Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (22 page)

The top floor was his own huge studio and bedroom, with lots of exposed brick and pipes, and the spaces on the lower floors he rented out to another painter who made a living as a carpenter; a gay actor couple; a stock analyst from Jaipur, India; a Russian soprano singing in the chorus at City Center; and a ballerina from Chicago living with a sculptor from Ibiza. “So shoot me,” Uncle Bernie said, with a groan, “I’m moonlighting as a slum landlord.”

He buzzed me in and came down in the old creaking freight elevator, wearing a fez and his aromatic Moroccan
djellaba
. “Hello, sweet Iphigenia, you cash cow. Come on in, Billy. Everyone’s is dying to meet you.”

Even before the gate of the elevator clanged open at the top floor, I sniffed exotic spices, and in a minute all the warmth of Ginger Casey bent to give me a hug. I’ve never been to a Tahitian rain forest, or a Delhi bazaar, or the perfume department of Bloomies, but I think that if you stirred them all together, that would be Ginger’s aura. In the winter heat of the loft I fell against her. My head settled in a place where I was looking straight down into the hollow of her silk blouse, with no bra blocking the sights. The big nipples of her breasts rose up at me. I went weak in the knees, and I backed up and out.

“Hi, Billy. How’s my ski buddy?”

“Good. Hi, Ginger. Gee, it’s hot in here.”

The loft was enormous, and Uncle Bernie’s paintings hung on most of the walls. They were large, and seemed abstract, formed from swatches and strips of painted canvas pasted to other pieces of painted canvas, so that they resembled a tapestry. When you looked at them for a minute or two, however, they revealed a geometric pattern of windows, walls, doors and fields, in shades of brown with reds and oranges and yellows mixed in.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“What do you think they are?”

“Old houses in Italian villages. You miss them, so you’re painting them. You make them look abstract so that people won’t say you’re being soppy. And probably because they sell better.”

Uncle Bernie turned to his friends. “My twelve-year-old nephew walks in from the boonies and knows more about my art than any SoHo gallery owner.”

His tenants were there, and his friends. A ton of deli food — knishes, corned beef and pastrami, smoked lox and sturgeon ends — was just being set out on the kitchen table. Most of the crowd was drinking red wine and a few were passing a potato that had been made into a pot pipe. Everyone fussed over me and Iphigenia.

The Super Bowl started, but I wasn’t interested in it and neither was the turbaned Sikh from Jaipur, Nawan Singh, the stock analyst. I asked him what he thought about the market and the dot-com mania, and after he got over his surprise that I knew about those things, he said, “I am a bear, and this has been a bad year for my species.” But there was no doubt, he said, that the high-flying, tech-heavy Nasdaq was going to collapse. “The consequences will be quite awful. The only question is when.”

I said that was like telling a person he was going to die one day but you couldn’t tell him exactly when. We know we’ll die.
All
that matters is when.

“My goodness, that is well phrased. So what is your opinion, young man, if I may be bold, as to when is when?”

I never got a chance to answer, because a shout went up from the gang watching the game.

Uncle Bernie yelled, “Billy, come quick! It’s you!”

I peered over a few heads. There I was, on the screen, with Iphigenia battling to haul a cherry-flavored Fruitie from behind my teeth. She snagged it. I—the I that I was looking at—said, “Why do you like Fruities? Because they taste so good, or because they’re hard to get?” Iphigenia popped her starred black eyes and went
chit-chit-chit
. (It had taken thirty minutes that day to get her to do that.) I said, “Both, eh? Taste so good,
and
hard to get. Well, they’re not hard for
me
to get.” I turned and winked at the audience.

Cut to me picking up a pack of Fruities at a shop counter. Finally, a shot of me rubbing my hands together over my secret stash of Fruities, and then a shot of Iphigenia giving me what you might call a dirty look. Then we were back on the football field, first and ten for the Broncos in the other team’s red zone.

Everyone in Uncle Bernie’s studio applauded, and Ginger threw a magnificent smile at me. “Did you write that dialogue, Billy?”

