Longboat Blues

by H. Terrell Griffin

  I laughed.

  “I did tell his wife I was sweet on you. Maybe he just assumed,” she said.

  “Sweet? That’s a little old fashioned, isn’t it? Hot would be more au courant.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want to tell her I had the hots for an elderly gentleman,” she giggled.

  “I’ll show you elderly,” I said, as I reached for her.

  After I proved, apparently to Anne’s satisfaction, that I wasn’t that old, we dressed and headed for breakfast at the Blue Dolphin. Over pancakes and sausages, I told her my thinking. There had to be some connection between Vivian’s and Golden Joe’s deaths. The link might very well be Cox and Rundel, but the only connection I could make was that Joe died in Miami, and Cox and Rundel lived there. I suspected that Joe had been lured to Miami with the hope of striking it rich in the drug trade, but was really being brought there to die. But, if somebody wanted to kill Joe, why do it in Miami? Why go to all that trouble when they could have wacked him in Chicago? Unless, the idea was to get Joe a long way from his home turf, so that his murder would seem random. The only reason that made any sense was that the killers were trying to erase any connection between the murder of the prostitute in Chicago, and the murder of her pimp in Miami. Besides, if the gators had done a better job, nobody would ever have found Joe’s body. That still left the question of why Rundel or Cox would be interested in a Chicago pimp.

  Anne didn’t say much during my soliloquy, letting me ramble in a stream of consciousness discourse that left a lot of loose ends. As we were leaving the restaurant, my cell phone rang. It was Logan, checking in. The conversation was short, since I had nothing to report. He told me he was on his way south, and would call on Saturday to arrange to meet me.

  After breakfast, we boarded my boat. I wasn’t going to accomplish anything in Logan’s defense that day, so I was taking the opportunity to show Anne Sarasota Bay. Over the years, I have driven and boated to every nook and cranny in the state of Florida. Nothing compares with the Sarasota Bay area.

  We spent the day sunning, while floating alone in the bay. Anne wore a striking red bikini that made me feel younger every minute. When I mentioned this, she laughed and flashed her boobs at me. Except for the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that time was slipping by, and I still didn’t have a good defense plan for Logan, it was a day that you put away in the memory banks. I knew I would roll out that memory for the rest of my life, and it would put me back into a glorious day on the water with a woman who was better than I deserved.

  At mid-afternoon we called it quits and headed for home. As you travel north, the channel meanders through the shoals, and narrows as it runs across the bay and into the constricted channel between the Sister Keys and Longboat. As I made the wide right turn that would take me into the narrow channel, I noticed an Anhinga cutting across the flats toward me. He came up on my beam and raced my boat along the waterway at 30 miles per hour. He was working mightily, his wings flapping rhythmically, his left eye fixed on me, daring me to go faster. I had the feeling he would strain his heart to a stop if I kept pushing. I slowed for a larger boat coming my way, its wake frothing a wave dangerous to my small boat. The Anhinga seemed to sigh with relief, and grin at his victory, as he settled, like a small plane, flaps down, on a waiting channel marker. Anne was delighted.

  “You remind me of that bird,” she said.

  “Oh, thanks a lot.”

  “No, I mean your tenacity. That bird was out to beat you, and he would have killed himself if you hadn’t slowed down. That’s the way you are about this case. Have you always been so intense?”

  “Pretty much. I think that’s why I burned out early. I want to win, and I want to do justice. Sometimes they’re not the same, and that adds to the tension. With Logan, I just can’t think about my friend going to prison for life, or worse.”

  “I’ve got an idea that I don’t want to talk about yet. I need to go to Miami in the morning. Will you trust me on this?”

  “Of course, I’ll trust you. But don’t you think you ought to let me in on the big idea?”

  “It might not work, Matt. I’ll know tomorrow.”

  We had an early dinner at the Hayloft, listened to the sweet jazz piano of Skip Cook for a while, and headed home to bed, where I did my best to demonstrate my youthfulness. I think she appreciated the effort.

