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

by Clifford Irving

  “I’ve had some bad luck,” Carter said. “I’m thirty nine now. Coming up forty. That’s a time when you got to face reality, make choices. My first choice is, I don’t want to be poor anymore.”

  He was always switching gears on me like that, talking about me and Amy one minute, himself the next. I wanted to hear more about Amy but I didn’t know how to force him to do that.

  “Where’s hauling garbage gonna lead? Can you tell me?”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “You put it hard but you put it straight. No one’s gonna come up to me in my advancing age and say, ‘You’re my long-lost son I left on the church door thirty-nine years ago. Here’s your inheritance. You’re rich.’ That’s a pipe dream. I know that now.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Better to face things, right? So I look around and I think to myself, ‘Carter, you have to do something different with your career. Be a boss instead of an eight-buck-an-hour wage slave. Buy your own business.’ Guys I went to school with—they own a flower nursery, a big garage, a hardware store, one of them has his own contracting business in Riverhead. That’s what I want. What I deserve. I got an idea for a fast-food delivery service at some yacht basin. Good, huh? But I need capital to get that going. Thirty nine, not a pot to piss in. Can you imagine? I look around me, and I say, ‘Carter, you may not have a dime but you have two major assets. One of them is your drive, your character. They can’t take that away from you. And the other is your beautiful daughter.’ Now, understand — this is me talking to you, Billy — no one’ll ever take Amy away from me unless I’m willing to let her go. And that’s hard for me, I admit it. The right person comes along, maybe I would let her go. For the right consideration.” He lifted the corners of his mouth into a cunning smile. “And that’s where you come in.”

  I had been drawn in by Carter, focusing on him, trying to stand in his shoes, see how he felt wanting to do something with his life, and liking him for it in spite of hating him, and then suddenly he veered.

  But at least we were back to Amy.

  “I come in?” I repeated. “How do I come in?”

  “Through the front door, if you play your cards right. And there’s your little girlfriend, who loves you, waiting for you with open arms.”

  He was back to the love business again. It made me feel uncomfortable.

  He shook his head; he seemed frustrated. “I’m being too subtle for you, right? I’m doing my darndest not to be crude. This isn’t easy for me. Help me, Billy. Cooperate with me. Ask me questions.”

  I was lost and drifting farther away. Glad to drift. I watched the dark clouds and the steel-gray ocean. I felt the wind. I said, “I don’t understand.”

  Carter sighed. “The big point is, you’re ready, Billy. You may not think you are, but you are. But you have to watch out. I’m an old Bonacker country boy. I know things you’ll never know. And one of them is, you’re getting older, and any day now that little weenie of yours’ll spring to life, and before you know what’s going on, it’ll be leading you around by the nose. You’ll be its slave. It will lead you places you never thought you’d go.” Carter looked out to the Atlantic, at the frothy waves breaking; he looked everywhere but into my eyes. He took a few raspy breaths. “Before that happens, you want to go someplace decent, and beautiful. Not where the one-eyed trouser snake leads you, but where you lead it. Man, I wish that had happened to me. I got led to some bad places. Good old Bob Buck Sr. saw to that.” Carter tried to smile at me, but this time it came out a leer. “I’m kind of circling the wagon train, right? Maybe getting you all confused. The thing is, growing up’s not easy. A kid needs help, and I want to give it to you.”

  I was there but I wasn’t there. I was getting it, but it was so foreign to me, so impossible, that I didn’t let myself get it. I stared at him stupidly. Plato and Lao-Tzu and Mark Twain couldn’t help me. I did a lot of blinking.

  “This is your big chance,” Carter said, “and you’d be dumb not to take it. Trust me on that one. But if you do take it, you’re gonna have a great time. Because she is a terrific little gal. And I’ll provide the place, because that’s always a problem with young folks. I got the RV.”

  I tried to picture it. The place. The RV. I was getting it. I couldn’t pretend anymore.

  “What do you want from me?” I said in a voice that quivered and shook.

