Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (27 page)

They had grown while I wasn’t looking. They weren’t big, they were just perky rounded bumps with points, poking against the white of the T-shirt where until recently there had been nothing at all.

I turned my head away so she wouldn’t see me staring. I yawned — I hadn’t slept a lot the night before, writing those letters and planning what we were doing today. That morning, as soon as my mom left the house, I had packed. It made me sad to leave all my climbing gear behind but it was too much to carry, and I knew it would always be there for me. They could send it to me by UPS once we got settled.

I asked Amy how many times she’d been to New York.

“Just that one time when the class went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

“Did you like the Met?”

“It was awesome,” Amy said.

“What was the best part of it?”

I thought she’d talk about the Egyptian pyramid and the mummies, but she said, “Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, those guys. If I ever painted, that’s how I’d want to do it.”

“You’ll paint,” I said. “And we’ll go to the Met again, and the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim, and the galleries downtown in SoHo, and the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and take a boat around Manhattan island. New York is so cool. They’ve got concerts in Central Park, and street fairs, and weird-looking people. I was born there, it’s my home town. I know my way around.”

I was boasting and I knew it. I wished I hadn’t done that.

“Can we go to the beach?” Amy asked.

“Sure,” I said, making a mental note to investigate the New York beach situation. Even in the years we lived there, we always went out to Amagansett.

The train stopped in East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Southampton, Hampton Bays, Westhampton, Speonk, Mastic-Shirley. People got on, but still it wasn’t crowded. The wheels kept clacking. Amy had her sketch pad in her lap but all she did was look at the window at the towns and the houses and the trees and the stations. It was a two hour and forty minute ride to Penn Station. With each stop, I was farther away from my parents and Oak Lane, from Inez, Simon, my room, my comfy bed, my pillow, my bike, my big desktop computer, my library, the tomatoes that my brother and I had planted last week—all the things I was so used to. I found myself taking deep breaths to fight off a feeling I couldn’t name.

“Are you okay?” Amy asked.

I could have said, “I’m fine,” which is what you usually do, but I wanted to be honest. I wanted Amy to know the things I felt the same way I wanted to know the things that she felt. So I said, “I’m thinking about all the things I’ll miss.”

But also, I thought, with each stop I’m thinking that we’re farther away from Carter Bedford. He’ll never find you if you don’t want him to find you.

“Billy, you look really tired. Why don’t you take a nap?”

That sounded like a good idea. “I need something for my head,” I said, and I started to rummage in my backpack for a sweater.

“Put your head on my lap,” Amy said.

Her legs were a little bony under her jeans but they were cool and it felt good to rest there. “When they announce Jamaica,” I said, “wake me up. We have to change trains in Jamaica. After Bay Shore and Babylon, comes Jamaica. Are you going to draw?”

“Go to sleep and don’t worry about me,” Amy said.

I shut my eyes, fought sleep because I was worried that she might miss the signs and not see Babylon, and then we’d be in Jamaica, and then—I passed straight out.

It seemed that only a minute or two had gone by. Amy was squeezing my shoulder.

“Billy… Billy…”

I opened my eyes. They felt raw and dry, and I began rubbing them, which is one of my unhealthy habits. “Are we in Jamaica?”

“Babylon. I think your mother’s here.”

My heart nearly stopped. I swear, that’s how it felt. I jumped up from her lap so that for a moment I was dizzy. My mother? Here in Babylon? Impossible.

“Out there.”

My mom drove a white Range Rover with black and red racing stripes and a license plate that said MODERN A — an easy car to spot. I craned my neck but I didn’t see it in the parking area. There were quite a few people on the platform at Babylon station. My mom was also easy to spot, with that mop of jet-black curly hair. I didn’t see her there.

“Isn’t that her?” Amy jabbed a finger against the window. “Big straw hat… blue shirt, white pants. See?”

It was my mom. A big straw hat hid her hair the first time when I looked too quickly. She was dancing in short steps—she wasn’t really dancing, but for a moment it looked like that—along the platform about two cars away, close to the train, waving her hand. At me? At the conductor? I felt the train move. It jerked — it stopped — then it jerked again. I realized that my mom was trying to get on the train. The door must have been closing. Had she seen us through the windows? I didn’t know. I didn’t understand how she had known to come here. I was confused. I had awakened too quickly from too short a sleep.

