“You know how kids are,” Mitch said. “They change. They look like one thing one minute, and a couple of minutes later they’re different.”
“All right,” Jub said, smiling. “Make him look like Rogan.”
Mitch perched the kid on a stool, gave it a spin, and turned his back. “What about the hub cap?” he asked.
“A thirty-eight slug, and the car was moving fairly fast when it was hit. What about that Chevy?”
“I found the kid, instead,” Mitch said. “I figure Rogan was hiding out back there and used the kid for a lookout. All the kid had to do was make a nuisance of himself, which he’s good at, and that would warn Rogan so he could beat it. I picked up Junior on account somebody has to come around and claim him.”
“Sure,” Jub said. “His mother.”
For the next couple of hours Mitch hung around kind of nursemaiding the kid. Word spread that Taylor had come up with a lulu, and guys from other parts of the building dropped in to see.
Mitch explained cheerfully. “He’s a child prodigy. Going to grow up and be a mental defective. No work, no trouble. State’ll take care of him.”
The kid sat in a corner and played with a busted pinball machine. Mitch almost got to like him, because he was a guarantee against a last-minute assignment. So Mitch was figuring on staying put until five, and then he could blow.
But the kid’s mother walked in, and she had brown, bulging eyes. Her forehead was sort of wide and her ears almost stuck out of her hairdo. She was a dead ringer for the kid.
She gave her name as Mrs. Leonard Jackson and she said her husband ran an automobile junk yard and her child had been playing there when he’d disappeared. And she thought something ought to be done about it.
She was nervous and scared and determined, all at the same time. She threatened to bring a kidnapping charge, but she wouldn’t sign a complaint and nobody could figure out exactly what she was after.
Finally the lieutenant got fed up and gave her a lecture on how she shouldn’t let a six-year-old run around loose in a junk yard where he could hurt himself or get lost or something, and she was lucky they didn’t bring charges against her and her husband for not taking proper care of their child.
She said they wouldn’t dare say that to her husband, they were taking advantage of her because she was a woman, and she up and left. As soon as she was gone, the lieutenant burst out laughing. And the ribbing that Mitch got after that was just a beginning. He figured these wisecracks, they’d still be coming at him three weeks from now, when he got back from the lake.
Mitch let them ride him — there was nothing he could do about it; but he kept remembering that hub cap and how the kid had looked like Rogan when he aimed the toy gun. And how maybe that Chevy and the $14,000 in loot were in the junk yard. And finally, if a kid looked like his mother, why couldn’t he look like his old man, too?
So Mitch, partly because he had this idea in the back of his head and partly because he was sick of being kidded, wanted an excuse to beat it. When he felt the toy gun still there in his pocket, he took the thing out and said maybe he ought to return it. The lieutenant said sure, go ahead, why not?
Before Mitch left, he went upstairs to the lab and told Jub what the score was and asked him to take a trip down to the junk yard. Because, even if Mitch had made a mistake about the kid, that bullet hole was real and there was still a chance of locating the Chevy. So Mitch arranged to meet Jub there and help him look.
The Jackson address was in the west end of town, not too far from the yard. The house was in a fairly good residential section and there were two cars in the driveway, one of them the jalopy Mrs. Jackson had driven down to headquarters, and the other a brand-new job.
Because of the new car and because nobody who ran a broken-down junk yard could afford to live in a house like this, Mitch had a funny feeling as he walked up the short path to the front door and rang the bell. The Jackson female opened the door, and she looked just as scared and nervous as she had been at headquarters.
She kind of shrank back from Mitch and then she said, “We just phoned and asked to have you come and bring it, and they said you were on your way.” She raised her voice and called out, “Len, he’s here.”
Jackson came from somewhere in the rear of the house. “Come on in,” he said He’d been sullen and itching for a scrap when Mitch had bought that hub cap this morning, but now the guy was all smiles and tail-wagging. So he wanted something, and the question was what.
Mitch stepped inside and took the imitation gun out of his pocket. “Junior forgot his toy,” he said.
“That’s what we wanted, that’s what we called about,” Jackson said. He grabbed it, and Mitch wondered if maybe the thing meant something and he’d missed out on it.
He asked directly. “What’s so important about it?”
Mrs. Jackson answered. “It’s Junior’s favorite toy, and he’s unhappy without it. He just can’t bear to lose it.”
“Yeah,” Mitch said, thinking how Junior had forgotten all about it ever since Mitch had stuck it in his pocket, and how neither of the Jacksons bothered to give it to the kid now.
So the toy gun was a handle to get Mitch here; they wanted to talk to him and now they were tense and edgy, but Mitch still couldn’t figure out what the play was.
Jackson said, “How about a drink?”
And Mrs. Jackson said, “Yes, what would you like?”
“Make it a beer,” Mitch said. He kept looking around the room, but he found nothing out of the ordinary, except that the place didn’t look used — no personal stuff lying around, as if they’d just got here and hadn’t had time to get settled
The Jackson dame went out to the kitchen for the beer. Jackson and Mitch sat down and Mitch said, “How come you’re not working? Yard closed up?”
“Too worried about the kid to bother with business,” Jackson said. “I been sitting here and stewing around, wondering what happened to him.”
“Must have been tough,” Mitch said. But if the guy had been worried, why hadn’t he gone up to headquarters instead of sending his wife?
“What was the idea of you grabbing him?” Jackson asked.
Mitch shrugged off the question with the gesture of a guy who had nothing but innocence inside him. “He was lost,” Mitch said. “I felt sorry for the little fella.”
“How’d you get along with him?” Jackson asked.
“Okay.”
“I mean, did he talk much? Kids are funny sometimes. What did he say?”
“A little of this and a little of that,” Mitch said, and he began to understand. Jackson was worried whether the kid had given something away — so worried that he had to find out.
The guy made some remark about the weather and about the neighborhood, and Mitch asked Jackson how long he’d lived here and Jackson switched the subject without answering direct. And all the time Mitch’s mind was churning, trying to figure out the real reason Jackson had phoned for him. Besides wanting to know if the kid had said anything, Jackson hoped Mitch would go back and say the Jacksons were nice normal people, that they had nothing to hide, had even invited Mitch in and given him a beer.
Which meant they weren’t normal and had plenty to hide.
Then it hit Mitch with a jolt that they were covering up — covering up for Rogan.
The kid was Rogan’s, and Rogan wasn’t far away. He’d come back for the loot. Jackson was a stand-in for him and was putting on an act to fool the police, and maybe the dame was Rogan’s wife and maybe she wasn’t, but sure as hell Jackson wasn’t the kid’s father. So if Mitch could slip in a question to show it one way or the other, he’d be on first base, anyhow.
He leaned back in his chair, as if he had nothing in mind except a little small talk. “That kid of yours,” he said. “He go to school?”