  Chapter 24

  SATURDAY

  Anne left after breakfast, headed for Miami. I spent the morning with my files, thinking hard about the confluence of events that put Logan on trial for his life, and me with my hands around his neck. Could Logan really be the guilty party here? Was I grasping at straws, seeing connections where there were none?

  Logan had been very vague with me during this whole ordeal. I couldn’t figure that out. There was no reason for him not to tell me everything, to hold back nothing. But he had been evasive, and maddening. Was he playing me for a sucker? Did he have a reason to kill Vivian? Was their relationship more complicated that he had led me to believe? Had he found out about her past and snapped?

  I wasn’t getting any answers sitting there, but a vague plan was taking shape. Logan had to present himself to the Sheriff’s office by six the next evening. I was expecting a call from him to give me his time of arrival. I wanted to meet him at the jail and get him situated. I called Dick Bellinger and ran the plan by him.

  At mid-afternoon, Logan called. “I’m getting off the interstate and headed for Longboat,” he said. “My brother Fred is with me. I’ll be at your place in thirty minutes. We need to talk before I head for the hoosegow.”

  And talk he did. We spent the rest of the afternoon with him telling me about where he had been for the past month, and me telling him my plan of attack for the trial. We were both surprised with what the other had to say, but everything seemed to be falling into place. I knew better. The trial lawyer part of my brain was braying tocsins, screaming at me about having missed something. Elizabeth was going to lay a big surprise on me, and I wouldn’t be ready for it. I was going to get Logan convicted. Trial lawyers suffer from chronic heartburn.

  Fred took a flight back to Boston late that afternoon. Logan and I spent the evening on my balcony talking. On Sunday, we simply relaxed. The plan was in progress, and there was nothing left to do. I knew the following week would be rough, and I needed the rest.

  Chapter 25

  MONDAY

  The Manatee County courthouse sits on its square in downtown Bradenton. It is a stylish old pile of yellow bricks with white trim that had been built more than seventy years ago. It has large white columns at the four entrances on each side of the building. A Confederate soldier stands watch on his pedestal, facing north, an engraving telling us that he is enshrined in the hearts of his grateful countrymen. I throw him a mental salute as I walk by, trial bag in hand, thinking briefly of my forebears who wore the gray.

  The courthouse had recently been remodeled, and while everything had been upgraded, the essential beauty of the old place was intact. There was a security station at the entrance, and a metal detector that scanned my bag. The security guard was a minimum wage rent-a-cop, and probably would not know a bomb if he saw one. It was a measure of how much stock the Manatee County high sheriff put in the security of judges, that he refused to waste valuable deputy time on guard duty. Instead, the county hired a private security company and let them worry about it.

  I suspected that the judges found little solace in this. As a practical matter, if I wanted to take out a judge, I’d simply wait until he headed for the golf course and blow him away in the parking lot. That thought had sustained me on many a sleepless night.

  I took the elevator to the third floor and pushed open the double doors guarding the place where Logan’s life would be on trial. The court room had a high ceiling, from which dangled fans that were once used to stir the fetid air, made rank by fear and anger. Old polished wood adorned the walls, and there was a balcony, that at one time had been reserved
for black folks.

  I was early, and the room was quiet. I always get to court early. I like to sit alone in the courtroom, soaking up the atmosphere, communing with the ghosts of lost causes that had played out here for so many years. There is a somberness to old court rooms; a sense of history permeates them. I wondered how many men had gone from here to the gallows that had once stood in the square, or later to old Sparky up in Raiford. I hoped Logan wouldn’t be making that trip.

  In Florida there is no requirement that counsel sit at a given table. The first ones there get the pick. I had never much cared at which table I sat, but since I was first today, I took the one farthest from the jury box. It was a great slab of polished walnut, surrounded by cane back chairs with green cushions and casters. The chairs were rockers as well, and thus made one as comfortable as one could be in a pit that was about to explode with the drama of a man on trial for his life.

