Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (3 page)

A fat bulldog and a large hairy young mongrel bunked in Carter’s pickup truck. They were supposed to be guard dogs. In some parts of the United States, a family like that would have been called poor white trash. But they hardly ever used words like that on the south fork of Long Island.

Carter Bedford was the man the State of New York accused me of trying to murder. My lawyer, Ginger Casey, said, “I won’t lie to you, Billy – the state has a good case. We have a lot of work to do. Are you ready for that?”

“Let’s rock and roll,” I said.

“Tell me everything that happened,” Ginger said.

Chapter 3

“Girls and boys, welcome Amy Bedford. She’s a transfer from middle school out in Montauk. How about a nice round of applause as our way of saying ‘Good to have you with us, Amy.’?”

Those words were spoken to us by Mrs. Metzger, the fifth-grade teacher in East Hampton Middle School, at the beginning of the spring term a few months before my first meeting with Carter Bedford.

I clapped louder than anybody, and a few kids stared at me as if my enthusiasm confirmed my status as the class nerd. Most people thought I looked like a miniature but pudgy version of Kramer, that geeky guy on
Seinfeld
whose hair stands straight up on his head. I felt sorry for that guy. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I might grow out of it.

The new girl paid no attention to my clapping. She was seated at a desk in the last row, and she was talking to herself. You could see her lips moving, although you couldn’t make out what words she was saying. It was a murmur, or she could have been singing under her breath. She was somewhere else.

Not cool, I thought. Something wrong with this girl.

She was tall and thin, freckled, with long legs, small fingers, and skin the color of the ivory elephants on our coffee table at home. Her hair was darker and shinier than a carrot, and she wore it in a frayed black ribbon.

During Math hour the first week, she must have felt me staring at her. She looked up, and checked me out like I was a frog on the dissecting table in Science class. Her eyes were a soft brown, like good Belgian milk chocolate, and they slanted upward a bit. She blinked a few times, then looked down, and started talking to herself again.

In a way that was hard to define, I thought she was the prettiest girl in the class. I watched her move through the fluorescent-lit halls of the middle school. She didn’t bounce like the other girls. She glided like a graceful ghost. And she didn’t chew gum.

I watched her often, but after that five-second look during Math hour, she ignored me.

One evening after we’d eaten paella in the kitchen and Inez had written out the recipe for me to enter into my computer, my brother Simon and I cruised into the den. I grabbed the remote so that Simon couldn’t turn on the TV. Simon, who was fourteen, played the drums, read sports car and professional wrestling magazines, and hung out with a bunch of guys I considered dorks;,but now and then, since he had good genes, he was capable of intelligent observations. Hoping that this would be one of those occasions, I told him what I knew about Amy Bedford.

“I know a few chicks in your class,” he said. “Which does she hang with?”

“None. They think she’s weird.”

“So do you.”

“But I’m interested in her.”

“You think you can get into her panties?”

“Simon, I’m eleven. I just want to get to know her. Maybe she’s a medium and she’s getting messages from the astral sphere. Maybe she’s talking a foreign language. It’s called ‘speaking in tongues.’”

“Bullshit. You want to get to second base, bro. Play with her titties.”

“She doesn’t have any.”

I should never have said that. For Simon, that put her in the category of what he and his friends called a “Tug”—Totally Uninteresting Girl. He grabbed the remote, shoved and kicked me off the sofa, and began watching TV.

When the other girls sneaked off to the baseball field during lunch hour to smoke cigarettes, Amy Bedford sat alone on the stone steps in front of the school. In class, when she wasn’t talking to herself, she drew in her notebook, covering the page with a pale arm so no one could see what she was doing. Her clothes were wrinkled. She never wore any makeup.

Then, in late August, her father, the garbage man, introduced himself to me in our driveway. A few days after school started up again, I stood outside on the steps at three o’clock of a sunny afternoon, waiting.

The girls of our class came out of the building in clumps of three and four, stopping to put their lipstick on because they weren’t allowed to wear it during school hours—plus, no mascara, no rouge, no high heels or clothes that let their belly buttons show. They were always talking about movie stars like Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio. For me, these girls were from another planet. The boys, barging out behind the girls, wore studded leather jackets and baggy pants that hung way below their knees. They fiddled with their peckers in class when they thought no one was looking. They were into heavy metal, the Mets, the Giants, and the Knicks, but they didn’t know dick about climbing.

Toting her book bag, wearing old blue jeans and scuffed sneakers, Amy slipped out of the school alone, trailing behind everyone else. I stood in her path, just like Carter Bedford had done to me, and then I planted myself at her side and began walking down the steps with her. My heartbeats were so strong, so deep, and so loud, that I was a little frightened by them.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

Dumb, but it got her attention. She swiveled her head toward me.

“I wanted to ask you,” I said, “what you thought of us saying the pledge of allegiance every morning. ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag’… blah blah blah.’ Do you ever think about what the words mean? I mean, I didn’t until a few days ago. We’re like robots. A lot of things we do in life are robotic. That’s my point. You seem like an intelligent and interesting girl, so I’d like your opinion.”

Amy kept moving at a fair pace down the steps, then turned up the street toward where the school buses stopped. She was taller than me, and she had long legs, so I had a hard time keeping up with her and talking to her at the same time.

