Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (34 page)

She’d had one nostril and her belly button pierced with steel rings.

I didn’t think it was cool or not cool. It just looked painful, maybe even dangerous. The side of her nose was a bright red color.

“Did it hurt?”

“When they make the hole it got hot, but not for long. After a while I’ll get real silver rings. Meantime I have to keep cleaning these with peroxide.”

“That sounds like a good idea.” I was glad I could be enthusiastic about some part of it, even if it was only the peroxide.

“You should wear an earring, Billy. Or a nipple ring.”

“Maybe one day.”

“You didn’t ask me how I paid for it.”

“How did you pay for it?”

“I took the money out of your envelope. Cost sixty bucks plus tax. I wrote it down. I owe you. When I get a job, I’ll pay you back.”

“Fine.”

Almost before we knew it, it was time to think about dinner. Mealtimes crept up on you. You didn’t have to look at the clock — your stomach announced the hours like an army bugle. We were growing. Nature wanted us to eat.

I had volunteered to cook for four that evening. Uncle Bernie had said he’d be home for dinner, and he was bringing Ginger Casey.

“Let’s get takeout,” Amy said.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Ginger would be insulted.”

“She’s some snooty uptown chick?”

“She’s my uncle’s girlfriend. She’s a lawyer.”

“Well, okay,” Amy said, “let’s cook spaghetti and meatballs. That’s my specialty. You sprinkle Italian cheese all over it.”

“I want to cook something more interesting.”

“Boy, Billy, you’re like your mother. You have all these attitudes.”

Now I understood how other people felt when I nagged at them. Some things you don’t want to have to explain. You just want to do what suits you and what seems right, and what you have the right to do, without someone else butting in.

“I’ll roast a duck or two,” I decided.

Amy shrugged, and went back to the television.

I bopped out again to the good market on Canal on the edge of Chinatown and bought a pair of ducklings and everything else I needed. I rubbed the duck with sea salt and fresh ground pepper, stuffed it full of onions and butter, then roasted it in a pan. I poured off the fat every chance I got. The last forty minutes I basted it with Tropicana pulpy orange juice and soy sauce. Inez had taught me all that. The ducks come out juicy, not crispy, but all the fat’s gone. And you can keep the fat and use it later to smear on potatoes before you roast them.

I thought the dinner was delicious, although socially it was definitely a weird event. Amy wore one of her new jeans and her Madonna T-shirt. She and I played hosts — she helped me serve the food, she cleared up, and we both washed the dishes — while Uncle Bernie and Ginger acted as our guests. Domestic. Cozy. Lots of laughs. Except for the age difference, we were just like two couples having dinner together.

Of course by now Ginger knew everything. Uncle Bernie couldn’t very well keep it a secret from her. I’d asked him what she thought when he told her, and he said, “I’m sure she’ll let you know this evening.”

Uncle Bernie and Ginger drank chilled Australian Chardonnay, Amy sucked Coke through a straw, and I finished a bottle of organic apple juice. Halfway through dinner I caught this expression on Ginger’s face that made me wonder if she was laughing at us.

“What is it?” I asked.

Caught. So she gave me her big toothy smile, and said, “Bernie told me what happened to you at the hotel with the cops and the social worker.”

“Amy thought that was fun,” I explained.

“Because neither of you dumbasses understand that those boys in blue and that social worker had every right to detain you. You were breaking the law, Billy.”

She gave us a long explanation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which afforded every American, including children, equal protection under the law. But parents were protected, too. They had the right to make the rules and do what they liked with their children unless that involved cruelty and abuse.

“In other words,” Ginger said, “you can’t legally run away from home. You can’t self-emancipate yourselves. You can’t, so to speak, get a divorce from your parents.”

Amy said, “But they can’t put us in jail for what we did, can they?”

