As Dog Is My Witness

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “Remarkably so.”

  “So, can you follow me tomorrow?” Suddenly, his eyes looked just like Warren’s.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Chapter Nine

  Before I could start following Mahoney, however, I had to deal with my children. Ethan usually beats Leah home from school, since he doesn’t have any interest in extracurricular activities or social interaction with other children. In other words, he doesn’t have any school friends to slow him down.

  Today, he lumbered into the house, ignoring the whines and cries of the dog, who did everything except leap into Ethan’s arms and beg for attention. Ethan hung his overflowing backpack on the banister, yelled, “Hi, Dad,” in no particular direction, and headed for the kitchen, where snacks are kept. He is his father’s son.

  Since I am, unlike Warren, gifted with the power of speech, I called into the kitchen, “How was your day?”

  “Okay.” Given that hearty chunk of data, I walked to his backpack and opened it, extracting the black and white notebook that Wilma Coogan, Ethan’s aide at school, and I pass back and forth every day. Wilma, partial to Ethan as she has proven herself to be, might not tell me everything he won’t mention, but she’s certainly a better source of hard information than a twelve-year-old with Asperger’s.

  So, it was with a modest amount of surprise that I turned to today’s page and read, “Hi, Aaron. Ethan forgot his science homework, and got a zero for the day. He reacted badly, and threw a pen at Ms. Markowski. Don’t worry—I made sure he apologized and didn’t get detention.” Wilma then listed Ethan’s homework for the next day, subject by subject, including the science worksheet he had apparently failed to bring in that day.

  “Ethan!”

  He ambled out of the kitchen and into my office, holding a brownie he’d found in the cabinet. Crumbs landed on his shirt, and, in a single motion, he wiped them onto the floor, smearing his white shirt with chocolate. “Yes, Dad?”

  “What happened in science?”

  He scowled, knowing Wilma had dropped a dime (or, allowing for inflation, thirty-five cents) on him. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Throwing a pen at a teacher is nothing?” I waved my arms over my head and smoothed my hair back like the primate I was becoming. “Ethan Atticus Tucker . . .

  He hates his middle name, which was his mother’s idea (he doesn’t know the only reason it isn’t his first name is because I ran interference for him). Ethan clenched his teeth, which is exactly what I do when I get angry, and snarled. “I didn’t hit her with the pen,” he growled. “Nobody got hurt.”

  “Not for lack of trying! Ethan, this is something I’ve been telling you since you were two, for chrissakes! You can’t throw things at other people! You can’t hit other people! You can’t choke other people!”

  “I know, I know . . . How dare I belabor the point that he shouldn’t commit violence. “You don’t have to tell me again.”

  “Apparently, I do. And why wasn’t your science homework done yesterday?”

  “It was! Why doesn’t anyone believe me?” Exasperated, he stomped to the living room couch and flopped down, causing an audible crack in the frame of the old sofa.

  I advanced on him, my temperature rising by the second, which wasn’t a bad thing, considering how cold it was in the room. “Do you have enough money for a new couch?” I asked him.

  This caught him off guard, so he answered honestly. “No.”

  “Then don’t destroy the one we already have, because I don’t, either!”

  One way in which AS kids are just like all other kids is that they have virtually no patience for their parents. Ethan rolled his eyes and pursed his lips in the universal symbol of almost-teenagers who know so much more than the people who’ve been doing their laundry for twelve years. “Oh, give me a break,” he said.

  The door burst open and Leah bounced in, heading, as she always does, directly for the dog. “Hello, Warren,” she cooed. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?”

  “Not me, according to Dad,” said Ethan. “He thinks everything that ever goes wrong is my fault.”

  “That’s not true,” I told him, “and you know it.”

  He ignored me entirely, which I’ve grown used to. Ethan sat and stared into the blank television screen as if watching a fascinating film that demanded his complete attention. He was actually watching his own reflection, but as a tactic, it had the desired effect. It annoyed me.

  “Do your homework,” I said.

