Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller

by Clifford Irving

  Amy woke up about ten seconds after I did. Before I could do anything to stop her, she rolled over in the bed in my direction. Her red hair was plastered all over her face. She had sweated during the night. She brushed the hair back and out of her eyes with one hand. I saw her eyes go wide. Then she looked down at herself and at the bed.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. Eee-agh.”

  She had rolled onto the sticky part of the sheet and the stuff I’d parted with in the early morning hours was now attached to her new nightgown. She started to wipe it with one hand, and then suddenly she stopped. Quickly, she wiped her hand on another part of the sheet.

  “Disgusting,” she said.

  I croaked at her: “I’m sorry, Amy… I couldn’t help it… I didn’t know it happened until I woke up.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “What?”

  “You sure you couldn’t help it?”

  “You don’t think I did it on purpose, do you?”

  “Well…”

  “Amy!”

  “Hey, don’t yell at me.“

  “I didn’t mean to do it. I swear I didn’t. Trust me.”

  Amy grunted. “Carter says that when someone says ‘trust me,’ what they’re really saying is ‘fuck you.’”

  I felt my cheeks flushing with color. I didn’t like it when she talked that way but there was certainly nothing I could do about it now. What could I say after what I’d done?

  Amy ran into the bathroom, her nightie flowing out behind her. I got out of bed, making sure that my pajama fly was covered up so that nothing pink stuck out or even showed. The tip of my dick felt sore; I must have given it a workout. I stripped the sheets off the bed and decided to take them to the laundromat around the corner on Delancey. I could hear Amy peeing in the toilet. That’s what I had to do, too. I wanted to tell her to hurry up but I didn’t dare. I felt awful. I felt like some sort of pervert.

  She came out, adjusting her nightie, and she was grinning at me.

  “I’m sorry I got on your case, Billy. It was a hot night. I guess you couldn’t help what you did. You’re getting to be a man. I’m not mad anymore.”

  Chapter 30

  The downstairs bell buzzed like an angry hornet. I ran down the three flights of stairs. A Federal Express woman stood at the door waving a letter to me from Modern Age Funds in Sag Harbor.

  I signed for it and tore open the envelope. Inside it was a photocopy of an article from the New York Times, and a scrawled note on stiff gray paper that was headed in raised dark red engraving: FROM THE DESK OF DR. DIANA J. ADLER, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER.

  The note read: “Billy, please read this a/s/a/p. Maybe we can discuss it on Saturday? Loads of love, Mom.”

  The title of the article, which I could see had been scissored from the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, was “A Brain Too Young for Good Judgment,” and it was written by Daniel R. Weinberger, director of the Clinical Brain Disorders Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health. A box under the headline said “Behind School Shootings, Neurological Immaturity.”

  For my parents, and for their friends and business associates, the New York Times was like the King James Bible was for many other people. If it was in the Times, it was gospel. You could quote it and nobody could contradict you. A long time ago God had come down from heaven and anointed the human beings who worked for the New York Times with perfect eyesight, 20-20 hindsight, and infallible powers of reasoning.

  Amy and I had eaten a breakfast of blueberry muffins with Vermont maple syrup that I’d bought in the bodega after I ran out and got the sheets washed and dried at the laundromat.

  The phone rang as soon as I got upstairs with the article. Uncle Bernie had gone out, so I picked up.

  “Billy, darling, hi. It’s me.”

  “I’ll read it, Mom.”

  “It arrived?”

  “About two minutes ago. I promise I’ll read it.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  “I want to tell you one thing, Mom.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t shot anybody at school.”

  She sighed. “Please read the article.”

  Amy was waiting for me, because we were going uptown to pick up her new eyeglasses. I told her that I had to go the bathroom. I took the article in there with me and sat on the throne and read it.

  The article was all about the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex was the part of the brain that allowed human beings to control their impulses and to act rationally. Without prefrontal cortexes, a society would have no moral and legal codes. Without the prefrontal cortex, homo sapiens would run amok. And — this was the point — the prefrontal cortex didn’t mature until you were in your early twenties.

  “This is why,” Mr. Weinberger wrote, “it is important for adults to help children make plans and set rules, and why institutions are created to impose limits on behavior that children are incapable of limiting.”

  I could see why my mom had sent the article to me. And it was in the New York Times, which meant you couldn’t argue with it. I didn’t think Tom Egan had read the article, but nevertheless this distrust of kids’ ability to reason was what lay behind his calling the New York State hotline. I had run away with Amy because I was acting irrationally and couldn’t help myself.

  In addition, the article was the answer to Amy’s question: why was I doing all this for her?

  “I’m doing it, Amy, because my weenie’s not grown and neither is my prefrontal cortex. My mother knows that. My dick is starting to get hard at night and my nerve cells aren’t communicating with each other properly. I’m neurologically immature.”

