Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (47 page)

One afternoon I went to my dad in the den. He was working on a new pro bono case in the State of Texas. Santiago in Florida had exhausted his appeals and Florida had set a date to electrocute him. Whenever I thought of that, it put my situation into perspective.

I asked my dad if he knew what was going on with Amy and what was left of the Bedford family.

“The juvenile court ordered Ginette not to leave Suffolk County until your case is resolved.”

“Dad, before I shot Carter, did you settle that lawsuit with him? Where he claimed we all kidnaped Amy?”

“Yes.”

I was surprised. “But you didn’t pay him anything, did you?”

“Carter hired a local attorney,” my dad said. “A congenial drunk from Bridgehampton. He needed money. I settled the issue for forty thousand dollars, in return for which I received a quitclaim — a document stating that Carter and Ginette gave up their rights forever to sue us on any of these various matters relative to their daughter Amy. After the lawyer took his share of the settlement, the Bedfords wound up with twenty five thousand dollars. That was more than enough for Carter to get started in Florida. It solved all his problems until… until…”

I couldn’t believe it. Which meant, of course, that I did believe it.

“Dad, how could you do that?”

His eyes glowed like just-snuffed match heads. “I didn’t pay the money because Carter deserved it. And I didn’t pay it because I believed that your mother and I had done anything wrong. I paid it because it was the simplest way to get rid of the man. You, however, found another way.”

That was a cheap shot, I thought, but I didn’t say so. I could see by the look in my dad’s eyes that he believed that by paying off Carter he’d done something clever, and therefore good. Money well spent. As he said: “Until…”

I stomped out of the den and went out to crouch on the grass by the pool. The August sun beat down on my head. I wanted to sweat out all the bad thoughts and feelings. I didn’t understand why my dad had done what he’d done. I saw it as caving in. Where was the justice? Was anyone interested in justice, or just interested in making the best deal possible?

Maybe that’s what justice meant.

All right, they could have lost a lot more money, plus the time and aggravation. Forty thousand dollars, to them, wasn’t a significant sum. But why hadn’t they come to me and discussed it?

Because I was a kid. That’s the category where they wanted me to stay until such time as they saw fit to release me from it. It was too hard on them when I acted like a grown person who had rights. As far as they were concerned, I had proved that when I tried to rescue Amy and wound up in Family Court facing a felony conviction for second-degree murder. I could see and understand their point of view.

I toweled off the sweat and marched back inside to the den.

“Dad, I want to give you that $40,000 out of the money that’s in my trust fund.”

His lips curved in a gentle smile. “You’re late with the offer, Billy, but that’s not your fault. I appreciate it. As it happens, I invaded the trust. Your mother signed the check.”

“You’re saying — ?”

“Yes. I’m saying that it was you who paid Carter Bedford. Carter didn’t know that, of course.”

I felt dizzy, but I recovered.

“Dad, you took my money, you invaded the trust, you did that without telling me?”

“Absolutely. With no hesitation.”

“If you had asked me,” I said, “I would have agreed. And you should have asked me. You still don’t understand what this was all about.”

And probably they never will. And probably they think the same thing about me.

Chapter 41

At the fact-finding inquiry, after Inez and Amy and everyone else had testified, Ginger called me to the stand.

She didn’t ask me all the questions that she and my dad already had put to me a dozen times in the den at Oak Lane; she simply suggested that I narrate in my own words the events of the fateful night and early morning. I did that.

I couldn’t tell what impression it made on the judge. He listened with great intensity. He never frowned; but he never smiled, either, or nodded encouragement.

Ginger had prepared me for cross-examination by the prosecutor. Plus, she had told me that the judge would have his own questions.

The judge, as it turned out, did it all. And without wasting any time.

“If I may, Mr. Hull?”

“Certainly, your honor.”

“Mr. Braverman…” Judge Walsh hesitated. “Do you mind if I call you Billy?”

“Whatever you like, your honor.”

“This is what I would like,” Judge Walsh said, regaining his momentum. “I would like to know some facts.” He cleared his throat. “You picked up the poker after Ms. Tur dropped it. You struck Mr. Bedford on the arm, causing him to drop the pistol he had used to strike Ms. Tur. Have I got that part right?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Then you threw the poker to the ground. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t need it anymore.”

“You mean you didn’t need it because you saw that you could pick up the pistol instead.”

“Well…”

“Did you say to yourself, ‘I’ll drop the poker because the pistol is a more powerful weapon.’?”

I thought about that for about ten seconds.

I said, “Your honor, that’s not how things usually happen. They’re not that logical. I mean, I know what cause and effect is, but it doesn’t always work that way in real life. You can see afterwards that one thing happens and then another thing happens right after it, and so you say, ‘This happened and then that happened,’ or, ‘This happened, and that’s the reason the second thing happened.’ But it isn’t always like that. Things just happen sometimes in… you could call it a random order. Or not. The logic of it occurs to you afterwards. But maybe it’s logical, and maybe it’s not. Do you see what I mean?”

Now it was the judge’s time to think. He didn’t argue with me, or reprimand me, as many judges might have done, for asking him a question when all I was supposed do was behave and respond like a good witness and a good boy.

“Yes,” he said, “I see. I’ll bear that in mind. Now I’d like you to answer the question. Do you remember what I asked you? Would you like me to repeat it?”

