Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller

by Clifford Irving

  “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.

  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.