Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (18 page)

He placed both his palms together and was tapping his fingertips against his nose. Then he lowered his hands but he couldn’t help tapping his palms together a few more times. My dad was a tapper.

“Billy, what you want is not going to happen. I’ll treat your request seriously, even though it’s childish, and tell you that if we did what you asked, if we took your friend Amy in to live with us, we would be breaking the law. She’s a minor child. You asked me if her parents owned her. No, they don’t own her. But they’re her legal guardians. “

“What if they’re lousy parents?” I asked.

A dry chuckle came from deep in his chest. “Too many people would fit into that category.”

“But she wants to leave them. She’s unhappy.”

“what she wants is not at issue,” my dad said. “Also, unfortunately, neither is her unhappiness. You can’t take a child away from her legal guardians simply because the child’s unhappy and wants to leave. Well, you can, but it’s illegal. You
may
not. If Carter Bedford and his wife neglected this girl, starved her, abused her, she could go to Child Protective Services and seek foster care. But she won’t be allowed to leave home just because she says, ‘I hate it there. I want to live with my good buddy Billy Braver-man.’” He grunted. “Be sensible, Billy. You’re a very bright kid. Show it. Go beyond your feelings.”

I wasn’t sure that was the right place to go. But we were in his territory, going at it his way.

“Dad, I have to tell you something…”

I had to break my word of honor. I’d never done that in my whole life. I had to do it in order to help Amy. You try to keep your honor, but life tricks you.

“Her little brother didn’t stab her,” I said. “It was her mother. Her name is Ginette. Ginette locked Amy in a closet for two days without water or food and without anything to use as a toilet, and when she let Amy out, she was crazy mad and she stabbed her. They made Amy say that Jimmy did it.”

My dad shook his head a few times, as if he doubted the truth of what I was telling him. He glanced at his watch. His law partner was waiting for the rascal.

He asked, “How do you know all this, Billy?”

“Amy told me.”

“But why?” he demanded. “Why did the mother stab her? If you know.”

“Amy won’t tell me. She said, ‘Don’t make me tell you.’” I looked into my dad’s nervous eyes. “Now can she stay?”

“No, she can’t, Billy.”

I sat up on the bed. “I just told you what happened.”

“And she still can’t stay.”

“You said if she was abused in any way—”

“If the New York State Office of Children and Family Services investigated her case and found that she was abused, they could shelter her. And place her. But
we
can’t.”

He put his hands on my shoulders. It reminded me right away how Carter did that to me when he had the Airweight in one hand.

I said, “Dad, I have one more thing to tell you.”

He looked again at his watch.

I told him about Carter on my birthday, and the words he’d used to me, and what he’d done with his pistol to me in the truck on the way back to town.

Now my dad stared at me as if I’d told him the moon was made of green cheese. “You’re telling the truth? You’re not making this up?”

How could he doubt me?

“Carter Bedford put a loaded pistol to your face?”

“Here.” I touched my lower lip. “Now do you understand?”

He looked nearly apoplectic; his face was the color of red wine.

“Now do you see why Amy has to leave there?”

“Amy… Jesus…
Amy?
Never mind Amy
. Good God. Billy, how do you know the pistol was loaded?”

He was always logical, always trying to assemble the parts of the puzzle. I told him about Carter taking target practice in the woods, and how he knocked down a branch with real bullets.

My dad seemed to have trouble speaking, and his breath quickened. He said, “This man is a goddam maniac.”

“Exactly. You’ve got it. That’s why Amy has to leave.”

“He cast racial slurs at you?”

“Yeah. Not just Jewboy. Smartass
city
Jewboy.”

My dad looked puzzled. “Am I missing a point?”

“Dad, don’t you believe that Amy needs our help?”

“Billy, this is scary. I need to think about this. Meanwhile, I have a dinner date. I’ll be home late, but tomorrow morning we’ll talk. I cannot let this go unresolved. This man is a menace.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to me. “A gun in my son’s face. Jesus Christ.” He focused on me again. “We’ll take whatever action is necessary. Necessary, practical, and legal.”

