Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (40 page)

I left the bike in the forest exactly where I’d left it earlier in the day. In the gloom of the woods the darkness was deep, but I knew the terrain pretty well now. Soon I was on the dirt road leading to the A-1 property. An owl hooted, and a shooting star flew across the night sky between Betelgeuse and the Belt of Orion. No dog barked. I guess I’d fixed Pablo’s career as a guard dog.

I found the glade in the forest where Carter had shot at the birch tree. The trees had been bare then and now they were in full leaf, but this wasn’t a place I could easily forget. From the glade I worked my way toward the big wire fence that circled the house. The house was dark except for a yellow anti-bug bulb over the office door. That helped me to see. I didn’t want to use my flashlight until I absolutely had to. The Toyota truck and the yellow VW were in the yard. So far, so good.

When I reached the back gate that Carter had used the day he threatened me with his pistol, I stopped. During my afternoon scouting trip I had figured out where I had to stop, and now I was there. My eyes had quickly grown accustomed to the darkness. I studied the house and the wall under Amy’s window for about ten minutes. It would be a great wall to climb. It was pitted, scarred, dented, with just about every kind of hold you would want. And then on the second floor there were those bars on the window. Piece of cake? Not quite — but no harder than Crab Rock. The only problem was, there was no angle. It was completely vertical. Well, so were the climbing walls in gyms.

I looked down at the ground. This afternoon, from a distance, the stone I was looking for had seemed close enough to the fence for me to reach it. Last winter the key to the back gate had been under that stone. Carter wouldn’t have moved it. Why would he do a thing like that? A small voice in my mind said,
“For a lot of reasons, you dork.”

I crept along the fence to the exact spot, bent down, and reached for the stone. I couldn’t get at it. It was too far away.

I lay down in the dirt, stretching my arm under the fence until I thought it would part from the socket. I dragged my arm across some sharp pebbles and cut myself. I didn’t yelp. I bit my teeth when the pain came. I knew I was bleeding.

And I couldn’t reach the stone. If I couldn’t reach the stone, he could have taken the key to Florida and it wouldn’t matter to me.

You just have to think. Then there’s always a way. Getting back to my feet, I walked back to the forest. On the way I used my handkerchief to wipe the blood from my arm and elbow where I’d scraped myself. I hunted for a dead tree, found one, and picked a branch that looked sturdy but wasn’t too thick. I worked it back and forth, then broke it off as gently as I could.

Snap
.

I froze. I didn’t think I’d wake Ginette. She slept out back in the RV, Amy had told me, and her sleep was usually fortified by booze or dope. It was Stevie and Jimmy I was worried about. They were in the yellow brick house in the second floor bedroom above the office. Kids are heavy sleepers, but unfamiliar sounds can penetrate even the deepest sleep. I knew that fact because I’d read it in a Horatio Hornblower novel — Hornblower in his captain’s cabin wakes because there’s a new sound in the rigging, telling him that the onshore wind has shifted, and he knows in a flash that the French will try to escape the English blockade.

Nothing happened. No change of wind. No French frigates creeping out of Brest. The night was completely still except for distant crickets and the fluttering of wings.

Back at the fence, I used the branch to reach the stone and nudge it aside. Now I had to turn on my flashlight so that I could see the key, and then, with the branch, I would drag the key across the dirt and under the fence, to where I could grab it. I snapped on the light, fast, for only a second.

No key. The key wasn’t there.

Better look again. Might have missed it, the way I’d missed the money under the couch in the Mayflower. The cone of light bloomed from my hand.

No key.

“Oh, shit,” I said — and clapped my hand to my lips to mute the words that had already passed between them.

But no one had heard me.

Shielding the beam of the flashlight with my other hand so that it shone as low to the ground as possible, I inspected the dirt. There were several small stones within a few feet’s radius. In six months, stones would get kicked, or be moved around by rain and mud. Worse, Carter could have changed his hiding place.

