Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 37

I couldn't stop him from rambling. He was my witness, and theoretically a friendly one.

"Did you do a paraffin test of any of the people in the house?"

"Which house?"

"The house where Solomon Zide was killed."

Stanzi looked puzzled. "No, sir. Why should we? The people in that house were the victims."

I said, "Pa.s.s the witness."

Muriel didn't know in what direction I was heading, but she saw that thus far I hadn't done any damage to the state's thirteen-year- old case. I'd only shown that witnesses and lawyers were human and missed out on certain things they weren't interested in and therefore weren't looking for.

"No questions," she said.

When we broke for lunch I looked toward the rear of the courtroom. Connie and Neil were still there. She was dressed in a gray suit today, as she had been when I first met her on that afternoon outside Dillard's, and her son was wearing a cotton windbreaker and baggy white trousers and a Melanesian coral necklace.

Then I also saw Tahaun Powers, Darryl's son. Tall and somewhat solemn, in white Nike T-s.h.i.+rt and bluejeans, he sat squeezed among a group of retirees, jovial courtroom groupies who frequented all the high-profile cases.

I went right up to him. "Tahaun ... you remember me?"

"Sure," he said. "The lawyer. How are you, man?"

"Good. Where's your mother?"

"I came alone."

"How'd you get up here?"

"Bus."

"Come have lunch with us."

I introduced him to Toba. The least I could do was give some warmth to this son of the man whose life I was fighting for. Maybe, wherever my own son was headed, someone would offer an equal simple kindness.

I ate a grilled cheese sandwich and drank nearly another quart of coffee. When we went back to the courtroom, Toba said to Tahaun, "Please sit with me."

"Sure," he said. He finally smiled a little.

The bailiff called for order as I moved forward to the counsel table. The throng settled into the wooden pews and became quiet.

"The defense," I said, "calls Terence O'Rourke."

How do you set about locating a man of seventy-two, who has disappeared from view, without alerting his former employers that you're looking for him? You put a seventy-five-year-old woman on the job and tell her to be discreet and send you the bill for her expenses when she's finished. I had found him with the help of my mother, whose aid in a court case I had enlisted for the first time in my life.

Sylvia was thrilled to get the a.s.signment. In only a few days she had tracked her quarry to a small rest home only a hundred yards from the ocean on Flagler Beach, south of St. Augustine. It was pricey there, but that wasn't a surprise. Terence had been given a handsome pension.

He was lucky to be alive.

The courtroom door swung open to admit Terence, Gary, and my mother, as well as an escorting bailiff. The previous morning, before I'd flown to the frozen North, I'd asked Sylvia to bring her catch here today and keep him occupied in the Lawyers Lounge until we gave the word. Charm him, I told her. Don't let him out of your sight.

"You're not matchmaking now, are you?" she'd asked me. "Because I can take care of that business myself."

"I have no doubt of it."

"Do you know how many propositions I get, on the average, each week?"

"Tell me another time, Mom."

Terence was a monkey-faced man with spa.r.s.e white hair, protuberant eyes, and horn-rimmed spectacles, round-bellied now but still conscious of his dignity. He wore a sport jacket and a brightly striped regimental tie for the occasion. He had been a cop in Orlando and, like most cops, had served his time on the witness stand. He knew what to do, and he still had a bit of a lilting Irish brogue.

I had him identify himself and provide some background. Then I said, "Sir, were you a witness in 1979, in Florida v. Morgan?"

"No, I was not."

"You were neither subpoenaed nor asked by either side to testify?"

"No, sir, I was not."

"Were you ever interviewed by any police officers or anyone from the state attorney's office?"

He related to the court that Sergeant Floyd Nickerson had talked to him on two or three occasions, had tape-recorded one conversation with him, and had finally thanked him and explained that since Terence's story corroborated what everyone else said, he wouldn't be needed as a witness. And no, not a soul from the state attorney's office had ever come round to talk to him.

And I remembered why. A few weeks before the trial, Nickerson, in response to my query, had said, "O'Rourke? Waste of time. He was asleep. He barely remembers the whole f.u.c.king night. He's a lush. He's unreliable. What do you need him for?"

I hadn't argued with that. I had been a busy man, winding up my affairs in more ways than one, and I wasn't at all keen then to put on a witness who might have fixed his ex-cop's eye on me and remembered that I'd come calling on Mrs. Zide when her husband was in Hong Kong, and had ended up in the swimming pool with all my clothes on.

"Mr. O'Rourke," I said, "did you follow the Morgan trial in the newspapers and on television?"

"No, I was on vacation around that time."

"Where did you go for that vacation?"

"I have a married daughter, Claire, who lives in Colorado, and a married son, Dennis, who lives in Manhattan Beach, which is near Los Angeles. I went out west to visit both of them."

