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

by Clifford Irving

  I waited in silence for another half hour. The Volvo nosed back out from the alley, and just before it reached the gate it activated a sensor, and the gate slid open so the Volvo could exit.

  There was one more thing I needed to know, but for that I would have to come back when it was dark.

  That evening Inez broiled red snapper smothered by crusty garlic, and Aunt Grace came over for dinner. “So the gang is together again,” she said, “except for the music student in Maine.”

  “Yes, it’s so nice,” my mom said.

  I hadn’t yet asked my dad about Carter’s lawsuit. I glanced at him; he didn’t look me in the eye. Maybe this wasn’t the right time.

  Between a bite of fish and a swallow of white wine, Aunt Grace wagged her finger at me. “Such a bad boy. You told me all that money was for your mother’s birthday present.”

  I helped myself to more crusty garlic.

  “What money?” my mom asked.

  “All the money he took out of the ATM. I told you about that, Diana.”

  “Yes, but…” My mom looked puzzled; I don’t think she wanted to go there, but she must have felt backed against a wall. She turned to me. “Billy, we never discussed this. How much cash did you draw out with that debit card?”

  “Plenty,” I said.

  Of course what I’d begun to realize was that she’d never known I’d sold my shares in the mutual funds and nearly emptied the money market account at Modern Age. She never checked the account. She was terrific that way.

  “How much money did you take to New York?” she asked.

  “Enough to live on,” I said. “And some extra.”

  My dad became interested, which is what I’d been afraid of.

  “Be more specific,” he said.

  “I’d rather not, Dad.”

  This was a tough one. If they knew I controlled more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash that was mostly in Uncle Bernie’s bank on Delancey Street, I would have a problem.

  “Not good enough,” my dad said. “How much, and where is it?”

  “Dad, it’s my money.”

  “Not in dispute. Nevertheless, I think we’re entitled to know the amount and the whereabouts.”

  “Well, I don’t want to tell you that.”

  “But you have to. I’m your father, and I insist.”

  “I have a right to privacy. Just like you do.”

  His blue eyes grew hard. “Billy,” he said, “there’s a limit.”

  What could I do? How many ways were there to say no?

  I shut up and chewed garlic.

  Aunt Grace muttered, “Oh, I’m so sorry I started this.”

  In a more kindly manner, my dad said, “My dear boy, on Monday morning your mother can find out what’s in that account. She can close it, and she can cancel the debit card. So you might as well get it over with. Tell us now.”

  He was not really computer literate. For that matter, my mom wasn’t so sharp, either. Their secretaries did everything for them. Neither of them seemed to realize that they could go online right now, on a Saturday night, and check the balance of anything under the sun provided that they knew the password.

  “I guess we’ll have to wait till Monday,” I said.

  The dinner ended in a cool silence. My parents didn’t glare at me but they looked at me the way they might look at some species of animal they’d never seen before and that might or might not do them harm. Aunt Grace finished off another bottle of wine, and when she got up from the table, she staggered. She fell, and put out her hand to stop the fall.

  “Gracie!”

  She hit the floor, grunted, then screeched in pain. And a moment after that she managed to flop over on her back, and lay there on the carpet, growing paler by the second, while she whimpered. “I think … shit!… I hurt …” Then she threw up all over herself and on the carpet.

  That white Berber carpet was a target for both man and beast.

  “I fell the same way up on Aspen Highlands,” I said, “except I didn’t puke.”

  My parents bundled Aunt Grace off to her house, and I scuttled up to my room and crawled into bed with a book. Around ten o’clock my mom looked in on me. She smoothed my hair — there still wasn’t much of it to smooth — and kissed me on the cheek. I pretended I was dead to the world.

  I waited until nearly two o’clock in the morning to be sure everyone was asleep. I had to make this trip now, because on Monday, after they checked the account at Modern Age, everything was going to hit the fan. God knows what they would do when they found out how much was gone from the account. They would ransack my room. The trail would lead to Rivington Street and Uncle Bernie. My dad would know just the right way to threaten him, and I would be poor again, just like every other kid.

