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

by Clifford Irving

  “It was too long ago. I can’t get involved.”

  I clenched a fist in frustration that bordered on anger; she couldn’t see that. But perhaps she could sense it.

  “I’m not being unfriendly,” Muriel said. “There’s a reason. What are you doing tonight?”

  “I plan to shove a fist through the cardboard wall of my hotel room and go to bed early.”

  “I’ll cook you dinner.”

  “And you’ll also tell me the reason you won’t help me with Carmen Tanagra?”

  “That’s not on the menu. Do you eat meat?”

  “Yes. And potatoes. And cheese, and butter, and chocolate mousse. The life expectancy of lawyers is not quite as good as that of NFL defensive tackles. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you go to trial.”

  “A lot of people don’t eat meat nowadays. In the short run it’ll make you aggressive, in the long run it’ll kill you. Nevertheless,” Muriel said, “tonight I have the urge. So to hell with my arteries, I’m roasting a leg of lamb in fatty gravy. Eight o’clock. And since you’re about to ask … yes, a very good bottle of red wine.”

  The slim forms of the Bordeaux bottles were patterned by the candlelight in wavering black shadows upon the walls. Muriel wore a scooped-neck blue silk blouse and floppy white harem trousers. With her golden skin and moody dark eyes, she captured my attention not only as a lawyer.

  I told her in detail the story of what had happened that morning at Raiford. I was glad to be alive, despite the traps that seemed to lie ahead. Maybe the wine had given me a fit of optimism.

  Muriel brought coffee. “You liked the lamb? Really?”

  “Loved it. I ate too much, but I’ll sleep well.”

  “You’re lucky you’re not sleeping the big sleep tonight, hombre. I guess you see now that you’ll have to turn this case over to someone else.”

  Coffee in hand, I moved over to the couch and replied, with the air of a perfectly sane man, “Just because the client tried to strangle me?”

  “Do they have to draw blood to make you lose interest?”

  My smile flickered briefly.

  She said, “All right, then. How about on general principles?”

  “Such as?”

  “Since you can’t defend a man you once prosecuted, it stands to reason that you can’t file an appeal for him, either.”

  I shook my head firmly. “Why does everyone think I can’t defend this guy? There’s no law says I can’t, just a guideline from the Florida Bar. You can do it if you get permission from the appropriate government agency. Which in this instance would be the Office of the State Attorney, Fourth Circuit.”

  “Would Beldon agree?”

  “He’s no killjoy.”

  “Don’t be naive. If Beldon wants to, he’ll find a reason. Inappropriate, tainted, unseemly, against the canons—there are plenty of words for it.”

  “But there are no laws or rules.”

  “Has it ever been done before?”

  I had done my homework in the Tallahassee law library. “Not in Florida,” I conceded. “But yes, once, about nine years ago, in California. A capital murder case: State v. Owens. A new witness popped up who confirmed the defendant’s alibi.”

  “There’s no alibi. Darryl Morgan admitted he was there.”

  “He didn’t have a fair trial,” I said. “For all I know, he may have been not guilty.”

  “Then who is guilty? Who did it?”

  I’d been thinking about that. “Could have been someone else who looked just like Darryl.”

  “Didn’t Darryl work for the Zides?”

  “Yes, but how much attention do you think Connie Zide really paid to the help?”

  “You told me he was six foot six. You’d pay attention to that.” “Yes, you would,” I said, and then remembered something out of the long-ago past, some words that I hadn’t thought of for a dozen years. The hairs rose on my forearms. I remembered Neil Zide’s description of the men who had shot his father: Young, black, wearing sneakers, jeans, and. I seem to remember a dark T-shirt.

  Was I remembering it wrong? If not, why hadn’t I, as the prosecutor, understood its significance then? Why hadn’t Gary Oliver? Muriel was still waiting.

  “For the moment,” I said, putting my vision in a place where I could recall it when I needed it, “there’s no contrary evidence. I’ve got to hang the case for a retrial on fundamental error.”

