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

by Clifford Irving

  Toba knew exactly what I was doing.

  The marital bed after a while can become boring; there seems a limited amount of things for the same two people to do there. Long ago I had studied the Kama Sutra and decided that most of it was silly. Could I really maneuver into those positions without a muscle spasm? Can I nibble on her earlobes and suck her toes and talk dirty and still keep a straight face? But I understood the need for variety, to make the manifestation of conjugal love and hormonal need a bit more memorable than merely the component sequential movements of a routine act. There had to be more to it than driving a golf ball properly off a tee so that it soared true for two hundred yards or more. (That also was an act composed of interlinked sequential movements.) And of course there was more to it. If you connected properly, as sometimes happened with the golf ball, the result was thrilling.

  But with us now, that didn’t happen often. In fact, lately it happened more often at the golf tee, which was why on certain weekends, weather permitting, I cast off the lines at the dock and sailed Dreamboat to Whale Key, or White Key, or the relatively empty waters off Bay Isles. I had learned a long time ago—and not only from my wife—how stimulating that change of venue could be.

  Today a rare white heron stalked the shallows near the key. The sun beating down on Toba’s bare breasts tended to make her feel lascivious. When she was lascivious, so I tended to be—and vice versa. That circle with no beginning that makes so many good things possible.

  I dove in, and Toba followed. The coldness of the water stunned us a little. We were quickly back on board, reaching for towels.

  But I wanted her, and the touch of her cold hand was exciting. I licked her nipples, erect and salty.

  A ketch was beating up on the windward side, heading toward Cow Point on Tidy Island. In a few minutes it would pass close enough for anyone with binoculars to see us. “Let’s go below,” I said, resting on my elbows, with my wife’s strong ankles up around the back of my neck. She went to exercise-and-stretch class three times a week.

  “Let them look,” Toba panted. “Maybe they’ll throw money… .”

  All the next day I kept thinking about what I had done. I had never lied to a client before. I could be disbarred. But images of blue fire were never far from my consciousness.

  When I reached home at seven o’clock, sweaty and ready for a swim and a Bloody Mary, Toba was waiting by the side of the pool.

  “Alan talked to me,” she said. “He thinks you don’t respect him. You’re disappointed in him.”

  “He’s right,” I said.

  “He’s depressed. His father’s a high-powered lawyer. His mother, in his cockeyed view, is a successful real estate agent. His sister’s a whiz kid off at an Ivy League college. And he’s a failure. Drugs are the only solace in his life, he says. Marijuana is his best friend.”

  I raised my eyes to heaven.

  “And worst of all, I think,” Toba said, “he’s suicidal.”

  “You think he’s suicidal?” I felt my shoulders sag, my heart seize up with despair.

  “You’re hearing what you want to hear. He says he’s suicidal. He says he climbs into his car, drives across the causeway, and he gets this urge to shut his eyes. He does shut them sometimes, for a few seconds. But then he turns chicken. He says to himself, ‘Dad’ll be furious, and it’ll ruin Mom’s life.’ “

  “Did you tell him that was the understatement of the year?”

  “No. I just cried.”

  That’s what I wanted to do. This was my son’s life. I would have given anything for none of this to be true. I was supposed to do whatever fathers did to protect their young, so that the species didn’t die out. If spotted hyenas and Bengal tigers and birdbrained robins could do it, why couldn’t I?

  “Ted, what are we going to do?”

  But I had no answer. I was heartsick. Unless I could intervene, my son, like Darryl Morgan, was on the road to death.

  Chapter 13

  I FLEW ON a little feeder flight to Jacksonville, rented a car at the airport, and drove straight out 1-10 and then down 121 through scrub woods and air heavy with pine resin. To Raiford again, and to death row.

  Sneakers squeaked where black men played basketball on cracked concrete. Bodies glistened and iron clanged where others lifted weights. Angry voices drifted through sunlight.

