Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 17

He saw freighters on the horizon, sometimes even insh.o.r.e. They moved placidly on the blue skin of the Atlantic. He liked the way they coasted along: serene, dogged, yet quiet. Must be pretty out there.

Work on boats. Build boats. Do something with these hands... . He spread his fingers, gazing down at the wide palms, the thick veined wrists. Where am I gonna learn to do that? Go down to Lauderdale where they got boatyards. Find Pauline somewhere. I could be a daddy for all I know. And I be a good one-don't slap my kid around, don't laugh at him all the time, call him "useless moron" and "r.e.t.a.r.d." Teach him what I know, soon's I can learn it myself.

He told his friend William only part of what was on his mind. He didn't want William to laugh at him. William was working from eight to five as a porter at the Greyhound terminal. "Hey, I go to Lauderdale with you," William said.

"With what, man? You got no money."

"Neither have you. We do a little night work, man."

Darryl scuffed his shoes on the pavement where they stood outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken. "Shorty Bigshoes told me the cops know me too good."

"Coupla scores down by the beach, we outa here. We on our way to Lauderdale."

"I don't want to hurt no one, man."

William shook his head energetically. "Main thing is, take what you want, get away. You in bad luck with a dude who say, 'I ain't giving up nothing,' but you can change his tune easy. Ain't got to kill him, just smack him with the gun or shoot him in the foot. He give it right up. I know this other dude done his score one time, then broke this bottle and stabbed this other dude's eyes out. One thing for sure, he say, that dude don't be looking at no photographs or no lineup down at no poh-lice station."

Darryl said in disgust, "William, you talking like all them dudes over at Raiford who be doing quarters back-to-back. I don't want to smack no one in the head, and I don't want to shoot no one in the foot, and sure as G.o.d made chicken I ain't fixing to stab no dude's eyes out."

"What you want to do in Lauderdale after you find this fox Pauline?"

"Get a job. Learn something. Don't know what yet." He knew it would be uncool to say he thought of becoming a s.h.i.+p's carpenter.

"This place where you picking up all that dogs.h.i.+t... they wealthy folks, right?"

"Wealthy don't cut it, man." He described the grounds and what he had glimpsed of the interior of the Zide house. "They rich."

"You know where things at?"

"What things?"

"Whatever they got we can sell, man."

Darryl mulled that over. He wanted to leave Jacksonville. "I been away. You know a dude buys TVs, paintings, and s.h.i.+t?"

"Course I know a dude, and I got wheels, and I know where we can pick us up a couple nice guns. Use 'em one day, give 'em back the next, cost twenty bucks apiece rent money. You know how to get in there at night? That fancy house?"

Darryl said, "I look around. I think about it, figure it out."

He figured it out. But he didn't want to hurt Paco, he told William. He liked old Paco; they were buddies. Paco had been trained not to take food from anyone he didn't know, but he knew Darryl. William promised to get some pills that would put Paco to sleep for six or seven hours. He'd wake up good as new.

Rich folks were having a fancy party in a few days, Darryl said, and pretty sure they'd do some drinking. Be over by midnight, they'd be happy to hit the pillows, sleep good.

"What they like?" William asked.

"Who?"

"White folks you work for."

"I don't hardly know 'em. She a foxy old b.i.t.c.h-got a boyfriend come over one afternoon when her old man out of town. She feeling him up by the side of the pool. Next thing you know, they jump in the pool together and start fooling around. Pool so big you could get lost in it."

"Shee-eet," William said, puckering his lips, shaking his narrow head.

"She come out on the lawn once and ast me how I like my job. I say, 'Jus' fine, ma'am.' She give me this big smile, like she done her good deed that day. Don't see much of her old man, and when he there, they always fights."

"Only them two?"

"I told you, the son live there too. Got his own part of the house. His daddy always yelling at him, and he yell back. He got this squeaky voice. He be a girl at the joint, they rent him out good."

"What these other dogs do? They bark?"

"Myra and Mickey so dumb they lick the hand of the devil."

"You tell me the other day there's a guard?"

"Terence too far away, down by the road."

"We home free, man."

At four o'clock on the day of the musicale, the groundskeeping staff was given two bottles of chilled Moet &c Chandon and two trays of smoked salmon and chopped chicken liver canapes. Under a yellow-and-white-striped awning, Darryl drank two gla.s.ses of the champagne-a new experience-and left the Zide estate just as the twenty-person catering crew was finis.h.i.+ng their setup for the concert and buffet. Usually at 6:00 P.M., or whenever the day's load of dogs.h.i.+t was disposed of, he took the northbound bus on A1A and then transferred to the westbound on Beach Boulevard. But today William was waiting for him outside the gates in his rattly blue Ford pickup.