  She shook her head so that the dark curls flew. “Listen, I respect Beldon. But you know as well as I do he thinks a balanced jury means six in the front row and six in the back. Prosecutorial misconduct is when the state loses a felony case. And fundamental error was what happened in the Garden of Eden.”

  “He’s still a friend, Muriel.”

  “In which case, also, he might want to stop you before you get murdered by the client.”

  I left her house just after eleven o’clock. At the door she raised her head without shutting her eyes, and I kissed her lightly on the lips. It was a little more than a brotherly kiss, but it was far short of a kiss from a would-be lover. And that seemed, for the moment, absolutely right.

  Duval County and the city of Jacksonville were by decree synonymous, making Jacksonville physically the largest city in the United States. It called itself “the insurance capital of the South,” and its avowed ambition was to be the home of an NFL franchise, but until that day it had to make do with college football, minor league baseball, and greyhound racing.

  I left the Marina Hotel at seven-fifteen the next morning. A lot of concrete had been poured here since I was a boy; gone were the old savannas, the wild marsh along the river. Now I drove from strip mall to strip mall, to intersection after intersection with a Publix, Winn-Dixie, Food Lion and Albertson’s facing each other on opposite corners.

  Muriel had told me that Neil Zide’s latest project was to build a two-story art deco shopping mall, in conjunction with a water park, all of it to be located a few blocks from the ocean.

  “A water park?” I asked. “Next to the ocean?”

  “You think that’s redundant? You against progress?”

  I crossed the Main Street Bridge, and fifteen minutes later stood in front of Carmen Tanagra’s front door. The small wooden house on Alabama Avenue was set back from the sidewalk. A plaque by the side of the door gave the following information:

  GLORIA WILLOUGHBY—CARMEN TANAGRA

  Crystal Balancing Nutritional Therapy Iridology Herbalism Kinesiology Colonic Irrigation

  I clucked my tongue a few times, preparing myself for various possibilities. Then I rang the bell. A tall, stern-looking woman of about forty opened it. She glared at me.

  “I’m sorry to bother you this early, ma’am. Is Ms. Tanagra in?”

  “Are you a patient?”

  “Not yet. But who knows what may happen?” I handed her a business card.

  Carmen Tanagra came to the door. I recognized her from her days as a detective; she looked older, but she also looked healthier. Plenty of high colonics, I imagined, not to mention crystal balancing. She also looked more butch. That was something I hadn’t grasped until now. It threw an oblique light on other matters.

  “Ms. Tanagra, I’m not here to talk about the Bongiorno case or your private life. May I come in?”

  In the living room five minutes later, I drank chicory coffee and ate a croissant. From the swinging door to the kitchen, Gloria Willoughby still glared at me. I wasn’t a patient. I was a man who had rung the doorbell at a quarter to eight in the morning. I decided I’d better move things along.

  “You don’t have any connections still with the sheriff’s department?”

  Carmen Tanagra shook her head firmly. “And I don’t want any. They shitcan the good cops. Only the vanilla people make it to the top. Then they become officious pricks.”

  Her feelings didn’t lack for definition.

  “You don’t miss it at all?”

  “What’s to miss? Carrying a gun? I have a better lif
e now, here with Gloria, believe me.”

  “I do believe it,” I said. “Which one of you does what?”

  “Huh?”

  I felt my face begin to turn pink. “The colonic irrigation, the crystal balancing … I saw your sign. Are you both iridologists? Do you both do everything?” But I was aware that I kept growing redder.

  “We both do it all,” Tanagra said icily. “But Gloria taught me just about everything. Look, Mr. Jaffe, what is it that you want?”

  “Do you remember the Solomon Zide murder?”

  Carmen Tanagra gazed at me waspishly for a few seconds. From her throat blared a harsh sound that might have been interpreted as a laugh. But I knew it wasn’t.

  “The black kid in the truck,” she said. “The one who got killed in the parking lot of that Lil’ Champ. The one supposed to have cut that woman’s face. William Smith was his name.”

  “Didn’t Floyd Nickerson shoot him when he was escaping?”

  In response, Carmen Tanagra made that harsh sound again.

