Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (35 page)

As regards Jerry Lee Elroy, I wrote, I didn’t know what in hell they were talking about. They were mistaken.

Then Beldon Ruth called me from Jacksonville.

“How are you, lad?” He was already assuming a lofty judicial air, and I sensed that it boded me no good.

“I’m well, Beldon. And you?”

“Couldn’t be better. And the family?”

“Great. And yours?”

That nonsense over, he got down to business. Our deal last summer, he said, hadn’t been open-ended. It had applied to my motion based on Jerry Lee Elroy’s affidavit. I had lost. It was a new ball game now. The state attorney’s office for the Fourth District was still the “appropriate government agency” that supposedly had to grant permission for me to represent Darryl in court, Beldon was still the state attorney, and he’d thought it over and decided that it was tainted, unseemly, against the canons—”and,” he said, “from what I hear, you’ve got your tail in a crack with the Bar Association. Time to back off, Ted my boy.”

“Horace Fleming granted my motion,” I said.

“For a hearing. That doesn’t mean you can be the lawyer to conduct that hearing.”

“Beldon, if nothing unravels, come January I’ll be there. I’ll have backup counsel, so you go ahead and file your protests and do whatever you feel you have to do. I think it’s shitty of you, but I suppose you’ve got your reasons.”

“You know them,” he said.

“And they’re not good enough.”

He thought that over. “If you go out and break both your legs, don’t come running to me.”

A week later the Ethics Committee sent me a letter by Federal Express overnight mail. This time they didn’t mention the accusation of my having lied to Jerry Lee Elroy; they had no proof, and the whole concept of plea-bargaining was best kept out of the public eye: it looked so tacky. But as regards the Florida Code of Professional Responsibility and its Rule 4—1.11, concerning successive government and private employment, the Bar Association felt I was guilty of “the appearance of impropriety.” In other words, it didn’t matter that Darryl Morgan wanted me as his lawyer. It didn’t look right.

I wrote back politely and said that was unfortunate, but nevertheless I was going forward with the case.

Harvey Royal asked me into his office. As a matter of form and courtesy, the Bar Association had sent copies of all this correspondence to Royal, Kelly, Wellmet, Jaffe
&C
Miller in Sarasota. The Bar Association, in other words, was snitching on me. They were in a fight they wanted to win.

Harvey sighed. “Ted, this is bad business. This is a little more serious than a broken nose. You could be censured. Even disbarred.”

“But I won’t be.” I tried to put a great deal of confidence into my voice and body language.

“Why are you so certain?”

“Because I’ll win the case in Jacksonville. If they disbar me, they’ll look bad. And we know that what they care about most is how they look.”

He tapped his fingers on the desk and said, “What about this other matter? That you lied to your client, this man Elroy. That’s a terrible accusation. I’m positive it has no basis in reality.”

I still don’t know why I did what I did. I suppose because I was tired of being everyone’s target. “Elroy is dead, Harvey. With a sea urchin shoved in his mouth. He can’t talk.”

Lines of age appeared to grow downward from Harvey’s narrow nose. He coughed a few times. “What are you saying?”

“That it’s my word against a dead man’s.”

The lines deepened. “Ted, I worry that you don’t grasp the significance of this. The state attorney in Miami seems to believe you told your client that part of the plea bargain was a requirement that he testify in the
Morgan
appeal. If you told him that, and you knew it wasn’t so, you acted unethically. Surely—surely you
see
that.”

I got up from where I sat, on the edge of his desk, and moved toward the door. “It would have worked,” I grumbled, “if some thug hadn’t slipped an ice pick between this asshole’s ribs when we were at the dog track. That was something no one could foresee.”

Harvey’s skin began to turn dapple gray, and his jaw was sagging. “You’re not implying that it’s
true?”

I winked at him. To deny what he’d seen, he quickly closed his eyes, but I think it was too late; it also gave me time to slide out the door.

Fall moved slowly toward winter. I was nervous; I knew the upcoming hearing was the last chance to save Darryl Morgan’s life.

Toba and I were finally allowed to call Alan up at Oakwood in New York. He explained that the telephone was in a hallway and there was a strict five-minute limit.

“What are you doing with your time?”

