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

by Clifford Irving

  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.”

  “And I risked a lot to win Iphigenia.”

  “three hundred euros isn’t even five hundred dollars.”

  His head went up, an animal scenting danger. “You know the exchange rate?”

  “Just guessing.”

  “Nineteen hundred bucks, and you own a rare jungle animal.”

  “Why don’t we play something for her?” I said.

  “Play something?”

  “A game.”

  “Like… gamble?” He blinked. “Are you kidding? You been hanging out at Jewish golf clubs? You want to risk your whole stash? “

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “You won her in a poker game, didn’t you?”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  I can ask “why?” and “why not?” ten times in a row and drive anyone mad.

  “I can’t do it to you,” he said, patting my cheek in the manner of favorite uncles and mafia dons.

  “You’re scared that an eleven-year-old kid can beat you at something?”

  His black eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to take advantage. You’re my nephew. What game did you have in mind?”

  I opened the door to my closet. My life stared back at me. Pretty messy in there.

  “You name it,” I said.

  Uncle Bernie offered a monologue on the skill and luck involved in chess, checkers, parcheesi, Monopoly, gin rummy and pinochle, seven-card stud and Texas hold ‘em poker, rejecting them all for one reason or another. Then he said, “Is that a backgammon board I see in the corner? Over there by your old Leggo?”

  “Yeah, but I just learned how to play. Aunt Grace gave it to me and forgot to teach me. I’m not even sure how to set up the men. I get confused about which direction to move them.”

  “Me, too. So we’re even.”

  He didn’t dare look me in the eyes.

  I asked, “Do you call them men, or pieces, or checkers?”

  “I don’t know.” Uncle Bernie shrugged. “Two out of three games. Your nineteen hundred against Iphigenia.”

  “Well…”

  “Are you chicken?”

  The directions on how to play were still in the box. Uncle Bernie read them aloud for the benefit of both of us. I let him arrange the checkers on the board.

  I left blots all over the place, so that he hit me a couple of times — “Billy, don’t you think that was just a wee bit careless? Haw, haw, haw” — but he barked like a seal on the wrong end of the harpoon when I came back in off the bar and starting hitting his own blots, and before he knew it I had a six-point prime that he couldn’t fight his way past. I won that game. His eyes narrowed again; he began to sweat. I thought of throwing him a game but decided that would be a mistake. I won the second game. “Beginner’s luck,” I explained.

  He glared at me. “You scheming runt. You knew how to open. You played a back game like a pro.”

  I felt that old sting of guilt that always makes you do things you shouldn’t do.

  “I won her,” I said. “But I’ll give you nine hundred dollars cash if you tell me how to take care of her.”

  “It’s a deal,” Uncle Bernie said. “Pygmy Green Rhesus monkeys pick up a human virus, like a common cold, they go into a kind of paralysis. In Florence I caught the grippe. She went into spasms. I had to find a vet to give her a Vitamin B-complex shot. In half a minute she was good as new.”

  The next day, in Village Hardware, I bought a bird cage for her to live in. Then Uncle Bernie took me and Simon to lunch at a deli on Main Street. He ordered tongue on rye and a cream soda. Simon had a hamburger swimming in ketchup, and a double-thick chocolate malted. I said to the waitress: “I’d like a cottage cheese sandwich on whole wheat, with sprouts, arugula, and sliced tomatoes. And a sour pickle. And a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.”

  Uncle Bernie stared at me. “What’s the matter with corned beef and hot pastrami?”

  “I don’t eat meat. I saw this special on late-night TV, how they butcher animals. They have to kill one cow every ten seconds, so if they fall behind they cut them up while they’re still alive. The Mexican guys in this slaughterhouse in Nebraska clean out vats of blood. The hydrogen sulfide fumes make them vomit. Five guys died.”

  “Anything else?” the waitress asked.

  “Can I have a side order of anchovies?”

  Uncle Bernie said, “Billy, if you knew how those poor fish get skinned before they get shoved into the tin, you’d never eat one again.”

  I ordered them and ate them. No matter what your principles, you can always find reasons to do the things you want to do. I knew that even then.

  Uncle Bernie went off to the city to battle his way past the primes of the art world. I thought my mom might give me a hard time about owning a monkey, but she decided that it would be good for me to have a pet. I once had a poodle who got run over by a Sears delivery truck, and when I was nine we had a one-eyed cat named Cyclops, but he ran away because Simon tied Heineken beer cans to his tail.

  My mom said, “If
you’ll take the monkey for a rabies booster shot immediately, and keep her cage clean, you can keep her.”

  What I didn’t tell her and my dad was that whenever they weren’t home, and that was most of the time, Iphigenia had the run of the house. She liked to search for bugs in the Persian carpets and sleep in table lamps close to a hot bulb, and when I did my homework she perched on my head and groomed me. She was showing her affection for me by cleaning out my lice. She weighed twelve ounces so I hardly felt her weight. She had miniature humanlike fingers, as long and as thick and as dark as the part of my dad’s eyeglasses that go over his ears. She poked nonstop, and sometimes my eyes glazed and I fell asleep over algebra problems while she scratched away in a desperate search for what was never there.

  I soon figured out when she needed to pee and I would put her in the cage above a tub of cat litter. In the crapping mode she dumped hard pea-sized pellets in the corners of rooms. The pellets didn’t smell and were easy to get rid of.

  Simon hated her, but he was out all the time with other teen-aged thugs in black leather windbreakers. Iphigenia showed her teeth if Simon came within three feet of her. One evening he swatted her with a rolled-up copy of The New Yorker — she scampered out of the den and hid under the living room sofa. When I called Simon a sadistic motherfucker, he grabbed Vogue and hit me twice on the side of the head.

  Iphigenia stayed under the sofa for two hours and I could get her out only by offering her a piece of hard candy.

  The next morning, when I unlocked her cage, she flew straight into Simon’s room like a thirteen-ounce greenish-brown missile launched from a silo. Simon was still half asleep. Iphigenia leaped up on his pillow and bit him on the nose. Her teeth were tiny but they were sharp.

  Inez had to drive Simon to the doctor. Luckily I’d kept my promise and taken Iphigenia to the vet for her rabies booster shot.

  Which brings me to the subject of her diet and the beginning of my career.

  Iphigenia ate fruit and insects. She liked to catch moths and crunch them in her jaws like popcorn. But most of all, starting with the day Simon swatted her, she enjoyed hard candy. She seemed to have a gut made of steel. She was always trying to get me to go halfies with her, and one day when I teased her with a cherry Life-Saver and then popped it into my mouth, she jumped on top of my head, reached down with her little claws, pried my lips apart like she was a diamond hunter and had found the mother lode, then poked inside next to my tongue, grabbed the Life-Saver with her claws and hauled it out. Her starred eyes blazed with pleasure.