Me and My Manny by M.A. MacAfee Read Free Book Online Page B

a layer of strong glue, was to a mouse what the La Brea Tar Pits were to a woolly mammoth.
    On this particular day, while heating beans to make burritos, I checked the traps and found a jumbo-sized pair of dead mice.
    “Harry,” I called, sickened by the carnage I’d caused. “Can you get rid of these dead rodents? I can’t leave the stove.”
    Harry put the pair in a plastic bag and headed for the Dumpster in the alley out back. Almost an hour had passed before he returned, and I was mad because we had planned to eat early to make the matinee before the tickets cost more. I’d already started eating without him.
    “Doesn’t matter if I skip lunch,” Harry said, washing his hands at the sink. “I just lost my appetite.” When I asked if he felt sick, he sat at the table across from me and lowered his head. “Not really, just upset over what I just heard from the teller lady who lives downstairs.”
    “Heard?” Since the banker was Whitehall’s finest gasbag, my curiosity peaked. “What did you just hear?” Harry was not one to repeat gossip, but I persisted. “Tell me. If you get it off your chest, you’ll feel better.”
    “Okay…okay,” Harry began. “I went out back to throw out the mice and old lady Crumble was studying the face of Jesus on a greasy stain down the side of the Dumpster while holding her trash.”
    I nodded knowingly. The widow Crumble had been seeing the face of Jesus in food stains and fabric patterns ever since her husband had had a fatal heart attack last year.
    “To be neighborly, I asked if she’d like me to toss her trash too. So, I’m separating the recycles she’s mixed with the rest, you know what a ditz she is, when the bank teller shows up. They get to talking, and the teller mentions that one day last week she was working the drive-through window when Ruthie from next door pulls up in her car with this strange-looking fellow in the seat beside her. Ruthie cashes a check for a couple of hundred dollars, places the money on the guy’s lap, and casually mentions she’s in the market for a new appliance. The teller didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but from the fuss Ruthie made over the guy while the teller counted out the money, it looked like something odd was going on between the two of them.”
    “Fuss? What’d she do? What, Harry, what?” I asked, giddy with excitement.
    “She straightened his hat and fastened his seat belt.”
    “You don’t say.”
    He nodded. “That’s not all. That ditzy old Crumble then waves her hand and says, ‘Oh everybody knows about Ruthie’s gigolo.’”
    “No wonder you lost your appetite.” I felt my own hunger diminish as this was the first I’d heard about Ruthie’s gigolo. I lowered my fork and looked at Harry. “You think the money was payment for services rendered?”
    Harry blinked, seeming not to comprehend why any guy would need to be paid for what to him most would gladly do for free, so I reminded him that gigolos don’t come cheap.
    I recalled how eager Ruthie was to get her hands on the manny, and I began to guess why. Ruthie intended to use the manny as an alibi to cover up her two-timing ways. Since neither Jason, nor anyone else for that matter, would believe that she actually dated a dummy, and since Wolf himself was worthless as a witness, only I could vouch for her, insofar as I could say, yes, she had rented the manny, but I couldn’t testify as to what happened while he was in her hands.
    The duplicity was staggering. Disturbing, too, for it indicated the lengths to which Ruthie would go to get away from her housebound husband.
    “It’s best we keep quiet,” I told Harry, who, with lips pinched white, nodded.
    I didn’t relish getting caught up in a neighbor’s sexual ploy. So the next time I took my manny out, I made sure he was incognito. That is, clad in Harry’s tan trench coat with the brim of the used Panama hat pulled down over his aviator-style sunglasses.
    Later, I had finished