Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (32 page)

I HAD FAILED to save Darryl Morgan’s life, and that plunged me into a pit of gloom that threatened to have no bottom. But life goes on. Though I was still focused on Darryl, there were other things I had to deal with.

Toba was having a hard time too. “The country’s depressed,” she said, “and so am I.” Her office telephone rarely rang; she wasn’t making money.

She set herself some new goals. To learn Spanish. To put in some serious time working for the pro-choice movement. To gain three or four pounds so that her face wouldn’t look so drawn but so the weight wouldn’t go to her thighs.

Cathy had a summer job as a cocktail waitress at a seafood restaurant on the Quay. Alan was working at a garage on St. Armands Key. He went camping one weekend down on the Caloosahatchee River with some friends. When he got back he told Toba that they’d never been able to set up the tent properly and, when a heavy rain began to fall, he and another kid found a station wagon with the back gate open. They went to sleep in it. Two cops woke them at 6:00 A.M. and took them in handcuffs to the Lee County courthouse in Fort Myers, where they were arrested for trespassing.

“Like criminals? That’s absurd!” Toba cried.

He would handle it himself, Alan said. Toba told me about it that evening. “If he pleads guilty, what sort of fine will they give him?”

“Couple of hundred bucks, maybe. Don’t worry—the court will let him do community service. Picking up garbage in parks, scrubbing graffiti off school walls.”

In order to make it easier for Alan to pay the fine for trespassing, Toba decided to pay his bill with Dorothy Buford. She called to make the arrangements.

The therapist said, “Alan’s not been my patient for the last three weeks.”

“Oh? May I ask why you let him go?”

“He
left. It was his decision that he didn’t need more therapy.”

Toba sat on this knowledge for a full week. One evening, staring at the September sunset with a vodka tonic in her hand, she took an uncertain step in the wrong direction and fell into the pool. She came up for air, gasping, with the highball glass and the wedge of lime and the ice cubes floating on the surface of the water. She went upstairs and changed out of her wet clothes into dry sweats.

Then she called Dorothy Buford. “Do you have an opening? May I sort of take my son’s place? I have some problems, but I can’t put my finger on them. I’ve been drinking too much. This evening I fell into our swimming pool, fully dressed.”

When I came home from the office, she told me what had happened. I began to pace the room, cracking my knuckles.

“You’re not making this up?” I said.

“Why are you so upset? I didn’t get hurt.”

“Years ago, do you remember I told you about a woman, a witness in a case up in Jacksonville, who fell into her pool fully dressed?”

“Vaguely.”

“I pulled her out.”

“So?”

“It just seemed strange for it to happen again.”

“You didn’t pull
me
out,” Toba said, puzzled. “And I’m not a witness. I’m your wife. I was shitfaced. That’s why I fell in.”

She told me then what she had learned about Alan.

I didn't want to ambush him. I left him a note: “Kiddo, I’ll be waking you before I go to the office. I want to talk to you about your leaving therapy.”

When I came downstairs at six-thirty in the morning, Alan was already pouring milk into his granola. He said sadly, “Well, I fucked up again.”

“That’s a way of putting it.” I put a kettle of water on to boil. Tea promised to be more calming than coffee.

“This is what happened,” Alan said. He wasn’t getting anywhere with Dorothy Buford, and so for the last three weeks he’d taken the money that I’d contributed toward the therapy fee and spent it on marijuana.

“And the story I told you about what happened down on the Caloosahatchee, that’s bullshit. We were in a car parked by the river. The cops rousted us about one o’clock in the morning because they were suspicious. They got us on possession. Two ounces, minus what we’d already smoked.”

“How’d you like jail?”

“Not much.”

And one more thing, he said. He’d told us he’d passed the courses in physics and American history, but that wasn’t true. No diploma was coming in the mail.

“Dad, I was thinking of going to San Francisco. My friend Bobby Woolford is out there now. He’s got his own apartment, and a job, and I can stay with him. Don’t worry, he’s off drugs. Frisco’s a place I always wanted to go to.”

