Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (10 page)

I hollered, “Carter!”

But except for the panting of the dogs and the beating of my heart, the house was silent.

Daisy, pouring rainwater from the barrel of her body, headed toward me, the bearer of drinkable water.

Pablo was a big ten-month-old mutt, part Chesapeake Bay retriever, part German Shepherd. Carter had selected him from all the other mutts wagging their tails in the East Hampton pound because he wanted a brute to guard A-1 Self-Storage.

Pablo saw Daisy aiming for me and the water.
No way, you fat bitch. You’ll drink it all
. So he slammed a shoulder into Daisy’s ribs. An airborne Daisy hit my ankles like a small tank. I was knocked off my feet, and the two bowls of water flew from my hands. One hit a Tiffany lamp, cracking it in three separate places. The other knocked half a dozen of my mom’s heart-shaped silver-framed family photos off an end table, and then it soaked the sofa.

Pablo slammed to a halt and focused his eyes on Iphigenia in her gym bag on the piano
. That’s the critter was in our truck…

Hoisting himself up on his great hind legs, Pablo began pawing at the piano to get at her.

Iphigenia screeched in terror.

I shoved Daisy to one side, and I launched myself at Pablo. I rocketed up from below him, grabbed him by the hocks and spilled him. He came down with a thump, his head slamming against the cherrywood leg of the baby grand. Cherrywood was harder than Daisy’s ribs and had no padding.

Pablo fell to the carpet, and his head sank down between the his paws.

I crawled out from under the piano. Daisy had vanished. I opened the gym bag. Iphigenia was curled up at the bottom, and when I lifted her out, her cold little body jerked and shook; then it was still; then it jerked and shook again. She was spasming.

In the back of the huge aluminum fridge in our kitchen, I had placed a small paper bag sealed with Scotch tape. On the bag I’d printed: IPHIGENIA’S VITAMIN-B SHOT – TO SAVE HER LIFE – DO NOT THROW OUT.

I carried Iphigenia into the kitchen and laid her down on a pile of clean dish towels in a wicker basket. As if an electric current was being passed through her, she spasmed. I saw her eyeballs jerk.

“Iphigenia, please don’t die.”

I got the box with the throwaway needle out of the cold paper bag. I had one chance to do this right. Shave the area first, the pharmacist had said. No time for that. I pushed the needle to get any air bubbles out. I held Iphigenia’s skinny chest and front legs with one hand, so that I felt her nickel-sized heart beating. I slid the needle about half an inch into her haunch. She stirred a little. Then I had to slide it back out a bit to make sure there’s no blood. I had studied this. I had prepared.

The yellow liquid moved up the tube and vanished into my monkey.

I pulled the needle out just in time or it might have broken off inside her, because a second later Iphigenia shot straight up off the table. She landed on all fours, next to the basket of towels that I’d thought might be her deathbed, and shook her head as if she’d just awakened from a bad dream.

I calmed her and put her back in the basket. I climbed up on a chair and put the basket on top of the fridge.

I was afraid to open the door from the kitchen. But I did it.

Pablo had woken up, but either he was groggy or he thought he’d done enough damage for one evening. He was stretched out in front of the fireplace, alive, head forward on his paws, gazing bleary-eyed into the grate.

Daisy, however, had clumped into to the den, where my dad had left his briefcase with his Yankee Stadium sandwiches in it. Daisy had dragged the briefcase into the living room, and laid down there for her evening meal: smoked chicken with herb stuffing, Tuscan cowhide, and yellow legal paper with my dad’s pencil scrawl all over it.

I screamed at her to stop, and she looked up out of that smashed face. You could kick Daisy, and you could ram her, but she drew the line at being robbed of food and leather that she had earned by hard chewing. She growled – a soft but cold sound – and that stopped me in my tracks.

I yelled again: “Carter! Where are you?”

“Right here, kid. Take it easy.”