“There are a lot of family meetings. And I read a lot.”

Family. Well, why not? I was doing what I could for Darryl, and Darryl’s brothers were doing it for my kid.

“Do you run? Can you work out?”

“There’s no place to run. And there’s nothing to work out
with.”

“But you’re not depressed?”

“I’m doing it one day at a time,” Alan said gravely.

Prison inmates said that.

Toba was working only part time in her real estate office now and spending the rest of the time canvassing for the local pro-choice group. She seemed to have cut out all alcohol except for one large glass of red wine with meals, and she rarely discussed the therapy she was doing with Dorothy Buford. But one December evening after dinner, the day before I was due to fly up to Jacksonville, she flung her napkin angrily on the table. “What a bitch! I never grasped that until now. So
negative
about everything! At college if she called and I said, ‘Hello,’ right away she’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ I’m still never superficial enough or cheerful enough for her.”

She didn’t have to tell me who she was talking about.

“Or attractive enough,” Toba said, going into high gear. “The last time I stayed with her, she barged into the bathroom—I was naked in the tub. She frowned and went, ‘
Hmmm
.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter, Mom?’ ‘Did I say anything was the matter?’ ‘Well, you gave me a funny look and you went
hmmm.
Am I misshapen, or anything like that?’ ‘Tell me, Toba,’ she said, ‘does he still like to
touch
you?’ “

“Tell her I do,” I said. “In fact, how about after we stack the dishwasher?”

On the way upstairs, I asked if her mother knew what was happening now with her grandson.

“Of course. But she told my aunt Hermine that he’s at a weightlifting camp in the Catskills.”

I flew to Jacksonville the next morning. The Friday before the hearing was scheduled to begin, when I was sitting by the pool at the Marina Hotel eating a late breakfast and swilling a gallon of coffee that I hoped would get me through the day, Gary Oliver called.

“I’ve got some people here in my office,” he said. “I talked to them last night, but it was kind of late to contact you. I want to bring them over now.”

“Who are they? I hate surprises.”

“You might like this one,” he said, chortling, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I was going over the Nickerson tape and getting some notes together before I drove down to Raiford that morning to see Darryl. I told Gary where I’d be. “If you don’t see me, look underwater at the deep end.”

Half an hour later he showed up at poolside with an attractive but fidgety black woman who appeared to be about thirty years of age. She was wearing brand-new bluejeans and a well-filled pink sweater, but her hair needed brushing. With her were three children, two girls and a boy. One girl was about ten years old, the other was probably seven or eight; they held hands, giggled, and whispered together while they stared at the pool and the rising sweep of the hotel. The boy was tall, lean, and good-looking, a bit surly in manner, maybe sixteen years old. He wore an old sweatshirt with a picture of Magic Johnson, and his jeans had the requisite holes in the knees. He looked like a young Darryl. For a few moments, as they all approached from the lobby, I thought that some cousins of Gary’s might have hit town from the boondocks, and he didn’t know what else to do with them other than drag them over to my hotel. This didn’t please me. Then it occurred to me that the boy who looked like a young Darryl looked
a lot
like a young Darryl.

“This is Pauline Powers,” Gary said, and the mother of the kids bobbed her head a few times and reached out to shake my hand. “And this is Polly and Priscilla”—the girls giggled even harder— “and this is Tahaun. His birth name was Peter, but he changed it himself just recently. Says it’s everyone’s right to choose his own name, and he thought Peter Powers sounded silly. That cute stuff’s okay for girls, but not for boys. You get the picture? Tahaun’s an African name, he tells me. He’s Darryl’s son.”

We drove down to Raiford together in Gary’s Cadillac. The men were in front, with Tahaun squeezed between us, and the women in back—that’s how Gary set it up.

By the time we turned off the interstate I knew that Tahaun rooted for the Lakers and the Dolphins and the Braves, and wanted to be a basketball star but was worried because he was only six feet two. His favorite music was rap, but he surprised me by saying he liked the Beatles and Elvis too. He was still a bit surly, but I sensed you could beat through it if he believed you liked him. He was a high school sophomore down in Boca Raton, where Pauline was the assistant manager in a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She was only fifteen when Peter/Tahaun was born, and a few years later she married. Her second child died of crib death. Then came

Polly and Priscilla, and then a while back her husband, Powers, an auto mechanic in Boca Raton, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Recently she saw on TV that Darryl was getting a new hearing for a murder he’d committed thirteen years ago. She hadn’t known about the murder or that the father of her son was on death row. She’d lost all touch with Darryl since he was a resident at the Arthur C. Dozier School for Boys. She had a car, and a week’s vacation coming.