“No, you haven’t committed a crime. Billy knows that. He knows that it’s just ‘a status offense’— if you were adults it wouldn’t be illegal at all. But, as a minor, if you become truant, or run away, or step outside the control of your parents, hey, that’s a wrongful act.”

“So what can the cops do if they catch us?” Amy asked.

“They can place you back under parental custody and control. By the nape of the neck if necessary.”

“And when we run away again?”

“They declare you a Person in Need of Supervision — ‘a PINS kid,’ they call it. The Office of Children and Family Services takes over your life. They stick you in a state facility until they decide what to do with you.”

Jerry Siegel the social worker had used that word.

“What’s a facility?” Amy asked.

“A place you can’t get out of too easily,” Ginger said, and she wasn’t smiling now.

“Is there a trial?” I asked.

Ginger shook her head. “A PINS kid — or any juvenile offender — has no right to a jury trial, not even if he beats someone to death in an alley. A judge in the Family Court decides everything. No right to bail. The right to a lawyer, yes.”

“What can we do to avoid all that happening?” I asked.

“You want some free legal advice, Billy? Like your dad does for those guys on Death Row?”

“Yes, please, Ginger.”

I thought she’d have a brilliant answer. A magical answer. The inside scoop that only a friend who was a lawyer could give you.

“Stop playing house,” Ginger said. “Go home. Get real.”

Chapter 31

“I’m not going home, Billy.”

“Neither am I.”

“I didn’t hear you argue with that woman lawyer.”

“I don’t have to argue, Amy. I just have to do what I want to do. What you and I agreed to do. What’s right for you and right for me.”

“So what’s right for us? Where are we going to live?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

That was our second night in our bedroom on Rivington Street opposite La Perla restaurant; the night was hot but the sidewalk tables were crowded and noisier than ever.

Amy frowned. “Are we going to stay in your uncle’s house forever?”

“You don’t like it here?”

“Remember when Charlie and Paulette were living in that little house on the pond?”

“Is that what you want?”

“More than this dump.”

“What about going out west? Should I put the ad in those papers? I can go online today and do that in an hour.”

“Billy, I don’t want to live in the boonies with just a bunch of cows and dumb horses to talk to.”

“You said you wanted to live on a ranch.”

“Well, mostly I wanted to be a bull rider. And I guess that meant living on a ranch. But when I thought about it…”

She let it hang there.

“You changed your mind,” I said.

“Billy, I’m a kid. I say things sometimes just to see how they sound and if I can really live with them. Don’t you ever do that?”

I understood. “So where,” I said, “do you want to go?”

“We could stay here in the city. I like New York. Find some apartment with A/C.”

“Let me think about it all tomorrow,” I said. “It’s late now. I’m sleepy.”

“Tomorrow your parents are coming. They’ll want us to go back home with them. I mean, want
you
to go back. To their home. Me, they don’t care about. I can go anywhere.”

“But we won’t do that, Amy. We’ll live our own life.”

Uncle Bernie and Ginger had eased out after dinner to a party up on York Avenue. From there they were going to Connecticut for the rest of the weekend. Amy and I hadn’t been invited; there was a limit to how much we could be included in adult social life. What would we do at a grown-ups’ party? People would drink wine, smoke pot, dance salsa, flirt. They’d be uncomfortable that we were there. If we stayed in the city, or went anywhere, we would have to make our own friends. But other kids would have parents and homes. Those parents would see us a bad influence. We would be on the outside of everything.

Outsiders had to seek other outsiders.

I knew this next stage of our life wasn’t going to be easy. What mattered was for Amy and me to be together. We’d settle on a place we both liked and we’d make a life. It would be a challenge. I loved challenges. Even if they got the better of you, you knew at the end that you hadn’t cut along the dotted line and you were bigger for battling. Maybe that was my problem: I always wanted to be bigger than I was.

“Let’s play backgammon,” Amy said.

Ginette had taught her how to play, and we’d played a few games out in Amagansett. She wasn’t especially skillful but she threw great dice. Maybe, I thought, we should move to Las Vegas.