“Most of it, but not on paper. I just told them what I thought would be good, and they said, ‘Okay, try them all.’ I never saw the finished commercial until right now.”

“It was a winner, champ,” Ginger said, hugging me again so that I felt dizzy and shut my eyes.

My dad called from Sag Harbor to tell me that everyone watching the game there had applauded, and most of them had no idea that the boy in the commercial was his son. He was trying to get back on my good side.

I received an e-mail from that part of Texas where the wind’ll blow a dog off a chain. “I darn near fell out of my chair when I saw you and Iphigenia on the TV. All the guys on the team want to meet you. You pick a date from the schedule I’m sending you, and you and Amy and Iphigenia will be my guests at Shea Stadium. Hope your arm and nose are mending real good. Warm regards, Tom Egan.”

The deal with Fruities gave them the right to use my picture, so print ads popped up everywhere. In one, Iphigenia was just in the act of snatching her cherry trophy, and the slogan said:
“FRUITIES. Taste So Good. Not Hard to Get.”
Max Russo called Jack and told him that slogan was the key to the campaign. “It was Billy’s idea. If that kid ever wants a summer job copy writing, I’m hiring.”

South Fork people were used to celebrities who expected privacy. But I couldn’t stop kids in school from asking me if I’d autograph ads they’d torn out of
Newsday
and
TV Guide
. It looked like some wanted to be friends with me — I didn’t encourage that, because I knew it wouldn’t last. They would realize soon enough that I was still a nerd.

I decided that my career in advertising was over. The contract prohibited Iphigenia and me from doing the same thing for any other product, and after Max Russo had taped Iphigenia taking the candy from my mouth from twenty different angles, what more work could we do? I didn’t mind. I didn’t need to be a celebrity. You lose all your privacy, and my privacy was me.

I also decided, sadly, that it was all over with Amy, and, gladly, that I’d seen the last of Carter Bedford. I was wrong on both counts.

Chapter 22

Spring was the reward for having survived the Long Island winter. The honeysuckles blossomed and a rare pair of five-feet-wide ospreys came back to nest and dive for alewives in the ponds. I liked to bike along the shore at Three Mile Harbor and watch the alewives wriggle upstream, heading for the shallow parts of the harbor where they could spawn. It didn’t matter that the tide was more at ebb than flooding and that the ospreys were on the prowl — the alewives kept coming.

One May afternoon, some fishermen stood on the banks of Three Mile Harbor Road and took a bunch of alewives in their nets. Most of the shoal slipped through, however, but the ospreys were waiting for them.

I was there on Three Mile Harbor Road, watching, when a horn honked. I turned, and my eyes locked with those of Carter Bedford, my private osprey, grinning at me from behind the wheel of his Toyota pickup. He kept raising his ginger-colored eyebrows, like he was trying to signal.

“Billy! Come on over here.”

I didn’t move.

“Come on, Billy, I’m not gonna do you no harm.”

I shook my head. No way, Carter.

“Jesus. All right. Daisy, stay.”

How did he find me? It might have been coincidence, or he might have trailed me from school: up Three Mile Harbor Road past the marinas and the dockside restaurants all the way to the narrow end of the road. Daisy stayed in the cab while Carter jumped down from the truck and with deep purpose strode across the road toward me. I wasn’t afraid that he would do anything to me, because the fishermen were close by, casting their nets for the silvery alewives, But I couldn’t forget what had happened the last time we’d met, and he’d pulled out his Airweight. I was ready to run.

When he got near I noticed something else: he was wearing a khaki shirt and, around his neck, aviator fashion, he sported a yellow polka-dotted silk scarf. My dad hadn’t misplaced it.

“Nice scarf,” I said, when Carter came up to me on the road, where I straddled my bike.

“Yeah, ain’t it? It was my Christmas present to myself. Bought it at that fancy men’s clothing store on Newtown Lane.”

I realized that he’d lie even when he knew that I knew he was lying. Or else he’d come to believe the lie was the truth, which is what they say happened with O.J. Simpson.