“My children never see where I was born,” she said to me.

I could look at her face in the rearview mirror. I caught her eye for a moment, and she looked away. Then she shrugged.

“My husband, he was a short man. Tahaun wanted to know how come
he
get to be so tall. It ain’t me, I tell him. After that, he asked about his natural daddy all the time. Drive me up the wall. Not much I remember about him, and that’s a fact, except how big the man was.”

“You want to meet him?” I asked Tahaun.

“Yeah.”

“We’ll try.”

In a strange way, Assistant Superintendent Ray Wright and I had become friendly. I don’t know how that had come to pass, except perhaps that we saw each other so often it was a bit absurd to go on sniping at each other. I suppose each of us suspected somewhere under the other’s skin was a human being, if you dug deep enough with a pointed instrument.

I suggested to Gary that he take the girls into Starke for something to eat and to see the sights, and I would ask Wright if Pauline and Tahaun could join me in the visit. Darryl and I had met the last couple of times in the attorney’s visiting room, the same room where he’d once tried to strangle me. There was an assumption now that my life wasn’t at risk. I hoped it was correct.

When I explained to Wright who I had with me, he thought it over for a few moments. “How old is the boy?”

“Eighteen.”

He peered out into the anteroom, where Pauline and Tahaun sat stiffly on two plastic chairs.

“He doesn’t look eighteen. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He sighed heavily. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, Jaffe. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“I’ve been told,” I admitted.

“They can see him if you’re with them.”

So Darryl met his son and the woman whose photograph as a fourteen-year-old girl he’d had on the plank of plywood at Dozier. He was shy with her, and she with him. They were strangers, of course.

When I introduced him to Tahaun, Darryl blew out his breath in amazement. “God
damn
he muttered. “I knew it.”

They shook hands, then drew back and measured each other for a while. They looked more like brothers than father and son. Darryl, even though he had gray in his bushy hair, was a man of only thirty- three. To me that was young. He was huge and powerful, and even if Tahaun didn’t grow that tall, he would look like his father one day.

“You play any ball in here?” Tahaun asked.

“Hell, no.”

“What do you do?”

Darryl thought for a while. There was a great deal, I realized, that he could have said. He could have told this boy stories that would raise the hair on the back of his sixteen-year-old neck. He could have mesmerized him with tales of brutality and death and absurdity and hustle in the joint and on the row. He could have told him how in the chill early mornings they rattled the spoons against the bars until the lights dimmed and they lost another brother to Big Wooden Mama.

“I’ll show you what I do,” he said. Leaning forward a bit, in one smooth motion from his back pocket he slipped out a deck of worn playing cards—one of the decks I’d given him—and a few skinny rubber bands that looked as if they were ready to fray and snap.

He entertained Pauline and his son and me for half an hour. His bony brown fingers seemed swifter than rips of lightning; I never saw what they did. The moons of his fingernails flashed under the fluorescence that beamed down from the ceiling. Pauline squealed with pleasure. Tahaun just stared.

With Darryl there were no jerky motions, no hand wagging. His misdirection and timing were as elegant as I’d seen. The hand, of course, isn’t really quicker than the eye, but it’s more clever. And the tongue is the hand’s partner. Darryl didn’t say, Pick a card. He looked at Tahaun and gravely intoned, “You’re my son, so we got an affinity. I can read your mind, just like your mama can. I can see in your naked eye that you doubts me, so I’m going to prove it to you.” And then, without touching the deck, Darryl ordered Tahaun to bury a chosen card and fan out the pack. “I wants you to keep your eye on my hands and this deck of cards, and don’t let your mind wander. Concentrate! Think of that card! Think
hard,
boy!” And he guided Pauline’s finger until it quivered over what turned out to be the king of hearts.