Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 2

When I told all that to Toba, she smiled. Her dark eyes were luminous from the wine, and perhaps also because prospects of more gracious living had opened to her.

"It's no crime, darling. You say it as if you're ashamed of it. That's what everyone wants."

"I used to think I wasn't like everyone else," I admitted. "That seems to have turned out to be an illusion."

"I love you, Ted," she said.

I fingered her thick black hair. "So let's think about it, although not for too long. They need an answer by Christmas." Out of the corner of my eye I saw Connie Zide dancing on the gra.s.s to the beat of a steel drum. I thought of her naked, of how her heels beat a wild tattoo on that September night when she'd come underneath me on this immaculate lawn, right there by the swimming pool. I dropped my hand to my wife's hip and said, "Let's go into the bushes."

Toba's eyes picked up an even deeper sparkle. She flushed a little. "What's got into you?"

Oh, Toba, if only you knew.

If she knew, if she ever found out, would she be able to handle it? Please G.o.d, let me never know the answer to that question.

"It's your t.i.ts, Toba," I said seriously. "I love the way they slide around under silk. They bounce like little kittens. Come on."

"You're serious?"

"Who'll miss us?" And there was a spot I knew, not twenty yards away in a grove of banana trees, where no one could see us.

Her flush deepened. "If they knew downtown what you were really like, Ted, they might not let you practice law. Not even in Sarasota."

Toba and I excused ourselves from the party a little after ten o'clock. Much of what happened I learned later. I was trained at asking questions and listening for significant details. I snoop. I have a good memory when it suits me.

JSO, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, determined that the last guests left the Zide estate by eleven-twenty. The caterers and other staff finished cleaning up around one o'clock in the morning. All the cigarette b.u.t.ts, giant shrimp heads, dirty napkins, and broken champagne gla.s.ses were swept up, bagged, pitched into a truck, driven off to the dump.

And then a silence settled over the Atlantic coast, a silence that was barely touched by the distant rumble of the surf. White tendrils of lightning crackled on the horizon. An occasional night bird flew by, croaking its melancholy song of alarm.

Some days later, on December 10, 1978, in Room 208 of Baptist Medical Center, Connie Zide made the following tape-recorded statement to Detectives Floyd J. Nickerson and Carmen M. Tanagra of the Homicide Division of JSO: ...We went to bed as soon as the caterers left, because that musicale, our party, had been tiring. But I couldn't sleep, and Solomon, my husband, is-was-a real night owl. He'd read in bed sometimes half the night, so around one-thirty in the morning I got up to make him a cup of camomile tea. And he followed me downstairs to the kitchen. We wound up playing backgammon-that was in the yellow drawing room. Then Neil, our son, came home from a party and sat down with us. It was probably 2:00 A.M., perhaps a little later. Right after that we all heard a sound from the patio, as if an urn had tipped over and crashed. Our electronic security is state-of-the-art. There's an armed night watchman at the gate-Terence is not young anymore, but he's a former Orlando police officer-and Paco, the Doberman, poor thing, was supposed to be down at the beach cabanas. So none of us was particularly alarmed by this crash. We didn't think of burglars at the time. It was late, we were tired. My husband just said, "I'll go look." He got up from the backgammon table and went off to do just that. I followed him, sort of trailed behind at a distance, not really concentrating, talking over my shoulder to Neil. Then I heard shots. Three, four, five in a row, I couldn't tell-I still don't remember. I went nuts, ran outside. Solomon was lying there on the terrace with blood all around him. Two men were standing there on the gra.s.s. One had a gun-a young black man, looking very frightened. I recognized him as one of our employees, although at the time I couldn't put a name to the face. I was in no state to think. And then the other man, who I believe was closer to me, yelled something and raised his hand and slashed at me with something. I imagine it was a knife, but I never saw it. I must have fallen down ... and I hardly remember anything else until I woke up here in the hospital. I a.s.sume I went into shock... .

Solomon Zide had been shot twice in the chest with a .38-caliber revolver. A third bullet had been found lodged in the Swedish oak paneling on the far side of the room. Connie Zide had been slashed twice, once in the upper arm and once in the face. Neither weapon was ever found; they were presumed to have been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean or the Intracoastal Waterway. Minutes later young Neil Zide, unhurt but close to hysteria, called the Jacksonville Beach police and then a man named Victor Gambrel, the head of security for Zide Industries. When Gambrel and the law and the paramedics all came storming up the driveway and into the house, Neil had recovered and was able to describe the murderer of his father. "Young, black, wearing sneakers, jeans, and I seem to remember a dark T-s.h.i.+rt. There were two of them. I didn't get a decent look at the other one who cut my mother. They were obviously clumsy, they didn't expect anyone to be awake at that hour... . My father surprised them, and they panicked. No, I don't know how they got onto the property. They ran off that way." He pointed in the direction of the beach.

