Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 6

"Oh, Connie, my love." The endearment was out before I knew it. I took her arm. "So many of these kids are dealt bad cards. That Morgan boy would probably put a rattlesnake in your pocketbook, then ask you for a light. But I pity him, yes, because something had to happen to make him that way. And he and William Smith didn't come to your house that night intending to kill Solly or cut you."

Her face was slightly averted, so that the scar was less visible, and it was not easy for me to read her reaction.

"Will you argue for the death penalty?"

I hesitated. "Do you want Morgan to die?"

"No," she said, revealing her purpose and surprising me.

"And neither do I. But you have to understand, after we get a guilty verdict I'll argue for death. I have to do that." I touched her arm again, felt its heat. "But perhaps not with sufficient vigor as to win."

A marauding spring shower slanted down. Sunlight glimmered through a pillar of rain that cannoned against the windows of the courthouse. Inside the courtroom, Gary Oliver had to raise his voice to be heard.

"The defense calls Darryl Morgan!"

It was not required: every defense attorney stressed this to his client, and prior to trial every judge stressed it to the jury. The basis of our system and our laws, ladies and gentlemen: innocent until proved guilty. And so you mustn't hold it against a defendant if he chooses not to testify.

In my experience, guilty men seldom took the stand in their own defense. They were frightened of cross-examination. A good prosecutor would carve them into bite-size pieces. Morgan was a selfconfessed murderer; he had no business up there unless he believed that he could con his way to freedom. Was Oliver so incompetent as to permit it?

I was angry, but there was nothing I could do.

The defendant slouched to the witness box in just a few strides. He wore a long-sleeved blue denim s.h.i.+rt, khaki trousers, jail-issue black shoes. A youth of twenty, Morgan dwarfed everyone in sight, including the beefy deputy sheriffs on hand to guard him in case he went berserk. His white teeth stood out against berry-brown skin, and a hard jaw jutted forth under a powerful face. Despite his ma.s.s, he seemed unripe. I didn't know it then, but a tattoo on the inside of his wrist said f.u.c.k YOU. In bright-blue ink on one deltoid muscle, PAULINE was immortalized, and BORN TO RAISE h.e.l.l was printed crudely across one rocklike biceps. They were prison tattoos; he had spent much of his life there. Gary Oliver had said to him, "Booger, whatever you do, don't roll those sleeves up in that courtroom, you hear?"

Morgan slumped awkwardly in the wooden chair. The oval whites of his eyes were rimmed with pink. The dark irises had tigerish flecks, glinting with suspicion as they stared out at the threatening world. In the air-conditioned courtroom, he sweated.

Oliver led Morgan through self-serving testimony for over an hour. Near the end, he said, "You're not denying that you tried to rob Mr. Zide's house?"

Morgan had a resonant baritone voice. "I done that," he proclaimed.

"But you didn't shoot and kill Mr. Zide?"

"No, sir."

"Tell this jury the G.o.d's truth, and may lightning strike you dead this minute if you lie! Did either you or William Smith slash Mrs. Constance Zide in the face and then leave that poor woman there for dead?"

Morgan said, "No, sir."

No conclusive white bolt came flying through the courthouse roof. The jurors were grateful, for they were only ten to twenty feet away. Under the fluorescent lights, Morgan's cheekbones gleamed a copper color as if daubed for some tribal ceremony. Not good for him: nine of the jurors were white. White people, I had come to realize, were frightened of young black men. If I had pa.s.sed Darryl Morgan on the street at night, I would have given him all the elbow room he needed.

"Darryl, did you throw away a thirty-eight-caliber pistol that night? In the ocean?"

"No, sir."

"Anywhere?"

"No, sir, I didn't throw no thirty-eight away, 'cause I don't have no thirty-eight. William was carrying a thirty-two that night. He threw that away in the ocean before they arrest us."

"Pa.s.s the witness!" Oliver cried, casting a smile toward the jury box, as if his client's denials were triumphant.

Rage, not triumph, flowered on Darryl Morgan's face. He glared at his lawyer, then at me, then up at Judge Eglin. I almost felt I could read his mind. It was all there, and he didn't hide it.

Don't matter what the man do, these motherf.u.c.kers gone find you guilty. The hind wheels of hard time coming down on your head. They gone kill you or make you a trained animal for the rest of your life.

Then, unaccountably as far as I was concerned-for at the time I was not privy to his thoughts except in my imagination-he smiled.

His stepfather, A.J. Morgan, had always counseled him to "Walk light. And be cool. You smile at the man, he don't know d.i.c.k about what you thinking. You ya.s.sah him, he always say, 'I've got this n.i.g.g.e.r where I want him.' "

Walk light, Darryl thought, because life got no weight. Walk on tiptoe, see what happen, boy. How much you can bear.

