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

by Clifford Irving

  “From Inez.”

  “I’m at the top of Aspen Highlands. It’s starting to snow.”

  My dad cut in and said, “We’ll meet you at the restaurant mid-mountain, Billy. Don’t be long.” He was wearing a black ski suit, Simon was in red, and Ginger in white. It was easy to see them winding their way down the run.

  “Wherever you are,” Amy said, “can you call me back? I have no more quarters.” She was in a phone booth outside Ashawagh Hall in Springs. She gave me the number, then hung up.

  The black, red, and white ski suits were almost out of sight. I poled over to the edge of the run, out of the way of the skiers flying down at me, and used the cell to call Amy back.

  I listened to what she had to say. It took a long time. Fat snowflakes started to fly around me and my toes turned cold in my boots. The cell phone connection from 10,000 feet wasn’t great.

  Amy said, “I’m scared. He hit Ginette again. Tries to… I don’t want… Last night he said, ‘I’ll kill you, bitch.’”

  “To Ginette?”

  “No, to me.”

  “To you?” I knew Carter was crazy. “Why is he angry at you?”

  “Because I don’t let him tell me what to do anymore. Can you get me out of here?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I can do it.” I don’t know where that came from, but it was from somewhere deep inside me and I couldn’t stop it. “Can I call you back later?”

  “Ten o’clock tonight. And don’t tell anyone what I told you. Promise.”

  I promised. After she broke the connection I stuffed the phone into my pants pocket. I was in a daze, thinking about everything she’d said, trying to make sense of it. When the wind kicked up I wiped fresh snow from my goggles, grabbed my poles and started downhill.

  I’d forgot to zip up the pocket where I’d put the cell phone, and I decided it was safer to change it over to an inside pocket. To do all that I’d have to take off my mittens. I should have cut across to the tree line, where I wouldn’t be in anybody’s way, but instead I blazed a hockey stop in the middle of the run. I wasn’t thinking.

  A skier came flying over a bump. I never saw him, and he didn’t see me, either, not until it was too late.

  The phone flew up, like that baboon bone at the beginning of 2001, landing in the snow among the aspen trees. I flew up, too. I felt all the air was leaving my lungs, driven out by some mysterious force. Uuuuhhhh. Ooooohhhh. I heard those sounds and didn’t realized I was the one making them.

  I landed face-down in packed powder. The world spun around nonstop, multi-colored stars shone all over the place… and soon my head hurt.

  Chapter 17

  Simon was already chomping at a cheeseburger and a double order of fries with half a bottle of ketchup poured over them. In the cold air on the deck of the Merry-Go-Round restaurant halfway up the slopes of Aspen Highland, my dad was chatting away happily to Ginger Casey.

  Fifteen more minutes passed without my arrival, and he got antsy. “Ginger, I’m going up to check on Billy.” Clicking into his bindings, he poled over to the lift, rode back up, and went hunting for me on the upper part of the mountain.

  But where everyone stopped at the head of a steep bump run, he heard someone say, “… this kid who got hit—looked like he was ten, eleven years old if he was a day — he’s tearing down the mountain all alone, and he’s talking all the time on his cell phone. I nearly died laughing. Then he got creamed. I saw it. They took him down on a stretcher.”

  My dad skied back down to the restaurant and ran inside to the ski patrol office. They told him I’d been taken to Aspen Valley Hospital in an ambulance. Nothing life-threatening, they said.

  He asked Ginger to take Simon home. “And if by any chance Diana calls, make sure no one says a word to her about this.” Then he skied down to the base of the mountain so fast it’s a wonder he didn’t wind up as the next guest on the stretcher. A SkiCo van was waiting to take him to Aspen Valley Hospital.

  He found me there, wrapped in ice packs, with a broken nose and broken left wrist. After the X-rays the doctor had given me a local anesthetic and pulled the wrist back straight. They work fast during the ski season because the E.R. gets so crowded with all the blown knees. The other skier, the one who plowed into me, had left a message to say he was sorry, and he’d be in touch. They told me he was a baseball player with the Colorado Rockies. A pitcher, they said. He felt more like a linebacker.

