Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (11 page)

“Yes, come.”

I rose from the counsel table. It was my duty to seek the end of the convicted murderer’s life. But Connie had said she didn’t want him to die. And neither did I. How could I, in conscience, seek a man’s death if I didn’t hate him? And didn’t see him as a threat to the survival of others?

“The State of Florida,” I said calmly, “will present no new witnesses. The state rests its plea for the death penalty on the previous evidence.”

With a perceptible scowl on his lips, Judge Bill Eglin looked down. He had been on the bench for three years; he was not new to this. But I had confused him.

Gary Oliver strode toward the jury again, a hearty man, arms spread as if to embrace the world.

He called Marguerite Little as his first witness. She fidgeted in the witness chair as if it might be the very chair her son was headed toward. With her wild iron-gray hair and Mother Hubbard dress, Morgan’s mother had the look of a woman let out of a mental institution for the day.

“He always been a good boy.”

That was the sum of her testimony, and I passed my right to crossexamine.

A.J. Morgan, the stepfather, in a black suit whose jacket seemed two sizes too small for him, took the stand. “I always told him he was gonna go too far. He never listen to me. He don’t know what he about, that boy—”

“Sir!” Oliver shot forward, cutting him off. “Tell us this: in your home, was your stepson violent?”

“I don’t permit that.”

“Outside your home, that you know of?”

“That’s what he here for, right?”

Oliver sank back toward the defense table, defeated by this friendly witness.

The time came for final argument in part two.

Rising, Gary Oliver faced the jury. “This is a young boy,” he begged. “He shot this man without meaning to. He didn’t go to that house to kill anyone, he went there to rob them.”

From his seat at the defense table, Darryl Morgan rumbled, “I didn’t shoot
no one
!”

The eyes of all the jurors swung toward him. Damn fool, I thought. You’ve accused these people of error in the most serious judgment any of them has ever made.

The judge eschewed the use of a gavel. Calmly he tapped his ballpoint pen on the oak bench from where he dispensed justice.

Oliver stared at his client, then turned back to the jury. “Robbery’s a crime, but not one you have to die for. The killing was bad, but ‘twasn’t meant to be. The one boy, his friend William Smith, is already shot dead by the police. One dead … don’t you think that’s enough? And you can’t really blame
this
boy for what his friend did to that lady’s face. Twenty years old! Be merciful! The Morgan boy will be forty-five years old when he comes up for parole, if you let him. Maybe they’ll give it to him, maybe not. But he’ll be a new man then. Give that new man a chance. Do the Christian thing! Give him the opportunity to repent!”

After Oliver sat, wiping his forehead with his ever-present white handkerchief, Judge Eglin waved his hand at me. The state, saddled with the burden of proof, was granted the right of the last word. A kind of coda: conclusive major chords, knells seeking doom.

Whatever I wished privately to happen, I had the obligation to set forth the opinion of the State of Florida. It had occurred to me that if I didn’t offer rebuttal, some zealot such as Judge Eglin could move for my disbarment.

I stood and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant was surprised in the act of burglary by Solomon Zide, and indeed, thinking he was threatened, may have reacted quickly and irrationally. But our common sense tells us that he carried a loaded weapon he was prepared to use. We’ve also heard testimony that after Mr. Morgan shot Solomon Zide, Mr. Smith turned on Mrs. Zide, a defenseless woman. Smith slashed her twice, in the arm and the face. That does not strike me as merely an irrational act. It strikes me as brutal, and certainly deliberate. And I ask you: Did Mr. Morgan make any effort to stop Mr. Smith from doing what he did? Did he say, ‘That’s enough, William Smith! Let’s go!’? You’ve heard Mrs. Zide testify to the contrary. The judge in his charge will tell you that our law requires that all participants in a criminal act be responsible for the actions of the other participants. Otherwise, imagine: in a bank robbery, one man would say, ‘Oh,
I
didn’t take any money, I was just standing there with a gun.’ If William Smith were alive, he would be equally responsible with Mr. Morgan for the death of Solomon Zide. In the same way, Mr. Morgan is equally responsible for the attack on the person of Constance Zide. The brutality of this crime is an aggravating circumstance that may outweigh any mitigating circumstances such as the defendant’s youth. Therefore the state moves for the application of the death penalty.”