  Tuesday was the day Carter was supposed to get back — “latest,” Amy had said. Monday night — early Tuesday morning — was D-Day for me. It was Sunday already. Later today, I decided, I’ll prep Duwayne. And I’ll talk to talk to Amy.

  At 1:55 a.m. I crawled out of bed, dressed, and padded downstairs in the darkness. I wheeled my bike from the garage, through the house, and out the big french doors that led to the garden.

  It was a moonless night with a sky full of stars. Crows whirred high above my head; I heard them but couldn’t see them. I took the back roads of Cozzens Lane and Town Lane, then pedaled north on Amagansett Springs Road. Now and then I heard the distant sound of voices. Saturday night parties were winding down, a couple were still in full swing. I had switched on my bike light and I carried a flashlight snugged against the handlebar. I didn’t want to get knocked down and maybe killed by some drunk partygoer.

  I left the bike in the forest exactly where I’d left it earlier in the day. In the gloom of the woods the darkness was deep, but I knew the terrain pretty well now. Soon I was on the dirt road leading to the A-1 property. An owl hooted, and a shooting star flew across the night sky between Betelgeuse and the Belt of Orion. No dog barked. I guess I’d fixed Pablo’s career as a guard dog.

  I found the glade in the forest where Carter had shot at the birch tree. The trees had been bare then and now they were in full leaf, but this wasn’t a place I could easily forget. From the glade I worked my way toward the big wire fence that circled the house. The house was dark except for a yellow anti-bug bulb over the office door. That helped me to see. I didn’t want to use my flashlight until I absolutely had to. The Toyota truck and the yellow VW were in the yard. So far, so good.

  When I reached the back gate that Carter had used the day he threatened me with his pistol, I stopped. During my afternoon scouting trip I had figured out where I had to stop, and now I was there. My eyes had quickly grown accustomed to the darkness. I studied the house and the wall under Amy’s window for about ten minutes. It would be a great wall to climb. It was pitted, scarred, dented, with just about every kind of hold you would want. And then on the second floor there were those bars on the window. Piece of cake? Not quite — but no harder than Crab Rock. The only problem was, there was no angle. It was completely vertical. Well, so were the climbing walls in gyms.

  I looked down at the ground. This afternoon, from a distance, the stone I was looking for had seemed close enough to the fence for me to reach it. Last winter the key to the back gate had been under that stone. Carter wouldn’t have moved it. Why would he do a thing like that? A small voice in my mind said, “For a lot of reasons, you dork.”

  I crept along the fence to the exact spot, bent down, and reached for the stone. I couldn’t get at it. It was too far away.

  I lay down in the dirt, stretching my arm under the fence until I thought it would part from the socket. I dragged my arm across some sharp pebbles and cut myself. I didn’t yelp. I bit my teeth when the pain came. I knew I was bleeding.

  And I couldn’t reach the stone. If I couldn’t reach the stone, he could have taken the key to Florida and it wouldn’t matter to me.

  You just have to think. Then there’s always a wa
y. Getting back to my feet, I walked back to the forest. On the way I used my handkerchief to wipe the blood from my arm and elbow where I’d scraped myself. I hunted for a dead tree, found one, and picked a branch that looked sturdy but wasn’t too thick. I worked it back and forth, then broke it off as gently as I could.

  Snap.

  I froze. I didn’t think I’d wake Ginette. She slept out back in the RV, Amy had told me, and her sleep was usually fortified by booze or dope. It was Stevie and Jimmy I was worried about. They were in the yellow brick house in the second floor bedroom above the office. Kids are heavy sleepers, but unfamiliar sounds can penetrate even the deepest sleep. I knew that fact because I’d read it in a Horatio Hornblower novel — Hornblower in his captain’s cabin wakes because there’s a new sound in the rigging, telling him that the onshore wind has shifted, and he knows in a flash that the French will try to escape the English blockade.

