Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (21 page)

“Handy at what?”

“Don’t matter. James teach you. Just go where it says on this here piece of paper. You see James. Tell him you willing to learn.”

James, a sinewy, bald old man, asked Darryl if he believed in Lord Jesus and the Christian work ethic. As if he were talking to a white man, Darryl said, “Yes, sah! I sure does!”

That was August ‘78. The following April, twenty minutes after sentencing by Judge Bill Eglin, shackled at the ankles and cuffed to a waist chain, Darryl found himself in a DOC van headed for Raiford and death row.

The day he arrived, three of the hacks took him into a room and showed him the chair. “That’s it, nigger. Gonna sit your black ass in Big Wooden Mama’s lap and pull the switch. Ever see an egg in a real hot pan?”

“You can appeal, boy,” another told him. “Got a whole system of appeals now. The last guy appealed, he lost every time, except right at the end his lawyer come running down here and goes, ‘Rastus! Good news at last! I couldn’t get ‘em to reduce your sentence … but I got ‘em to reduce the voltage!’ “

The hacks cracked up laughing. Darryl said quietly, “Fuck you, motherfucker”—figured he had nothing to lose, but he was wrong. On the way to his cell—he was handcuffed behind his back—they pushed him down a staircase. By the time he had bounced to the bottom his nose was broken, his forehead and one ear flowed with blood, an ankle had been sprained. The official report: “Inmate tripped and fell.”

He often wondered why they didn’t just kill you when you got there. Make you kneel by a ditch, put a bullet in the back of your head, boot you in. He’d seen that in a movie about a Nazi death camp. It had seemed pretty awful then, but not anymore.

Lights came on at 4:30 A.M. Feeding time was an hour later. You never left your cell except twice a week to shower and get an hour’s exercise on the covered roof. You had your own black-and-white Emerson TV, your own radio. The power stayed on all night. There was no work to do. Now and then, if you knew how to read, you could get hold of a book, usually tattered Erie Stanley Gardner murder mysteries or appeals for Christianity. You slept and ate and pissed and crapped in your cell. You never saw the men in the other cells except when they passed by or during exercise hour, but you could talk to them—shout through the bars, play long-distance chess or checkers, make bets on ball games. Darryl knew the batting averages of nearly every player in the major leagues.

He had known some bad dudes but never been around such sorry motherfuckers in his life. He heard two men arguing over who had raped and killed the oldest woman.

“Hey, mine was seventy-two!”

“Well, you win, man, mine was only sixty-five… .”

Visitors were allowed once a week. Darryl put his family’s names down on the list. No one came.

Three years later his old buddy Isaac, from Apalachia, made the trip to Q block and Big Wooden Mama. Isaac had robbed a liquor store of $240 in cash a few weeks after he got out of Branville back in ‘77. Two police cars had chased him. Isaac squeezed off a few shots from his Colt Detective Special, and one of them struck a young patrolman between the eyes. Cop killers moved more rapidly than others through the appeal hierarchy. Came time for Isaac to bequeath his worldly goods, he gave all his clothes and cigarettes to the boys he’d jailed with earlier in C block, and said, “None of these threads gonna fit Darryl, so he can have these here mementos of a wasted life.” He left Darryl two packs of playing cards, a box of number 6 rubber bands, some plastic glasses and coins, as well as a couple of dog-eared, cellotaped paperback books on magic tricks. Darryl taught himself to be a magician.

Chapter 16

A SEMICIRCLE OF thick black iron protruded from the wall next to the toilet. The shackles and chains wrapped around Darryl’s ankles and waist were looped through the ring bolt. The handcuffs were shackled to the steel waist chain. This system of restraint had been invented three decades earlier by a U.S. Army general. Later the general was convicted for embezzlement of government funds. On the way to a federal prison camp in Pennsylvania, he was shackled and chained with his own invention. He was seen to smile.

Darryl, similarly trussed, sat on the concrete floor of his cell, back braced against the wall, long legs splayed out like a pair of scissors ready to close. He didn’t smile.

