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

neck and glittered in the slant of hot light. Quickly, with peppy strides, he closed the distance between himself and the elegant woman. I hit the brake and threw the car into Park. I wanted to yell, “Watch out!” but I was too far away.
    Alejandro Ortega, born in Santiago de Cuba nineteen years earlier, son of a marielito, expert broad-daylight jewelry thief, got rapidly to where he was headed—face-to-face with Doña Constancia—and slipped his hand through the big gold necklace dangling from her white throat. He yanked hard. As he expected, the connecting link snapped.
    Connie Zide gave a tremulous cry. A bone at the back of the neck, a cervical vertebra, was bruised.
    Alejandro clutched the necklace in his hand and wheeled, ready to sprint through the parking lot to his souped-up Trans Am, which faced the exit in the shade of a royal palm, driver’s door open a few inches, motor idling.
    Connie Zide owned a lot of jewelry. Most of it was expensive. She’d once filed a claim with her insurance company for a two-and- a-quarter-carat white diamond that had slipped out of its setting. It took more than a year to collect, and even then it wasn’t payment in full. After that she had copies made of her best jewelry, and she wore the copies on shopping trips or to luncheons where there wasn’t tight security. So what Alejandro Ortega snatched from her lovely white neck was fake.
    She was wearing low black heels. She took one quick step, and as
    Alejandro started to bolt, with her red-tipped fingers she tore one of the gold necklaces from his neck.
    Later she said, “Why did I do that? Because I felt violated, Ted. People think they can do anything they want with a woman who’s on her own. And most of the time they’re right. But I hate that feeling. You’re just a target for these little shits.”
    “You weren’t frightened?”
    “There wasn’t time.”
    “Did you mean to yank the chain off his neck?”
    “I didn’t mean anything, for heaven’s sake. It was all adrenaline.”
    “And weren’t you frightened that he’d retaliate? They do that, Connie.”
    “I had a pistol in my handbag. And a license to carry it.”
    “You’d have used it?”
    “If I had to … quien sabe?”
    Alejandro’s necklace was a gift from his girlfriend Luisa, who brokered a little three-card monte game down in Coral Gables, where Alejandro lived most of the time when he wasn’t touring the better shopping malls of the southern United States. He got four or five quick running steps away from his mark before he realized that the feeling he’d experienced of something wrenched from his skin was genuine; it had signaled the disappearance of the 24K gold chain draped with much affection about his neck by the beloved Luisa. Inscribed too, with tender sentiments. He whirled in the air like a basketball guard about to launch the ball to the hoop. The bitch had scoffed his necklace!
    He snaked toward her, lips curled in a smile of acknowledgment, the way a torero contemplates a bull who’s made a thrust of his horns into the torero’s territory. He extended his hand in mute, eloquent demand. At that point he became aware of a presence growing larger by the millisecond, but it was too late to do anything about it. That presence was me.
    I’d decided that if this unknown beautiful woman could do what she’d done, then I, the male of the species, could get off my butt and lend a hand. I weighed one hundred and sixty-seven pounds and hit that fellow broadside, on the run, with a bent shoulder. One hundred fifty pounds of Alejandro flew backward, striking the radiator of the Datsun with such force that the wind left his lungs. He wound up on his knees, visibly amazed, huffing. I had twisted his right arm high up behind his back.
    I looked up at the woman in the gray suit and said, “Would you mind, ma’am, going back into Dillard’s? Ask someone to call 911. Don’t take too long.”
    And to Alejandro I said, “Don’t even think