By the time the JSO Homicide team arrived on the scene, the entire estate was locked in the hard yellow glare of its own floodlights. Detective Tanagra found the dead Doberman-poisoned by a piece of meat. She also found imprints of two pairs of sneakers in the wet sand near the beach cabanas. From the s.p.a.cing and the gouges in the dunes, it looked to her as if two men had been running. One of them wore size fourteen or fifteen shoes.

"Let's cruise around," Floyd Nickerson said to her. "Pair of bayou c.o.o.ns, where can they go? Feet like that you can't hide."

The team of detectives drove off in their unmarked Plymouth and left the tech squad to do its work. Tanagra, at the wheel, headed south on A1A, then veered off to Marsh Landing before taking Roscoe Boulevard along the Intracoastal, while Nickerson broadcast an APB throughout the county. The detectives stopped at various bars and icehouses, then angled west and then north on Southern Boulevard. Over the mossy bayous and highways hovered a jungle darkness. They stopped at bars with pickup trucks out in front, talked to bartenders and waitresses. Black men drinking beer and rye whiskey peered at them with stoic dread. Nickerson, in his late thirties, was burly, mustached, his pockmarked white skin s.h.i.+ny with sweat; he was made instantly as a cop. Carmen Tanagra was thin, flat-chested, good-looking, often taken for a junkie.

The detectives turned east on Atlantic Boulevard, back toward the beaches and in the direction of the naval air station. They pa.s.sed gas stations and car dealers.h.i.+ps and pizza joints, empty lots overgrown with weeds, supermarkets, a Discount Auto Parts, intermittent Lil' Champ food stores. A big sign on an abandoned warehouse said GO GATORS. At nearly 5:00 A.M. the air was cool but still humid.

Nickerson had a nose for finding people. "Turn in there... ." He pointed across the highway to a Lil' Champ, with its plastic statue of a kid standing with one gloved fist raised.

Tanagra slowed the Plymouth. "You need something?"

"Smokes."

They both smoked red Marlboros. "I've got an extra pack," she said.

With a blunt finger, Nickerson pointed again. "Just turn in, Carmen."

A blue, salt-pitted '68 Ford pickup, which had been smacked in the rear and had a caved-in panel behind the pa.s.senger's side door, stood isolated in one of the parking slots. A Pink Panther hung from the rearview mirror. The front b.u.mper was broken. A small puddle of leaking oil glistened in the blurry glow of a streetlamp.

"n.i.g.g.e.r truck," Floyd Nickerson said.

Two young men came out of the Lil' Champ, carrying a carton of milk, a six-pack of Miller High Life, and several bags of potato chips. One of them, William Smith, was lean and tall. He wore a gray sweats.h.i.+rt and sported an Afro. The other youth, Darryl Morgan, wore faded jeans and a black Nike T-s.h.i.+rt. He was huge, probably six feet six, could have been a basketball player from U. of North Florida, except that as he ducked his skullcap of black crinkly hair to move through the door, he moved awkwardly, not the way an athlete would move. Nickerson glanced down at Darryl Morgan's sneakers. Feet like boats.

By the time the detectives stepped forth to be seen, William Smith had climbed behind the wheel of the pickup and slammed the door behind him. Darryl Morgan, the big-footed one, moved more slowly.

"Poh-lice! Hold it right there!" Nickerson flipped his gold s.h.i.+eld, which said JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF'S OFFICE. He made sure the crackling fluorescent light above the Lil' Champ shone on it. "Let's see some ID, boys."

No one moved. Moths struck and sizzled on the fluorescent tubes.

"He over twenty-one," Morgan said, indicating Smith in the truck. Smith had carried the beer. "I jus' along for the ride."

Nickerson said, "If I wanted to hear from an a.s.shole, I'd have farted."

Smith turned the ignition key, starting the engine so that the pickup rattled violently.

Nickerson tugged at the Sat.u.r.day Night Special in his waistband.

Tanagra yelled at Smith, "Hold it, hold it right there, hold it!" She reached for her own pistol. "You hear me? Right there!"

