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

by Clifford Irving

“What about sex?”

  That was so far out. Again, that was just like Carter, only with good manners.

  “No sex, Dad. She’s my best friend.”

  “You’re telling me that on the last three nights, in this house, with Inez far enough away so as not to be an inhibiting factor, you and Amy slept in separate beds?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He grunted his disbelief. “No visiting?”

  “None.”

  “No touchy-feely?”

  “No, Dad.”

  He digested that. I could see that it troubled him. I think he would have preferred it the other way. It would have been simpler. And maybe he thought there was something wrong with me that I hadn’t crawled into a bed with her.

  “Can you explain something else to me, Billy?”

  “I’ll try, Dad.”

  “If Carter Bedford threatened and insulted you that way, what on earth moved him to give his daughter permission to sleep over here for the last three nights?”

  The truth had evaded him. That can happen, even to someone as smart as my dad.

  I told the story: how Amy had come scratching on the glass door of Oak Lane, and how Carter had followed. All that healthy ruddy color from the mountain air of the ski slopes faded away and my dad grew pale.

  When I finished, he put his head in his hands for half a minute. Then someone knocked on the door.

  He looked up and in a hoarse voice said, “Come in.”

  The door slid open and there was my mom, wearing a big terrycloth morning bathrobe and some furry slippers. Her face was scrubbed.

  “Hi, guys. Is this private?”

  “No, you’d better hear it,” my dad said. “Come in and shut the door behind you.”

  I looked at the VCR, which told me that it was 7:33 a.m..

  My dad said, “Billy, I’m going to fill your mother in with a shorter version, if you don’t mind. When I’m done, if I got any of it wrong, make any comment you like.”

  He told the story accurately, but it didn’t sound the same in his words.

  My mom’s jaw dropped; her eyes did a jig in their sockets.

  “Her mother stabbed her? Her father threatened Billy with a loaded pistol? And he tried to break into our home last night?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes.” My dad reached out to touch her cheek, to calm her. “Are we going to the police?”

  “I don’t think so. The girl was here as a runaway, without her parents’ permission. And Inez lied to the father about Amy’s presence here.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear.”

  “So it could get sticky.”

  “Nothing even remotely like this,” my dad intoned, “will ever happen again. Billy is going to end his relationship with all of the Bedfords.”

  That was the first I’d heard of it.

  “Now,” he added, “be quiet for awhile. I need to think.”

  “Dad —”

  “I said be quiet.”

  “Maybe,” my mom said, “we should have a little break. I’ll make a fruit smoothie. We have those delicious Granny Smiths we bought on the way from Islip. Would you like that, Jack? Billy? I’ll wake Simon.”

  “No,” my dad said, “no smoothie. Not yet. Diana, please ask Inez to come in here.”

  My mom thought it over a few seconds, then left the room.

  My dad said, “Billy, this situation has gotten out of control. Against the will of her parents, Amy Bedford has been sheltered under this roof for seventy-two hours. The Bedfords might show up any minute here with the police, who will unquestionably allow the Bedfords to take Amy home. Your mother and I will be in an untenable position.”

  “What’s ‘untenable’ mean?” I asked.

  “Not able to be defended against attack. Meaning, there are a half dozen charges that a sharp Bonacker lawyer could bring before a local judge. The headline in the East Hampton Star will be: NEW YORKERS ALLEGED TO HAVE SEPARATED LOCAL GIRL FROM PARENTS. I’d settle out of court, and mighty quickly. That may be the reason Carter hasn’t been pounding on the door since that first night. He may have figured out that he has the high ground.”

  I did what I always did. I battled. It had always worked; I always made some headway. I could wear them out — “Why?”— “Why not?”—trying to get a foot in the door: Amy’s foot, literally, in our door.

  But my dad said, “That’s enough, Billy. I know what you’re doing. You’re not going to change my mind.”

  “Dad, I just want —”

  “No more ‘justs.’ No more ‘I wants.’ The answer is no. That’s final.”

  Inez knocked on the den door. My dad told her to come in.

