Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (26 page)

“What do I say if Diana calls me?”

“She won’t call you until I get there. Then I’ll deal with it.”

*

I remembered how much fun my mom and I had choosing
Dianaskid
and
Billysloot
as user name and password. I logged into Modern Age and typed them in to see how I was doing.

Back in January, when the advertising agency had paid me for the Super Bowl commercial, my 25% net of the gross had been $65,287.50. There was a lot more in the trust, but that sixty five thousand and change was the money they’d agreed to let me invest on my own. I’d put it into all the high flying funds to keep company with my original $900 and the extra $700 in cash from my socks. In five months my money had nearly doubled to more than $120,000.

My mom never looked at the statements anymore; she just asked me, “How are we doing, kiddo?”

I always said, “Good.”

I dug out my calculator and began pushing buttons. I figured out that at this rate of increase, if I let the money ride, in two more years I would have almost $2 million, and in five years my investment would reach a cool billion. I had a pang of regret — it would have been fun to watch my paper profit soar steadily up and up and up. I don’t think I wasn’t alone in those thoughts back then.

So I punched in the numbers and instructed Modern Age to sell us out of the stock funds at the close of business that day, and to deposit all of the proceeds into the money market fund. If I had been allowed to maintain a bank account where I could write checks and withdraw cash I would have transferred the whole sum into that account, but the law didn’t allow kids to handle money without their parents’ approval.

Three days later, after school let out, I took one of the money market fund checks that my mom had signed and filled it out to Bernard M. Adler for ninety thousand dollars. I biked over to the FedEx office in East Hampton and sent it overnight for delivery by 10:30 a.m. the next morning.

On the way home I stopped at a drive-in bank on Pantigo Road that had an ATM machine. I put my debit card in the slot, punched in the PIN, and asked for five thousand dollars. The machine grumbled,, and finally came back with its answer: EXCEEDS THE LIMIT.

I tried twenty five hundred. Still too much. I tried a thousand. No good. This machine was a real miser.

Finally, after I’d worked my way down to $500, the crummy machine agreed to cooperate. It spat out ten almost-brand-new $50 bills. I slid them into a manila envelope and stuffed the envelope into the deepest, darkest part of my backpack.

Next stop was the first bank in Amagansett. I got this electronic cheapskate to part with another five hundred in not-so-crisp fifties, and I put them into the manila envelope.

I biked along to the next bank, the only other one in the village. The ATM wouldn’t work. I went back to the second bank. It wouldn’t work, either. Disgusted, I went inside, told a teller what I’d done, and asked what was the problem. She looked down and smiled at me as if I was a dog who had stood up on its hind legs — they always smile that way at kids who ask questions about money, as if it’s cute but has nothing to do with real life — and explained that ATMs had a daily limit of a thousand dollars per debit or credit card.

“Would you give me cash against this debit card?”

“I will when you turn eighteen, young man.”

Turning eighteen made you worthy of trust. Tell that to the people who ran the prisons. What could I do? Only one thing: go back every day and coax the machines into spitting out two lots of five hundred.

That worked. And then on the fifth day, on a cloudy afternoon in front of the bank on Main Street Amagansett, just as the ATM gurgled and began regurgitating fifties, someone grabbed my arms from behind. I almost pissed in my pants. Instead, I yelped. I twisted, ready to fight to the death for my money.

It was Aunt Grace — her office was on a side street only half a block away — her big eyes aglow with the pleasure of surprise. But she let go of me pretty quick when she felt my panic.

“Billy! Hi, honey! Ooooh, you’re so strong. Wha’d you think, I was a mugger? What are you
doing
? Where is this huge wad of dinero headed for?”

I hadn’t expected to be caught. You never do. I couldn’t think of an excuse.

“Aunt Grace,” I begged, “please don’t tell my mom.”

“Oh, Billy…” She meant: how can I not tell her?

“Aunt Grace —
please
.” I saw my whole plan going up in smoke. And then suddenly her eyes widened.

“Oh, Billy. Her birthday, right?”

Diana’s forty-third was coming up in late June. I was a little early, but that was only a detail.

“I want it to be a surprise,” I said.

“But that’s a lot of money you’ve got there. What in heaven’s name are you getting her?”

“Aunt Grace, please don’t ask me anymore.”

She didn’t know what to do. So she wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, you’re so cute, I could just eat you up.” It was five o’clock in the afternoon. I could smell alcohol on her breath and heavy-duty perfume in the folds of her neck.

I was antsy for a while after that, but my mom never said a thing. Maybe Aunt Grace told her, maybe she didn’t. In any case, by then I had $15,000 in fifty-dollar bills sucked from the guts of the ATMs and safely hidden in my sock drawer and old Leggo set.

Uncle Bernie deposited the $90,000 check. He told me that it made him nervous to have that much cash around the house, so he left it all in the bank and we wrote out an I.O.U. that he put in an envelope. On the envelope he wrote: FOR BILLY BRAVERMAN IN CASE OF THE DEATH OR INCAPACITY OF BERNARD M. ADLER. He gave the envelope to Ginger Casey and she tucked it away in the safe at her law office.

It was another warm, dark night, and I couldn’t sleep. I got up to open the window wider. A quiet current of fresh salt air wafted in from the ocean and I sucked it deep into my lungs. I couldn’t even hear Iphigenia breathing. I moved closer to her cage and put my nose between two of the bars. She opened one eye to look at me.

“Sleep,” I whispered.

Iphigenia shut her eye.

I felt wide awake, even though it was two o’clock in the morning, so I sat down at my computer to write the letters that I’d been composing in my head for more than a week.

Dear Mrs. Ostrow:

Please excuse the fact that Amy Bedford and I are not there in school for the last week of the term.

