Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (33 page)

I bought some potato chips and exited via the express checkout lane. Then I waited in the car.

There was a melodic tweet-tweet-tweet as Floyd Nickerson hit the beeper that disarmed the Viper alarm on his Buick. He looked up, and his eyes locked with mine from a distance of about twenty yards. There was nothing unusual in a man sitting in a car smoking a cigarette, so he probably thought little of it, although I stared pointedly and didn’t drop my gaze for even a fraction of a second. He looked away.

He had noticed me; that was what mattered.

His house was diagonally across the street from the fifth hole of the Orange Meadow golf course—designed by Robert Trent Jones, the brochure proclaimed. That evening he ate at home. A woman arrived at a few minutes past seven o’clock. She was blond and strong-looking, a Viking in her early forties. I sat across the street by the fairway in the rental car, waiting for her to leave, but at midnight I gave up and drove back to the motel on the edge of the campus in Gainesville.

I prayed I wasn’t playing the fool, but I knew it was possible. I had to have patience. Even more than patience, I had to have luck.

At seven-thirty the next morning I parked there again, across from the two-story pink house with its trellises of roses and climbing violet bougainvillea. At a few minutes past eight the electronic garage door rolled up smoothly and the big blond woman backed out behind the wheel of her Jeep Cherokee. Nickerson, a wet bath towel draped around thick shoulders, took a few steps from the interior of the garage to wave as she drove off.

He saw me again.

Under my breath I counted slowly to five. We aren’t that far removed in time from our primitive animal reactions; five seconds is a long time for an adult male to be stared at directly by another adult male, whom he doesn’t know and who doesn’t drop his eyes, doesn’t smile, and doesn’t speak. It’s about as long as a man can stand to be stared at without needing to demand why. I had read that in a Tallahassee motel room in a book on police surveillance and interrogation.

I started the engine and cruised past the sand trap and out the eucalyptus-lined roads of Orange Meadow Estates. This was Floyd Nickerson’s bailiwick, and he could easily have called security. He was still chief of it here.

I followed the woman’s car north on 441 to a real estate office on University Boulevard in Gainesville. It was one of those modern glass-fronted offices where you could look in from the street and see the salespeople at their desks, exuding an air of important things getting done. Her desk was close to the window on the street. I didn’t stop or park there; I just slowed down, had a good look, then kept driving.

The rest of that day I was more careful. I knew he’d be expecting the pattern to continue. If I’d had all the time in the world I would have taken a few days off, flown back to Sarasota, given him time to stew.

I didn’t have the time.

I called him in the early evening from a public telephone in a service station. He answered with a gruff “Yes?”

I hung up.

The following morning I went to Avis and then drove out 441 again and cruised past the house. Parked fifty yards down the street in a cul-de-sac by the sand trap was an Orange Meadow Estates Security patrol car with two men in the front seat. They wore gun- metal-gray uniforms with red piping on the epaulets. They were looking for the white Chevy I’d driven the morning before. But I had traded it in for a maroon Toyota.

Wherever he went now, he’d be looking for me. He might even see me if I wasn’t there.

Just games. The kind that grown men seldom play unless they’re desperate.

A plaque on her desk said: SUZANNE BYERS. I walked in from the heat of University Boulevard, wiped my forehead with a sigh of gratitude for the cool indoor air, sat down at her desk, and said, “Ms. Byers, my name is Ted Klauber. I’m a psychologist from Jacksonville. I’m about to relocate here in the Gainesville area, and I’m looking for a house to buy. I hoped you could help me.”

“You’ve come to the right place, Mr. Klauber,” she said cheerfully.

A few minutes later she got around to asking me why I’d come to this office and why I’d selected her.

“Impulse,” I said. “I saw you from the street, from my car, and I said to myself, why not Suzanne? She needs the business as well as anyone else who was recommended to me. And here I am.”

It was false enough to put her on her guard and make her doubt me just a little, which is what I wanted. But of course she had to treat me like a potential customer. I showed enthusiasm, my shoes were shined, and I had an air of affluence. The recession had created a soft market in real estate.

