Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 7

"I knew her, although she wasn't in my case load. Isn't she a freshman now at Cornell?"

What was I trying to say? She's a terrific kid, an A student, she wants to save the planet. So don't be so d.a.m.ned hard on us "Are you talking about hard drugs" Toba's voice was chilly "or just marijuana?"

"Marijuana, Mrs. Jaffe, although I'll bet my paycheck these kids have dabbled in other stuff. LSD, mushrooms, has.h.i.+sh, cocaine, Ecstasy, crack, speed-everything's available."

"Marijuana isn't going to kill them, is it?"

"In ma.s.sive amounts, Mrs. Jaffe, yes, it might. We're talking cigar- size joints. Your son's brains are being fried."

The walls of Alan's room were covered with posters of rock stars, bodybuilders, Harley-Davidsons, and Bogart movies. Dumbbells and free weights were flung carelessly on the floor. Alan had inherited Toba's dark hair and my lean physique; he was determined to swell his biceps and pectorals to the size of a teenage Schwarzenegger's.

He cried when I talked to him that evening. He admitted that the boys smoked in the janitor's storeroom; they had stolen a key. He'd sold a few lids to friends.

"I didn't make any money on that. I was just doing these guys a favor."

"What about crack?"

"No way. That's bad karma, Dad."

"Cocaine?"

"Once or twice. Didn't do anything for me. And it costs a fortune."

"Cigar-size joints is what Mr. Variano said. Is that true?"

Alan bit his lip, but he nodded.

"Do you want to quit?"

"Yes. I know it's ruining my life."

I was pleased. These admissions had to be therapeutic.

"If you know that, Alan, and you want to quit, you can. And you will."

Briefly I remembered what Toba had said to me years before about leaving black Jacksonville in the search for a "decent, safe" school. I sighed.

In spring the school advised us that Alan would not be graduated with the rest of his cla.s.s. He had failed required courses in American history and science.

That was when we decided to move to Longboat Key. Take the kid away from his dope-smoking pals, get him in a new environment for the makeup semester.

"And I want to put him in a drug program," I said. "I've done some investigating. There's a good one downtown."

Toba resisted my depiction of our son as an addict. "Ted, back in the sixties, at college, gra.s.s was a way of life. Did it fry our brains? We still take a few hits now and then at a party-you do, anyway. Alan's just... well, I don't know what he is."

"Then we'll find out," I said.

After we moved to Longboat Key in August, Alan began a twice- a-week evening program. Parents were advised to come for separate guidance sessions those same evenings. Toba dropped out-"You never learn anything new," she explained-but I drove there with Alan the evening after I met Jerry Lee Elroy at Sarasota County Jail.

Thirty adults gathered in an elementary school cla.s.sroom in Newtown, a black area north of the city center. The walls were papered with children's drawings, and we sat at small wooden children's desks scarred with initials. Most of the parents were black or Hispanic.

A bowl was pa.s.sed, and I slipped a check for fifty dollars under some crumpled tens and fives.

I made it. Why can't my son?

There was a fundamental parental dilemma. You loved your kid, so you got involved. A sailing trip down to the Keys, Beethoven or U2 together in the evening, a discussion of the book he was reading for his school a.s.signment. But after a while whatever advice you gave or whatever example you set, an unwritten law declared that the kid would do virtually the opposite. Or hate you at some level for meddling.

"Don't lecture him so much," Toba told me. "You have a tendency to pontificate."

I hated that word, pontificate. Probably because it was accurate.

I tried to pay attention to what was going on in the hot schoolroom. A single mother was telling us about her twenty-year-old son who had come home, begging to be fed. "But I knew he'd steal whatever money he could find, make me real crazy. I say, 'Go away until you clean!' Two days later they call me from the hospital. They say, 'Elston's here, he's undernourished, he's sick, he say his mama kick him out.' I say, 'When he quit killing hisself with that rock cocaine, I come see him.' "

The group applauded her, while she wiped her eyes. But what would happen to Elston without his mother? Could I do what she did? Tough love, they called it. Coddle them, forgive them, and they a.s.sume the world will too.

That night, on the drive home to Longboat Key, I said to Alan, "How are you doing, son?"

"Fine, Dad. We sit in a big group, and everyone gets up and raps about the s.h.i.+tty things they did when they were on dope, and how they've been clean for ten days, or thirty days, and we all applaud. Then we hold hands and say the serenity prayer."

"Do you get up there and talk?"

"Not anymore. I'm clean."

"Do you want to leave?"

"I know what a terrible thing drugs are now. I could use the time for studying. I'm having a real tough time with physics."

We were home. Alan hit the b.u.t.ton that opened the electronic security gate, and it whirred open.

"Let me think about it," I said. "I'll talk to your mother."

Stars glittered above Sarasota Bay. Standing in the driveway, I reached out to give Alan a hug, remembering that my own father had never done that to me. Leonard, who had died a few years earlier in St. Augustine from a heart attack, had been a handshaker, not a hugger or a kisser. Coming back from my licentious summer in Europe before law school, I'd greeted him with an embrace and a kiss on both cheeks. He had flushed, drawing back a bit to make sure our groins didn't touch.

