Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (30 page)

We waited five minutes at the gate and then Tom Egan showed up. He wore a ten-gallon hat, a buckskin shirt, jeans and high-heeled boots. His face and neck were as brown as leather. He gave me a shake with that slab of beefsteak he called a hand, and then I introduced him to Amy.

“I sure am pleased to meet you, Miss Amy.”

She seemed to pick up new energy. “Are you a real cowboy, Mr. Egan?”

“When I’m not a baseball pitcher, I reckon I’m a cowboy.”

“Billy says you live on a ranch.”

“That’s a fact.”

“You ride horses and those bulls with the horns? Like in the rodeo?”

He threw Amy a wide smile. “I ride ‘em on the ranch. Now and then, when I’m feeling brave, I climb on board in the local rodeos.”

“That’s so neat.”

“Let’s mosey round to the locker room,” he said.

I wondered if he was putting on some of that cowboy lingo just for Amy’s sake. I didn’t care. She liked it.

When we reached the Rockies’ locker room a few of the players had already arrived. They were getting out of their street clothes and into their baseball uniforms. The room smelled of after-shave and deodorizer. Tom stood at the door, blocking our view, cupped his hands and shouted: “Twelve-year-old young lady in the pit. No frontal nudity. No rear nudity. No nudity, period. Twelve years old. Everybody got it?”

“That’s okay,” Amy said to him, “just so long as they don’t put their hands on me.”

Tom didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I saw him blink.

“Miss Amy, I guarantee that will not happen.”

Then he turned back to the players. “Guys, this young fella is my ski buddy, Billy Braverman. And in that black bag he’s carrying Miss Iphigenia, the most intelligent monkey I’ve ever met, excluding some of you jokers. Billy, Amy, these three handsome sluggers you see before you are, left to right, Larry Walker, Dante Bichette, and Todd Helton. Sad to say, I can’t make a living without their help. Billy, why don’t you let the monkey out of the bag?”

We fooled around with Iphigenia for about five minutes, she ate a spider she found in Larry Walker’s locker, and then Tom drew me aside and said, “You wanted to talk to me. Can it wait until after the game?”

We had seats in a box behind third base near the Rockies’ dugout. I watched batting practice while Amy dozed. I woke her up when the game started. In the first inning Tom struck out two of the Mets and got the third to pop up to the catcher. I applauded and yelled, “Way to go, Tom!”

All the Mets fans sitting around me gave me dirty looks.

“You like it?” I said to Amy.

“It’s more fun when they score runs.”

“The Rockies will do that.”

In the second inning Tom walked a batter, and the next guy up crashed the ball down the left field line for a home run. The crowd roared. In the third inning the Mets scored three more times on a walk and a bunch of hits. A coach came out of the dugout to talk to Tom. In the fifth inning Tom walked the first two men up. The coach came out again, and Tom handed him the ball. He didn’t hang his head, he just ambled to the dugout. The Mets kept pounding the ball. At the end of that inning it was ten to one their favor. Amy went to sleep again.

Not too long after that an usher bent to my ear and whispered: “Mr. Egan says that if you don’t mind skipping the rest of the slaughter, I should take you to the locker room.”

I woke Amy again and we followed the usher. Tom Egan came out of the locker room freshly showered, cheeks all pink, hair and big brown mustache glittering under fluorescent lights.

“Not the way it was meant to go, pardner” he said.

“You’ll beat them the next time.”

“Good thinking.” He led us through a door into a room where there were two easy chairs, half a dozen folding chairs, and a television set. “Will you be comfortable here, Miss Amy?”

She nodded, curled up in one of the easy chairs, shut her eyes, and in five seconds was asleep again. Tom and I went to a far corner of the room and sat down on a wooden bench.

“What’s up, Billy? Fire me that fastball.”

“Tom, who cooks for you on your ranch?”

“Bonnie Rae cooks for me and the baby. I got three hands live in a bunkhouse and they take turns rustling up their own grub.”