  “Inez, when Billy called me in Aspen the other night, I spoke to you. You didn’t say anything about Carter Bedford pounding on the front door and threatening to break a window, did you?”

  “No, Mr. Jack. I should have but I didn’t.”

  “He was outside the house at the time of the call, wasn’t he?”

  “He went away, Mr. Jack, while Billy was on the phone to you.”

  I remembered my telling her that she’d done the right thing. It didn’t seem that way right now, and she looked terrified in the face of my father’s questioning.

  “I didn’t want you to worry, sir,” Inez said, lowering her head.

  I’d never heard her call my dad “sir” before that.

  “You breached my trust,” he said.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “No, Inez. We value you and we care for you as a person. I want you to give me your word that it will never happen again.”

  “You got it,” Inez said, and she crossed herself to make it a proper oath on Jesus.

  “If anything like this ever happens again, I will have to ask you to leave. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Mr. Jack, I understand.”

  “Dad” — I couldn’t keep quiet anymore — “you’re blaming Inez for something I did. She wanted to call you and ask you what to do, and then things got confused. I bullied her.”

  My dad ignored me and said, “Inez, please dress warmly and bring your Honda round to the front door. I’ll bring Amy to the car. I would like you to drive her to her home and drop her there.”

  “I don’t know where she lives, Mr. Jack.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be able to tell you.”

  “Dad —”

  “Keep out of this, Billy. Stay here. Do not leave this room. That’s an order. “

  Penalty of death, Carter would have said.

  I heard Inez’s Honda slide to a stop, its engine purring smoothly. Then I heard my dad’s light footsteps and Amy’s even lighter footsteps coming down the stairs, not quickly, not slowly, and moving in the same measured tread to the front door. Whatever had to be said had been said upstairs, and their trip across the carpet through the entrada to the front door was silent. The front door opened, then closed. Footsteps crunched across ice and snow, then the door of the Honda opened and shut.

  I could have gone to the window and watched. I could have called out goodbye. But I didn’t want to see or be part of any of it. I wanted to howl with anger, but I didn’t do that, either. I just sat there in the den with my head in my hands, feeling helpless. My dad was doing his best for what he thought was right. But it didn’t feel right. It felt like there had to be another way.

  Half an hour later I stood in the cold morning air of the driveway, looking off in the direction that Inez and Amy had gone. And then the Honda cruised back down the driveway with Inez gripping the wheel. She saw me, and she opened her door.

  “What did she say to you, Inez?”

  “Not hardly anything. And I don’t ask anything. I just drive. This poor girl, she got lots of problems. Diós mío, is a real spooky place she lives at, Billy. Looks like a jail. You been there?”

  “I’ve been there,” I said, “and it’s worse than a jail.”

  My mom opened the front door, still wearing her blue terrycloth robe, her arms hugging her chest. “Bill
y, it’s cold out. Please come inside the house, darling. Things have a way of working out for the best.”

  I wondered if my mom told that to her shareholders when the market went into free fall.

  Chapter 21

  Before he left for Manhattan, my dad marched upstairs to my room. He said, “Billy, I know Amy is in your class. I know you’ll see her there, and I can’t prevent that. But apart from school hours, you are forbidden to see her. I want you to come straight home from school every day, and I want you here on weekends, too. If you won’t accept that order out of common sense, and out of the realization that your relationship with this girl has put our entire family in harm’s way, then you’ll have to accept it simply as a parental order. Firm and final. There will be no debate.”

  I saw that it would be a total waste of time to argue.

  But I didn’t make any promises. To forbid me a friendship with Amy I thought was gross and unfair. I never shook his hand. I was determined to talk to Amy, but I couldn’t call her at A-1 Self-Storage, so I had to wait until Monday morning when school opened after the holiday. I biked through the cold to the middle school.

  I saw Amy right away in the hallway outside Mrs. Ostrow’s classroom. Her skin, usually as white as the inside of a seashell, looked gray.

  “Amy, I couldn’t stop him.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s okay?”

  She sneered and said, “You wanted me to come and live with you there in your house? With your mom and dad? I can’t stand either of them. They’re phonies and rich snobs. And you’re the most stupid person I know.”

