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

they had thirty movie studios! But there were so many car chases and mob scenes that in 1920 the city fathers got fed up to the gills and kicked them out. Can you imagine? They lost all that.”
    I asked my father if there were still Indians.
    “Where?”
    “Where we’re going,” I said impatiently. It may have been my first cross-examination.
    “Maybe,” Leonard said.
    The Timucuans had been wiped out by the French Huguenots, and what was left of the Seminóles and the Mikasukis lived far to the south in the Everglades. As a boy I never quite grasped that; I was sure they were nearby because someone in authority had told me so, and from the age of seven onward I roamed the banks of the St. Johns River in search of any indigenous population I could find: a Jewish Tom Sawyer. Rhoda asked to go with me, but I left her at home. Girls couldn’t do that sort of thing, I told her, with the wisdom of my youth and of those straitjacketed times.
    In the environs of Jacksonville, whose rutted trails and bogs I explored on a single-speed Schwinn bicycle, what I found (instead of redskins) were Florida crackers who skinned possum and ate deep- fried turtle and marsh hens. I came upon old men in the cypress strands who took me fishing for sheephead and snapper and who taught me that different animals’ eyes shine different ways: a coon’s green, a gator’s persimmon red, and a deer’s eyes golden red like a coal of fire. I learned to say “a mess of” when I meant a lot, “a tad bit” when I meant a little.
    In junior high, however, and at home, when I used such cracker language, eyebrows were raised. And Rhoda, eager for revenge, laughed at me. I hated her for that.
    I had a secret relationship with Rhoda. When we were younger and traveled in the back seat of the family Chrysler, Rhoda often complained, “He’s touching me.” Neither of our parents saw evidence of this, but it was true. I don’t believe there was anything sexual in what I did to her; I was just trying to annoy her. I was not innocent, not truly good. I knew I had to work at being good, and it often seemed like too much trouble. Rhoda would get up from the TV and say, “He’s making noises at me. He’s breathing funny.” She didn’t whine these complaints, which lent some credence to them; but no one except me understood what she meant. I was being driven by forces just a hair beyond my control.
    Eventually the tormented Rhoda would go upstairs to her room and read. As a result she was better educated than I and later was offered several graduate scholarships when she left FSU cum laude as a psychology major. She moved to La Jolla, California, became a psychotherapist, and married a man in the bagel business.
    Her relationship with me now was friendly but distant. She, more than anyone, suspected that I wasn’t truly good. She would not have been surprised by what happened between me and Connie Zide.
    I first met Connie Zide almost a year before the night of the musicale and the murder of her husband. Driving home from work one afternoon, I decided to stop at the Regency Plaza Mall to buy a tie. The dark-red foulard I had bought two years before at Dillard’s was my favorite to wear in court, but I had spilled turkey gravy on it at lunch a few days earlier. The stain refused to come out.
    I nosed the Honda toward an empty slot in the mall parking lot, and at that moment a tall, tawny-haired woman emerged from Dillard’s, moving from cool shade into the glare of sun. She wore a tailored gray suit. She was not young. That woman, I thought, can’t be as beautiful and as elegant as I believe she is—there’s no one like that in Jacksonville. There may be no one like that in North Florida. Palm Beach, New York, the cover of Vogue, that’s possible. Shadow and artifice were ganging up to trick the senses of an overworked man.
    A young fellow in blue jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt stepped from behind a Datsun. Gold chains jangled around his