Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (2 page)

I stood and walked across the room to the barred window. No law or canon required that a lawyer like his clients; my obligation was to tell them the truth and do the best I could to minimize their exposure to legal grief.

From behind my back, Elroy asked slyly, “Can’t we work something out like before?”

I turned to him; now it was my turn to frown. Before what?

“Like up in Jacksonville,” he said.

I could see the butter on my lobster congealing and growing cold. “I don’t follow you.”

“I told you I had a couple of priors—three or four, come to think about it. Couple’s under my real name, which happens to be Jerry Lee Elroy, not Elroy Lee. You know me now?”

“No, I don’t.” But I was already uneasy. I
did
know him. I just couldn’t place him in the proper context.

“Jacksonville.”

“All right,” I conceded, “the name’s familiar. Refresh my memory.”

“Ten years ago, in Duval County. You were on the other side of the law then, Counselor.”

“Not quite,” I said. I had been chief assistant state attorney in Jacksonville and Duval County, but a lawyer, no matter what side he was on, was always an officer of the court, bound by the canons of ethics and his conscience, such as they were. Mine had always been pretty well anchored in place. I’d never done anything I was ashamed of. As a lawyer anyway.

Then it struck me; I remembered the cute gap between Elroy’s teeth. It was twelve years ago, not ten.

“The Morgan trial?”

“Right!” He looked immensely pleased.

“You were a witness, is that it?”

“For the state. For
you.
I snitched on this guy, Morgan.” He gave a shy, toothy smile. “You got it now? You remember the deal? Okay?”

I still hadn’t the slightest idea what he was getting at. “Okay
what}”

“Work something out like we did before.”

“Listen carefully,” I said. “I don’t read minds.
What
did we do before?”

Elroy sighed and rolled his ditch-water-green eyes in their sockets as if he were dealing with a backward child. “I was just thinking … I help out this here sheriff the same way I helped you out back then, and then these guys could drop the charges on the cocaine. Then my case don’t take up so much of your time, and maybe you’ll see your way clear to less cash.”

I walked back across the stuffy little room and sat down once more at the table. I tapped with my pen on my yellow legal pad.

“What the hell are you talking about, Elroy? What did you do in Jacksonville back in 1979 that I’m supposed to remember? Run it by me nice and slow.”

Elroy concentrated for a minute. “Nigger killed a rich Jew, you remember that?”

Now I had other reasons for wishing I were with my wife and my promised lobster. Under the table, where he couldn’t see, I balled my fists. “I remember very well,” I said coldly. “A black man named Darryl Morgan shot a white man named Solomon Zide.”

“Out at the beach, right?”

“Yes,” I said, “at the Zide estate. After a big party.”

“That’s it. It just so happens I was in the same cell with the nigger that did it. Big nigger, too dumb to pour piss out of a boot before he put it on. Cop took me up on the roof of the Duval County Jail. He asks if this nigger talks to me, and I say, ‘That’s not likely.’ Cop wants to know, ‘How about on the telephone? You ever hear him say, “Yeah, I did it”?’ I go, ‘He could have.’ ‘Well, he
did
do it,’ the cop says, ‘ ‘cause he told
me
he did it, so he might just as well have told someone else, like on the telephone here in jail, right?’ And I say, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Cop tells me he can cut a deal for me on my case, get me time served and probation. Hell, if the nigger told the cop he did it, he’s a dead nigger already, right? So I go, ‘Okay, now I recollect on it, I heard him say he done it.’ “

I remembered how the issue arose in Judge Eglin’s court twelve years ago. As in all Florida criminal cases, there had been full disclosure during discovery, and Gary Oliver, Darryl Morgan’s lawyer— the names had not been in my mind for a decade, but they rose up now like jagged rocks at low tide—had made a pretrial motion to suppress the testimony of Jerry Lee Elroy. Even if Darryl Morgan had said on the jailhouse telephone what my witness would testify to, Oliver claimed, it was still intended to be a private communication and therefore privileged.

