Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (40 page)

IT WAS ALAN, of course. He had called at seven o’clock that morning from the pay phone at Oakwood. He didn’t hesitate or waffle. He said, “Mom, I can’t stand it here anymore. I’m going. I just thought I owed it to you and Dad to let you know.”

Toba had wanted to ask, “Alan … are you cured?” But the key word seemed too raw.

“Will they let you go?”

“They can’t stop me. There’s this woman, Germaine, keeps yelling at me, tells me I’m a quitter and I’ll go back on drugs. And the guys have stopped talking to me. But it’s like a prison here. Germaine wants me to stay another three months. And when that’s over, I know she’ll say, ‘Three months more.’ “

“He took his GED test,” Toba told me. “He’s sure he passed, so he’ll have the equivalent of a high school diploma. But he doesn’t get the results until this afternoon. He said he’d wait for that, and then he’s off tomorrow.”

“And what are
you
doing?” I asked, for we were in the coffee shop at the courthouse, and her feet were propped up on her traveling bag. Her sheepskin winter coat was tossed over the back of her chair.

“I have a plane ticket that gets me into Newark Airport at six P.M. I can rent a car and be at Monticello certainly before midnight, and I’ll find this Oakwood joint by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. If he still insists on going, at least I can make sure he doesn’t go out on the road like a pauper.”

“The road to where?”

“San Francisco, he said. He was going to hitchhike. Can you imagine? In the middle of January?”

“And why did you stop off here, Toba?”

“I had to talk to you first. I couldn’t get through to you in the courtroom. So I thought: fuck it, why not.” Toba glanced at her watch. “I have to be at the airport in two hours to make my connection.”

I shook my head in despair. “We’ve been over this ground. It’s a mistake for Alan to quit. Germaine Price is the woman who told me he would die if he didn’t go through the program.”

“Which I always considered a major hunk of melodrama.”

“You always
hoped
it was a major hunk of melodrama.”

Toba hunched her shoulders. I thought I saw new lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes. Or maybe she was tired, or hadn’t put on her makeup with her usual fastidiousness. No, they were new crow’s-feet. A gift from her son. From life.

She straightened up. “Well, Ted, you’ve done all you can. You can’t leave in the middle of a trial, or hearing, or whatever it is. So I’ll bite the bullet. I’ll go up and deal with it.”

She had once said to me, when Alan had told us he considered driving his car off the causeway, “What if
he
dies while you’re off trying to save some lousy murderer’s life?”

Wrong. Darryl wasn’t a murderer. But neither was Alan. If I was battling to save Darryl, didn’t I owe the same allegiance and effort to my son?

Judge Fleming had given me until 5 P.M. tomorrow to finish the hearing. He had to pack up and vacate his court; he couldn’t change his schedule. It didn’t seem that I could go up to Oakwood with Toba and get back in time.

But I had to, and there was only one way.

If it didn’t work, Darryl could die. And maybe Alan too, if Germaine Price hadn’t been serving up major melodrama to the peanut gallery. I felt a cold clamp of fear in the middle of my chest.

I threw coins down on the table for the coffee that was growing cold. “Let’s go find Gary Oliver.”

Toba and I flew to Newark together, grabbed a Hertz car, and by six-thirty had struggled through the maze of highways and late rush- hour traffic onto the Jersey Turnpike and then Route 17 into New York State. The night was dark and the temperature well below freezing. Rags of snow lay on the edge of the road; it made me shiver just to look out there. I still wore the clothing I had worn in the air-conditioned Jacksonville courthouse.

The highway skirted the Palisades, and then we rose gradually through the foothills of the Shawangunks into the Catskills, past Tuxedo Park and Middletown and the Holiday Mountain Ski Area. Here, in another life, my grandparents had spent summer vacations, and not too far to the north, at Grossinger’s, my mother and father had first met and courted. Now the snow was thick upon moonlit pastureland; the cold wind ripped past the car. This was famed speed-trap country so Toba was at the wheel—I didn’t trust myself to keep within the 55-mile-an-hour limit. The heat in the car was stifling, but whenever I opened the window even a crack, needles of cold penetrated my trousers and chilled my flesh. I smoked a few cigarettes, until Toba said, “For God’s sake, Ted, kill yourself if you insist, but give
me
a break. …”

We had telephoned from the airport. When we bumped down the icy dirt road outside Oakwood and spotted the ramshackle buildings of the therapeutic community, a flashlight beam shone out of the darkness. Toba slowed to a crawl. I opened a window.