She saw me. At least I think she saw me, it was hard to tell. But her black eyes burned straight into mine. Her mouth opened. I saw her lips purse into kiss mode, or hiss mode, it’s the same.

“
Billy —!
“

Her hat blew off. Her pretty straw hat with flowers and ribbons, that I’d bought for her birthday last year, blew right off her head, because she was running toward the train to get in the last barely-open door. My mom tried to snatch at her straw hat as it spun off, and then she turned quickly, looking like a lovely and graceful woman, and bent to grab her hat up off the platform before it blew onto the tracks on the other side of the platform where, who knew, a train might be coming that would crush her hat.

Then, I saw, she realized:
No
, if I do that, I’ll miss the train, I have to give up the hat… but it was too late. She had the hat but not the train.

The train door slid shut and the train continued to roll out of the station, bound for Jamaica. I watched my mom on the platform, she and the platform receding into the distance: the platform into a vanishing point, she into the figure of a charcoal gray doll; then darker, and nearly black; then, as we rounded a slight curve, gone.

Amy was shaking her head in amazement. “How did she know?”

“I have no idea,” I said, and the moment I said those words, the solution thundered into my mind.

I’d left that note in the mailbox, marked in big red letters. Inez sorts the mail, recognizes my printing: PERSONAL AND IMPORTANT. Oooh, don’t sound good, better call Mrs. B. in Sag Harbor.

My mom says, “Open it, Inez. Read it to me if you think I need to hear it now.”

That’s how I explained it to Amy. “… and so my mom freaks out. Wherever we’re going, she figures, we’ve got to get to New York first. She calls the Hampton Jitney. Did two kids get on the bus by themselves? No. So it’s got to be the train. She grabs the Long Island Railroad schedule from a bulletin board in her office. She works it out, where she can intercept us. Babylon. She burns up the road, and even then, she barely makes it. Then her hat blows off.”

A hat blows off, and it can change someone’s life.

“Now what will she do?” Amy asked.

It was 1:35. I looked at my own train schedule. Babylon Lv. 1:33. Jamaica Ar. 2:09. That made it a thirty-six minute trip, the longest one of the whole run. From Jamaica, after we changed trains, it was another twenty-three minutes to Penn Station.

I said, “She’ll drive like crazy to Jamaica so she can be there at the train station waiting for us. Can she do it in thirty-six minutes? Not unless she goes at seventy miles an hour, and my mom is definitely not a speed freak. Plus, it’s tough to park there. Jamaica is a little city.” I blew out a sigh of relief. “I think we’re okay.”

Except, I thought, if my mom was on her cell right now to my dad in Manhattan, he had almost an hour to get to Penn Station. Unless he was in court, or at death row in Florida, he would drop everything and be there on the platform, waiting for us.

“That’s all right. This is what we’ll do” — as if I’d spoken all those thoughts aloud. “When we get to Jamaica, we’ll take a taxi to the city.”

I hadn’t slept enough the night before or on the train, so I wasn’t really figuring things out the way I should have been. I was figuring what I hoped would happen rather than putting myself into my parents’ minds and grasping all the possibilities that would occur to them, and how they would deal with them. I knew they’d be upset but I didn’t grasp
how
upset. When I said to Amy, “I think we’re okay,” I became a victim of denial. They should make that the eighth deadly sin.

The station at Jamaica is elevated. You come in and you see a lot of rooftops with laundry hanging out to dry, TV aerials and dishes, lavanderias, bodegas, pizza joints, Indian and Lebanese restaurants. People crowd the streets. A lot of mean streets out there, a big change from the rural terminal moraine leading to Montauk. I heard Amy draw in her breath when she saw it.

The train eased in, right on time. I was craning my neck, scanning the station for my mom. If she was there, if in those thirty-six minutes she’d managed to drive from Babylon to Jamaica and get her car safely parked so that she could race up the steps to the train platforms, we were sunk. I didn’t know what we’d do. Have a big argument right there on the platform. I didn’t think I could win that one. We’d have to go with her. She was a mother and she had the power.

