Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (14 page)

On behalf of the trust he cut a check for the correct amount to Bernard Michael Adler, who called me two days later and asked, “How often is justice done? Rarely, believe me. I owe you, Billy, and that’s a marker you can call in anytime. There’s a check in the mail to you for the nine hundred. It’s my girlfriend’s check—she’s a lawyer, too —because I don’t have a bank account yet.”

The check arrived from someone named Ginger Casey, one of those fancy multicolored checks that showed birds flying over the ocean at sunset and said “Peace on Earth in Our Time” and it looked like toy money. When my mom got home that evening I told her I wanted to start a money market account and an investment account, because my savings account at the local bank paid a lousy three quarters of a per cent interest. The government had given banks a license to steal.

My mom opened her eyes wide and began to breathe rapidly. “I’ll get you an application right away. My company’s money market fund is currently paying four and a quarter percent, which is above average. Stock funds have no guarantees — extremely high risk, Billy — although long-term you always win. Yes, the market looks strong. It will have to be a custodial account in my name or Dad’s, because you’re a minor.”

“You mean I can’t pick the funds? That’s no fun.”

“You can pick them. However, the custodian will have to make the actual buys.”

“Can’t you buy Modern Age funds online?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, if I have the password for the account, how can they tell who’s doing it?”

“You’re absolutely correct… but… well, why not? You’ll get a kick out of it, and it’s your money. You’ll follow my general advice, won’t you?”

“Sure. Can I sign checks on the money market account?”

She explained that only she could do that, assuming that she became the custodian. And why would I want to? I was
investing
the money, wasn’t I?

“I just hate that I haven’t got the right. Why can’t a kid spend his own money on presents and stuff?”

We were talking about a lousy nine hundred dollars.

“I tell you what, Billy. You can’t sign the checks — that would be against the law. But I’ll sign a bunch of them and you can keep them and fill them out and use them whenever you feel like it. And the statements will come here to the house and you can study them, so you’ll make the investment decisions and feel in charge. Is that okay?”

We shook on it. Not quite a golden handshake, but it was binding.

She brought the papers home the next evening, already signed by her, with the choice of funds left blank. There was no minimum investment amount; that was another one of Diana’s principles that had made Modern Age so popular. I picked a couple of funds whose names I liked, put a check on the box that asked for an ATM debit card (I figured my mom had just forgotten to do that), endorsed Ginger Casey’s check, and mailed the package.

A few weeks later the mail brought a book of serious-looking gray checks with my name and Diana Adler’s name as custodian, a preliminary statement, and two debit cards, one in my mom’s married name and a second unasked-for one in my name. Minor clerical error, I figured, so I took my card and stuffed it into a sock with my cash. Armed with the New York
Times
financial pages, I got out my calculator and figured out that my funds were up six and a half percent in one month. The next afternoon I biked over to a savings bank on Main Street and traded a paper bag full of bills for a cashier’s check. That came to almost seven hundred dollars. I mailed that to Modern Age with instructions on how to invest it.

Money makes a lot of things possible that otherwise wouldn’t work. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Chapter 15

I was eating a fudge sundae and Amy was spooning up a butterscotch sundae with chocolate swirl ice cream. We had biked along the back roads of the township until we’d wound up in the Candy Kitchen, a cosy eatery on Bridgehampton Main Street.

“Ginette loves ice cream,” Amy said. “Mint chocolate chip is her favorite. Sometimes she buys a whole container and shares it with us.”

She spoke about Ginette the way a girl speaks about a mother she loves. All right, I thought, that kind of love can go so deep that you can’t help it. You need to love your mother.

“Has she bought you any ice cream,” I asked, “since the day she locked you in the closet and tried to kill you?”

“She didn’t mean to kill me,” Amy said.

“If Duwayne and I hadn’t come along, you might have bled to death.”

“She would have come out and found me.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me when she saw the blood on the knife, she sobered up. She got really scared. She knew she’d done something bad. She wasn’t even sure what it was.”

