Toba reddened.
“Without money,” Germaine said, “he won’t go. He can’t go. You think he’s a Mohawk who’s learned to live off the land? He knows he’s not. He’d freeze his balls off in a ditch by the side of the road. And Alan doesn’t want to die that way, believe me. He uses you. He’s clever at it. So clever he may not even realize what’s going down.”
Alan sprang up and said to Germaine, “Will you please keep out of this?” He faced his mother. “Now, just yes or no, like Dad would say. Will you lend me the goddam money or not?”
I felt myself flush. “Watch your language,” I cautioned.
Alan glared at me; I’d never seen that much anger on his face.
“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “Alone, if no one minds.”
Toba and Germaine hesitated, then went out the door. I heard the wooden floorboards creaking, and then the stairs.
Maybe it was the strain of what was happening in that Jacksonville courtroom, maybe it was the stress of all the years of Alan’s lies and half-truths. Accumulated feathers, says one Chinese sage, will sink the boat. The boat of my paternal stamina was sinking.
“Is it true that the only reason you called Mom was to get money from her?”
“Probably,” he said, a bitter smile twisting his jaw to one side. “So what? I sure didn’t ask her to come up here, and I sure as shit didn’t ask you to come, either.” He talked with wide sweeps of his arms, his body taut, his eyes glaring again. “I asked to borrow money. Big deal! Isn’t money the big thing in your life and everyone else’s life? What’s so terrible about asking for it? Would you rather I tried to steal it or sold drugs to get it, like the people you’re always trying to help?”
Alan had never lost his temper with us. He always tried to con us with amiable sweetness and apologies and promises—usually with some measure of success. I knew that other teenagers were more hot- blooded in the season of their rebellions, and for the most part I’d been grateful for Alan’s softer nature. In that, I may have been shortsighted.
But that sweetness seemed to have fled.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he went on. “I’ve changed my mind about the fucking money. You can keep it, because I don’t need it. Germaine’s wrong—I won’t freeze my balls off in a ditch. I’ll leave here tomorrow morning. I’ve got enough to take a bus to Binghamton and check into the YMCA, and I’ll get a job washing dishes or pumping gas and save money to get out to California. I’ll be there by summer. On my own! So fuck her!”
His skin turned white as he clenched his fist. I think he wanted to blurt out, “And fuck you too!” I don’t know what restrained him.
“Alan, I’d like to explain something to you—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said sharply, raising his open palm. “I want to finish.”
I ground my teeth. It had been a long day, and it would be a long night before another long day dawned.
“A few minutes ago,” Alan resumed with fervor, “Mom said she had faith in me—you remember? And Germaine said that was dumb, because I was a lying junkie motherfucker. Well, I saw the look on your face, and I knew right away you agreed. And I could see that in some crazy way you were glad she believed that, because it proved you were right all along, and you did the right thing sending me to this hellhole in Siberia. So I want to ask you, why don’t you have any faith? Because you always think I’m going to mess up, unless I do it by the rules? Your rules? I say I want to study art and you think that’s bullshit because I’m not already an artist, not already practicing. Well, maybe I need help to get started, did you ever think of that?”
I hadn’t thought of that; he might have been right.
He kept going. “You think that way about me because I did mess up a lot. And maybe I’ll mess up again.” He shook now with rage. “But who cares if you’re right? Give me a chance to be right! Or wrong! If I mess up, it won’t kill me. You can’t run my life anymore, that’s the bottom line. Let me do it my way! You always do things your way, don’t you? I’m getting out of here, Dad. Tomorrow.”
I was a stubborn man. When I knew what I wanted, you couldn’t stop me. That had certainly been proved in the past year. It began to seem that my son had inherited that trait. It had just taken a while to surface.
Yesterday, when the state had offered him life instead of certain death, Darryl had made a choice. He had turned down the offer and chosen to throw the dice, risking everything. That was a human being’s final privilege.
My son’s too. He was declining this sanctuary, which he hated, in favor of risk. And he had no advocate to argue for him. He had to do it all alone. I began to respect him.
“Do you want to come back to Sarasota?” I asked.
“No! I’m going out west. On my own!”
“Good luck,” I said.
“I will!”
He was hearing words other than the ones I spoke. But we all do that.
I yawned and said, “Let’s go downstairs. I’m bushed. I’m hungry too. Would you like to go into town and have a hamburger and coffee with us?”
He took a few deep breaths to regain his composure. He studied my face, looking for hidden motive, but there was none. I was just tired.
“Sure,” he said.
“Is there a place that’s open?”
“A diner on 17 outside the town of Oakwood.”
“Will they let you leave?”
“You heard what the head jailer said. It’s not a prison.”
We drove through Oakwood and ate at the diner. Alan ordered scrambled eggs and a double ration of bacon, which he claimed he hadn’t tasted in three months. After we ate I realized he didn’t light up a cigarette, and hadn’t done so in the office when Germaine offered him the pack.
“No,” he said. “I quit.”
“Why?” Toba asked.
“To prove something to myself, I guess, and because I always wanted to. It’s a disgusting habit.”
“I started again,” I said glumly.