  “Isn’t that what your police report said?”

  “That’s what it said.”

  So there was that too. I was getting in even deeper. I told her what I had learned from Jerry Lee Elroy.

  Tanagra said, “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re not surprised,” I said. “So Nickerson must have told you himself that it was bullshit.”

  “I don’t recall what he told me.”

  “You’re still friendly with him?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You know where he is now?”

  “He got a good job as a rent-a-cop.”

  “Do you know for who?”

  “Is this some kind of cross-examination?”

  “Sounds like one, doesn’t it?” I smiled. “You want me to get off your tail? Am I walking too close?”

  “Close only counts in horseshoes and dancing,” Carmen Tanagra said, but without an answering smile.

  I wasn’t sure what I had done or said to lose what little of the high ground I’d occupied.

  “Morgan is still on death row. They’re supposed to pull the switch next month. But there was one witness at his trial who lied.”

  Tanagra said, “And you want to know if there was a second one.”

  I hadn’t had to prompt her. She had said it. My heartbeat quickened, and I put a clamp on my tongue.

  “If I told you there was,” she said, “what would you want out of me?”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “I’d want you to make a statement under oath. Back it up at an appeal hearing.”

  “Mr. Jaffe, let me tell you a story. A while ago these barges with fake ballast tanks off-loaded a hundred tons of marijuana at Fort George Inlet. JSO got tipped. They made a big bust, including the Cuban guys who were meant to pick up the stuff. Those Cubans are at the dock in two Mercedes. Amazingly—figure this one out—the two Mercedes wind up in the garages of two high-ranking police officers. But one day a file clerk down at the courthouse got pissed off and snitched on them. The cops had to give back the two Mercedes. Were they prosecuted? No, sir. You hear of any resignation? No, sir. The file clerk, though, he has to resign. Now he’s a cook in a short-order joint downtown… . You see what I’m saying?”

  She had told me what I wanted to know.

  “If I snitch on Floyd Nickerson,” Tanagra offered, “it won’t matter how long ago he was a cop.”

  “They busted you in the Bongiorno case,” I said, “and you were a cop.”

  “To be in the brotherhood you need a dick. That time in the Gambrel murder, the snitch I had was for real. But Bongiorno had real good friends in Tallahassee. Money and political clout is what it came down to. The snitch changed his story, and I got shitcanned. And if I do what you’d like me to do . . She drew a finger across her throat. “I don’t have a medical degree or a license to practice. I could wind up with that clerk, taking orders for grits and eggs.”

  “I don’t want that to happen to you, either, but—”

  “Then don’t threaten me,” Tanagra said.

  “William Smith is dead. You remembered that. There’s another man on death row waiting to be executed. Don’t you think one dead is enough? You want to remember him too?”

  “I can’t help you,” she said, putting down her coffee cup with a gesture of finality. Her friend Gloria still listened to us from the kitchen door.

  “I could put you under subpoena,” I said. “You’d have to tell the truth.”

  Carmen Tanagra got up from her chair and walked across the room. She opened the front door and then banged open the screen door against the wooden front of the house. She said, “Why don’t you go cry in one hand and piss in the other to see which one gets full first? But do it outside. And don’t bother coming back to tell me how it worked out.”

  Chapter 15

  THE REST OF THE MORNING I spent in the library at the public defender’s office. In the early afternoon I went to the courthouse to visit a judge I knew. I asked him a favor he had the power to grant, and at three o’clock I climbed into the rental car and headed west again on I-10.

  Twenty-five minutes later I took the now familiar turnoff south onto State 121. I recognized landmarks: the Country Variety Store, the sagging white clapboard Raiford Road Church. A dry winter sun burned into the meat of my left arm resting on the car door. Tuning the radio to a country-music FM station, I snapped my fingers to the beat.

  The whine and wail of violins filled the car, then swirled into the leafy green afternoon that rushed past the open window. Call me on the telee-phone … Daaaarrrrlin’ I am always home … If you ev- errrrr change yore mind …

  Back in Sarasota were my wife and son and law firm: problems closer to the bone. This was as good a way as any—a kind of chemotherapy of the soul—to keep all that in remission. And to recapture whatever it was I had lost in the last decades that now seemed so dear, and necessary, in the time remaining.