Morgan backed his huge frame against the building. His eyes were wide as eggs.

Nickerson dropped to one knee and fired what he would later describe in the official police report as "two warning shots when the suspect Smith attempted to escape." One of the shots struck a nut on the front left wheel of the pickup, flinging sparks into the night like angry fireflies. The other pa.s.sed through the old metal of the driver's door and into William Smith's left thigh. Smith yelped in pain and fell forward. His left foot lifted off the clutch; the weight of his right leg was thrown onto the accelerator.

The pickup hurtled backward in a screeching curve. Before Smith could s.h.i.+ft his weight and lift himself up, the rear end of the truck smashed into a pair of concrete posts on the edge of the highway. The pickup tilted over, as if a dozen men had shoved it, and fell on its side with the sound of a thousand nails being dropped on a counter. Then it bounced and settled. The engine died. A shower of gla.s.s fell.

Silence slowly filled the damp air outside the Lil' Champ. Metal creaked for a minute or so. Until Darryl Morgan, his back still pressed flat against the building, said, "Lord Jesus ..."

"Go take a look, Carmen," Nickerson told his partner.

After a couple of minutes, Carmen Tanagra walked back from the wreck. The way she walked, hips undulating in tight slacks, a distinct s.p.a.ce between her upper thighs, often made men stare and calculate. She was not unaware of it.

"Boy seems to have a bullet in his leg. Definitely has a sliver of winds.h.i.+eld in his throat, and it's sticking out the back of his neck. He's looking poorly."

"You gonna stand around talking, Carmen? Or call an ambulance?"

"No rush for that, Nick."

"What are you saying?"

"Graveyard dead, that's what I'm saying."

Nickerson's eyes rolled in his head. He wheeled on Darryl Morgan, who towered over him but looked as frightened as a rabbit dumped into a swamp teeming with alligators.

Nickerson said angrily, "You and your dead pal been out to the beach tonight, right? Looking to score a few TV sets, or maybe better. Got caught in the act and lost your cool, and you shot a man. Big fella, don't pop my cork by telling me it ain't so! Let's just hear about it. And then I'll tell you how you got the right to remain silent, and all that other s.h.i.+t."

Chapter 3.

TEN DAYS AFTER the murder of Solly Zide I accepted the job with the Sarasota law firm. Then it was called Royal, Kelly, Green & Wellmet-Green was the one leaving, and Jaffe was about to insinuate himself into the letterhead. I gave three months notice to the state attorney's office in Jacksonville and celebrated by buying a case of chateau-bottled Bordeaux.

But I was basically a sober fellow and still had work to do. One of the places to do it was the Lawyers Lounge on the fourth floor of the Duval County Courthouse. The voices drifting through its smoky blue air might have been those of men and women chattering in a singles bar, except that the subject was time served, deals offered, the hairpin curves of criminal law.

One morning I sat on the sofa there with a young a.s.sistant public defender, plea-bargaining a drug case. She said gravely, "Mr. Jaffe, the last offer you made was a straight eighteen. Would you consider coming down to maybe twelve years, with a substantial fine?"

I swallowed more coffee; I knew this was going to be a long day. "Eighteen is bottom line," I said, "and if your client had the brains of a p.i.s.sant, she'd take it. Better yet, she'd hightail it back to Colombia."

"But I can't tell her to do that, can I?"

That was true. That would break the canons of ethics. But it would certainly simplify matters. Sometimes I wished that lawyers could do what any other practical person would do-like, in this case, tell the client to jump on the next plane and go home.

"Yes," I said, "she's got to be smart enough to figure that out for herself. What's her bond?"

"Fifteen thousand dollars."

"She's a mother, right? She's got two children down there in Medellin?"

"You're telling me . .."

"I wouldn't think of such a thing. You do whatever melts your b.u.t.ter. Just remember how poor the State of Florida is, and that we could use the bail money."

Most prosecutors, if they hadn't chosen the law, might have opted for law enforcement or the church. I wasn't one of that majority.

The telephone by the coffee urn rang, and one of the hovering defense attorneys s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. "Your lord and master," he said, waving the receiver in my direction.

A moment later the gruff voice of Beldon Ruth said in my ear, "Get your a.s.s upstairs, Ted, if you're not too busy and you're still working for me."

I took the stairs two at a time to the fifth floor and soon sat squeezed between two potted purple azaleas on the window ledge of the state attorney's office, the only s.p.a.ce available for any visitor to sit down. Beldon's legal files for current cases were spread on the floor in semicircles in front of his desk. They were also piled on the sofa and on three chairs.

