Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 4

There was no way out of it; that was my job. And it was a way to get where I had to go.

"Tell me everything that happened."

He had run a stoplight, he said, at Route 41 and Beach Avenue. He had an outstanding warrant for failure to pay traffic tickets, and when the traffic cops flashed him over he'd cut through a bank parking lot and tried to lose them on the back roads before you get to the interstate. But then he took the wrong turn down a dirt road and came up against a chain-link fence at the end of a cul-de-sac. They nailed him.

In the back seat of the car they spotted a triple-beam balance scale. Probable cause. They held him by the side of the road and radioed in for a drug dog. A c.o.c.ker spaniel jumped straight to the trunk of the Cutla.s.s and went nuts.

"They're going to want to know who you got the cocaine from," I said. "If you decide to be a stand-up guy and keep your mouth shut, you can forget about the five years I was talking about yesterday. You're looking at ten to fifteen."

"You mean if I get convicted."

"Pay attention, Elroy. If you go to trial and get convicted, the judge will cla.s.sify you as a habitual offender, stick it to you on three separate counts, and run the sentences back-to-back. That could add up to half your life. I'm talking about getting it down to ten to fifteen if you make a deal."

"That's what you call a deal? Where are we, Red China?"

"It's the best you can get unless you snitch."

Elroy wasn't the kind of man who had to think that over for more than a few seconds. "What do I get if I snitch?"

"Five years, maybe. You might even walk away if you convince them your cooperation is sincere."

"I can be plenty sincere. But I have to tell you, Counselor, these other people they might want to know about, these are heavyweight dudes. These people are from Miami. You snitch on these people, they inch you. You know what that is?"

"Yes."

Elroy glanced around at my plush office, with its rows of cla.s.sical CDs and bound National Geographies. "You sure you know what that is?"

I leaned back in the jade-green leather chair and said calmly, "They cut off your fingers. And then your hands, and then your feet. And then your c.o.c.k. Inch by inch. With a machete. Right?"

Elroy nodded solemnly. "It ain't just a bedtime story, amigo."

"You ever hear of the witness protection program?"

"I saw a movie about it on TV. This guy's ex-wife's boyfriend snitched and got into it, so she and him took the guy's kids to another state. Got a new name. Poor guy didn't see his kids for years, and he hadn't done nothing at all."

"Well, Elroy, you haven't got kids and an ex-wife, have you?"

He laughed bitterly. "I do, but I don't know where the f.u.c.k they are."

"Then think about it. I'll talk to whoever's handling this in the state attorney's office. I'll see what they've got on you that you haven't told me about. Meanwhile, don't leave town."

Ruby was printing out the day's letters on the LaserJet, stacking the revisions of legal briefs and collating whatever parts of the copies the big Xerox hadn't collated: getting ready to hit the singles bars on the Quay. I came out of my office at ten past five.

"Just a few things, Ruby, if you don't mind. And if you haven't got a hot date ..."

Ruby was a divorced woman in her late thirties who answered ads placed in the local magazines. But she still blushed.

"What is it, Ted?"

"Book me on a late-afternoon flight to Jacksonville the day after tomorrow. Then get in touch with the sheriff's office up there. See if there's a Homicide detective named Floyd Nickerson still on the roster. Find out his s.h.i.+ft and his days off. If they give you a hard time, call Kenny Buckram at the PD's office-he'll help. Then call the state attorney's office, Fourth District. There was an aggravated battery case nolle-prossed back in '79. The accused was our client, Jerry Lee Elroy. I need to know the woman ASA who prosecuted and dropped the case. See if she's still around."

Ruby looked up from her shorthand pad. "Will you need a hotel room?"

"Yes, in town, not the beach. And I'm not finished. Call FSP in Raiford. There was a man named Darryl Morgan committed to death row in April 1979." I took a deep breath. "I need to know what happened to him."

"What do you mean?" Ruby asked.

"Was he executed or not. And who handled his appeals." Even if Morgan was dead, I was obligated to set the record straight.

"Did you say '79 or '89?"

"Seventy-nine, Ruby."

"That's twelve years ago. Why wouldn't they have executed him?"

"Just find out," I said, and turned away.

At six o'clock I was still reviewing the file when Ruby bounced in, clutching her steno pad and a sheet of yellow legal paper.

