Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 15

In response, Carmen Tanagra made that harsh sound again.

"Isn't that what your police report said?"

"That's what it said."

So there was that too. I was getting in even deeper. I told her what I had learned from Jerry Lee Elroy.

Tanagra said, "Uh-huh."

"You're not surprised," I said. "So Nickerson must have told you himself that it was bulls.h.i.+t."

"I don't recall what he told me."

"You're still friendly with him?"

"Are you kidding?"

"You know where he is now?"

"He got a good job as a rent-a-cop."

"Do you know for who?"

"Is this some kind of cross-examination?"

"Sounds like one, doesn't it?" I smiled. "You want me to get off your tail? Am I walking too close?"

"Close only counts in horseshoes and dancing," Carmen Tanagra said, but without an answering smile.

I wasn't sure what I had done or said to lose what little of the high ground I'd occupied.

"Morgan is still on death row. They're supposed to pull the switch next month. But there was one witness at his trial who lied."

Tanagra said, "And you want to know if there was a second one."

I hadn't had to prompt her. She had said it. My heartbeat quickened, and I put a clamp on my tongue.

"If I told you there was," she said, "what would you want out of me?"

I leaned forward in my chair. "I'd want you to make a statement under oath. Back it up at an appeal hearing."

"Mr. Jaffe, let me tell you a story. A while ago these barges with fake ballast tanks off-loaded a hundred tons of marijuana at Fort George Inlet. JSO got tipped. They made a big bust, including the Cuban guys who were meant to pick up the stuff. Those Cubans are at the dock in two Mercedes. Amazingly-figure this one out-the two Mercedes wind up in the garages of two high-ranking police officers. But one day a file clerk down at the courthouse got p.i.s.sed off and snitched on them. The cops had to give back the two Mercedes. Were they prosecuted? No, sir. You hear of any resignation? No, sir. The file clerk, though, he has to resign. Now he's a cook in a short-order joint downtown... . You see what I'm saying?"

She had told me what I wanted to know.

"If I snitch on Floyd Nickerson," Tanagra offered, "it won't matter how long ago he was a cop."

"They busted you in the Bongiorno case," I said, "and you were a cop."

"To be in the brotherhood you need a d.i.c.k. That time in the Gambrel murder, the snitch I had was for real. But Bongiorno had real good friends in Tallaha.s.see. Money and political clout is what it came down to. The snitch changed his story, and I got s.h.i.+tcanned. And if I do what you'd like me to do . . She drew a finger across her throat. "I don't have a medical degree or a license to practice. I could wind up with that clerk, taking orders for grits and eggs."

"I don't want that to happen to you, either, but-"

"Then don't threaten me," Tanagra said.

"William Smith is dead. You remembered that. There's another man on death row waiting to be executed. Don't you think one dead is enough? You want to remember him too?"

"I can't help you," she said, putting down her coffee cup with a gesture of finality. Her friend Gloria still listened to us from the kitchen door.

"I could put you under subpoena," I said. "You'd have to tell the truth."

Carmen Tanagra got up from her chair and walked across the room. She opened the front door and then banged open the screen door against the wooden front of the house. She said, "Why don't you go cry in one hand and p.i.s.s in the other to see which one gets full first? But do it outside. And don't bother coming back to tell me how it worked out."

Chapter 15.

THE REST OF THE MORNING I spent in the library at the public defender's office. In the early afternoon I went to the courthouse to visit a judge I knew. I asked him a favor he had the power to grant, and at three o'clock I climbed into the rental car and headed west again on I-10.

Twenty-five minutes later I took the now familiar turnoff south onto State 121. I recognized landmarks: the Country Variety Store, the sagging white clapboard Raiford Road Church. A dry winter sun burned into the meat of my left arm resting on the car door. Tuning the radio to a country-music FM station, I snapped my fingers to the beat.

The whine and wail of violins filled the car, then swirled into the leafy green afternoon that rushed past the open window. Call me on the telee-phone ... Daaaarrrrlin' I am always home ... If you ev- errrrr change yore mind ...

Back in Sarasota were my wife and son and law firm: problems closer to the bone. This was as good a way as any-a kind of chemotherapy of the soul-to keep all that in remission. And to recapture whatever it was I had lost in the last decades that now seemed so dear, and necessary, in the time remaining.

