Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (5 page)

My mom put a hand to her mouth. She cried: “Billy… !”

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s someone else’s blood.”

My dad was in the den, working on a brief in defense of some New Jersey nursing home company that the government was alleging had cheated big-time on its taxes, but through an open window he heard my mom’s gasp. He strode out to the pool. He was calm — he was always calm. He was dressed in khaki shorts with a dozen pockets and a bright yellow biking shirt.

In a level voice he said, “What’s up, folks?”

We sat by the pool, and I told them the story, and my dad asked a lot of questions.

My mom kept twisting her hands in her lap. “I wonder who her parents are. Do we know any Bedfords? Jack, should we look them up in the phone book? Call them? Be supportive?”

“Her father is the garbage man,” I said. “He comes every Tuesday morning.”

My mom’s eyes widened. “He’s what?”

“The garbage man. His name is Carter. Should I bring the phone book? So you can look him up, Mom, and call him?”

“Is he African-American?”

I laughed. “Amy’s white like a rabbit. Has red hair. So does he, sort of. He’s a Bonacker.”

“Well, maybe we won’t contact them. Don’t interfere,” she said, giving instructions to herself.

I asked if I could call the hospital in Southampton.

“I’ll do that,” said my dad, and he punched through on his cell phone to the desk in the E.R.

“This is Jacob Braverman in Amagansett. I’m an attorney. I’m inquiring about the condition of a patient admitted earlier today. Her name is Amy Bedford. A child of… ?” He looked at me inquiringly.

“Eleven or twelve. Dad, ask if she can have visitors.”

He listened a little longer. “Thank you for your cooperation.” He clicked the phone off, turned to use, and said, “She’s in stable condition. That’s hospitalese for ‘okay.’ They don’t give out details.” His eyes moved to my mom. “Apparently, they’ve already contacted her mother.”

I asked him if I was right that Amy had been stabbed.

“Billy, they didn’t tell me that, and I didn’t think it was appropriate to ask.”

“What about having visitors?”

“I didn’t ask that, either.”

“But I
asked
you to ask, Dad.”

He looked again at my mom, exchanging one of those looks, not longer than two blinks, the way married couples do who believe they speak a secret silent language that no one else can understand. Except, of course, almost everyone else understands quite well.

“Billy,” my mom said, “we don’t think it’s a good idea that you visit this girl in the hospital. The situation is more complicated than you realize.”

My dad continued: “Your mother means that if there was any criminal act, which seems probable, it would be best if you don’t get involved.”

“But I’m already involved,” I said. “I found her. Maybe I saved her life. You know the Chinese believe that if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them forever after. I just want to visit her and bring her something. Like a book, or some flowers.”

“That’s so sweet of you,” my mom said. She leaned over and stroked my leg, the way you pet a cat, or a dog with a wagging tail.

My dad smiled at me with his blue eyes that sometimes were hard as steel and other times were warm as a summer sky. “This girl is a classmate? A particular friend of yours?”

“I’ve only spoken to her once in my life. And then she hit me in the face.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She hit me in the face. She’s weird.”

“But why did she hit you in the face?” my mom asked.

“She never told me.”

My dad looked hard at me. “Did you touch her?”

“On the elbow. To help her into a bus.”

“You’re sure? Just the elbow?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Hand didn’t slip?”

“
No
, Dad.”

“And she’s not your friend?”

“I don’t think she’s got any friends.”

My mom looked dumbfounded. “Then why, for heaven’s sake, Billy, would you want to visit her in Southampton Hospital?”

We heard gravel being tortured, and then the front door slammed. Simon had come skidding home on his bike. He had to hear the story, too, and I obliged. He kept saying, “Holy shit!” and “You’re shitting me, dude!”

My mom made a big arugula salad. My dad grilled his great lean-meat burgers with Stilton, and brought out a special home-made barbecue sauce he’d been given in Florida by the mother of a guy on Death Row.

In the middle of lunch I said, “Well, I’ve got the answer.”