  That was the only way she could defend, by attacking.

  After that she kept a good distance between us, and her eyes, on the rare occasions when I could get a glimpse of them, were cold and sad.

  Life became dull. It didn’t seem to have a purpose anymore. I told my mom and dad that I wanted to take the train into the city for the Super Bowl party at Uncle Bernie’s loft.

  My mom said, “The game ends late, and that’s not a good neighborhood.”

  “I can sleep over in the loft, Uncle Bernie said. I’ll catch the early train back on Monday morning. I’ll miss one hour of class.”

  “You don’t like football, Billy.”

  “I know, but the party is in my honor.”

  “Let him go,” my dad said, trying to be the good guy.

  He was going to a Super Bowl party at the Sag Harbor country house of his editor. My mom, not a fan — “I like their buns, but that’s it” — intended to stay home and work. Simon, invited to Uncle Bernie’s, preferred to watch the game with his pals. I was going because I didn’t know what else to do with myself these days.

  On the Sunday afternoon, with Iphigenia in her traveling bag, I took the train into Penn Station, and then a taxi down to Uncle Bernie’s loft on Rivington Street north of Delancey. On the train I read The Great Gatsby. I tried to imagine what Long Island was like seventy years ago in the dark ages. Not easy, but I could identify with Gatsby, pining for his lost Daisy.

  The loft was part of a four-story building that had once been a Lower East Side sweatshop where they manufactured children’s dresses. The building had been bought by a group of SoHo painters and then converted into bare brick studios and apartments. The painters squabbled and fought all the time and didn’t do well in the real estate business. Uncle Bernie cut a long-term deal where he rented the entire building and had permission to sublet. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Billy, with the money you fought for that night at the dinner table.”

  The top floor was his own huge studio and bedroom, with lots of exposed brick and pipes, and the spaces on the lower floors he rented out to another painter who made a living as a carpenter; a gay actor couple; a stock analyst from Jaipur, India; a Russian soprano singing in the chorus at City Center; and a ballerina from Chicago living with a sculptor from Ibiza. “So shoot me,” Uncle Bernie said, with a groan, “I’m moonlighting as a slum landlord.”

  He buzzed me in and came down in the old creaking freight elevator, wearing a fez and his aromatic Moroccan djellaba. “Hello, sweet Iphigenia, you cash cow. Come on in, Billy. Everyone’s is dying to meet you.”

  Even before the gate of the elevator clanged open at the top floor, I sniffed exotic spices, and in a minute all the warmth of Ginger Casey bent to give me a hug. I’ve never been to a Tahitian rain forest, or a Delhi bazaar, or the perfume department of Bloomies, but I think that if you stirred them all together, that would be Ginger’s aura. In the winter heat of the loft I fell against her. My head settled in a place where I was looking straight down into the hollow of her silk blouse, with no bra blocking the sights. The big nipples of her breasts rose up at me. I went weak in the knees, and I backed up and out.

  “Hi, Billy. How’s my ski buddy?”

  “Good. Hi, Ginger. Gee, it’s hot in here.”

  The loft was enormous, and Uncle Bernie’s paintings hung on most of the walls. They were large, and seemed abstract, formed from swatches and strips of painted canvas pasted to other pieces of painted canvas, so that they resembled a tapestry. When you looked at them for a minute or two, however, they revealed a geometric pattern of windows, walls, doors and fields, in shades of brown with reds and oranges and yellows mixed in.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “What do you think they are?”

  “Old houses in Italian villages. You miss them, so you’re painting them. You make them look abstract so that people won’t say you’re being soppy. And probably because they sell better.”

  Uncle Bernie turned to his friends. “My twelve-year-old nephew walks in from the boonies and knows more about my art than any SoHo gallery owner.”

  His tenants were there, and his friends. A ton of deli food — knishes, corned beef and pastrami, smoked lox and sturgeon ends — was just being set out on the kitchen table. Most of the crowd was drinking red wine and a few were passing a potato that had been made into a pot pipe. Everyone fussed over me and Iphigenia.

