Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (46 page)

I intended, of course, that Amy come with us. But Carter began to figure out what I had in mind. In the melee, he’d forgotten the chief issue.

He said, “Hey, no way.”

“Your stuff’s in the car,” I told Amy. “In your Macy’s duffel bag.”

Carter took a step toward his daughter and said, “What the fuck you think you’re doin’?”

“She’s coming with me,” I said.

“Not this time.” Carter took a long darting stride forward, across the yard, and grabbed Amy from my grasp. He had recovered from my blow; he was strong again. “You crack me up,” he said, and now in the pale light his eyes had no more color than chips of dirty ice. “You know what you should do? Go home and sit on the toilet, read a comic book and jerk off. Got your ashes hauled one time, you think it makes you a man? Know what you are? You’re a piss-ant. Go home to your momma and your fucking mansion.”

He had one arm wrapped around Amy, holding her waist, and with his other flat heel of his palm he shoved me, the same way he’d shoved me into his pickup truck when we left the hospital last October. I was between him and the house, so he shoved me in that direction. He didn’t care where he was shoving me. He just wanted to shove and show me he was in charge again, Amy’s boss, that he could do as he pleased with her.

“I’ll put your brains in the dust,” he said. He stooped, and he picked up the poker I’d dropped. He raised it and leaned toward me.

I stumbled backward to keep out of harm’s way, but I kept my balance. He moved again, heading toward the door that led into the office of A-1 Storage. He was still hauling Amy, and she began to squirm to get out of his grip. I could see clearly that she didn’t want to go with him. But once he got her back into the house, I knew that was the end. He would lock her up, and by the afternoon he’d be out of there, with her and the boys and crazy Ginette, headed toward the pleasures of the sunshine state. I would never see Amy again. Carter would slam the door on her life. He would do whatever he wanted to do with her.

Silently, Amy kept struggling to get free of his grip. Her struggle had halted their progress toward the house. Carter had her wrapped in his left arm, but he focused his attention on me.

He showed those shiny teeth. “You brat, you ain’t gonna shoot me. You couldn’t even shoot the branch off a tree.”

True enough. And he raised the poker again to show me he meant business.

In my fantasies I had killed Carter so many ways. The pistol jerked in my hand, making the same cheap and silly
snap
that it had made when Carter had fired it in the forest behind his house last winter, and when he’d fired at Duwayne’s feet. “Not like the movies,” Carter had said. I didn’t even aim. I just pulled the trigger.

The medical examiner’s report said that the bullet ruptured the endocardeum and the left anterior descending artery of Carter’s heart. Carter died quickly. He looked so surprised. Almost as surprised as I must have looked, standing over his body, watching the blood seep into the dirt as a shaft of sudden morning sunlight turned it from darkest crimson to brightest and purest red.

Chapter 40

“Billy,” said Ginger Casey, “these are the issues. This is what the judge is going to want to know. So pay attention. And answer me carefully. You don’t have to hurry.”

I promised I would do that: pay attention, answer carefully, not hurry.

“The first issue,” Ginger said, “is the key to everything. Did Carter Bedford threaten you with the poker in a way that endangered your life?”

We – Ginger, my dad, and I – were sitting in the den of our house on Oak Lane. It was a warm July morning. My mother was not there. Three days had passed since I had shot Carter Bedford. I hadn’t spoken to Amy since then, and she hadn’t called me, either. I knew from Duwayne that there had been a cremation and Carter’s ashes had been scattered off the dock at Montauk. But that’s all I knew.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Ginger frowned. “You didn’t believe that your life, or, let’s say, your physical well-being, were in danger?”

“For a split second,” I admitted, remembering I’d taken a single step backward. “But not really. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“That he was a scumbag. That I hated him. He’d hit Inez. He’d grabbed hold of Amy. I thought I might never see Amy again.”

“Did you try to retreat, Billy?”

“Retreat? Like, run away? And when do you mean?”

“When he raised the poker over your head.”

She was making a point, but I must have missed it, because I said, “The poker wasn’t really over my head. He just raised it up in the air. Maybe he raised it twice. Raised it, I mean — then lowered it — then raised it again. I don’t really remember.”

“But he did raise the poker. In the least, you saw him raise it at you. You did see him do that, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And did you retreat? Did you try to retreat? Not run away, Billy. Just retreat.”

“No.”

“You don’t recall taking a step backward? In the direction of retreat? Away from him, rather than toward him?”

“No, I didn’t do that. I wasn’t scared.”

Both Ginger and my dad sighed, as if they were part of the chorus in a tragedy by Sophocles. .

Ginger asked me: “Did you mean to pull the trigger of the pistol?”

“I must have meant to,” I said, “because I did it. I don’t think you do what you don’t mean to do.”

“Never mind the philosophy lesson, Billy. Did you consciously pull the trigger?”

“Consciously… like… was I aware I was doing it?”

“Yes.”

“Probably.”

“How about ‘willfully’? Intentionally.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “It’s hard to say.”

She frowned again.

“But you didn’t intend to kill Carter, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you intend to wound him seriously?”

“I just pulled the trigger.”

“Did you intend to wound him at all?”

“No.”

“Good. Then what was your intention when you pulled the trigger of the pistol?”

“I meant to stop him from doing whatever he was doing.”

She smiled, but without much enthusiasm.

From the corner of the room, in crisp white shorts and navy blue golf shirt, slumped in his big leather easy chair, my dad cleared his throat. He said, “Billy, you’re going to have to rethink this. You’re going to have to remember things that may not be very clear to you now. There are levels of truth. Does that make sense to you? Do you follow me?”

