Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (13 page)

“Is that anyone I know, Billy?”

“Amy Bedford, Dad.”

“She bring her father’s dogs?”

“They’re playing in Mom’s walk-in closet.”

He squeezed my arm. He looked back at Amy; he could still see her through the door, sleeping. I could tell there were a lot of thoughts running through his mind, and a lot he wanted to tell me, and even more he wanted to ask. But he didn’t, he just pinned me a searching look, as if he was seeing something in me he hadn’t seen before, and then he patted me on the head, and walked off down the hall toward his bedroom.

Later when Amy woke up she found one of the tennis balls. She sat cross-legged on the floor, threw the ball in the air, clapped her hands three times, then caught it. She did that about fifty times in a row. When she finished, I applauded.

In the late afternoon I walked her into the village so that she could catch the bus down the Montauk Highway and then out Springs Fireplace Road.

“You can forget about that crazy idea, Billy. Your mother doesn’t even like me.”

I didn’t know how to counter that, because I’d seen that it was true. I let it go.

The next Sunday was cold and cloudy; after we met in town we decided not to walk on the beach. I brought Amy back to our house. My mom was in town at her pilates class. Jack was playing in the semi-finals of the tournament in Quogue. Simon was out; you could count on that. I took Amy upstairs and this time I showed her how to boot up and go online and do a search in Yahoo! We looked up everything there was about lobsters, and I printed it out for her.

I cooked lunch again; I was trying to get her used to eating here, trying to make her feel that she was at home. My dad, in stained gray sweats, put his head in the kitchen at one point. I was cooking cheese blintzes and I’d churned up a huge purple fruit smoothie with apple, banana, blueberries, and grapefruit juice.

I asked my dad if he wanted to join us and have some and he looked at me in the same puzzled way as the week before, and then he said thanks, but he needed to shower, and he was trying to keep to two meals a day. “But you two kids enjoy yourselves. I’m very glad to have met you, Amy, even so briefly.”

When he was gone she said, “Well, at least your dad likes me.”

“Of course he does. But how do you know?”

“Men always like me,” she said.

The next evening I heard a shriek from my mom’s bedroom. I hurried in, expecting a dump from Iphigenia in the walk-in clothes closet. What my mom had found, however, was her missing Queensland opal and diamond bracelet. She stared up at me from where she sat cross-legged on the carpet, the bracelet dangling from her fingers, and said, “Oh, Billy, look. I feel awful.”

She’d taken the bracelet on a business trip to Atlanta, and left it for two whole months in the zippered side pouch of her leather overnight bag. “I was sure that your girlfriend’s father had stolen it that night he broke in with his dogs. I didn’t report it to the police because I thought you’d be too upset…”

“Did Dad find his yellow silk scarf?”

“No, but now I suspect it’ll turn up.”

“You don’t like Amy, do you, Mom?”

“Why do you say that?”

When you ask a question that people don’t want to answer, they always ask you a question back, so they can have time to figure out how to wriggle out of the first one.

“Amy felt it,” I said.

“Billy, it’s not a matter of like or dislike.”

“Then what is it a matter of, Mom?”

“She’s very pretty. Glorious white skin. And I’m sure she has a sweet side to her.”

“So what is it that you don’t like about her?”

My mom sighed. “My answer will upset you, darling.”

“I can take it,” I said, although I wasn’t so sure.

“I think she needs a bath,” Diana said, “or a lesson in feminine hygiene. I don’t like the way she dresses. And I find her a little coarse.”

My stomach churned. “Coarse in what way, Mom?”

“Her attitudes are common. She has that unfortunate manner of speaking. ‘He’s, like’… ‘She goes’ instead of ‘she said.’ I know that’s the way most children and young adults speak these days, but I don’t find butchery of the English language attractive. I don’t want to belabor this, darling.”

“If you heard the way Simon speaks to his friends, Mom, you’d think he’d been brought up in a gutter by bums.”