  “Speak up, Billy. You’re mumbling. And that wind’s blowing.”

  I yelled, “What do you want from me?”

  He smiled like a wolf baring its fangs, and said, “Ten thousand dollars would be a good start. Not a lot, considering what you’re making on TV with the monkey. Up front, so I know you’re sincere. Later “— he shrugged —”depending on how it goes — we’ll see. Might be up to you.”

  “Take it back!” I yelled.

  “What?”

  “Take it back! You…” I couldn’t find the word.

  I wanted to smash that face, hurt him, make him bleed and plead with me and say he was sorry and he hadn’t meant it, or that I was having a nightmare. But if I hit him then he might hit me, too, in which case it was me would do the bleeding. I wanted to kill him. I’d fantasized about that on the night of my birthday. But my Swiss army knife was in my backpack, in his truck, and I didn’t have a gun, or a car to run him over with. And killing was too good for him.

  So I gathered my anger into a ball of huge power, and I reached up and quickly put my hands on his chest and I shoved him. It was really a way of saying: Get away from me, you piece of slimy shit. He was so surprised that he went back two steps — more to avoid me than from the force of my shove — and the second step he took was into the air.

  I mean, he ran out of rock.

  With his mouth open — maybe he screamed, maybe he didn’t, I couldn’t hear for the crashing of waves against stone — he toppled backward off the jetty into the stormy and pitiless Atlantic Ocean. It was a fall of a little more than a man’s height. He landed on his back, in the shallow water, with an enormous splat.

  I leaned down. I yelled: “Drown, you fucking creep!”

  I meant it. At least I meant it for half a minute or so. Then, I’m not sure how, his body rolled, turned like a big fish, easing over a hundred and eighty degrees, so that he was face down in the shallows, and I couldn’t see his face anymore.

  Oh my God, I thought. The fall killed him. He’s hit his head on a rock. Any second that gray foamy water was going to turn red. Or else, hitting the surface had knocked him out, and now he was drowning. I hated Carter, and I wanted to kill him, but not so that he was dead. There was a space between fantasy and fact, and when you crossed it you felt chilled to the marrow of your bone.

  I ran as fast as I could back over the jetty to the wet sand, and then I ran at full speed into the ocean, over the pebbles and rocks, plunging into the freezing water at first up to my ankles and then up to my knees, heading for Carter Bedford, to save his miserable life if he was still alive.

  His body rolled back and forth, pushed by the small waves. He was still face down. I bent and grabbed his head, trying to lift it above the surface. Slowly his head turned, and then those watery gray eyes were staring right into mine; his face was shining wet, streaming, and his mouth was grinning.

  A hard hand grabbed the back of my neck.

  “Gotcha,” he said. “You little fuck. Now it’s your turn.”

  He pulled me down into the water, half on top of him, half next to him. I swallowed a pint of briny Atlantic. I began to gasp, to choke and spit in vain, to gag – and then to drown.

  When something like that happens, if you want to survive, you fight with all you’ve got. Because if you don’t do that, you’re dead. There’s no tale to tell, no one to complain to. You’re gone. There’s no you.

  I thought about it later. He could have told the police and my parents any story he liked:

  “Poor kid just took the wrong step, fell right off the jetty. I tried to save him. I ra
n back, I ran into the water. I couldn’t see him. When I found him, I was too late. Oh my God – Mrs. Braverman, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. He was a great little kid.”

  My senses hadn’t left me. I sputtered and flailed, I reached for anything I could find to push off, push away, liberate myself, survive, breathe the air of life again, get loose of the devil’s grip — anything — and I found it. In the churning terror of the shallows my right hand closed on a rock. The smooth absolute hardness of that rock gave me courage. A rock is a part of the mother earth — I was a climber and I loved the perfect brutality and awful beauty of rocks. This rock, this rock-child of the earth on the cold ocean bed, gave me strength I’d never possessed before.

