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

pass without comment. The hangover of love, if indeed that’s what it had been.
    Until that past December and the night of the murder, Connie had been a beautiful woman. Now a scar puckered her left cheek, and dark pouches sagged under bloodshot eyes. She had gained weight. But I felt close to her; I had allegiance to memory.
    “Ask, Connie… .”
    In the middle of the day, I had my shirt sleeves rolled up, my suit jacket flung carelessly over one shoulder. She placed her fingertips on my bare arm. Little beads of sweat started where our skins touched. She still had a power.
    “I know there are no guarantees in life, Ted, much less in a murder trial. But I need to know what will happen.”
    Her husband, however little she had cared for him, had been murdered before her eyes. I thought I knew she was thinking: what if by some bizarre mischance Darryl Morgan walked out of the courtroom a free man? The justice system was not perfect, lawyers and judges less so. In former circumstances, when I was anything but on guard, I had told her enough horror stories to have planted that idea in her mind.
    We stopped by the river, which was cloaked by a violet haze. Looking into her ruined face, I said, “The jury will find Morgan guilty.”
    “That’s not what I meant. Ted, do you ever feel pity for a murderer?”
    I hesitated, and she caught her breath.
    “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 shirt, 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 mass, he seemed unripe. I didn’t know it then, but a tattoo on the inside of his wrist said FUCK YOU. In bright-blue ink on one deltoid muscle, PAULINE was immortalized, and BORN TO RAISE HELL 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