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

by Clifford Irving

  Inez had only a fireplace poker to defend us against a man who owned a gun and might have it out there with him, and who at any moment might break through a window. She said again, “Billy, the man is still out there. You got to call your dad. Ask him what we should do.”

  There was a phone in the third-floor guest room on the bedside table. I dialed the number in Aspen and my dad picked up after one ring.

  “Dad, it’s me.”

  He didn’t yell at me for flying off from Aspen the way I did; he just asked if I was all right. Any more swelling? Any pain? I said I was fine, that Inez had picked me up in the limo.

  I heard the truck’s engine start out in front of the house. It rumbled for a few seconds, then the rumble grew gradually fainter — the truck must have been moving out the driveway. The night was quiet again. Carter was gone.

  I looked at Inez. She heard all the sounds, too, of Carter’s presumed retreat..

  “Hang on a minute, Dad.”

  I buried the phone in a pillow and whispered to Inez: “Go take a look out the window in the big bedroom. Stay in the dark, don’t turn on any lights so he can see you. Make sure he’s not parking the truck on the road and walking back.”

  When Inez vanished, I picked up the phone again.

  My dad asked, “Billy, how did you manage to get from Aspen to Denver?”

  “That pitcher, the guy who crashed into me on the mountain? He had his own plane. He was flying to Texas. He dropped me off in Denver. Uncle Bernie didn’t know anything about it.”

  My dad was silent. As usual, I don’t think he quite believed my story.

  “Amy’s here, Dad. She’s staying over.”

  He said nothing.

  “Billy, please put Inez on.”

  At that moment Inez came back into the bedroom. She gave me the thumbs-up sign, meaning that Carter hadn’t come back. I handed her the phone, and she said, “Hello, Mr. Jack… that’s okay, don’t mention it… he looks good… in the guestroom upstairs… you too, Mr. Jack… I put him on.”

  She handed the phone back to me.

  “Billy,” my dad said, “there are a number of unanswered questions, but I don’t believe this is the right hour to get into them. I’m trusting you to behave responsibly. Is that clear?”

  Clear, and vague enough to suit me. I wondered why he hadn’t said he was flying straight back. That’s what I was afraid he’d do. Maybe it was because his law partners had flown out there to Aspen.

  “I love you, Billy.”

  “I love you, too, Dad.”

  “Give my regards to your friend Amy.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  I hung up, turned to Inez, and said, “You didn’t tell him about Carter.”

  “The man took off, didn’t he? I don’t want to make your papa worry any more than he got to.” She bit her knuckles. “You think I should have told him?”

  “No. You did the right thing, Inez.”

  “If he comes back, the door-banger, whatever his name is, I got to call the police.”

  “All right.”

  Amy finished the last Pepperidge Farm cookie and said, “He won’t come back tonight. He starts work at six. It’s already one o’clock. He likes his sleep.”

  Inez gave Amy a pair of my flannel pajamas, a new toothbrush, and a set of towels, and showed her where things were in the bathroom. Inez asked: “How long you stay out there in the garden?”

  Amy shrugged. “Since about seven thirty. I squeezed through the hedges. I heard Carter come the first time. Then I heard him go. I was going to ask you if I could, like, wait inside, but you took off in that limo. So I waited. I thought, well, this is it. If I freeze, so what? I’m not afraid to die.”

  “You’re a brave girl. How did your papa know you were here?”

  “He knew there was nowhere else I could go.”

  Inez pressed Amy’s hand. “Take a hot bath, chica.”

  We were all exhausted, but it was hard to sleep with so much that had happened and so much to worry about. I lay in the dark, listening in case Carter came back, looking out the window at the cold stars, and then looking up at the ceiling of my room, and thinking about the fact that Amy was asleep just over my head. And my dad knew about it, and he hadn’t told me to kick her out in the morning. I thought it was all going to work out, if we could keep Carter at bay. I thought of him as an animal at bay. A wounded animal, and all the more dangerous for it.

