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

by Clifford Irving

  “Lew Harmon?” I suggested. “Marty Girard?”

  “One of them two, I think. Was a long time ago. What about it, Mr. Jaffe? You got good connections here with the sheriff—can you arrange it?”

  I dropped my voice as though someone might be listening. “Are you sure you can make bail?”

  “I got a friend coming over from Miami tomorrow afternoon. He’ll have the money. But I don’t know a bondsman over here.”

  I made up my mind. Something had to be done, and I had to keep this man under my control no matter what the cost. “I’ll find a bondsman for you,” I said, “and we’ll be here together at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I’ll get you out of here.”

  Elroy seemed surprised. “You’ll take my case?”

  “Yes, I’ll take your case.”

  “What about the fee?” he asked slyly.

  “We’ll work that out. Don’t worry about it. I need to think about this for a while.”

  When I left the jail, the sun was a squashed blood-red ball quivering on the horizon. A chill wind had sprung up to ripple the bay. I hurried to my car, but there was no way to avoid that wind. As it struck me, I had the feeling that it blew out of the past.

  Chapter 2

  IN EARLY DECEMBER, over twelve years earlier, Solomon Zide and his wife sponsored a benefit performance by the Florida Symphony Brass Orchestra. The concert took place at the Zide estate at Jacksonville Beach on what would come to be memorialized as the night of Solly Zide’s death. It was a black-tie affair, part of a tour sponsored by the Jacksonville Mental Health Association. Buffet dinner was $250 a plate.

  I received one of the engraved invitations in the morning mail at my office on the fifth floor of the Duval County Courthouse. The envelope was addressed in blue ink, in a flowing feminine hand, to Edward M. Jaffe, Esq., Chief Assistant State Attorney for the Fourth District of Florida.

  I was a public servant, a prosecutor, not a lawyer who could afford to spend $250 for dinner. I didn’t own the Frida Kahlos then, and the only decent espresso I’d ever had was when I was backpacking through Italy the summer before law school at the University of Florida.

  But the invitation included a handwritten note from Connie Zide, a note that read: “Please come with Mrs. Jaffe. You will be our honored guests.”

  When I arrived home that evening I showed the note to my wife. I told her that I’d called Connie Zide’s secretary and accepted.

  “Why did you do that?” Toba said. “You could have called me first. Why did you assume I’d want to go?”

  We were in the kitchen, where I was opening a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Toba, slim and black-haired, her long neck gracefully curved like that of a Modigliani model, stood at the butcher-block table, chopping onions to go with calf’s liver. She was wearing a hand-printed batik sundress that looked to me as if someone had thrown fried eggs and soggy hash browns over it. In the living room, Cathy and Alan bickered over the volume level of the television. It has always amazed me how women manage to ignore the endless squawks of their children.

  “Since when did you have anything against a party?” I asked.

  Toba glanced up, trying to look at me, but the sting of the onions blurred her vision.

  “Ted, are you attracted to Connie Zide?”

  Radar. Women are born with it. I forced what I hoped would come out as a smile of amused, warmhearted indulgence.

  “Connie’s an attractive woman,” I replied with extreme care. “But no, I’m not attracted to her. Not the way you mean. I admire her. Solly Zide’s supposed to be a hard man to live with.”

  At the time I was thirty-six years old. Connie Zide was forty-seven. Connie and I had been involved in a court case after she had been mugged by a Cuban thief, and later we had served together on the boards of two North Florida Jewish charities. I wasn’t lying to my wife; I wasn’t attracted to Connie any more than I would be to a scorpion that had stung me after I’d walked blindly into the bathroom on a dark, damp night.

  But I was prevaricating; Connie and I, until recently, had had an affair. As a result, I’d learned things about myself that even now, closing in on the age of fifty, I still find difficult to accept. We are what we are, said Theseus back in the Golden Age. But I wonder now if that’s as true as it sounds.

  My child bride, as I liked to call her—she was five years younger than I—seemed to bow to my denial. “Ted, you hate these big fancy parties.”

  “I usually do. But they’re going to play a Mozart horn concerto. That’s hard for me to resist.”