  I’d been speaking to Leah, but it was the opening Ethan had been waiting for. He stood up and faced me with the blatant, pointless rebellion of youth.

  “No,” he said.

  Leah, sensing a storm on the horizon, grabbed up her backpack from the floor and went upstairs to her room, taking the dog with her.

  “No?” I said, eyebrows raised. “What the hell do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I’m not doing my homework.” He had a smile on his face that said, “Go ahead. Make my day.” So I did.

  I firmly put both my hands on his shoulders. “You’re going to do your homework, Ethan. And when you’re done with each page, you’re going to bring it over to me so I can see it, and then I’m going to watch you put it all in your backpack, so what happened today won’t happen again.” All the while, I tightened my hold on his shoulders.

  “Ow!” Ethan is especially sensitive to touch, and a tiny bit of pain produces a reaction similar to what most people would experience if a cheetah was chewing off their legs. “Stop choking me!”

  Reflexively, I took my hands away. “Choking you? That’s not choking you. My hands were nowhere near . . . As usual, I fell into a typical parent trap: addressing the side issues and losing sight of the main point. He still wasn’t doing his homework.

  Ethan, rubbing one shoulder as if it were broken, started to tear up. Walking toward the stairs, he passed his backpack without removing anything.

  “You get back down here, Ethan, and you get your books. You’re doing your homework. NOW!”

  He kept walking.

  Normally, I would have let things go until later, but this was a school issue and besides, I was pissed off. I ran halfway up the stairs and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To my room . . . to play video games.”

  I spoke very slowly. “Not until you do your homework.”

  “No.” Defiance had worked for him before. He tried to turn, but I held his arm tightly.

  “If you don’t do your homework now,” I said, teeth clenched, “I’m going to take the PlayStation out of your room. Forever!” Parents are constantly making threats they know they won’t ever carry out, expecting their kids to back down.

  Ethan’s eyes widened. Here it came again. “NO!” he screamed, broke my hold on his arm, and ran into his room, slamming the door.

  Because I’m a total idiot, I followed him. He held the door closed when I tried to open it. “Ethan!” I shouted.

  “You can’t come in! It’s my room!”

  But I’m bigger and heavier, for the moment, and stronger. I pushed my way into the room. Ethan, only a couple of inches shorter than I am, was fully in tears now. I had threatened his very way of life.

  “I’m not kidding, Ethan. Do your homework now, or the video game goes.” You can’t back down on something like that, or they’ll never believe you again. And I thought impulse control was his problem.

  “No!” he said, but he clearly knew he was going to capitulate, and I knew it, too. I might as well have told him I was going to break both his legs. For him, PlayStation was what the world was all about. I knew and exploited it. So much to be proud of, from just one short conversation.

  “Why not?” I finally said. “Why don’t you want to do your homework?”

  He thought about it for a long moment, and cried a little harder. “I don’t know,” he said. For some fathers, the day just isn’t complete until yo
u’ve made a twelve-year-old boy sob like a baby.

  “Be sensible. Just do the homework, and then you can play your game.”

  “Okay.” He stood, walked to the door, turned the knob, and said the most stomach-dropping thing he possibly could.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  He went to do his homework, and I pondered what a 43-year-old man would look like if he were crying. Instead, I went into Leah’s room and held out my arms. She gave me a Leah hug, the finest form of therapy on the planet. Okay, second finest.

  “Is the fight over?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t like it when you and Ethan fight, Daddy.”

  “I know, puss. But we don’t mean the things we say.” Now, there’s a classy rationalization, huh?

  “Warren doesn’t like it, either.” I looked at the dog, who was sleeping in a corner of the room and didn’t look especially bothered.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I can tell,” she said with a maturity far beyond her years, a matu-rity she’s gained by watching her mother deal with me. “He came right up to my room, and usually he doesn’t like to come up here because I close the door.”

  “You made your point,” I told her.

  “Besides, he whimpers and cries when you guys are yelling at each other . . .

