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‘Ambrose! Oh my God, what’s going on, what happened?’ My mom was almost screaming as she leapt out of the car. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight.
‘What the hell happened here?’ she shouted at one of the cops. ‘Who are these men?’ I don’t think she recognized Cosmo, with his bruised and bloodied face.
‘Ma’am, you’re going to have to calm down,’ said a police officer.
‘Calm down? Calm down?’ she shrieked.
While Mom shouted at one cop, the other officers handcuffed Cosmo, Silvio, and the goons and put them in the backseats of the two cruisers. I guess they decided that Amanda and I weren’t flight risks or hardened criminals because once my mom had calmed down a little, they told her (and Mr Acheson, who’d dropped her off and who now stood on the sidewalk, looking very uncomfortable) that we could drive ourselves down to the station to give our statements.
Amanda couldn’t drive Cosmo’s car because it wasn’t an automatic, so Mr Acheson had to take us. Amanda and I got into the backseat of his brand-new Prius, a hybrid that ran on a combination of gas and electricity. I would have liked to ask him questions about this, but under the circumstances I decided against it.
As we drove, following the police cruisers at a respectable distance, Amanda, who was shaken, started talking to my mom.
‘Ms Bukowski, I don’t even know where to begin. This is a terrible way to finally meet you.’
‘And you are?’ my mom asked. Her voice was ice cold.
‘Amanda. Amanda Svecova,’ she said. ‘Director of the West Side Scrabble Club.’
My mom nodded in the front seat. ‘Huh. Interesting. The club I very clearly told my son he was not allowed to join.’
‘But – you signed the consent form,’ Amanda started, then she stopped. She looked at me, hard. I just turned away and stared out the window.
‘I did no such thing. What kind of organization do you run, anyway?’ my mom continued. ‘He’s a minor. Did it even cross your mind to check with me?’
‘No,’ Amanda said firmly, ‘it didn’t. I took your son’s word that he was telling me the truth.’ I could still feel her eyes boring into me like a drill. ‘I believed I could trust him. Clearly I was mistaken.’
‘Well, I can’t imagine that the game of Scrabble had anything to do with what I witnessed tonight. I have no idea what you were doing anywhere near our thug of a neighbor—’
‘Surely you’re not referring to Cosmo,’ said Amanda, but my mom just cut her off.
‘I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to my son.’
‘Mom, Cosmo didn’t do anything wrong …’
She laughed, but there was nothing ha-ha about it.
‘Your son’s telling the truth,’ said Amanda, and I could hear the edge in her voice. ‘Cosmo’s been nothing but a friend to Ambrose. A father figure …’
Oh, man.
‘Don’t you ever call that … that convict creep a father figure.’
A cold silence fell.
Finally Amanda said, her voice tight with anger, ‘Alright, I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t call Cosmo a father figure if you won’t call him a creep. He’s working really hard to put his life back on track.’
‘Is he your boyfriend?’ Mom asked. ‘If so, I pity your taste in men.’
I hazarded a glance at Amanda. She looked like she wanted to reach forward and tear out my mom’s hair.
‘How dare you say such a thing!’
‘I’m just calling it as I see it.’
‘Now, Irene, easy does it,’ Bob said, the first words I’d heard him say all evening.
‘You stay out of this,’ Mom snapped.
I felt kind of sorry for Bob, all of a sudden.
We arrived at the police station. It was a huge building, housing the main division for the whole city of Vancouver. Bob found a parking spot on the street and we all got out of the car. Amanda was so angry, she was vibrating.
‘I’m beginning to see why your son has such difficulty telling you the truth, Ms Bukowski. Because it wouldn’t make any difference to you, would it? You’d still believe exactly what you want to believe.’ Then she looked at me and said, ‘Good luck, Ambrose. I can see you’re going to need it.’ She strode off alone toward the cop shop.
I’d never been inside a police station before. All I knew about cop shops I’d learned from watching reruns of Barney Miller, when we lived in Regina.