One of the guards entered the cell with me. He blocked my path with a rigid arm and said, “If you move from this area of the room, sir, we have orders to immediately terminate this visit.”

The guards seated themselves on the green-painted catwalk in opposite directions, each one on a metal folding chair about fifteen feet away from the foot of the bed. They were beyond earshot, but I was in both their lines of vision.

I sat at the foot of Darryl’s bed. My pigskin briefcase, which the guards had searched, lay on the khaki blanket. In my lap I had a Sony tape recorder and a yellow legal pad.

I said to Darryl, “I can help you.”

“Why you come back?” he asked, his eyes unblinking.

“I like your company.”

“Sound like crap to me. You a free man.”

“I made a choice. Coming back is part of it.”

“Last choice I made, I say to the hack, ‘Gimme channel seven.’ “

“You made one when you tried to strangle me,” I reminded him.

“You a smart dude. I keep forgetting.”

“So why did you agree to see me? You said it was some kind of flimflam, you weren’t interested.”

“Man, you don’t know shit from wild honey.”

“Then maybe you can enlighten me.”

“Something to do, man. Pass the time.”

“Why do they call you Wizard?”

“I had a deck of cards or some rubber bands, motherfucker, I’d show you.”

I wiped some oily sweat from my forehead. If this was winter, what was it like here in August?

“Where did you learn magic and sleight of hand?”

“Here on the row, man. Taught myself.”

He told me then about his dead friend Isaac and his time at Branville. “And from books. One called
The Secrets of Alkazar.
No dude ever named Alkazar. This magician dude named Kronzek make that up. But what he show you, that is definitely real.”

“What can you do?”

For the first time, Darryl chuckled. His sleeves were rolled up; I saw his tattoos clearly. “Sweet deception,” he said, “is the name of the game. I can cut rope, put it back together. Can do things with cards, make you think I’s a real magician. You don’t gonna believe what I can do.”

“Why did they take away all your magic stuff?”

“This is Q block. They take all you got. What you want from me?”

“I want you to tell me what happened that night.”

“What night?”

“The night you went to rob the Zides’ house at Jacksonville Beach.”

“You not gonna believe it. You never did believe it.”

“Try me. Enlighten me.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling at last. “I enlighten you.”

He didn’t like the job at the Zides’ because the chief gardener, James, got on his case all the time. Cutting the grass too short, boy.

See that bit of brown turf? No good. Now you’re cutting it too long, boy. Have to do it all over again in a day or two.

He was given the job of hunting all over the estate for dogshit. The lady had three dogs already: Paco, the eight-year-old Doberman and guard dog; two amiable and witless cocker spaniels named Myra and Mickey; and now she’d just bought a pair of three-month-old puppies, some kind of Chinese name Darryl couldn’t pronounce, and turned them loose on the lawns. They crapped six or seven times a day each.

“You look for their doodoo,” James said. “You find it, first you dump a lot of earth on it. Pick all that up in a shovel, get it into this barrow. Put it in one of those plastic sacks.”

“Make good fertilizer,” Darryl said.

“You don’t know nothing, boy.”

“You don’t teach me. How’m I gonna learn?”

Old James turned away, said nothing.

But Darryl, no matter how hard he tracked, never could find all the soft smelly heaps. The lawns and flower beds were huge, and the Chinese puppies ran everywhere.

James confronted him. “The lady says she nearly step in doggy poo yesterday. Right by the front door. And she says they getting flies in the house. You too far away from the ground to look real good at it? You want binoculars? You need to crawl round on your knees to find all that stinky-poo?”

“My daddy say you teach me about gardening.”

“When you’re ready.”

“How many tons of dogshit I have to pick up ‘fore you think I’m ready?”

James ignored him.

Darryl rapped now and then with Terence, the chief security guard, and Terence smoked a cigarette with him one evening and told him that James never taught anything to his assistants. He was sixty-three years old and fearful that one of these years he would be put out to pasture in favor of someone who knew more than he did.