I followed him, but it didn’t take me where he and Ginger wanted me to go. I could see that I wasn’t going to be a good witness, not if I talked about what had happened the way I remembered it.

The problem was that all of the issues that Ginger had raised were open to interpretation. Worse, the answers to her questions were all clouded by that weakest and most corruptible of human faculties — memory. Everyone knows memory is self-serving, but everyone pretends that it’s not so. We all think we know what happened a minute ago, yesterday, last New Year’s Eve. But we don’t. We only know what we remember, and, more often, what we choose to remember.

They wanted me to change what I remembered. It happens all the time. I was just having a hard time doing it.

After the shooting, I had gone numb.

I was still numb when the East Hampton police arrived at A-1 Self-Storage a few minutes before the ambulance. Yet by then, with Duwayne’s help, I had managed to call Oak Lane, awakening my mother and father into what surely they viewed as nightmare.

The police were polite. But they seemed shocked. This was the bucolic East End of Long Island, not the gritty streets of the South Bronx.

Moreover, every cop knows that a twelve-year-old boy isn’t an adult, and ever since 2200 B.C., when Hammurabi, the Babylonian king, codified several centuries of criminal law, society has treated offenders of tender years in a light quite different than that shone on adult malefactors. I found out later that the police have what’s called broad statutory authority. When a child is taken into custody, the law of arrest for adults is normally applied, but parents are contacted immediately, and
Miranda
warnings must be given. Kids can be let go if it’s not a serious crime.

Well, this was serious enough, so no one was going to let me go. Not just yet, anyway.

Officers Halloran and Gordon went through the routine. It was like a TV show.
“You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford …”

“My dad’s an attorney. He’s on his way.”

“I know this kid,” Officer Halloran suddenly said, peering at me through his blue sunglasses, and then he turned to his partner. “You remember that night? — raining, a couple of dogs in the truck? We pulled over that guy who gave us all the lip? Didn’t have his proof of insurance with him?”

“That’s the guy I shot,” I said. “The one laying there.”

The other cop said, “And then this kid’s mother called us about some garbage had been dumped.”

I pointed toward Carter, dead in the dust. “And he’s the one dumped that garbage,” I said. It sounded stupid, as if it explained the entire sequence of events. Of course, in a way, it did do that.

The odd thing was that, throughout all this, neither Ginette nor Amy had stepped up to Carter’s body, hadn’t hugged him, cradled him, hadn’t wailed in pain or grief. They had just retreated back into the shadows. And his two weird sons had never even come out of the house.

Carter was still the unloved: the victim, or failure, he’d always imagined himself to be. He’d never have his fast-food delivery service at any yacht basin. He wasn’t even an eight-dollar-an-hour wage slave anymore. He was nothing.

I would have felt sorry for him except that he no longer existed.

*

A few hours later, that same Monday morning, we all stood before Judge Walsh in the air-conditioned Family Court in Riverhead.

It’s scary that one person should have so much power over you. On the other hand, your parents have the same power to make a mess of your life, if that’s how they’re inclined, and you rarely make any comment until you’re of an age when it’s too late to do anything about it.

Children are not assumed to have the capacity to take care of themselves. So, in juvenile courts, all the niceties of the evidentiary rules and the technicalities of procedure are relaxed in the midst of the struggle to arrive at what the system likes to call “the truth.” There’s no such thing as bail for a juvie, because kids aren’t supposed own property that they’ll forfeit if they run. The State either keeps you in a detention center or they send you home until there’s a hearing, or trial. A trial in Family Court has to begin as soon as possible — sixty days is tops. Proceedings are closed, the court record is confidential, and if the case is dismissed, all records are sealed.

Meaning, in sum, that the judge has the power to do pretty much what he or she pleases.

Judge Walsh talked to the police for about half an hour, and then he turned me back into the custody of my stern-faced father and weeping mother and set a date for an arraignment.

That was good, I thought.

On the other hand, I felt that I was in the grip of a process over which I had no control. That wasn’t good at all.

So I decided the way to gain some small measure of control was to have Ginger Casey as my lawyer. As soon as I got home I went upstairs and called her, and she said yes, she would do it, she would defend me, provided that my parents agreed.

“I’ll talk to them,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

Then I told my dad what I wanted.

He was outraged, of course.

I said, “I just don’t think it’s good for a father to be a lawyer for his son.”

“I agree with you,” he said. “And I don’t intend to represent you. But my partner Maury Cooper is a highly experienced defense attorney. I’ve already put in a call to him. Maury will do a fine job.”

“Has he ever defended a kid accused of murder?”

“I doubt that. No, he hasn’t. But —”

“I want Ginger,” I said. “I know Ginger. I trust Ginger.”

“She’s too young, Billy.”

“Well, I’m not old, am I? And she knows all that stuff. She told me all about the Fourteenth Amendment, and status offenses, and becoming a PINS kid. In New York she told me go home and stop playing house.”

“Anyone with even half a brain would have told you that. I’ll talk to Ginger. Maybe she can sit second chair to Maury, if that will make you feel better.”

He turned his attention back to his legal pad.

“Dad, it’s my life. It’s my choice. I don’t want a stranger as my lawyer.”

He didn’t believe that I meant it and would stick to it. But I did. And Ginger arrived that same afternoon from New York.

I hung out at home, read Dostoevski, watched National Geographic videos, poked around online, not selling lemonade but drinking a lot of it to keep cool. I swam in the pool with either my mom or Inez watching me because my mom feared that I might be depressed, and, as a result, accidentally — maybe even deliberately — drown myself.

I wasn’t depressed at all. But I lost weight. And I wasn’t doing any climbing. They wouldn’t let me out of the house.