We biked back to Hedges Lane, and I brought out some videos and asked Amy which of them she’d seen. None.

“Not even Charlie Chaplin?
Modern Times
?”

“Never heard of it.”

She flopped down on the carpet, cross-legged like my mom, only Amy was younger and could do it better. I put the video in the VCR, sat down next to her, and hit the remote.

“What’s wrong with the color?”

“Wait.”

She started to chuckle as soon as Charlie was on the production line, tightening nuts and bolts, trying to keep up. She laughed hard when he used the wrench to tighten the boss’s nose. She shrieked when Charlie was hooked up to the feeding machine so that the workers didn’t have to stop for lunch, and the machine shoved a pie into his face. When someone belched in Charlie’s direction and he waved his hat to drive the smell away, she turned to me and said, “He’s kind of higher class, right? Just like you.”

By the end of the movie, when Charlie was running away through the restaurant and pushing whole rows of chairs in the path of his pursuers, Amy was hysterical with laughter. “He’s so clever!” And then when the shack fell down around him and he and Paulette Goddard, his orphan girlfriend, leaned on a door and fell out into the pond, Amy screeched so hard that she had to jump up and dart to the bathroom.

I paused the video.

She came back, a little red in the cheeks. “I couldn’t help it,” she said.

Paulette and Charlie were together in the shack, drinking out of tin cans and gnawing on a loaf of bread. Charlie went off to work at the factory — Paulette waved goodbye to him from the door of the shack.

“I wish I lived there,” Amy said.

“You and I could live in a house like that,” I said.

“Would you work in a factory?”

“No, I told you, I’d own a restaurant.”

“And what would I do?”

“You could get a job. You could be hostess in the restaurant. Study something, like computers. Or you could sit home and read or watch National Geographic videos. Fix up the house, make it look better. Swim in the pond if it got hot.”

“Sounds nice,” she said. “Where’s this house?”

“Could be a ranch somewhere.”

She quieted down for the rest of the movie.

“Want to watch another? I’ve got the Marx Brothers.”

“I wet my panties laughing,” Amy said. “I had to wash them and leave them on a hook in your shower. Where’s the dryer?”

I took her downstairs to the laundry room. I didn’t crack any jokes about her wetting her pants. No girl had ever said words like that to me before. You could say anything you wanted to a best friend.

On a Friday in early December, on the steps of the middle school, in the gray afternoon light, Amy handed me a package wrapped in brown paper that looked as if it had been cut from supermarket bags. Some tape sealed the edges and a purple strip of ribbon was tied around it and ended in a bow.

“Happy birthday, Billy.”

I knew she had no money and I couldn’t imagine what she’d bought for me. It felt and looked like a hardback book.

“Amy, you shouldn’t have done this.”

“I wanted to.”

I unwrapped the package. It was a hardbound notebook. On the cover she had printed in big red letters: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BILLY FROM AMY.” And then, in black letters and numbers, the date. I opened the notebook. It was full of drawings in crayon and colored pencil. They were drawings of Amagansett and East Hampton: the row of elms where Woods Lane meets Main Street, salt box houses on Bluff Road, the old Indian trail to Montauk, the windmill at the head of Main Street, Ashawagh Hall in Springs, and even a drawing of the middle school. On one page there was a drawing of me and on another a drawing of our house on Oak Lane. All the drawings had titles printed in crayon, like: “The Elm Trees On Woods Lane” and “Billy’s Beautiful House in Amagansett.”

I’d had plenty of presents of things that I’d wanted for a long time, and of things that cost a lot of money, but I knew right away that I’d never had a present that took as much effort as that notebook of drawings.

“Thank you, Amy. This is so cool.” I leaned forward — and up a little — and kissed her on the cheek. Amy was almost two inches taller than I was. “How did you do them? You didn’t sketch me. I never saw you outside the house… “

“From my memory.”