“If you go there,” I said, “be sure you don’t call it Frisco. San Franciscans will throw rocks at you.”

Into the teapot I measured out what I considered to be the proper mixture of Irish Breakfast and Earl Grey. I poured boiling water into the pot, and the fragrant heat of another continent rose to my nostrils. I wished I were there, sitting on a straw mat, absorbing enlightenment.

I gathered my family together that evening in the living room and told them that I had a proposition to make to Alan. I wanted their input as well as his.

I turned to him and said, “I want to thank you for your honesty. I understand now why you’re depressed, and even why you’ve contemplated suicide. You’d have to have balls of iron and a heart of steel not to be depressed by your life. Because anyone who keeps making the same mistake over and over again has to know he’s on a treadmill like a laboratory rat.”

Alan lowered his head.

“I made some calls today,” I said. “I wound up talking to a woman lawyer in Jacksonville whose kid brother was a coke addict. He went into a state-sponsored residential drug program in upstate New York. I spoke to the head of the program, and he said he’d make an opening for you now. He’d want you to come to Manhattan within a week for an interview, and I’d have to go with you.”

“Dad, I told you I wanted to go to San Francisco.”

“Yes, you did, and so I also spoke to the assistant state attorney down in Fort Myers. They know about the other bust, on Siesta Beach—they could hit you with thirty days jail therapy now. If you go to San Francisco before all that’s settled, it makes you a fugitive. But if you go into the New York drug program, the State of Florida will drop the charge.”

We argued for more than an hour. Finally I called a halt. “Alan, I need to know by the end of the week. And the last time we talked, I made something clear to you—I’m not backing down on it. You can’t stay in this house any longer. Go into the program or get out of here.”

On Thursday morning, unshaven, Alan was waiting for me again at the breakfast table.

“All right,” he said quietly.

When you’ve won, when the other party’s agreed to your terms, don’t gloat or encourage more debate. Walk away. I made the necessary telephone calls.

On Friday we flew to New York.

We stayed in a hotel facing Central Park. Glass-and-steel office buildings soared into the sky, and homeless men sprawled in their shadows. On Fifth Avenue black men sold fake Rolex watches. Other men clutched at our arms and begged. Beautiful women, white and black, hurried by, heels clicking.

“You like New York, Dad?”

“Yes, but I doubt that I could explain why.”

“It’s a scary city.”

The planet is scary, I wanted to tell him.

In the morning a warm September rain fell. Our cabdriver, a West African, spoke what to me was nearly incomprehensible English. Nevertheless, he got us to our destination on West 104th Street. In this neighborhood
bodegas
and
lavendarías automáticas
had replaced all the delicatessens and candy stores.

The drug program, occupying a ravaged brownstone east of Broadway, consisted of a reception room, a few offices, and basement dormitories. It was early in the day but already hot. No air- conditioning here. A young Puerto Rican woman with red plastic curlers in her hair sat behind a metal reception desk. I spotted a cockroach scuttling away from the water cooler.

Alan and I waited on a wooden bench. Three other young men— two black, one Hispanic—joined us. They were gaunt and worried- looking. Alan had brought a small suitcase, which he clutched between his knees. I was trying to see the place through my son’s eyes. He was on the fringe of a foreign world that he didn’t want to get involved in. To observe it was okay, to plunge into it was wholly unacceptable. I smiled with all the encouragement I could muster. But it wasn’t much.

Our appointment was with Germaine Price, a frail, sharp-jawed woman in her late thirties, who led Alan into a small windowless office and asked me to wait outside.

Ten minutes later Alan came out and said, “Dad, can I talk to you privately?”

We went into a bare room that contained an old school desk. Alan said, in a strangled voice, “This program is for crackheads, real ghetto kids. The place they send you to, what they call the therapeutic community, is a hundred and twenty miles north of here, in the mountains near a town called Oakwood. You have to stay sixty days without even making a telephone call. You can’t have anyone visit you for ninety days. You can’t leave the grounds. It’s like a prison. I don’t need that.”