  “Leah . . .

  “. . . and he puts his tail between his legs . . .

  “Leah. . .

  “. . . and besides . . .

  Okay, she had me. “Besides what?”

  “He told me.”

  I looked at her for a long time, wondering if my daughter was the next Son of Sam, before she burst out laughing. And after a while, I started to laugh, too.

  If your children teach you properly, it is indeed possible to be a good parent.

  Chapter Ten

  Mahoney called me from the road the next morning at eight-thirty, as we had arranged. He told me the location of his first repair job of the day, a West Windsor address, which was actually somewhat convenient for me, since I wanted to drop in on Mary and Justin Fowler on the way back, and North Brunswick is about halfway. I told him I’d arrive about twenty minutes after he did, and find an out of sight place to park. If I was any good at this following gig, he wouldn’t see me, but we’d keep in touch via cell phone.

  I had a little time, so I pondered the Justin Fowler story. I had called the attorney for Karen Huston, the wife of the man whom Justin was accused of murdering. But this very pompous man named Rezenbach hadn’t called back until after six, when I refuse to answer the phone unless the West Coast is calling. He left a message saying Mrs. Huston was “far too distraught” (no, I’m not kidding, the man said “distraught!”) to submit to an interview. Maybe later in the week.

  That left Justin himself. First, I had to figure out how they’d managed to come up with the $200,000 that had sprung Justin, and from there, maybe I could find either a legitimate alibi for Justin at the time of the shooting, or a way to get the charge against him lowered to involuntary manslaughter. I understood so little about the incident that the questions were coming from seventeen different directions, and none of them added up.

  Being confused took about twenty minutes, so I hopped into the Saturn (I felt the minivan, which I detest anyway, was too easy to spot on the highway) and headed toward the spot Mahoney had described.

  It was on the side of Route One, in the northbound lane, toward an area of trees. Luckily, there was a Burger King in perfect position to view a new SUV with rental car plates and Mahoney’s van in front of it. I parked in a good vantage spot, noting that even at this time of the morning, other cars were in the Burger King lot, which was good, and called Mahoney on the cell phone.

  “The eagle has landed,” I said when he picked up. “Over.”

  “You don’t have to say ‘over,’” he said. “We’re on cell phones.”

  “Okay, but you’re taking the fun out of it. I’m here.”

  “I know,” he sighed. “I saw you pull up. If you had flames shooting out of the tailpipe and a bullhorn screaming at four thousand decibels, it might have been a little less obvious.”

  “No need to thank me,” I told him. “You’re my best friend. So, what are you fixing over there? A bum transmission? A cranky electrical system?”

  All I could see was the raised hood, but I heard a little engine noise through the phone. “Drained battery,” he said. “The idiot who rented this thing decided to pull over to the side of the road and read his newspaper, turned off the car, but left the heater on.”

  “That’s all it takes?”

  “Yeah. They build an SUV the size of Sandusky, Ohio, and they put in a battery big enough to run your kid’s transistor radio. And the punchline is, without the engine running . . .

  “. . . the heater did nothing.”

  “Exactly.”

  I’ll spare you the next fifteen minutes of scintillating banter. I kept my engine on while watching, and at one point, with prior notification to Mahoney, walked into the Burger King, got myself a hot chocolate, and came out with a newspaper, pretending to read while downing my morning beverage.

  Mahoney called back a minute later. “The battery’s running,” he said. “My next job is in Florham Park.”

  “What’s the matter—they couldn’t find something farther away?”

  “Yeah, I guess all the cars in Cape May are running okay today. I’m out of here.”

  “I’m keeping my eyes open, Chief,” I said.

  “I’m calling in now. Let’s nail this guy before he kills again,” Mahoney countered. I’m pretty sure he was kidding.

  The plan was for me to stay and observe until the local rep came to drive the SUV back to his dealership. If nobody came to destroy Mahoney’s handiwork (he said it happened about once a day), I’d move on to Mary Fowler’s house, do some actual work, and then, time permitting, catch up with Mahoney before the kids were due home from school.

