Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (42 page)

“Here’s the money,” I said, pulling the envelope out of my back pocket.

“Not till we’re done, dude.”

“Well, you never know.”

Even in the dark I could see that he looked puzzled, as if he wasn’t sure what I meant. I wasn’t sure, either.

He took the money. “Billy, what’s movin’ around in that bag?”

“My monkey.”

“No shit. The one on the TV?”

“Yeah. Can we go?”

The Chevy made a lot of noise. The springs squeaked and some of them poked through the streets. I stuffed all the gear in the back seat.

“How’s the gas?”

He looked. “Near a quarter full.”

“Is that enough to get us up to Springs, and then to Montauk, and then get you home?”

“Maybe not.”

“Duwayne…”

“Hey, it’ll get us out to Montauk. Then I can fill ‘er up on the way back. Not your problem. See?”

“What if the cops stop us?”

“Why the cops gonna stop us?”

“I don’t know. But if they do, how do you explain that you don’t have a license?”

“Hey, dude, you ever hear of any cops drivin’ round here at four a.m. on a Monday morning? They asleep like everyone else got even a quarter of a brain.”

He showed those big white teeth. I was a nag and Duwayne was a realist. I shut up. Reaching into the Adidas bag, I stroked Iphigenia.

The Chevy chugged stubbornly through the darkness of the summer night. There were no stars or moon. We were on Amagansett Springs Road, well past the country club and coming up on Red Dirt Road, and I was going over the plan and the scenario in my mind, when I realized what I’d done — or rather, not done — and I let out a yelp to wake the dead. I dug into my pants pocket but I knew I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for.

Duwayne’s head whipped round. “What happen’?”

“I forgot the key.”

What I’d really done was forgot to put it on my list. If it wasn’t on my list, it didn’t exist. That’s the only problem with making lists. You get to depend on the list and not on your memory.

“What key you talkin’ about?”

I groaned. “There’s a key to a gate and I’ve got to have it. I left it in my other pants. I had it in my pants pocket last night and I put the pants over a chair, so I didn’t have to write it down on my list, about the key — it was
done,
see? — but then when I woke up in the dark at two thirty in the morning, I put on another pair of pants, and then I was so busy checking off stuff on my list, that I forgot about the key… oh,
shit!
“

“So let’s go back and get it,” Duwayne said, “and you be cool. Calm down, you live longer.” He stamped on the brake. “Watch the way I turn this little mother round, like, on a dime. You think Robert can do this? No way, dude.”

He spun the wheel to the left and flung the Chevy round. I heard the tires screech in rubbery pain and felt my side of the car, as well as my stomach, rise up off the road. I thought that it was all over, that I’d never rescue Amy, that I’d wind up with a cracked skull on a road in Springs, that my parents’ hearts would break, and that Amy would be doomed to submit to Carter Bedford forever, because clearly that Chevy was going to tip and roll, and smash into a tree. A fate worse than a King Cobra, thundering boulder, and flamethrower, all put together. Because it was real.

But when I opened my eyes, the wheels bounced and settled, the tires hummed easily, and we were racing south on Amagansett Springs Road.

I didn’t like the idea of going back into the house on Hedges Lane. I had been lucky slipping out so easily the first time, lugging my gear down the stairs in the darkness, bumping it out through the french doors into the garden, hauling it one bag at a time across the grass along the sliver of path that I knew existed between the sensors. Going back in, and then getting out undetected a second time, anything could happen.

I entered the house through the french doors. I didn’t need a flashlight. Upstairs, a night light burned in the hallway. I climbed the stairs slowly. If I left my bedroom door open I could see well enough for what I wanted. I squirmed my fingers into the side pocket of my pants slung on the back of the chair — the key was there. I snugged it down deep in the pocket of the pants I was wearing.

“Billy.”

I nearly shot up out of my shoes.

