Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (25 page)

My dad asked if something had happened that he didn’t know about. I told him that Carter and I had an argument the previous afternoon and that I’d pushed him off the Georgica Beach jetty, into the ocean. And that when I ran into the water to save his life, he’d tried to drown me. “Then,” I said, “I brained him with a rock. I left him there to die.”

“Billy,” my dad said, “I’m beginning to see that you have an over-active imagination.”

“The garbage is on our lawn, Dad. It’s not in my imagination.”

He thought about that.

“You had an argument with him, you said. What about, Billy?”

“He made me a disgusting offer.”

My dad sucked in his breath. “What sort? He propositioned you? Sexually?”

“It was about Amy.”

He thought about that, too, for about five seconds.

“When the police come,” he said, “don’t tell them anything about Carter unless they ask you a direct question. In other words, don’t lie, but don’t volunteer any information. Let me talk to Mom.”

When my parents finished their conversation my mom told me that she was going to drive me to school after she’d dealt with the police. And then she would drive in from Modern Age at three o’clock and pick me up from school, too.

A township police car bounced down the driveway off Oak Lane in five minutes, siren wailing to alert the neighborhood that the boys in blue were on the job. They were the same guys who had pulled Carter and me to the side of the road and given him the speeding ticket. The yellow-haired one wore the same blue-tinted sunglasses. The other guy was thin and had a hatchet nose. They introduced themselves as Officers Halloran and Gordon, tapping their brass nameplates.

They gave no sign that they recognized me from that night last October. But they were cops, taught to observe all, reveal nothing.

“Ma’am,” said Officer Halloran, from behind his sunglasses, “do you have any idea who could have done this?”

“No.”

That answer, quite unlike my chatty mom, was my dad speaking. He was a good ventriloquist and had the ability to throw his voice fifteen hundred miles.

From a distance, in class on Monday morning, I kept looking at Amy.

You’re for rent. The price is ten thousand dollars. And you don’t even know it
.

When Mrs. Ostrow called on me with a question about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ostrow… I wasn’t listening.”

“I know, Billy.”

Amy turned toward me. When I caught her eye, she started to giggle. She couldn’t stop.

Mrs. Ostrow’s frown deepened. “What exactly is so funny, Amy?”

Amy shrugged, and resumed her stony face.

All day long, in my mind’s eye, I held that image of her giggling. But it didn’t take me all day to work out what was behind it. She knew what had happened at the jetty at Georgica Beach. She just didn’t know what Carter and I had been arguing about.

It was right then that I saw what I had to do, and I began to plan it.

Our service drained and refilled the pool, and my mom called a landscape contractor to clean up the lawn on an emergency basis — this was not something that Mr. Papademetriou could handle. From Tallahassee my dad had already called the East Hampton police chief, and on Saturday morning he went to see him.

That evening, at dinner, my dad said, “The garbage company manager insists that his trucks are locked up in a yard all night long. He also claims they’re emptied in the town dump on the Old Sag Harbor Turnpike every day after the pickups. The police chief says there’s no evidence. So there’s nothing he can do.”

“Carter used his own pickup,” I said. “And he could have got one of his friends to help him with a second pickup. They went to the town dump in the middle of the night and they loaded up.”

My dad slowly nodded. “I should have asked the chief if they checked Carter’s pickup for garbage smears.”

“Carter would have hosed it down,” I explained.

“I might go have a talk with this man,” my dad said.

My mom looked alarmed. “Jack, the guy may be a looney-tune, but with the police sniffing round now, he’s not going to dump garbage a second time. Why antagonize him?”

After dinner, my dad took me outside on the porch. The evening was cool, and you could smell brine from the ocean. We sat on my mom’s favorite antique school bench.

“What exactly was this proposition that Carter made to you about Amy?”

I told him.

“I can hardly believe that, Billy.”

“There’s a lot I tell you that you don’t believe, like about Tom Egan flying me to Denver and Uncle Bernie not knowing. It’s all true.”

My dad said, “This man Bedford is despicable.”

“Are you going to go out there to see him?”

“I’d like to break his neck. But Mom’s right when she says I’d be asking for trouble.”

“What about what I just told you?”

“I’m going to think out loud.” He did that from time to time, so we were used to it and didn’t interrupt. “We could file a complaint to the state under the Child Protective Services Act. They encourage people to do that. I’d go with you, Billy, but anything I say is hearsay. You’re the witness. They bring Carter in. He says, ‘This kid’s making it up. He has a crush on my daughter and she rebuffed him. He’s a violent kid. He threw me in the water at the jetty. He came after me and hit me on the head with a rock.’ Billy, we could have the juvenile authorities out here.”

“Dad, you almost always have a reason why not to do something.”

His eyes shifted back and forth, like he was watching a tennis match. “Lawyers are often accused of that. We try to keep people from going out on a limb. Especially where the limb might break off.”

“Climbers aren’t blind,” I said. “They can see which limbs might break.”

He reached out to hug me. I didn’t back off the way I backed off when he’d told me I couldn’t go rock-climbing anymore. This time I hugged him back. He was my dad. I knew he loved me, and he wanted the best for me.

And I knew he’d miss me.

There were only three more weeks of school. Once the school year ended, unless some drastic changes occurred, I wouldn’t see Amy until September. And by then the Bedfords could be gone to Sayville or to Florida.

I sent out rays of light and will. I pictured what I wanted to happen. I breathed deep. I shut my eyes and tried two or three different mantras until my mind was pretty much a blank. I stood in tadasana, the mountain pose. I stood in the wu chi position that the Tai Chi masters recommended. I smiled the Inner Smile down into my center, into my core, which is a few inches below the navel, and the seat of power.

