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

hung it on the wall next to my law diploma.
    But that Sunday on the sand, two skinny black teenagers passed by and glanced at the logo on my sweaty chest. One boy said, “Fuck you, man.”
    I kept on jogging.
    Who had I convicted? A brother? His father? The boy himself? Unknown faces tend to blend into other faces, and when they were of another hue they blended much more easily. I knew that a black sixteen-year-old could hate a honkie assistant state attorney as much as he could hate a white cop. He could hate both because both possessed the power and the potential to harm him, and probably would.
    Toba listened to the story, then shook her head wisely. “That wouldn’t make you turn tail. You get rid of scum, Ted. You feel good about it.”
    Bugs grated against the immense screen covering the pool. The scent of jasmine drifted through the air, and several people passed by, laughing. I drank my second glass of champagne.
    “I guess I’m just a little bit tired of putting people in jail,” I said. “Even scum.”
    “You want to keep them out of jail?”
    Once I had, yes. In the early sixties I’d been a history major at FSU in Tallahassee, where the last Confederate victory of the Civil War had taken place. I led protest marches for civil rights. One night in my final year of law school I was helping the other editors on the Law Review finish off a case of iced Chihuahua beer. My friend Kenny Buckram, another Jacksonville boy, threw out a question to the gang.
    “What’s your deepest ambition?”
    Those were wonderful years: questions had simple answers. “To argue a case successfully before the Supreme Court,” I said. “And to save an innocent man’s life. If possible, at one and the same time.”
    Most of our little group wound up in civil law, where the money was. A few, like Kenny, joined the public defender’s office, but he had a private income from a doting grandmother. And I, for the sake of courtroom experience, joined a clinic program offered by the state attorney’s office. I took four misdemeanor cases to trial before six- person juries in Gainesville, winning all four. I loved winning. It was a kind of aphrodisiac.
    Shortly afterward, Beldon Ruth, chief assistant state attorney in the Fourth Circuit, invited me up to Jacksonville for lunch. Beldon was in his late thirties at the time. Immaculately dressed in a navy blazer, with yellow polka-dot tie and elephant-hide boots, he was “not fat,” as he explained when I knew him better, “just a little short for my weight.” A black man in power: unusual enough in the late seventies, even rarer then, in the sixties. He had been a police sergeant down in Dade, then completed a law degree at Florida Atlantic. A few years later some good ole boy who went up against him on a capital murder case in Jacksonville said, “That nigger could pick your pocket with his tongue.”
    Beldon Ruth and I ate conch fritters and catfish at The Jury Room, a private club in the Blackstone Building, across the street from the courthouse. I explained to him that I had always pictured myself as a defense attorney.
    “You want to help people who are guilty?”
    “Why was I under the impression,” I fired back, “that under American law they’re considered innocent until proved otherwise?”
    “You can consider them whatever you fucking well like,” he said, slathering hot jalapeño sauce on his catfish, “but if we indict them, you can bet your ass they’re guilty. In my bailiwick, a prosecutor doesn’t go to trial unless he has the facts—but a defense attorney goes in there because he has to eat. And before he eats, he has to cozy up to the slimy bugs who rape our sisters and sell smack to our twelve-year-old kids. A prosecutor gets to put those people where they can’t do any more harm. And that dog’ll hunt.”
    We were southerners and spoke the same language. This was not a visiting lecturer in jurisprudence but a man in the trenches. Suddenly I wanted to