The reality was quite different. This one was much busier than the world of Barney Miller, but big and clean and somehow efficient and businesslike all at once.
We sat in a large waiting room, with bucket seats and fluorescent lighting and lousy magazines. It was full of people from all walks of life. I saw a man who was passed out over three seats, wearing no shirt, with his fly undone.
A nice uniformed policeman, whose name tag read SERGEANT JAMES, came and got me. My mom insisted on coming, too. He took us back to a little glassed-in office that overlooked the bustle of the station. Mr Acheson stayed in the waiting area. I got the feeling he wished he could just go home.
‘You say you’d been out with one of the gentlemen involved in the altercation – is that right?’ Sergeant James began. He was taking my statement, and I have to admit, it felt kind of cool.
‘Yes. Cosmo Economopoulos. I was with him all day.’
My mom sucked in her breath. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Where had you been?’
‘An all-day Scrabble tournament. I won six of my eight games.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Sergeant James, while Mom just stared daggers at him.
‘Then we had dinner at Milestone’s on West Fourth. Which was delicious, by the way. I would highly recommend the fettuccine Alfredo, if you ever go there. It’s peanut-free.’ I added that last part for my mom’s benefit.
‘Thanks for the tip. When you came home, what happened?’
‘This friend of Cosmo’s, well ex-friend, Silvio, was waiting for Cosmo with two big guys.’
‘Had you seen this fellow Silvio before?’
I nodded. ‘A couple of times.’
‘What?’ That was my mom.
‘Ms Bukowski, please,’ said Sergeant James. ‘Can you tell me about these other times?’
‘Well, once I overheard him asking Cosmo for some money he owed him. And another time I didn’t see him, but there was a brick through Cosmo’s front window and we were pretty sure we knew who did it. He was sending a message.’
My mom sucked in her breath again. ‘You told me that was some neighborhood kids.’
‘We didn’t want you or the Economopouloses to worry.’
‘We?’
I knew the heaping piles of you-know-what that I would be in later, but here’s the thing: it was kind of a good feeling to be asked all these questions. To be the center of attention. It was like I was a guest on a talk show, and someone was really interested in what I had to say. Also, he was a police officer and I felt obligated to tell the truth. And even though my mom was sitting right beside me, it was easier to look a policeman in the eye and tell him all this stuff than it ever would have been to look her in the eye and tell her.
‘What about the second time?’
I hesitated. ‘He came knocking on our door one night, when Mom was at work.’
‘Oh my God. Oh my God, oh my God,’ Mom started chanting, as she rocked back and forth in her seat.
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘Sort of. He’d figured out I wasn’t Cosmo’s nephew.’
‘Cosmo was pretending you were his nephew?’ Mom was practically shrieking.
‘No, no, that was just a little something I made up so Silvio would leave the first time I saw him and so Cosmo would drive me to the Scrabble Club. You see,’ I said to Sergeant James, ‘he didn’t want to take me, even though he liked playing Scrabble himself. It involved some convincing. But then he met Amanda, who’s giving a statement to your colleague, I believe, and he was totally googly-eyed about her, so getting a drive was not a problem after that.’
‘How many times have you been in his car?’ my mom asked.
I shrugged. ‘Ten? Twenty?’
She kind of moaned and sank in her seat.
‘So this Silvio threatened you,’ said Sergeant James, trying to bring us back on topic.
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I mean, it wasn’t anything he said; it was the way he said it. He said to tell Cosmo to pay him what he owes him, or else.’
‘So Cosmo owed Silvio money,’ said Sergeant James.
‘Yeah. See, Silvio and Cosmo used to work together when Cosmo was a druggie and a thief. They were friends back then. And Silvio loaned Cosmo some money – two thousand dollars – and before Cosmo could pay him back, he was arrested after he tripped on a Labradoodle, but when he got out of jail, Silvio still wanted his money, even though Cosmo took the fall for him in a way because Silvio was also supposed to be in on the Labradoodle job. But Cosmo didn’t have the money because, well, he’d been in jail, and then at first when he got out, he was just lazy. But then he did get a job, but they didn’t give him a lot of shifts at first so he didn’t earn a lot of money, and he was trying to pay Silvio back a little bit at a time, but Silvio didn’t think it was fast enough.’