It was eleven o’clock and it had been a long day — good cooking takes a lot of energy — but I said okay. I’d brought my travel set. We opened the board out on the rumpled sheet.

“Want to play for money?” Amy asked.

She had no money. She had access to my cash supply. Maybe I should have given her a stash of her own, or an allowance, but I didn’t know how to do that gracefully. I realized that if she lost to me at backgammon she’d just add it to her debt, like for the piercings, that she was going to pay back to me when she got a job.

“Sure,” I said.

“How much?”

“Ten bucks a point.”

“Hey, that’s a lot.”

“So what? If you lose, you can owe it to me.” I’d had an inspiration. We played, and I made a couple of careless moves. The second time Amy said, “You left a blot.”

“No fun if you don’t take risks.”

An hour later she was two hundred and sixty dollars ahead.

“I quit,” I said. “You’re too good for me tonight.”

“I was lucky.”

“I got sloppy. The dice punished me.”

“You only have to pay me two hundred, Billy. I owe you sixty for the studs, remember? Oh, yeah, plus the tax.”

“Forget the tax. The tax is my treat.”

“And you don’t have to pay me until tomorrow.”

I yawned.

“Are you tired, Billy?”

“It’s midnight. I just don’t know if I can sleep in this heat. Maybe I’ll take a shower. Cool down.”

“Want to smoke a joint?”

“What?”

“You might sleep better.”

“You don’t have a joint.”

“Don’t I?” Amy grinned.

“Where did you get a joint?” For one bad moment I thought that Uncle Bernie gave it to her.

“From this dude in the shop on Astor Place. Ahmad is his name. He lives in Paris when he’s not in New York. He’s a friend of Marisa, the lady who pierced my lip. Marisa is from Cuba.”

“This guy Ahmad gave you a joint? Just like that?”

“He gave me one free when I bought one. Ten bucks is all it cost. It’s Humboldt Big Bud. From Humboldt County, California — spelled b-o-l-
d
-t, he said. Supposed to be the best. Ahmad really knows about dope, what’s the absolute best and what’s only just medium okay. So, yeah, that’s another ten I borrowed from you. You only owe me a hundred and ninety.”

“You have them here?”

She reached under the mattress where we were sitting, where we’d just played backgammon, and came out with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. They weren’t cigarettes, she explained, they were
bidis
, from India. They came in a skinny yellow paper packet that had a picture of Ganesh, the elephant god of success. She’d got them from Ahmad as part of the deal, although you could buy them anywhere in Manhattan; they were pure Indian black tobacco. These
bidis
were mango-flavored. And they were smaller than cigarettes and wrapped in a natural caramel-colored leaf, also pure Indian. She made them sound as if they came from the organic produce section of Whole Foods.

“Have you smoked one yet?” I asked.

“In the shop, when Marisa pierced me. Just a hit, so I’d relax. See, they look a lot like joints, so you can hide the real joints in the pack. No one can tell.
I
can tell.” She pulled one out of the pack. “Want to try?”

“Is that a
bidi
or a joint?”

“I’ll let you guess.”

“Amy —”

Her warm brown eyes sparkled. “Billy, tell the truth. Have you ever smoked dope?”

Simon, after he had tried and failed to get me interested in tobacco, had done the same for marijuana. I’d had two tokes, and coughed a lot, and the grass had done zilch for me.

Amy listened to my smoking history. “Well, it probably wasn’t anything like Humboldt Big Bud. And you must have sucked it down too fast. You have to sort of let it slippy-slide into your tummy.”

“Amy, who got you on to dope?”

“I’m not
on
to it. I just say yes when someone offers. It’s fun.”

“Who offered? The girls at school?”

“They wouldn’t give me the time of day. Ginette offers.”

“Your
mother?
“

“Carter’d kill her if he knew. I guess she figured she was doing me a good turn.”