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

lodged in the Swedish oak paneling on the far side of the room. Connie Zide had been slashed twice, once in the upper arm and once in the face. Neither weapon was ever found; they were presumed to have been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean or the Intracoastal Waterway. Minutes later young Neil Zide, unhurt but close to hysteria, called the Jacksonville Beach police and then a man named Victor Gambrel, the head of security for Zide Industries. When Gambrel and the law and the paramedics all came storming up the driveway and into the house, Neil had recovered and was able to describe the murderer of his father. “Young, black, wearing sneakers, jeans, and I seem to remember a dark T-shirt. There were two of them. I didn’t get a decent look at the other one who cut my mother. They were obviously clumsy, they didn’t expect anyone to be awake at that hour… . My father surprised them, and they panicked. No, I don’t know how they got onto the property. They ran off that way.” He pointed in the direction of the beach.
    By the time the JSO Homicide team arrived on the scene, the entire estate was locked in the hard yellow glare of its own floodlights. Detective Tanagra found the dead Doberman—poisoned by a piece of meat. She also found imprints of two pairs of sneakers in the wet sand near the beach cabanas. From the spacing and the gouges in the dunes, it looked to her as if two men had been running. One of them wore size fourteen or fifteen shoes.
    “Let’s cruise around,” Floyd Nickerson said to her. “Pair of bayou coons, where can they go? Feet like that you can’t hide.”
    The team of detectives drove off in their unmarked Plymouth and left the tech squad to do its work. Tanagra, at the wheel, headed south on A1A, then veered off to Marsh Landing before taking Roscoe Boulevard along the Intracoastal, while Nickerson broadcast an APB throughout the county. The detectives stopped at various bars and icehouses, then angled west and then north on Southern Boulevard. Over the mossy bayous and highways hovered a jungle darkness. They stopped at bars with pickup trucks out in front, talked to bartenders and waitresses. Black men drinking beer and rye whiskey peered at them with stoic dread. Nickerson, in his late thirties, was burly, mustached, his pockmarked white skin shiny with sweat; he was made instantly as a cop. Carmen Tanagra was thin, flat-chested, good-looking, often taken for a junkie.
    The detectives turned east on Atlantic Boulevard, back toward the beaches and in the direction of the naval air station. They passed gas stations and car dealerships and pizza joints, empty lots overgrown with weeds, supermarkets, a Discount Auto Parts, intermittent Lil’ Champ food stores. A big sign on an abandoned warehouse said GO GATORS. At nearly 5:00 A.M. the air was cool but still humid.
    Nickerson had a nose for finding people. “Turn in there… .” He pointed across the highway to a Lil’ Champ, with its plastic statue of a kid standing with one gloved fist raised.
    Tanagra slowed the Plymouth. “You need something?”
    “Smokes.”
    They both smoked red Marlboros. “I’ve got an extra pack,” she said.
    With a blunt finger, Nickerson pointed again. “Just turn in, Carmen.”
    A blue, salt-pitted ‘68 Ford pickup, which had been smacked in the rear and had a caved-in panel behind the passenger’s side door, stood isolated in one of the parking slots. A Pink Panther hung from the rearview mirror. The front bumper was broken. A small puddle of leaking oil glistened in the blurry glow of a streetlamp.
    “Nigger truck,” Floyd Nickerson said.
    Two young men came out of the Lil’ Champ, carrying a carton of milk, a six-pack of Miller High Life, and several bags of potato chips. One of them, William Smith, was lean and tall. He wore a gray sweatshirt and sported an Afro. The other youth, Darryl Morgan, wore faded jeans and a black Nike T-shirt. He was huge, probably six feet six, could have been a