Spare Change (37 page)

“Go home, Clara,” Olivia
answered. 

“Don’t you tell
me
go
home; I heard gunshots! You’d better open this door!”

“
Please
,” Olivia
begged, “don’t get involved. There’s been an accident, but Ethan’s not hurt,
both of us are alright.”

“Accident?” Clara screamed
and took to rattling the door so furiously that Olivia worried it might pop
loose from its hinges.

“If you want to help,”
Olivia shouted, “go home and call for the police!”

Clara, who claimed that
under no circumstances was she leaving, sent Fred to place the call and stayed
where she was, pressing her ear to the door. “I’m listening to what’s going on
in there,” she called out, which caused Olivia to start speaking in a whisper.

“Ethan,” she whispered,
“you’ve got to do
exactly
as I say, and you’ve got to do it without one
word of disagreement.” She pulled the boy close enough to hear the hum of his
heartbeat and said, “We’ve got to keep what happened here a secret. A secret,
that is just between the two of us.”

“But, Grandma…” Ethan gave a
sigh of disappointment. 

“Believe me, sweetheart, I’m
real
proud of you. You saved my life and you
are,
without a
doubt, the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

“So why can’t we tell
nobody?”

“Because, if the police
suspect you shot Scooter Cobb it could lead to a whole mess of trouble. Even if
you didn’t get sent to jail, you’d have a black mark against you, and that
could last your whole life long.”

“I don’t care about no black
marks.”

“Not now maybe, but someday
you will. I’m old, I’ve already done most everything I’m gonna do, so I’ve got
less to risk. Besides, the police might say you shot Scooter Cobb because of
what he did to your daddy; and they could consider that murder!”

Ethan sat there wide-eyed,
taking in every word she spoke.

“Me,” she said, “well now, I
had no grudge against the man, so I can claim it was self defense. I’ll say he
tried to break into my apartment, and I had to shoot him—there it is, plain and
simple!”

Ethan had to admit it did
seem a better plan, “But,” he sighed, “nobody’s gonna know I saved your life.”

“You know,” she answered,
“You know and I know; that’s what really matters.”

The boy gave her a smile
that stretched the full width of his face.

Three times Olivia went over
the way it would be told; she tried to think through any loose ends, tried to
make sure there wasn’t some detail that would jump out the minute she started
explaining what happened.  Once that was done, she wiped the browning clean,
took it in her hands and held it to her shoulder in position for shooting and
fingered both triggers. She pressed her fingers firm against the butt then the
barrel and as she was doing so, she asked, “Where’d you get this thing?”

“The storage bin in the
basement,” Ethan answered.

“Seth Porter’s storage bin?”

He nodded.

“This is his gun?”

He nodded again.

“I told you not to go
pilfering that stuff,” Olivia said, even though inside her heart she was
thankful the boy had taken the gun which saved both their lives. 

Given the circumstances, she
had to alert Seth Porter. “I’m terribly sorry to involve you,” Olivia explained
over the telephone, “but, I’ll have to tell the police the gun is yours. I’ll
say I borrowed it; borrowed it because I was fearful for my life.”

“What gun?” Seth Porter, a
man deaf in one ear, asked.

“The Browning shotgun that
was in your storage bin; I’m ashamed to say I took it without asking and I’d
prefer to tell the police it was
borrowed.
”

“That old Browning? What
would you want with that thing? It’s likely as not rusted through. If you’re
looking to borrow a gun, what you want is—” 

“Thanks Seth, but I’ve
already made use of the Browning,” Olivia sighed, then hung up.

W
hen the Wyattsville police arrived, Clara was still
standing outside the apartment with her ear pressed to the door, but she’d been
unable to hear a single word of what was going on. Once the door was finally
opened, there in the foyer was a mountainous hulk of a man—dead as dead could
be, and spilling blood all over the carpet. 