  Nothing happened. No change of wind. No French frigates creeping out of Brest. The night was completely still except for distant crickets and the fluttering of wings.

  Back at the fence, I used the branch to reach the stone and nudge it aside. Now I had to turn on my flashlight so that I could see the key, and then, with the branch, I would drag the key across the dirt and under the fence, to where I could grab it. I snapped on the light, fast, for only a second.

  No key. The key wasn’t there.

  Better look again. Might have missed it, the way I’d missed the money under the couch in the Mayflower. The cone of light bloomed from my hand.

  No key.

  “Oh, shit,” I said — and clapped my hand to my lips to mute the words that had already passed between them.

  But no one had heard me.

  Shielding the beam of the flashlight with my other hand so that it shone as low to the ground as possible, I inspected the dirt. There were several small stones within a few feet’s radius. In six months, stones would get kicked, or be moved around by rain and mud. Worse, Carter could have changed his hiding place.

  I poked at all the other stones, pushing them gently with my branch. I flicked the narrow beam of light at each one in turn.

  Something gleamed. The key.

  “Hey!”

  A high voice came out of nowhere. I jerked back, dislodging pebbles, trying to scramble to my feet before I was attacked, or shot, or torn apart by Pablo or some other terrible beast I hadn’t known lived there.

  “Billy…”

  My head snapped back and I looked up. Amy was at her window. She hadn’t turned on a light but I could still see her by starlight. And she could see me.

  “Wait,” I said, as loud as I dared.

  I scrabbled the key under the fence, grabbed it, quickly moved down along the fence and unlocked the gate.

  “Billy… what are you doing here?”

  “Shhh.”

  I pushed the gate open as quietly as I could. I tiptoed in until I was standing just about under her window.

  I had to risk it. It was a chance too good to miss. If anyone else heard me, I would turn and run for the woods..

  “Monday morning at first light,” I said. “I’m coming for you.”

  “What?”

  I repeated it. “Be ready. I need your help. Do you hear, Amy?”

  A stir came from somewhere inside the house.

  “Amy, did you hear me?” I repeated.

  “I heard you, Billy. How are you going to do it?”

  “Be ready, Rapunzel,” I said. “Come to the window before dawn. Let down your golden hair.”

  “What?”

  I turned and beat it out the gate, closed it softly, locked it, and shoved the key deep into my pocket. I wasn’t taking any chances this time with the whereabouts of the key.

  I biked back home through the blackness, under a few hazed stars. The elms shut out the view on both sides of the lane. A sea mist muffled all sound except the swish of my tires on macadam.

  Chapter 35

  At nine o’clock on Sunday morning, my mom cried out: “Billy! What’s this?”

  “What’s what?” I yelled, from the bathroom.

  “Blood! All over your sheet. And on your clothes!”

  I spat toothpaste into the sink and hurried back into the bedroom.

  There was dried brown blood on the sheet, and on the pants and shirt I’d worn on my excursion the night before and tossed onto a chair when I finally reached home and sneaked upstairs. That had been 3:25 a.m., I recalled, according to my bedside alarm clock.

  “Must have had a nosebleed, Mom.”

  She thrust a finger at the center of the bottom sheet. “But how did the blood get all the way down here? And on your pants? Your nose is up there.” Her finger swiveled toward my rumpled, clean pillow. “No blood on your pillow.”

  “Well, it’s actually an elbowbleed,” I said.

  My elbow was all scraped and raw. It hurt, too. My mother examined it.

  “You’re going to need an antibiotic and some sort of dressing. Billy, what happened to you? “

  “Must have bumped it during the night.”

  “It’s a mess.”

  “Maybe scraped, not bumped. Elbow bleeding is like that. Capillaries close to the skin. Can’t stop the flow.”