  I woke early. Amy, worn out, slept till eleven. Carter didn’t come hammering round again and he didn’t call. It was another wicked cold day, colder than Colorado, the sun pale in a pale sky, and the air grabbing at your lungs if you stepped outside. My dad called at nine o’clock: he didn’t say a word about Amy, or ask if she was still there; he just wanted to be sure I felt okay. I said, “Inez is going to teach us to cook sesame-crusted spring chicken and veggies with couscous.”

  He didn’t comment on the us.

  Immediately after that my mom called from Virginia, where she was staying at a congresswoman’s house. I could tell she knew everything but she didn’t mention Amy or my bolting from Aspen.

  “Keep warm, Billy, and save some room on your cast for me to draw a heart.”

  “Okay, Mom. I love you.”

  I went upstairs at eleven thirty and found Amy in the bathrobe that Inez had given her, a white towel wrapped around her hair, and her face looking pale and shiny and freshly scrubbed. She was wandering around, inspecting the house, which had a lot of ups and downs and small walnut staircases under eaves. “You could get lost around here,” she said.

  We rugged up, and Inez took us in her Honda to shop at Gristedes. Inside Gristedes I peered down each aisle, kind of hiding behind the cart, until Amy bent to my ear and said, “He shops at the A & P.”

  When we got back again to Oak Lane together we brought in a bunch of wood from the pile on the back porch. I made a fire the way my dad had taught me, stacking the grate with slivers of Georgia pine soaked in pitch, and then some driftwood, and oak logs on top of that. It roared up. In a minute or two it crackled, and pieces of red ash snapped and bounced against the fire screen.

  Amy said, “It’s like in a movie, Billy.”

  She gazed into the flames. You could drift away.

  “Amy, what happened after my birthday?”

  “Carter said you were a bad influence. If I hung out with you, I’d start to want things I couldn’t have. He said I’d be unhappy. And he’d punish me if he caught me seeing you again.”

  Amy kept her eyes on the flames. The logs crackled and glowed.

  “Do you want to stay here with me on Hedges Lane, Amy?”

  She nodded, and said, “Yes.”

  “Live here?” My heart beat with rapid throbs.

  I could see the flames dancing in her eyes. She didn’t speak, she didn’t move her head at all. Not yes, not no.

  “Amy, I need to know.”

  Still nothing.

  Then I got it. She wanted me to answer it for her.

  I could promise, I could be a hero and tell her, “Leave it to me, Amy, I’ll take care of everything.” But maybe I couldn’t take care of everything. Maybe I didn’t have the power. Sometimes I felt old enough to do it all. Other times I felt like I was flying down a wild white river and there was no branch to hang on to, and everything rushed at me so fast.

  “Will you tell me why Ginette stabbed you?” I asked.

  Amy didn’t say anything.

  I said: “You know why, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Amy said.

  “Then why?”

  “Don’t make me tell you that, Billy.”

  I went back to gazing into the fire with her.

  That day that Amy told me more about Ginette.

  Her father was a GI in Vietnam. After he returned to America, Ginette’s mother died in a land mine explosion and Ginette was placed in an orphanage. The orphanage was run by nuns — her vanished father gave money to send Ginette to this nun’s school
. But he wanted no part of her. And by the time she was sixteen she was on a list of Vietnamese orphan girls who had American fathers, had been educated by nuns, spoke acceptably good English, and were willing to be mail-order brides for American men who didn’t have the time to find a wife any other way. Or maybe the men liked the idea of getting a young Asian wife who would look up to them as someone who saved their lives, and who would clean the house and not give them any lip about women’s rights. With other women, Ginette was flown over from Vietnam in an Air Force transport plane to marry a Portuguese-American fisherman who worked out of the Montauk docks.

  “She showed me a picture of him,” Amy said. “He had hair all over his body like a gorilla.”

  The fisherman, also a Vietnam vet, smoked cigar-sized joints and drank half a bottle of brandy every night after dinner, and when he was stoned he beat Ginette and spanked her with a paddle so that there were times when she couldn’t sit down except on a pillow with a hole in the center.

