Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (2 page)

“Oak Lane.”

Oak Lane was what we called our country home in Amagansett, on Long Island, in Suffolk County, because it sat on a short, tree-lined street bearing that name. We’d owned it then for four years, and we went there every Memorial Day for most of the summer. All of us loved Oak Lane.

My dad said, “Year-round, Diana?”

“Jack, one door closes and the draft opens another one. Yes, year-round. I can do what I’ve always wanted to do”—and she raised her pinky and index finger, in the direction of Central park, to ward off the Evil Eye.

She meant Modern Age Green, whose name and purpose she had already registered with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

My dad asked, “And what do you suggest I do about my law practice?”

“Jack, you’re out half the week-nights anyway for drinks and dinner with clients. If not, you’re in Dixie holding the hand of some poor schlemiel on Death Row. Get a pied-à-terre on the East Side near the firm. Walk to work. Come out to Oak Lane for weekends and holidays. We’ll have quality time together.”

At the end of the discussion she turned to me and Simon. “How do you guys vote?”

We voted the way she wanted us to.

They sold the apartment for $2.5 million and we moved to Amagansett, whose name meant, in the old Algonquian language, “the place of good water.” Amagansett was located at the eastern end of Long Island, which on the map looks like an open-jawed alligator flopped out into the Atlantic Ocean from New York City. The lower jaw of the alligator is often called the South Fork, and its lanes and roads are lined by oak, elm, maple, flowering dogwood, and huckleberry. Sweet corn and good Katahdin potatoes grow; in summer the lawns are as green as English meadows. In those days Amagansett kids past elementary school level either biked or were bused to schools five miles west in East Hampton. My parents and quite a few other people didn’t lock their doors when they went out. On the South Fork, in that final decade of the last century, you could smell high taxes, salt air, and a sense of self-congratulation. People thought, and sometimes said, “This is the right way to live, and we are blessed.”

My mom bought a farmhouse outside the nearby village of Sag Harbor, converted it into an office complex, and started a mutual fund that refused to buy shares in companies that polluted the environment or the lungs. When Modern Age Green doubled in value its first year,
Barrons
called it “the tiny new superstar of ecologically-responsible no-load mutual funds.” My mom became a New Age hero: she lectured at womens’ clubs, was given an honorary Ph.D. by her alma mater, Brown University, and was invited by Hillary to the White House. The President joined them at tea.

Later, Oprah interviewed my mom, and asked, “Dr. Adler, what was your reaction to President Clinton?”

“Kinda cute,” my mom said, which brought the house down.

My dad, Jacob Braverman, Esq., a trim, fresh-faced, handsome man with feet so small you’d think his parents had bound them when he was a boy, was almost always called Jack. If he was at a party he seemed to vanish among the bigger people, but when he held forth in his mellow voice on subjects such as white-collar crime, opera at the Met, the current crisis in the Middle East, or the Yankees’ chances in the playoffs, people always clammed up and listened. His major passion, however, was defending convicted murderers on various death rows in the Deep South. He did it for free, flying to Florida or some other state once or twice a month, and he had a contract with a New York publisher to write a book about all the men and women in this country who had been convicted of murder, then executed, and later shown to have been innocent.

So we lived the good life, the honorable life, the purposeful life, the life that just about everybody in this country would want to live and profit by. And then I messed up big-time.

Early one Sunday morning in August I watched while my mom dove into the twenty-meter pool in the garden at Oak Lane. In swimming goggles and a black bikini, she always swam at least thirty laps, and when she finished she was never out of breath. She shook out a yoga mat, did half an hour of poses under an elm tree, chanted her oms, and then settled in the shade of the cabana to work her way through
Barrons
and the Monday Special edition of
Investors Business Daily
.

My dad was out biking, and my brother Simon was out eating pizza and yakking with his buddies about all the disgusting things they’d like to do to girls. I was still eleven years old at the time; I hated the thought of being a teen-ager and was trying to figure out a way to skip it.

I curled up in a deck chair next to my mom, and began reading another Horatio Hornblower sea story. I loved adventure books, except that the love parts bored me.

“Am I bothering you, Mom?”

“Oh, no, darling just the opposite. I adore it that you’re here. Come give me a hug.”

After the hug, she folded up her well-marked copy of
IBD
and said, “Billy darling, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure, Mom.”