  At the main building of the prison, I was expected. My ID was checked, I passed through the metal detector, and I was led into the cool office of the assistant superintendent. A placard on the desk read: RAYMOND G. WRIGHT.

  There were two telephones on the desk: a red instrument to communicate with the outside world, a black one to communicate within the perimeter of the prison. Raymond G. Wright wore a white button-down shirt and a striped tie. A creased brown suit jacket hung on a wooden clothes tree in the corner of the room. I remembered seeing Wright for a minute or two in the death chamber when they had electrocuted Sweeting. Fred Olsen had told me that the assistant superintendent engaged the circuit breakers before the switch was tripped by the executioner and the automatic cycle began. Everyone had a hand in the killing, literally.

  “We don’t get many prosecutors visiting here,” Wright said.

  “You may have misunderstood. I’m not a prosecutor now.” From the breast pocket of my suit jacket I extracted a card from Royal, Kelly, Wellmet, Jaffe & Miller. I slid it across the desk.

  I had come prepared to face the consequences of having struck my fist into Clive Crocker’s face on the day of Sweeting’s execution. Prepared to apologize, offer some compensation if necessary. But my name seemed to mean nothing to Raymond G. Wright. Or perhaps, I thought, FSP administrative assistants were struck so often that no one took much notice.

  “The man I want to visit is Darryl Morgan.”

  “You’re Wizard’s attorney?”

  “Who is Wizard?”

  “That’s what the guards call Mr. Morgan.”

  “No, I’m not his attorney yet. But I will be. I’ve just come from Tallahassee, from CCR—they’re handling his current appeal. The governor’s already signed the death warrant. I believe Morgan’s in what you call Phase One of Death Watch.”

  Wright said, “But you’re not on Mr. Morgan’s visiting list.”

  “I called and your secretary said there wouldn’t be a problem. I prosecuted Morgan,” I added.

  The logic of this seemed to baffle the assistant superintendent. And that was understandable.

  “If it will help,” I said, “you can call Beldon Ruth, the state attorney up in Jacksonville. Or the public defender, Kenneth Buckram. Verify my credentials.”

  Wright cleared his throat and began moving some papers back and forth on the neat surface of his desk. From the expression in his eyes I finally realized that he found it difficult to deal with a situation for which no specific written guidelines existed. A telephone call wouldn’t help.

  Wright frowned. “How could you become his attorney if you prosecuted him? Wouldn’t there be some sort of conflict of interest? You can’t defend someone you once prosecuted.”

  “Are you an attorney-at-law?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then I’d appreciate your not telling me what, as a lawyer, I can and can’t do. I don’t tell you how to run your prison, sir.”

  Wright said, “I wasn’t telling you, sir, I was just asking.” But he reached for the black telephone.

  The attorneys’ interview rooms were in the main building, a quarter of a mile away from Q wing. An underground tunnel connected the two. There were two folding metal chairs and a metal table. Through a glass wall a correctional officer could observe anyone in the interview room but couldn’t hear.

  In another room Darryl Morgan was strip-searched. His waist chain and handcuffs were removed. I stood up when he entered. I avoided his eyes, conscious only of a physically large, dark presence in prison denim.

  Darryl Morgan was thirty-three years old now. If I hadn’t known that, I would have guessed
him to be forty. There was gray in the kinky black hair above the temples. The eyes were deep-set and dark, but they no longer smoldered with anger, as they had in the courtroom where I’d last seen him. They were wintry with resignation. They were old.

  I realized that he didn’t recognize me.

  “You know who I am?”

  “They tell me you’re a lawyer.”

  “You don’t know me?”

  “You looks familiar.”

  “I was at your trial,” I said. “I was the prosecutor.”

  Morgan slowly nodded his huge head up and down. He said nothing. I waited for a reaction, but there was none, or so it seemed.

  “Ted Jaffe is my name. Do you remember me?”

  Morgan nodded again. The eyes barely changed.

  I fought against the instinct to lower my gaze. I could smell Morgan now, an alien bitter smell.