“Dad? Mom?” It was Alan, bundled in a thick winter parka, waiting for us in the dark.

Inside the main building the heat pressed into my face like a hot towel. Alan looked grave, a little confused. He had lost a few pounds; he seemed leaner but healthy-looking, and certainly looked older. He embraced us. Behind him, sprawled in easy chairs, three T-shirted young black men and one young white woman watched us silently. Alan gestured at them with one hand.

“These are my friends, but they won’t talk to me because I’m splitting. I mean, they’re not
allowed
to talk to me. Bucky, and Richard, and Veronica, and Anthony. My parents.”

They waved cheerfully. So did we. I remembered Bucky from my visit to the center at 104th Street and Broadway. “Where’s your pal Jack?”

“Graduated.” Bucky grinned. “You got a good memory, Mr. Jaffe.”

Toba gazed at these boys as if they were behind bars at a zoo for aliens. Germaine Price, still frail and pale, bustled in from another room. “I have a few things to do,” she said, “and I’m sure you want to talk to Alan alone. So I’ll join you in ten minutes.”

I had told her on the telephone that I was in the midst of trial, that I couldn’t come any other time. She was breaking a number of the local rules by letting us visit at this hour of the night.

Alan led us upstairs into an office furnished with a sagging sofa, a bookcase filled with texts, a desk, and a single easy chair with, I soon found out, a broken spring. He finally smiled. “I passed my GED.”

“That’s great.” I shook his hand heartily.

“Well, this is what’s happening,” he said, easing himself onto the surface of the desk, legs swinging, hands folded across his chest. “This was the wrong program for me, but I knew I needed help, and I got it. Sticking it out here was the hardest thing I ever had to do. The thing is, I’ve run out of problems. And patience. So it’s time to go.”

“And they don’t want you to,” I said.

“They tell me I’ll die. They scream at me. Not just the counselors, but the kids. They tell me I’m not ready. But I am.”

And we couldn’t stop him either, he said. He had fifty dollars he’d saved from his last job and deposited in the office safe when he’d first arrived here. He wanted to borrow a few hundred more from us. But if we wouldn’t lend it to him, he was going anyway. He’d hitchhike out west, work along the way, survive. That was it.

“And what about your addiction?” I asked.

“I’ll always miss smoking dope,” he said. “And I don’t promise I won’t ever smoke again. But not for a long time, and never like I did before.”

“What will you do when you get to San Francisco?” I asked.

“Study and work.”

“What will you study?”

“Art, or maybe journalism.”

“Have you been doing any drawing while you’re here?”

“Not really.”

“Is that a yes or a no?” In the end, there was something to be said for the heartlessness of cross-examination.

“It’s a no,” he muttered.

“And have you written anything?”

“No, but I’d like to.”

I said nothing.

Germaine Price slid into the room. “What has he told you?”

Toba repeated most of what Alan had said, and finished with: “I’m impressed. I trust him. I think we have to trust him.”

Germaine dropped into the one empty chair and gave a thin laugh. “Why? He’s a lying junkie motherfucker.”

I glanced at Alan, who smiled nervously.

Toba’s lips quivered; her cheeks brightened as if she’d been struck. “That was unnecessary,” she said.

“A little rough,” Germaine said, “but no less true.” She took out a pack of Marlboros and offered them around. We all shook our heads.

“What do you mean?” Toba demanded.

“Mrs. Jaffe.” Germaine lit her cigarette, then took a deep drag. “He wanted you to come up here. You understand that, don’t you? Otherwise, why call you in Florida? He thinks of this as a prison, and it’s a tough place, I grant him that, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that there are no walls or guards. If you look in the dormitories you won’t find any bars. There’s just peer pressure. If Alan wanted to, he could have taken off yesterday, the day before, anytime. So why did he wait for you to rush up here?”

“I don’t know,” Toba said.

“Of course you do,” Germaine said.

Toba leaned back against the sofa, folding her arms. “You think it’s money.”

“I know it’s money.” Germaine sucked at her cigarette. “Didn’t you bring it?”