“This is a fabulous sauce,” my mom said. “This could be marketed.”

“I want to visit Amy in the hospital,” I said, “because I want to become her friend.”

My mom’s eyes grew bigger and darker. “Billy! You’re so dogged.”

“Woof woof,” I said.

My dad frowned. “I’m telling you again, we don’t want you to get involved. Is that clear?”

“What about what
I
want?” I asked.

“Wipe your nose, Billy — it’s dripping.” He raised his index finger, which I always think of as the Father Finger. “There’s something we haven’t dealt with. In all the excitement over your finding this bleeding girl on the road — a girl who slapped your face for reasons as yet unknown, or, shall we say, as yet undisclosed — we’ve glossed over one fact. And that is: what were you doing up there at Accabonac Harbor?”

“Climbing Crab Rock.”

He jumped an inch or two in his chair. “By Barnes Landing?”

“Nearer to Louse Point.”

“Billy, I thought we’d agreed on no rock climbing until you were thirteen.”

“That’s more than a year away. I was ready, Dad. “

“You didn’t have time to discuss this with me in advance?”

“You’re never here.”

“I was here this morning.”

“I wanted to get an early start. Supposed to rain this weekend.”

He ground his teeth. “Were you alone?”

“I partnered with this other kid, Duwayne.” I spelled it. “He’s sixteen. He’s a cool dude.”

“Billy,” my mom said, “you’ll send me to an early grave.”

They asked a few more questions, but they forgot to ask if I wore a climbing helmet, and they didn’t know enough about rocks to ask if I’d done any face climbing without ropes or a belay.

My dad reached his conclusion. “This was an abuse of trust. I’ll need your word of honor that you won’t climb any more rocks without first getting permission from me.”

Climbing was all I had, aside from Iphigenia.

“Dad, that’s not fair.”

“It’s fair, it’s reasonable, and it’s life-preserving. Do we have your word?”

“It makes me your slave.”

“It does no such thing. It defines our responsibility for you as our child. You’re only eleven years old. Will you promise? I want a golden handshake.”

I was ready to bawl. I felt the tears working through to my eyes, and I had to bite my lip.

“No.”

He sighed. “In that case, I’m putting your climbing equipment in the attic, and locking the attic. And Inez will not have a key for you to wheedle out of her.”

“You can’t do that.”

One of his children telling him he couldn’t do something was, to my father, a subversive idea. Maybe an alien idea. He raised his eyebrows.

“I can do it, Billy, and I intend to do it.”

I knew he would do it. And if he did that, then I couldn’t even go climbing the indoor wall at the high school gym. For a moment I hated him. They can make you do that. You don’t truly hate them, but they stand in your way. They have the power even if you don’t understand why, and even if you never gave it to them, which of course you never did. You want to be free.

“All right,” I muttered.

My dad bore on. “Does that mean that you give us your word of honor? That you’ll shake on it?”

“I said all right, didn’t I?”

He gave up the idea of the handshake and the word of honor, and said, “Come. Let me hug you.”

“No.”

I ran into the house and then up the stairs. My breath came in short bursts and when I passed the big hall mirror I saw a red face and puffy eyes. I took Iphigenia from her cage and petted her nonstop, and she went
chit-chit-chit —
in her nervous mode, probably because she felt that I was unhappy. I still didn’t cry. I remembered how I’d been frightened halfway up the face of Crab Rock and hadn’t sobbed or called for help. I’d just kept on climbing.

Nothing was going to stop me, ever, from doing what I wanted to do. Call it ego, call it the power of positive thinking, call it lunacy. That’s what I believed.

I looked in the mirror again. I glared at myself. I gritted my teeth. My cheekbones stood out, even in my pudgy face.

“Woof woof,” I said.

Chapter 6

I can’t go on with the story of me and Amy and what happened with Carter Bedford unless I tell you about Iphigenia, and how I won her from my Uncle Bernie, and about her diet, which put my face in thirty million American living rooms.