  “The last concert we went to? In summer? You fell asleep in the middle of Wagner.”

  I remembered that debacle, which included a few snores and nearly falling off my chair. “I’d been in trial all week, I was tired, and Wagner’s not my cup of tea. Besides, this is business tonight.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Business? What’s that mean?”

  But then, at last, she had to yell into the living room for the children to stop scrapping and reduce the volume.

  “Come with me to the party,” I said. “I have a surprise for you.”

  On the fateful night, I strolled about the grounds of the Zide estate with my wife. Our hosts lived in a fourteen-thousand-square-foot pink palace fronting the Atlantic. The two-story entrance foyer was dominated by a curving Ferrara marble staircase, which soared from the middle of formal drawing and dining rooms crammed with Louis XIV furniture. Hanging on the red Chinese silk walls were a matched pair of blue Chagalls, a Dufy oil of the paddock at Longchamps, a series of Picasso bullfight sketches, and some god-awful paintings of French court scenes by Forcella. The bathrooms were purple onyx, with the requisite heavy gold fixtures. Parrots sat in cages in each corner of the rooms, squawking a cacophonous tropical medley.

  This outrageous structure was set behind ornate iron gates on a lawn roughly the size of the field at the Gator Bowl, where Toba and I went every November to see our alma mater’s University of Florida Gators battle the University of Georgia Bulldogs. The Zides also had two clay tennis courts and two Jacuzzis, one outdoors and one in the master bedroom suite. The six-car garage housed a Ferrari Mondial, a pearl-gray Mercedes 500SL convertible, a Stutz Blackhawk, and a chocolate-colored Cadillac stretch limo. The entire junglebound estate was edged by massed flower beds under crape myrtles and palm trees.

  “Have you ever been here?” Toba asked me.

  “No,” I lied. We were approaching the buffet tables. “Let’s pig out.”

  Besides the usual cold meats and local shellfish, smoked Nova had been flown down from Zabar’s in New York. The champagne was Moét & Chandon. I could hear the rumble of the ocean surf and smell the fragrance of mimosa. Palm fronds clicked in the darkness. Toba’s black hair shone in the spotlights that illuminated the pool area. I’m a lucky man, I thought, and life is good. And with a little more luck and some patience, soon it will be even better.

  Connie Zide, surrounded by a group of men, passed by and thanked Toba and me for coming. At a party, Connie’s attraction worked collectively. She seemed to hum silently, like a nuclear-powered reactor. No matter where she moved on the grounds of the estate, the center of the party shifted with her. When she excused herself to go to the powder room, people relaxed and felt more at ease. Other women seemed to become more attractive; men’s laughs became more natural. Tonight she was wearing a necklace of pearls and emeralds and a diamond ring with a center pearl so large it gleamed like a small, iridescent ice cream cone. I knew that the jewels were fake.

  Until just two months ago this woman had held me in thrall. On the edge of this very lawn, in the cloaking darkness of a September evening, we had copulated like dogs in heat until I fell away from her with sore knees and weak loins and the fear that I had lost my mind. I was her prisoner then, but now I was free. At least, paroled.

  Toba squeezed my arm. “Are you having fun?”

  “Because I’m with you.” I meant it; no one in my life has ever seemed as comfort
able to be with as my wife.

  “So what’s the secret, Ted? Why are we here?”

  I smiled as if I were about to tell my kids a particularly thrilling bedtime story.

  “Some of Solly Zide’s pals in Sarasota want me in their law firm. They need a litigating partner. Therefore, in the sense that I didn’t say no to the party invitation, I’m kissing Solly Zide’s ass. Is this the beginning of the end of my integrity?”

  “Sarasota? Tell me more!”

  In our view, Sarasota—halfway down the opposite coast of Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico—was where people tended to migrate in order to live the good life. No serious crime, no pollution, no hassle, and not much hustle. And usually no jobs. We were northern Floridians. Toba was from Daytona Beach; we had met at Gainesville when I was in my second year of law school. Neither of our families came from the old Sephardic stock that had emigrated south from the Carolinas during the early nineteenth century, but neither were they arrivistes in red golf pants or ash-blond coiffures and harlequin sunglasses with sparkle frames. They were business folk. They settled and worked and bred.

