Spare Change (30 page)

“Jeez,” Ethan moaned, “you
gotta put it
that
way?” After a considerable amount of back and forth
conversation he reluctantly agreed to talk to Jack Mahoney. “But,” he said, ‘I
gotta do it my way. I ain’t telling him it was Scooter ‘til I see the light,
okay?”

“Okay,” Olivia answered.

Ethan Allen

I
know Grandma Olivia means well, but I got serious
concerns about this light in the eye business. If Scooter’s policeman son would
send me off to reform school for lying, what’s he gonna do if I claim his
daddy’s the one what did the killing? 

I seen the damage those
Cobbs can do and believe you me, I ain’t none too anxious to tangle with either
of them. Grandma Olivia says— I call her Grandma Olivia now ‘cause she said
that’s what I’m supposed to call her—anyway, she says she ain’t afraid. She
says truth and honesty is on our side; maybe so, but size and meanness is sure
on their side.

Other than nagging me for
using cuss words, Grandma Olivia’s nice. She treats me good, like I was her
true-born grandkid, and she’s always going on about how I remind her of my
handsome Grandpa. She says I got his blue eyes and the cut of his chin. I gotta
laugh when she says that, ‘cause in the picture I seen, he’s an old man and his
chin’s hiding behind a bunch of whiskers.

Truth be Told

I
n the fall of the year, when a carpet of leaves
covered the ground and tree pollen was thick in the air, Jack Mahoney’s
allergies ran rampant. He swallowed down pills and sniffed inhalants, but still
his eyes watered constantly. Sometimes he appeared almost glassy eyed, and at other
times you could believe you were looking into a still water pond reflecting the
sunlight. When he finally began sneezing with every other breath, he called in
sick and did not return to the station house for five days. On Monday, there
was a message from Olivia Doyle waiting for him; all it said was—
please
call
, but he knew what it meant.

Jack called Olivia and told
her he would be right over.

“No,” she answered, “I’d
rather you wait until tomorrow afternoon; be here at three o’clock.” 

Although preferring sooner to later, Jack agreed.

W
hen Ethan arrived home from school on Monday
afternoon, Olivia told him Detective Mahoney would be there the following day
and they set about making their plans. First off, they had to know for certain
that Mahoney came alone, that Officer Cobb was not waiting outside in the car,
or lurking in the dark of the stairwell. Secondly, they had to be absolutely
positive there was no chance Ethan might be taken back to the Eastern Shore,
and lastly, the boy had to see the light in Mahoney’s eyes for himself—if there
was no light, there’d be no telling what he’d seen.

Once Ethan and Olivia
decided what they would tell and under what circumstances it would be told,
Olivia began calling the neighbors for help. Fred McGinty volunteered for the
curbside watch, Sam Bowman to patrol the staircase, Clara and Barbara Conklin
as sofa-sitting witnesses and Seth Porter planned to hide in the bedroom, his
shotgun ready, in the event anybody tried strong-arm tactics. When the doorbell
rang at three o’clock Tuesday afternoon, all the pieces were in place.

When Olivia opened the door,
Jack Mahoney said; “Afternoon, Missus Doyle.”

She took one look at those
eyes, glittery as a springtime river, and smiled. “Come in,” she said
pleasantly and motioned him into the living room. After Olivia had introduced
Clara and Barbara, she sauntered over to the window and looked down at Fred. He
gave the all clear signal, waving his right hand. Mahoney had been alone in the
car. She spent the next five minutes chattering on about nothing of
consequence, waiting until she heard the three loud clunks echo up the radiator
pipe. All clear; no one was hiding in the stairwell. “So,” she said, abruptly
changing the subject, “I suppose we should get Ethan Allen out here.”

In response to her call, the
boy came from the bedroom. He walked with slow shuffling footsteps, his hands
jammed deep into his pockets and his head bent toward the floor. “Afternoon,
Detective Mahoney,” he said without raising his eyes.

Seeing the dread pitched
over the boy like a pup tent, Mahoney squatted down until they were
face-to-face. “Son,” he said, “you’ve no need to be afraid of me.”

