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

was already starting to form the words and send them to my tongue, when I realized how insulted he would feel. I choked off the rest of the sentence.
    His icy eyes grabbed mine. It was like being physically grabbed. And I saw in the hardness of his face that he knew what I’d been going to propose.
    “Don’t even think about it,” Carter Bedford said.
    Next thing I knew he had shrugged into a yellow oilcloth jacket and was hugging Amy goodbye and telling me to shake a leg. “You want to kiss her goodbye, Billy, you can do it. On the cheek.”
    I hadn’t been thinking about kissing her goodbye. I shook her hand, which was stubby, and white, and cool. “I’ll see you in school.”
    Carter bent to hug her. “You hang in there now, sweetheart.” And then he took me by the arm and hauled me out of the hospital room like I was a caught fish.
    But when we reached his truck and I saw what was inside it, I said, “This isn’t going to work. I’ll take a taxi.”
    “No fucking way,” Carter said.

Chapter 9

    Uncle Bernie had told me that on hot summer days Iphigenia slept on the tile floor of his Tuscan house in order to keep cool. One afternoon a farmer’s dog wandered in and picked Iphigenia up between her teeth. When Iphigenia shrieked, the dog, perhaps equally frightened, dropped her and bounded away. No physical damage was done, but Iphigenia had a long memory.
    Outside Carter’s truck she began to cry. It sounded almost like a baby crying.
    Because what Carter had neglected to mention, when he offered me the lift home from Southampton Hospital, was that his two dogs were in the front seat of his truck. When Carter appeared out of the rain with me at his side, both dogs whined with joy. They beat click-clack on the windows of the cab with the nails of their paws. The tail of one, a big long-haired mutt, went thump-thump-thump on the dashboard. The other was a bulldog, so she had no tail to thump with.
    The Toyota pickup, a scarred wreck, no longer had a color. If you rolled the tires out flat you could have skated on them. Woolen army blankets covered the seats. When I put my head inside the cab, I almost gagged. Everything smelled of rotted fish and unwashed dog.
    I bent to the mesh of the gym bag. “It’s all right, little girl. No one will hurt you.” I slid the zipper open and squeezed my hand in to stroke her. Iphigenia was trembling.
    Carter yelled, “Daisy! Pablo! We got company. Behave, bitch. Pablo, you make trouble, I’ll whip your ass from here to next week. Just get the hell in,” he commanded me. “The beasts will calm down.”
    Raising his hand into a karate chop pose, he growled at the dogs the way a wolf would growl. The jaws of Daisy, the bulldog, curled up, and two brown teeth stuck up toward nostrils that were like pink bullet holes. She crawled down under the steering wheel on top of the brake and accelerator. I think she leaked some piss on the floor-boards. The big mutt, Pablo, stretched out on the seat, his eyes bulging.
    Carter had the door of the cab already open; he spread his hand on my back and shoved me up into the cab.
    “Hey!” I kept one hand on Iphigenia. “My monkey —”
    “For Christ’s sake, Billy, don’t let her outa that bag. Pablo’ll kill her. Him and Daisy will chew right through leather.”
    There wasn’t room for all four of us, never mind petrified Iphigenia, in that front seat. The dogs couldn’t ride in the back of the truck because of the rain. I took shallow breaths — I didn’t want that wet warm doggy air to get into the lower part of my lungs.
    “Carter, I have to get out of here.”
    Carter snorted and swallowed it. “Pablo, shove over. Billy, get your little butt down on the seat next to the door.” He was still crowding me from behind with one hand, fingers hard as rods, and with his other hand he was muscling Pablo. I found myself squeezed into the seat with Iphigenia in her bag.
    “See?” Carter said.
    He ran around to the driver’s