"I booked you on two flights on Wednesday-USAir 456 at three forty-five and Delta 1088 at five. Confirm with your credit card number two hours ahead of time. You do that, you can just show up and run on board. You're in the Marina Hotel, eighty-nine dollars with a king-size bed. That's a corporate rate. Did you want a rental car the other end?"

"Yes, if I go."

"I reserved National. A compact. You get mileage on your One Pa.s.s frequent flier program." Pleased, she looked back at the steno pad.

"The prosecutor in the Elroy case was named Muriel M. Suarez. She's still there. Floyd J. Nickerson left the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in 1980. They didn't choose to tell me where he is now, or maybe they really don't know. I put in a call to Mr. Buckram at the public defender's office, but he was in Tallaha.s.see for the day. I left a message with his secretary for him to call you at home tonight up to eleven P.M. Was that okay?"

"Fine," I said. My heartbeat was accelerating. The worst for the last. She was torturing me because I'd made her stay in the office so late.

She read from her notes. "Darryl Arthur Morgan entered FSP 24 April 1979. Appeal to the Florida Supreme Court in June 1981- that was denied. Court of Appeals, Second District, filed on the basis of previous incompetent counsel-also denied. That's 1983. Public defender handling it all. Appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Tampa, denied in 1985. Atlanta, Federal Court of Appeals, application denied. We're up to 1988. Application for cert with the U.S. Supreme Court-naturally, denied. The governor signed the death warrant on October 2, 1990. Scheduled for execution, a.s.suming no relief in the trial court, on April 11 of this year, 1991. One more appeal for postconviction relief to the trial court in Jacksonville. Original trial judge no longer on the bench, case will go to another judge. Decision pending."

I said quietly, "You're telling me that Morgan is still alive."

Ruby said, "He better be, because if they find out a dead man's making all these appeals, they're going to be seriously p.i.s.sed off."

Chapter 5.

BEFORE WORLD WAR II, my father had been an insurance salesman in the Bronx. He spent the war as a clerk at a naval base in Virginia, and in 1945 his insurance company asked him to start a branch office in Jacksonville.

Sylvia Jaffe, my mother, said, "Miami would be acceptable, Leonard. But Jacksonville? Who ever heard of it? Where in Florida is this place?"

"An industrialized city, in the north of the state," he reported. "On the beach. A short drive anyway."

"Did you know," he said to us on the train ride down, "that once upon a time there were Indians in Florida, just like in the Tom Mix movies?"

Neither my younger sister, Rhoda, nor I had known that.

"And that they had thirty movie studios! But there were so many car chases and mob scenes that in 1920 the city fathers got fed up to the gills and kicked them out. Can you imagine? They lost all that."

I asked my father if there were still Indians.

"Where?"

"Where we're going," I said impatiently. It may have been my first cross-examination.

"Maybe," Leonard said.

The Timucuans had been wiped out by the French Huguenots, and what was left of the Seminles and the Mikasukis lived far to the south in the Everglades. As a boy I never quite grasped that; I was sure they were nearby because someone in authority had told me so, and from the age of seven onward I roamed the banks of the St. Johns River in search of any indigenous population I could find: a Jewish Tom Sawyer. Rhoda asked to go with me, but I left her at home. Girls couldn't do that sort of thing, I told her, with the wisdom of my youth and of those straitjacketed times.

In the environs of Jacksonville, whose rutted trails and bogs I explored on a single-speed Schwinn bicycle, what I found (instead of redskins) were Florida crackers who skinned possum and ate deep- fried turtle and marsh hens. I came upon old men in the cypress strands who took me fis.h.i.+ng for sheephead and snapper and who taught me that different animals' eyes s.h.i.+ne different ways: a c.o.o.n's green, a gator's persimmon red, and a deer's eyes golden red like a coal of fire. I learned to say "a mess of" when I meant a lot, "a tad bit" when I meant a little.

In junior high, however, and at home, when I used such cracker language, eyebrows were raised. And Rhoda, eager for revenge, laughed at me. I hated her for that.