“Are you ever lonely?”

“Why should I be lonely?”

“Because your dad’s in the city so much of the time, and down in Florida trying to keep people from being executed, and I work late in Sag Harbor, and I travel a lot, too—I have to, you understand, because I feel personally responsible to everyone who buys a single share in any of my funds. But you’re alone so much. I know that you and your brother fight. So… I was just wondering if you were lonely.”

“No, Mom, I’m fine,” I said. “I read. I go online. I have e-mail pals in Buenos Aires and Paris. I’m going to find one in Rome, too, as soon as my Italian gets good enough. And I climb. I’d be climbing today, except the gym’s closed on Sundays.”

I was crazy about climbing. If you climb to the top of anything, even if it’s no more than the climbing wall at the high school gym, you feel as if you’re on top of the world. My mom often reminded me that even before I could crawl I climbed out of my crib, fell to the carpet, turned red, and later purple and blue, but didn’t cry. I’d climbed all the big elms and oaks on our property and I’d climbed all the rafters of the garage. I’d been punished for it often, but that never stopped me. Punishment, I figured, was part of a kid’s life.

This was my plan. Before I was eighteen I was going to climb Mount Everest, so that I’d be the youngest Western climber ever to do it. Our housekeeper Inez was teaching me Spanish, French, and Italian, and
cuisine à la françaises
. I intended to become a gourmet chef, cook a five-course amazing meal at base camp, carry it up to the summit of Everest, heat it and eat it, and broadcast the menu to the world in several languages. Then, after I graduated Harvard, I would start a chain of gourmet restaurants called Everest. This plan couldn’t miss, I thought.

When I first told it to my mom, she said, “Do you know how many people have died trying to climb Mt. Everest?”

“One hundred and sixty seven far in this century. But that won’t happen to me.”

“Billy, do you think you’re immortal? And that you can’t be hurt? Or crippled?”

“Sort of,” I admitted.

Another time, when she was talking to my dad outside the pool cabana, I was up a nearby tree and heard her say, “Jack, when he goes to the beach, the lifeguard has to whistle him back from the deep water. He plays with snakes in the garden. This passion for climbing frightens me. He’s got a reckless streak. And he’s still so
small
.”

“But he’s tough,” my dad said, “like me.”

I loved him for saying that.

“No, Mom,” I said, that day at the pool, “I’m not lonely at all. I’m one of the luckiest kids I know.”

A household chore of mine was to take out the garbage first thing on Tuesday mornings. Later I’d see the guys in their overalls dumping the plastic sacks and I’d get a whiff of what was in the guts of the garbage truck. I figured that had to be the worst job a man could have.

On the Tuesday before Labor Day Weekend, I rolled the big green cans from the garage to the driveway. An hour later I started out with my ten-speed to the A & P to stock up on lemons for my beach business, Yummy-in-the-Tummy Lemonade Company, of which I was founder, boss, and sole employee. I stopped on the gravel to adjust my backpack, and the gray garbage truck pulled into our crescent-shaped loop, its back gate clanking.

One of the garbage men hopped down out of the truck and walked up to me. He was a lean guy in his late thirties with pale reddish hair and the biceps of a bodybuilder. He wore denim shorts, a sleeveless white T-shirt that said BONACKER PRIDE, and a blue silk scarf tied around his neck, like he was Cary Grant playing the role of a jaunty hard-muscled garbage man. His teeth were as white as bathroom tiles. He had shifty silver eyes, but now they bore right into me.

He said in a friendly voice, “How you doing, sonny?”

“I’m doing fine.”

“I’ve seen you before. What’s your name?”

“Billy.”

“Mine’s Carter.”

“Well, that fits,” I said.

Those watery eyes grew twenty degrees colder. “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

I was a wiseass. I tried not to be, but I didn’t always succeed.

“I meant that your name is Carter, and you’re in the carting business.”

He kept glowering. His intensity scared me, but I didn’t back down.

“Carting is another word for taking things away,” I said. “A lot of last names in English come from professions. Baker. Hunter. Smith. Carpenter. Carter. See?”

The garbage man squared his shoulders. “Except my last name ain’t Carter. Carter is my Christian name. My last name is Bedford.”

