Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (43 page)

“Cool,” Duwayne said. He meant that they were perfect for climbing, for grabbing hold of, or even looping with a climbing rope and an anchor knot, if they were solid bars that wouldn’t give way. After all these years of weather and rot, I thought, they might give way if you put a couple hundred pounds of downward pressure on them, but I still hadn’t got my weight up to even seventy five pounds, so they ought easily to hold me no matter whatever method I used, grabbing or looping.

Inez said, “Billy, let’s go home. I make you pancakes with maple syrup and a fresh fruit smoothie. Whajoo eat this morning? Simon, you hungry? I want to go. This place gives me creeps.”

“I think you’re right, Inez,” I said. “We have to go home.”

“That’s the smartest thing you come out with all day,” Inez said.

My forgetting the key and the extra forty-five minutes of delay had killed our chances. If Carter woke up in the middle of the operation, he would go berserk. I would be in more trouble than I thought I could handle. I would have to try another day. Or come up with some other plan.

Duwayne wrinkled his nose. “What you sayin,’ dude?”

“We have to forget it.”

“How come?”

I tried to make my heart beat more slowly. Be calm. Think it through.

Try another day. But which day? For all I knew, later today Carter might turn around and head south. Unlikely, but not an impossibility. He’d rushed up here — he’d probably rush back. He had a job and his amigo waiting for him. Why dally? Well, he might be tired from the long drive. Okay, maybe not today. More likely, tomorrow. Leave early, because it made sense to do that. So how was I going to rescue Amy from her tower on another day?

I had run out of days.

And I didn’t have any other kind of plan. I wasn’t a never-ending fountain of plans. I’d done my best to come up with this one. I’d thought and thought, and this seemed the only way. It had failed, or seemed to have failed, but it was the best I could do. I wasn’t a twelve-year-old Albert Einstein and I wasn’t a twelve-year-old Superman.

But I wasn’t a quitter, either. If I quit, I would lose Amy. Worse, she would be lost. She would be in Carter’s grip, and there would be nothing ever that I or anyone could do about it before it was too late. That would ruin her life. How can you let something like that happen?

“Well, maybe not,” I said.

“Maybe not what, dude?”

“Maybe we won’t go home. Maybe we’ll still try it.”

That big air of contentment faded from Inez. “What you say to him, Billy?” I turned to her in the back seat. Her eyes had narrowed, her mouth looked pinched.

“Inez,” I said. “You, too, Simon. You have to help me. If you won’t help me, you shouldn’t have come.”

Inez seemed to be taken aback by that. She had thought the escapade was over.

Simon squeaked. “Help you do what?”

“The first thing,” I said, “is to be quiet. I mean real quiet. And stay here in the car. Duwayne and I are going down to visit that house.”

“
Un momento
,” Inez said. “You just tell me we going back home. Now you tell me you visiting someone at five o’clock in the morning?” Her voice rose to a loud whisper.

“Can you be quiet, Inez? If not, Duwayne will drive you home.”

That was a bluff. I had no time to drive her home or anywhere. But she believed me. She saw that I was as determined as she could be.

“Nothing bad gonna happen to you, is there, Billy?”

“Nothing, Inez. Stay here, okay? Stay here and watch out for Simon.” I turned to Simon. “Don’t leave the car.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Simon said.

“So go.”

“Where do I go?”

“Behind a tree, you dork.”

“I have to do more to do than pee.”

“Then go do it.”

“I don’t have toilet paper.”

“Jeez, Simon, you were just three weeks camping in Maine, in the forest.”

“It was a music camp. We had tents with Port-a-Potties. We had toilet paper.”

“Well, this is the forest primeval. Use leaves. Use your finger and wipe it in the earth. Go . Crap.”

“What about soap and water to wash my hands with?”

My mom’s upbringing had a long arm.

But why I’d ever let Simon get into the car in the first place, I still don’t know. Meanwhile, the rosy glow continued to fill the sky and the spaces between the trees.

Inez began to moan. Maybe a prayer. It gave me an idea. I spoke to her in Spanish.

“Inez, do me a favor?”

“What, Billy?” Her voice was tiny.

“You see down there? See that Winnebago behind the brick house?”

“That winnawhatta?”