  “Oh, Billy, that’s nonsense.” Even as she spoke, she strode toward the bathroom cabinet to rummage for medicines and bandages. She ran the hot water, and turned to face me. “You’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes by being cute. You’re not cute anymore. You’re just devious. There are bicycle tire tracks all over the carpet in the living room. Where were you last night? I demand to know.”

  The grass in the garden had been wet and I had brought the bike in through the french doors. I felt shamed by what she’d said about my being not cute but devious. She was right. But that’s what I had to be in order to get the job done.

  “I went out,” I said.

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “I had to be somewhere.”

  “Here we go again. As your father would say, be specific. And put out your arm. This may sting.”

  “Mom, I have a private life.”

  “Yes, we know that. We found out the hard way. Did you go off to see that girl?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What does that mean? Yes or no? Did you go out last night to see Amy, or didn’t you?”

  You don’t have to be a lawyer to cross examine. You just have to be a parent.

  “I saw her, Mom.”

  “At what hour?”

  “It was around two thirty.”

  “Oh, Billy! Shit! What are we going to do with you?”

  My mom had never cursed like that to my face.

  “This has got to stop,” she said. “I’m going to talk to your father. We’re going to reach a decision. I can guarantee it’s going to be one you won’t like. Now straighten out your elbow so I can put on this bandage.”

  I knew there would be trouble. That night, Sunday night, was my launch hour, not only because Carter was due to arrive in Springs on Tuesday, but because on Monday my mom would discover that one of the signed checks from the Modern Age money market account had been cashed by Uncle Bernie for $90,000, and another $15,000 had been sucked out of the guts of three local ATMs. Following those revelations, I could assume that a tornado of unimaginable proportions would simultaneously strike Oak Lane and Rivington Street.

  By then Amy and I had to be gone.

  Immediately after breakfast on Sunday I called Duwayne at his home. A man growled at me like a jungle animal. I had no idea what he said.

  I said back: “Is Duwayne there, sir, please?”

  “Listen up, kid. This household don’t function on Sunday until crack of noon.”

  He hung up. I thought about it for five seconds, and then redialed before he could get comfy on his pillow again.

  “Shitwhatisit?“

  “Sir, it’s an emergency. I need Duwayne.”

  “Doo-wayne! Goddamn it! Telepho
ne!“

  Duwayne came on the line as grumpily as his father.

  I told him I had to see him today. We needed a planning session. We were set for four o’clock tomorrow morning.

  “Four? You out of your mind, dude?”

  “I told you it would be at night.”

  “That’s not night… that’s…” He couldn’t find the words for what it was.

  “Duwayne, I’m counting on you.”

  “I never said yes to no four o’clock in the fuckin’ morning.”

  “Can you meet me today at the Brothers Four? One o’clock.”

  “One o’clock in the morning?”

  “This afternoon, Duwayne.”

  “I see you there, little bro. We work this out together like civilized people.”

  I called Uncle Bernie. I didn’t wake him; he said he was at the easel. But he sounded in a bad mood, too.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Ginger wants to get married.”

  “To you?”

  “Women have that mission. Why are you so surprised? Am I so undesirable?”

  “What did you say to her? Yes or no?”

  “Jesus, you sound like a lawyer. I said I’m not ready for a permanent relationship.”

  “Are you still friends?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then can you get the money out of her safe so that I can have it tomorrow afternoon?”

  I hadn’t been paying close attention to the schedule of family matters. Simon was due back from camp in Maine that same day. My mom wanted to spend a couple of hours with him by the pool, and then in the evening she was taking off to the West Coast for a Monday morning breakfast date with people at Microsoft, and then a lunch with some executives from a utility conglomerate named Enron that I heard her say to my dad was “breaking new ground.”

  Simon’s flight got in from Portland at 2:20 P.M. My dad would pick him up at Islip, and he asked me to go with him. It would be a great opportunity on the drive there, he pointed out, for us to have quality time alone.