By then, Ethan Allen was
dressed in pajamas, his bedspread had been folded back and the pillow crumpled
to match the shape of his head. Still wearing the dress splattered with
Scooter’s blood, Olivia was sitting on the sofa. She was trying valiantly to
hold onto her composure, although her fingers, having a mind of their own, were
twitching and twiddling. “Clara,” she said, “perhaps you should take Ethan
Allen back to your place, this isn’t something a boy of his age should see.” 

Clara grabbed hold of
Ethan’s hand but before they were out the door, the police sergeant, said the
boy had to stay until they’d heard his version of what happened. A rookie named
Timothy Michaels was on his first full tour of duty that night and he’d turned
queasy at the sight of Scooter’s body. Taking note of his condition, Clara asked,
“Would you care for some Pepto Bismal? Or tea maybe?”

Officer Michaels shook his
head and then with Clara leading the way, he tromped off to ask if the neighbors
had seen or heard anything. The questioning of Olivia was left for Sergeant
Gomez to handle.

After having released Sam
Cobb earlier in the day, Gomez breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived at the
Wyattsville Arms apartment building and discovered the attacker was Scooter
Cobb, not Sam. Knowing Mahoney had identified the elder Cobb as a murder
suspect,” Gomez immediately put in a call to the Eastern Shore Precinct. For
hours Mahoney had been bouncing from bar to bar in an effort to find Scooter;
when he heard the news of what had happened he turned the car around and headed
for the mainland. He pulled onto the last ferry of the night, with not a minute
to spare. 

Gomez was a man with a bushy
black mustache, he was low to the ground and round as a pumpkin, as different
from Charlie Doyle as a man could possibly be; but when he spoke Olivia could
swear it was the voice of her dead husband. “There are questions I have to to
ask,” he said, “but it’s simply so that we can get an understanding of what
happened here; it’s nothing to worry about…”

Olivia, who was already a
nervous wreck, broke into tears.

“Now, now,” Gomez said and
patted her hand in the most comforting manner.

Olivia’s sobbing grew
louder.

“This is routine procedure,”
he assured her, “there’s no reason…” 

“I’m sorry,” she sniffled,
“it’s just that you remind me of Charlie.”

“Charlie?”

“My husband; Ethan’s
grandfather.” She immediately segued into a lengthy tale of what happened—not
an explanation of how Scooter Cobb was shot to death in her foyer, but the
story of how Charlie had died of a heart attack while they were still on their
honeymoon.” 

“That is a tragedy,”
Sergeant Gomez said sympathetically, “…but, let’s get back to what happened
here tonight.”

“Well,” Olivia sighed, “I
was in the kitchen, preparing pineapple upside down cakes for the bake sale…” 
She hesitated a moment and asked if he’d care to have a piece; when the
Sergeant shook his head, she continued on. “That’s when the doorbell rang.
After Sam Cobb was here last night, I borrowed a shotgun from Seth Porter, and
I had it right here on the hallway table. When I opened the door and saw who it
was, I grabbed hold of the gun.” 

“He was the one at the door,”
Gomez pointed to the body, “right?”

She nodded.

“So, why’d you open the
door?”

“I thought it was my
downstairs neighbor, Barbara Conklin, delivering the box of sugar I’d asked to
borrow.”

“You have a neighbor who
looks like
him
?”

“Barbara doesn’t look anything
like him! I just didn’t look.”

“Do you normally do that; open
the door before you check through the peep-hole to see who’s standing there?”

“No!” she answered
indignantly. “But, I was busy in the kitchen and I figured for sure it was
Barbara. I’d spoken with her a few minutes earlier and she said she’d be up in
a few minutes, so—” 

“What did he say, when you
opened the door?”

“Say? He didn’t say much of
anything, just came charging at me.”

“That’s when you shot him?”

“Yes. If someone came charging
at you, wouldn’t you shoot them?”

Sergeant Gomez gave her a
deadpan look and didn’t answer.