  I slipped an arm around Toba’s waist. “Did you think you’d always be a prosecutor’s wife? That you’d never travel on the Concorde?” When the puzzled look didn’t quite fade from her eyes, I said, “Something happened on the beach last Sunday.”

  I had been jogging, I told her, wearing a T-shirt that advertised in gold letters the Duval County State Attorneys Athletic Association. I played shortstop for the prosecutorial nine in the Merchants Softball League. “Good field no hit” had always been my label, but this year in the annual game against the defense attorneys I had singled in the winning run with the bases loaded, and the Times-Union had run my photograph with the caption: Ted Jaffe Comes Through. I wasn’t an athlete, so no accolade could be sweeter; I’d framed it and hung it on the wall next to my law diploma.

  But that Sunday on the sand, two skinny black teenagers passed by and glanced at the logo on my sweaty chest. One boy said, “Fuck you, man.”

  I kept on jogging.

  Who had I convicted? A brother? His father? The boy himself? Unknown faces tend to blend into other faces, and when they were of another hue they blended much more easily. I knew that a black sixteen-year-old could hate a honkie assistant state attorney as much as he could hate a white cop. He could hate both because both possessed the power and the potential to harm him, and probably would.

  Toba listened to the story, then shook her head wisely. “That wouldn’t make you turn tail. You get rid of scum, Ted. You feel good about it.”

  Bugs grated against the immense screen covering the pool. The scent of jasmine drifted through the air, and several people passed by, laughing. I drank my second glass of champagne.

  “I guess I’m just a little bit tired of putting people in jail,” I said. “Even scum.”

  “You want to keep them out of jail?”

  Once I had, yes. In the early sixties I’d been a history major at FSU in Tallahassee, where the last Confederate victory of the Civil War had taken place. I led protest marches for civil rights. One night in my final year of law school I was helping the other editors on the Law Review finish off a case of iced Chihuahua beer. My friend Kenny Buckram, another Jacksonville boy, threw out a question to the gang.

  “What’s your deepest ambition?”

  Those were wonderful years: questions had simple answers. “To argue a case successfully before the Supreme Court,” I said. “And to save an innocent man’s life. If possible, at one and the same time.”

  Most of our little group wound up in civil law, where the money was. A few, like Kenny, joined the public defender’s office, but he had a private income from a doting grandmother. And I, for the sake of courtroom experience, joined a clinic program offered by the state attorney’s office. I took four misdemeanor cases to trial before six- person juries in Gainesville, winning all four. I loved winning. It was a kind of aphrodisiac.

  Shortly afterward, Beldon Ruth, chief assistant state attorney in the Fourth Circuit, invited me up to Jacksonville for lunch. Beldon was in his late thirties at the time. Immaculately dressed in a navy blazer, with yellow polka-dot tie and elephant-hide boots, he was “not fat,” as he explained when I knew him better, “just a little short for my weight.” A black man in power: unusual enough in the late seventies, even rarer then, in the sixties. He had been a police sergeant down in Dade, then completed a law degree at Florida Atlantic. A few years later some good ole boy who went up against him on a capital murder case in Jacksonville said, “That nigger could pick your pocket with his tongue.”

  Beldon Ruth and I ate conch fritters and catfish at The Jury Room, a private club in the Blackstone Building, across the street from the courthouse. I explained to him that I had always pictured myself as a defense attorney.

  “You want to help people who are guilty?”

  “Why was I under the impression,” I fired back, “that under American law they’re considered innocent until proved otherwise?”

  “You can consider them whatever you fucking well like,” he said, slathering hot jalapeño sauce on his catfish, “but if we indict them, you can bet your ass they’re guilty. In my bailiwick, a prosecutor doesn’t go to trial unless he has the facts—but a defense attorney goes in there because he has to eat. And before he eats, he has to cozy up to the slimy bugs who rape our sisters and sell smack to our twelve-year-old kids. A prosecutor gets to put those people where they can’t do any more harm. And that dog’ll hunt.”