  The Super Bowl started, but I wasn’t interested in it and neither was the turbaned Sikh from Jaipur, Nawan Singh, the stock analyst. I asked him what he thought about the market and the dot-com mania, and after he got over his surprise that I knew about those things, he said, “I am a bear, and this has been a bad year for my species.” But there was no doubt, he said, that the high-flying, tech-heavy Nasdaq was going to collapse. “The consequences will be quite awful. The only question is when.”

  I said that was like telling a person he was going to die one day but you couldn’t tell him exactly when. We know we’ll die. All that matters is when.

  “My goodness, that is well phrased. So what is your opinion, young man, if I may be bold, as to when is when?”

  I never got a chance to answer, because a shout went up from the gang watching the game.

  Uncle Bernie yelled, “Billy, come quick! It’s you!”

  I peered over a few heads. There I was, on the screen, with Iphigenia battling to haul a cherry-flavored Fruitie from behind my teeth. She snagged it. I—the I that I was looking at—said, “Why do you like Fruities? Because they taste so good, or because they’re hard to get?” Iphigenia popped her starred black eyes and went chit-chit-chit. (It had taken thirty minutes that day to get her to do that.) I said, “Both, eh? Taste so good, and hard to get. Well, they’re not hard for me to get.” I turned and winked at the audience.

  Cut to me picking up a pack of Fruities at a shop counter. Finally, a shot of me rubbing my hands together over my secret stash of Fruities, and then a shot of Iphigenia giving me what you might call a dirty look. Then we were back on the football field, first and ten for the Broncos in the other team’s red zone.

  Everyone in Uncle Bernie’s studio applauded, and Ginger threw a magnificent smile at me. “Did you write that dialogue, Billy?”

  “Most of it, but not on paper. I just told them what I thought would be good, and they said, ‘Okay, try them all
.’ I never saw the finished commercial until right now.”

  “It was a winner, champ,” Ginger said, hugging me again so that I felt dizzy and shut my eyes.

  My dad called from Sag Harbor to tell me that everyone watching the game there had applauded, and most of them had no idea that the boy in the commercial was his son. He was trying to get back on my good side.

  I received an e-mail from that part of Texas where the wind’ll blow a dog off a chain. “I darn near fell out of my chair when I saw you and Iphigenia on the TV. All the guys on the team want to meet you. You pick a date from the schedule I’m sending you, and you and Amy and Iphigenia will be my guests at Shea Stadium. Hope your arm and nose are mending real good. Warm regards, Tom Egan.”

  The deal with Fruities gave them the right to use my picture, so print ads popped up everywhere. In one, Iphigenia was just in the act of snatching her cherry trophy, and the slogan said: “FRUITIES. Taste So Good. Not Hard to Get.” Max Russo called Jack and told him that slogan was the key to the campaign. “It was Billy’s idea. If that kid ever wants a summer job copy writing, I’m hiring.”

  South Fork people were used to celebrities who expected privacy. But I couldn’t stop kids in school from asking me if I’d autograph ads they’d torn out of Newsday and TV Guide. It looked like some wanted to be friends with me — I didn’t encourage that, because I knew it wouldn’t last. They would realize soon enough that I was still a nerd.

  I decided that my career in advertising was over. The contract prohibited Iphigenia and me from doing the same thing for any other product, and after Max Russo had taped Iphigenia taking the candy from my mouth from twenty different angles, what more work could we do? I didn’t mind. I didn’t need to be a celebrity. You lose all your privacy, and my privacy was me.

  I also decided, sadly, that it was all over with Amy, and, gladly, that I’d seen the last of Carter Bedford. I was wrong on both counts.

  Chapter 22

  Spring was the reward for having survived the Long Island winter. The honeysuckles blossomed and a rare pair of five-feet-wide ospreys came back to nest and dive for alewives in the ponds. I liked to bike along the shore at Three Mile Harbor and watch the alewives wriggle upstream, heading for the shallow parts of the harbor where they could spawn. It didn’t matter that the tide was more at ebb than flooding and that the ospreys were on the prowl — the alewives kept coming.