I hurried back to the counsel table. “Don’t talk to anyone,” I instructed Darryl. Two burly deputy sheriffs cuffed him and began to shove him toward the back door of the courtroom. “I’ll be at the jail in ten minutes.”
I had to elbow my way past the gang of reporters; they knew what the state had done. They could smell it, or they had been tipped by the court reporter who had been up there at the bench with us. “No comment!” I yelled, rushing past the wildly swinging boom mikes. Then I thundered down the staircase and out a side door that led to the Duval County Jail.
The press followed me into the street. High heels clicked and Reeboks scuffed on hot pavement.
“Did you tell Darryl? Will he accept?”
“Do you view this as a victory?”
“Why do you think the state caved in, Ted?”
“No comment,” I said. You always feel a bit of an ass when you say that. But you have to. It’s part of the game.
The jail was only a block from the courthouse, and I was there in less than the promised ten minutes. I turned to the media gang, all of us sweating in the midday heat. “Give me a break, guys. It’s Morgan’s decision, not mine.”
And Darryl knew all about it by the time I reached him in the air- conditioned room given over to visits by lawyers. The deputy sheriffs couldn’t resist; they had told all. Darryl kept clenching and unclenching his fists, and now and then he beat with them against his massive thighs.
“You can live,” I said. “That’s what it comes down to.”
He looked at me with hard eyes. “How much time I got to do that way?”
“Another twelve years before you’re eligible for parole. There’s no guarantee you’ll get parole. Most convicted murderers don’t, I have to tell you that. But you’ll live”
“I ain’t afraid of death,” he said.
“I know that.”
“But I don’t want to die like Sweeting done.”
“I understand. Listen, Darryl, if you take this deal, if they give you life, you get off the row. That’s what you have to focus on. They put you into population. You work at a job, you walk around the yard, you talk to people. You have visitors and you do things. You take your cards and your magic with you. You can do those tricks for the other men. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I don’t know where to look,” Darryl said.
I didn’t understand what he meant, but I didn’t say anything.
“I take life,” Darryl said, “this hearing, it’s over, right?”
“That’s right. I’ll make a motion for a retrial, but I probably won’t get it.”
“How we doing?”
“In court so far? We haven’t done anything yet. And we’re a little short of time now.”
“How it turn out if we keep going?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“You ain’t smart enough to figure that out?”
“No.”
“You want me to take the deal, right?”
“If I tell you to turn it down, and we lose this appeal, and they electrocute you, I can’t live with that, Darryl.”
He put his hand on my shoulder again. “You got to think about what I can live with, Mr. Lawyer. What you can live with don’t matter, ‘cause you out there, a free man. Hear what I’m saying?”
I didn’t know Darryl or understand his mind. He might have come from Mars or New Guinea for all that I was able to get into his thought processes and heart. He had always been one-dimensional for me, as I probably had been for him. I saw that now, and it made me ashamed. So I just nodded.
He began to pace the little room. Then he stopped and said, “Tahaun, he came back again with Pauline. You know that?”
“I heard.”
Gary Oliver had told me about it. They had all driven down to Raiford the day before the hearing began. Once again Gary had taken Pauline’s daughters for a strawberry milk shake in the town of Starke.
“I talk to that kid alone for a time,” Darryl said. “I ask Pauline to step outside. She a real good woman. She do it for me.”
“How did the visit go?” I asked.
“Real good.” Darryl sounded surprised. “You know, he’s my son.” He said that to me as if I hadn’t known, and almost as if he too had only recently figured it out.
“I know that.”
“Nice boy. But he got problems.”
“I have a son too. They all have problems.”
“Black boy got different ones. We talk some shit for a while, then I say, ‘How are you, dude?’ And he turn away, he don’t want me to see him cry. And I say to him, ‘Dude, I know how you feel. You know how I got to be on this earth? My mama and some dude get it off in a one-night stand. Dude just split for she don’t know where. She was drunk that night, she don’t even remember his name for sure. And I always think, I ever meet that dude, I kill him.’ I say to Tahaun, ‘Maybe you think that about me too. And here I is, right in front of you, your daddy who never done nothing for you. How ‘bout that? You want to kill me, boy?’ He smile a little and say, ‘No. Not anymore.’ So we keep talking, and I see this boy don’t know where he can go. Talks about playing basketball, but he tells me maybe he ain’t really good enough. He ain’t even a star on his high school team, so it must be true. I tells him, ‘Stick with it, but don’t dream about it no more. Dream about something else.’ Then I figures it out, ‘cause I remembers what it’s like to be sixteen, and big, and black, and dumb. I figures out he’s angry. Angry ‘cause he know if he ain’t good enough to play no ball he probably ain’t smart enough to do nothing else. You dig? And he got to get past the anger so’s he can see who he is and who he want to be. I tell him that.”
“I hope he paid attention,” I said. “It was good advice.”