"What a f.u.c.king mess," I said. "How are you going to survive when I'm gone?"

"I'll do just fine. It's you I'm worried about." Beldon rocked back and forth in his creaky swivel chair. "I know Sarasota-I took a vacation there once with Laurette. Lost my watch in the sand and didn't give a rat's a.s.s. Screwed a lot, drank a lot of Tennessee sour mash, walked into a lot of art galleries, watched a buncha beautiful sunsets. I was sure glad to get home and go to work again. But come to think of it, I guess that was the good life."

"I'm betting that it still is," I explained.

Beldon laughed, the deep rumble of a man twice his size.

"What's Toba going to do while you pace the wall-to-wall carpet of your office, wondering whether to trade your Honda for a Porsche or a Mercedes?"

How well he had come to know me. I wondered if he liked what he now saw.

"Real estate. She may be the one winds up driving the Porsche. You going to hang out here for the rest of your life, Beldon?"

He sighed theatrically. "Bare work and poor pay sort of suits me."

"I won't be doing just civil law," I said, feeling a little defensive. "There'll be criminal cases."

"h.e.l.l, yes! You're gonna argue for leniency when rich folks' kids get drunk at the wheel or buy dope from a lady cop. You're gonna rack up thousands of hours of community-service sentences. But meanwhile you still work for the State of Florida. So listen up for a bit."

He picked up the bulkiest of the brown accordion folders piled on his desk.

"The Zide case," he said.

I had a.s.signed it to Dale Settels, an eager young prosecutor who had moved last year from Boston to Jacksonville.

"A slam-dunk for the state," I told Beldon.

"It's for sure a slam-dunk for the newspapers and the TV," he grumbled. "Could go national, and sure as h.e.l.l it'll go southern. Two black perps, and one gets shot by a trigger-happy JSO Homicide a.s.shole while the kid's trying to escape."

"Or so the a.s.shole says," I pointed out.

"Got the ACLU poking their nose into that, and more power to 'em. So we're left with one live black defendant in a big murder trial, and wouldn't you know it, he's come up with a black lawyer."

I hadn't heard about that. "Who is it?"

"Guy named Gary Oliver."

"I don't know him."

"But you see where I'm heading? Constance Zide knows you, likes you, seems to trust you, and she's asked me if you'll prosecute."

I made no comment. This was quicksand.

"An old dog for a hard road," Beldon said. "You're not old, and you're on your way out the door to greener pastures. But you're the man for the job. Will you do it, Ted?"

My affair with Connie Zide was defunct-Beldon didn't know about it; no one did-but it was still something for me to consider. Beyond that, however, was an even more worrisome factor. Seven years earlier, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court had declared the death penalty unconst.i.tutional. Florida's state legislature in Tallaha.s.see was the first to fas.h.i.+on new law to get around that edict. Now in 1979, first-degree murder carried with it the possibility of electrocution, a spectacle that seemed to grip Floridians almost as much as that of a man jerking at the end of the hangman's noose had once excited the English. Schoolchildren in our state built model electric chairs. The governor had already earned the nickname "Barbecue Bob."

This case, for many reasons, was not for me.

"Tell me about Gary Oliver," I said.

"Used to be a good private investigator. Then he got uppity and went to law school, like some other d.i.c.kheads we know. But he's got a problem the others don't have. Down in St. Augustine last winter he was so s.h.i.+tfaced he was pulled over for drunk driving, and he hands the cop his fis.h.i.+ng license. Guy's favorite drink is the next one."

"Why didn't Darryl Morgan go to the public defender?"

"He did, and Kenny a.s.signed a white woman lawyer. Morgan didn't trust her-he fired her. She didn't protest too much: I heard she didn't like him or the case. So his mother managed to come up with whatever it took to hire Gary Oliver. Actually, I heard that Oliver's doing it for just his expenses."

Not that it mattered, Beldon explained. Forty-eight hours after his Miranda rights had been read to him, Darryl Morgan confessed the murder to Sergeant Floyd Nickerson of Homicide. A few nights later he repeated the confession in front of his cellmate at the Duval County Jail. And Connie Zide identified him positively as the man who had shot her husband during the attempted burglary. Neil Zide confirmed the ID at a police lineup.

"This Morgan kid's six foot six," Beldon said. "A f.u.c.king giant. Hard to mistake him for anyone else."