“The camper van. Not the pickup truck. The camper van in the back. Kind of light brown color. Has a flat place on top where people sleep. See it?”

She grunted. She saw it.

“When Duwayne and I are at the house, if a guy comes out of the camper… Inez, you remember Carter Bedford?”

“The door-banger? The garbage-dumper?”

“You remember what he looks like?”

She crossed herself.

“If he comes out of the winnawhatta, you honk the horn. Honk it loud. Keep honking on it. Lean on it hard.”

Inez was silent.

“Will you do that for me, Inez? Will you honk if you see him?”

“
Sí. Lo hago.
I’ll do it.”

I think she would have liked to say a lot more, but she was frightened, and poleaxed by the realization of where we were and what might be going on. I wasn’t happy, either.

However, as soon as we got out of the car, I began to feel better. If Carter had come in last night, or even yesterday evening, he’d be tired from the road. He certainly wouldn’t be up and prowling around at five in the morning. And we would be super quiet.

“Inez is gonna honk the horn if there’s a problem,” I told Duwayne. “You hear the horn, haul me down. Then we get out of there as fast as we can.”

I wondered if Duwayne knew about “danger pay” in the foreign service. I think the concept was getting through to him.

But he was a positive thinker. “You ready, little bro? You cool?”

“I be cool. You be cool?”

“You gonna wear them sneaks? They grip good enough?”

“Thanks, man, I forgot.” I wrestled out of my sneakers, dug my Voodoo climbers out of the gear bag, laced them in place, and then I got the rest of the gear together: ropes, biners, harnesses, chalk bag, helmet. Duwayne had the belay device clipped to his belt and he carried the crashpad. I put on my harness, and I put on my helmet this time.

“Oh, Billy…” Inez moaned.

I must have looked to her like I was headed into the tunnel with the King Cobra.

I picked up half a dozen more pebbles and put them in my pockets. I looked at my watch as we came through the trees to the birch glade. The sun would rise at 5:10, in six minutes. It was daylight, but over the office door the yellow bulb still glowed.

I pretended I was from the Iroquois tribe. They were the best stalkers east of the Ohio. I don’t know who Duwayne was pretending to be. I guess he was just naturally graceful. We avoided rocks and pebbles, and when we couldn’t avoid them, we stepped on them softly.

We were at the back gate before you knew it. I fished out the key from my pocket, worked it into the lock, and turned it. Open sesame. I moved the gate an inch at a time so that it wouldn’t squeak. When the gate swung open far enough for us to slide through, I gave Duwayne a thumbs-up sign. We were inside.

I looked up for Amy. I’d told her to be at the window and to be ready, but I didn’t see her. But it’s hard to see much inside a window in daylight. I stopped a few seconds and looked for movement, a sign. I had told her I’d be there at first light. Maybe when first light came and then went, she decided that I’d changed my mind, and she’d gone back to bed.

The brick wall looked good. There were all those pits, scars, and dents. And then, not too far up, the bars of the second floor windows. I knew I’d have to be silent when I got to that second-floor level. Stevie and Jimmy were sleeping up there.

I slung the ropes over my shoulder, clipped the plate to the harness, and chalked up while Duwayne spread the crashpad. This would be the hard part, the first part, the free climbing. Duwayne studied my equipment, making sure everything was in place. My feet sank comfortably into the foam of the crashpad. I dug into the first handhold and began the climb. Slow and steady. One limb at a time. Plan ahead. Stay centered. I used the inside edge of my left shoe and found a good foothold on top of a slab of rock that formed a foundation for the brick. Fingers bent at the middle joint, thumb pressing hard over the index finger to make the grip strong. One more inside-edge foothold where the bricks were broken, and I wrapped my fingers around a window bar. Just in time. The ropes slung over my head and shoulders felt like they weighed a hundred pounds. I hauled up, and I peered in.

I was looking into the little living room, where Amy had slept on the convertible sofa before she ran away with me and got jailed on the third floor behind the locked gate. No one was there. The room was empty. I needed good luck today and this was it.

One of my ropes was already clipped to my harness. I looped it around the bars of the window and lowered it to Duwayne. He attached it to the plate and clipped that to his own harness. I was on belay.

