“Were you able in any way to corroborate that last statement of Mr. Gambrel’s? That he’d been in the house ‘only a couple of minutes’?”
“I believe the security guard corroborated it.”
“Oh? The one down by the gate?”
“There was only one, I believe. So yes.”
“When did you talk to him?”
“Sergeant Nickerson questioned him the next day. Down at the sheriff’s office.”
“You weren’t present at that questioning?”
“I was doing some other work. I don’t remember exactly what.”
“And did either of you question Mr. Gambrel?”
“Sergeant Nickerson did, then and later. He and Gambrel knew each other. As soon as we walked in, Gambrel looked up and said, ‘Hello, Nick,’ and Nickerson said, ‘Hello, Victor.’ “
“Like they were old friends?”
“Not quite. Like they knew each other professionally, I’d say. I think Gambrel had been a JSO officer before he went into private work.”
Gary Oliver was scribbling notes as fast as his black Flair pen could fly across or over the lines of his legal pad. His handwriting was a large scrawl, so that every minute or so he would flip the page loudly to uncover a fresh one. For a moment I glanced at Muriel Suarez. Her eye for that split second was on Gary as he wrote; she was frowning. In this courtroom today the lawyers didn’t have to hide their emotions. There was no jury to observe, to wonder.
I looked at my own notes. “Ms. Tanagra, you said in direct
examination that, as far as you knew, the crime scene had been preserved. I’m curious—what did you mean by ‘as far as I knew’?”
“Well… it didn’t seem to have been disturbed.”
“How did you make that judgment?”
Her nostrils flared; she was angry. She wasn’t a cop anymore, but she still wanted to be thought of as having been a good cop. “I don’t recall,” she said.
“By ‘the crime scene,’ I take it you mean the immediate area around the body of the murdered man.”
“Yes, more or less.”
“Did you ask Mrs. Zide and Mr. Neil Zide if they’d touched anything in that area? And if they’d moved the body at all?”
“Yes, I did ask. They said no.”
“And you believed them?”
“They were in a state of shock,” Tanagra said.
“That’s not what I asked you. I asked if you believed them when they said they hadn’t touched anything or moved the body.”
“Up to a point. I mean, this was a hysterical woman. She was bleeding all over the place. She might have moved the body, might have tried to cradle her husband. Sure, that could have happened. A lot of things happen that aren’t meant to happen. But the medical examiner—”
“Was the son hysterical?” I persisted. “Neil Zide?”
“A little. Yes, he was.”
“Was Mr. Gambrel hysterical?”
“I don’t recall that at all. He’d just arrived.”
“He was calm?”
“I believe he was calm, yes.”
“You talked to him?”
“No, Nick—Sergeant Nickerson talked to him. I went off to find the dog.”
I’d been fishing. The hook was wiggling a little in the murky depths, and I wasn’t at all sure what was on it. But I felt that slight pressure.
Slowly I said, “Ms. Tanagra, you went off to find the dog at the beach cabanas, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And the dog, the Doberman, when you found him, was dead. Poisoned, as I recall, by Smith and Morgan.” Darryl, at my side, shifted his weight and grunted. “By Smith,” I corrected myself.
“Right.”
“When you went off toward the beach, Ms. Tanagra, did you know the dog was dead?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did you know there was a dog there at all?”
Her brow knitted; she was trying to recall. But it was thirteen years ago. That’s nearly five thousand days and nights crammed with incident. She shrugged a bit helplessly.
“Let me see if I can refresh your memory again,” I said, “and please stop me if I’m wrong. You left the living room, where all these people were gathered … you went outside onto the terrace.” She was nodding, so I kept going. “You could have gone in any direction, but you didn’t. You turned left”—I knew that house and lawn and terrace, of course; I had partied there, I had even fucked there— “and you crossed the lawn toward the beach. Why did you do that?”
“To see if the dog was all right,” she said.
“Why did you want to see if the dog was all right?”
She spoke almost dreamily. “Because someone had said, ‘I wonder why the dog didn’t bark.’ Or maybe, 'I wonder if the dog’s all right. Why isn’t he barking?’ Something like that. I remember that now. And I went out there to find out. I went down to the beach. The son said that, I think. Said the dog was down by the beach and pointed in that direction. Yes, I’m fairly sure it was the son.”
“Neil Zide?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go down to the beach alone?”
“No, I took one of the Jacksonville Beach cops with me. Nick said, ‘Don’t go alone, Carmen. You never know who’s out there.’ So this cop went with me.”
“And you left Neil Zide and Mrs. Zide and Victor Gambrel and Sergeant Nickerson and one other Beach patrolman in the house.” “No, there were two other Beach cops. Three of them came in two patrol cars. One went with me to the cabanas—I remember he had this huge, powerful flashlight that he could hang on his belt. Two stayed behind.”
I took a chance. “When you and the third Beach cop got back from the cabanas to tell them about the dead dog, were the two other Beach cops still in the living room with the Zides and Victor Gambrel and Sergeant Nickerson?”
“I don’t think so,” Carmen Tanagra said. “I think the ambulance was coming up the drive and those two guys were out there to flag it down. Yes, I’m positive of that.”