Before we reached the first house I had told her the story of my life, some of it based on truth and—despite my mother’s admonition that if you don’t lie you never have to remember what you’ve said— some of it whatever popped into my mind. She also told a version of her life story: born in Michigan, secretarial school, marriage, later became a computer programmer, divorced and moved south to Florida ten years ago.

“No children?”

“Two. They’re grown. Both graduated FSU.”

“That’s hard to believe. What’s your secret, Suzanne?”

She smiled with satisfaction.

“Ah! There’s a man in your life,” I said.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, there is.”

“Let me see if I can guess. He’s in his early fifties. He’s virile, naturally. Independent. Not rich but reasonably well off. Divorced, no children.”

“That’s very
good!”
she exclaimed.

“Thank you.”

“Have you been spying on me?”

“Tell me about him,” I said.

“Well, Ted, I’m not sure I want to. Or ought to.”

It occurred to me then that she thought I was making a covert pass at her.

“There’s a woman in my life too,” I said. “She does colonic irrigation and iridology in Jacksonville. She’s an ex-cop.”

“An ex-cop? Really? That’s funny.”

“Why? Is your boyfriend an ex-cop too?”

“Yes. And also from Jacksonville. He was in the Homicide Division.”

“How about that? So was my girlfriend. Maybe your friend knows her.”

“He was there a long time ago.”

“What’s his name?”

“Floyd,” she said, and she glanced quickly at me—she was behind the wheel of her Cherokee and trying to find a house number—to see my expression.

“That’s his first name or last name?”

“Floyd is his last name.”

Good. I was bothering her. “What’s he do now?” I asked.

“I don’t really think I should tell you.”

“Cops usually go into private security work,” I said.

“Do they?”

“Yes, they do. If they get lucky.”

We visited two more houses, and I told Suzanne Byers they weren’t quite right. One was too large, the other too small. “I’ll call you in a few days. Maybe between now and then you’ll dig up what I’m looking for.”

“Where are you staying, Ted?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“You’ll be here awhile?”

“A few more days. I’ll call you.”

I was at the University Motel on University Boulevard, under my own name. Not hard to find, if you were a well-connected ex-cop and had a good reason to hunt. Suzanne would give him one. And a description of me.

He was well connected, and he was quick.

That evening I left my motel room and drove to a steak house on the edge of town, where I ate a filet mignon and a baked potato with sour cream. After dinner I drove past the condo where Suzanne Byers lived. That hadn’t been difficult to locate; she was in the telephone book. When I came opposite her unit I slowed as if I were scanning the windows for signs of occupancy. I had no idea whether she was there or not, and I didn’t care.

I headed south on 441 to Orange Meadow Estates.

That night at Orange Meadow there was no security patrol car parked in front of Floyd Nickerson’s home. But there was a Volvo curving through the streets behind me at a varying distance. I’d thought so when I left the motel, but I wasn’t sure until now.

The Volvo speeded up, passed me, then swerved to cut me off. I touched the brakes.

Nickerson was out from behind the wheel quickly, and so was another man, who’d been in the passenger seat. Tonight he was in sports clothes rather than gun-metal gray with epaulets. He stayed by the passenger door of the Volvo, unlike Nickerson, who in a few strides was wrenching at the door handle of my Toyota. It wasn’t t locked.

“Come out of there, Jaffe.”

He didn’t seem to be armed, which gave me more courage than was reasonable under the circumstances. He was a cop, a man practiced in violence, burly and thick through the chest. And he had a backup.

“What the hell do you want? What are you butting into my life for?”

He wore khakis, his usual golf shirt, and, because the night was cool, a poplin windbreaker. There wasn’t much light in that part of the street, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face. But I expected he was more livid than red-faced. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists. He wanted to harm me. I believe he was frightened.

He obviously hated my silence.

“You follow me to the supermarket,” he said shrilly. “You harass my friends. You’re looking for big trouble, friend.”

“Let’s talk, Nick.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“How about the good old days? Before you were on the take.”

“Fuck you,” he murmured.

I heard his rapid breathing. No, he didn’t want to harm me. He wanted to kill me.

I had thought for a while that I might try to move him by appealing to his humanity. He had to have some humanity. He was a man who had done terrible things, and maybe they kept him awake sometimes at night. Maybe in some part of him he wanted to be decent and make amends.