  So I did what I do best: I sat, watched, and thought. Howard and family would appear at my house that night, so this could be my last chance to think for a week.

  It didn’t make sense that Justin Fowler would kill Michael Huston for the fun of it. Asperger kids, no matter how much they retreat from the world of human interaction, aren’t by nature antisocial. Many of them want to have friends and a social life, but don’t know how. It’s an education and training issue, not a question of impossible stubbornness. Justin, new gun in hand, wouldn’t kill Michael Huston just to try it out.

  A blue Lexus slowed down near Mahoney’s last patient, but kept going. The guy driving was talking into a cell phone, and weaved a little in his lane. He wasn’t obeying the “hands-free” law recently enacted in the Garden State. I considered making a citizen’s arrest, but I would have had to use my cell phone to do so, and that seemed wrong, somehow.

  Meanwhile, Huston’s widow was “too distraught” to talk to me, which wasn’t a huge surprise. But there’s distraught and there’s distraught, if you know what I mean. It wouldn’t be an awful thing to look into their marriage a bit and see how distraught she’d likely be facing life without her husband.

  A top-of-the-line Honda stopped by Mahoney’s car, and I sat up. But the passenger door opened, and a guy in a mechanic’s jumpsuit got out, waved to the driver, and closed the door. He got into the car, started it up, and the Honda drove away. The mechanic, clearly from the nearby rental outlet, drove the SUV off the shoulder and onto the highway. Waste of time.

  I put my car into reverse and backed out of my parking space, probably causing jubilation inside the Burger King. For a lousy cup of hot chocolate (and I mean that in every sense of the word), I had occupied a parking space for close to an hour.

  On the way up Route One, I checked in with Mahoney. I used the “hands-free” device that’s supposed to help, and while I did have to look down quite a bit to see the number I was dialing, at least the head-phone paid off by making me almost inaudible.

  �
��How’re things in Florham Park?”

  “I’m still about fifteen minutes out. I take it nobody assaulted my patient.” He sounded disappointed, as if everything should just happen in the first ten minutes so he could breathe easier.

  “Sorry. Your charge, recharged, is back at the shop, where someone can charge it.”

  “Has anyone ever told you you were amusing?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact . . .

  “They were lying.”

  We agreed that, after the Fowler interview, it would be stupid for me to try to make it to Florham Park, a good forty-five minutes away. So I’d check in with Mahoney afterward.

  The drive to North Brunswick took maybe twenty minutes, so it was about ten-thirty when I rang Mary Fowler’s doorbell. She didn’t expect me this time, but she was just as fast getting to the door.

  “Mr. Tucker!”

  “I asked you to call me Aaron, Mary. May I come in? I’d like to meet Justin, and I hear he’s home.”

  Mary hesitated. “I don’t know . . .

  “Mary, it’s cold out here, and I’m not great at cold.”

  She smiled with one side of her mouth, and stepped aside. I walked in, and Mary closed the door, cutting off the frigid air. Why did her older, not-in-perfect-shape house retain the heat, while mine always felt like a windstorm was taking place in the living room? I guess there’s something to that insulation stuff, after all.

  “I’m sorry, Aaron, but Justin isn’t expecting you, and, well, you know . . .

  “I know, Mary. Preparation is everything with Asperger’s. But I’ll do my best, okay? Maybe you could tell him I’m here and get him used to the idea while I talk to Kevin for a minute.”

  She looked surprised. “Kevin? Kevin’s not here.”

  “I assumed he was the one who bailed Justin out.”

  Mary shook her head. “I don’t know who bailed Justin out. Justin said he’d never seen the man before.”

  That was a surprise. “A bondsman?”

  Mary nodded. “It seems that way. But I don’t know who put up the collateral. Justin won’t tell me—he’s too afraid. And Kevin hasn’t been back home since you saw him. He might have gone back to Indiana. I don’t know what’s going on, Aaron.”