I had a seafood lunch with Toba at The Jury Room, with Connie and Neil Zide at a table on the far side of the restaurant. We went back to the courtroom and at a few minutes past 4:00 P.M. the jury announced that they had reached a decision. Filing in, they took their seats on the padded wooden chairs. The foreman rose; he was a retired electrical engineer with yellowing hair. He read from a slip of paper in his hand.

“The jury advises and recommends to the court that it impose a sentence of life imprisonment upon Darryl Morgan without possibility of parole for twenty-five years.”

I met Connie Zide’s eyes; she was nodding her head up and down in what I knew was relief. Toba nodded at me too, and smiled. I looked across the table at Darryl Morgan.

There was pure hatred in his gaze. I had tried to kill him, he seemed to be thinking. Tried and failed.

Judge Bill Eglin tapped the pen again. “I want to remind you,” he declared—his voice penetrated and instantly stilled the light murmur that had swept through the courtroom—”that I have the right to uphold or override the jury’s recommendation. This provision is a safeguard built into the law of our state, so that if a judge feels a jury has given too much weight to either aggravating or mitigating circumstances, that judge can rectify what he perceives as an error.”

He leaned forward, a pockmarked man in his late forties, and turned toward the jurors. “I suspect y’all have cast your verdict on the basis of the defendant’s youth, although I want you to realize that by the current laws of our nation he’s considered old enough to vote. But in addition, I’m moved by Mr. Jaffe’s final argument. Prosecutor for the state correctly points out that this defendant was responsible for the acts of his accomplice, now deceased. That accomplice, Smith, attacked and might have killed Mrs. Zide. Now I ask you, is the convicted man penitent? Does he apologize for the scarring of a beautiful woman? Does he show remorse for taking the life of a beloved husband and a benefactor of this community? Does he say those simple words we all want to hear: ‘I’m sorry’? You heard his outbursts!
He does not!”

The judge was grimly quiet for a few moments.

“I have to tell you, I find this a reprehensible crime. And I’m going to override the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence. Darryl Morgan, I sentence you to death. I order that you be taken by the proper authorities to the Florida State Prison and there be kept in close confinement until the date your execution is set. That on such day you be put to death by electrical currents passed through your body in such amounts and frequency until you are rendered dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

I couldn’t believe what I had heard. Connie Zide, her face gone white, looked at me. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do.

Twelve years would pass before I would see her again.

I stared dully at Judge Bill Eglin, and then at the defendant, whose lips twisted in fury.

The judge tapped his pen. The two deputy sheriffs standing behind Darryl Morgan swiftly clicked handcuffs on his wrists. “All rise!” the bailiff cried.

The judge in his black robes swept from the courtroom.

Chapter 9

MY COLLEGE FRIEND Kenny Buckram was a short, thickchested man with the curly hair and friendly appearance of a teddy bear. In 1990 his third and most recent ex-wife had a bumper sticker made, which she glued to the rear of his Lincoln Town Car. It said: HONK IF YOU’VE BEEN MARRIED TO KENNY BUCKRAM.

Having taken a sabbatical now from marriage, Kenny told me that he had fewer affairs; instead, two or three times a year he flew to Rio or Bangkok, where he would hire a hotel suite for a long weekend and install a pair or even a trio of young hookers. “Simplifies my life,” he explained, “and in the long run it saves me money. As well as vital bodily fluids.”

Vital bodily fluids. Straight out of
Dr. Strangelove,
our favorite film back in the days when we thought we could save the world. Or even change it.

At forty-seven, Kenny Buckram was now the elected public defender for the Fourth Circuit of Florida. After Ruby had told me that Darryl Morgan was still alive and on death row, I asked her to put in a call to Kenny at his Jacksonville office.

