Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (10 page)

But that was not why we had moved.

One morning almost two years earlier, on Siesta Key, I had been squeezing orange juice and trying to read the national edition of the
New York Times,
when the telephone rang. Our son, Alan, was an eighteen-year-old high school senior—the early-morning caller was his guidance counselor, Mr. Variano. He asked Toba and me to come see him.

We dutifully and apprehensively appeared at the high school that same afternoon.

“Alan is a good-natured boy,” Variano said. “Sensitive, friendly, interesting to talk to …”

Toba blushed as if she herself had been complimented. “We thought you’d brought us here to tell us he was in some sort of trouble.”

". .. when he’s not stoned,” Variano continued, “which isn’t often.”

Twice, he said, Alan had been caught smoking marijuana on school grounds. He often fell asleep in class. He cut classes regularly.

“Didn’t you know this?” Variano asked.

“Not really,” I managed.

“He’s been arrested, hasn’t he?”

I nodded cautiously. “With Bobby Woolford on the beach last Fourth of July. They had a pipeful of grass they were sharing. They were let go at juvenile court with what’s called a withhold. It amounts to a lecture. I’m sorry, but I can’t consider that as really serious.”

Variano looked at his notes. “We have reason to believe that Alan and his friends—the Becker twins, the Woolford boy, Susan Hoppy —have been heavily into dope-smoking since they were thirteen. And selling small amounts of it to the other kids for the last year or two. Are you aware of that, Mr. Jaffe?”

“Definitely not the selling. The other, not the way you put it. In a sense, perhaps, but…” My stomach tightened into a ball of turbulence. “Mr. Variano, do you know our daughter Cathy?”

“I knew her, although she wasn’t in my case load. Isn’t she a freshman now at Cornell?”

What was I trying to say?
She’s a terrific kid, an A student, she wants to save the planet. So don’t be so damned hard on us

"Are you talking about hard drugs" – Toba's voice was chilly – "or just marijuana?"

“Marijuana, Mrs. Jaffe, although I’ll bet my paycheck these kids have dabbled in other stuff. LSD, mushrooms, hashish, cocaine, Ecstasy, crack, speed—everything’s available.”

“Marijuana isn’t going to kill them, is it?”

“In massive amounts, Mrs. Jaffe, yes, it might. We’re talking cigar- size joints. Your son’s brains are being fried.”

The walls of Alan’s room were covered with posters of rock stars, bodybuilders, Harley-Davidsons, and Bogart movies. Dumbbells and free weights were flung carelessly on the floor. Alan had inherited Toba’s dark hair and my lean physique; he was determined to swell his biceps and pectorals to the size of a teenage Schwarzenegger’s.

He cried when I talked to him that evening. He admitted that the boys smoked in the janitor’s storeroom; they had stolen a key. He’d sold a few lids to friends.

“I didn’t make any money on that. I was just doing these guys a favor.”

“What about crack?”

“No way. That’s bad karma, Dad.”

“Cocaine?”

“Once or twice. Didn’t do anything for me. And it costs a fortune.”

“Cigar-size joints is what Mr. Variano said. Is that true?”

Alan bit his lip, but he nodded.

“Do you want to quit?”

“Yes. I know it’s ruining my life.”

I was pleased. These admissions had to be therapeutic.

“If you know that, Alan, and you want to quit, you can. And you will.”

Briefly I remembered what Toba had said to me years before about leaving black Jacksonville in the search for a “decent, safe” school. I sighed.

In spring the school advised us that Alan would not be graduated with the rest of his class. He had failed required courses in American history and science.

That was when we decided to move to Longboat Key. Take the kid away from his dope-smoking pals, get him in a new environment for the makeup semester.

“And I want to put him in a drug program,” I said. “I’ve done some investigating. There’s a good one downtown.”

Toba resisted my depiction of our son as an addict. “Ted, back in the sixties, at college, grass was a way of life. Did it fry
our
brains? We still take a few hits now and then at a party—you do, anyway. Alan’s just… well, I don’t know what he is.”