  When the doctor told me it was only a broken nose and wrist, I asked: “Can I still fly to New York tomorrow?”

  “If necessary. We’ll give you something for pain. Excuse me, sir, you can’t come in here—”

  “It’s okay,” I said, “that’s my dad.”

  After he’d cross-examined this young doctor and assured himself that nothing was punctured or shoved out of place inside me, my dad inquired about the whereabouts of his cell phone.

  “It’s somewhere up there in the snow on that ski run. I’m sorry about that, Dad.”

  “I have a question. Were you skiing down the mountain and talking to this girl Amy at the same time?”

  “No way.”

  “Are you sure?” He told me what he’d heard this guy say about my being on the phone while I was skiing.

  I sighed. “That guy’s lying.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “It makes a better story.”

  I could see by the way my dad averted his eyes that he didn’t believe me. The doctor came back in and said, “We’ll put a cast on his wrist and a bandage on his nose. The nose should heal by itself. Keep it iced with packets of frozen peas.”

  On Smuggler Street, upstairs in the master bedroom, my dad made me lie down on the bed with a bag of Birdseye frozen peas on my nose. My mom had flown off to Washington but you could still smell her Chanel Number Five.

  I said, “Dad, can we talk about something serious?”

  “What is it, Billy? Do you want to change your story about the cell phone?”

  “That story is true, Dad.”

  “Why did Amy call?”

  “I promised not to tell. But I have to fly back to Amagansett tomorrow.”

  After a short silence he said, “Please say that last bit again.”

  “I said that I have to fly back to Amagansett tomorrow morning.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Amy’s in trouble, and she needs me.”

  My dad sighed. “What exactly do you mean by ‘trouble’?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He picked up a pen from the table and began tapping it on the arm of the easy chair. “If you want me to help,” he said, “I need facts. I require a modicum of honesty and trust.”

  “I don’t want you to help me, Dad. I mean, I do — later — but not now. I can do this part myself. I just want to fly back home tomorrow.”

  My dad shook his head in what seemed to be mild amazement. “We’re not changing our travel plans because your girlfriend is in some kind of unnamed trouble and you think she needs your physical presence.”

  “I didn’t ask you to change your plans, Dad. I just want to change mine. Don’t you trust me? Don’t you think I have a good reason to want to go?”

  He let out a soft sigh. “I’m quite sure that you think it’s a good reason. But since I don’t know what it is, I can’t even consider it. I do trust you, but you don’t seem to trust me. What kind of trouble? Are the police involved? Is she afraid of the consequences of something she’s done?”

  My dad had a lot of practice in getting the truth out of people. On a car trip, whenever we played Twenty Questions, he always reached the answer before anyone else.

  “No police,” I said. “And I gave her my word I wouldn’t tell. You know what that means.”

  “And I respect it. But sometimes there are extenuating circumstances.”

  “Where you can break your word of honor?”

  He looked at the ceiling. “I’m arguing with a twelve-year-ol
d.”

  That was familiar. Carter Bedford had said pretty much those same words in October, when I was eleven.

  My dad took a deep breath. “Billy, you’re a good young person, and you want to help your friend Amy. When you get home, you’ll have that opportunity. But you can’t just go galloping back tomorrow like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. If Amy’s in trouble, she has parents who can help her. When you say she’s…” — he blanched. “Good God, you don’t mean that kind of trouble?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I said so.

  “Billy, is she pregnant?”

  I was so astonished that I could hardly get my breath. The air swelled up from my lungs and filled my throat.

  “No,” I said, when I recovered. “Not pregnant. Not. She’s only twelve.”

  Aunt Harriet called from downstairs. “Jack, are you up there? Jack, dear, telephone call for you. Your partner? An Englishwoman? Doreen Drewett?”

  “In a minute, Harriet. Billy, we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Dad, I need to talk to you this evening.”