I still needed a way to get higher. I needed help. That’s what I had tried to tell Amy the night before. Climbing up this far I’d had good holds in the old stone, but above me now there was only yellow brick. There were ridges between the bricks, but the wall was straight up. If I tried to climb it, I would fall. If I had a rope to hang on to, I could do it. I needed Amy.

Bracing my feet against the wall, I held to the bar, dug into my pocket with the other hand, and pulled out a pebble. I tossed it up toward Amy’s window.

I must have missed. Tom Egan could have done it, I thought. Better yet, Duwayne, because it was more like a hook shot than a fastball over the plate, but for me this wasn’t easy. I shifted the ropes to my left shoulder. I tossed another pebble up, harder this time, and overshot.

The next shot struck home
.
And the next. The pebbles flew through Amy’s open window.

I waited a full minute more, and then, pale and sleepy-looking, she leaned out, staring down at me, wide-eyed.

“Billy!”

“Shhh.”

“What are you doing?”

“Come to get you.”

“How’d you get up there?”

“I climbed. I told you I’d do it.”

“You told me what? Hey, you know you hit me with a rock? I was asleep. It hit me in the ear.”

“I’m sorry.”

Great shot, I thought. Perfect. This was working just the way I’d planned it.

“You’re not bleeding, are you, Amy?”

“No, but it kind of shocked me.”

“It was only a pebble. I wanted to let you know I was here. I said I was coming. Yesterday I said it. With my friend Duwayne. I said at first light.”

“You said what?”

“Amy, I can’t shout, I don’t want to wake anyone. I can’t do this alone. You have to help me. Okay?”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Well, okay.”

She didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

I told her what I wanted her to do. It was called toproping. And I wanted her to hurry, because I was getting tired hanging on to the bars. The trouble was, the bars didn’t feel as strong as I’d hoped. They felt loose in the concrete they’d been set into when the old jail had been built.

I got a good grip on one of the ropes and reached it up to her, and she reached down for it. But not quite far enough. She couldn’t grab hold of it.

“Can you lean out more, Amy?”

“I’ll fall.”

“Is there something you can hang onto with your other hand?”

“There’s a bed. My bed. An iron bed.”

“Cool. Make sure you hold tight.”

I didn’t want her leaning out so far that she fell on my head and got us both killed.

She leaned out and down, got her fingers on the rope, and pulled it up.

“Awesome. Now, here’s what you do.” I told her to pull her bed snug up against the window, slowly and as quietly as she could, try not to scrape the legs on the floor, then loop the rope around the leg of the bed and lower the end of the rope to me.

“Can you do that?”

She did it. I clipped the loose end of the rope to my harness along with the other end, gave it a slow tug, and when it was almost taut, so that I still had slack, I climbed the wall. It wasn’t far, but my blood was beating bongos in my ears.

I wriggled in through the window and into Amy’s room.

There was nothing in that room except a single cot with iron legs, around one of which my rope was tightly looped, and a bridge table, a cardboard box with clothes in it, a basin, a pitcher full of water, and a chamberpot. And Amy.

“Billy, I can’t believe you got up here.”

Neither could I now that I was there. “Amy, this is terrible. This is a prison cell.”

“Gross, isn’t it?”

“It’s like
The Count of Monte Cristo
. And
The Man in the Iron Mask,
except you’re not being tortured. How could he do this to you?”

“He’s punishing me.”

“For running away?”

“And for the other.”

“What other?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. What other?”

“Come on, Billy.”

I understood. I lost my breath for a few seconds. I felt myself flushing. “You told him?”

“Yeah. I was pissed off at him.”

“But — you—”

“And he kept asking me if we did it. So I told him, yeah, we did it.”

I couldn’t think about that now. “Amy, we’re getting out of here.”

“How?”

“Down the rope. The way I came up.”

“No way.”

“You can do it, believe me. I’ll show you.”

“No.”

“Don’t be scared.”

“But I
am
scared. And what then? Billy, what do you want to do?”

“I told you. I have a plan. Listen.”

I explained it all to her.

Amy frowned. “But that’s the same as the last time.”

“Yes, except now I won’t tell my parents where we are. And I’ll only e-mail them. You can’t dig an e-mail out of the garbage. Amy, you said you’d do it.”