He marched at a measured pace down the stairs, fisherman’s slicker slung over one arm, a strange expression illuminating his face. He looked as if he’d been dreaming and was having difficulty waking up. He’d never taken off his boots and the staircase was stained with mud footprints.

At the same time I heard a familiar creak and slide of wood over carpet. Cold air darted into the room and I spun around.

The front door had swung completely open. Standing on the porch in his canvas barn jacket and woolen Irish cap from County Kerry, with the cold rain bucketing down behind him, was my dad.

No one had returned his calls. He’d needed his edited documents of
United States v. National Nursing Homes
for the morning’s meetings at Foley Square. So in the top of the eighth inning he called the limo service and arranged to be driven home to Amagansett. He heard the final outs of the game on the radio. His team didn’t let him down.

The limo rolled into our driveway. The rain stopped the gravel from popping under the tires.

Brown mud and black dog tracks streaked the carpet. One flank of the cherrywood piano had claw gashes from top to bottom. Broken glass from the silver photo frames had created a hailstorm on the floor. A cracked Tiffany lamp tilted on its base. A large hairy dog occupied the entire area in front of the fireplace, and shreds of
United States v. National Nursing Homes
littered the living room, where a bulldog was consuming the Italian leather briefcase.

Moreover, a unkempt and unknown man was ambling down the stairs from the second floor.

Also, at the same time, a terrible smell rose from my dad’s feet. filled that part of the living room. It was the smell of shit, of dogshit. A gift from Daisy or Pablo, maybe both. My dad had brought it in from the darkness outside. He had tracked it all over the carpet. He looked down, realizing what he had done. His face twisted with the pain of it.

Carter reached the bottom of the staircase. my dad’s voice trembled at him.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?
Upstairs
in my house.”

“Carter Bedford.” Carter showed his shiny white teeth. “Friend of Billy’s. Great kid. Real hospitable.”

He extended his hand, but my dad, instead of shaking, took a step backward and pointed a finger at the animal life.

Carter grinned as if the judges at the annual dog show held by the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society were approaching him to tell him that one of his entries had won the blue ribbon. “Left to right, Daisy and Pablo.” And he tipped a hand in their direction.

“That bulldog is eating my briefcase.”

Carter roared: “
Daisy!
Drop it!
Outside, bitch!”
He gave her the karate chop threat.

Daisy, opening her jaws so that what was left of the destroyed briefcase slid in a slobbering brown mess to the carpet, squirted piss all over the carpet to mingle with her shit — or it might have been Pablo’s; there was no way we could ever find out — and slunk out the front door.

“Pedro, too,” said my dad, a little white around the nostrils.

“Pablo,” Carter said, correcting him. He surveyed the living room. “I hope you’ve got good insurance.”

My dad clenched his fists at his side. I knew he was strong for his size – tough, like me – but I didn’t think he could handle Carter Bedford, who lifted garbage cans five days a week.

But Carter didn’t react that way. He gave my dad a cold and feral look, and then grabbed hold of Pablo’s collar and hauled him across the room and out the door. Together they thumped off the porch and crunched across the gravel driveway.

I heard the pickup’s engine rumble, then growl off into the night.

“Better check the phone messages, Dad,” I said. And I added: “You rascal.”

Chapter 11

I sneezed like a machine gun until my nostrils turned raw around the edges. I had read that a sneeze can fire out spray at a hundred miles an hour, and now I believed it. On Monday morning Inez took my temperature, and it was a hundred and one, so she said, “No school,” and fed me hot chicken soup. Aunt Grace came over and took my temperature again: it had risen to a hundred and two.

My dad had told Inez not to clean the carpet, that it would need a professional. “Diana will make those decisions,” he said.

She showed up after meeting with the congresswomen and flying from Washington to Islip, and then my dad arrived in the evening. They had a long talk before they came into my room.

“How are you feeling?” my dad asked.

“Great.” My voice sounded like mud mixed with gravel.

“Billy, are you missing anything?”