“Well, Dad, you always admitted you were a nonpracticing addict.” He gave me a tolerant smile.
“I’m going to quit when this trial’s over.”
“How’s that going?”
“It’ll be over tomorrow,” I said.
“Is this guy going to die?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll bet you feel good about that.”
Alan had never made a comment like that before, or showed any interest in my cases.
“Yes,” I said. “If he lives I’ll feel very good.”
Alan went to the men’s room.
“What happened?” Toba asked. “He seems so calm. So sure of himself.”
“I’ll tell you on the drive back. Meanwhile I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette. While I’m freezing my balls off in a ditch, give him a few hundred dollars. Insist on it. He’ll take it from you, but not from me.”
“But—”
“Let him throw the dice and do it his way, Toba, whatever that is.”
I tried to sleep on the drive down to Newark Airport, but at one o’clock in the morning it began to drizzle, and then sleet fell in the mountains. My forehead pressed against the car window; it was like cozying up to the shady side of an iceberg. Toba skidded on a curve and I yelled, “Jesus!”
“Do you want to drive?”
“I want to sleep.”
“I’m sure there’s a hotel at the airport. You could take a nap for an hour or two.”
“If we don’t get killed en route.”
She hit the brakes. “Drive, Ted!”
By 4 A.M., when we returned the car to Hertz, my nose was dripping, my eyes felt ragged and I had trouble keeping them open. But at least, so far, the soles of my feet stayed calm.
“I’ll come to court with you,” Toba said. “I’d better be there if you fall asleep at the counsel table.”
My heart seemed to slow another beat or two. Now my feet itched. “That’s good of you,
darling, but—”
“Oh, knock it off, Ted. I’m coming.”
There was nothing I could do. She would be there, and she would hear my witnesses.
My father had given me two bits of advice I often remembered. Never try to save money on what goes between you and the ground (he meant shoes, tires, and mattresses), and treat yourself to a good steak and a shot of Jack Daniel’s whenever you’re feeling depressed.
At 5:00 A.M. in the airport restaurant I ordered a medium-rare T-bone and a pot of coffee. The bourbon didn’t seem like a good idea yet.
Chapter 30
TOBA AND I changed planes in Atlanta and landed at Jacksonville International just after ten in the morning. The air was warm and crisp. The sun was shining, and the glare hurt my eyes. I kept wiping my red raw nostrils with Kleenex; my stomach had what the Florida crackers of my boyhood called “the whistlebelly thumps.”
We took a taxi into the city and reached the courthouse just before eleven. In the elevator I buttoned my collar and tied my tie. A few TV cameramen outside Courtroom Five stared at me. I’d used my suit jacket as a pillow at Newark Airport, and there was a stain on my trousers where a piece of breakfast T-bone had landed. In general, I felt as if I’d been shot out of a cannon and missed the net.
Floyd Nickerson was to have been my first witness, assuming he hadn’t left town and risked a contempt citation. He was under a subpoena that Gary Oliver had hand-delivered one evening a week before to Orange Meadow. At first Nickerson had tried to slam the front door. Then he threatened bodily harm to Gary, who stood his ground and said, “Mr. Nickerson, I’m acting as an officer of the court. Touch a hair on my head, and I’ll hand you this subpoena tomorrow in a jail cell.”
Yesterday after lunch, Gary had gone to Judge Fleming and explained that I’d been called out of town on urgent family business, but that I’d be back the following morning and we would complete our case by the end of that day, as promised—as, in fact, demanded.
In a midnight call from Oakwood, I had prepped Gary on how to examine Nickerson. “Draw it out until I get there. Whatever you do, save the other witnesses for me.”
But as soon as I pushed open the courtroom door on Wednesday morning, I realized that Floyd Nickerson was not on the witness stand.
Darryl Morgan, in a khaki jumpsuit provided by the jail, filled a wooden chair at the counsel table. Gary Oliver, seated next to him, was examining a man named James L. Duckworth. In his early sixties, Duckworth was the chief medical examiner in Duval County; he had been my witness in the trial thirteen years ago.
Toba and I passed by Connie and Neil Zide. With a gracious smile, Toba squeezed herself into a seat on the wooden pew across the aisle from them. She hadn’t seen Connie since the last time we’d all been together in court, thirteen years ago. Clamping my teeth together, I continued past the bar and to the counsel table.
Gary looked up and spotted me. Without hesitation, he said, “No further questions, Your Honor, and we request a brief recess.”
Judge Fleming banged his gavel in agreement.
I sat down, nodding to Darryl. Clutching Gary’s arm, I said softly, “Where the hell is Nickerson?”
Gary told me that at three o’clock that morning, Nickerson had killed himself.
Light seemed to fade before my eyes, as in a brownout. I whispered, “I don’t believe it.”
“Believe, Ted.”
“How?”
“Ate his gun.”