“That sure won’t be me,” Darryl said. He had a better view now of his own abilities and future. But he liked working outdoors. He could be a gardener, if he could ever get past mowing lawns and shoveling dogshit.

Paco, the guard dog, had to be taken for a two-mile run every afternoon. That became one of Darryl’s chores. He and Paco bounded up the beach until Darryl’s soles were swollen and his lungs felt on fire. But he liked it when they stopped to rest, liked the tangy salt air and the cold bite of surf on his big bare feet. Day by day the run became easier. He breathed rhythmically.

I could be a sailor on the ocean. Except no one never taught me to swim. Ship go down, be one dead nigger go with it.

He saw freighters on the horizon, sometimes even inshore. They moved placidly on the blue skin of the Atlantic. He liked the way they coasted along: serene, dogged, yet quiet. Must be pretty out there.

Work on boats. Build boats. Do something with these hands… . He spread his fingers, gazing down at the wide palms, the thick veined wrists. Where am I gonna learn to do that? Go down to Lauderdale where they got boatyards. Find Pauline somewhere. I could be a daddy for all I know. And I be a good one—don’t slap my kid around, don’t laugh at him all the time, call him “useless moron” and “retard.” Teach him what I know, soon’s I can learn it myself.

He told his friend William only part of what was on his mind. He didn’t want William to laugh at him. William was working from eight to five as a porter at the Greyhound terminal. “Hey, I go to Lauderdale with you,” William said.

“With what, man? You got no money.”

“Neither have you. We do a little night work, man.”

Darryl scuffed his shoes on the pavement where they stood outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Shorty Bigshoes told me the cops know me too good.”

“Coupla scores down by the beach, we outa here. We on our way to Lauderdale.”

“I don’t want to hurt no one, man.”

William shook his head energetically. “Main thing is, take what you want, get away. You in bad luck with a dude who say, ‘I ain’t giving up nothing,’ but you can change his tune easy. Ain’t got to kill him, just smack him with the gun or shoot him in the foot. He give it right up. I know this other dude done his score one time, then broke this bottle and stabbed this other dude’s eyes out. One thing for sure, he say, that dude don’t be looking at no photographs or no lineup down at no poh-lice station.”

Darryl said in disgust, “William, you talking like all them dudes over at Raiford who be doing quarters back-to-back. I don’t want to smack no one in the head, and I don’t want to shoot no one in the foot, and sure as God made chicken I ain’t fixing to stab no dude’s eyes out.”

“What you want to do in Lauderdale after you find this fox Pauline?”

“Get a job. Learn something. Don’t know what yet.” He knew it would be uncool to say he thought of becoming a ship’s carpenter.

“This place where you picking up all that dogshit… they wealthy folks, right?”

“Wealthy don’t cut it, man.” He described the grounds and what he had glimpsed of the interior of the Zide house. “They
rich.”

“You know where things at?”

“What things?”

“Whatever they got we can sell, man.”

Darryl mulled that over. He wanted to leave Jacksonville. “I been away. You know a dude buys TVs, paintings, and shit?”

“Course I know a dude, and I got wheels, and I know where we can pick us up a couple nice guns. Use ‘em one day, give ‘em back the next, cost twenty bucks apiece rent money. You know how to get in there at night? That fancy house?”

Darryl said, “I look around. I think about it, figure it out.”

He figured it out. But he didn’t want to hurt Paco, he told William. He liked old Paco; they were buddies. Paco had been trained not to take food from anyone he didn’t know, but he knew Darryl. William promised to get some pills that would put Paco to sleep for six or seven hours. He’d wake up good as new.

Rich folks were having a fancy party in a few days, Darryl said, and pretty sure they’d do some drinking. Be over by midnight, they’d be happy to hit the pillows, sleep good.

“What they like?” William asked.

“Who?”

“White folks you work for.”