“Then we’ll find out,” I said.

After we moved to Longboat Key in August, Alan began a twice- a-week evening program. Parents were advised to come for separate guidance sessions those same evenings. Toba dropped out—”You never learn anything new,” she explained—but I drove there with Alan the evening after I met Jerry Lee Elroy at Sarasota County Jail.

Thirty adults gathered in an elementary school classroom in Newtown, a black area north of the city center. The walls were papered with children’s drawings, and we sat at small wooden children’s desks scarred with initials. Most of the parents were black or Hispanic.

A bowl was passed, and I slipped a check for fifty dollars under some crumpled tens and fives.

I made it. Why can’t my son?

There was a fundamental parental dilemma. You loved your kid, so you got involved. A sailing trip down to the Keys, Beethoven or U2 together in the evening, a discussion of the book he was reading for his school assignment. But after a while whatever advice you gave or whatever example you set, an unwritten law declared that the kid would do virtually the opposite. Or hate you at some level for meddling.

“Don’t lecture him so much,” Toba told me. “You have a tendency to pontificate.”

I hated that word,
pontificate.
Probably because it was accurate.

I tried to pay attention to what was going on in the hot schoolroom. A single mother was telling us about her twenty-year-old son who had come home, begging to be fed. “But I knew he’d steal whatever money he could find, make me real crazy. I say, ‘Go away until you clean!’ Two days later they call me from the hospital. They say, ‘Elston’s here, he’s undernourished, he’s sick, he say his mama kick him out.’ I say, ‘When he quit killing hisself with that rock cocaine, I come see him.’ “

The group applauded her, while she wiped her eyes. But what would happen to Elston without his mother? Could I do what she did? Tough love, they called it. Coddle them, forgive them, and they assume the world will too.

That night, on the drive home to Longboat Key, I said to Alan, “How are you doing, son?”

“Fine, Dad. We sit in a big group, and everyone gets up and raps about the shitty things they did when they were on dope, and how they’ve been clean for ten days, or thirty days, and we all applaud. Then we hold hands and say the serenity prayer.”

“Do you get up there and talk?”

“Not anymore. I’m clean.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“I know what a terrible thing drugs are now. I could use the time for studying. I’m having a real tough time with physics.”

We were home. Alan hit the button that opened the electronic security gate, and it whirred open.

“Let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll talk to your mother.”

Stars glittered above Sarasota Bay. Standing in the driveway, I reached out to give Alan a hug, remembering that my own father had never done that to me. Leonard, who had died a few years earlier in St. Augustine from a heart attack, had been a handshaker, not a hugger or a kisser. Coming back from my licentious summer in Europe before law school, I’d greeted him with an embrace and a kiss on both cheeks. He had flushed, drawing back a bit to make sure our groins didn’t touch.

Toba was upstairs, watching
thirtysomething.
With a snifter of Rémy Martin for company, I went out on the boat deck. Under gathering clouds the Gulf was a silvery gray, and from the other side of Longboat Key the waves splashed and receded gently.

Years ago, I thought, life had been simpler. In Jacksonville I could grab a cold piece of chicken and a Mexican beer and feel happy. Now we searched for three-star restaurants, and I wouldn’t consider a Chardonnay for under twenty dollars. I used to drive my old Honda, Toba a tanklike Volvo wagon. We currently owned four cars: my Porsche, Toba’s Jaguar, Alan’s hand-painted, gas-guzzling ‘82 Pontiac, Cathy’s Toyota hatchback up in Ithaca. I was kicking in for four insurance premiums and supporting the economies of four nations.

The oiled black arc of a porpoise appeared out on the water. Cathy had brought back a bumper sticker for me that said: MY DAUGHTER AND MY MONEY GO TO CORNELL, and I had laughed. But some days when I saw it on the rear of my car I felt more plundered than validated. She was already talking about graduate school. Not to become a lawyer, but to earn a degree that would allow her to get in line for a low-paying job in Washington where she would help give away part of my tax dollar to the poor in Ethiopia or Bangladesh. This fucking recession, I thought, came at the wrong time.

