Free Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller by Clifford Irving Page A

was one of a continuum. Perhaps this time was better for her than the others—how could I know?—but still I was sure it was part of a pattern. She was too skilled at her arrangements. The ease with which she borrowed the weekend cottages was the giveaway.
    She was on the board of two Jewish charities, and she asked me to join. I would have to do very little; it was the prestige of my name they needed. This amused me. I agreed, with reservations and caveats; it was usually: “Connie, I can come for an hour, no more. I’ve got a child rape case on the docket, and at three o’clock I’m giving a lecture in my trial advocacy course.”
    At one of these charity luncheons I met Solly Zide. In his mid fifties, he was a medium-size man with hard little brown eyes. He wasn’t particularly friendly to me or anyone else, but he displayed brief sparks of wit. Connie said of him, “He gets his major thrill from making money. He sees himself as a descendant of Mellon and Flagler. He’s not quite in that league, but if you tell him that, he freaks out.” She had married him, she said, not so much for money as for the security that attended it, and to put an end to her whoring, which is what it had come down to in the last year she was alone in Los Angeles. That was not a word she used, but I picked up hints.
    “Solly had two daughters by a former marriage. Nasty, spoiled brats. When he met me, he wanted a son and heir. I gave him one. After that, I considered that I’d done my duty.” They had a minimal sex life now; what her husband did outside their bedroom was his business, assuming that he was reasonably discreet about it. “He likes to watch two women making love to each other. Little staged seductions, stuff like that. It’s about the only thing turns him on anymore. I was never interested in joining in. He tried to get Neil into that scene too, I hear from my spies. Without success.”
    Neil was twenty-two when I met Connie. He had graduated Duke and was living at home, working on the big ZiDevco landfill project with his father. I asked how they got along.
    “Like the proverbial cat and dog. Neil’s a spiritual person. He can paint, he can write, he’s got a natural talent in music. He could become a world-class photographer if he wanted. He’s the light of my life,” she said.
    What she didn’t say, but what I heard elsewhere, was that Neil was gay or at least bisexual. Her silence on the subject indicated to me that she accepted it, since she was too sophisticated a woman to be ignorant of such a fact. She wanted grandchildren; but gays married, made certain arrangements, had children. How Neil’s father felt about all that was another matter, and not one that Connie ever brought up. I didn’t care. I really wanted nothing to do with Connie’s life outside of what we did together in bed, and on government- issue desks, and on carpeted floors by various fireplaces, and by the sides of swimming pools and on the decks of borrowed boats, and once on the furry blue toilet seat of a locked bathroom at a luncheon given in honor of the famous Rabbi Shimkin, up from Miami Beach to raise funds for Israel. I was in thrall, palely loitering. But for me, although not for the knight in the poem, birds sang. I was not wholly happy and yet I felt wholly alive. My guilt did not rise to the level of my desire and the resultant pleasure. I expected some thunderbolt to strike me from heaven, or the vengeful Mother Earth to open up and swallow me, or some terrible revelation that would put my marriage and career in peril. None of that happened, then

Chapter 6

    DURING LUNCH BREAK on the first day of Darryl Morgan’s trial in April 1979, I strolled along the south bank of the St. Johns River with Connie Zide. I still remember how the gray surface of the water barely moved in the April heat. To the east of Jacksonville, over the Atlantic, lightning flared.
    “Ted, darling, I need to ask you a favor.”
    I let the endearment