"Do you recall anything unusual, Mr. O'Rourke, about that vacation?"

"Well, the way it came about was a little unusual, you could say, if you had a mind to think that way, which I don't mind telling you I did not, for the Zides were fine people to work for."

He had made his point and established his loyalty.

"Nevertheless," I said, "tell us what might have been considered unusual."

"It was that I had a week due me in summer, but Mrs. Zide came to me one night in February-poor lady still had her face all bandaged up from that awful night-and she said she'd prefer I take my holiday earlier, in the spring, for reasons that I don't at this moment recall. And because it might be an inconvenience, she said, I could take longer than was due. She indicated she was pleased with my work too, which accounted for her generosity. I thanked her and said I surely wasn't going to turn down a kind offer like that."

"How long were you away from Florida?"

"She gave me three weeks off with pay, she did. I was half the time in Denver and half in California. I have a total of seven young grandchildren out there."

"And so you missed the Morgan trial?"

"I was away for all of it, yes, that's what I'm telling you."

"The Colorado and California newspapers didn't cover the trial?" "I read something about it, but I can't remember where. I believe I read that Morgan had been convicted and sentenced to death. But that was all."

"Mr. O'Rourke, I have to ask you some questions that may embarra.s.s you, and I apologize in advance."

He flushed a little; he knew more or less what was coming. I'd talked to him at some length out on the porch of the rest home at Flagler Beach. But I hadn't coached him-I didn't believe in it, because it tended to make witnesses sound stiff-and that lack of certainty as to exactly what I might ask was making him a little nervous.

"That's all right, sir," he said.

"Do you have a drinking problem?"

"I don't now, but I did. I want to say that I owe my success in licking my problem to the Flagler Beach chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous and to the divine intervention of our Lord Jesus Christ."

I let him enjoy the silent respect of the courtroom for a minute, and then said, "Did you have a drinking problem back in 1978 and 1979?"

"I took a wee drop now and then."

"On the night of December 5, 1978, the night of your employer's murder, were you drunk?"

"That is not a fact, sir. That is definitely an exaggeration. It would be accurate to say I'd a drop taken."

If there were a jury I would have pressed the point and pinned him down, but I had only to worry about Judge Fleming, and when I glanced up I could see by the look in the judge's hooded eyes that he understood completely the euphemism that Terence had elected to use.

"Mr. O'Rourke, cast your mind back and tell us-as best you recall, for it was a while ago-what happened on that night of December 5, 1978."

He was on duty, he said, down at the main gate. There was a party. A good many cars moving in and out, and cla.s.sical music was played out on the lawn by an orchestra.

"You were alone at the gate?"

No, he had help: a young fellow, the day man. But that young fellow left at midnight after they'd checked their in-out sheet and were sure that all the guests and caterers had departed.

"And then you were alone at the gate?"

"Yes, I was alone."

"You stayed awake?"

"Not all the time. I must have been dozing at one point."

"What woke you?"

"A shot."

"You heard a shot?"

"Indeed. At least, I knew later that it was a shot. And I know now. At the time I wasn't sure. It sounded like a shot, but in the middle of a dark night, and not expecting it, who was to say? I'd been dozing, and the shot woke me. I told you that. I'm not proud of it, but I'm human, and by G.o.d it's a fact."

"I understand. So you woke up at the sound of what you thought was a shot, but you weren't absolutely sure it was a shot." I paused. "By the way, when you say 'a shot,' do you mean, literally, a single shot, or many shots?'

"A single shot is what I meant."

"When you woke, were you wide awake or dazed?"

"I'd a drop taken. I told you that too."

"But try to answer my question, please, Mr. O'Rourke. We're human too, and we understand. Were you wide awake or dazed?"

"Not wide awake. Not dazed. It would be correct to say I was awake but a trifle sleepy."

I had to settle for that; he was already pink with shame. "And what did you do in response to hearing what you believed might be a single shot?"

Terence O'Rourke sighed a bit mournfully, a bit bravely. "Nothing. I waited."

"How long?"

"It would be fair to say ... a minute or two."

"And after that minute or two, did you hear anything else?"

"I heard more shots."

"How many more?"

"Three or four, I believe. If I had to choose, I'd say three."

"The three shots were together or s.p.a.ced out?"

"Close together. One after the other. Like bang bang bang."

"And these last three bangs occurred a minute or two after you heard a single shot?"

"That's correct."

"You're sure of that?"

"Yes, sir."

"When you heard the three shots, what did you do?"

"I took my pistol out of my holster, and I went up to the house."

"You walked up there?"

"With a flashlight in my hand, I did indeed."

"Were you frightened?"