It was what cops did when they were old and tired and depressed, or still on the job and unable to face the consequences of something rotten about to be uncorked. In his garage, the same garage where I’d seen him saying goodbye to Suzanne Byers—at about the hour that Scott Fitzgerald had called “the dark night of the soul”—Nickerson had put his service revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. An insomniac neighbor, hearing the shot, hurried over to find him. Nickerson’s subpoena was on the kitchen table next to a copy of the Times-Union with its lead story about the hearing, an empty pack of Camels, and an overflowing ashtray. There was also a ground-out butt next to his body in the garage. Gary’s report had indicated that Nickerson hadn’t smoked for the last ten years. It was, I suppose, his final pleasure.
Jerry Lee Elroy, now Floyd Nickerson. I could understand how you might think twice about becoming a witness for Ted Jaffe.
Darryl hadn’t said a word. He was the only one of us who was calm.
“What do we do?” Gary asked. Together we had planned the strategy of this hearing. He knew where Nickerson would have fit, why his presence was so important.
“Does the judge know?”
“Not yet. I thought if I told him, he might call the whole thing off. I called Jim Duckworth just to stall.”
The point was, of course, that Fleming had granted this hearing on the basis of my tape recording of Nickerson and the former JSO Homicide detective’s promised presence as a witness. Technically, without Nickerson, we had no case of our own except what might be proved through cross-examination.
“Go get Terence,” I said. I stood up, brushed past Whatley and grabbed Muriel Suarez by the arm, and made a dash for chambers.
Judge Fleming peered at me with his lizard eyes and said, “Well, I’ll be dog. You’re not funning me? You lost another one?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Off on a stony lonesome, like we say in Clay County?”
I nodded. “Gone belly up.”
“You got any other witnesses?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Worth my listening to?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They in court or close enough to hear you yell?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was like a cross-examination where a good lawyer fires a salvo of leading questions that only permits the witness to say yes or no.
“And by the way,” the judge said, adjusting his glasses and letting his eyes roam over me, “what in hell happened to you? You look like you just had a root canal.”
“That would have been preferable. I had a long night, Your Honor.”
“Worth it?”
“Too early to tell.”
“Usually is,” the judge said. “Well, we’re here, we’ve cleaned the wax out of our ears, we’ve got a few hours left of precious court time. Seems a shame to send all these snoopy TV folks home early. How long will you take?”
“Not too long,” I said.
“Sounds about the right amount of time. Let’s get on with it.” Muriel, crowding my elbow there in chambers, protested, but the judge finally flashed me a poisonous smile and said, “Call your next witness, Counselor, before La Bella Cubana comes up with something makes me change my mind.”
Back in the courtroom, when his honor had ascended the throne and the bailiff had called for order, I dropped down in a wooden chair next to Darryl and said, “The defense calls Michael Stanzi.”
Mike Stanzi, the JSO ballistics expert, was still working at the same job. I had his official report in front of me, as well as the pages of his thirteen-year-old trial testimony. He was a man of forty-five, with curly gray hair, a big mustache, and a pleasant demeanor.
“Mr. Stanzi, tell us briefly what you observed on the morning of December 6, 1978, when you reached the Zide estate and had a good look around.”
No secret about that. Stanzi had observed a corpse with two bullet holes. The rounds were from a .38-caliber revolver. A third shot from the same weapon had struck the wall on the far side of the living room from the terrace and embedded itself there in the Swedish oak paneling.
“About how high up in the wall was that bullet hole, sir?”
He glanced at his papers. “My official report says eleven feet seven inches.”
“You found no other spent rounds?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“And you never found the gun?”
“Never.”
“Then it’s possible that more than three shots were fired from that thirty-eight-caliber pis
tol, isn’t it?”
“Well, I suppose it’s theoretically possible, but we didn’t find any evidence of that.”
“Did you look outside the house?”
“No, because it was just lawn and trees out there, and the pistol had been fired by someone who was facing the house from the direction of the terrace.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes, sir, that’s a fact.”
“But how did you know that to be a fact?”
Stanzi smiled, patronizing me. “Because we knew that the perpetrators had been standing on the terrace and fired toward the room. And that was confirmed by the bullet we found in the woodwork on the far wall.”
“Mr. Stanzi, think about that a moment. Did you know the perpetrators had been standing on the terrace and firing into the room, or did you just assume it?”
“Well, as I said, there was the spent bullet in the woodwork. And I was told by a fellow officer that the bullets had been fired from the terrace.”
“Which fellow officer told you that?”
“I believe it was Sergeant Nickerson, when we arrived.”
“So you really didn’t know, you simply took his word for it, right?”
“Yes … but there was the evidence of the bullet in the woodwork.”
“That evidence,” I said, “told you that one bullet had been fired in a specific direction. It didn’t tell you that the bullet had been fired from the terrace, did it?”
Stanzi shrugged. “Well, no. All right.”
“The bullet in the woodwork didn’t tell you anything about the bullets that had struck Mr. Zide, or any bullets that might have been fired from inside the room in the direction of the lawn—did it?”
“There weren’t any other bullets out there,” Stanzi said smugly.
“How do you know that?”
“Because there were only three shots fired, and those rounds were all accounted for.”
“And how did you know that?”
“Sergeant Nickerson informed me.”
“Did Floyd Nickerson tell you he was there and heard three shots? Only three shots?”
Muriel objected. This was hearsay, a statement made out of court that couldn’t be confirmed.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller Page 31