Simon stood there in my doorway, in his underwear, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of one hand. In a cracked voice still full of sleep, he said, “Billy, whatchoo doin’?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“Go back to sleep, Simon.”

He shook his head. Doggedness may have been a family trait.

He raised his voice. “Billy —”

“
Shhh
.”

“Don’t shush me. You’re dressed. You’re goin’ out, right?”

“Bed, Simon, bed.”

“You’re going out to see that girl. The one who talks to herself. The one you went to New York with.” He was suddenly wide awake. “My nerdy kid brother is getting laid before I do. I can’t believe this.”

In disgust, he started to leave, then turned back again.

“And you’re grounded,” he said. “Dad grounded you, right?”

I shrugged.

“And you don’t give a shit.” There was awe in his voice.

“Keep it down, Simon.”

“My little brother has got some big balls.”

I didn’t want Simon’s admiration, I wanted his silence, and I said so again.

“All I want to know,” he said, “is, has she got a friend she can bring along?”

“Can you please shut up? We’ll wake Inez.”

I got past him and out into the hallway. Maybe he wouldn’t follow me. At the top of the stairs I peered down and stopped short: I saw a moving shadow in the living room. The shadow grew darker, clearer, and the shadow took form and became Inez. She looked like she was crouching, but she wasn’t, it was just her natural hunchbacked shape; she was standing to her full height, tall as she could get, wearing her nightgown and slippers, and she carried the fireplace poker in one hand.

My carefully-worked-out plan was starting to unravel.

“Where you goin’, Billy?” Inez demanded.

“Out.”

“Your dad told me you was grounded. That means not go out. He says to me, ‘Inez, I count on you. Make sure he stays home.’”

She blocked my path at the bottom of the stairs. She was holding the poker as if she was going to wallop me with it. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but it looked that way. And it made me smile.

“Four o’clock in the morning,” she said, “and I’m telling you what’s right and what’s wrong. You think that’s
muy cómico
?”

Four o’clock? Actually, ten past four. I looked up from my watch, looked out through the french doors into the garden. It was no longer black out there. The sky above the hedges was the color of dark ash. The stars had grown paler. Mist edged among the tree trunks. Soon it would be dawn.

“Inez, I have to go.”

“Oh, Billy,
cariño,
what happen to you? You used to be a good boy. So sweet. Everybody love you. What make you change?”

Her words stung me. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. I thought about it a lot. I had changed. I wasn’t sweet and good anymore. I was tough and determined. Was that part of growing up? And if it was, was it the good part or the bad part of it? And was it worth it?

I was trying to save Amy’s life. So maybe I wasn’t so sweet and good anymore. But I wasn’t ashamed of what I was doing, even if I had to lie and break other people’s rules by doing it.

“Inez, I have to go.”

“Where you gonna go? How you gonna go? Your dad, he chained your bike to Simon’s. I got the key. Thanks God, safe and sound.”

I walked past her and out the front door of the house. The security lights split the darkness and the mist with their intersecting white beams. I didn’t have to worry about the beams now, and I didn’t have to worry about the bikes being chained together. I walked toward the lane.

Inez came stomping after me onto the gravel. Simon had run into his room and quickly thrown on baggy shorts and unlaced Nikes. He was right behind Inez, in her nightgown, still brandishing her poker.

“Billy, you stop,” she said.

I turned, ducked around and under the poker, and hugged her.

“I can’t, Inez,” I said. “Some other time, I’ll explain.
Te quiero, y te querré siempre
.” That meant: I love you, and I’ll love you always.

“You explain now,” she yelled, and she followed me down the gravel path. Simon trailed along behind the two of us, scraping his heels, kicking stones. He was confused, too.

I couldn’t get rid of either of them. I hoped they’d get bored and give up. But they followed me all the way up Hedges Lane to Main Street, where Duwayne waited in the high-rider parked again by the hickory tree across from the Talkhouse.