That’s what the books I’d read told you to do.

Of course there were other books that told you couldn’t do anything, that you were the seeker but not the doer. All events were God’s will, preordained by a higher view of what we mistakenly called time. There was no time. There was just change. All human actions, just like the actions of skunks, trees, hurricanes, comets, were no more and no less than a function of the universe — or even the multiverse — chugging along on the ordained physical path.

My head spun.

Sometimes I believed that if there were intelligent life out there in the billion other galaxies, which seemed like a good bet, they would look down on human beings and see us the way we saw ants. We didn’t know one ant from another. We only see ants in the plural. I felt like one of those nameless, featureless ants you see scurrying in the dirt—back and forth, back and forth — doing important ant business.

People were so certain of what they believed—certain that they believed it, and certain that what they believed was true—and even more certain of what they told you they believed. On the other hand, I wasn’t certain of anything. But I was only twelve years old.

I wound up saying to myself, “If I have the ability to desire it, the universe has the ability to deliver it. If I point myself in the right direction, and start moving, I’ll get to where I want to be and where I want to be is where I should be. Not in one big leap, but step by step. I don’t care what anyone else has done in the past — I’m the creator of my own experience. I have the power.
I allow myself the power.
“

I biked off to school on a sunny morning when the air was heavenly warm and yellow butterflies fluttered along the street like little dancing flames. I biked along, wandering with my bike from one side of the street to the other side. It was too early for traffic. A perfect time of a perfect day that made you glad you were alive.

In class, Mrs. Ostrow talked about spring, the regeneration of plants and flowers, the life cycle. I looked over at Amy. She was talking to herself.

Even as I watched, Amy closed her mouth and looked directly at me. She looked into my eyes and I looked into hers. I saw right into the depths of her eyes where a wind blew half a gale out of an ocean with whitecaps like teeth.

Then the storm clicked off. Amy’s eyes seemed at peace and grave with wonder. She nodded to me — what did that mean? — then turned away.

She slipped her notebook and pen in her backpack. She got up from her seat. Without a word to Mrs. Ostrow or anyone, she walked out of the classroom.

Because it was a warm morning, the door was open. Amy walked through it, turned down the corridor, and vanished from sight.

I got up from my seat, too. Mrs. Ostrow’s eyes, which had followed Amy in a deeply puzzled stare, switched over to me.
What’s this?
I grabbed my backpack, stuffed everything into it, said, “Sorry about this, Mrs. Ostrow,” and hurried out after Amy. I didn’t think much about it. I just did it.

I ran down the empty hallway toward the big door that led outside. For a few seconds the light of the day was blinding. Amy was halfway down the steps on her way to Newtown Lane. I caught up with her.

She turned and said, “Hi, Billy.”

“You ran out.”

“You did, too.”

“I did. After you.”

“Well, maybe you had to do it. And maybe I had to do it.”

“Why, Amy?”

“Because it’s all so…” She searched for the word, and found it. “So irrelevant.”

I absorbed that, and then asked, “How’s Carter?”

“Got a big cut on his ear where you hit him. Ginette told him to go to the hospital and get stitches. He wouldn’t do it”.

“Where are you going now?”

“Nowhere in particular. What about you?”

“With you.”

“Well, I don’t want to stand here all day on these steps.”

Once we were walking up Newtown Lane in the direction of the railroad station, I said, “Amy, I have a plan. I’m going to tell it to you. I think it could work. And then everything will be good for you. You’ll have a chance for a good life. Okay?”

She didn’t nod or say okay. But she didn’t shake her head no, either, and say she didn’t want to hear it. We walked to the end of Newtown Lane and then up Long Lane to Stephen Hands Path, where the forest began, and where the clover and the blue chicory grew in the summer. From time to time a wisp of cloud passed overhead, looking like a small handful of wool.

When we got to Stephen Hands Path I had finished a detailed outline of my plan.

Amy looked at me. “That’s a good plan, Billy. Not easy to do, though.”

“But do you want to do it with me?”

“Sure I do.”

“Really? I mean, you really,
really
want to do it?”

“Really.”

“It will take me a while to arrange things.”

“How long will it take?”

“Two or three weeks, I think. Maybe more. Can you wait?”

“I can wait. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yes you are. Think positive thoughts. You have to connect with the plan. Be there in your mind. The rest of you will follow, Amy. That’s what I learned when I climbed Crab Rock.”

She took my hand. That was the first time she’d ever done that. I knew she didn’t like to be touched. I’d often wondered about that, and in the end decided I would have to learn to live with it, and that in time it would change, because I liked to hold her hand and it was a friendly thing to do and made me feel good. So hand in hand we walked along Stephen Hands Path and then back to town on Cedar Street to where she could catch her bus to out Springs Fireplace Road.

Chapter 24

I didn’t want a record showing up on the monthly phone bill at Oak Lane, so I went out to a public phone booth on Pantigo Road close by the police station and used my Modern Age debit card to make the call. I loved technology; it was one of the few things in this world that didn’t discriminate between adults and kids.

Uncle Bernie was home in his painting studio. I told him what I needed.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “that’s a lot to ask of me.”

“You said you’d do anything. You said you owed me.”

“I did say that, didn’t I? Jesus Christ. But your mother will kill me if I do this for you.”

I was silent. I let him stew.

“For how long, Billy?”

“Only a few days.”

“And how big will the check be?”

“Between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Jesus Christ. Billy, do you know what you’re doing?”

“I hope so.”