But when is there a right time?

I went back inside the house to the den, where I read for a while in a new le Carré novel. A clock was ticking softly in the kitchen. Gulls flew over the atrium, so close that I could hear the rushing choral beat of their wings. The pool filter stopped. A rich and gracious silence filled the night.

There was a rhythm to any life, I thought, a routine that both sustained and deadened. Countless moments became strung together in the guise of a whole, punctuated with flashes of pleasure, ache, doubt, and desire.
I want. I can’t. I wish.
Those were the themes. I was forty-eight years old. It would be over all too quickly, and if I had the courage at the end, I would ask myself: What was it all about? What did you do that really mattered?

And what would I answer?

I thought of my seventy-two-year-old mother then, for I knew what she would answer. I visited her whenever I could in her Century Village condo in West Palm Beach, where she had moved after Dad’s death. Set free from marriage, she had become a world traveler. She visited Israel, cruised the South Seas, flew up to New York with a friend for a fortnight of theater, and toured all the national parks in the West before arriving in La Jolla to baby-sit her California grandchildren. My sister joined her once in Jerusalem for a few days of guided visits to West Bank settlements. Rhoda called me after she got back to La Jolla.

“They were a group,” Rhoda said, “but I picked up on it right away—she was with this man named Sam Schatz. A retired Cadillac dealer from Cleveland.”

“Did Mom admit it?”

“Teddy, I’m not a cross-examiner like you. I’m a shrink. In my world, intuition has more validity than proof. I
knew.”

My mother was fatter now, but her eyes had more radiance than I was used to seeing. She had had a tuck. She dyed her hair a light rust brown, had given up girdles, and wore pistachio-colored slacks, flowered Mexican blouses, white Italian shoes. She said “shit” and “screw,” words I couldn’t recall her using at home in Jacksonville, and watched A&E and
60 Minutes.

To all my musings and soul-searchings, she once said, “Teddy, most of what happens isn’t planned. Who knows what’s going to be? So do your best. Be kind, enjoy, try not to worry.”

I tried.

When I went up to bed at half past eleven, Toba didn’t even stir. I loved her; she was my companion. But she snored. If I woke her she would be annoyed, deny it, soon snore again. In the dark I searched for the wax earplugs that I kept in the bedside table. When they were in place, I heard nothing except a faint neutral sound, as of distant surf.

The foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn
…

Once I had read Keats. Once I had dreamed of standing before the Supreme Court and arguing for a man’s life.

My mother’s advice was good only up to a point. In the silent darkness I thought of Jerry Lee Elroy, and then of Darryl Morgan, the man I had sent to death row. And I didn’t even have to dream that recurrent horror. Now I saw it and heard it while I was still awake: the black head in the leather cap, the crash of the switch, the dimming of the lights—the burst of blue fire.

Chapter 8

YOU TWIST, TURN, cast off the sheets, know you should be able to escape. And
must
escape. But you remain in the nightmare’s sweaty grip.

Twelve years before, the second part of the Morgan trial in Jacksonville had gone quickly. But in memory it would always have the quality of drawn-out nightmare.

I had risen at first light that morning and gone running barefoot along the sand of Neptune Beach. Waves shattered against the dunes, and the last of the night wind chanted through the sawgrass. When I came puffing back, Toba appeared on the beach near the house, bearing a mug of fresh coffee. She shivered in the morning chill.

Sweat ran down my neck from my forehead. “Thanks, my love,” I gasped, clutching the coffee.

Our street was quiet as she walked home with me.

“Sleep well, Ted?”

“Do I ever?”

I meant on the night before final argument in a murder case. Toba understood.

“Ah, but rejoice,” she said. “This is the last one you’ll ever have to do.”

“Yes!” And I hugged her.

“Shall I come to court? I’ve got the time today. Would you like that?”