Ethan looked into the man’s
river water eyes.

“I’m on your side,” Mahoney
said in a most convincing manner. “The only thing I really want—is to see the
person responsible for killing your mama and daddy brought to justice.”

“You ain’t gonna try to take
me back to Missus Cobb?”

“Absolutely not! The best
place for you is right here with your Grandma.”

Ethan looked square into
Mahoney’s eyes and saw the light—it was bright as the noonday sun shimmering on
a still water pond. If such a thing was proof enough for Grandma, then it was
proof enough for him. “I wasn’t sleeping,” he said, “I seen it all.”

“Good Lord,” Mahoney sighed,
“you actually saw what happened?”  

Ethan Allen nodded.

“Did the attacker see you?”

“Uh-uh.” Ethan Allen timidly
shook his head side to side. “He didn’t see me ‘cause I stayed hid, way far
back under the bushes.”

“Did you recognize him?”

Ethan Allen nodded and
opened his mouth, but the words felt so painful in his throat that instead of
speaking the name as he had intended, he began to cry. “Honey,” Olivia sighed,
wrapping her arm around the boy’s shoulders, “you don’t have to be afraid of
telling the truth. The Lord himself is on the side of truth, and so is
Detective Mahoney.”

“That’s right,” Mahoney
said. “The only thing anybody can ask of you is the truth about what happened
that night.”

Turning his face into
Olivia’s shoulder, Ethan mumbled, “Mister Cobb did it.”

“Sam Cobb?” Mahoney gasped.

The boy shook his head,
“Uh-uh, his daddy—Mister Scooter.”

“Scooter Cobb was the man
who killed your Mama and Daddy?” Mahoney echoed with an overwhelming gasp of
astonishment.

“Not Mama; just Daddy.”

“Did you see who killed your
Mama?”

“Daddy, I reckon,” Ethan
answered, “but, I think it was an accident.”

“Do you suppose,” Mahoney
asked, “you could tell me the whole story of how things actually happened that
day?”

Ethan looked up at Olivia, his
eyes questioning such a move. Only after she gave him a reassuring nod, did he
start to speak. “We was gonna run off to New York,” he said, “so Mama told me
to hide out back ‘til it was time to leave. She thought I might slip and say
something and then Daddy would know what we were up to.”

“Just you and your mama were
going to New York?” Mahoney asked. 

Ethan shook his head. “No,
Mister Scooter was going too, that’s why Mama didn’t want Daddy to know. First off,
just me and her were going; but after Daddy took all Mama’s money and spent it
on a tractor, she said Mister Scooter was gonna take us cause he had a lot of
money. Thing is, Daddy must of caught wind of it, cause him and Mama got into a
real big fight. Once the cat was out of the bag, she threw her suitcase in the
car and told him she didn’t give a beaver’s tit about what he wanted, we was
still going to New York—that’s when Daddy punched her and she fell down.” 
Ethan suddenly stopped talking and turned his attention to picking at a loose
thread on the pocket of his pants.

Seeing the tears in the
boy’s eyes, Mahoney waited a long while and then sympathetically said, “So I
guess your mama got hurt pretty bad when she fell down, huh?”

Ethan nodded.

“What happened then?”

“Daddy picked her up and put
her in bed.”

“You know if she was still
alive?”

Ethan shrugged and kept
picking at the thread.

“Scooter Cobb, was he
there?”

“Not then,” Ethan said, “he
came late at night.”

“Were you in the house when
he got there?” 

“Uh-uh.” Ethan shook his
head. “I was out back in the woods.”

“How’d you know it was
Scooter?”

“I heard the car. At first I
figured it was Mama. I thought she might of felt some better and was leaving,
so I snuck close by the yard to see. But it wasn’t Mama, it was Mister Scooter
getting out of his car.”

“You sure it was him?”