From my chair at the counsel table I looked up at the black youth: six and a half feet tall, two hundred fifty pounds of muscle and s.h.i.+ning skin. I wondered why he wasn't in the backcourt with Earl Monroe or being touted by the NFL as the next Mean Joe Greene. Some young men could claw their way up out of any pit. Most could not, and this was one who had not. And the law decreed that he, not his genes and most certainly not society, was responsible for his acts.

The rain eased. Sunlight arrowed down on concrete and gla.s.s, probing for a way into the cool courtroom. I stood up to cross.e.xamine, facing Darryl Morgan for the first time.

"Mr. Morgan, you don't deny breaking into the Zide estate with William Smith at two o'clock in the morning, do you?"

"I say I done that."

"You don't deny giving poisoned meat to Paco the Doberman on the beach side of the house, do you?"

"I done that too. But I didn't know it was poison. I thought he just go to sleep. William, he lie to me."

He seemed aggrieved by that lie, if indeed it had taken place.

"You were able to get close to Paco, weren't you, because he knew you? Trusted you and liked you? Isn't that a fact?"

"A fact," Morgan agreed, his face like dark stone.

"But you deny being surprised in the act of entry by Solomon Zide?"

"I never saw no one except her," Morgan muttered. He pointed toward Connie Zide.

"And you deny that William Smith ever slashed Mrs. Zide in the face with a knife?"

"William never do that."

"And on the morning of December 6 of last year"-looking directly into the violent yellow eyes, I raised my voice a notch-"you didn't shoot Solomon Zide twice in the chest?"

"I never do that."

"And on the evening of December 9, 1978, just a few nights later, in the Duval County Jail, you didn't confess that murder to Detective Floyd Nickerson?"

"Never do that, either."

"And on or about January 3 of this year, 1979, in that same Duval County Jail, you didn't say in front of one of your cellmates, Jerry Lee Elroy"-I glanced at my notes-" 'I'm in deep s.h.i.+t because I was robbing this house and shot some Jew ... then his wife came running out and I had to shoot the b.i.t.c.h too.' "

"Never said that. Ain't so."

This young giant had gall; I had to give him credit.

"Your contention is that Constance Zide-who testified under oath that you were standing over the dead body of her husband with a pistol in your hand-is lying or mistaken?"

"Didn't do it. Don't know why she say what she say. She know it ain't so."

"And the eyewitness testimony of Neil Zide, the victim's son- that's also mistaken, or false?"

"Didn't do it," Morgan said.

"Your Honor, please ask the witness to be responsive."

Judge Bill Eglin looked down from the bench. "Darryl, just tell us if the eyewitness testimony of Neil Zide was mistaken or false. That's all Mr. Jaffe asked."

"Was one or the other."

"Officer Nickerson and Jerry Lee Elroy are also either lying or mistaken?"

"They ain't mistaken," Morgan said. His voice rose to a tenor. "They lying."

I let the jury savor that. The panel had been asked in voir dire if they would automatically take the word of a police officer. All those accepted as jurors had replied, in effect, "No, I would make my judgment based on his credibility." But the truth was, they would always believe a cop.

"Mr. Morgan, would you lie in order to save your life?"

I waited for an objection, but Gary Oliver chewed the end of a stubby yellow pencil.

"No lie here," Morgan growled.

"That's not what I asked you. I asked: Would you lie, if your life depended on it?"

"Can't rightly say."

I announced that I had no further questions.

"No redirect," Gary Oliver said. "And the defense rests."

But Morgan continued: "Man do a lot of things he don't think he can do, is what I'm saying. But I don't kill no one! You wrong about that, mister."

"That's enough!" Judge Eglin began to cough; he was suffering from a respiratory ailment, and his cough sounded like the bark of a dog. "Step down!"

After a brief recess, Gary Oliver rose from his chair and positioned himself a few feet from the jury box, instantly invading their precious s.p.a.ce. They drew back an inch or two without realizing it. Oliver was unaware. He launched into his final argument.

"Look at him, folks. Just a simple colored boy from the ghetto! He might smoke some dope on Sat.u.r.day night, he might steal from a man, but it's not in him to murder anyone! I think that Mr. Solomon Zide, a rich businessman, he had plenty of enemies. Plenty of people with motive enough to want him dead, and one or two of them were probably the ones who did it. Mrs. Zide says, 'It was him, it was Darryl Morgan did it.' Her son, Neil, says the same. But it's real dark that awful night, and this defendant, as you can see, is a dark-complected boy. So how can they know for sure it's him? Who knows who else came there that night? I believe this boy when he says he didn't do it. I don't believe his cellmate, that man Jerry Lee Elroy, at all. A professional snitch, folks, is what I think he is. Sc.u.m! And the detective who says my client confessed to him ... well, yessir, I admit that's a high one to jump over, but why should we take his word? ..."

