Spare Change (26 page)

“Hold you down? Telling you
not to insult people is holding you down?”

“Not letting me handle the
questioning—that’s what you do. I’m ready to take the lead on this case; and I’m
plenty capable.”

“I’m sure you are,” Mahoney,
who was known for his patience, answered. “But, when it comes to seeing the
boy’s involvement in this case, you’ve got a blind spot.

“I can see the truth of
things just as well as you can! But, I know for a fact that we’re just wasting
our time trying to find a kid who wouldn’t tell the truth if you held a red hot
poker to his tongue.”

“You don’t
know
that.”

“Yeah, I do. Pop told me the
kid’s a born liar; lies even when the truth’s in his favor.  Pop said—”

“Oh, and your father’s an
expert?”

“No expert, maybe; but he’s
had a lot of experience with this kid!”

Mahoney gave Cobb a look of
doubt and shook his head.

“It’s the truth! One time
the kid even made up a story about his mama carrying on with Pop. The kid said
he’d spread it all over town if Pop didn’t give him free pie.”

Mahoney began chuckling,
“That’s a new one—a blackmailer demanding pie!”

“So laugh,” Cobb sneered,
“but, I’m telling—”

“Was he?”

“Was who what?”

“Was your pop having a thing
with Susanna Doyle?”

“Shit, no!”

“Face it Sam; such a thing
ain’t beyond believing.”

“He’s my Pop!”

“He’s also got a reputation
for chasing after women. Remember the problem with that woman from Portsmouth—”

“Forget it!” Sam growled,
“Just forget I ever mentioned it.”

“Okay, it’s forgotten,” Jack answered. But, the truth
was that such an idea had started him thinking.

O
n Tuesday, Sam Cobb, who for over a week had claimed
to be having problems with his digestive tract, woke up feeling under the
weather; so, even though he’d promised that Sam could take over most of the
questioning, Mahoney went in search of Butch Wheeler alone. He arrived at the
Route Thirteen truck stop shortly before ten; parked himself on a stool across
from the plate glass window then sat and drank cup after cup of coffee. After
the fourth cup, the waitress suggested he ought to have a jelly donut or crumb
bun to soak up some of the caffeine he’d been downing. “That stuff will scald
your insides,” she said jokingly. Without taking his eyes off of the parking
lot, Mahoney smiled and told her that he was willing to take his chances. He
said nothing about what he was really thinking—jelly donuts meant sticky hands;
sticky hands meant a trip to the washroom—no thanks. It was close to one
o’clock when the truck carrying a load of chickens pulled in.  According to the
description he’d been given, Mahoney figured the man would be about the size of
Scooter Cobb, but Butch Wheeler was bigger—about the same height, but much
wider. 

Jack swiveled around,
stepped down from the stool and walked outside. “Excuse me,” he called across
the parking lot, “You Butch Wheeler?”

“Sure am.” Butch saw the
badge clipped to Mahoney’s jacket and gave the kind of wide open grin only a
man with a clear conscience is capable of. “Am I in trouble with the law?” he
asked laughingly.

“Nah,” Mahoney replied, “I’m
looking for a runaway boy and Tom Behrens over at the ESSO station thought
you’d be able to help.”

“I had a feeling,” Wheeler
said.

“Had a feeling?”

“Yep. Jack Mahoney, that
wasn’t the boy’s name, was it?”

Mahoney shook his head, “No
sir,” he said, “that’s my name.”

“You’re Jack Mahoney?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Whoo-ee. That kid has brass
ones, stealing a policeman’s name.”

“I wouldn’t say he stole
it,” Jack replied, “more like fell back on it, so he’d have somebody to be. His
real name’s Ethan Allen Doyle. That ring any bells?”

Wheeler shook his head.
“Can’t say it does.”

“Anyway, he was supposedly
headed over to the mainland to find his grandpa—do you recall where you dropped
him off?”

“Right in front of the building;
even waited to make sure he got in safe.”

“You remember the address?”