I poked at all the other stones, pushing them gently with my branch. I flicked the narrow beam of light at each one in turn.

Something gleamed. The key.

“Hey!”

A high voice came out of nowhere. I jerked back, dislodging pebbles, trying to scramble to my feet before I was attacked, or shot, or torn apart by Pablo or some other terrible beast I hadn’t known lived there.

“Billy…”

My head snapped back and I looked up. Amy was at her window. She hadn’t turned on a light but I could still see her by starlight. And she could see me.

“Wait,” I said, as loud as I dared.

I scrabbled the key under the fence, grabbed it, quickly moved down along the fence and unlocked the gate.

“Billy… what are you doing here?”

“Shhh.”

I pushed the gate open as quietly as I could. I tiptoed in until I was standing just about under her window.

I had to risk it. It was a chance too good to miss. If anyone else heard me, I would turn and run for the woods..

“Monday morning at first light,” I said. “I’m coming for you.”

“What?”

I repeated it. “Be ready. I need your help. Do you hear, Amy?”

A stir came from somewhere inside the house.

“Amy, did you hear me?” I repeated.

“I heard you, Billy. How are you going to do it?”

“Be ready, Rapunzel,” I said. “Come to the window before dawn. Let down your golden hair.”

“What?”

I turned and beat it out the gate, closed it softly, locked it, and shoved the key deep into my pocket. I wasn’t taking any chances this time with the whereabouts of the key.

I biked back home through the blackness, under a few hazed stars. The elms shut out the view on both sides of the lane. A sea mist muffled all sound except the swish of my tires on macadam.

Chapter 35

At nine o’clock on Sunday morning, my mom cried out: “Billy! What’s this?”

“What’s what?” I yelled, from the bathroom.

“Blood! All over your sheet. And on your clothes!”

I spat toothpaste into the sink and hurried back into the bedroom.

There was dried brown blood on the sheet, and on the pants and shirt I’d worn on my excursion the night before and tossed onto a chair when I finally reached home and sneaked upstairs. That had been 3:25 a.m., I recalled, according to my bedside alarm clock.

“Must have had a nosebleed, Mom.”

She thrust a finger at the center of the bottom sheet. “But how did the blood get all the way down here? And on your pants? Your nose is up there.” Her finger swiveled toward my rumpled, clean pillow. “No blood on your pillow.”

“Well, it’s actually an elbowbleed,” I said.

My elbow was all scraped and raw. It hurt, too. My mother examined it.

“You’re going to need an antibiotic and some sort of dressing. Billy, what happened to you? “

“Must have bumped it during the night.”

“It’s a
mess
.”

“Maybe scraped, not bumped. Elbow bleeding is like that. Capillaries close to the skin. Can’t stop the flow.”

“Oh, Billy, that’s nonsense.” Even as she spoke, she strode toward the bathroom cabinet to rummage for medicines and bandages. She ran the hot water, and turned to face me. “You’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes by being cute. You’re not cute anymore. You’re just devious. There are bicycle tire tracks all over the carpet in the living room. Where were you last night? I demand to know.”

The grass in the garden had been wet and I had brought the bike in through the french doors. I felt shamed by what she’d said about my being not cute but devious. She was right. But that’s what I had to be in order to get the job done.

“I went out,” I said.

“In the middle of the night?”

“I had to be somewhere.”

“Here we go again. As your father would say, be specific. And put out your arm. This may sting.”

“Mom, I have a private life.”

“Yes, we know that. We found out the hard way. Did you go off to see that girl?”

“Sort of.”

“What does that mean? Yes or no? Did you go out last night to see Amy, or didn’t you?”

You don’t have to be a lawyer to cross examine. You just have to be a parent.

“I saw her, Mom.”

“At what hour?”

“It was around two thirty.”

“Oh, Billy! Shit! What are we going to do with you?”

My mom had never cursed like that to my face.

