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

by Clifford Irving

  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.

  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 tha
t?”

  “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?”