“What do you need, Alan?”

“I think I could take care of that misdemeanor business in Fort Myers. Go to court, explain things to the judge. Then I’d go to San Francisco, get a job. Get rid of my drug problem.”

“Alan, you’re full of shit. I want to talk to Ms. Price. Stay here, all right?”

I went into her windowless office, wondering if Alan would be waiting when I came out. I saw myself arriving at Sarasota-Bradenton, saying to Toba, “Sorry, I lost our son at a Hundred and Fourth Street and Broadway.”

I sat down with Germaine Price and said, “Does this kid need your program, or is it overkill?”

“Mr. Jaffe, I’m telling you, if he doesn’t do this or something like it, he’ll die.”

I felt a worse chill than in the county jail at Starke. I reached for a cigarette, the first one I’d smoked that day.

“I have to assume you’re exaggerating,” I said.

“No. Before their time, that’s really what I’m saying. From AIDS, general deterioration, poverty, overdosing, shit that happens in prison. They can be bright, and they’re usually good-natured, like your son seems to be. They lie a lot. They break your heart.”

“What’s your background, Ms. Price?”

“Drug addiction and a master’s degree in social psychology.”

I stepped back into the room where I’d left Alan; he was sitting on the desk, tapping his fingers on the scarred wood. His eyes were a little damp. But he hadn’t fled.

I said, “I don’t have the answer for you, son. I have my own choice to make, and I’ve made it. If you don’t go into this program, I wash my hands of you.” I made a sharp gesture with my hands, while I felt my heart cracking.

Alan’s face twitched, and he shambled from the room.

Germaine Price came back to me half an hour later to tell me that he had gone downstairs to what they called Receiving. He had signed up. She shrugged; she’d seen this happen before. It wasn’t a triumph, it was just a beginning.

He came up the stairs from the basement with two black youths who wore leather windbreakers and torn jeans. One of them was tall and looked like a younger, slimmer Darryl Morgan.

“Who are they?” I asked Alan, after they had vanished into an office.

“Two guys in the family. They’ve been residents for a while— they’re what’s called expediters. Bucky and Jack. They’re down here on a pass. We’ll go up to Oakwood together in the van.”

He had the jargon already. Already he was Bucky and Jack’s little white brother.

“Which one is the tall one?” I asked.

“Jack. Why?”

“He reminded me of someone.”

I took Alan with me to the front door and out on the stoop, while the rain drummed on concrete. In all those years I had been a prosecutor, I wondered, how many fathers and mothers had said goodbye to sons this same way? I looked into Alan’s face and saw that he was close to tears. But he was brave; he was going. I hugged him and whispered, “Good luck, my boy.”

Withdrawing from the embrace, I twisted my mouth into a smile and walked off into the rain toward Broadway. I had no umbrella, but I didn’t care. A few beats later I turned around for one last look. I started to wave, but the stoop was empty.

One of the reasons we’d been prompted to leave Jacksonville had been Toba’s feeling that it was too black. “Black means more violence,” she’d said. “More drugs.” I smiled, a little bitterly, for to cure that possible mistake on our part, I had wound up entrusting Alan’s recovery to that same black community.

I went straight from Broadway and 104th Street to La Guardia Airport. Now it was Darryl Morgan’s time, and there wasn’t much left of it. But I had a plan. I didn’t fly back to Sarasota. I flew to Orlando and changed planes for Gainesville.

Chapter 24

HE SAW ME first in daylight, sitting behind the wheel of a rented car and staring at him as he came out of a supermarket wheeling a cart full of groceries bagged in plastic.

He wore the usual floppy pastel-colored cotton slacks and oversize white golf shirt that middle-aged Florida men wear in order to hide their paunches. I had been in the supermarket with him, trailing at a distance, watching him pluck from the shelves two six-packs of Lowenbráu Dark Special, a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a pair of tenderloin steaks, a pound of peeled Gulf shrimp, Ben
&C
Jerry Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. Eclectic tastes and little regard for price; he was divorced now and did his own shopping.