They drove south through the scrub forest, past the Methodist church and the Florida National Bank. "Where we headed?" Darryl asked.

"Got eight hours to kill, man."

They went to a bar for a while, drank Michelob on tap, became bored. "Better sober up, man," Darryl said. They drove west to a mall with a triple movie theater, took a cold six-pack of Bud in with them and saw The Buddy Holly Story and then a revival of The Guns of Navarone. That excited them. Each in his secret thoughts pictured himself as Gregory Peck and David Niven going in to destroy the giant German guns. But it was still only midnight. Still time to kill. William bought two more six-packs in a Lil' Champ down in Ponte Vedra, and they pulled the truck into a parking lot at the public beach and sat there in the darkness, popping the cans. An owl hooted in the forest. Darryl climbed out to take a leak against a sign that said: Warning, no dumping or littering, St. Johns County. Misdemeanor, punishable by fine $500 and/or 60 days in jail or both.

At least two dozen crushed beer cans and six-pack cartons were scattered in the sand at the base of the sign. With a powerful stream of urine Darryl sank nine or ten of the cans. They were the German battles.h.i.+ps and submarines; he was a strafing dive-bomber. He went back to the truck to pop another Bud.

Close to 2 A.M., William said, "Hey, man, we gotta go. We late."

They reached the area of the Zide estate, pa.s.sed the black gates. "Where we gonna park?" William asked.

"Got to be a public beach nearby."

"You don't know where the beach is?"

"Sure I know. You doing fine, you heading right."

But Darryl didn't know where the public beach was. They parked half a mile away, in a clump of sawgra.s.s off the road. The moon had already set, but the night was thick with stars. Darryl stuffed a pair of wire cutters into his belt and a flashlight into the back pocket of his Levi's. William had only been able to find one pistol, a Colt Python. He carried it, and a plastic supermarket bag with some beef liver in it. The liver had already begun to smell, and the plastic was leaking blood. They shouldered their way through the brush, to the dunes, and then onto the beach.

After fifteen minutes of slogging in the darkness through soft sand, they reached the edge of the Zide estate. A disturbed seagull gave a raucous cry.

William said, "What kinda TVs you say they got there?"

"Got a big screen Advent, got a RCA console, and s.h.i.+t, must have two, three more nineteen-inch babies upstairs somewhere."

"Man, how we gonna carry them mothers back to my pickup? I thought we park right nearby."

Darryl laughed wickedly, deep in the center of his chest, and said, "Won't be easy."

"You didn't plan this good."

"Was your idea, man."

"But you the one on the inside."

"We just take the paintings," Darryl said. "Can't weigh too much, and they worth big bucks."

A fog rolled off the ocean as they reached the beach gates, and out of the gloom they could hear Paco growling.

William halted. "He don't bark?"

"He bark, you don't have to worry. He growl, he getting ready to grab your throat and eat you up. You ready with that meat? You got the pills in it?"

Darryl approached the gate. "Hey, old Paco, it's me. Be cool, boy."

The dog lay in the sand near a clump of sawgra.s.s.

William cut through the barbed wire with the clippers. They made their way up through more dunes and then along a boardwalk, past sea grape and a line of palm trees, ebony fronds against a suddenly cloudy sky. Off to the right, through the fog, the swimming pool and the tennis courts began to show their shapes.

"Don't s.h.i.+ne that light," Darryl whispered.

"Why I need to," William grumbled, "when this place lit up like it Christmas?"

Orange insect lamps glowed on the lawn and by the pool. Lights burned on all three floors of the house, which was as big as a monastery. Wings and covered walks arrowed out in different directions. Look like a haunted house, Darryl thought. With William following, he moved across the soft springy lawn, along a line of hibiscus, onto the terrace. They cut across the ultraviolet beam of a security lamp. It blazed swirling yellow light across their path.

They heard voices. Both youths crouched against a fluted marble column. Darryl rested his hand on it and felt the chill of the stone right up to his wrist. William started to hiss at him, and Darryl growled, "Shut up, fool. ..."

The voices rose in pitch. Downstairs in the house, people were arguing.

A man's voice snarled in rage. A light snapped on upstairs. Then the Lhasa apso puppies sprinted down the terrace toward Darryl and William, yipping and baying like baby wolves from h.e.l.l.

They knew Darryl and liked him, and they had smelled him. Tails wagging furiously, they skidded to a stop on the tiles. They rose on their hind legs, clawing at his jeans.

Wearing a billowing white bathrobe, Connie Zide stepped suddenly out of the house through French doors. She was about thirty feet away from Darryl when he saw her. She looked pale enough to be an apparition from an old black-and-white horror movie. She stopped and stared at him.