“I’m a terrific cook,” I said. “I cook French, Spanish, Italian, American, and Middle Eastern. I’m talking Cordon Bleu quality. I’ll cook anything. The thing is, I need a job for the summer and maybe even longer than that if there’s a good middle school out there in West Texas. Not just any kind of job — I need a job on a ranch. I’ll cook for you and Bonnie Rae, or for your ranch hands, or for all of you. Amy could clean the house, wash the dishes, whatever you and Bonnie Rae wanted. We’d do that for room and board and riding lessons. No pay. I don’t need money, Tom. The thing is, Amy’s always wanted to live on a ranch. Ride horses and bulls. It’s her dream. What do you think, Tom? Can all that happen?”

Tom Egan waited a long time before he answered. I hung in there, sweat popping out on my forehead.

“Billy, I’m flattered. I have to tell you, summer in the Panhandle, it’s hot enough for a hen to lay a hard-boiled egg. What I mean is, we’re not down at the ranch until the end of September. I’m in Denver with the team, or on the road, like now, so Bonnie Rae and I have a little house in a suburb of Denver. Bonnie Rae’s mom is there with us, to keep company, kind of help out. What I’m saying is, we couldn’t squeeze in a tic, much less two young ‘uns. Not that I don’t want to try your cooking — pardner, my mouth is already watering.”

I’d been kidding myself. I’d been positive that this was going to work out. He wouldn’t have to pay me, so how could he say no? Another con job of wishful thinking. What was wrong with me? Why did I keep doing that?

Tom took a swig from a Gatorade bottle. “Billy,” he said, “you’re holding something back.”

“What do you mean, Tom?”

“You two kids have run away from home, right?”

“How did you know?”

“Well, you just told me. You didn’t say your folks and her folks were moving to Texas. So you’re running away.”

I’d never used those words, or even thought them, and the harshness of them didn’t describe how I felt or what had happened. But they were real enough to other people.

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s the deal, pardner?”

“It’s got nothing to do with my folks,” I said. “It’s Amy’s problem. Well, it’s more than a problem. It’s a rotten situation.”

I didn’t think I was bound to secrecy anymore. What I really mean is, I’d broken my word once and it didn’t seem like too bad a thing to do it a second time. I told him about Ginette locking Amy in the closet and stabbing her. I told him a few things about Carter Bedford.

I finished up by telling him about Carter’s offer to me on the Georgica jetty.

Tom stared at me. “This geek wanted $10,000 from you, and if you forked it over he’d let you get it on with his twelve-year-old daughter? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Isn’t that gross?”

“Billy, it’s downright criminal. A man like that should be lynched.”

I told him all my dad’s reasons for not wanting Amy to live in our house, and that he’d said Amy should go to the social services to seek shelter and to file a complaint.

“Makes sense,” Tom said.

“But she won’t go,” I explained.

“And you sure can’t force her.”

“No, I can’t. I wouldn’t want to.”

He thought for awhile. “You know,” he said, “on my ranch we brand heifers. It hurts them. And we pen them up, which they don’t like, either. If we didn’t do all that, they’d wander off and die somewhere. See what I’m saying?”

I understood. But Tom and my dad didn’t see things the way Amy and I did. You couldn’t blame them for that. A crowded elevator smells a lot different to a midget than it does to Michael Jordan.

Suddenly, right in the midst of this discussion, I felt my eyes glaze. I started yawning and I couldn’t stop. That happens to me. From one minute to the next, I collapse. I can try to hang in there but all you have to do is look at me and unless you’re blind you can see that I’m gone. I wished that weren’t so, but I’ve said what I have to say about wishing.

“Where are you kids staying?” Tom asked.

“The Mayflower Hotel. Central Park West.”

“That’s real close to where the team stays. You want to wake the little gal, I’ll give y’all a lift home.”

On the drive into the city, over the Triboro and down the FDR Drive, Tom was silent. I thought he might be worrying about having walked all those Mets batters.