  I remembered how once I had wanted to be of service, how my deepest ambition had been to argue a case before the Supreme Court and save an innocent man’s life. In the quest for creature comfort and security, somehow that had faded from my consciousness. Just a short while ago I’d thought that I had almost everything I wanted. All that blocked my path to the happiest of endings, I’d decided, was the economic recession and the torment of my son.

  How shallow I had become in these years. Do we do the right thing, I wondered, by giving up our youthful fantasies?

  But I might not have to now, for I’d found what I wanted in those old dusty files at the courthouse. Now I knew that Neil Zide, on that bloody December night at the beach a dozen years earlier, had not described Darryl Morgan as tall.

  The same creased brown suit jacket hung from the wooden clothes tree in the corner of the office. At his desk, FSP Assistant Superintendent Raymond G. Wright wore a white button-down shirt but a different-color striped tie. Blue and green yesterday, red and brown today.

  Wright made a humming sound in his throat. “Yesterday, Mr. Jaffe, you made a point that I wasn’t qualified to tell you what you could or couldn’t do as a lawyer. No more, you said, than you could tell me what I could or couldn’t do as a prison administrator. After yesterday’s unfortunate incident of violence, the decision concerning your request to visit Darryl Morgan falls into the category of how to run the prison. I have a right to deny it. I have to consider your safety.”

  “If you deny my right to visit,” I replied, “I’ll have a court order from Judge Krawitz in Jacksonville on your desk by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Do you really want to force me to go to all that trouble?”

  He does, I thought. He truly does. But he’s got to suspect the judge will bust his chops. And if the judge does that, Raymond G. Wright’s boss may do the same thing. The motto of any prison system, carved in the hardest stone of its walls, is: Keep out of the public eye and judicial disfavor. If they don’t know we’re here, then we’re doing the job right. And we’ll reti
re on full pay.

  Wright’s hands rested on the desk, motionless, like empty gloves. He said, “In the light of what happened, the physical circumstances of your visit would have to be different this time. We can’t take responsibility for your safety unless we can protect you.”

  That wasn’t unreasonable. “Good. I like the idea of protection.”

  “We’ll ask you to sign a release.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “There’ll be glass between you and Morgan, and you’ll have to talk on a telephone.”

  “Not acceptable,” I said flatly.

  “Then we’ll need two correctional officers in the visitor’s cubicle with you both.”

  “No. Our conversation falls under attorney-client privilege. I can’t have anyone listening, or I abrogate that privilege.”

  “The alternative is to cuff and chain and shackle your client.”

  “Fine,” I said. Let them put him in a straitjacket if they wanted to. I feared Morgan now. You can’t feel a man’s hands try to throttle the life-giving air out of you and be easy with him after that.

  “We can’t do that in a visitor’s cubicle,” Wright said. “There’s only a table and chairs. Nothing fixed. No ring bolts in the walls.”

  “So what do you suggest, Mr. Wright?”

  “You can talk to him on the row. In his cell.”

  I hesitated a moment. “Death row?”

  “That’s where his cell is.”

  I looked into the assistant superintendent’s narrowed, unblinking pale eyes.

  “All right,” I said.

  Wright smiled smugly. “What we need, then, is for Wizard to agree to the visit. If he doesn’t, all this is beside the point. Not even a judge can force an inmate to talk to a lawyer.”

  “You’re absolutely right. Will you ask him?”

  “Not until later this evening. If he agrees, you can be here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Tell him,” I said, “that I think he may be innocent. And I intend to save his life.”

  In the morning the guards led me into Q block through a series of double gates that were operated from behind a bulletproof-glass control center. We entered the block. When the gates shut, they clanged for ten seconds, humming a symphony of discordant sound. The hot air smelled stale. The reek of cloistered bodies attacked my nostrils. A wail of voices struck at my eardrums.