I know we are going to miss the final history test. If you would mail us the test and let us take it on the honor system, I would appreciate it. We give you our words of honor that we won’t look at the test before taking it, and we won’t look at books or notes during the test. We could mail the test back to you and you could mark it and figure out a final grade for us.

We don’t know if we will be back in middle school in September. If we are not back, we’ll be somewhere else in school.

I just wanted to also say that we both enjoyed your class and learned a lot from you, especially about the Civil War.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Billy Braverman Amy Bedford

P.S. Please send the test and any other materials to my home address. Someone there will forward it. Please do not send anything to Amy’s home address.

*

Dear Mom & Dad,

I love you both a lot and the last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you or drive you crazy.

By the time you read this letter, I will have gone away with Amy. We are going to travel. She’s had a lot of bad things happen to her, and I am going to help her to get over them and to be happier.

If I had discussed this with you ahead of time, you would have found a thousand reasons why it wasn’t a good idea. Probably most of them would be right, too.

Dad, you said that lawyers always tried to help their clients from climbing out on a limb that might break off. You said that fathers did that, too. But sometimes kids have to go out on that limb because it’s leading them somewhere important for them to go. They have to take the chance that it will break. Because even if it breaks and they fall off, they won’t necessarily get killed. Maybe they’ll just hurt themselves, the way I broke my wrist and my nose on the ski slope, and that hurt me but it didn’t kill me.

The second thing you’ll probably say is, Amy should go to the police or the people at the state social services.

Well, Amy doesn’t want to do that. I’ve researched it online and I found out that she would have to swear about those things in front of a judge. It’s easy for you to say that she should do it, but it’s harder for the person who actually has to do it. And even if she did, and the judge said that she could leave home and Carter couldn’t come after her, where would she go?

I looked that up and the answer is that she would go to a state juvenile home or to foster care. She doesn’t want do that.

This way she feels safe because Carter doesn’t know where she is. And he can’t yell at you and say that you know where we are and you have to tell. Because you don’t know.

I wish I could run my lemonade business this summer but it doesn’t look like that would be a brilliant thing to do. If Simon wants to do it he can take the Yummy-in-the-Tummy name. Just tell him to use fresh lemons, not the stuff that comes in bottles.

What I would like, more than anything, is for you to say to me that you understand, and it’s all right, and “Go for it, Billy!” Then we could see each other whenever we wanted to. We would just have to keep the whereabouts of me and Amy a secret from Carter and Ginette. Do you think you could figure out a way to do that?

I’ll write by e-mail. Please don’t come hunting for me. We’ll see each other for sure when the summer’s over. I give you my word on that. A golden handshake.

Lots of love to Inez, and thank you for being the best mom and dad any kid could have.

XXXXXXXOOOXXXXXOOOOOXXXXXOOOOOXXXXX

with love from

Billy

P.S. Amy wrote a note to Carter and Ginette, which I copied for you. Here it is. And also a copy of a letter I sent to Mrs. Ostrow.

*

Dear Carter and Ginette,

I’m gone for good. Don’t try to find me. And don’t bug Mr. and Mrs. Braverman, because they don’t know where I am.

Amy

I pasted a stamp on the letter to Mrs. Ostrow. I put the original of Amy’s note into another envelope that she had already addressed and then I stuck a stamp on that one, too. Later in the morning, in town, I would mail them. I would leave the letter for my parents in the mailbox on Oak Lane. Inez went out there every day at noon to pick up the mail. The box was usually stuffed with bills, catalogues, and magazines. A letter might get buried among them, so I used a red marker to print on the envelope:

PERSONAL AND IMPORTANT.

Then I went online.

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Game at Shea

Hi Tom,

This Thursday evening would be cool. I’ll bring Amy and Iphigenia. Two tickets will be enough, because Iphigenia hasn’t grown enough to need her own seat.

What do I tell them at the ball park so that they let us get through to visit you?

I hope we have time alone because there’s something important I need to talk to you about. I’m going to throw you another fastball.

best regards from

your buddy,

Billy Braverman

Chapter 25

The 11:40 a.m. train wasn’t crowded, but it never is when it sets out from the far reaches of Long Island, where sometimes it feels like you’re stranded in the Atlantic Ocean halfway to Europe. I gave Amy the window seat. She had a new drawing pad, and I had a paperback of Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
. I put the Adidas traveling bag close to the window on the seat opposite so that Iphigenia could look out through the mesh and watch the world fly by. But she curled up and went to sleep. The first thing I had to do when I got to New York was buy a new cage for her.

I was wearing shorts and old Nikes, and Amy wore a T-shirt and jeans and her windbreaker. All last week she had worried about clothes. I guess all girls worry about not having enough clothes or the right clothes.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “we can buy whatever you need.”

“Billy, if we do that, you’ll run out of money.”

She didn’t know how much I had. I didn’t want to rattle her brains by telling her.

“It’s summer,” I had said. “You don’t need a lot of clothes.”

“I want to take my winter stuff, too.”

“Right. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Every morning you bring a few extra clothes to school in your backpack. Like, one day, your windbreaker and gloves. Next day, your boots and some thick socks. I’ll take them home to my house every afternoon in my backpack. I’ll put them all in a duffel bag. On the day we leave, I’ll bring the duffel bag for you.”

“Billy, you’re the smartest person I’ve ever known. Usually.”

Well, maybe the smartest kid, but surely not the smartest person. Still, I blushed.

The train moved off from Amagansett station on a warm and cloudy day in May. Amy took off her windbreaker, and when she turned to put it up on the rack with her duffel bag, I noticed what I’d never noticed before. Her T-shirt was a little tight, and under it I saw that she had breasts.