“Positive … after thirteen years?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but I could see by the fresh lines etched into her forehead that she was troubled by some memory or vision just beyond her grasp. Or maybe just within it, so that her mental fingertips touched it but couldn’t haul it in.
“I have no more questions,” I said, “for now.”
Chapter 28
IN THE AFTERNOON, after lunch, Whatley said calmly, “The State of Florida calls Constance Zide.”
Heads turned, and necks craned. A uniformed bailiff escorted Connie into the courtroom, down the aisle past the bar and through the well to the witness stand. Even as the door hissed shut you could hear the clicking of Nikons and the soft roll of the rubber wheels on the big TV cameras. I turned too, and saw that Connie’s black leather purse was raised in front of her face in the direction of the cameras.
When she passed in front of me on her way to the stand, I understood why she was doing that. I hadn’t seen Connie since the day Darryl Morgan had been given his death sentence by Judge Eglin. She was nearly sixty years old now. I had assumed that with her bone structure and her pale clear skin she would always remain a beautiful woman, that if you were young you would look at her and wish you’d known her in her prime.
That had not happened.
Her hair was the same color, dyed now to mask the gray, and it had lost some of its sheen. But her hair was almost the only recognizable feature.
Connie’s cheeks were doughy, and a roll of flesh moved down from the chin to the thick throat. The scar was of course gone; cosmetic surgery had taken care of that. She wore a black suit as if she were still in mourning, but I remembered that she had once said, “Darling, black’s not my color, it’s too dramatic, although it does make one look thinner. The day you see me in black, you’ll know I’m an over-the-hill bag.”
When she walked she swayed with un
certainty, as if it took a certain effort to move her hips down the aisle, and she seemed grateful to finally sit down in the witness box. Diamonds and emeralds and heavyweight gold bangles bedecked her as though she were a film star, and I sensed that today they weren’t fake. I was about twenty-five feet away from her, and when she gazed across the courtroom there was hardly any expression in her eyes: a minimal greeting by way of rapid blinking, a bit of anesthetized pain, perhaps, but that was all. The blue-green eyes were flecked at the corners with a tracery of pink. Surrounded by heavy pancake makeup and set above thin vermilion lips, they seemed moribund.
Oh, Connie … my old dear Connie, what happened to you?
I wanted to reach out, touch her and comfort her. But I could hardly do that.
On the bench, Judge Fleming coughed, and when I looked quickly up I realized that for the first time he was wondering if it was so important to be enlightened. But it is, Judge—it is. I promise you.
John Whatley treated Connie gently.
He took her back thirteen years to the night of December 5, to the Mozart horn concerto and smoked Nova flown down from Zabar’s on the West Side of Manhattan. And in a slightly hoarse but warm voice, which had hardly changed over time, she told the story of that night.
I had heard it before. She had been my mistress and my witness. I had read her testimony later in the trial transcript. And I had thought about it now for nearly a year.
Telling that tale now took only fifteen minutes. She had heard shots, she recalled, and rushed outside to the terrace, where her husband lay dead. Two black men had been standing there, one with a pistol in his hand. Someone had slashed her in the face. That’s all she remembered.
Whatley moved a deferential step backward, like a courtier withdrawing before a queen, and gave her a gracious smile as accolade.
“No further questions. Thank you, Mrs. Zide. We’re sorry to have troubled you this way.” He turned to me and said curtly, “Pass the witness.”
“I have no questions,” I said.
And Connie’s eyes shone at me with a gratitude beyond deserving.
I added, “But I would like to have Mrs. Zide stay in the courtroom, or nearby on call.”
In most trials, witnesses are prohibited from hearing the testimony of the other witnesses. But that prohibition must be invoked by one side or the other—literally, the defense attorney or the prosecutor rises at the outset of trial and says, “Your Honor, we invoke the rule.”
Neither Muriel nor I had done so in this hearing. I had my reasons, and I assumed that she did too. So Connie stayed in the courtroom to listen to her son testify. Neil had listened to her as well, and to Carmen Tanagra.
Neil’s hair was still long and unruly, but he had shaved for this occasion, and wore a three-piece suit and pin-dot cranberry-colored tie instead of Levi’s and silk cowboy shirt. The suit was black; Neil was slim and unafraid of drama.
His testimony about the failed burglary and the shooting echoed what his mother had said. He too had been my witness thirteen years before, so there were no surprises.
When Whatley said, “Pass the witness,” I rose from my seat at the counsel table.
“Mr. Zide, you and I have known each other socially for about fourteen years, isn’t that correct?”
“Yes, it is.” He was already wary. I suppose he had thought I would let him go the way I had done with his mother.
“So you won’t mind if I call you Neil?”
“No, of course not… Ted.”
“I didn’t want the court to think that I was taking liberties,” I explained, and smiled up at Judge Fleming.
Then I turned back to Neil. “You’ve been in the courtroom, and you heard the testimony of Ms. Carmen Tanagra today, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I was here,” Neil said.
“So you heard her testify about going to find the Doberman in the dunes near the beach? And the dog was dead, she told us. Poisoned.”
“Yes.”