At that exact moment, the banged-up old Toyota pickup, with Carter Bedford at the wheel and wearing an army-style field jacket, drew up to the curb beside us.

“Hey, good-lookin’! Hey, Billy! How’re you doin’?”

I said, “Hello, Carter.” Amy nodded at him.

“I keep looking for you Tuesdays,” he said to me, “but I never see you. You zipping off to school early so’s you don’t have to see me? Or’s it just bad timing?”

I had been leaving early on Tuesdays, deliberately; that was a fact.

“Hop in,” Carter said.

“We’d like to walk,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. That’s what I’m telling you.” He flipped a quick smile at Amy. “I was wondering why you were coming home so late from school every day, sweetheart. So I said to myself, ‘Carter, go down there to Newtown Lane when school lets out, and you’ll find out.’ And that’s exactly what I did. Hey, I don’t mind. I just like to know. I’m a father. I gotta watch out for my little girl. This is a dangerous world. Now hop in.” And then he added, “I have to talk to you, young Braverman.”

Amy was already moving toward the passenger side of the truck, so I didn’t have much choice unless I wanted to just abandon her. Clutching my book bag, I followed. Daisy and Pablo weren’t there in the cab, although their smell wafted up from the old army blankets to remind me that they existed.

“Where were you guys headed for?” Carter asked.

“Nowhere special,” I said.

“Oh, do better than that, Billy.”

“But it’s true.”

“Tell you what, let’s go out to our place. I visited your house. Now you visit mine.”

He threw the truck into gear, and we did a U-turn in Newtown Lane and rattled out along the streets that led to Accabonac Road.

“The real reason I come by,” he said, “is that I owe you an apology. Should have come by to tell you, but I felt a little shy about knocking on your door — thought your dad might hit me over the head with a baseball bat. Hated to phone you—apology’s got to be face-to-face, man-to-man. What I want to say is, I feel real bad about what happened that night with the beasts.”

“It’s all over,” I said. “Gone and forgotten.”

“So tell me, what did it cost your people to get all that mud and piss cleaned up off of the rug?”

None of your beeswax, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut.

Amy sat between us, scrunched up, her arms folded across her chest. It was like she wasn’t there. Didn’t want to know.

“They don’t tell you details like that, huh, Billy? Okay, now I got a question where I know you know the answer. What did you do to Pablo?”

“Huh?”

Carter bore down on the gas pedal and we rocketed up Fireplace Road. “We get home that night, Pablo’s all dopey. Can’t hardly stand up. I look, and there’s a lump on his head the size of a cue ball, plus there’s blood. I think back. I’m upstairs having a look at your zillion-dollar house. I hear some kind of doggy racket coming from down there, but I don’t pay attention, I’m having too good a time satisfying my curiosity. Except I remember all of a sudden it got real silent. So what was it you did to Pablo?”

I said to Carter that when I launched myself at Pablo to stop him from clawing his way up the side of the piano to get at Iphigenia, he had banged his head on the piano leg.

“Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I kept calling you. You didn’t answer.”

“That’s a big goddam house, how’m I supposed to hear a squeaky-voiced kid calling me? You coulda come up and got me.”

“You heard the dogs barking. Why didn’t you hear me call you?”

No one likes it when other people get logical with them. He scowled at the road.

“That dog was bought to be a guard dog,” he said. “He ain’t worth shit now. Anyone comes at him, he backs off. You ruined that dog’s fighting spirit.”

I knew they didn’t buy Pablo, they got him from the pound. We still hadn’t reached Accabonac when Carter suddenly looked over at me, reached across Amy and, in his unpredictable way, slapped his palm on my thigh.

“I seen you on TV the other night. On
Everybody Loves Raymond
. Commercial break comes, I nearly fall out of my chair. I grab Ginette. I yell, ‘That kid with the monkey is Billy! That’s the kid I been telling you about, the one likes Amy.”