Toba was upstairs, watching thirtysomething. With a snifter of Remy Martin for company, I went out on the boat deck. Under gathering clouds the Gulf was a silvery gray, and from the other side of Longboat Key the waves splashed and receded gently.

Years ago, I thought, life had been simpler. In Jacksonville I could grab a cold piece of chicken and a Mexican beer and feel happy. Now we searched for three-star restaurants, and I wouldn't consider a Chardonnay for under twenty dollars. I used to drive my old Honda, Toba a tanklike Volvo wagon. We currently owned four cars: my Porsche, Toba's Jaguar, Alan's hand-painted, gas-guzzling '82 Pontiac, Cathy's Toyota hatchback up in Ithaca. I was kicking in for four insurance premiums and supporting the economies of four nations.

The oiled black arc of a porpoise appeared out on the water. Cathy had brought back a b.u.mper sticker for me that said: MY DAUGHTER AND MY MONEY GO TO CORNELL, and I had laughed. But some days when I saw it on the rear of my car I felt more plundered than validated. She was already talking about graduate school. Not to become a lawyer, but to earn a degree that would allow her to get in line for a low-paying job in Was.h.i.+ngton where she would help give away part of my tax dollar to the poor in Ethiopia or Bangladesh. This f.u.c.king recession, I thought, came at the wrong time.

But when is there a right time?

I went back inside the house to the den, where I read for a while in a new le Carre novel. A clock was ticking softly in the kitchen. Gulls flew over the atrium, so close that I could hear the rus.h.i.+ng choral beat of their wings. The pool filter stopped. A rich and gracious silence filled the night.

There was a rhythm to any life, I thought, a routine that both sustained and deadened. Countless moments became strung together in the guise of a whole, punctuated with flashes of pleasure, ache, doubt, and desire. I want. I can't. I wish. Those were the themes. I was forty-eight years old. It would be over all too quickly, and if I had the courage at the end, I would ask myself: What was it all about? What did you do that really mattered?

And what would I answer?

I thought of my seventy-two-year-old mother then, for I knew what she would answer. I visited her whenever I could in her Century Village condo in West Palm Beach, where she had moved after Dad's death. Set free from marriage, she had become a world traveler. She visited Israel, cruised the South Seas, flew up to New York with a friend for a fortnight of theater, and toured all the national parks in the West before arriving in La Jolla to baby-sit her California grandchildren. My sister joined her once in Jerusalem for a few days of guided visits to West Bank settlements. Rhoda called me after she got back to La Jolla.

"They were a group," Rhoda said, "but I picked up on it right away-she was with this man named Sam Schatz. A retired Cadillac dealer from Cleveland."

"Did Mom admit it?"

"Teddy, I'm not a cross-examiner like you. I'm a shrink. In my world, intuition has more validity than proof. I knew."

My mother was fatter now, but her eyes had more radiance than I was used to seeing. She had had a tuck. She dyed her hair a light rust brown, had given up girdles, and wore pistachio-colored slacks, flowered Mexican blouses, white Italian shoes. She said "s.h.i.+t" and "screw," words I couldn't recall her using at home in Jacksonville, and watched A&E and 60 Minutes.

To all my musings and soul-searchings, she once said, "Teddy, most of what happens isn't planned. Who knows what's going to be? So do your best. Be kind, enjoy, try not to worry."

I tried.

When I went up to bed at half past eleven, Toba didn't even stir. I loved her; she was my companion. But she snored. If I woke her she would be annoyed, deny it, soon snore again. In the dark I searched for the wax earplugs that I kept in the bedside table. When they were in place, I heard nothing except a faint neutral sound, as of distant surf.

The foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn ...

Once I had read Keats. Once I had dreamed of standing before the Supreme Court and arguing for a man's life.

My mother's advice was good only up to a point. In the silent darkness I thought of Jerry Lee Elroy, and then of Darryl Morgan, the man I had sent to death row. And I didn't even have to dream that recurrent horror. Now I saw it and heard it while I was still awake: the black head in the leather cap, the crash of the switch, the dimming of the lights-the burst of blue fire.

Chapter 8.

YOU TWIST, TURN, cast off the sheets, know you should be able to escape. And must escape. But you remain in the nightmare's sweaty grip.

Twelve years before, the second part of the Morgan trial in Jacksonville had gone quickly. But in memory it would always have the quality of drawn-out nightmare.

I had risen at first light that morning and gone running barefoot along the sand of Neptune Beach. Waves shattered against the dunes, and the last of the night wind chanted through the sawgra.s.s. When I came puffing back, Toba appeared on the beach near the house, bearing a mug of fresh coffee. She s.h.i.+vered in the morning chill.

Sweat ran down my neck from my forehead. "Thanks, my love," I gasped, clutching the coffee.

Our street was quiet as she walked home with me.

"Sleep well, Ted?"