“Like what, Dad?”

“Let me put it this way. I’m missing a yellow silk scarf, with black polka dots, that your Aunt Harriet gave it to me. I happened to notice that Bedford wore a blue silk scarf around his neck. Made me think. More to the point, your mom is missing her Queensland black opal and diamond bracelet. My birthday present to her.”

I coughed. “You think he took that stuff?”

“He was roaming around up here while those monster dogs were turning our house into a war zone. If we want to file a claim with our insurance company, we first have to report to the police that the bracelet is missing. I’d have to tell them about Bedford.”

“Maybe you left the bracelet somewhere, Mom.”

“Anything is possible.” That was a favorite phrase of my mom’s, which meant “no way.”

“But I didn’t leave my yellow silk scarf anywhere. I haven’t worn it since the spring.” My dad arranged some of my floppy disks in a more ordered pile; he always needed to be busy. “Billy, I got a call today from Max Russo. The CEO of Oxford Enterprises, which is the company that owns the company that’s going to bring out Fruities, saw the video of you and the monkey. He loves it. So Max asks you to reconsider. They’ll pay you a great deal of money to do this commercial. I know how you feel, but —”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

He seemed taken aback. “When did you decide that?”

“Today. I want to pay for the damage to the carpet and the lamp and anything else that got ruined or stolen on Sunday night. Making the commercial is the only way I can do that.”

“No, that’s not acceptable,” my dad said.

“But I want to do it.”

“We won’t take money from you that way.”

“Why not?”

“Billy, bad stuff happens.” My mom, sitting on my bed, patted my head. “You shouldn’t have gone to the hospital without telling us beforehand, that’s true, but once you did, everything else may have been foreordained. Thank God, the house didn’t burn down, no one was injured. Minor property damage is something that can always be fixed. Just please have nothing to do with this man or his daughter anymore. That’s all we ask.”

“I’m going to do the commercial,” I said, “to pay for the carpet.”

If they had known what that would lead to, they would have chained me to the bed.

During the night I had growing pains in my legs. I always measured myself against marks on the wall. I’d made the last mark with a red pen three months after my eleventh birthday. In the morning I stood against the wall, laid a ruler flat on my head, and made a mark with a black ballpoint. I turned around. The black mark was at the same level as the red mark.

Well, maybe the pain came first, the growing later.

I didn’t want to stay home from school a day more than was necessary. I wanted to see Amy. On Wednesday evening I popped the thermometer out of my mouth as soon as my mom and Aunt Grace were out of the room, gave it a hard flip with my wrist and slipped it back in my mouth when I heard them coming back.

“Normal,” my mom said. “That’s funny. Your forehead feels warm.”

“Can I go to school tomorrow?”

Aunt Grace threw up her hands. “Kid’s a workaholic. Wonder where that comes from.”

My mom considered, then said, “No, I want you to take the week off, darling. Get strong.”

“Mo-om!”

She looked at me in an odd way. I think she knew that something didn’t parse, and she shook her head.

Early on Thursday morning she went off to work in Sag Harbor. I didn’t feel sick anymore, just heavy in the heart. The wind beat against the sides of the house and the sky looked like it was full of camel humps. I finished the last of Horatio Hornblower’s fabulous adventures. Around three-thirty in the afternoon I heard footsteps crunch on the gravel of the driveway. Creaking porch sounds rose up, then the doorbell chimed. Soon I heard Inez talking to someone.

Inez clumped upstairs. “You got a visitor, Billy. Needs a little fattening up.”

It took me a few seconds to figure it out. “Amy Bedford?”

“I forgot to ask her name.”

“Inez!”

“Now I recall, that’s just what she said. ‘Amy Beffid.’ Something like that.”

I’d never had a friend visit me before. I’d never had a friend, so how could one visit me? I was flabbergasted, which is a step up from dumbfounded.

“Inez, what should I do?”

“You want me tell her to go ‘way?”