  Amy said, “He got her hooked. The grass, the blow, the booze. And then—good luck, I guess — he got drowned at sea. He had some insurance, so Ginette bought the RV.”

  But she was in trouble because she hadn’t been married with the dead fisherman long enough to get her green card, and was still on what INS called probation. They talked about sending her back to Vietnam. She needed money for a lawyer.

  “She became a hooker,” Amy said. “You know what that is, Billy?”

  I told Amy that General “Fighting Joe” Hooker of the Union Army had defended Washington D.C. against the confederacy. “He didn’t want his troops to be lonely, so he put these girls in houses that the soldiers could visit, and they were called ‘Hooker girls.’”

  “Mrs. Ostrow never mentioned that.”

  “They only tell you what they want you to know,” I said. “The rest you have to find out for yourself.”

  Carter had a job at the yacht club when he met Ginette. He was a drinker too but he got Ginette to go to AA meetings, and he went with her. For a while they both did the twelve-step program and cut back on the sauce, and she cut out the drugs. They got married, and she got her green card, and in five more years she had American citizenship.

  Ginette was only thirty-three when I met her. She looked the other side of forty.

  Amy said, “You want to know how I got my name? When she got together with Carter, for a while she kept hooking. He didn’t know that. She gets pregnant, and she thinks it’s by Carter but she forgets a lot that happens so she isn’t absolutely a hundred per cent sure. They told her it’d be a girl, and one of her friends goes, ‘You should call the kid Amnesia. That’s the Greek goddess of forgetting. And if you want to you can call her Amy for short.’

  “Then one day Mrs. Metzger asked me how I got my name. I told her what Carter always told me, that I was named for a Greek goddess. Mrs. Metzger goes, “No goddess, it’s a medical term, just means loss of memory.’ And I’m, like, ‘Thanks a lot, Mrs. Metzger. You made my day.’”

  The cold spell ended the next morning and we walked the Nature Trail off Davids Lane. We watched the muskrats digging tunnels in the banks of Hook Pond and tracked mallards in the reeds. When we came home I played a video of the Marx Brothers that made Amy squeal with joy. I gave her a drawing pad and colored pencils. She drew. Later we played word games.

  “Billy, you’re so clever.”

  “But I can’t draw like you. Would you teach me to do that?”

  “It’s easy. Just have to pick up a pencil and start.”

  “Well, it’s exactly the same thing with the stuff that I know.”

  “Billy, I need some clothes.”

  We biked through the slush to the Bargain Box on Main Street. When rich men died, the widows brought all their suits and shoes into the store, and if kids like Amy and me came in, the Ladies Village Improvement Society ladies practically gave the sweaters and skirts away. We filled up a small suitcase and it cost me twenty dollars. One of the sweaters that fit Amy was gray cashmere.

  “Didn’t you ever shop here before?” I asked.

  “Carter wouldn’t let me. He goes, ‘My kids don’t wear hand-me-downs from strangers.’ He took us to Wal-Mart and Target.”

  Something had been nagging at me for a long time, ever since my mom had said that Amy was “coarse.”

  “Amy, would you do me a favor? Don’t say ‘he goes’ or ‘he went.’ Or, ‘he’s like.’ Say, ‘he said.’”

  “Oh, like, you mean, don’t talk, like, dumb? Talk proper? Like, not like a Valley girl?”

  “You know that you’re doing it?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “So, like, for my sake, could you go, ‘I said’ and ‘he said.’?

  With a gloved hand, from my bike to hers, on Egypt Lane, she blew me a kiss.

  On Saturday my dad and Simon left Aspen to hook up with my mom at Islip airport and all come home together in a limo. At nine o’clock that night Inez started to heat up a seafood lasagna, bubbly and crispy around the edges, which she’d prepared that afternoon. We heard the limo crunch over the gravel. Car doors slammed.