I remembered how once I had wanted to be of service, how my deepest ambition had been to argue a case before the Supreme Court and save an innocent man's life. In the quest for creature comfort and security, somehow that had faded from my consciousness. Just a short while ago I'd thought that I had almost everything I wanted. All that blocked my path to the happiest of endings, I'd decided, was the economic recession and the torment of my son.

How shallow I had become in these years. Do we do the right thing, I wondered, by giving up our youthful fantasies?

But I might not have to now, for I'd found what I wanted in those old dusty files at the courthouse. Now I knew that Neil Zide, on that b.l.o.o.d.y December night at the beach a dozen years earlier, had not described Darryl Morgan as tall.

The same creased brown suit jacket hung from the wooden clothes tree in the corner of the office. At his desk, FSP a.s.sistant Superintendent Raymond G. Wright wore a white b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt but a different-color striped tie. Blue and green yesterday, red and brown today.

Wright made a humming sound in his throat. "Yesterday, Mr. Jaffe, you made a point that I wasn't qualified to tell you what you could or couldn't do as a lawyer. No more, you said, than you could tell me what I could or couldn't do as a prison administrator. After yesterday's unfortunate incident of violence, the decision concerning your request to visit Darryl Morgan falls into the category of how to run the prison. I have a right to deny it. I have to consider your safety."

"If you deny my right to visit," I replied, "I'll have a court order from Judge Krawitz in Jacksonville on your desk by ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Do you really want to force me to go to all that trouble?"

He does, I thought. He truly does. But he's got to suspect the judge will bust his chops. And if the judge does that, Raymond G. Wright's boss may do the same thing. The motto of any prison system, carved in the hardest stone of its walls, is: Keep out of the public eye and judicial disfavor. If they don't know we're here, then we're doing the job right. And we'll retire on full pay.

Wright's hands rested on the desk, motionless, like empty gloves. He said, "In the light of what happened, the physical circ.u.mstances of your visit would have to be different this time. We can't take responsibility for your safety unless we can protect you."

That wasn't unreasonable. "Good. I like the idea of protection."

"We'll ask you to sign a release."

"I'll do that."

"There'll be gla.s.s between you and Morgan, and you'll have to talk on a telephone."

"Not acceptable," I said flatly.

"Then we'll need two correctional officers in the visitor's cubicle with you both."

"No. Our conversation falls under attorney-client privilege. I can't have anyone listening, or I abrogate that privilege."

"The alternative is to cuff and chain and shackle your client."

"Fine," I said. Let them put him in a straitjacket if they wanted to. I feared Morgan now. You can't feel a man's hands try to throttle the life-giving air out of you and be easy with him after that.

"We can't do that in a visitor's cubicle," Wright said. "There's only a table and chairs. Nothing fixed. No ring bolts in the walls."

"So what do you suggest, Mr. Wright?"

"You can talk to him on the row. In his cell."

I hesitated a moment. "Death row?"

"That's where his cell is."

I looked into the a.s.sistant superintendent's narrowed, unblinking pale eyes.

"All right," I said.

Wright smiled smugly. "What we need, then, is for Wizard to agree to the visit. If he doesn't, all this is beside the point. Not even a judge can force an inmate to talk to a lawyer."

"You're absolutely right. Will you ask him?"

"Not until later this evening. If he agrees, you can be here at eight o'clock tomorrow morning."

"Tell him," I said, "that I think he may be innocent. And I intend to save his life."

In the morning the guards led me into Q block through a series of double gates that were operated from behind a bulletproof-gla.s.s control center. We entered the block. When the gates shut, they clanged for ten seconds, humming a symphony of discordant sound. The hot air smelled stale. The reek of cloistered bodies attacked my nostrils. A wail of voices struck at my eardrums.

Three tiers with catwalks rose above me. My escorts and I climbed the concrete stairs to the second tier, then marched down the catwalk. Hard leather heels echoed off the concrete. Men shouted at each other through the bars in their cells. Faces peered out of the shadows at the three of us marching by.

I didn't see James Cagney anywhere. I didn't see George Raft, either. I saw a few thin white faces, but mostly in those shadows I saw the haggard red eyes of caged black men blazing out like the eyes of maniac animals. In my youth I had seen such dementia behind bars at the zoo, where brainsick creatures, torn from all that was natural and dear, stared, or paced, or lay in urine and torpor. I had smelled that same stench, and I had turned away. I had never taken my children to zoos.