“I’m
real
sure.” If
Mahoney had looked close enough he might have been able to catch sight of the
image flickering across the boy’s eyes, a memory-movie of Scooter Cobb heaving
a bloodied Benjamin across the yard. “It was him alright,” Ethan said, “He was
driving his big white car. I seen that car plenty of times. One time I even
seen him and Mama parked out back of the diner in that car…”

“Ethan…” Olivia warned with
a raised eyebrow.

“After Scooter got there,”
Mahoney asked, “what happened?”

“He went in our house; then
he started screaming that Mama was dead. He called Daddy all kinds of names and
said he’d killed her. Then he beat him up.”

“Scooter beat up your
Daddy?”

“Yeah. Daddy didn’t even
fight back, he just stood there and let Mister Scooter pound on him. I wanted
to go help Daddy, but I was too scared so I stayed hid.”

“In a situation such as
that, keeping yourself safe is usually the best thing.”

“It didn’t feel like the
best thing,” Ethan replied sorrowfully.

“But, it is a lot safer to
stay hidden,” Mahoney said, “besides, if it was Scooter Cobb, I doubt there’s
anything you could have done to save your Daddy.” He went on with a number of
questions as to where exactly the fight had taken place; then reiterated, “Now
Ethan Allen, you’re
absolutely sure
it was Scooter Cobb, right?”

“I told you I was.”

“You’re
sure
you
ain’t just making up this story, to get back at Mister Cobb for his taking
advantage of your Mama?”

“I didn’t say none of Mama’s
other boyfriends did it.”

“That’s true,” Mahoney
replied, nervously pushing his fingertips back and forth across his forehead. “Okay,
I’m gonna take you at your word.”

“Now, you’ll arrest Scooter
Cobb?” Olivia asked.

“We’ll see,” Mahoney
replied.

“See?” A frown drifted
across Olivia’s face. “What is there to see?”

“Every accusation has to be
investigated; proven meritorious.”  Mahoney pulled his handkerchief from his
pocket and swabbed his eyes, “We’ve got procedures,” he said, “we don’t go
around arresting every person rumored to have done something.”

Olivia bent forward and
studied his eyes—the light was gone. There was not even a trace of glimmer;
they were dark and dry. She had mistaken faulty tear ducts for the light of
God, how absolutely stupid.  “Don’t think for an instant that I’ll allow you to
take this boy back with you,” she said in a manner concrete as the building
cornerstone. “Do whatever investigating you need to do, but expect nothing more
from either of us.”

Ethan sensing a heavy duty
argument hanging in the air slipped behind Olivia. Clara and Barbara Conklin
moved forward to the edge of the sofa. A click sounded from the bedroom, where
Seth Porter had cocked his rifle even though he had no bullets. “Let’s just
calm down and take it easy,” Mahoney said, extending out the palms of his
hands, “I’m not here to take Ethan Allen back. He’s where he belongs. There’s
simply some groundwork to be done before I arrest anybody. The law states a
man’s innocent until proven guilty—the proving, that’s my job.”

“How can you possibly
suggest that Scooter Cobb might be innocent? Ethan Allen saw him do it!”

“If we have nothing but the
boy’s say so, it’s simply one person’s word against the other. That’s why we’ve
got to substantiate his claim with actual evidence.”

When Mahoney finally took
his leave, Olivia was not feeling one bit good about convincing Ethan to tell
what he knew. In fact, she was considering taking Fred up on his offer of
marriage and the three of them moving off to Baltimore, Maryland.

Mahoney was feeling no
better about the situation. “Hell’s afire,” he moaned as he slid behind the
wheel wishing he didn’t know what he knew. He was suddenly wishing that he’d
simply left well enough alone and settled for having an unsolved murder on the
books. If the boy didn’t want to be found, what business did he or anybody else
have in finding him?  Long before the ferry docked on the Eastern Shore, Jack
Mahoney decided to do a bit of behind-the-scene investigating before he said
anything to anyone, especially Sam Cobb.

Detective Jack Mahoney

I
’d like to believe that the kid is lying; that he’s
concocted the entire story, just to get even with Sam. It would make my life a
whole lot easier if I could just chalk the kid’s story up to a case of
misdirected anger.