I had a secret relations.h.i.+p with Rhoda. When we were younger and traveled in the back seat of the family Chrysler, Rhoda often complained, "He's touching me." Neither of our parents saw evidence of this, but it was true. I don't believe there was anything s.e.xual in what I did to her; I was just trying to annoy her. I was not innocent, not truly good. I knew I had to work at being good, and it often seemed like too much trouble. Rhoda would get up from the TV and say, "He's making noises at me. He's breathing funny." She didn't whine these complaints, which lent some credence to them; but no one except me understood what she meant. I was being driven by forces just a hair beyond my control.

Eventually the tormented Rhoda would go upstairs to her room and read. As a result she was better educated than I and later was offered several graduate scholars.h.i.+ps when she left FSU c.u.m laude as a psychology major. She moved to La Jolla, California, became a psychotherapist, and married a man in the bagel business.

Her relations.h.i.+p with me now was friendly but distant. She, more than anyone, suspected that I wasn't truly good. She would not have been surprised by what happened between me and Connie Zide.

I first met Connie Zide almost a year before the night of the musicale and the murder of her husband. Driving home from work one afternoon, I decided to stop at the Regency Plaza Mall to buy a tie. The dark-red foulard I had bought two years before at Dillard's was my favorite to wear in court, but I had spilled turkey gravy on it at lunch a few days earlier. The stain refused to come out.

I nosed the Honda toward an empty slot in the mall parking lot, and at that moment a tall, tawny-haired woman emerged from Dillard's, moving from cool shade into the glare of sun. She wore a tailored gray suit. She was not young. That woman, I thought, can't be as beautiful and as elegant as I believe she is-there's no one like that in Jacksonville. There may be no one like that in North Florida. Palm Beach, New York, the cover of Vogue, that's possible. Shadow and artifice were ganging up to trick the senses of an overworked man.

A young fellow in blue jeans and a white sleeveless T-s.h.i.+rt stepped from behind a Datsun. Gold chains jangled around his neck and glittered in the slant of hot light. Quickly, with peppy strides, he closed the distance between himself and the elegant woman. I hit the brake and threw the car into Park. I wanted to yell, "Watch out!" but I was too far away.

Alejandro Ortega, born in Santiago de Cuba nineteen years earlier, son of a marielito, expert broad-daylight jewelry thief, got rapidly to where he was headed-face-to-face with Doa Constancia-and slipped his hand through the big gold necklace dangling from her white throat. He yanked hard. As he expected, the connecting link snapped.

Connie Zide gave a tremulous cry. A bone at the back of the neck, a cervical vertebra, was bruised.

Alejandro clutched the necklace in his hand and wheeled, ready to sprint through the parking lot to his souped-up Trans Am, which faced the exit in the shade of a royal palm, driver's door open a few inches, motor idling.

Connie Zide owned a lot of jewelry. Most of it was expensive. She'd once filed a claim with her insurance company for a two-and- a-quarter-carat white diamond that had slipped out of its setting. It took more than a year to collect, and even then it wasn't payment in full. After that she had copies made of her best jewelry, and she wore the copies on shopping trips or to luncheons where there wasn't tight security. So what Alejandro Ortega s.n.a.t.c.hed from her lovely white neck was fake.

She was wearing low black heels. She took one quick step, and as Alejandro started to bolt, with her red-tipped fingers she tore one of the gold necklaces from his neck.

Later she said, "Why did I do that? Because I felt violated, Ted. People think they can do anything they want with a woman who's on her own. And most of the time they're right. But I hate that feeling. You're just a target for these little s.h.i.+ts."

"You weren't frightened?"

"There wasn't time."

"Did you mean to yank the chain off his neck?"

"I didn't mean anything, for heaven's sake. It was all adrenaline."

"And weren't you frightened that he'd retaliate? They do that, Connie."

"I had a pistol in my handbag. And a license to carry it."

"You'd have used it?"

"If I had to ... quien sabe?"

Alejandro's necklace was a gift from his girlfriend Luisa, who brokered a little three-card monte game down in Coral Gables, where Alejandro lived most of the time when he wasn't touring the better shopping malls of the southern United States. He got four or five quick running steps away from his mark before he realized that the feeling he'd experienced of something wrenched from his skin was genuine; it had signaled the disappearance of the 24K gold chain draped with much affection about his neck by the beloved Luisa. Inscribed too, with tender sentiments. He whirled in the air like a basketball guard about to launch the ball to the hoop. The b.i.t.c.h had scoffed his necklace!