Here, quarantined from daylight, men lived in order to die. They lived like subhumans, shut in Q block until the last appeal had been exhausted by the last weary lawyer, and they were granted what amounted to the mercy of Big Wooden Mama.

There is a great deal about Darryl Morgan that I learned, then and later, but I'm going to tell it now.

Darryl's first beef was larceny, after he had broken two school windows and been placed on probation. The larceny charge came after he had boosted a tape deck from a Chrysler New Yorker and been caught trying to p.a.w.n it. Looking down from the bench, the judge said, "I want to help you, son. And I think the kind of help you need is jail therapy, because it'll make you think about the consequences of your acts. Understand what I'm saying? Let's try six months to a year at ACI."

Apalachia Correctional Inst.i.tute, or ACI, was in Liberty County, west of Tallaha.s.see in the Apalachicola National Forest. Darryl entered ACI a week before his sixteenth birthday. He was housed in Dorm 5, a ramshackle single-story white wooden building that over the years had acquired the hue and wrinkled texture of a sheet that hadn't been changed for months. The smell of sweat oozed not only from the residents' bodies but from the walls and the creaking wooden floors.

Darryl's supper that first evening was baked beans with chunks of pork fat, a gla.s.s of milk, a cookie with a few raisins in it. Later in Dorm 5, Darryl's new neighbors, seventeen-year-old boys named Hubert and William, got into a religious debate. William's last name was Smith, and he was destined to die outside the Lil' Champ food store four years later in Jacksonville. "In this life, brother," William said, "ain't no such thing as no motherf.u.c.king salvation. This just one mean motherf.u.c.ker from the time you born to the motherf.u.c.king end when you go."

"Amen," Hubert said.

Darryl had been a.s.signed an upper bunk next to the showers. The mattress was thin, the springs sagged. By midnight his back ached. So did his knees, from growing pains.

He had never been away from home before. Not too bad. Sure don't miss no one.

He woke at three o'clock in the morning. Hot water dripped in the shower room, steam billowed into the dorm: well over one hundred degrees in there. With the crawling mist, rising steam, the steady drip of the water as from branches, the dorm was like a tropical rain forest.

None of the other boys seemed to mind. I be as tough as they be, Darryl decided. So I don't mind neither.

Soon he learned a new language. Your house was your bed, your slice of territory. The hole was solitary confinement. A shank was a homemade knife made from the guts of an iron cot. A one-year sentence was a bullet, two was a deuce, three a trey, five a nickel, ten a dime, twenty-five a quarter.

Darryl's new friend, William Smith, said, "I had bad luck. I go before a dime-store judge. All this motherf.u.c.ker knows is five, ten, 'n' a quarter. First time out of the box, motherf.u.c.ker slips me a nickel. Open my mouth, I say, 'It ain't right, Judge, it's too much ... ,' and he laughs. He says, 'Keep the change, boy.' "

Hubert and an older boy called Suitcase approached Darryl on a Sat.u.r.day night. "How about us have a little fun together, dude?" Darryl knew from the look in their eyes just what they meant. He growled, "f.u.c.k you, f.a.ggot. Touch me, I'm a kick yo' natural a.s.s." He flexed his muscles.

Sunday afternoon Hubert and Suitcase and a couple of other dudes threw a blanket over Darryl's head and stuffed a towel in his mouth. They carried him kicking and grunting to Suitcase's cot, and f.u.c.ked him in his natural a.s.s. Four other boys, including William, were playing cards on the porch. One of the most uncool things you could do in the joint was interfere with another dude's serious intentions, especially if those intentions were unlawful.

William talked to Darryl that evening, trying to explain the way things were. "A dude tell you, 'I wanna f.u.c.k you,' you say 'no,' he feel insulted. Hubert and Suitcase don't wanna hurt you. Hubert, he gentle as a lamb. They just need some place to stick they meat."

After seven months Darryl returned to Jacksonville. For a while he had a job at a car wash. He found a girlfriend named Pauline. When Pauline got pregnant he needed money to pay for an abortion. A friend said, "Be cool. We go down to the beach tonight. Find us some fun-lovin' dudes with cash in their jeans."