“Wyattsville; I can’t recall
the address...” Butch scrunched his forehead into a washboard of wrinkles;
“But, I could tell you how to get there.”

“Good enough,” Jack answered
with a smile. 

Once he had a fix on where
Ethan Allen had gone, Jack couldn’t wait to get to Wyattsville. The more he
thought about it, the more certain he became—the boy had a story to tell; a
story that quite possibly could get told, if Sam Cobb wasn’t doing the asking.
Still, a promise was a promise and he’d promised Cobb that he could handle the
interrogations. Of course, if Cobb happened to be unavailable… 

Had Jack Mahoney not agreed
to be sitting in the front row when his daughter performed in the school play
that evening, he would have started for the mainland immediately; but he’d
promised, and he’d already broken too many such promises so the trip would have
to wait until the following day. Wednesday, he reasoned, was more often than
not a slow day, and the likelihood was that Sam wouldn’t get back to work before
the end of the week.     

Wednesday, a good hour
before dawn, on the road running smack through the center of town, a gasoline
truck headed north jackknifed—turning itself into a fireball and setting five
of the stores on the western side of the street ablaze. By the time Jack got to
the station house, the duty officer was handing out assignments to officers not
even scheduled for work that day. 

Despite the hullabaloo, Jack
didn’t slow down as he whizzed past the front desk. “I’ve got a solid lead on
the Doyle boy,” he told the Captain who was standing at the water cooler
swallowing down some aspirin, “so, if you’ve no objections, I’m gonna shoot
over to Wyattsville and check it out.”  

“Not today,” the Captain
answered. “I need every man I’ve got.”

For the next two days, Jack
was assigned to investigating a number of vandalisms that occurred around the
business area where several stores were left wide open because their front
windows had been knocked out by fire hoses. When he was finished with that,
there was a mountain of paperwork to attend to and he didn’t get clearance for
the trip to Wyattsville until four days later, by then Sam Cobb was back at
work. 

“I don’t think this kid’s
gonna talk to you,” Mahoney told Cobb as they sat waiting for the ferry to the
mainland. “Maybe you ought to wait in the car and let me handle the
questioning.”

Cobb, who by now had a
severe case of hemorrhoids and was in a worse than usual mood, grumbled, “Bullshit!”

Olivia

I
t’s strange how a thought that’s been cemented inside your
head for a lifetime can all of a sudden disappear. I used to pity poor Francine
Burnam because of her having those five kids. With one of them always wanting
something, she never seemed to have a minute to call her own.  But, thinking
back, I can remember how I’d be beside myself because the kids were romping
around like a herd of wild buffalo; but she’d just sit there with the most
contented smile on her face.  

It’s an unexplainable
thing, but having a youngster around makes a person feel they’ve got a more
purposeful life. You wake up in the morning and instead of thinking… here I am
stuck with another day to muddle through… you pop out of bed and start frying
up an egg. After Charlie died, I worried about what would become of me; but
now, I’m more worried about that boy—he’s downright foul-mouthed and skinny as
a snake.

You’ve got to wonder what
kind of parents would let a child grow up cussing the way he does. Not me,
that’s for sure! Every time he lets go of one of those words, I say, Ethan
Allen, watch your mouth. 

The Youngest Resident

O
nce the Rules Committee decreed that Ethan Allen could
stay at Wyattsville Arms, he took to marching through the hallways like a man
who was part-owner of the building. He rode the elevator up and down for the
least little thing, a drink of water, a snack, a trip to the bathroom—sometimes
he rode up and down just for the pure fun of doing it, pushing buttons for
floors where he had no intention of getting off. When Mister Capolinsky frowned
and said he ought not to be doing such a thing, Ethan replied that the Rules
Committee had made allowances for him.

“Just for living here,”
Mister Capolinsky, who was rather crotchety, replied, “not for destroying
private property.”