He snaked toward her, lips curled in a smile of acknowledgment, the way a torero contemplates a bull who's made a thrust of his horns into the torero's territory. He extended his hand in mute, eloquent demand. At that point he became aware of a presence growing larger by the millisecond, but it was too late to do anything about it. That presence was me.

I'd decided that if this unknown beautiful woman could do what she'd done, then I, the male of the species, could get off my b.u.t.t and lend a hand. I weighed one hundred and sixty-seven pounds and hit that fellow broadside, on the run, with a bent shoulder. One hundred fifty pounds of Alejandro flew backward, striking the radiator of the Datsun with such force that the wind left his lungs. He wound up on his knees, visibly amazed, huffing. I had twisted his right arm high up behind his back.

I looked up at the woman in the gray suit and said, "Would you mind, ma'am, going back into Dillard's? Ask someone to call 911. Don't take too long."

And to Alejandro I said, "Don't even think about fighting back. I'll snap your arm like a twig. Then I'll break your neck. I'm a karate black belt. Cinturon negro, comprendes?"

There wasn't a word of truth in any of that.

Pale but thrilled, Connie Zide said, "My hero." It didn't sound at all sarcastic.

I'm almost positive that the serious expression on my face didn't alter, but some other sea change took place in me, some upheaval of the senses in keeping with my braggadocio. Latin people have a name for it, which translates into English as the "thunderbolt." You cannot evade its effects.

After the cops arrived and wrote down Mrs. Solomon Zide's name, address, and telephone number, and bundled Ortega off to the Duval County Jail, Connie slumped against the side of her car and said, "My G.o.d, what a thing to happen! I need a drink. Can you indulge me just a bit more than you already have?"

We went to the first bar we could find on Atlantic Boulevard: a quietly lit place called Ruffino's Kitchen, which served thin-crust pizza. She ordered a double Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks with a twist.

We talked, but there was a roaring in my ears, and half the time I wasn't able to listen with the required concentration. I had known a few beautiful women before. Toba, when she was in her twenties, would have been considered beautiful, or close to it. A young a.s.sistant public defender who had been Miss Florida and had an M.A. in penology hit on me for an entire winter, and I patted her cheek and said, "You're lovely, Angie, and I'll bet it would be great fun, but I don't need the complication."

Connie Zide's blue-green eyes, set in the perfect oval of her face, were large and clear, her lips ruddy and full, her teeth even and white. Her body was richly sculpted, with a slender neck, round b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and long legs. All of this was topped by an affluence of silky light-brown hair that fell halfway down her back unless she piled it on top of her head, which is what she normally did in public. (Most southern women then, I'd observed, had hair that looked fried and dyed.) If you got past the dazzle you noticed that she was deep into her forties but looked ten years younger. That was because her bones were prominent and also because she'd had periodic work done on the skin and musculature by a world-cla.s.s cosmetic surgeon in Atlanta. The sea-colored eyes were veiled from time to time by melancholy light, and her smile had that same underlying worry. Her raucous laugh came as a welcome surprise; sometimes it seemed to surprise even Connie Zide.

"Well, Mr. Jaffe, what happens next?"

A question wild with meaning. I held her gaze as steadily as I dared. It wasn't possible, I decided, that she was reacting to me the way I was reacting to her. Such things didn't happen-not to me.

"You have to go down to the courthouse first thing tomorrow morning," I said. "File a complaint. Make a statement. Otherwise they can't hold this guy."

"He'll get sprung?"

"You watch cop shows?"

She laughed wickedly. "Good heavens, Mr. Prosecutor, everyone knows sprung."

"Here's how it works, Mrs. Zide. In most states, this kid would have to be indicted by a grand jury. In Florida, to speed things up, we do it differently. One of the people in my office will be there at the jail to hear what the cops have to say. They'll file a probable cause affidavit, and the a.s.sistant state attorney will file what's called an information. Unless the kid wants to hire his own lawyer, someone from the public defender will be there to represent him. The point is, nothing will happen from then on if you don't go down to the courthouse and make a sworn statement. I'll have to do it too. I was a witness."

She sighed. I had heard that kind of sigh before.