Darryl nodded, but he wasn’t really concerned with my reaction; he was listening to himself. “You got to fight, I tells him. I ain’t good at this, but what I’m trying to ‘splain to you is this—if you like me, you think you’re too big, too black, too loud, too clumsy, too ugly. I sees that in him, ‘cause that’s the kind of kid I was too. You don’t like who you be, and that make you scared. You don’t know where to look. I don’t read good, I couldn’t get it out of no books. Couldn’t get it out of no job, ‘cause what kind of job I ever get? Got it out of what I did, and you know what that was. You know how much pen time I done in my life? Shit, I’d have to add it up, and I can’t hardly count that high.”
He was silent.
Then he said, “I take the deal, where I got to go now? What kind of life that be at Raiford? Do my magic in the yard for cons and hacks? Listen to me, man, ‘cause I don’t believe you hear what I’m saying.” His dark eyes glowed furiously. He had changed gears. I had seen his anger; I knew what he could do. But this anger was of a different quality.
“Where that boy gonna go?” he demanded of me. “He a lot smarter than me, but still he do some drugs, shit like that. I asked him, and he told me.” Darryl leaned forward to me, so that once again I could smell him. But I was used to his smell now, the way I hoped he was used to mine.
“I didn’t kill that Jew, you know that. You get me outa here, you get me free, I can take care of that boy. That boy want to be with me, want to see me. I knows that. Don’t matter what we do, long as he with me. I can do it,” he repeated doggedly. .
I said carefully, “What about Pauline?”
“She a good woman. Shit, I don’t talk about taking that boy away from her. I get a job, I stay with Pauline, if she have me. Says she got two other kids. Girls. You see them?”
“Yes.”
“What they like?”
“Nice kids,” I said.
“So I have a family. I ain’t against that.”
“If you can convince her.”
“Can’t do that from no cell in Raiford,” Darryl said.
“You’re telling me,” I said slowly, “that you don’t want to take the deal the state’s offered you.”
“And you’re he
aring me,” he said.
I felt my heartbeat quicken. “You’re throwing the dice for your life, Darryl.”
“No, you throwing the dice. I just putting up the stakes. You roll a seven, I live. You crap out, I go where that Sweeting boy went. I ain’t completely crazy, so you got to tell me we got some chance to win. You say that to me, we go back in there and tell that skinny young dude and that sexy spic lady they can go fuck theyselves.”
And Darryl smiled at the thought, showing white teeth and frightened eyes.
He wasn’t letting me play the great white father; he was taking responsibility for his life, just as he had done thirteen years before with Gary Oliver. I had respect for this man.
“We have a chance,” I said.
“Then go to the whip, dude,” Darryl said.
Chapter 27
TUESDAY MORNING, for the first time, Judge Fleming showed me an emotion midway between vexation and anger. His eyes were bleak, and his lips grew thinner. He said to me the same words I had said to Gary Oliver so long ago in my office. “Counselor, it’s my duty to remind you that your first responsibility is to keep your client alive.”
“My client knows what’s going on, Your Honor. We’ll gratefully accept the state’s joining our motion to commute the death penalty, but we want a new trial on the guilt-or-innocence issue. Otherwise … no deal.”
The judge beckoned, and I leaned forward across the bench. Muriel did too, but he waved her back. He broke the first canon of judicial ethics by whispering in my ear, so that opposing counsel couldn’t hear.
“Mr. Jaffe, if your client’s guilty, you’d do better trying to put socks on a rooster than looking for a new trial in my court.”
I leaned farther up and whispered back into his white, hairy ear: “He’s not guilty.”
The judge told us all to step back a pace or two. Then he called shrilly, “Mr. Morgan, kindly step up here.”
Darryl looked at me for approval. He wasn’t fond of judges. I nodded, and he got to his feet and lumbered to the bench. He was a physically imposing sight.
Fleming wagged a finger back and forth at the court reporter, meaning: stop transcribing, you fool. The courtroom was full again. The judge knew that a defendant wouldn’t invade his space, so he had to lean forward himself, his white whiskers almost touching Darryl’s flat, broad nose. I could just barely hear him.
“Your lawyer,” Fleming said softly, “claims you’re turning down the state’s offer of a life sentence. You aware of that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You agree with your lawyer?”
“Usually,” Darryl said.
“How about now?”
“Yes, sir. I agrees.”
“You think I’m a pussycat?” the judge whispered.
Darryl cocked his head. “What you say?”
“I say, you think I’m a pussycat? Think I care if you live or die?”
“No, sir,” Darryl said. “I don’t think you give a sick rat’s ass.”
The judge thought that over.
“You can sit down,” he said.
He raised his head then, sniffed the air, and said to the waiting courtroom, “Let’s get on with this hearing.” Then he turned toward Muriel. “You ready? Get it done.”
Muriel understood that in order to make the judge happy she didn’t have to bring on the Jacksonville Beach deputy sheriffs who had first reached the house and viewed the body of Solomon Zide, or the county medical examiner who had conducted the autopsy, or even the JSO ballistics expert. But she did have to offer up some background so that the court knew where we were and who had died.
Accordingly, the state called ex-JSO Sergeant Carmen Tanagra— under subpoena—as its first witness.
Muriel could as easily have called Floyd Nickerson, but she didn’t want me cross-examining him. If he was to testify, it was I who would have to subpoena him as a witness for the defense—then Muriel, or John Whatley, would have the precious right to crossexamine.