  My fingers clawed and closed and the rock fit snug into my fist. I worked my hand up out of the water – when it burst free, I tensed the muscles of my arm, and I slugged him with the rock. I wasn’t aiming for anything particular and the first time I hit him on the meat of his shoulder — I don’t believe he even felt it. I swallowed more water. I hit him again, as hard as I could. This time I believe I got him on the side of the head just above the ears.

  He let go of me. I didn’t see it, but I felt him fall back into the water. And I was able to splutter up to the foaming surface, gulping at the briny air. It tasted so good, so sweet.

  I crawled away through the icy water until I reached the hardpacked sand near the ocean. I turned to look back just once, when I was halfway up the beach on the route of my escape. Carter was head down in the shallows where once I had been. He was drowning. I didn’t care. No, I did care. I was glad.

  I grabbed my bike out of the back of the truck, growled at Daisy, who tried to wag the stub of her tail, and pedaled off down West End Road toward Amagansett and home. I was wet and so cold that I thought I’d die.

  Chapter 23

  I didn’t die. I made it home, crawled into a hot bath, where I soaked for an hour and felt grateful to be alive.

  I waited for the telephone to ring, the doorbell to chime. I conjured up the unsmiling face of a uniformed policeman, asking me if I was Billy Braverman.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are your parents home?”

  “No, sir.”

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Inez made a grilled salmon dinner for Simon and me. She asked me if I was all right.

  “I’m fine, Inez.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look awful.”

  “I was hungry,” I explained.

  My dad called from the city, which he did almost every day that he wasn’t home, even from his cell phone outside death row in Florida, to find out from Simon and me how we’d spent the day. At the end of the call he always said, “I love you, Simon” or “I love you, Billy,” and we, in our turn, said, “I love you, too, Dad.”

  This time, when he asked how my day had gone, I told him that I had watched the alewives come in on Three Mile Harbor. “It was spectacular.”

  “That’s wonderful. I have to go now. I love you, Billy.”

  “I love you, too, Dad.”

  Minutes later my mom called from Seattle, where she’d flown for a quickie to see the crew at Microsoft. I told her about the fleeing alewives and the pursuing ospreys.

  “I love you, Billy.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  “Could you put Simon on, please, darling?”

  After the exchange of vows, Simon ran down to the soundproof basement to beat on his drums, and I went upstairs to my room to think things over.

  All that evening I felt numb; I was probably in some kind of shock. I had killed a man, I believed. But I felt no remorse or shame. He would have done it me if I hadn’t done it to him. And beyond that, he was a devil and he deserved it. The world was better for him being dead. I knew that without a doubt.

  I could call the police, but why? Carter was drowned, his head smashed in, and nothing could change that. The body might still be there in the shallows, or it might have washed ashore, and tomorrow someone would find it and make a report. Or it might have been swept out to sea by the fury of the storm. Gone forever, devoured by sharks or drifted to the deep black ocean floor where it would rot forever. In which case — what should I do? Confess and face the consequences? Say nothing and hope for the best?

  I didn’t think any of the fishermen on Three Mile Harbor had been watching when Carter pulled up in his banged-up Toyota truck and I had been seduced into climbing on board. But you never knew.

  “A boy,” they would say. “No, I didn’t really see his face. He looked to be about eleven or twelve years old.”

  What other boy that age did Carter know? The finger would point at me. I could lie, but they would be professionals and they would know it. How would I account for the fact that I hadn’t reported his death? Could I do anything other than tell the truth, that I had crushed his head with a rock?

  From our house on Oak Lane we didn’t see the ocean. Nevertheless, we could hear it. On stormy nights the surf bashed the beach, but the ocean noises were just like the birds chirping and the frogs croaking and the wind in the fruit trees and the oaks. They couldn’t hurt you. They were part of life, of Nature.

  That night, though, they terrified me. I had killed a man and left him in a watery grave. The sounds I heard were the sounds of the waves tugging at Carter Bedford’s body.