“No,” I’d argued to the court, “if there’s one phone per cell, and you know three other men are standing around, where’s your expectation of privacy? That doesn’t wash, Your Honor.”

The judge nodded, and I had continued my direct examination: “And so what did Morgan say, Mr. Elroy?”

“He said, ‘I’m in deep shit because I was robbing this house and I shot some Jew … then his wife come running out, and we had to take care of the bitch too.’ “

Judge Eglin had ruled that the witness would be allowed to testify before the jury.

Now, twelve years later in Sarasota, I was finding out that this redneck worm who had been my witness in a capital murder case— my last case before I went into private practice and moved down here to the good life on the Gulf of Mexico—had perjured himself at a police officer’s request. He had lied first to me, and then to the judge, and finally to the jury. He’d lied about a man who was facing the death penalty. I hadn’t known he was lying, but that didn’t change the fact. And it didn’t make me feel less disgusted with myself —or less apprehensive.

“What was the charge against you in Jacksonville, Elroy?” “Aggravated battery. Beat up on a woman, no big deal.”

I could have throttled him.

“You recall the name of the cop who talked you into remembering what you didn’t hear?”

“Hey, maybe I
did
hear it.”

“No, you scumbag, you didn’t hear a fucking thing!”
I crashed my fist on the metal surface of the table with a force that startled him and me both.

“Take it easy, Counselor .. .”

“Don’t get cute with me,” I snarled. “Not unless you want to do twenty years on the concrete at Raiford. Who was the cop?”

Elroy turned a little pale, and he concentrated for a minute. “On the stocky side. Had a mustache. Nasty as catshit.”

I tried to remember which Jacksonville Homicide sergeant fit that description. Unfortunately, many.

“Lew Harmon?” I suggested. “Marty Girard?”

“One of them two, I think. Was a long time ago. What about it, Mr. Jaffe? You got good connections here with the sheriff—can you arrange it?”

I dropped my voice as though someone might be listening. “Are you sure you can make bail?”

“I got a friend coming over from Miami tomorrow afternoon. He’ll have the money. But I don’t know a bondsman over here.”

I made up my mind. Something had to be done, and I had to keep this man under my control no matter what the cost. “I’ll find a bondsman for you,” I said, “and we’ll be here together at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I’ll get you out of here.”

Elroy seemed surprised. “You’ll take my case?”

“Yes, I’ll take your case.”

“What about the fee?” he asked slyly.

“We’ll work that out. Don’t worry about it. I need to think about this for a while.”

When I left the jail, the sun was a squashed blood-red ball quivering on the horizon. A chill wind had sprung up to ripple the bay. I hurried to my car, but there was no way to avoid that wind. As it struck me, I had the feeling that it blew out of the past.

Chapter 2

IN EARLY DECEMBER, over twelve years earlier, Solomon Zide and his wife sponsored a benefit performance by the Florida Symphony Brass Orchestra. The concert took place at the Zide estate at Jacksonville Beach on what would come to be memorialized as the night of Solly Zide’s death. It was a black-tie affair, part of a tour sponsored by the Jacksonville Mental Health Association. Buffet dinner was $250 a plate.

I received one of the engraved invitations in the morning mail at my office on the fifth floor of the Duval County Courthouse. The envelope was addressed in blue ink, in a flowing feminine hand, to Edward M. Jaffe, Esq., Chief Assistant State Attorney for the Fourth District of Florida.

I was a public servant, a prosecutor, not a lawyer who could afford to spend $250 for dinner. I didn’t own the Frida Kahlos then, and the only decent espresso I’d ever had was when I was backpacking through Italy the summer before law school at the University of Florida.

But the invitation included a handwritten note from Connie Zide, a note that read: “Please come with Mrs. Jaffe. You will be our honored guests.”

When I arrived home that evening I showed the note to my wife. I told her that I’d called Connie Zide’s secretary and accepted.

“Why did you do that?” Toba said. “You could have called me first. Why did you assume I’d want to go?”