I looked across the tracks at the eastbound platforms. No sign of Dr. Diana Adler. Only then did it occur to me that she could have phoned my dad earlier than Babylon, could easily have phoned him on her cell while she was flying down Stephen Hands Path toward the Montauk Highway — and that Jacob Braverman, Esq. might be there in the flesh on the platform at Jamaica railway station in his navy blue power suit and shiny black shoes. Not only couldn’t I win that battle, I couldn’t even begin to fight. My heart felt like it was trying to squeeze itself into my large intestine and hide out down there.

I wrestled the window open. I poked my head out part way and looked for my dad. Small, but he always stood out.

I didn’t see him.

But I did see two New York City cops standing in their blue short sleeve shirts, caps tilted back on their heads, hands spread on their hips. The older one was black, with a belly, and the younger one with his mustache could have been Hispanic. They were scanning the groups of people starting to exit from the Babylon train, but they cocked their heads only when kids passed by. A gang of kids in gray uniforms and carrying baseball gear were weaving and bopping and clopping along in their spiked shoes, and some of them took a wide turn around the cops even though the cops didn’t seem to be interested in them.

Duh. That’s because the cops were interested in Amy and me.

I couldn’t believe it, but there was the proof. Two of New York’s finest out to collar a runaway boy and girl. My mom had called the police. My own
mother
.

“Amy, duck down.”

She did it right away without asking any questions.

“Stay there,” I said.

I hunched down with her. Our backpacks were strapped into place and I had already piled Amy’s two sacks and my suitcase and Iphigenia’s bag on the seat opposite us.

I thought it through. The cops didn’t have to board the train. If they did, we could slip out and get by them. Two twelve-year-old runaways. White middle-class boy and girl. No big deal. On the other hand, I remembered all those white couples like Bonnie and Clyde who had killed people all through the Midwest in the olden days, and the not-so-olden days. Maybe the cops wouldn’t take any chances.

When you reached the Jamaica railway station from out on Long Island you either walked across the platform to the connecting train for Penn Station, or you walked down the steps and into the hopped-up city streets of Jamaica. You could also cross to another platform through the connecting train, once that train opened its doors. I glanced again at the schedule. The train for Penn Station in Manhattan left Jamaica station four minutes after the Babylon train came in.

“What will they do to us, Billy?”

Handcuff us and drag us off to the police station, I thought. Then phone my mom. “Stay down,” I said to Amy.

I shot my head up to peer out. I was ready to duck back down but I didn’t have to do it. The cops were nattering away to each other. I guess they didn’t think we ranked up there with Bonnie and Clyde. Almost everybody was off the train by now. The older black cop pointed to the forward end of the train. He was telling something to the young white cop. The white cop nodded and began to walk toward the rear of the train — I ducked down.

“Amy, I think one of them is going to walk down the aisle inside. The other will stay on the platform. Flush us out like birds. Pick up your stuff. Let’s get near the door.”

I grabbed my suitcase in one hand and Iphigenia’s bag in the other. We scuttled down the aisle to the metal platform by the door. It was a question of timing. You were usually luckier if you prepared well, moved fast, and didn’t hesitate. But you had to remember that usually didn’t mean always.

I didn’t accept that. That was always my problem. I thought that if I wanted to do it, I could do it.

Three minutes passed. Getting on for three and a half. We had about thirty seconds before the train on the other track moved off toward Penn Station.

“Stay real low,” I said, “and follow me.”

We darted out when the black cop had his back turned to us for a moment; he was looking toward the staircase leading down to the street.

I crab-walked across the platform toward the New York-bound train, with Amy following. I had one foot inside the door of the train when Amy squawked. Sounded like distress. I glanced back over my shoulder. Crouching, carrying her two sacks, she had stumbled. One knee hit the concrete. “Ow,” she yelled. “Shit!”—her sacks went flying.

I dropped my suitcase and it clanged on the metal platform between the cars. I ran back three steps and pulled Amy to her feet. One knee of her jeans was torn. People were hurrying by us, because the train to Penn Station was about to shut its doors and take off.