  “I’m going out to dinner with some attorneys from my firm. If you want to ask about flying back early to New York, the answer is still no. Please understand, this is for your own good.”

  That’s the one they always fall back on when they’ve run out of arguments or time.

  He yelled: “Coming, Harriet! Tell her to hold on!”

  Everyone was in the den waiting for me. “You can’t write on these fancy casts,” said Uncle Eli, “like you could on plaster in the old days. I once broke —” There was a shout behind him. He turned, bellowing: “I missed it! My nephew breaks his goddamned wrist and I miss the go-ahead touchdown in the Rose Bowl!”

  After the game my dad cooked turkey and scrambled eggs for me. That was one of his favorites; I think his dad used to cook it in the Bronx on Sunday nights. No one really liked it much, but no one could ever convince my dad of that.

  “Everybody’s going out this evening” he explained, “except Nana. If you need her, yell loud. I’ll look in on you when I get home. That might be late.”

  “Don’t you have a few minutes now, Dad?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, resigned.

  This was the wrong time, of course, but I was desperate, and I blurted out my plan:

  “Dad, can Amy come and live with us?”

  He looked blank for a few seconds. Then he raised his eyebrows. “Live? As in move in? On Oak Lane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?“

  “Yes, move in. In a room of her own. Like, on the third floor. Those rooms we never use.”

  “For how long?”

  “For good,” I said.

  “Billy, you can’t be serious.”

  “That’s what she said when I first suggested it. I said, ‘Amy, you could live in our house.’ She went, ‘Are you crazy?’ And I went, ‘It’s unusual, but it’s not crazy.’ And I still say that. Why is it crazy? Here’s this girl, has a drugged-up mother and a lunatic father, so she’d rather go and live somewhere else. You can’t blame her. Naturally her mother and father may not like it, but they don’t own her. Doesn’t she have the right to go where she wants to go, as long as it’s not some dark alley where she’ll starve? I mean, we have a comfortable home, we’re a family, and I’m her best friend. If it costs money, I’ll pay for it. You can invade the trust again. Amy wants to lead a decent life. What’s wrong with that?” I took a deep breath; then I summed up. “Dad, I really would like her to live with us, and I know she would like it, too, and I hope you and Mom will say yes.”

  He placed both his palms together and was tapping his fingertips against his nose. Then he lowered his hands but he couldn’t help tapping his palms together a few more times. My dad was a tapper.

  “Billy, what you want is not going to happen. I’ll treat your request seriously, even though it’s childish, and tell you that if we did what you asked, if we took your friend Amy in to live with us, we would be breaking the law. She’s a minor child. You asked me if her parents owned her. No, they don’t own her. But they’re her legal guardians. “

  “What if they’re lousy parents?” I asked.

  A dry chuckle came from deep in his chest. “Too many people would fit into that category.”

  “But she wants to leave them. She’s unhappy.”

  “what she wants is not at issue,” my dad said. “Also, unfortunately, neither is her unhappiness. You can’t take a child away from her legal guardians simply because the child’s unhappy and wants to leave. Well, you can, but it’s illegal. You may not. If Carter Bedford and his wife neglected this girl, starved her, abused her, she could go to Child Protective Services and seek foster care. But she won’t be allowed to leave home just because she says, ‘I hate it there. I want to live with my good buddy Billy Braver-man.’” He grunted. “Be sensible, Billy. You’re a very bright kid. Show it. Go beyond your feelings.”

  I wasn’t sure that was the right place to go. But we were in his territory, going at it his way.

  “Dad, I have to tell you something…”

  I had to break my word of honor. I’d never done that in my whole life. I had to do it in order to help Amy. You try to keep your honor, but life tricks you.

  “Her little brother didn’t stab her,” I said. “It was her mother. Her name is Ginette. Ginette locked Amy in a closet for two days without water or food and without anything to use as a toilet, and when she let Amy out, she was crazy mad and she stabbed her. They made Amy say that Jimmy did it.”