I consulted Gary Oliver’s notes. “Sergeant Tanagra remembered that the reason she went down to the beach was because someone had said, ‘I wonder if the dog’s all right. Why isn’t he barking?’ And she thought that someone was you. Do you remember that, Neil?”
He laughed good-naturedly. “Ted, we’re talking about thirteen years ago. I like to think I’ve got a good memory, but that’s pushing it right against the edge of the envelope.”
“You mean you don’t remember?”
“That’s absolutely correct.”
“You didn’t tell Sergeant Tanagra that the dog was down by the beach?”
“Look, I’m saying I may have. Or I may not have. I don’t want to guess or speculate. I’m under oath, Ted.”
“So you are.” He was a wonderful witness: arrogant, well-spoken, almost cheerful.
I picked up a slim manila folder from the counsel table, asked the judge’s permission to approach the witness, and handed the folder to Neil in the witness box.
“Would you open that folder, please, and look at its contents?”
Neil treated the folder as if it might have been a letter bomb. But he opened it carefully and flipped through the pages inside it. Then he looked up at me calmly. He shrugged. What’s the big deal?
“Neil, would you tell the court what you’ve just looked at?”
“They seem to be copies of a statement I made to the police thirteen years ago—”
“That’s all?”
“You didn’t let me finish. And a couple of pages of my testimony at the subsequent trial.”
“What’s the gist of it all?”
“It’s my description of the two men who tried to rob the house and then shot my father. And my description of what happened that night.”
“Your memory was fresh then, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You told the truth, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I certainly did.”
“Thirteen years have passed. Do you have any reason to change your mind about what you saw and what you believe happened on that tragic night?”
He looked at me for a moment, not sure if there was irony in my tone. There wasn’t.
“Certainly not.”
“You’ll stand by what you said to Sergeant Nickerson on the morning of December 6, 1978, and under oath to the trial jury?” “Of course.”
I took the folder from his hand and read aloud to the judge: “ ‘They were young, black, wearing sneakers, jeans, and I seem to remember a dark T-shirt. There were two of them. I didn’t get a decent look at the other one, who cut my mother. They were obviously clumsy, they didn’t expect anyone to be awake at that hour … my father surprised them, and they panicked… . No, I don’t know how they got onto the property.’ “
I looked up at the bench. “That’s from the JSO offense report, Your Honor. Mr. Zide signed each page in the margin, including the one I read from. And now, Your Honor, I’ll read from the trial transcript. This was on direct examination. I was the prosecutor. I asked the questions, and Mr. Zide answered them.”
I took a drink of water, then read:
“Q [by Mr. Jaffe]-. Did you see them clearly?
“A [by Mr. Zide]: Oh, yes.
“Q: They weren’t in shadow?
“A: No, I could see them quite well. One was a very tall young black man. The other one I don’t remember as well.
“Q: Describe the lighting, if you don’t mind.
“A: The lamps in the living room were on, and they were shining out onto the terrace. And in addition, as I recall, the spotlights on the lawn had finally been triggered, I assume by these two men, so there was a lot of light out there coming from several directions.
“Q: About how far away from you would you say the two men were standing?
“A: Oh … fifteen or twenty feet, perhaps. Hard to say exactly.
“Q: How is your eyesight, Mr. Zide?
“A: Excellent.
“Q: You don’t wear any eyeglasses
or contact lenses?
“A: I have twenty-twenty vision. All right, to answer your question, I don’t wear glasses or contact lenses.
“Q: And for how long did the two men remain there on the terrace before they ran away? That is to say, from the time you first saw them to the time they turned their backs.
“A: It’s hard to say. A few seconds. But it was long enough for me to see their faces.
“Q: And did you watch them run away?
“A: Yes, for—I don’t know—a few moments.
“Q: Did either of them look back over his shoulder?
“A: Yes, the one who shot my father. The big tall one. Just for a second or two.
“Q: Did you see his face then?
“A: Yes.
“Q: Is either of those two men in the courtroom here?
“A: One of them.
“Q: Would you point to him and identify him?
“A: The man who shot my father is sitting at the table there, wearing a blue denim shirt and khaki pants. [The Witness pointed to Mr. Morgan.]”
I laid the papers on the table. “That’s accurate, isn’t it, Neil? I read it the way it’s written and the way you testified, didn’t I?”
“Yes, I assume so.”
“Would you like to check?”
“No. I believe you read it accurately.”
“Neil, Mr. Morgan’s in the courtroom today too, isn’t he?”
Next to me, Darryl stirred slightly in his chair.
Neil scowled. He felt I was treating him like a child or an idiot, and he didn’t like it. “Yes, he’s here,” he said.
“Sitting next to me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Morgan, would you please stand up?”
Darryl rose slowly to his full six feet six inches.
“Neil, what’s the most outstanding characteristic of Mr. Morgan? What’s the thing you notice first?”
“Objection as to relevance,” Whatley interrupted.
“That will become clear,” I said.
“Overruled,” Judge Fleming said. “You can answer, Mr. Zide.”
“Well,” Neil said, “he’s black and he’s tall.”
“Normally tall?”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller Page 29