“This has got to stop,” she said. “I’m going to talk to your father. We’re going to reach a decision. I can guarantee it’s going to be one you won’t like. Now straighten out your elbow so I can put on this bandage.”

I knew there would be trouble. That night, Sunday night, was my launch hour, not only because Carter was due to arrive in Springs on Tuesday, but because on Monday my mom would discover that one of the signed checks from the Modern Age money market account had been cashed by Uncle Bernie for $90,000, and another $15,000 had been sucked out of the guts of three local ATMs. Following those revelations, I could assume that a tornado of unimaginable proportions would simultaneously strike Oak Lane and Rivington Street.

By then Amy and I had to be gone.

Immediately after breakfast on Sunday I called Duwayne at his home. A man growled at me like a jungle animal. I had no idea what he said.

I said back: “Is Duwayne there, sir, please?”

“Listen up, kid. This household don’t function on Sunday until crack of noon.”

He hung up. I thought about it for five seconds, and then redialed before he could get comfy on his pillow again.

“
Shitwhatisit?
“

“Sir, it’s an emergency. I need Duwayne.”

“Doo-wayne! Goddamn it!
Telephone!
“

Duwayne came on the line as grumpily as his father.

I told him I had to see him today. We needed a planning session. We were set for four o’clock tomorrow morning.

“
Four?
You out of your mind, dude?”

“I told you it would be at night.”

“That’s not night… that’s…” He couldn’t find the words for what it was.

“Duwayne, I’m counting on you.”

“I never said yes to no four o’clock in the fuckin’ morning.”

“Can you meet me today at the Brothers Four? One o’clock.”

“One o’clock in the morning?”

“This afternoon, Duwayne.”

“I see you there, little bro. We work this out together like civilized people.”

I called Uncle Bernie. I didn’t wake him; he said he was at the easel. But he sounded in a bad mood, too.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Ginger wants to get married.”

“To you?”

“Women have that mission. Why are you so surprised? Am I so undesirable?”

“What did you say to her? Yes or no?”

“Jesus, you sound like a lawyer. I said I’m not ready for a permanent relationship.”

“Are you still friends?”

“Of course.”

“Then can you get the money out of her safe so that I can have it tomorrow afternoon?”

I hadn’t been paying close attention to the schedule of family matters. Simon was due back from camp in Maine that same day. My mom wanted to spend a couple of hours with him by the pool, and then in the evening she was taking off to the West Coast for a Monday morning breakfast date with people at Microsoft, and then a lunch with some executives from a utility conglomerate named Enron that I heard her say to my dad was “breaking new ground.”

Simon’s flight got in from Portland at 2:20 P.M. My dad would pick him up at Islip, and he asked me to go with him. It would be a great opportunity on the drive there, he pointed out, for us to have quality time alone.

“I can’t make it, Dad. I’m meeting a friend.”

“Change the date, Billy. There are things we need to talk about.”

Girding my loins to do battle again with Mr. Williams, I called Duwayne’s house again. Busy. I called again. Busy. And again, and again. The phone must have been off the hook.

“Dad, I can’t reach my friend. So I have to meet him at one o’clock.”

“Where?”

“The Brothers Four.”

“We have exactly enough time to drive by there at one, and you can see your friend, and apologize, and make a date with him for some other time.”

“Dad, he’s not the kind of guy who’ll be there at one sharp.”

“Then you’ll leave a message for him, apologizing for the fact that you had to go to the airport.”

“Dad — no.”

“Billy, this business of saying
no
has to got to stop. You’re not a two-year-old. I told you last night at dinner that there was a limit.”

A kid of two or three said no, and you had any number of ways to sway him, including dragging him by the scruff of his neck. A kid of six or seven could be spanked, bribed, threatened, sent to his room without TV, or even yelled at, and he’d cave in. A kid of twelve or older was different. My dad could have physically overpowered me and hauled me into the car, but where do you go from there? Authority is the key. But the kid has to accept the moral right of the authority. And if he doesn’t…