My mom looked startled, upset, annoyed, all at once. She twisted a little where she sat, but she didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to teach Amy to speak better English,” I said.

I didn’t know I intended to embark on that project until the words popped out of my mouth.

“But, Mom, she does bathe. I know she bathes. She showers, I mean. And what’s ‘feminine hygiene’? How is it different from regular hygiene?”

“Oh, Billy.” My mom’s eyes blurred as she reached out to me. “You’re so innocent…”

“I like her a lot, Mom. I can’t tell you all the reasons why. That’s too hard. Didn’t you fall in love with Dad across a crowded room?”

“Yes, I did… but surely you’re not telling me that you think you’re in love with Amy.”

“I never said that. She’s my best friend. She’s a terrific person. She’s unhappy at home. I want to help her.”

My mom hugged me.

Chapter 14

Cross-legged on the Berber carpet in the half-lotus position, my mom said, “We’ve rented a big victorian in Aspen for the Christmas holidays. The Russos had it last year, and they raved about it. Five bedrooms, a hot tub, and it comes with a four-wheel-drive Range Rover. Want to see pictures?”

We were in the den, where we always gathered for family announcements. Simon and I sprawled in soft easy chairs and it felt real snuggly-buggly. My dad sat at his oak desk, editing another brief in the defense of National Nursing Homes, whose misdeeds were going to pay for the holiday in Aspen. He glanced up on occasion, smiling to assure us that he was paying attention.

Simon said, “Cool,” bounced up from his chair, and ran up to his room to get on the telephone to his buddies.

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

My mom twisted from what seemed like an impossible position, and faced me, eyeglasses dangling. “Billy, this is a family holiday. Families need to reassert their ties. Everyone’s coming. Young and old, rich and poor—”

“Who’s poor in this family, Mom?”

“The boys and girls can snowboard at Buttermilk or ski with the grownups on Ajax. We’ll go dogsledding. Night snowmobiling. Your father found out that there are indoor climbing walls at the health clubs. We’ll get a temporary membership for you. Call it a Christmas present in advance.”

Bribery. Under any other circumstances it would have worked.

“Mom, our family holidays are always awful.”

My dad’s two sisters couldn’t sleep under the same roof without a minimum of three walls between them; at night they snored, and during the day they scrapped. Nana, my dad’s mom, widowed and living in a Westchester County nursing home, needed her own TV to watch the soaps, and the volume had to be at the max. My Uncle Eli, an importer of Ping-Pong equipment from China, always established himself in front of the living room TV: “But just for those sporting events,” my mom explained, “where they use a ball, a puck, or a glove.” My cousin Lisa vomited if she smelled fish. My cousins Donna and David instructed everyone on what holistic remedies to take for whatever ailed them and what political opinions to hold in order to cure what ailed the world.

“I want to be here with Amy over Christmas,” I said.

My mom’s eyes snapped, like matches had been lit inside them.

“Billy, you’re obsessed.”

“Don’t argue with him, sweetheart.” My dad barely looked up from the desk, where his head was six inches from the legal pad. “Just tell him what’s going to happen.” He muttered, “I think I need a new prescription…”

I did the mathematics in my head. “I’ll come for the five days that Uncle Bernie and the two of you will be there at the same time.”

My dad was going to arrive late, after attending a Christmas march on the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee to urge clemency for a Death Row client. And my mom had explained that she would leave on New Year’s Day for meetings with
Fortune
magazine staff writers who were doing a story called “Women at the Helm.”

My dad put down his fountain pen and leveled the Father Finger. “Billy, we are not prepared to bargain with you.”

“So it’s the whole twelve days, or none at all? I choose none at all. You can’t force me to get on the plane.”

“That is the brattiest thing I have ever heard come out of your mouth,” my mom said. She wheeled on my dad. “I repeat,
obsessed
.”

In November the first Fruities commercial aired on
Friends,
and then on
The Simpsons.
On Thanksgiving morning I heard the big front door swing open. I smelled sheep.