“I want to talk to you,” Carter said.

“No one’s stopping you.”

“Not out here in the street. Somewhere private.”

“Forget it, Carter.”

“Lighten up, Billy. I’ll run you down to the beach. Throw your bike in the back of my truck. I’ll put Daisy back there, too. What are you scared of? You don’t trust me?”

I laughed at him.

“Ooooh… you’re really pissed off.” Carter wagged his head up and down. “But you gotta see things from my point of view. My little girl runs off, I’m crazy with worry, I don’t know where she is. And then I think, well, maybe, who knows, maybe she’s at Billy’s place. I go to Oak Lane, I see her footsteps in the snow on the porch. And that dumb Puerto Rican maid keeps tellin’ me, ‘Go way, she’s not here, I’m gonna call the cops.’ I’m her father. Imagine how I felt.”

I knew half of it was lies. Amy had squeezed through the hedges, and her footsteps hadn’t been on the porch, and Inez had never told him Amy wasn’t there. But all that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Carter was a madman.

“Look, Billy, maybe I go overboard sometimes. I say things I shouldn’t. Nobody’s perfect. Shit happens.”

“Like Ginette stabs Amy with a knife?”— I said it before I could stop myself. “And you tell everyone Jimmy did it?”

He wasn’t angry. Not even surprised.

“Billy, I have to live with that every day. Think about it — what am I supposed to do? I can’t kick Ginette out into the cold, can I? Let the law deal with her? She wouldn’t survive. Worse’n that, they could take Amy from me. They’d say, ‘Bedford, you got a job pays a lousy eight bucks an hour, no medical benefits, how can you handle all those kids by yourself?’ They could say, ‘This here one’s got a screw loose and needs medication, and we’ll turn the other two into wards of the state, shove ‘em into these homes that are like prisons.’ That happened to me when I was a kid. You think I want my kids to go through that hell, too? Put yourself in my shoes.”

I tried to do that. It gave me a feeling of hopelessness. No, I wouldn’t want to be Carter Bedford.

I took my foot off the bike pedal. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

“About Amy. What did you think?”

He had me. He had swung his net in the right direction and I was caught. How could I back off?

“What about her?”

“Not here. We’ll go down to the beach. I give you my word, nothing will happen to you.”

I wheeled my bike over to the truck, picked it up and slung it in the back along with my book bag from school. While I was doing that he hauled Daisy out of the cab and led her round to the back of the truck on the other side. She was too fat to jump so he had to pick her up in his arms and dump her on top of some old tarpaulins. He did that easily; he was strong. “There, girl,” he muttered. “Don’t you fall out.”

I got in the cab. The smells of dog and fish still filled the air, but now I could roll down the window. Carter turned the key and we drove back along Three Mile Harbor Road.

“So how you been, Billy? Whatchoo been doin’?”

I hadn’t seen him since my birthday in December, and now it was May. I’d seen Amy, of course, every day in class at the middle school, but we exchanged hardly a word since that January morning on Oak Lane when my dad had kicked her out and forbidden me to see her.

My wrist had mended, and my nose when it healed didn’t look any different. I’d read a lot that winter: I read Bullfinch’s
Mythology
, Benjamin Franklin, Machiavelli, most of Mark Twain, and books of philosophy by Plato, Lao-Tsu, and Jean-Paul Sartre that were hard to understand but I plowed through them because I sensed that they were wise and I wanted that to rub off on me. I read
Le Petit Prince
in French and
Cien Años de Solitud
in Spanish. I climbed on the indoor wall at the high school with Duwayne Williams. I got fan mail from kids all over the country asking me about my life and what was my monkey’s name, and I wrote back to every one of them. I watched my mutual funds fly off the charts. When residual payments came in from the commercials, I put them into the fund. I looked into a few books about the stock market and I decided the best thing was to be in a bull market and to be lucky.

I missed Amy. It didn’t help that I saw her in school. It made it worse, because she was there in front of my eyes, but she might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.