“No, I remember, your honor,” I said. “You asked me if I said to myself, ‘I’ll drop the poker because the pistol is a more powerful weapon.’”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“The answer is… I don’t know. I don’t really remember.”

The judge frowned. You can’t argue too well with someone who claims he can’t remember. The judge’s frown became a small glare. He leveled a stubby brown finger at my chest.

“But,” he said, “you picked up the pistol immediately, didn’t you?”

“I had to. Otherwise Carter could have grabbed it back.”

“When you picked it up, what did you intend to do with it?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. “I mean, I had no real intentions.”

“Isn’t it a fact that you intended to use it in order to stop Mr. Bedford from removing his daughter Amy from your control and back into his house?”

“No, sir,” I said, “that’s not a fact. It’s a possibility, and it sounds like it’s probably part of the truth — but it’s not a fact. It’s a supposition. I don’t know what I was thinking when I picked up the pistol. I just did it.”

He swallowed that; he was remarkably patient. “Didn’t it occur to you, Billy, that you could throw it away and render it a neutral object?”

I considered that.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You didn’t see that possibility?”

“Not really. I do now. I didn’t then.”

“What were your feelings about Mr. Bedford at that time?”

“There? That moment? In the yard outside his house?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty negative,” I said.

“Did you want to kill him?”

“Not then,” I said.

“Are you implying that at another time, prior to that moment when you held his pistol in your hand, and fired the shot that ended his life, the answer was yes?”

“Oh, yes. Many times. I dreamed about it.”

“Daydream or night dream? Which one do you mean?”

“Both. We had an argument once about Amy. Carter called me a ‘smartass city Jewboy.’ He put the barrel of his pistol in my mouth. Another time he tried to drown me in the ocean. I dreamed about stabbing him with my Swiss Army knife, and running him over with a Humvee. I staked him out in the desert and the ants ate him. I shot him once, too. Those were daytime dreams.”

Soon after that, the judge decided that he had no more questions, and the prosecutor decided to quit while he was ahead.

There were what they call final arguments by Ginger and then Mr. Hull, but I can hardly remember them. They didn’t bring up anything new.

The judge said he needed a few days to reach a decision, and he set a date for sentencing.

Chapter 42

We showed up for the judge’s decision, the sentencing, on a rainy day in late August: my mom, my dad, Simon, Ginger, Uncle Bernie, Aunt Grace, and Inez, with the media people outside on the steps of the courthouse, yelling at us and shoving mikes at us in the hopes of a sound byte for the six o’clock news.

Several times my dad said, “No comment.”

Simon was wearing a button that they sold for fifty cents in the pizza parlors and hardware stores all over Eastern Long Island. It said: FREE BILLY — as if I’d already been sentenced to the maximum six years in Spofford. My dad made Simon unclip the button before we walked into the courtroom.

The prosecutor avoided looking me in the eye. The judge’s eyes were bloodshot; his features seemed to have sagged since I’d last seen him. He was not a man of oak and iron, he was a judge who had to deal all the time with the antisocial violent things that young human beings did.

He had his decision printed out, but he put the stack of paperwork aside and spoke to us directly. He explained that he would deal with the charges one at a time, starting with the charge of rape. That had hardly been dealt with at the fact-finding inquiry, but it had not been dismissed, and suddenly, from behind me, I heard my mom suck in her breath.

“The law in the State of New York,” Judge Walsh said, “makes clear that rape is a sexual act committed without consent of the victim, and that a person who’s under seventeen years of age is deemed incapable of consent. The law also states that when the victim is less than thirteen and the perpetrator, the actor, is eighteen or older, the act, even when the victim gives consent, is considered forcible compulsion. That’s rape in the first degree, a Class B felony.

“With a twelve-year-old male actor and a twelve-year-old female victim, there’s a gray area. The law is not precise. You could even say, it’s absent. Therefore the burden lies on the prosecution to prove a consciousness of the wrongfulness of the act, and the relevance of that consciousness. Is that clear?”

We all nodded, except Inez. To her the judge could have been talking in Swahili.

“I believe,” the judge said, “from what I’ve heard in his voluntary admissions, that the defendant, Billy Braverman, was conscious that the act he performed with Amy Bedford was a wrongful one. He didn’t want to do it. But why is that relevant? A twelve-year-old is not an adult. He may have the IQ of a near-genius, and he may be clever as all get-out and know how to get things done, but that doesn’t make him a responsible adult. His criminal capacity is irrelevant. He’s a child.

“Furthermore, there’s doubt, based on testimony by Miss Bedford, as to who was the actor in the event. You can’t jail even a grown man for stealing a jewel if a shopkeeper shoves the jewel into the man’s pocket, and says, ‘Take it.’ No, I don’t believe that, in conscience, you can do that.

“So,
in
re
the charge of rape, the court finds the defendant not guilty.”

Ginger had told me that’s what would happen. The judge consulted his papers. He was rubbing his forehead, breathing deep through clogged nostrils.

“
In re
the charge of second-degree murder, the court notes that Billy Braverman defends his act in part by stating in direct examination that he was protecting Amy Bedford against her father, Carter Bedford. Billy Braverman alleges that Mr. Bedford had committed criminal sexual acts against his daughter, had kept her locked up in what amounted to a prison cell, and had announced that he was heading for the State of Florida where, Billy Braverman believed, Mr. Bedford would continue to commit the same criminal acts.