While his two brown-skinned associates dumped our cans into the truck, Carter Bedford snorted and honked a load of phlegm up his nose. Then he made a funny sound at the back of his throat. He didn’t spit. He swallowed it. That was gross.

He angled his head toward the big white house at the end of the driveway. Oak Lane had been remodeled quite a few times through the centuries, and it was still a stop on the summer house tours conducted by the Ladies Village Improvement Society. “Nice little shack,” Carter Bedford said.

The breeze shifted, and I caught the smell of his breath, which was like the smell of the stuff in the truck.

I spun my pedals. “I have to go now.”

“You headed for the beach?”

“No, sir, the supermarket.”

Carter Bedford took a step that blocked my path. “I knew about Bedford being the name of a place in the old country. I’m a Bonacker, but my people come over here a couple hundred years ago. In England we probably lived in one of those castles with a moat. All I know, I might be related to William Shakespeare.”

The Latino guy behind the wheel of the garbage truck tapped on the horn, but Carter Bedford ignored him. He pulled a bent pack of Camels from his overalls and shook one out, so that it dribbled tobacco flakes on the gravel.

“What school you go to, Billy?”

“Middle School, East Hampton.”

“Which grade?”

“I start sixth next week.”

“No kidding.” Those gray watery eyes sparkled. “My daughter’s going into sixth. She’s got hair same color as mine. Real pretty. Name’s Amy.”

“I know who she is,” I said. “But I haven’t ever talked to her.”

“That’s because she don’t talk to strangers. She’s shy.” He had lit up, and he pushed his pack of cigarettes in my face. “Want one?”

“No thanks.”

“You should get to know my daughter,” Carter Bedford said.

“Maybe next term.”

“Don’t get fresh with her, though. That’ll piss her off.”

What an asshole, I thought. Still, I went for the bait. I said, “Why would I get fresh with her?”

“‘Cause your little pecker might twitch and you couldn’t help yourself, that’s why.” He brayed a laugh.

“I have to go, Mr. Bedford. Nice to have met you.”

He studied me with those polished silver eyes. “Yeah, you definitely oughta get to know Amy.”

I pedaled onto the grass, veering around Carter Bedford. I could feel his stare on the back of my neck. I left him dragging on his limp cigarette, flexing his ropy muscles, and snorting snot.

He’d called himself a Bonacker. A long time ago that was a beach person who came from Accabonac Harbor, a few miles to the north of Amagansett, and dug for clams and scallops. In hard times Bonackers trapped seagulls and roasted them in sand pits. Now the hardware stores from Water Mill all the way out as far as Montauk sold bumper stickers and T-shirts, like the one Carter Bedford wore, proclaiming BONACKER PRIDE. Bonackers sold tennis balls to the summer residents, repaired their plumbing, tended bar at their lawn parties, filled their speedboats with gas, and hauled away their garbage. I don’t think they liked us much but they needed us so that they didn’t have to go back to trapping seagulls.

Carter Bedford and his wife—I learned this quite a while later—still lived near Accabonac Harbor in a part of the township called Springs, which was considerably less expensive and more rural than East Hampton Village. There was a self-storage facility out there in Springs, A-1 Self-Storage, in a dusty field on a back road. Attached to it was a small yellow brick building, a former local jail that Springs residents had once called the Yellow Brick Jail. It had a strange shape: although it was a narrow cube, it had three stories. The top story was set to one side of the roof.

After its term as a jail it was empty for a decade, and then for a time it had been used as a warehouse by an auto parts shop on Pantigo Road. In the 1980’s, with a minimum of rehab, the warehouse was turned into a residence for the caretakers of a newly-built self-storage facility. The latest caretakers were the Bedfords. The job paid nothing but the family lived rent-free in the yellow brick house, which still had bars on some windows from the era when it had been a jail. The Bedfords kept an old Winnebago RV out in back, and Carter and his wife slept in it. A-1’s office occupied the downstairs of the house, with the two Bedford boys sharing a queen bed in the one-bedroom apartment upstairs, and Amy, the oldest child, sleeping on a convertible sofa in the apartment’s tiny living room. The top floor was just a small cube of a room connected to the second-floor apartment by a narrow staircase with a barred gate— another relic of jail days. There was one bathroom for everybody, because the pipes in the Winnebago had frozen, cracked, and never been repaired.