“Will you think about what I asked you about Amy?”

“I said that tomorrow morning, Billy, we’ll talk.”

“I heard you. I just asked you to think about it, like, between now and then.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Have fun with your law partner, Dad.”

“Partners,” he said.

Nana fell asleep in front of the TV, and I went into the master bedroom upstairs and opened the drawers of the bedside tables until I found all the airline tickets with a rubber band around them. I called United Airlines, and they told me that the flights from Denver to Islip the next day were full but if I went standby I’d have a fair chance to get on. The flight from Aspen to Denver, however, would be difficult. There were standbys listed on all flights all day long. Chances weren’t good.

At eight o’clock sharp, keeping in mind the time difference between the Rocky Mountains and the east coast, I dialed the number of the telephone booth in front of Ashawagh Hall. No answer. I waited two minutes and dialed again.

“Billy?”

“Whew. I was worried for a while. Amy, are you all right?”

“Can you come back?”

“The flights are full. I have to fly standby.”

“What’s that?”

I was too upset by everything else to explain it to her. I said, “Look, I’ll get there somehow. I have to change planes in Denver, and then I have to get from Islip to Amagansett. I don’t have much cash here with me. I broke my wrist. My nose, too. I look weird. My eyes are turning black and blue.”

“Gross. How’d that happen?”

“This baseball pitcher crashed into me on the mountain.” I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing again. If Aspen airport got socked in, the planes might not even fly. “Listen, Amy, I’ll be back as soon as I can and as fast as I can.”

“I’m sorry I was so mean to you after your birthday. He made me do it.”

“How can I reach you when I get there?”

“I have to go,” Amy said, and the line went dead.

Chapter 18

It snowed all night and in the morning the earth was absolutely still and the sky a deep clear blue, the snow tufting every branch of every tree. The rest of the family had gone home to the various parts of the world where they lived. Simon, as usual, was asleep. Uncle Bernie and Ginger at the dining room table eating croissants with blackberry jam. My dad, who had come home late the night before, said to me, “I can tell you in advance, Billy, that what you want is not going to happen. My partners are powder hounds, and I’m off for the mountain. This is a perfect day.”

“Go for it, Dad.”

“Keep those peas in place. Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off. Bernard, are you skiing today?”

Uncle Bernie was still in his bathrobe. “I couldn’t move two feet in this stuff without falling flat on my schnozz.”

“Champagne powder. Very forgiving. You should try it.” He clapped Uncle Bernie on the shoulder. If he did that, he was really in a good mood.

He left the house at nine o’clock. I was alone with Ginger and Uncle Bernie, who had moved to the living room and was doing his version of yoga, stretching in different directions, then stopping to catch his breath and sip some coffee.

“Aren’t you going out with Ginger for a walk or something?” I asked. “It’s a winter wonderland.”

“Later. Want to come along, Billy?”

“No, thanks, I’ve got stuff to do. I was just wondering when you were going.”

I had to call a taxi soon for the airport and I didn’t want them to see me go. I’d already written a note and left it on my pillow: “DAD, I HAD TO GO. I’LL BE FINE. DON’T WORRY. LOVE, BILLY.” I needed to get on standby for an 11 A.M. flight, and the only other flight that would make my Denver connection took off at noon. If I missed that one, I’d have to creep back to Smuggler Street with my tail between my legs. And I’d have no way to let Amy know I couldn’t make it.

I called United again. They told me I was ninth on the standby list. I groaned, because everything was out of my control, and there aren’t many worse feelings.

The front doorbell rang. When I opened the door, a man in a sheepskin coat and tan cowboy hat stood tall on the porch in the bright morning sun, grinning at me. In his late twenties, with a thick brown mustache, like one of those guys in the barbershop quartet competitions, he had the biggest hands I’d ever seen.

“How y’all doin’, Billy?” He pointed a banana-sized finger at the cast on my wrist. “I did that to you. I’m Tom Egan.”