  I didn’t say those words. I just thought them.

  Maybe they were true.

  Robert Frost is my favorite poet because you know what he’s saying and it’s always interesting. When he was an old man someone asked him what was the most important thing he’d learned about life. He said, “It goes on.”

  So we went on with it, first of all by taking the F train uptown to pick up Amy’s glasses. In the shop she put them on and stared down at the test card on the counter.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “You look like a movie star. Do you see better?”

  “The print jumps right out at me. Billy, can we go back to the museum, the one with the paintings by Vincent, the guy who cut off his ear?”

  I didn’t need a fully developed prefrontal cortex to make a decision that it was cool to go to the museum.

  The MoMA was only a few blocks away. Amy and I took the escalator upstairs to the Van Gogh section and she carved out a little island of territory for herself about five feet away from the painting of the wild and crazy starry night. She didn’t take up a lot of room, and she was just a kid, so no one objected.

  “Can we look at that book again, Billy?”

  In the gift shop she picked out a book about Van Gogh and another book that showed the most famous paintings in the museum’s collection.

  I paid cash for them and gave them to her.

  “I couldn’t read them the other day. Do you know, Carter gave me a copy of Alice in Wonderland for my birthday. It had this small print. It was all blurry. I threw the book out in a Dumpster. I told him I left it in school and some other kid scarfed it.”

  That was the first time she’d mentioned Carter.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  “I was going to take you out for lunch.”

  “Where?”

  “A seafood restaurant.”

  “I’m not crazy about fish, Billy.”

  “But you could have a lobster. Didn’t you say you wanted to eat a lobster? The restaurant’s in the Plaza Hotel. It’s on my dad’s personal list of ten favorites.”

  Amy laughed. “You’re always saying your dad likes this and your dad likes that — like, your dad’s the expert on everything that matters.”

  “Not everything,” I said, “but he knows a lot.”


  “And you always believe him?”

  “I guess not, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  She thought that over. So did I. I knew my dad wanted the best for me. He was always trying to teach me something, or explain a word or an idea to me. He had taught me the difference between amend and emend, affect and effect, immigrant and emigrant, and to spell tough words like Antarctic, February, icicle, and villain. And to put your weight on the downhill ski, and to tell the truth and follow your gut reaction and keep your eye on the ball and step into it and don’t let it or the world overpower you. Well, I was doing all that, or most of it. I wondered if he was proud of me or just disgusted with himself for making me so smartass and ornery.

  “Could we go there another time, Billy?”

  “Excuse me. I was dreaming. Go where another time?”

  “The fish and lobster restaurant.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d really like to go home now and use these glasses.”

  So Amy spent the next part of the day curled up on the sofa reading with her new glasses — first in the book about Vincent van Gogh, and then a movie magazine she’d bought that had articles about Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp, her favorite stars. Julia had been going to marry Kiefer Sutherland, Amy explained, but she didn’t, she married the singer Lyle Lovett instead, although that didn’t work out; and Johnny Depp had fallen in love with a French girl and decided to move to France to be with her. Then Amy put the glasses away in their purple leather case, turned on the television, for which she didn’t need glasses, and watched the soaps for an hour, and then MTV.

  I went out and bought Chinese take-out on Mott Street. I’d learned that when you’re on your own you have to think about a lot of things that ordinarily you would never bother with, and the most important one, of course, was eating, which means three meals a day if you’re a normal gluttonous American. At home your parents took care of it. They planned, shopped, carried home, stocked, prepared, and cooked, and you just said, “What’s for dinner, Mom?” (Or, in my case, “… Inez?”) But if you were on your own you had to do all that for yourself. Carrying the food home wasn’t simple if you were small and you couldn’t drive a car. And the cooking took time and could get boring if you were doing run-of-the-mill things like boiling eggs and toasting bagels. Then you had to wash the dishes and clean up, plus, in New York, kill the cockroaches. And there were two of us, and Amy wasn’t in the shopping or cooking mode; she wanted to kick back and do all the things she’d never been allowed to do. So I bought Foo Wong’s Chinese take-out for our lunch.

  “Don’t you want to draw?” I asked, after lunch.

  “Not now.”

  In the middle of the afternoon, she vanished. She didn’t say, “I’m going out, Billy, I’ll be back in an hour or two.” Nothing like that. Why should she? I wasn’t her jailer. We were partners, friends on an adventure. She could do what she liked. Still, I wish she’d said, “So long,” or “See you later.”

  Three hours later she came back, all smiles. “Look. I went all the way up to Astor Place to get it done. You know, if you’re a kid you’re supposed to have a letter from your parents, but on Astor Place they just go, ‘Do you have permission?’ and you go, ‘Sure,’ and that’s it. What do you think? Is it ever cool?”

  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, i
f 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.”