After that Ethan held back
from pushing the buttons for all twelve floors, except times when he found himself
alone in the elevator—he figured a thing that was as much fun as an elevator,
should be used for riding pleasure. He reasoned that if a person simply wanted
to get in or out of the building, they’d use the back staircase like he’d been
doing for the past two weeks.  

On the very first afternoon
of his being allowed, Ethan Allen loaded both the bicycle and dog in the
elevator, rode down to the lobby and strolled leisurely out the front door,
nodding to folks he’d never before seen as he passed by. Missus Willoughby,
who’d not yet heard the news of the Rules Committee’s decision, gasped aloud
and wobbled as if she was about to fall into a faint. “It’s okay,” Ethan said
proudly, “
I’m
allowed!
”  He wheeled his new bicycle to the
sidewalk, lifted Dog into the basket and off he went. He rode round and round
the building walkway for hours; so long in fact that residents started waving
from their windows and counting the laps as he passed by. Afterward, he rode
over to the park and then to the playground, which was locked because of it
being a school day.  Finally, having run out of places to go and tired of
circling the building, he parked his bike in the lobby and went upstairs. “You
need anything from the store?” he asked Olivia. “Bread, maybe? Milk?”

“Well,” she answered, “I
suppose I could use a bit more peanut butter.”

“Okay,” he chirped
cheerfully, and was out the door before she had time to mention they were also
running a bit low on potato chips.

When that errand was
finished, he went by Clara’s apartment and asked the same question. She, it
seemed, was short of buttermilk, so Ethan peddled back to the Piggly Wiggly and
fetched it for her. Clara, pleased she wouldn’t have to make the trip herself,
gave Ethan a nickel for his trouble. After that, Mister Edwards sent him for
the new issue of Life Magazine. Then it was a bag of onions for Hanna Michaels,
a tube of toothpaste for Barbara Conklin, some sugar for Elsie Kurtz and a
newspaper for Fred McGinty, who gave him a dime for fetching a newspaper that
cost five cents. By suppertime, Ethan couldn’t make a move without hearing the
sound of coins jingling in his pocket.

“Where’d you get all that
money,” Olivia asked as they sat down to eat.

“Earned it,” he answered,
his face bright as a Christmas tree, “doing errands.”

Olivia couldn’t help but
notice the way the boy’s mouth stretched into a smile—smaller, but angled
exactly like Charlie’s. “You’re not going around bothering folks, are you?” she
asked, but that wasn’t really what she was thinking.  

Ethan shook his head, and
reluctantly chomped down on a forkful of string beans which, along with a chunk
of fatback, had simmered on Olivia’s stove for hours. “These is real good,” he
said letting go of a smile.  “They taste different than beans from a can.” He
shoveled in another bite. 

Olivia smiled. She knew the
taste of canned string beans only too well; she’d been eating them for over
thirty years. Canned string beans, a single pork chop, one leg of a chicken—that
was the way a single woman had to cook; anything more would have been wasteful.
But, after a lifetime of canned goods and ready-made foods from the downtown
delicatessen, she was ready for some home cooking. She’d planned to do it for
Charlie, not just planned, eagerly anticipated, even gathered up a whole collection
of recipes,  then…  Olivia gazed across the table at the boy with twilight blue
eyes and a curled up grin, and saw him as a miniature of his grandfather.
“Close enough,” she sighed.

After supper, while Ethan
Allen was sitting at the table counting up his money for the fourth time,
Olivia brought up the subject of school.  “You’ve got to go,” she said, “or
else the truant officer will come looking for you.”

Ethan Allen felt quite
comfortable with the amount of schooling he already had so he said, “How can he
come looking for me, when he don’t even know I’m here?”

“The truant officer rides
around town looking for kids who are out playing at times they ought to be in
school.”

“I ain’t playing. I’m
running errands!”

“All the same,” she said,
“you’ve
got
to go to school.” That was her final word on the subject. “Tomorrow,”
she told him, “we’ll get you registered and you can start on Monday.”

When she turned back to
washing the dishes, Ethan thumbed his nose at her back.