The detective was wearing an
expression that concerned Olivia; his mouth was stretched straight across and
eyes narrowed. She began to worry that he might have seen some incriminating
bit of evidence she’d missed; or maybe she’d said something that gave him doubt
as to the truth of her story. “He was nine times my size,” she blurted out
nervously, “if I hadn’t shot him, he would have killed me—me and my grandson both!
If it were you, would
you
stand there and let an intruder murder
your
family?”

“So you thought he was an
intruder?” Gomez asked.

“Absolutely; just by the way
he charged at me, I knew he was here to do us harm. Look at this,” Olivia slid
back the shoulder of her blouse to show the mark of Scooter’s hand, which was
already turning purple. “I had to protect Ethan Allen. He’s already lost his
parents; I’m all he’s got.”

Gomez glanced over at the
huge body, then back to Olivia. “How could you get to the shotgun and take aim
with him standing so close?”

This was the question she’d
been dreading, the make or break believing of her story. Olivia knew she had to
watch every word. A line of perspiration was already rising up along her
forehead, but her hands were colder than a chunk of ice. “It happened so
quickly,” she said. “I can’t swear to the
exact
order of things; all I
remember is that I reached for the shotgun the minute I saw him, then he
grabbed me by the shoulder…”

“Where was the gun?”

“On the hallway table.”

“Isn’t it a bit unusual to
have a shotgun on the hallway table?”

“I wanted it there for our
protection. Ethan Allen had been attacked once by this man’s son and I was afraid
he’d come back here and—”

“Okay, okay. Then what
happened?”

“I tried to get loose; but
my shoe got caught in the carpet and I tripped. As I was falling down, I
squeezed the trigger as hard as possible and the gun went off.”

“Let’s see if I got this
right,” Gomez said, a considerable amount of doubt mingled in with the words. “
While
you were falling, you were able to fire both barrels?”

“Yes,” she answered. “You see,
I didn’t fall straight back, I sort of stumbled, then fell; so the first time I
pulled the trigger I was still in the process of stumbling.”   

“Well now,” Gomez said
shaking his head as if he’d heard something beyond believing, “that’s truly
amazing. You were off-balance and unfamiliar with the gun, yet you were able to
pump two shotgun shells into your assailant.”

“God must’ve been on my
side,” Olivia replied, figuring a mention of the Almighty would make her seem a
bit less culpable. 

“Where was the boy when all
of this was happening?”

“In bed; sound asleep.”

“The commotion didn’t wake
him?”

“The sound of the shots did.
When he came to see what was going on, he told me this man was Scooter Cobb.” 

“Hmm,” Gomez fingered his
chin pensively, “And, you say you’ve never before handled a shotgun…no target
practice? No other shooting experience?”

“Not really,” Olivia sighed,
“but the Good Lord—”

“I know, was on your side,”
Gomez reiterated. “Well, what about the boy? Does he know how to use a gun? Has
he maybe done some hunting?”

“He’s eleven! An eleven year
old boy has no business with a gun!”

“Maybe not in town, but on a
farm—”

“The boy had nothing to do
with this. It was me. I shot Scooter Cobb.  Shot him because he was breaking
into my house; that’s all there is to it.”

“Would you be willing to
take a lie detector test?”

“I most certainly will not,”
she answered. “You have no right—” 

“Whoa,” Gomez said, “it was
just a question. With a shooting like this, it’s routine. It just helps us to
determine the truth, right off.”

“I’ve already told you the
truth!”

“The lie detector is just to
confirm—”

“No!”

After he’d finished with
Olivia, Sergeant Gomez questioned Ethan, but the boy did just as he’d been
instructed; he swore he was sound asleep and didn’t hear a thing. “No doorbell
ringing? No shouting? Arguing maybe, you hear any of that?” Gomez asked, but Ethan
shook his head repeatedly. The few things Ethan did make mention of matched
what Olivia said, word for word.