Mom buried her head in her hands.
‘But Cosmo could have got the money if he wanted to, I’m sure of it. He could have borrowed it from his parents, or from Amanda. She offered to give them the money tonight, in fact, and I offered to give him my quarter collection, which was supposed to go into my education fund.’
‘You didn’t,’ my mom said, her head still in her hands.
‘No, I didn’t, because Cosmo wouldn’t let me. And he wouldn’t let Amanda, either. That’s the thing. He’s a very honorable guy …’
Now Mom snorted. ‘Honorable? What kind of “honorable” person would start up a friendship with a twelve-year-old boy?’
‘Mom, he’s not a pervert.’
She turned to Sergeant James. ‘I want you to arrest this man for … for kidnapping a minor … for whatever it is he had in his sick head—’
‘Mom!’
She turned to me. ‘Did he touch you? Did he say things to you? Did he take pictures of you?’
‘Mom, stop! He’s a good guy. He’s my best friend.’
She looked at Sergeant James again. ‘Help me out here, I’m begging you.’
Sergeant James shrugged. ‘Nothing the kid says leads me to believe …’ She gave him the biggest stink-eye I’d ever seen. ‘But if you want, I can ask him a few routine questions.’
‘You can’t do that!’ I said, my voice rising. ‘That’s just insulting. Why can’t you take my word for it, Mom? Why can’t you believe a word I say?’
She turned her stink-eye on me. ‘You’re asking me why I can’t believe a word you say? You have the gall to ask me that, after everything you’ve just said in here?’
She did have a point.
‘I think that’s everything for now,’ said Sergeant James. He stood up, signaling that the interview was over. ‘I may need to ask you more questions at another time, Ambrose, but for now you’re free to go.’
‘What about Cosmo?’
‘He’ll be spending the night in lock-up.’
‘But it wasn’t his fault—’
‘It’s just routine.’
‘Will they let him see a doctor? Those guys really hurt him.’
‘Don’t worry. He’ll be looked after.’
‘Let’s go, Ambrose,’ Mom said.
‘Please don’t charge him with anything. All he’s trying to do is lead a regular life.’
‘Now,’ my mom said firmly. She grabbed my arm and marched me toward Bob, who was wedged in between two women who looked a lot like prostitutes, if you ask me. Amanda was nowhere to be seen.
I thought I saw the sarge give me a sympathetic wave as we left.
Bob dropped us off and drove away pretty fast. Mom hadn’t been very nice to him on the drive home, saying things like ‘Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.’ Once she actually said, ‘Shut up, Bob,’ even though saying ‘shut up’ in our household was a big no-no.
The Economopouloses’ Escort was parked out front. As we walked up the driveway, Mr and Mrs E hurried out of their house, still dressed up from their evening out.
‘We just got a call from Cosmo. He’s at the police station.’
‘I know, we were just there too. I saw the whole thing,’ I said.
Mrs E’s eyes widened. ‘Are you alright?’
‘No, he’s not alright,’ my mom said coldly.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Your son has been a terrible influence,’ said my mom.
‘He has not,’ I protested.
‘Ambrose, get in the house. Now.’ Mom grabbed my arm and started to pull me away.
‘We go to see Cosmo now,’ Mr E said.
‘My baby,’ Mrs E added, and she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.
‘Baby, my ass,’ muttered Mom, which, even under the circumstances, was unnecessarily rude.
‘None of it was Cosmo’s fault,’ I shouted, as the Economopouloses got into their car and backed it out of the driveway.
And that’s when I saw it.
My MOST PROMISING NEWCOMER trophy, lying right where the front left tire of the Escort had been. The little silver cup was crushed into a gazillion pieces.
‘What’s that?’ my mom asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
I picked up the pieces and tossed them into the bushes.