  In the hour before dawn when the stars still glimmered and just a trace of light quivered over the hedges on the eastern end of our property, I thought I heard strange noises that weren’t part of the night. I thought I heard the rattling of a vehicle, and thuds. But I was too dopey to do anything about it.

  On the dining room clock the early morning hours struck one after another. The sound floated up the staircase. A pearl-gray light finally filled the air, and a milky fog bathed the tops of the trees that I could see from my bed. The first birds twittered — this is my tree, dude, your tree is over there. My eyes came unglued. I had my window open for fresh air, but I was cold, and I got up to close it. I looked out the window, down at the front lawn.

  The lawn was strewn with garbage. It wasn’t in bags, it was loose and scattered. I saw tins cans, and fruit rinds and cores, and what must have been pieces of animal flesh and bone and fat because three of the neighborhood cats were down there on the lawn gnawing on them. I saw plastic bags and cartons and globs of liquid and candy wrappers and soggy potato chips and empty bottles of beer, wine, booze, vinegar, and soda all over the grass and gravel. There was a punctured volleyball and a pair of old tennis shoes with no laces.

  I ran into the hallway and looked out a window at the back lawn. Garbage floated in our swimming pool. The rind of a cantaloupe melon, banana skins, and the remains of a chicken carcass bobbed in a greasy circle of oil at the shallow end of the pool.

  So Carter Bedford was anything but dead.

  In Tallahassee, Florida, my dad was drinking coffee and eating a donut in the coffee shop of a hotel when my mom got through to him on his cell.

  “Call the town police,” he ordered. “Don’t clean up. Make sure to leave everything exactly the way you found it. Let me talk to Billy.”

  I got on the line.

  “Billy, did Carter Bedford did this?”

  “Looks that way, Dad.”

  “Is this man trying to feud with us? Is he crazy?”

  “Both.”

  “Are you on the cordless?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take it somewhere where Mom can’t hear what you’re saying. Make some excuse.”

  I said, “Mom, I’ll be right back.” I took the phone with me out the front door, as if he’d asked me for a description of the crime scene.

  “Okay, Dad, I’m alone.”

  My dad asked if something had happened that he didn’t know about. I told him that Carter and I had an argument the previous afternoon and that I’d pushed him off the Georgica Beach jetty, into the ocean. And that when I ran into the water to save his life, he’d tried
to drown me. “Then,” I said, “I brained him with a rock. I left him there to die.”

  “Billy,” my dad said, “I’m beginning to see that you have an over-active imagination.”

  “The garbage is on our lawn, Dad. It’s not in my imagination.”

  He thought about that.

  “You had an argument with him, you said. What about, Billy?”

  “He made me a disgusting offer.”

  My dad sucked in his breath. “What sort? He propositioned you? Sexually?”

  “It was about Amy.”

  He thought about that, too, for about five seconds.

  “When the police come,” he said, “don’t tell them anything about Carter unless they ask you a direct question. In other words, don’t lie, but don’t volunteer any information. Let me talk to Mom.”

  When my parents finished their conversation my mom told me that she was going to drive me to school after she’d dealt with the police. And then she would drive in from Modern Age at three o’clock and pick me up from school, too.

  A township police car bounced down the driveway off Oak Lane in five minutes, siren wailing to alert the neighborhood that the boys in blue were on the job. They were the same guys who had pulled Carter and me to the side of the road and given him the speeding ticket. The yellow-haired one wore the same blue-tinted sunglasses. The other guy was thin and had a hatchet nose. They introduced themselves as Officers Halloran and Gordon, tapping their brass nameplates.

  They gave no sign that they recognized me from that night last October. But they were cops, taught to observe all, reveal nothing.

  “Ma’am,” said Officer Halloran, from behind his sunglasses, “do you have any idea who could have done this?”

  “No.”

  That answer, quite unlike my chatty mom, was my dad speaking. He was a good ventriloquist and had the ability to throw his voice fifteen hundred miles.