  After a minute he said, “Why’re you here?”

  “To try to help you.”

  That was all I could think of after weeks of gnawing doubt that bordered on torture. Those five words.

  “You help me best,” Morgan said, “by getting the fuck out of here.”

  I had expected that and believed I could deal with it.

  “I understand how you feel, Mr. Morgan.”

  “You do?”

  Abruptly I felt drained. All that was left was my sense of foolishness. I was an intrusion here, my presence a terrible tampering with what remained of a condemned man’s life. What I’ve got to remember, I thought, if I’m going to get through this and accomplish whatever is still worth accomplishing, is that this man did in fact murder an innocent person. Whatever he is now, he was that then. Some outermost punishment was required, or there is no proper equation in events. But by law, not by error or judicial whim.

  “Darryl,” I begged, “please listen to me. I have some new information about your case. I know that your cellmate back in Duval County Jail, Jerry Lee Elroy, lied about overhearing you confess on the telephone. If this comes to light, it could win a new appeal for you—maybe even a new trial. I don’t promise anything. I definitely don’t promise that the verdict will be different. But there’s always a chance that we can get the death penalty decision reversed. I met with the CCR group in Tallahassee yesterday. They’re willing to let me take over the case.”

  Morgan, through all this, kept shaking his head. Not in denial so much as amazement.

  “You’re crazy, man.”

  “I don’t think so.” I almost added: “Although quite a few others agree with you,” but I clamped my teeth together in time.

  “You put me here, man.”

  “Yes, I did. I was part of that process.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Morgan muttered.

  “I need to ask you a lot of questions.”

  “Suck my dick.”

  “You have nothing to lose.”

  “You always got something to lose,” he said.

  “Not at my hands.”

  “Some kind of flimflam here. I told you, I ain’t interested.”

  “Darryl, I don’t work for them anymore. I can’t harm you. I can only help you.”

  “Who you work for?”

  “I’m with a law firm in Sarasota.”

  “You still think I kill that man. Think William Smith stuck a knife in that lady.”

  He was right, but I couldn’t tell him that. “What I think doesn’t matter,” I said carefully.

  “Better you split from here,” Morgan said. “I kill you, what I got to lose?”

  “Didn’t you just say you always have something to lose?”

  “Maybe you right and I wrong. Forty-four days, they gone kill me. What do I care if they kill me for doing you too? Who deserve it more than you and that snitch and that motherfucker cop? Maybe my life have a purpose then. Least then I done something for what they done to me. I strike a blow for brotherhood. You know what Malcolm X say?”

  There was a light in his eyes now for the first time since I had entered the room.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  I had to dominate him. Every lawyer has to dominate his client. In this case, it was a little more necessary than usual. Morgan was a big, powerful man. I held my ground, and for the first time I locked eyes with him.

  “I tell you how it is over on Q,” Morgan said. “They take my cards and my magic stuff away from me when I get over there, and my cards and my magic was all I got. So I hook cockroaches together, sort of like they was a team of mules. They drag a matchbox around on the floor. That pass the time. Then a little frog come up through the shit jack. I kept that little frog a couple of weeks and I give him my roaches to feed him. But froggy hungry, he ain’t gonna last, so I flush him back down the shit jack. See what I’m saying?”

  “I’m trying to,” I said.

  “Cockroach, froggy, Jew lawyer—what the difference in the end? They hurting me over there, waiting on Big Wooden Mama. The real mean thing what they done in here is keep me waiting. You feel like, when you first get in, it ain’t real. Got locked up for something I don’t do, and I say, ‘Hey, this can’t be right, couple months I be out of this.’ I get here, a dude tells me, ‘Man, one night you gonna find yourself crying, there be tears in your eyes, and you gonna wonder why.’ I said, ‘Shit, I don’t cry for nothing.’ And three, four years slide by, I cry. I did, man, I swear. Twelve years gone by. You talking about another appeal? What do I need it for? Every day go round, it come in my mind, ‘When all this be over with?’ Feeding me to Mama, they ending my hurt. I get rid of you, dude who put me here, maybe they do me that much faster.”