That was the way the game was played. Muriel was no advocate of the death penalty, but her oath of service required that she battle to keep Darryl Morgan on his path to Big Wooden Mama.
And there was always the matt *r of ego. Nobody likes to lose.
Carmen Tanagra was sworn in by the court clerk. John Whatley rose from the counsel table to question her.
In clipped, unemotional prose, the former JSO Homicide sergeant set the scene for us: the luxurious beach estate, the tropical night, the hard glare of the floodlights.
She and Sergeant Nickerson pulled up in the driveway. The Jacksonville Beach patrolmen took them straight to the body on the terrace, which was identified by Neil Zide as his father, Solomon Zide, who appeared to have been shot at least twice. She checked for a carotid pulse. “There was none,” she testified. “He was dead.”
The crime scene, as far as she knew, had been preserved. She herself, after making sure that Mrs. Zide’s bleeding had been stanched and that she was resting comfortably on a sofa in the care of a housemaid, who had been awakened by the commotion, talked briefly to Neil Zide and then left him with Sergeant Nickerson. She walked about the grounds and discovered the dead Doberman by the dunes near the beach cabanas. In the wet sand closer to the ocean she found the imprint of the sneakers of two running men. She determined that one of the fleeing murderers wore size fourteen or fifteen shoes.
I could have objected to her assumptions, but I kept still.
When she got back to the house, red lights were flashing. An ambulance had arrived, and paramedics were bundling Mrs. Zide into it. Her partner, Sergeant Nickerson, was questioning Neil Zide. The tech squad had arrived too; someone was taking photographs. Armed with Neil Zide’s description of the two young black men who had apparently bungled a burglary, then shot and killed his father, she and Nickerson set out together into the dark night to see if they could find the perpetrators.
Tersely she described the encounter at the Lil’ Champ, the death of William Smith, the arrest of Darryl Morgan.
“Pass the witness,” Whatley said.
I rose slightly in my chair. My tone was as casual as it could be without putting everyone to sleep.
“Ms. Tanagra,” I asked, “when you and Sergeant Nickerson arrived at the Zide estate in your car, how did you get in?”
“Through a gate down at the road,” she said.
“The gate was open?”
“I don’t really remember. Maybe open, maybe shut. There was a security guard there. Maybe he opened it. This was thirteen years ago—it’s hard to say.”
“I appreciate that. So the security guard may have unlocked the gate and let you in?”
“He may have.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“I don’t really remember.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Not after this long a time,” she said.
“Do you remember if he was young or old?”
“Old, I’d say.”
“Over forty?”
“Definitely. Well, probably.”
“By any chance, do you recall his name?”
“No. It’s too long ago.”
“Could it have been Terence O’Rourke?”
“That sounds familiar. But I don’t really remember.”
“Did you wonder, considering that several shots had been fired, why he was there at the gate and not up at the house?”
Carmen Tanagra thought that over for a while. “I seem to recall that someone had given him an order to stay there because the police were coming.”
“He told you that?”
“I think so. I’m not sure.”
“Did he say who gave him that order?”
“If he did, I don’t remember.”
“How far was it from the gate to the house?”
“Hard to say.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll try to refresh your memory.” I signaled to Gary Oliver, who stepped into the hallway leading to the judge’s chamb
ers and returned with an easel and a large sheet of white cardboard. On it in bold black lines was drawn a plan of the Zide estate. It had been drafted with the aid of the original architect and landscape designer. Gary had been on their backs all fall for them to get it done, and they had signed an affidavit as to the plan’s accuracy.
Muriel inspected the affidavit. All right, she was willing to stipulate that the plan was accurate. “However, Your Honor,” she said, “I don’t see the relevance. I’d like to remind the court that basically we’re here to listen to fresh evidence promised by the defense. This is not fresh evidence.”
“The purpose of this line of questioning,” I said, “is clarity. And enlightenment.”
That was the magic word. The judge said, “If you’re objecting, ma’am, I’m overruling.” He turned to me. “Just hurry it along, Mr. Jaffe.”
Muriel smiled graciously and sat down.
I pointed out to Carmen Tanagra that according to the landscape designer’s drawings it was approximately one quarter of a mile from the front gate, where she and Nickerson had entered, to the main rooms of the Zide house.
“That seems about right,” she said.
“Ms. Tanagra, if a shot had been fired in the house while you were passing through that gate, would you have heard it?”
“Of course,” Carmen said.
“But no shots were fired while you were there?”
“No.” She seemed puzzled. That was fine. I meant her to be puzzled.
“When you reached the house, what other vehicles were parked on the driveway in front of the house?”
“Two black-and-whites from Jacksonville Beach. And one civilian car.”
“Belonging to?”
“A man named Victor Gambrel.”
Gambrel was in the main living room, she explained, when she and Nickerson entered the house. He identified himself immediately as director of security for Zide Industries. He was with Mrs. Zide, taking care of her. He had been there for only a couple of minutes, he told them, after a telephone call he received from Neil Zide.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller Page 28