Chapter 28

A few minutes past eight o’clock the following morning, I was showered and dressed in a new white T-shirt from Macy’s and thinking about what Amy and I were going to do that day. Texas wasn’t the only state with ranches. I could put an ad in the HELP WANTED sections of a few newspapers out west. I’d start by trying Wyoming and Montana — they seemed like the most out-of-the-way places where some rancher might be happy to hire a really good cook even if he was just a kid.

Meanwhile, I’d decided that what we should do this day was take advantage of the good weather and go to the Statue of Liberty, unless Amy wanted to do something else like go to the bone museum. It looked like she really loved museums. The bone museum was going to knock her socks off.

The phone rang.

This was a snazzy joint. There was a phone in each room and wall phones in both bathrooms. No one knew we were here except Tom Egan, so it had to be him calling. Or else it was the hotel desk. But why would they call this early? I didn’t want the ringing to wake Amy — I grabbed the living room phone off the cradle.

I’d been right; it was Tom.

He said, “Billy, I had a hard night. I made a decision, and I didn’t want it to hit you like a brick falling off a wall. I made a few calls. The last call I made was to a New York State hotline number. I told them all about Amy and that rotten father of hers. Billy, I told them where you were staying. They’re gonna come get her, son. I wanted to prepare you. Don’t run. It’s the best thing could happen to your little gal.”

I found my voice from out of a deep dizzying well of helplessness. “Tom, I don’t believe you did that.”

When people use those words, what they really mean is that they do believe it but they don’t want to believe it.

It felt like I’d been thrown into that well of helplessness and been hit by a falling brick. My head actually hurt. Or maybe that was the power of suggestion. Who would have thought that my straightshooting, fastballing buddy, ace of the Colorado Rockies, even though the Mets had handed him his head on a platter, would do such a thing to me?

“Billy, one day you’ll thank me for this.”

This wasn’t that day. Even before he’d finished those words, someone was knocking on the door of the suite. I hadn’t ordered anything from Room Service. Tom was still on the line, waiting for me to say something. How could it happen so quickly?

“They’re here,” I said, and I called out: “Who is it?”

“Police. Open the door, please.”

I had no time to tell Tom that his good intentions had screwed up our lives in the worst way, so I hung up the phone. For a few seconds I didn’t move or even breathe. I was trying to figure a way out of a dead end. There had to be a way. In those movies where the hero’s cornered and there’s absolutely no way out, he always finds one. He’s the hero. The movie can’t go on unless he escapes. I love escape movies.

“If you don’t open up, son, we have a key. We can come in, and we will.”

I’d seen a dozen movies where the SWAT team, guns drawn, position themselves outside a locked door, ready to smash it in with a shoulder, a boot, or a ram. They never tell you they have a key. They don’t call you “son.” They don’t say “please.” This wasn’t a SWAT team.

“Can you wait a minute, please, so I can put some clothes on?”

I ran into Amy’s bedroom. She was sitting up in bed, eyes wide — she had heard some of what had happened. All her clothes were strewn over the chaise-longue, all her toys over the ocean-colored carpet. I said, “The cops are here to take you to social services. Do you want to go?”

“Are you nuts?”

“Then get dressed and get your stuff together fast as you can. And be super quiet.”

“What’ll we do, Billy?”

“I’m working out a plan, Amy.”

I ran back into the living room and opened the door. Two uniformed cops and a civilian stood there. One cop, a man, had a wide jaw and looked Irish; the other cop was a woman, blond, built like a weightlifter with a fat bottom. The civilian was a short, chubby man wearing a brown suit that sagged off his shoulders. He had a face like a fish.

The two cops were already eyeballing the suite — they weren’t used to picking up runaways or delinquents in places like this. The fish-faced man said, “My name is Jerry Siegel. Office of Children and Family Services. You’re Billy Braverman? Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir, I’m he.”

“Is Amy Bedford here with you?”

“Still asleep.”

“Don’t worry, nothing bad will happen. We’re on the same team, Billy. But we do require that both of you come with us.”

“Do we have to?” I asked. I didn’t want to seem too smart or too willing, or they might get suspicious.