Toba reddened.

“Without money,” Germaine said, “he won’t go. He can’t go. You think he’s a Mohawk who’s learned to live off the land?
He
knows he’s not. He’d freeze his balls off in a ditch by the side of the road. And Alan doesn’t want to die that way, believe me. He uses you. He’s clever at it. So clever he may not even realize what’s going down.”

Alan sprang up and said to Germaine, “Will you please keep out of this?” He faced his mother. “Now, just yes or no, like Dad would say. Will you lend me the goddam money or not?”

I felt myself flush. “Watch your language,” I cautioned.

Alan glared at me; I’d never seen that much anger on his face.

“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “Alone, if no one minds.”

Toba and Germaine hesitated, then went out the door. I heard the wooden floorboards creaking, and then the stairs.

Maybe it was the strain of what was happening in that Jacksonville courtroom, maybe it was the stress of all the years of Alan’s lies and half-truths. Accumulated feathers, says one Chinese sage, will sink the boat. The boat of my paternal stamina was sinking.

“Is it true that the only reason you called Mom was to get money from her?”

“Probably,” he said, a bitter smile twisting his jaw to one side. “So what? I sure didn’t ask her to come up here, and I sure as shit didn’t ask you to come, either.” He talked with wide sweeps of his arms, his body taut, his eyes glaring again. “I asked to borrow money. Big deal! Isn’t money the big thing in your life and everyone else’s life? What’s so terrible about asking for it? Would you rather I tried to steal it or sold drugs to get it, like the people you’re always trying to help?”

Alan had never lost his temper with us. He always tried to con us with amiable sweetness and apologies and promises—usually with some measure of success. I knew that other teenagers were more hot- blooded in the season of their rebellions, and for the most part I’d been grateful for Alan’s softer nature. In that, I may have been shortsighted.

But that sweetness seemed to have fled.

“I’ll tell you something else,” he went on. “I’ve changed my mind about the fucking money. You can keep it, because I don’t need it. Germaine’s wrong—I won’t freeze my balls off in a ditch. I’ll leave here tomorrow morning. I’ve got enough to take a bus to Binghamton and check into the YMCA, and I’ll get a job washing dishes or pumping gas and save money to get out to California. I’ll be there by summer. On my own! So fuck her!”

His skin turned white as he clenched his fist. I think he wanted to blurt out, “And fuck you too!” I don’t know what restrained him.

“Alan, I’d like to explain something to you—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said sharply, raising his open palm. “I want to finish.”

I ground my teeth. It had been a long day, and it would be a long night before another long day dawned.

“A few minutes ago,” Alan resumed with fervor, “Mom said she had faith in me—you remember? And Germaine said that was dumb, because I was a lying junkie motherfucker. Well, I saw the look on your face, and I knew right away you agreed. And I could see that in some crazy way you were glad she believed that, because it proved you were right all along, and you did the right thing sending me to this hellhole in Siberia. So I want to ask you, why don’t you have any faith? Because you always think I’m going to mess up, unless I do it by the rules? Your rules? I say I want to study art and you think that’s bullshit because I’m not already an artist, not already practicing. Well, maybe I need help to get started, did you ever think of that?”

I hadn’t thought of that; he might have been right.

He kept going. “You think that way about me because I
did
mess up a lot. And maybe I’ll mess up again.” He shook now with rage. “But who cares if you’re right? Give
me
a chance to be right! Or wrong! If I mess up, it
won’t
kill me. You can’t run my life anymore, that’s the bottom line. Let me do it my way! You always do things your way, don’t you? I’m getting out of here, Dad. Tomorrow.”

I was a stubborn man. When I knew what I wanted, you couldn’t stop me. That had certainly been proved in the past year. It began to seem that my son had inherited that trait. It had just taken a while to surface.

Yesterday, when the state had offered him life instead of certain death, Darryl had made a choice. He had turned down the offer and chosen to throw the dice, risking everything. That was a human being’s final privilege.

My son’s too. He was declining this sanctuary, which he hated, in favor of risk. And he had no advocate to argue for him. He had to do it all alone. I began to respect him.

“Do you want to come back to Sarasota?” I asked.

“No! I’m going out west. On my own!”

“Good luck,” I said.

“I will!”