My mother was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, into what they call a good family. But she has a kid brother, Bernard, who was kicked out of Amherst College, where he studied art and art history, and became a political activist who protested just about everything done by anyone in a position of authority. He discovered that protesting didn’t have much effect on the world, and so he took a small sum of money he’d inherited, grew a beard, and flew across the Atlantic to follow the path of Masacchio and Michelangelo. He lived in a village near Florence in an old farmhouse he shared with chickens and a goat. Now and then he’d fly back to New York and stay with us, and try to find a gallery for his paintings, but after a month or so he always yelled, “Hypocrites! Con men in suits! I’d rather paint watercolors of the Duomo for Kraut tourists. I’m going home. To
bella Toscana.
“ And he’d flee.

My parents took a biking wine tour in Chianti, and they visited Uncle Bernie. When they came home I heard my mom on the telephone to my aunt: “Grace, I went back to the hotel and wept. Our baby brother is out of touch with reality. Jack called his lifestyle ‘squalid.’”

Then, at the age of thirty five, Uncle Bernie made a trip back to the USA, and he smuggled a monkey through Customs at JFK. He’d hidden her in an Adidas gym bag into which he’d cut a mesh window so the monkey could breathe. He took the train out to Amagansett to visit us, and he brought the monkey.

She was greenish-brown in color and had midnight-dark eyes with white four-pointed stars in the center. She was six inches long, and even with an eight-inch tail she weighed less than a pound. She looked like a shrunken imp and her fur felt like clipped mink. I loved Iphigenia at first sight.

Simon, my brother, my torturer, my enemy, three years older than me, took one look at her and wrinkled his nose. He said, “Yuck. Ugly, disgusting, smelly, retarded creature.”

She smelled sweet, actually. And she was anything but retarded.

Iphigenia hissed with surprising violence at Simon, who took off for the cellar and his drums. Iphigenia then gave me an arm’s-length inspection. I widened my eyes, tilted my head, and threw her a goofy smile. She made a noise with her teeth that sounded like a soft
chit
.

“Uncle Bernie, is she trying to talk to me?”

Uncle Bernie, a burly man, wore sandals and a Moroccan djellaba. He lay on our living room couch, and he took up most of it. He had told me that grinding paints and stretching canvases were the only exercises a painter ever needed.

“When she goes
chit
,” he said, “it means she likes you. If she does it a few times in a row,
chit-chit-chit
, it means, ‘Back off, dude, you’re crowding me.’”

“Where does she come from?”

“I won her in a poker game in Siena from a Greek pimp. I filled a flush – I bet three hundred euros. This schmuck thought I was bluffing. He was tapped out, so he put up Iphigenia.” Uncle Bernie chortled.

“How old is she?”

“ Hard to tell. She’s young.”

“And what’s her native habitat and genus?”

“Spanish Guinea in Africa. Pygmy Green Rhesus. Very rare.”

I looked in my Hammond atlas, and on the lighted globe in my room, but I couldn’t find Spanish Guinea. Uncle Bernie followed me, although he grew out of breath climbing the stairs. He explained that those undeveloped countries changed their names all the time. I searched in my Columbia Encyclopedia, my unabridged dictionary, and my zoology books. I found rhesus but not pygmy green.

“Listen, kid,” Uncle Bernie said, “you love to read, and you respect the printed word, but you better understand that books don’t tell you everything there is to know. A lot of them will mess you up. This pygmy monkey is healthy, smart as a whip, and she’s going to help finance the New York phase of my painting career.”

“You’re going to sell her?”

“I have to do it.”

“How much do you want?”

“Out of your league, Billy.”

“I have a lemonade business. I have more money than you think.”

I opened the bottom drawer of the bureau where I kept my socks rolled up in pairs. When I unrolled the argyles I never wore, a summer’s worth of cash spilled out on the carpet. “Nineteen hundred and change,” I said. “I worked hard for it.”