We were in the kitchen, where I was opening a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Toba, slim and black-haired, her long neck gracefully curved like that of a Modigliani model, stood at the butcher-block table, chopping onions to go with calf’s liver. She was wearing a hand-printed batik sundress that looked to me as if someone had thrown fried eggs and soggy hash browns over it. In the living room, Cathy and Alan bickered over the volume level of the television. It has always amazed me how women manage to ignore the endless squawks of their children.

“Since when did you have anything against a party?” I asked.

Toba glanced up, trying to look at me, but the sting of the onions blurred her vision.

“Ted, are you attracted to Connie Zide?”

Radar. Women are born with it. I forced what I hoped would come out as a smile of amused, warmhearted indulgence.

“Connie’s an attractive woman,” I replied with extreme care. “But no, I’m not attracted to her. Not the way you mean. I admire her. Solly Zide’s supposed to be a hard man to live with.”

At the time I was thirty-six years old. Connie Zide was forty-seven. Connie and I had been involved in a court case after she had been mugged by a Cuban thief, and later we had served together on the boards of two North Florida Jewish charities. I wasn’t lying to my wife; I wasn’t attracted to Connie any more than I would be to a scorpion that had stung me after I’d walked blindly into the bathroom on a dark, damp night.

But I was prevaricating; Connie and I, until recently, had had an affair. As a result, I’d learned things about myself that even now, closing in on the age of fifty, I still find difficult to accept. We are what we are, said Theseus back in the Golden Age. But I wonder now if that’s as true as it sounds.

My child bride, as I liked to call her—she was five years younger than I—seemed to bow to my denial. “Ted, you hate these big fancy parties.”

“I usually do. But they’re going to play a Mozart horn concerto. That’s hard for me to resist.”

“The last concert we went to? In summer? You fell asleep in the middle of Wagner.”

I remembered that debacle, which included a few snores and nearly falling off my chair. “I’d been in trial all week, I was tired, and Wagner’s not my cup of tea. Besides, this is business tonight.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Business? What’s that mean?”

But then, at last, she had to yell into the living room for the children to stop scrapping and reduce the volume.

“Come with me to the party,” I said. “I have a surprise for you.”

On the fateful night, I strolled about the grounds of the Zide estate with my wife. Our hosts lived in a fourteen-thousand-square-foot pink palace fronting the Atlantic. The two-story entrance foyer was dominated by a curving Ferrara marble staircase, which soared from the middle of formal drawing and dining rooms crammed with Louis XIV furniture. Hanging on the red Chinese silk walls were a matched pair of blue Chagalls, a Dufy oil of the paddock at Longchamps, a series of Picasso bullfight sketches, and some god-awful paintings of French court scenes by Forcella. The bathrooms were purple onyx, with the requisite heavy gold fixtures. Parrots sat in cages in each corner of the rooms, squawking a cacophonous tropical medley.

This outrageous structure was set behind ornate iron gates on a lawn roughly the size of the field at the Gator Bowl, where Toba and I went every November to see our alma mater’s University of Florida Gators battle the University of Georgia Bulldogs. The Zides also had two clay tennis courts and two Jacuzzis, one outdoors and one in the master bedroom suite. The six-car garage housed a Ferrari Mondial, a pearl-gray Mercedes 500SL convertible, a Stutz Blackhawk, and a chocolate-colored Cadillac stretch limo. The entire junglebound estate was edged by massed flower beds under crape myrtles and palm trees.

“Have you ever been here?” Toba asked me.

“No,” I lied. We were approaching the buffet tables. “Let’s pig out.”

Besides the usual cold meats and local shellfish, smoked Nova had been flown down from Zabar’s in New York. The champagne was Moét & Chandon. I could hear the rumble of the ocean surf and smell the fragrance of mimosa. Palm fronds clicked in the darkness. Toba’s black hair shone in the spotlights that illuminated the pool area. I’m a lucky man, I thought, and life is good. And with a little more luck and some patience, soon it will be even better.