“Uncle Bernie!”

He was in the front hall, brushing raindrops from the djellaba whose greasy brown wool had been sheared by Berbers in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. His beard looked thicker than ever. He filled the front hall and had to duck to avoid banging his head on the crystal chandelier.

He looked up at me on the staircase.

“You piss-ant, how many zillions are you making on that commercial? And—more to the point—where’s my cut?”

That night, after my dad carved the turkey, and my mom ladled out the veggies and stuffing, and Simon scooped half of the cranberry sauce onto his plate, I explained to everybody that Uncle Bernie and I had come to a new understanding based on joint trusteeship of Iphigenia.

“Because neither of us believes that he can own her,” I said. “We can just take care of her and enjoy her. Only Iphigenia can own Iphigenia.”

This new understanding, I explained, required a new divvying up of the financial pie. “I did all the work on the Fruities commercial, which Uncle Bernie and I agree is worth half of the money. He’s responsible for bringing Iphigenia into the family. And I’m responsible now for taking care of her. So the other half we’ve agreed to split fifty-fifty. Which means we have to amend the trustee agreement about the money.”

My dad gave us his lighthouse-beam smile that had charmed judges, juries, billionaires, even serial killers.

“Very generous of you, Billy,” he said. “Although, with due deference to Bernard’s prior custody of the monkey, we were led to believe that you bought his interest from him for nine hundred dollars cash.”

“Yes, but there’s more to it.”

“The kid’s a con artist,” Uncle Bernie said. “He reeled me in like a fish.”

This led to what diplomats call a frank discussion. My mother called her brother “an opportunist who never did an honest day’s work in his life.” My father accused him of trying to “swindle money that an eleven-year-old has earned through hard work, a concept that’s foreign to you.” Uncle Bernie in turn called his sister “a capitalist lackey” and described his brother-in-law as “lawyerly,” a word that on my uncle’s lips seemed like a blend of amoral and scrofulous.

I think it’s cool when grownups lose their temper. It’s one of the few times they say what they truly, deeply think.

My dad pushed his plate away, drank some red wine, and, settling back in his armchair at the head of the dining room table, explained that whatever we had decided was irrelevant, because the income from the commercial had been placed in an irrevocable trust.

“Meaning, Bernard, that the trust cannot be amended. Otherwise, any time that I felt like buying a new model Mercedes, I could dip into the trust to do so That’s precisely why you create an irrevocable trust. So that the trustee, or the beneficiary, on a mere whim, or under pressure from a well-meaning relative who feels, shall we say, disenfranchised, can’t monkey with it. No pun intended.”

“You can’t tell me,” Uncle Bernie said, “that a smart lawyer like you isn’t able to figure a way around the language in a contract. If I hired you and paid you five hundred bucks an hour, you’d find a way.”

“You oversimplify,” my dad replied. “And my hourly fee has gone up.”

I piped up again. “The money’s mine, isn’t it?”

My dad put the tips of all his fingers together, tapped them a few times, and then leaned forward toward me. “I just explained to you, Billy, about an irrevocable trust. Are you sure you understand what the word ‘irrevocable’ means?”

“Impossible to revoke. ‘Firm and irrevocable is my doom.’ Shakespeare. But you told me, Dad, that you set it up in a way that you could invade the trust. As in, march aggressively into someone else’s territory. Didn’t you say you could do that?”

His smile grew a trifle threadbare around the edges.

“Yes, I did, but —”

“Invade it,” I said.

When I saw the look on his face, and then heard Uncle Bernie’s quick goatlike bray of laughter, I added, “Make it work, Dad. Please. I know you can do it.”

I signed the paper on Saturday in front of my mom, who was a notary, and then on Monday the trust sold $37,500 worth of stock and shares in the Modern Age Green Fund. There was also a clause in the agreement that required Uncle Bernie to give me back the nine hundred in cash I’d given him in exchange for Iphigenia. “I insist on that,” my dad said.