Yet I doubted it.

“I have an affidavit,” I said, “from Jerry Lee Elroy. You remember him?”

“No,” he said, and that was probably the truth.

“Darryl Morgan’s cellmate in Duval County Jail twelve years ago. You got a battery charge dismissed for him. He was the guy you set up to lie on the witness stand that he heard Morgan confess to killing Solly Zide.”

He took a step backward.

“He’ll testify to that, Nick. And you’ll go to prison.”

He didn’t know that Elroy had been stabbed to death at the dog track. He turned toward the Volvo and said, “Patrick, this gentleman and I are going for a little walk on the course. Stay here and keep your eye on his car, okay?”

Patrick’s voice came out of the darkness. “Yes, sir.”

Before Nickerson finally made up his mind what to do about me, he wanted to know what I knew. And he didn’t want to be overheard.

With hard fingers he grasped my arm. “You play golf? This is a championship course. The fifth hole is right opposite where I live. …” He guided me past an oak tree, up a slope, onto the rolling fairway. In the gloom I could see a dogleg to the left, and two broad sand traps, and a pond.

A humid night breeze blew from the pond. An owl hooted. When we got to the edge of the first trap, about ten yards from the green, Nickerson halted. He placed his hands on his hips, probably to keep them from strangling me.

“I remember Elroy,” he said. “But your story, that’s all bullshit.”

“You lied in court too, Nick. You testified that Morgan confessed to you.
That
was bullshit.”

He snickered, but he didn’t say any more.

“Carmen Tanagra will testify to that,” I said.

“If she did, she’d be lying.”

“A judge will decide. And not Bill Eglin.”

“All crap.”

From behind the clouds a thin crescent of moon appeared, and I breathed deeply.

“Nick, I’m trying to give you a break. You’ve got a new life, a new girlfriend. You want it all to go up in smoke? Your bank accounts at the Barnett Bank can be subpoenaed. You flew to the Bahamas in March of 1980 with your wife for a little holiday. The cash that Neil Zide gave you went with you, and later it paid off your mortgage in Jacksonville. You got a sweetheart contract here at Orange Meadow. You want to tell me it was a reward for catching Morgan and shooting William Smith? No, Nick, it was a payoff from Neil Zide.”

In the past three weeks Gary Oliver had done some good sleuthing. Nickerson was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “The big black kid shot and killed Solly Zide, and that’s a fact.”

“No, it isn’t, Nick.”

“If he didn’t kill him,” Nickerson asked, “who did?”

He was trying to sound sincere, but I knew too much to believe in it.

“Maybe you did,” I said.

He laughed heartily.

“Right,” I said. “It’s funny. I know you didn’t do it.”

“Good,” he said, still chuckling.

“All you did was destroy evidence. Keep other witnesses from testifying. I don’t think they’ll give you more than ten years in Raiford for that.”

He stopped laughing. I saw his hands begin to clench and unclench again.

“Of course if you killed Gambrel, and they can prove it, then you’ll swap places with Morgan. Where’d you put the payoff money, Nick? Bank of Nova Scotia in Nassau? Fidelity Magellan and Dreyfus? How about a junk bond fund with Vanguard—a nice little offshore annuity. The IRS know about that? You ever pay any bills —like your MasterCard and American Express—with that Vanguard checkbook?”

I’m not even sure what he did. I heard him grunt and I smelled his sour breath and felt a combination of pain and nausea all at the same time. He was big and quick. I think he did a karate step to the side and struck me in the groin with the toe of his shoe. And it was not a canvas Adidas or a leather Reebok; it was a real shoe, a brogan with a steel toe plate.

Dirt filled my mouth. I don’t know if I fell into the sand trap or was borne there under the weight of his body. But I still smelled his meaty breath, because he was leaning over me and pressing his fingers into my temples.

Darryl had nearly choked me to death. I’d spent a night in a county jail with piss-soaked feet. And now Floyd Nickerson was doing something horrible to my nerve endings. This was the part of the legal profession they hadn’t told me about in law school.

He was so enraged he could hardly speak. He didn’t let up on my temples, so that his voice seemed to rasp at me from a watery distance, as if a killer whale had found a tongue. I couldn’t understand most of what he said.