Instantly Darryl jumped from his crouch, bellowed like an elephant whose young were threatened, and ran. William followed, crouched low and weaving, emulating the fighting men they had seen in the movie.

The puppies believed it to be a fine game, and they pursued. William kicked a puppy out of his path. He had killed a dog; what did a puppy matter? The puppy, striking against a marble column, screamed.

Darryl pounded across the gra.s.s toward the beach gate, tripping another light beam; it blazed in his eyes. He heard a crash behind him, as of pottery smas.h.i.+ng, but when he flung his head around to look, he saw through the swirling mist only William's long-jawed face bobbing up and down in stride, the lips, bathed by the harsh light of the tennis court security lamp, drawn back over white teeth in a rictus of terror.

I raised a palm, meaning "Stop right there."

Darryl nodded, adjusted himself against the cool wall of the cell. He moved the waist chain, flexed his wrists.

"I have a few questions," I said.

This story of Darryl's hadn't come out at trial. Bits and pieces had been alluded to during Gary Oliver's direct examination of his client, but never in a narrative. For the most part, in that testimony long ago, Darryl's lawyer had allowed him only to deny what the state's witnesses had sworn to. In that, if only in that, I thought, Oliver had been wise.

If Darryl had told this tale then, I would have ripped it apart. Because who were you going to believe-the wife and son of the murdered man, or the hulking black youth who had admitted being there on the terrace and confessed the murder to a homicide detective and later in the presence of a cellmate? If someone else had shot Solomon Zide that night, how could Connie and Neil have made such a firm identification of Darryl Morgan? Darryl was not someone you forgot, not someone you easily mistook for another man.

The two guards appeared at the door to the cell. "Sir?"

I turned.

"It's time for this prisoner to exercise."

I asked if it wasn't possible for him to do that later, when I had gone.

"No, sir. It's supervised, and we have a schedule. This is his time."

I turned to Darryl, slumped against the wall of the cell. "Can you skip your exercise today?"

"We get up on that roof twice a week," Darryl said. "For one hour, man. I skip it today, I got to wait three days. It rains three days from now, they tell you, 'Bad luck.' Which you think I rather do-rap with you or breathe fresh air and stretch my bones? You don't believe me, nohow. You think I kill that old Jew. You was a sc.u.mbag then and you a sc.u.mbag now. Day you say to me, 'Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you telling the truth,' then we talk. If I don't be dead by then. That happen, I talk to you from the grave, motherf.u.c.ker." He chuckled. "Yeah. I haunt you. See how you like it."

Chapter 17.

WE HAD JUST finished our weekly partners' meeting, and Harvey Royal asked to see me alone. He slid an antacid pill into his mouth, leaned back in the leather chair and said, "Ted, just what the h.e.l.l are you doing up in Jacksonville?"

"I explained it last week, Harvey."

His bony head with its thin mat of gray hair bobbed up and down. "There's an entire organization in Tallaha.s.see devoted to these appeals, isn't that so?"

"Yes, it's called CCR."

"An organization far more suited to do this important work than our little provincial firm here in Sarasota, wouldn't you say?"

"Not necessarily. Darryl Morgan's run out his string. He's been on death row for twelve years. He's due to be executed four weeks from today."

Harvey knew, of course, that the winning of the case hinged on the testimony of the firm's new client, Jerry Lee Elroy. But what I didn't dare tell him, or anyone, was that all hope of Elroy's testifying would go down the drain if I turned the case over to CCR. The CCR lawyers wouldn't lie to Elroy and pretend that his recantation was part of the deal to get out of the drug charge. And if they didn't lie, Elroy would never testify. If he didn't testify, Darryl Morgan died.

Harvey peered at me over his reading gla.s.ses. "I am not unsympathetic to what you're feeling," he said. "But at the meeting today we discussed several cases in which you're involved. Barry and Marian have filled in while you were up north trying to play the role of good Samaritan. I have to ask you, Ted-are you ready to pull your load once again with this law firm?"

"I've got to put out the biggest fire," I said. "And I don't need to apologize for that. If this firm won't accept my doing that, then I don't want to be a lawyer here. I'm flying up north again in a few days. I'm going to take over the defense of Darryl Morgan."

The phone beeped in the conference room. Harvey picked it up and told his secretary to hold all his calls. He turned back to me.

"Let me be cruel, Ted. From everything I've learned, you stand no chance of winning. You'll be drawing out this man Morgan's agony for an undetermined period of time before he receives the coup de grace. Can you justify that?"

Darryl Morgan had said, Every day go round, it come in my mind, "When all this be over with?" Feeding me to Mama, they ending my hurt... .