Using two-by-fours to threaten, they jackrolled drunks and white teenagers successfully for two weeks, and on the third weekend were caught by a black undercover cop posing as a drunk. The juvenile court judge sentenced Darryl to a year at the Arthur C. Dozier School for Boys.

The Arthur C. Dozier School for Boys was in the Florida Panhandle, only twenty miles from the Georgia state line. In the official state literature it was called a "treatment center for delinquents." The residents chopped sorghum and harvested sugarcane and sometimes went to school.

The boys lived in bunks with armed guards outside. When it grew dark there was nothing to do except talk and play cards and jerk off and cornhole and suck d.i.c.k. Darryl made friends with two boys named Hog and Isaac. They agreed they would have s.e.x together when they got h.o.r.n.y but would stand united against anyone who tried to rape any of them.

Isaac had two decks of playing cards under his pillow. He said to Darryl, "You got big hands. I teach you to shuffle the cards good, do some tricks. We do some neat things." At lunch breaks he showed Darryl how to shuffle so the cards didn't change places, how to make a one-hand cut, how to deal off the bottom of the deck.

Darryl's house in the bunk was five feet by eight feet, bounded on the sides by four-foot-high sheets of stiff cardboard supported by the backs of his neighbors' upright lockers. Between Darryl's lockers a thin plank of plywood rested on two hinges to form a wobbly desk area. On it, Darryl placed a photograph of Pauline. One day while the boys were at work, a group of hacks and the superintendent ripped apart the cubicles in the bunks. All the flimsy plywood desks and the personal decorations were removed and destroyed. The photograph of Pauline was gone.

Hog said quietly, "I never had nothing on my locker or under my bed. I don't keep nothing personal, 'cause I know them pigs tear it off sooner or later, and I catch them doing it I bust some hack's motherf.u.c.king head and get sent to the hole. And I don't need that s.h.i.+t. So I got nothing. They can't take that away from me."

Back on the street after eight months, Darryl discovered that Pauline had gone to Miami. He decided to go down there and claim her and his possible child. But he had no money. He was seventeen. He could work as a laborer, a dishwasher, a waiter, janitor, porter, maybe a mechanic or a carpenter if he learned how. Pump gas. Couldn't be a cabdriver or a barber now, because he had a record.

Don't know how to do this, don't know how to do that. What I know? Know how to jackroll drunks, bust windows, set fires, crack warehouses, grab money from cash registers, stick a dude up, break into cars with slimjims and slaphammers, and swipe a tape deck. Know who dealing in weed, c.o.ke, dust, black tar, hash, speed, uppers, downers, smack, meth, acid, spikes, and hypos. Got me some connections now from the joint-I find you a Sat.u.r.day Night Special, a sawed-off, a blade, gravity knife, b.u.t.terfly knife, a bayonet. Man, I find you a f.u.c.king Uzi you want one bad enough. Want a c.o.o.ncan game, I know where they playing. A color TV? I knows the truck one just fell off of.

Just need something to do. Goof around ... you know, have some fun. What I learn in the joint is, people got to prove things to people. Watch people's faces when they see you-they scared, or they don't care? One or the other, nothing between. Like if I had a .357 magnum right now, you'd do whatever I want you to do, right? I be Jesse James, John Wayne, that dude Shaft from Harlem. And you couldn't do nothing about it. All my life, people been doing that to me. Now I like to get that feeling where they do what I want them to do.

So he s.n.a.t.c.hed fifty dollars from a Burger King cash register in a town called Middleburg, but was picked up by the cops that evening in Jacksonville; he was too recognizable. He did four months in Clay County Jail. He said to his cellmate there, "I can do this kinda time standing on my head."

A few months later he was caught with goods from an auto parts warehouse burglary. He was eighteen, an adult, and he drew seven years.

The joint was called Branville, and a sign painted on the wall of the chow hall read: IF YOU WOULD HAVE A MAN STAY AS HE IS, THEN TREAT HIM AS HE IS. IF YOU WOULD HAVE A MAN CHANGE, THEN TREAT HIM AS THE PERSON YOU WOULD WANT HIM TO BECOME.

By some dude named Goethe. Darryl looked at that sign and thought: one thing sure, this Goethe dude never did no time.