  I watched him rise from his chair and glide toward me. I didn’t have the power to move an inch. I just waited for him.

  Chapter 14

  THE ROOM SLOWLY resolved into focus; it had a sharp smell of Merthiolate and disinfectant.

  “Rest here for a while,” a voice said. I didn’t argue.

  My fingers trembled when I held my hands out in front of me. I had been taken from the visiting cubicle to the prison hospital—I was conscious by then and, with a bit of help, could navigate. The doctor, a pale young man who was trying without much success to grow a goatee, said that nothing had been broken or damaged. My larynx was bruised, that was all. There would be some discomfort for a day or two; I would be better off talking only when necessary.

  I asked the doctor, “Do you know what happened back there?”

  “An inmate tried to strangle you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I gasped, “I know that. I mean, how did it end?”

  “The guards came in and subdued him. There are always two guards outside. They got there just in time.”

  I lay on a hospital bed in a room with two white inmates; one had had his appendix removed, the other’s leg was in a cast. They were swapping stories of other joints where they had done time. “Now, Terre Haute,” the broken-legged one said, “that was a bad stop. I’m in the chow hall one day, there’s one jelly doughnut left on the tray. Nigger at the head of the chow line starts to take it, then the nigger in back of him grabs it. So the nigger in front whips out a shank and shoves it into the other nigger’s guts. And he goes over to a table and eats the jelly doughnut while the other nigger just lays on the tile right at his feet. No shit, I saw that happen.”

  This is a dangerous place to be, I thought. On my first visit, I hit a man. On my second, someone tried to kill me. Violence might be infectious. Or perhaps, as the philosopher Hobbes had suggested a few centuries ago, it was the natural state of man outside the constricts of society.

  Be kind, enjoy, try not to worry. Okay, Mom.

  I signed the necessary release papers and left the prison. I didn’t stop off at the administrative office to see Raymond Wright; he hadn’t come to visit me.

  In Jacksonville I checked into the Marina Hotel again, showered, then called Ruby at the office. “What’s new, sweetness?”

  “Jerry Lee Elroy’s getting paranoid. Wants to know
what he’s supposed to do.”

  “If he calls again, remind him not to leave town. And be cool until I get in touch.”

  “I have difficulty hearing you, Ted. Do you have laryngitis?”

  “Something like that. Who else called?”

  “Charlie Waldorf. Says, ‘Do we have a deal? Miami needs to know.’ “

  “If he calls again, tell him yes, be cool, I believe we do.”

  “Barry buzzes you twice a day, and also your other partners. In varying states of apoplexy.”

  “Same message. Be cool. I’ll be back on Monday.”

  “Are you sure you’re not in the Caribbean with a bimbo?”

  “Goodbye, Ruby.”

  I called home. “How is Alan?”

  Toba’s voice, like the weather at the end of summer, had a chilly edge. “He’s all right. Today he’s at the beach with Sue Hoppy.”

  “Could this be romance?”

  “The dope fiend and the anorexic. Made for each other.”

  “I’ll try to be back by the weekend.”

  “Were you out carousing last night?”

  “Yes, at the CCR law library in Tallahassee. I have a sore throat. I love you.”

  She didn’t say it back to me, as she usually did.

  I put in a call to Brian Hoad at the public defender’s office. He had gone but had left a message: a name, address, and telephone number.

  On the second ring a woman answered. “Yes?”

  “Carmen Tanagra?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ms. Tanagra, excuse me, but this is Ted Jaffe. I was chief assistant state attorney here a long time ago.”

  “I don’t want to go through this again.”

  “I’m not out to hassle you. I’m in private practice now. I’d like to talk to you about something.”

  “I’m not interested,” she said, and hung up.

  I called Muriel Suarez at her office. “You knew Tanagra. Can you help me with her?”