“Oh! Wow!”

He shook my hand; it was like being wrapped up in a sirloin steak. I wondered if all pitchers had hands like that. If they did, it wouldn’t be fair to the batters.

“I was going fast,” he said, “and you come up outa nowhere. I saw you trying to shove that phone in your pocket.”

“It was all my fault, Mr. Egan.”

“I felt bad that I couldn’t get a chance to talk to you afterward. They told me, ‘Not now. Later.’ So here I am.”

“I’d ask you in, sir, but —”

“Hey, no sweat, Billy, this is a quickie. I just swung by to say sorry young buddy. Then I’m heading home.”

“Where’s that?”

“Ranch Road 683, twenty miles northwest of Amarillo, Texas. Got my sweet wife and baby daughter waiting for me. Skiing is not their thing.”

I noticed that a black Isuzu with a ski rack was parked at the curb in front of the house.

“You driving?” I asked.

“Heck, no. That’s a rental car. I got my plane at the airport.”

“Your plane?”

“Cessna One Seventy. Twin-engine lightning.”

I had to take a deep breath and search for courage. I found it.

The Cessna leveled off at two thousand feet above the Rocky Mountains. I’d never seen that much snow in my life. The air was so bright I had to wear special sunglasses that Tom Egan gave to me. From that height you were reminded that the earth was a planet, looking like a round white soccer ball in space. The snowy peaks and spurs stood up like teeth. And whenever we passed over a town I saw people as ants, houses as shelters, roads as links, and cars as magic carpets. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what they are.

“Ain’t it great?” Tom Egan had to yell at me — it was hard to hear above the whine of the engines.

I added flying a plane to my list of ambitions.

He’d been glad to help me out; I think he felt guilty about banging into me on the mountain even though it was my fault. He was so big, I was so small. It was a few miles out of his way to stop at Denver International, he said, but what the heck. A detour for a good reason never killed you. He said later, “I’m a fastball pitcher. Got a curve, but it’s nowhere near as hard to handle as my fastball. They say, ‘Tom Egan challenges the hitters.’ So I appreciate the way you asked if I could fly you to Denver. You challenged me with a fastball.”

When he helped me carry my bags out of the house, he noted movement inside the Adidas bag.

“Hold on, pardner. What’s in there?”

“A space monkey. Is that cool?”

After we cleared the tower at Aspen airport, Tom let Iphigenia run around the cabin. She pressed her nose to the plexiglass, interested by what was whizzing past. The Cessna hit a pocket of cold air, yawed, then settled back into its forward motion. Iphigenia squirmed quickly back into her bag.

Up there in the wild blue, we talked about life on a ranch. He told me about his wife, Bonnie Rae, and his six-month-old daughter, Katie, and his dogs, and his horses, and some cattle he ran. In the Texas panhandle, he said, “the wind’ll blow a dog off a chain.” He talked about his life as a baseball player, how it was tough to be on the road so much of the time, and how you could be at the top of the stats one season and back in the minors the next, and you wondered what you’d be doing when you were forty. That’s why he bought the ranch outside Amarillo.

I told him a few things about Amy, and a lot about rock climbing and how one day I planned to run a chain of gourmet restaurants. Before we landed we exchanged e-mail addresses, and he said, “When the Rockies come to town next summer, I’ll give you and Amy a hoot. Y’all come visit at Shea.”

After he made a perfect three-point landing at Denver airport, he asked me if I had enough money.

I thanked him and said, “Getting to Denver was the hard part.”

“Happy trails, pardner.”

It took me a while to work my way through the airport to the Delta counter, and I signed up for standby on the flight to Islip. If I didn’t get on, they explained, I could stand by for a later flight to LaGuardia. And if that didn’t work, I’d have to spend the night at a motel near Denver airport. I went down the corridor to a Subways restaurant and bought an apple for Iphigenia. Back at the gate, I shut my eyes and imagined myself on the plane. I was there, in my seat, sipping apple juice. I could see it clearly. Ten minutes before the flight took off, they called my name.