  We were southerners and spoke the same language. This was not a visiting lecturer in jurisprudence but a man in the trenches. Suddenly I wanted to be there with him, under fire. I shook Beldon Ruth’s hard hand, and I took the job he offered me. When I passed the bar exam I married Toba, and we moved into an apartment on Neptune Beach, forty minutes from the courthouse in downtown Jacksonville.

  Five years later, in a panic to ensure his getting the black vote in the next election, the governor over in Tallahassee called Beldon and asked him if he wanted to be state attorney for Duval County and the Fourth District: that was Jacksonville. The current incumbent had been elected to the state senate.

  Beldon replied—so the legend went—”Governor, would a two- ton hog make a lot of bacon?”

  He considered me his brightest young prosecutor and appointed me to take his place as chief assistant. And that’s who I was on the night my wife and I strolled the moonlit lawn at the Zides’ party and I told her I had a better offer from a Sarasota firm.

  “This firm,” I said, “represents a string of Solly Zide’s luxury condos over on the Gulf. The litigating partner accepted a judgeship. They need an experienced trial lawyer. Someone really good.”

  I wasn’t modest about my skills; when I went to trial I had a ninety-eight-percent conviction rate. My peers had named me Florida Prosecutor of the Year in 1970 and for two years in a row after that kept me as president of the statewide association.

  “Sarasota’s lovely,” Toba said. “But it ain’t cheap, my lad.”

  “The firm’s offered me a draw of eighty-five grand a year against fifteen percent of the profit.”

  Toba’s eyes widened, just as mine had; that was more than double my current salary. But my wife wasn’t an impetuous woman. “You think it would be good for the kids?”

  Alan was eight, a dreamy boy who had trouble paying attention in class. Cathy was ten, a straight-A student. Sometimes it seemed that there weren’t enough books in the Jacksonville library system or local bookstores to satisfy Cathy’s lust to read.

  Toba plucked a fresh glass of champagne from a silver tray. She answered her own question. “Well, maybe. God knows there’s no decent safe high school here in Jacksonville. Not even out at the Beach. You know just what I mean.”

  “Too black is what you mean,” I said.

  “I hate to say things like that. Or even think them. But yes, that’s what I mean. Black means more violence. More drugs.”


  “It would definitely be whiter and safer in Sarasota.”

  We heard the musicians warming up beneath the peppermint- striped tent: first the French horn, then the deep moan of the bassoon, like the wail of a stricken mythical beast.

  “Ted, what do you want to do?”

  I hadn’t lost all my youthful idealism; I still wanted to be involved, to be proud of what I did. But beyond that, I wanted wines smoother to the palate than Gallo. I wanted a little sailboat of my own, and a car for my wife that didn’t break down every other season. I wanted my kids to go to a decent college without my having to pinch pennies and give up the trip to the Soviet Union and the East African safari that Toba and I had talked about for years.

  However mundane all that seemed, I was tired of making small sacrifices. I wanted to be comfortable—maybe quite a bit more than comfortable.

  When I told all that to Toba, she smiled. Her dark eyes were luminous from the wine, and perhaps also because prospects of more gracious living had opened to her.

  “It’s no crime, darling. You say it as if you’re ashamed of it. That’s what everyone wants.”

  “I used to think I wasn’t like everyone else,” I admitted. “That seems to have turned out to be an illusion.”

  “I love you, Ted,” she said.

  I fingered her thick black hair. “So let’s think about it, although not for too long. They need an answer by Christmas.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Connie Zide dancing on the grass to the beat of a steel drum. I thought of her naked, of how her heels beat a wild tattoo on that September night when she’d come underneath me on this immaculate lawn, right there by the swimming pool. I dropped my hand to my wife’s hip and said, “Let’s go into the bushes.”

  Toba’s eyes picked up an even deeper sparkle. She flushed a little. “What’s got into you?”

  Oh, Toba, if only you knew.

  If she knew, if she ever found out, would she be able to handle it? Please God, let me never know the answer to that question.