  My dad shook Amy’s hand and my mom gave her a peck on both cheeks. They were all happyface and “Nice to see you again,” and “We hope you’ve been comfortable while you were here…” Amy was friendly in return. Simon shook her hand.

  My mom, who noticed everything and needed to know everything, said, “I love your sweater, Amy. It’s cashmere, isn’t it?”

  “Billy bought it for me. Five bucks. Feel it.”

  Soon they were gobbling up the seafood lasagna and asking Inez all about her trip to Barcelona. Simon, Amy, and I got ready for bed after my mom had given my arm and nose a good inspection and decided that I was going to live. She kissed me goodnight, and she and my dad retired to the den.

  It’s a beginning, I thought. It wasn’t difficult to go from there to: I think it’s going to work. And from there to: I can hardly believe it, but it’s going to work.

  Chapter 20

  I woke at six in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. At a quarter to seven I dressed in warm clothes and headed downstairs for the kitchen. Whatever other problems I had, I was still growing, and so I was hungry. But when I passed the den I saw that my dad was already hunched over behind his desk. He wore a white Irish sweater and his thick corduroys; he had pencil in hand and the familiar yellow legal pad in front of him. The stereo was playing some Italian opera, but so low that you could barely hear it even when you stood at the sliding doors.

  He peered at me over his black-framed reading glasses. “Come on in, kid. Close the doors behind you.”

  “Dad, you only had a few hours sleep. Aren’t you beat?”

  “I have work to do.”

  “Is this the nursing home case?”

  “No, I’m writing an appeal that I hope will get a man off Death Row.”

  I forgot about being hungry and sat down on the couch near the desk, where we usually sat to watch movies on the big screen TV.

  “What did he do?”

  “Allegedly shot an old woman for a fake pearl necklace. That’s what my client, Santiago, confessed to. Later he said, ‘The police kept me awake for three days and three nights until I confessed. I was there, but I didn’t shoot the old lady. My friend Bautista did it.’” My dad shrugged. “Santiago is Haitian. He’s black. The jury in Miami was all white and five of them were Cuban-Americans. They look down on the Haitians as a lower class of refugee.”

  “You think Santiago is innocent?”

  “He was there at the shooting. Did he pull the trigger, or did Bautista do it?” He contemplated for what looked like the hundredth time. “I don’t know. Is Santiago morally culpable for what happened that night? Guilty in the eyes of the law? Yes. But the judicial process seems to have been improper, and he didn’t get a fair trial.”“So you’re going to fight for him.”

  “I’m trying to save his life.”

  “Do you think you’ll win
?”

  “It’s unlikely.”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “Do I mind that I have to write one brief after another, argue with the partners at my firm about payment for investigators, and fly to Florida whenever Santiago wins a new hearing — and that Florida will probably still pull the switch one of these years and electrocute this guy? Yes, I mind a lot.”

  “But you won’t quit?”

  “I’m not a quitter.”

  “Even though you haven’t got much of a chance?”

  “I have to do my best, Billy.”

  I knew what my dad did for a living, but the process was always a little foreign to me. This case, fighting for a poor Haitian’s life, certainly wasn’t one that paid for vacations to Aspen or even put croissants on our table. But now I understood that whenever he had a chance, even if he wasn’t positive that he was right, my dad did his best. I saw him in a clearer light.

  No one had told him yet about Carter’s laying siege to our house.

  “Dad, I have to talk to you.”

  He didn’t let me begin, though; he got in first licks.

  “I cannot tell you,” he said, “how upset I was, and am, by what you told me in Aspen – about Carter Bedford putting a loaded gun to your face. I’ve been thinking of filing a criminal complaint. The problem is, it won’t stick. There’s no proof. There were no witnesses.”

  “And he’ll deny it.”

  “The man is a maniac. He destroyed our living room. He pointed a pistol at you. He cast racial slurs. We have to eject this man from our lives.”

  “Dad —”

  “Your relationship with him is based purely on your friendship with his daughter. Isn’t that a fact?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s the nature of that friendship?”

  “What do you mean?”