Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 29

"Judge"-she was angry and didn't hide it-"he will retry the case if you allow him to cross our princ.i.p.al witnesses!"

The judge smiled mischievously. "Well, Ms. Suarez, I'll ask you again: what do you want? Not what you don't want, but what you do want."

Muriel rose to the occasion. "I want justice, Your Honor, leavened with common sense."

"Good for you," Judge Fleming said. "So do I, most of the time. But most of all, I want to be enlightened. You follow me?"

"Not quite," Muriel said.

"Ma'am, I want to know why this Nickerson fella was so het up by Mr. Jaffe's accusations. And since the princ.i.p.al witnesses are alive and kicking, why shouldn't we hear them? Think of it this way." He jerked a thumb in my direction. "By the time it's over we'll have this fella off our backs. That would make life a lot easier for the state attorney's office and this court, wouldn't it?"

"Your Honor-"

"Just a little hearing," Judge Fleming said, "for the purposes of judicial enlightenment and-what did you call it, ma'am?-justice leavened with common sense? I like that. But not until January, because I've got a full calendar right up until New Year's Day, and on Monday, January 13, I turn over this courtroom to Mr. Ruth. So make it Monday, January 6. I'll grant another stay. Come January, I'll give you three days, tops. I need Thursday and Friday before the weekend to pack up and get out. That gives you both plenty of time between now and then to think things over and refresh anyone's memory needs refres.h.i.+ng. Or maybe even cut a deal. Is that all right, Ms. Suarez? Does early January suit you? And by the way, do you like fruit?"

She took a deep, shaky breath. "Yes, Your Honor, I do."

"I always have fruit in my courtroom. Which is your favorite fruit?"

"A freshly picked Was.h.i.+ngton State Delicious apple," she said, once again rising to the occasion.

The judge turned to me. "And you, sir?"

"Honeydew melon," I said.

"No." He frowned. "I meant does early January suit you?"

"Yes, Judge." I was ready to let out a war whoop, but I controlled myself. "Suits me just fine."

Chapter 25.

CERTAIN CASUAL REMARKS echo with far more weight than the speaker intended. Some years ago the veteran Steelers, a cla.s.s act in pro football, met the upstart Rams in the Super Bowl. This was the first Super Bowl appearance for the Rams. The Steelers trampled them, and I remember the TV commentator explaining: "The Rams came here to play, but the Steelers came here to win. The outcome was never in doubt."

The keenness of that observation stayed with me, waiting just below the surface of memory until I needed it. I had felt triumphant, even vindicated, when Judge Fleming granted a hearing in Florida v. Morgan. It would have been acceptably human to prepare for the hearing, go to court, and do the best I could, for better or for worse, win or lose. That would be playing the game.

But unlike the Rams, I wasn't showing up in court merely for the glory of playing. Like the Steelers, I was going there in order to win. I had to win. I had to do considerably more than the best I could. And I had to make some sacrifices.

How large they would be, how they would reshape my formerly ordered life, I could only speculate; and then I had to say to h.e.l.l with it and lower my head to plunge forward through the thickets of deceit and the swamp of denial that my life had become over the past dozen years. Somewhere in Camus, one of the characters mourns, "I see too deep and too much." Those words had always touched me, even if they struck me as hyperbolic. But now I lived them, for I knew that Darryl Morgan was innocent of the crime for which he had been accused, convicted, and condemned to die. And I believed I knew who had murdered Solomon Zide. What I didn't know was how to prove it and how to escape with my marriage and my career intact.

In October, finally, I heard from the Florida Bar a.s.sociation in the state capital. I never found out who lodged the complaint, but I suspect it was done at the behest of the chief judge of the Supreme Court, he whom I had accused of making "a serious mistake." I had been a wisea.s.s; there was a price to pay. There's almost always a price for quixotic derring-do, and it's almost always not worth paying. This instance may have been the exception.

The Professional Ethics Committee of the Bar wanted to know how I could justify representing a man whom I had formerly prosecuted. They also asked me to respond to a complaint by the state attorney's office in the Seventeenth District-Robert Diaz in Miami -that I'd "knowingly and willingly" misrepresented to my former client Jerry Lee Elroy the terms of a plea-bargaining agreement between Elroy and the state attorney.

What was I meant to do? Since humankind emerged from the cave, we've lived by an evolving rule of law that allows us to face the sunset without dread. But there were times when the rule of law didn't keep its promise. There were even times when chaos was better than law if law proved barbaric.

Who defined "better"? The representatives of the law did, of course. At best, this was a tautology. At worst, it was a vicious circle.

I wrote a letter to the Ethics Committee. I said that I was representing Darryl Morgan because it was in the interest of justice for me to do so. He had asked me to represent him. And I intended to keep on representing him as long as he wanted me.

As regards Jerry Lee Elroy, I wrote, I didn't know what in h.e.l.l they were talking about. They were mistaken.

Then Beldon Ruth called me from Jacksonville.

"How are you, lad?" He was already a.s.suming 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 a.s.sociation. 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 s.h.i.+tty 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation had sent copies of all this correspondence to Royal, Kelly, Wellmet, Jaffe &C Miller in Sarasota. The Bar a.s.sociation, 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 a.s.shole'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 canva.s.sing for the local pro-choice group. She seemed to have cut out all alcohol except for one large gla.s.s 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 b.i.t.c.h! I never grasped that until now. So negative about everything! At college if she called and I said, 'h.e.l.lo,' 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 brus.h.i.+ng. 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 sweats.h.i.+rt 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 soph.o.m.ore down in Boca Raton, where Pauline was the a.s.sistant 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, a.s.sistant Superintendent Ray Wright and I had become friendly. I don't know how that had come to pa.s.s, 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 a.s.sumption 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. "G.o.d d.a.m.n he muttered. "I knew it."