Read Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller for Free Online Page A

battle when it comes to sentencing.”
    “If I had the case, yes.”
    “You’re asking me is Oliver capable of doing that, the answer is fuck no.”
    I hadn’t asked him a damn thing. “Well, there’s my answer too.” “It won’t come to that, Ted. Take the case. Handle the media people. Cut a deal up front with Oliver.”
    “Why can’t Settels do that?”
    Beldon studied me for a few moments. “Is there some other reason you don’t want to prosecute?”
    “No,” I said hurriedly, fiddling with the lock on my briefcase. I looked up. “If I cut a deal, you’ll approve it?”
    “Hey, white boy, you think I want blood? A twenty-year-old dumbass black boy’s blood? We got a white cop who got trigger- happy, and some unhappy black folks out there all over the county and the state. I don’t want a riot. I don’t even want a trial. I want it smooth, Ted. That’s your specialty. Do it as a personal favor to your old Uncle Beldon.”
    He had me where he wanted me, and I nodded. “For you,” I said, puckering my lips.
    “Bless your little cotton socks,” he said. He threw me a kiss and handed me the case file.
    When the grandfather clock in my office chimed the morning hour of seven, I settled behind my state-issue metal desk and read the rap sheet on Darryl Morgan, who for a month prior to the murder had been an assistant handyman on the Zide estate. (Mowing that stadium-size lawn was a day’s work for a man on a Toro, and it was done twice a week.) He was the third of five illegitimate children born to Marguerite Little, who cleaned white people’s homes in Jacksonville Beach. His biological father was unknown. Marguerite’s common-law husband, A.J. Morgan, was a groundskeeper at the Palmetto Country Club and a part-time Baptist preacher, who had been heard to cry, “I’m here to do God’s work, whatever the hell it is.”
    Marguerite’s other living children were Dwight, a heroin addict who had left home at seventeen and was doing time in Illinois for armed robbery; and Gull, twenty-two, illiterate, churchgoing, narcoleptic, the mother of four children by various fathers. After two abortions, she had been sterilized by a local midwife. Gull made a living as a prostitute, charging ten dollars, singing Christian hymns, and sometimes falling asleep while she worked. The family lived in a four-room wooden shack on the edge of a rat-infested palm grove west of San Pablo Road, half a dozen miles from the beach. No cooling Atlantic breezes reached that grove.
    Since his fourteenth birthday Darryl Morgan hadn’t known two straight years of freedom. Banished to reform school for breaking school windows and hoisting a tape deck from a parked car, he had then done time on a penal farm for jackrolling drunks and in Clay County Jail for grabbing money from a Burger King cash register. Finally he had been sentenced to a branch of FSP for burglarizing an auto parts warehouse. He was eighteen then. He did nineteen months on that seven-year bit, then was released, because in the crowded Florida prisons a man usually served less than a fifth of his sentence.
    Gary Oliver, his knight in the lists, arrived at my office at 8:00 A.M.
    I poured coffee from the Silex into two chipped mugs. We both took it black without sugar, a coincidence that seemed to please Oliver, for he beamed and made comment. Lifting a pack of Winston Lights from the pocket of his suit, he offered one to me. I shook my head.
    “You a nonsmoker, Mr. Jaffe?”
    “No, sir, I’m an addict who quit.” I didn’t mention that I still puffed at the occasional Havana smuggled in by friends flying back from London or Mexico City.
    Oliver clucked his tongue. “That tells me you’re a man of character.
    “At times, yes.”
    There it was, the raw truth. I was proud of myself. I could have accepted Oliver’s compliment without comment and probably gotten away with it.
    My portly visitor got right to the point; he said to me, “Mr. Jaffe, I’m from