  My dad shook his head a few times, as if he doubted the truth of what I was telling him. He glanced at his watch. His law partner was waiting for the rascal.

  He asked, “How do you know all this, Billy?”

  “Amy told me.”

  “But why?” he demanded. “Why did the mother stab her? If you know.”

  “Amy won’t tell me. She said, ‘Don’t make me tell you.’” I looked into my dad’s nervous eyes. “Now can she stay?”

  “No, she can’t, Billy.”

  I sat up on the bed. “I just told you what happened.”

  “And she still can’t stay.”

  “You said if she was abused in any way—”

  “If the New York State Office of Children and Family Services investigated her case and found that she was abused, they could shelter her. And place her. But we can’t.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. It reminded me right away how Carter did that to me when he had the Airweight in one hand.

  I said, “Dad, I have one more thing to tell you.”

  He looked again at his watch.

  I told him about Carter on my birthday, and the words he’d used to me, and what he’d done with his pistol to me in the truck on the way back to town.

  Now my dad stared at me as if I’d told him the moon was made of green cheese. “You’re telling the truth? You’re not making this up?”

  How could he doubt me?

  “Carter Bedford put a loaded pistol to your face?”

  “Here.” I touched my lower lip. “Now do you understand?”

  He looked nearly apoplectic; his face was the color of red wine.

  “Now do you see why Amy has to leave there?”

  “Amy… Jesus… Amy? Never mind Amy. Good God. Billy, how do you know the pistol was loaded?”

  He was always logical, always trying to assemble the parts of the puzzle. I told him about Carter taking target practice in the woods, and how he knocked down a branch with real bullets.

  My dad seemed to have trouble speaking, and his breath quickened. He said, “This man is a goddam maniac.”

  “Exactly. You’ve got it. That’s why Amy has to leave.”

  “He cast racial slurs at you?”

  “Yeah. Not just Jewboy. Smartass city Jewboy.”

  My dad looked puzzled. “Am I missing a point?”

  “Dad, don’t you believe that Amy needs our help?”

/>   “Billy, this is scary. I need to think about this. Meanwhile, I have a dinner date. I’ll be home late, but tomorrow morning we’ll talk. I cannot let this go unresolved. This man is a menace.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to me. “A gun in my son’s face. Jesus Christ.” He focused on me again. “We’ll take whatever action is necessary. Necessary, practical, and legal.”

  “Will you think about what I asked you about Amy?”

  “I said that tomorrow morning, Billy, we’ll talk.”

  “I heard you. I just asked you to think about it, like, between now and then.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Have fun with your law partner, Dad.”

  “Partners,” he said.

  Nana fell asleep in front of the TV, and I went into the master bedroom upstairs and opened the drawers of the bedside tables until I found all the airline tickets with a rubber band around them. I called United Airlines, and they told me that the flights from Denver to Islip the next day were full but if I went standby I’d have a fair chance to get on. The flight from Aspen to Denver, however, would be difficult. There were standbys listed on all flights all day long. Chances weren’t good.

  At eight o’clock sharp, keeping in mind the time difference between the Rocky Mountains and the east coast, I dialed the number of the telephone booth in front of Ashawagh Hall. No answer. I waited two minutes and dialed again.

  “Billy?”

  “Whew. I was worried for a while. Amy, are you all right?”

  “Can you come back?”

  “The flights are full. I have to fly standby.”

  “What’s that?”

  I was too upset by everything else to explain it to her. I said, “Look, I’ll get there somehow. I have to change planes in Denver, and then I have to get from Islip to Amagansett. I don’t have much cash here with me. I broke my wrist. My nose, too. I look weird. My eyes are turning black and blue.”

  “Gross. How’d that happen?”

  “This baseball pitcher crashed into me on the mountain.” I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing again. If Aspen airport got socked in, the planes might not even fly. “Listen, Amy, I’ll be back as soon as I can and as fast as I can.”

  “I’m sorry I was so mean to you after your birthday. He made me do it.”