“You can’t stay in a hotel,” Kenny said. “That’s crazy, Ted. I haven’t seen you in years! I’ve got a house out by the beach, with plenty of room. I’m between wives.”

I flew to Jacksonville on Wednesday. At half past six that evening, carrying cold bottles of Pilsner Urquell, Kenny and I walked past the surf shop and Silver’s Drugs and the Sun Dog, and onto Jacksonville

Beach. Seagulls screeched in the cool evening air. I finally got around to telling Kenny what I had learned from Jerry Lee Elroy in Sarasota.

“But you were a prosecutor,” Kenny said. “You’re not telling me you didn’t know there were people out there who’d sell their souls to get out of jail. Hey, put me behind bars, I might be one of them…

We passed a sign: CITY OF ATLANTIC BEACH.
Please no picnicking, no littering, no alcoholic beverages, no glass containers, no motorized vehicles, no surfboards without tether lines, no dogs unless leashed and having Atlantic Beach City tags. All animal droppings must be disposed of. Strictly enforced. Thank you.

“Lucky they still allow you to fucking breathe,” Kenny muttered, taking a pull from the bottle of beer.

“Tell me what you know about Floyd Nickerson.”

“I don’t know anything. In Homicide they’re whores, they’ll sleep with anyone. You got some good ones, and some you have a hard time believing if they tell you, ‘I had tuna on rye for lunch.’ Nickerson’s supposed to have got a confession out of Morgan? Okay, assume that’s true. It’s a big case for the detective who’s on it. Years later they’ll say, ‘Floyd Nickerson? Oh, yeah! Dude who nailed down the Zide murder.’ So he thinks: I’ll hammer in an extra nail to make sure. No big deal to convince a scumbag like Elroy to lie. And it paid off, didn’t it?”

“Why is it,” I asked gloomily, “that I never smelled it?”

A blind young musician passed by, strumming a guitar. He was followed by a tall, good-looking blond woman in a bikini, wheeling a bicycle. Kenny and I both turned for a moment to look.

“Because,” Kenny said, “you had your head up your ass in a plastic bag, trying to pretend you had a clean job. What I hear, Ted, a lot of things went on, you just said, ‘No, that can’t be, so I won’t look.’ And you marched merrily onward until it suited you to cop out for Sarasota.”

“You heard
that
? Are you bullshitting me?”

“Listen, it’s nothing new. Ambition is the fuel of the justice system, denial is the grease. Why should you be different?”

“You make it so personal,” I said.

“So do you. You came up here looking for Nickerson’s balls. All he did was what half the guys in his shoes do all the time. And you should have known. Talk about snitches, listen to this. We investigated a complaint a few years ago—you remember Bongiorno, our local organized crime boss? This Homicide detective was accused of planting a story in order to get Bongiorno on a murder one conspiracy rap. Detective goes to a professional snitch and says, ‘What we heard is, So-and-so provided the murder weapon, and they made the drop over there.’ And the snitch goes, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what this dude admitted to me!’ “

“What happened to that detective?”

“Bongiorno had political connections in Tallahassee and he put a lot of heat out. The snitch changed his mind. They needed a fall guy —come to think of it, it was a fall gal—so they suspended the detective from JSO, and eventually she got married and quit.”

“Kenny, never mind that. I need to find out what happened. Who lied, and why. Do you know where Nickerson is?”

“Long gone, and the sheriff’s office isn’t that buddy-buddy with me these days. You’ll have to go through Beldon. Are you still friends?”

“I send him a card for Christmas, he sends me one for Hanukkah. Sure we’re friends. Why shouldn’t we be?”

In the deepening twilight the tourists headed for their efficiency units. Somebody in the parking lot was yelling about sand in the new Hyundai and wet bathing suits on the upholstery. Kenny craned his neck in several directions, but the tall blonde in the bikini had vanished.

“With all this AIDS shit,” he said, “I was thinking of giving up my trips to Rio and getting married again. That tall blonde would have been fine … if she was rich. I love tall women. But I love rich women too. I know this terrific rich widow down in St. Augustine. But she’s only five feet tall.”