During this, I doodled exploding s.p.a.ce-age rockets on the legal pad in front of me. I could have jumped to my feet and objected to Oliver's offering opinions as to which evidence should be believed and which shouldn't, and to the denigration of witnesses, but I kept silent.

When he finished, I stood. I counted to ten and then said, "If I am ever seated in that chair over there, facing the possibility of death by electrocution, I guarantee you one thing, folks: I will lie until my hair turns white and my teeth fall out on the courtroom floor."

A few jurors smiled. Most of them nodded, for they would lie too.

"Physical evidence has placed the defendant on the Zide estate at the hour of the crime. And he's admitted to being there. Mrs. Zide has identified him as the man who brutally murdered her husband. He was in her employment as an a.s.sistant groundskeeper. She's not just picking him out of a police lineup. She knew him. Comes Neil Zide, who witnessed the murder of his father-and he also identified the defendant here in court. Under the circ.u.mstances, that is sufficient to warrant a guilty verdict. And yet, beyond that, two men, one of them a veteran Jacksonville police detective, have stated unequivocally that the defendant confessed to the murder. Combined with the positive identification, ladies and gentlemen, that is powerful. That is conclusive far beyond reasonable doubt. But still Mr. Morgan says, 'I didn't do it.' "

I paused to let the next words gather some weight.

"Well, he has to say that, doesn't he?"

I sighed as if saddened by my prosecutorial duty and the defendant's plight, but that was not all acting. "The evidence is simply overwhelming. I beg you to do your duty. Find Darryl Morgan guilty."

From the corner of my eye, I saw Morgan smile at the jurors. That, I thought, was the smile of a madman.

It took the jury less than twenty minutes to return. The foreman delivered the expected verdict.

Judge Bill Eglin said, "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Y'all have found the defendant guilty of first-degree felony murder. Tomorrow morning, evidence and argument will be presented by both sides that will help you to recommend one of two punishments for the defendant. I'll list and explain nine statutorily defined aggravating circ.u.mstances, as well as seven mitigating circ.u.mstances, that you must weigh carefully in order to guide your decision. You'll recommend either death by electrocution or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years. In our law here in Florida, there is no alternative. Your recommendation will not be binding on this court. The final decision is mine. Court is adjourned until nine A.M." He barked twice, then rapped his oak gavel.

Chapter 7.

ARRIVING HOME on Longboat Key every evening, I tried to do fifty laps in the pool. Then, feeling righteous, I went straight to the wet bar in the living room to mix an Absolut martini.

Our house was brick and marble and gla.s.s, with an atrium foyer and tropical landscaping. A twenty-eight-foot sloop was tied up at the private boat dock, from where we had views of both Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. We had moved here from a wooden A- frame on Siesta Key, a more jungly area. We had traded up, no doubt of it, to a showcase home befitting a partner in a prestigious law firm.

But that was not why we had moved.

One morning almost two years earlier, on Siesta Key, I had been squeezing orange juice and trying to read the national edition of the New York Times, when the telephone rang. Our son, Alan, was an eighteen-year-old high school senior-the early-morning caller was his guidance counselor, Mr. Variano. He asked Toba and me to come see him.

We dutifully and apprehensively appeared at the high school that same afternoon.

"Alan is a good-natured boy," Variano said. "Sensitive, friendly, interesting to talk to ..."

Toba blushed as if she herself had been complimented. "We thought you'd brought us here to tell us he was in some sort of trouble."

". .. when he's not stoned," Variano continued, "which isn't often."

Twice, he said, Alan had been caught smoking marijuana on school grounds. He often fell asleep in cla.s.s. He cut cla.s.ses regularly.

"Didn't you know this?" Variano asked.

"Not really," I managed.

"He's been arrested, hasn't he?"

I nodded cautiously. "With Bobby Woolford on the beach last Fourth of July. They had a pipeful of gra.s.s they were sharing. They were let go at juvenile court with what's called a withhold. It amounts to a lecture. I'm sorry, but I can't consider that as really serious."

Variano looked at his notes. "We have reason to believe that Alan and his friends-the Becker twins, the Woolford boy, Susan Hoppy -have been heavily into dope-smoking since they were thirteen. And selling small amounts of it to the other kids for the last year or two. Are you aware of that, Mr. Jaffe?"

"Definitely not the selling. The other, not the way you put it. In a sense, perhaps, but..." My stomach tightened into a ball of turbulence. "Mr. Variano, do you know our daughter Cathy?"