“Dude, what’s this? You brought a gang with you? Plan changed? We gonna rob a bank?”

Dawn was already rising above Main Street, bathing the saltbox houses and the oaks in a pale gray light, like the tint of a watercolor. Birds were twittering.

I said, “Inez. Simon. Please. I have to go.”

“Who’s in that car?” Inez said.

“My friend Duwayne.”

I introduced them.

“What’s he say about robbing a bank?”

“It was a joke, Inez.”

“Maybe so,” Inez declared, “but you think I let you go off on your own? You gotta be loco in the coco. You get in trouble, your dad and mom they never forgive me.”

I opened the door to the front passenger seat of the car and climbed in. Duwayne turned the ignition key. The engine rumbled, the chassis shook, you could smell oil. The next thing I knew, Inez wrenched open the back door and wriggled her bulky little body among the duffel bags. From somewhere in the pile, Iphigenia squeaked.

“Oooh! You got
la mona
with you. Did I sit on you,
pobrecita
? I wanna know—you tell me, Billy—where you and this colored boy off to this crazy hour?”

Simon jumped into the car, squeezing next to Inez. Iphigenia caught a whiff of him and fired both barrels:
“Chit-chit-chit! Chit-chit-chit!”

Duwayne turned to me, eyes rolling in their sockets. “Little bro, what you want me to do?”

“Floor it,” I said. “We’re running late.”

Chapter 37

It was almost the longest day of the year, and a rosy brightness spread slowly over the sky. We reached the forest between Neck Path and Red Dirt Road. Last October, not far from here, Duwayne and I had found Amy bleeding in the dust.

Since then my life had changed. So had I, according to Inez.

“Stop here,” I told Duwayne.

I didn’t intend to drive the car right up to A-1 Self-Storage and wake Ginette and her kids and the dogs. My plan was to park in the shadows about a hundred yards away, and then, with Duwayne, move on foot to the small gate in the fence. I had checked the sunrise and sunset tables in the newspaper; my timing would have been perfect if I hadn’t made an incomplete to-do list, so that I had to go home for the key, which woke Simon, and then my talking with him woke the vigilant Inez. But what could I do? Inez was determined, and I was stuck with her. Simon, I figured, had tagged along because he had nothing else to do. None of that changed my plan, it just delayed things by about forty minutes. That wasn’t good but it didn’t seem a disaster.

I wanted to be at the house at first light. I just didn’t want to get into that part of the early morning when people might be waking up, although with Ginette and her kids I didn’t believe there was a big chance of that happening. They didn’t live on a farm where there were cows to be milked. It was just a self-storage place, and it didn’t open for clients until seven a.m.

Through the trees, from where we stopped the car, we could see the yellow brick house and the storage units. It wasn’t yet five o’clock. We had a good view of the Winnebago parked behind the house, and we could see the two vehicles, the Toyota truck — Carter’s trusty beat-up old Jap — and Ginette’s Beetle, both parked in the yard behind the front security gate.

And I could see a third vehicle, too. Looked like a Dodge. Looked to be a dark red color. Looked like the van that had pulled up opposite the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway and West 45th Street in Manhattan.
Was
that same van.

It was the van Carter Bedford and his amigo Woody had driven to Bradenton, Florida. According to Amy, Carter had been driving it back up north to collect whatever he had of value, including his wife, his sons, and his daughter. Amy had said, “by Tuesday latest.” If you’re thinking straight, Tuesday latest means anytime before Tuesday. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. Nothing makes you feel dumber than the unexpected that should have been expected

“Shithouse mouse,” I said.

“Billy, watch your language,” Inez said. “And tell me what are we doin’ out here in the middle of nowhere. I got to know what’s happening. Your dad is gonna ask for a full report.”

I looked at her. I felt beaten. I didn’t answer her.

“That the house?” Duwayne asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sure is a funny looking place.”

“Well, I told you, it was a warehouse, and then a jail. See the bars?”