  Judge T. Johnson O’Reilly was to preside over the trial. I’d heard of him over the years, and since learning that he would be our judge, I had talked to lawyers who regularly practiced in the Twelfth Circuit. Every judge has a history, and those lawyers who knew him as an attorney or appeared before him as a judge, whispered to each other the secrets they learned. You could always get a pretty good idea of who and what a judge was by simply asking the local trial lawyers.

  Judge O’Reilly was tired, a lawyer with too many battles behind him. He wore his cynicism like some ancient amulet designed to ward off any errant appeal to the notion of justice that resides in the soul of those who love the law. He had battled mightily and often, sometimes even finding himself fighting for principles in which he believed. Too often, however, he was the one who perverted justice at the whim of his client. He consoled himself with the money he made, and with the belief that he had never committed an unethical act.

  But he knew in his gut that he misused his powerful intellect and his courtroom presence to prevail over lesser lawyers with better causes. It ate at him until he became rich, and then he quit the law. Still, he loved the law, which was in truth his only mistress; a mistress who demanded devotion; who could not be controlled and who was always ready to embrace inferior rivals.

  So he came back to the law. He took the bench, and saw a prostitution of the law that surprised and overwhelmed even him. A large number of the lawyers appearing in his court were shameless charlatans, and he treated them with towering contempt. He got to the point that he was so disenchanted with the poor lawyers that he could not distinguish between them and the good lawyers who found their way into his courtroom. With this, he became a tyrant, and an object of derision among the members of the bar.

  I was not too concerned by this thumbnail sketch of a tired and obstreperous judge. I was sure that I could appeal to that small kernel of justice that was surely buried deep in his heart. Do your job, I thought. Know your facts and know your law and the judge will embrace you for the lawyer you are. Boy, was I wrong.

  After a while the door near the judge’s bench opened, and a lady with an armful of files came in and took the seat next to the bench reserved for the clerk. During the trial she would be the custodian of all the evidence submitted to the court.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I’m Bonnie Moore.”

  “Good morning. I’m Matt Royal, defense counsel.”

  “Nice to meet you Mr. Royal. As soon as everybody gets here, we’ll bring in the venire. Judge O’Reilly likes to start on time.”

  Elizabeth Ferguson came through the double doors, followed by a young assistant carrying their trial bags. She came over and I stood to shake hands. She introduced me to her assistant, Richard Wightman, a singularly unprepossessing young man whose handshake was like that of a sick fish. I didn’t think he’d be handling much of the trial.

  “I can still do a deal on a plea,” Elizabeth said.

  “No can do, Elizabeth. Logan is innocent.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, going to the other counsel table to instruct young Richard on how to get the files out of the bags.

  The door opened again, and in came two deputy sheriffs, with a handcuffed Logan between them. He was wearing one of the suits we had brought from his condo. He looked wan and humorless. A night in the county jail does that to a man. As they entered the rail, Logan smiled faintly, and said, “Good morning, Matt.”

  “Morning Logan,” I said. One of the deputies uncuffed Logan, gave him a hard stare, and took his seat at the desk reserved for the court deputy who used to be called the bailiff. Another deputy entered from the door beside the bench, looked around, and asked, “Are we ready for the judge?” Elizabeth and I both nodded assent, and the deputy disappeared.

  At exactly nine o’clock, there was a knock on the back door, a signal that the judge was about to enter. The door opened and the deputy stepped out, with the judge right behind him. We all jumped to our feet. The deputy intoned the formal greeting that always sends chills up my spine. “All rise. The Circuit Court of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit of Florida, in and for Manatee County, is now in session, the Honorable T. Johnson O’Reilly presiding.” The battle was about to be joined.