"Do I ever?"

I meant on the night before final argument in a murder case. Toba understood.

"Ah, but rejoice," she said. "This is the last one you'll ever have to do."

"Yes!" And I hugged her.

"Shall I come to court? I've got the time today. Would you like that?"

"Yes, come."

I rose from the counsel table. It was my duty to seek the end of the convicted murderer's life. But Connie had said she didn't want him to die. And neither did I. How could I, in conscience, seek a man's death if I didn't hate him? And didn't see him as a threat to the survival of others?

"The State of Florida," I said calmly, "will present no new witnesses. The state rests its plea for the death penalty on the previous evidence."

With a perceptible scowl on his lips, Judge Bill Eglin looked down. He had been on the bench for three years; he was not new to this. But I had confused him.

Gary Oliver strode toward the jury again, a hearty man, arms spread as if to embrace the world.

He called Marguerite Little as his first witness. She fidgeted in the witness chair as if it might be the very chair her son was headed toward. With her wild iron-gray hair and Mother Hubbard dress, Morgan's mother had the look of a woman let out of a mental inst.i.tution for the day.

"He always been a good boy."

That was the sum of her testimony, and I pa.s.sed my right to cross.e.xamine.

A.J. Morgan, the stepfather, in a black suit whose jacket seemed two sizes too small for him, took the stand. "I always told him he was gonna go too far. He never listen to me. He don't know what he about, that boy-"

"Sir!" Oliver shot forward, cutting him off. "Tell us this: in your home, was your stepson violent?"

"I don't permit that."

"Outside your home, that you know of?"

"That's what he here for, right?"

Oliver sank back toward the defense table, defeated by this friendly witness.

The time came for final argument in part two.

Rising, Gary Oliver faced the jury. "This is a young boy," he begged. "He shot this man without meaning to. He didn't go to that house to kill anyone, he went there to rob them."

From his seat at the defense table, Darryl Morgan rumbled, "I didn't shoot no one!"

The eyes of all the jurors swung toward him. d.a.m.n fool, I thought. You've accused these people of error in the most serious judgment any of them has ever made.

The judge eschewed the use of a gavel. Calmly he tapped his ballpoint pen on the oak bench from where he dispensed justice.

Oliver stared at his client, then turned back to the jury. "Robbery's a crime, but not one you have to die for. The killing was bad, but 'twasn't meant to be. The one boy, his friend William Smith, is already shot dead by the police. One dead ... don't you think that's enough? And you can't really blame this boy for what his friend did to that lady's face. Twenty years old! Be merciful! The Morgan boy will be forty-five years old when he comes up for parole, if you let him. Maybe they'll give it to him, maybe not. But he'll be a new man then. Give that new man a chance. Do the Christian thing! Give him the opportunity to repent!"

After Oliver sat, wiping his forehead with his ever-present white handkerchief, Judge Eglin waved his hand at me. The state, saddled with the burden of proof, was granted the right of the last word. A kind of coda: conclusive major chords, knells seeking doom.

Whatever I wished privately to happen, I had the obligation to set forth the opinion of the State of Florida. It had occurred to me that if I didn't offer reb.u.t.tal, some zealot such as Judge Eglin could move for my disbarment.

I stood and said: "Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant was surprised in the act of burglary by Solomon Zide, and indeed, thinking he was threatened, may have reacted quickly and irrationally. But our common sense tells us that he carried a loaded weapon he was prepared to use. We've also heard testimony that after Mr. Morgan shot Solomon Zide, Mr. Smith turned on Mrs. Zide, a defenseless woman. Smith slashed her twice, in the arm and the face. That does not strike me as merely an irrational act. It strikes me as brutal, and certainly deliberate. And I ask you: Did Mr. Morgan make any effort to stop Mr. Smith from doing what he did? Did he say, 'That's enough, William Smith! Let's go!'? You've heard Mrs. Zide testify to the contrary. The judge in his charge will tell you that our law requires that all partic.i.p.ants in a criminal act be responsible for the actions of the other partic.i.p.ants. Otherwise, imagine: in a bank robbery, one man would say, 'Oh, I didn't take any money, I was just standing there with a gun.' If William Smith were alive, he would be equally responsible with Mr. Morgan for the death of Solomon Zide. In the same way, Mr. Morgan is equally responsible for the attack on the person of Constance Zide. The brutality of this crime is an aggravating circ.u.mstance that may outweigh any mitigating circ.u.mstances such as the defendant's youth. Therefore the state moves for the application of the death penalty."

I had a seafood lunch with Toba at The Jury Room, with Connie and Neil Zide at a table on the far side of the restaurant. We went back to the courtroom and at a few minutes past 4:00 P.M. the jury announced that they had reached a decision. Filing in, they took their seats on the padded wooden chairs. The foreman rose; he was a retired electrical engineer with yellowing hair. He read from a slip of paper in his hand.

"The jury advises and recommends to the court that it impose a sentence of life imprisonment upon Darryl Morgan without possibility of parole for twenty-five years."