?”

“Five years, maybe. You might even walk away if you convince them your cooperation is sincere.”

“I can be plenty sincere. But I have to tell you, Counselor, these other people they might want to know about, these are heavyweight dudes. These people are from Miami. You snitch on these people, they inch you. You know what that is?”

“Yes.”

Elroy glanced around at my plush office, with its rows of classical CDs and bound
National Geographies.
“You sure you know what that is?”

I leaned back in the jade-green leather chair and said calmly, “They cut off your fingers. And then your hands, and then your feet. And then your cock. Inch by inch. With a machete. Right?”

Elroy nodded solemnly. “It ain’t just a bedtime story, amigo.”

“You ever hear of the witness protection program?”

“I saw a movie about it on TV. This guy’s ex-wife’s boyfriend snitched and got into it, so she and him took the guy’s kids to another state. Got a new name. Poor guy didn’t see his kids for years, and he hadn’t done nothing at all.”

“Well, Elroy, you haven’t got kids and an ex-wife, have you?”

He laughed bitterly. “I do, but I don’t know where the fuck they are.”

“Then think about it. I’ll talk to whoever’s handling this in the state attorney’s office. I’ll see what they’ve got on you that you haven’t told me about. Meanwhile, don’t leave town.”

Ruby was printing out the day’s letters on the LaserJet, stacking the revisions of legal briefs and collating whatever parts of the copies the big Xerox hadn’t collated: getting ready to hit the singles bars on the Quay. I came out of my office at ten past five.

“Just a few things, Ruby, if you don’t mind. And if you haven’t got a hot date …”

Ruby was a divorced woman in her late thirties who answered ads placed in the local magazines. But she still blushed.

“What is it, Ted?”

“Book me on a late-afternoon flight to Jacksonville the day after tomorrow. Then get in touch with the sheriff’s office up there. See if there’s a Homicide detective named Floyd Nickerson still on the roster. Find out his shift and his days off. If they give you a hard time, call Kenny Buckram at the PD’s office—he’ll help. Then call the state attorney’s office, Fourth District. There was an aggravated battery case nolle-prossed back in ‘79. The accused was our client, Jerry Lee Elroy. I need to know the woman ASA who prosecuted and dropped the case. See if she’s still around.”

Ruby looked up from her shorthand pad. “Will you need a hotel room?”

“Yes, in town, not the beach. And I’m not finished. Call FSP in Raiford. There was a man named Darryl Morgan committed to death row in April 1979.” I took a deep breath. “I need to know what happened to him.”

“What do you mean?” Ruby asked.

“Was he executed or not. And who handled his appeals.” Even if Morgan was dead, I was obligated to set the record straight.

“Did you say ‘79 or ‘89?”

“
Seventy-nine
, Ruby.”

“That’s twelve years ago. Why wouldn’t they have executed him?”

“Just find out,” I said, and turned away.

At six o’clock I was still reviewing the file when Ruby bounced in, clutching her steno pad and a sheet of yellow legal paper.

“I booked you on two flights on Wednesday—USAir 456 at three forty-five and Delta 1088 at five. Confirm with your credit card number two hours ahead of time. You do that, you can just show up and run on board. You’re in the Marina Hotel, eighty-nine dollars with a king-size bed. That’s a corporate rate. Did you want a rental car the other end?”

“Yes, if I go.”

“I reserved National. A compact. You get mileage on your One Pass frequent flier program.” Pleased, she looked back at the steno pad.

“The prosecutor in the Elroy case was named Muriel M. Suarez. She’s still there. Floyd J. Nickerson left the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in 1980. They didn’t choose to tell me where he is now, or maybe they really don’t know. I put in a call to Mr. Buckram at the public defender’s office, but he was in Tallahassee for the day. I left a message with his secretary for him to call you at home tonight up to eleven P.M. Was that okay?”

“Fine,” I said. My heartbeat was accelerating. The worst for the last. She was torturing me because I’d made her stay in the office so late.

She read from her notes. “Darryl Arthur Morgan entered FSP 24 April 1979. Appeal to the Florida Supreme Court in June 1981— that was denied. Court of Appeals, Second District, filed on the basis of previous incompetent counsel—also denied. That’s 1983. Public defender handling it all. Appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Tampa, denied in 1985. Atlanta, Federal Court of Appeals, application denied. We’re up to 1988. Application for cert with the U.S. Supreme Court—naturally, denied. The governor signed the death warrant on October 2, 1990. Scheduled for execution, assuming no relief in the trial court, on April 11 of this year, 1991. One more appeal for postconviction relief to the trial court in Jacksonville. Original trial judge no longer on the bench, case will go to another judge. Decision pending.”

I said quietly, “You’re telling me that Morgan is still alive.”

Ruby said, “He better be, because if they find out a dead man’s making all these appeals, they’re going to be seriously pissed off.”

Chapter 5

BEFORE WORLD WAR II, my father had been an insurance salesman in the Bronx. He spent the war as a clerk at a naval base in Virginia, and in 1945 his insurance company asked him to start a branch office in Jacksonville.

Sylvia Jaffe, my mother, said, “Miami would be acceptable, Leonard. But Jacksonville? Who ever heard of it? Where in Florida is this place?”

“An industrialized city, in the north of the state,” he reported. “On the beach. A short drive anyway.”

“Did you know,” he said to us on the train ride down, “that once upon a time there were Indians in Florida, just like in the Tom Mix movies?”

Neither my younger sister, Rhoda, nor I had known that.

“And that they had thirty movie studios! But there were so many car chases and mob scenes that in 1920 the city fathers got fed up to the gills and kicked them out. Can you imagine? They lost
all that.”

I asked my father if there were still Indians.

“Where?”

“Where we’re going,” I said impatiently. It may have been my first cross-examination.

“Maybe,” Leonard said.

The Timucuans had been wiped out by the French Huguenots, and what was left of the Seminóles and the Mikasukis lived far to the south in the Everglades. As a boy I never quite grasped that; I was sure they were nearby because someone in authority had told me so, and from the age of seven onward I roamed the banks of the St. Johns River in search of any indigenous population I could find: a Jewish Tom Sawyer. Rhoda asked to go with me, but I left her at home. Girls couldn’t do that sort of thing, I told her, with the wisdom of my youth and of those straitjacketed times.

In the environs of Jacksonville, whose rutted trails and bogs I explored on a single-speed Schwinn bicycle, what I found (instead of redskins) were Florida crackers who skinned possum and ate deep- fried turtle and marsh hens. I came upon old men in the cypress strands who took me fishing for sheephead and snapper and who taught me that different animals’ eyes shine different ways: a coon’s green, a gator’s persimmon red, and a deer’s eyes golden red like a coal of fire. I learned to say “a mess of” when I meant a lot, “a tad bit” when I meant a little.