  The judge climbed the three steps to the bench, his black robe floating behind him like a priest’s cassock. He was a big man, probably six feet two, and two hundred pounds with a head full of snow white hair. He sat in his chair, high above the trial pit, as seemingly befitted the man who would preside over the life and death struggle that would play out here over the next few days. He looked out at the courtroom, and in a deep voice said, “You may be seated.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Ferguson,” the judge said. Then looking at our table, “And you must be Mr. Royal.”

  “Yes, I am, your Honor. Good morning.”

  “Good morning. Now before I bring in the venire, I want to lay some ground rules. You will not take more than thirty minutes a side on your voir dire, and then we will take fourteen jurors, including two alternates. Do I make myself clear?”

  Uh-oh. This was not starting out too good. I stood, “With all due respect your Honor, I believe that restriction will constitute absolute reversible error. The State vs. Morgan case clearly gives the defendant an unlimited time for voir dire.”

  “You’re wrong, Counselor. That case stands for the proposition that you are entitled to a reasonable time on voir dire, and I think thirty minutes is reasonable.”

  “Your Honor, I have a copy of that case with me if you’d like to see it. It clearly says that even a three hour time limit is unreasonable, and the concurring opinion says that the defendant is entitled to unlimited time.” I handed him and Elizabeth copies of the case, and returned to my table. I knew I was playing with fire by challenging the judge this early in the trial, but on the other hand, I had to establish that I was not one of those marginal lawyers that didn’t mind getting pushed around by judges.

  After scanning the case, the judge scowled down at me, and said, “I’m not sure I entirely agree with your reading of the case, Counselor, but I’ll give you all the time you need to pick this jury. But be aware that I like to move trials along. Bring in the venire.”

  They trooped through the double doors, all sixty of them, and took seats in the pews that made up the court room gallery. Most of them were not happy to be here, but all had come in response to the notice sent by the Clerk of Courts notifying them that they would be held in contempt of court and jailed if they did not come at the appointed time. A few years before Florida had gone to a system of selecting potential jurors from the driver’s license rolls instead of the voter’s rolls. It made for a decidedly less intelligent jury pool, but lawyers were learning to live with it.

  Voir dire, the act of picking a jury to try any case, much less a capital felony, is a laborious task. Since Logan was on trial for his life, the state and the defense were entitled to ten peremptory challenges each. That meant that I could get rid of ten prospective jurors for any reason, and I didn’t have to state the reason.

  We
settled in to trying to determine which of the twelve people in the gallery would be able to fairly try the case. Neither Elizabeth nor I were concerned about fairness. We wanted those people most likely to find in our favor. I was still concerned about agreeing to Logan’s demand that we not try to change the venue because of all the pre-trial publicity. The trick was to find fourteen people, including the alternates, who had not read or heard enough about the case to form an opinion as to Logan’s guilt. Looking at the panel we had to work with, I was convinced that I could pick fourteen people who did not know they were in Manatee County. I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad for our side.

  By the end of the day, I had exercised six peremptory challenges and Elizabeth four. One of my biggest fears was that the jury would think that Longboat Key was peopled only by the rich, and would not be sympathetic to Logan. I was trying to find jurors with some assets. The only way I could do that was by matching them to addresses in the more affluent areas of the county. I didn’t know if Elizabeth had figured this out, but she had stricken two of the people who lived in upscale neighborhoods along the Manatee River.

  At five o’clock on the nose, Judge O’Reilly dismissed the venire with a warning not to talk among themselves or read or watch any accounts of the trial in the press. I knew in my bones that every one of them rushed home to catch the six o’clock news to see if somehow the cameras had picked up his or her image. Who knew how this would affect them.

  “Counsel,” the judge intoned after the court room was cleared, “I don’t want to be here all week picking this jury. We need to move it along. Do you think we can finish voir dire tomorrow?”

  Elizabeth conferred briefly with her protege, then stood and said, “Maybe, your Honor.” Well, I like certainty in a lawyer.

  The judge looked at me. I stood and said, “Maybe.”

  “Well, let’s move it along. We’ll be in recess until nine tomorrow.” He rose and left the court room.