I thought of showing her my Swiss army knife. I’d bought it for myself as an tenth-birthday present. It had thirteen blades. I played mumblety-peg with it on our front lawn. But deep down I knew she wouldn’t be interested.

“I met your dad one morning in front of our house,” I said. “He believes his ancestors are English, maybe from Stratford-on-Avon. Did you ever discuss that with him?”

She shot a quick sharp frown at me.

“He suggested I get to know you,” I said. “He made a big point of it.”

We reached the bus stop. She didn’t give me any more looks to make me feel I’d just crawled out from under a slimy rock, but that’s because she was peering down Newtown Lane for her bus.

I kept trying. “What book are you going to read for your report? Mrs. Ostrow gave us a good choice, don’t you think? I thought I’d do
The Diary of Ann Frank,
because I’m Jewish, and I got all choked up when I first read it. I have a feeling you’d like
The Hobbit
. It’s cool.”

The yellow bus, the one that took the kids north to Springs, pulled up, brakes hissing. I’d always seen my dad help my mom in and out of cars by taking her arm, or her hand, and I thought it was a classy thing to do. Amy was about to get on the bus, so I reached out and took hold of her elbow to help her up the step.

She wrenched her arm loose from me, turned, drew her hand back, and hit me in the face. I don’t mean she socked me with a closed fist, but neither do I mean that she slapped me. I never had time to figure out what kind of a blow it was. I staggered back a step. Pain ran up the nerves to my brain and then back to my cheekbone.

Some of the kids saw it. They must have figured I’d done something gross.

It was just her
elbow
, for Chrissake…

I could feel my cheeks turning bright red. Amy Bedford didn’t even wait to see if I’d been knocked out or fallen down into the gutter in a faint. She jumped on the bus, and all I could see of her was her back, moving away into the shadowy interior of the bus, then vanishing from view.

Tears of pain filled my eyes. Or maybe they were tears of shock. Maybe even tears of embarrassment.

I ran to the bike rack, where I unchained my ten-speed. I heard kids giggling. I jumped aboard the bike and pedaled down Newtown Lane, then swerved left into traffic on Main Street, so that a car honked at me; then I took a hard right down the Montauk Highway, and then I flew along Skimhampton Road until I got to Amagansett fifteen minutes later.

What a bitch. What a dummy. What a creepy, stupid, unfriendly, aggressive, arrogant, nasty human being. What did she think I was trying to do? I got a headache from thinking about it.

I couldn’t tell my brother. But I had to talk to someone, and that someone was Inez.

Three years ago, when we’d moved from the West Side of Manhattan to the South Fork of Long Island, my mom decided we needed a full-time housekeeper, nanny, and cook, all in one persona. She wanted somebody foreign, on the theory that they were harder workers, better educated, and more traditional as regards how children should be cared for, so she contacted a top domestic help agency in London. Four applicants made the final cut. Two were German, one Scottish, another Spanish. The first three had great references, were under thirty years of age, and appeared attractive in the photographs attached to their applications. They wrote in their resumés that they loved children and wanted to work in the USA because it was the land of opportunity and it had always been their dream to see America.

The last applicant was Inez Tur, a dark-eyed Catalan woman of forty-two. She gave her height as five-feet-one but that was probably the only direct lie Inez ever told anyone in the Braverman family. She wrote that she had worked as a waitress to put herself through cooking school in Barcelona, then been an assistant to a sous chef at a restaurant in Perpignan, France. “I like most children,” she wrote. “I can’t have any of my own, which make me sad but that’s destiny and I don’t argue. I’m living now outside of London, with a rich English family, but my feet are always cold and I’m underpaid for what I do. I have a beloved brother Alfonso is hairdresser in Great Neck, N.Y., Long Island, so a job near to him sounds good to me as long as it’s not damp the whole year round and the pay is fair.”

My mom was used to analyzing data. “Those first three young women are expecting to have a good time. The Spanish woman, Inez Tur, is a mature spinster. She’s realistic. She’s straightforward. And she’s family-oriented. She looks unattractive—well, let’s just say, plain. I’ll pay top dollar. She can have her own thermostat.”

That evening, after Amy Bedford smacked my head at the bus stop, Inez asked, “Whassamatter with you, Billy?
Qué pasó?
Why’s your face so red? Some bad boy socked you,
cariño
?”

“A girl,” I said.

“Oooh. You was fresh?”

“No
,
Inez. Honestly.”

I told her the story about what happened on Newtown Lane outside the middle school. I told her all about Amy.

“She likes you,” Inez concluded.

That startled me. “I like her, too,” I said.

Inez looked into my eyes. I think she saw something there that had never been there before and that no one else could see. “Be careful,
mi amor,
“ she said.

Chapter 4

At dawn on a Saturday, not too long after that, I pulled my rope bag out of the closet. I had worked out every kink in my ropes and not a single one of them had fuzzed in the gym. I had a harness, slings, carabiners, nuts, cams, hexes, bouldering shoes, a rappel device and a belay device. I was equipped to climb major-league rocks like the Fracture at Yosemite or the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado. With my kind of equipment, a lot of guys could have climbed the Eiger.

But before I could climb the Fracture or the Black Canyon, never mind the Eiger, I decided I’d better climb Crab Rock out at Accabonac Harbor in Springs.

Until then I’d never climbed anything except the climbing wall in the East Hampton High School gym. My dad had forbidden me to climb real outdoor rocks until I was older.