Tyrone Taylor was always hitting on the town’s 5th grade girls. Sounds really creepy, until you realize Tyrone was 10 years old. Taking that into account, the creepiness factor decreases, but doesn’t completely disappears.
He was pissed off because he was trying to woo Betty Holden, but Stingy Stetson snaked Tyrone’s love interest. Stingy, as the nickname suggests, was a cheapskate. Tyrone saw Stingy at Mr. O’Hara’s drugstore with Betty. Stingy had bought her an “Idaville Special” with three scoops of ice cream.
Tyrone had no idea why Stingy was suddenly making it rain, so he assumed the worst. He accused Stingy of stealing money. He even dropped a quarter at the Brown Detective Agency so that Encyclopedia could find out what was going on with Stingy.
Encyclopedia reminded Tyrone that accusing someone of stealing money just because he stole his woman isn’t very nice. Tyrone explained that he had actually seen Stingy outside of the Medical Building the previous day. What was he doing there on a Sunday? It was closed.
Now, what happens next is needlessly complicated. Tyrone was hanging out by the Medical Building (by the way, that’s capitalized, which leads me to believe that that’s the actual name of the building) when he saw Stingy and his older brother, Pete, doing some weird walk across the parking lot to their truck. He couldn’t see the lower half of their bodies, but he could somehow tell that they were walking funny. Encyclopedia figured out they were walking along the white lines that marked the parking spots.
Encyclopedia later asked his father if the Medical Building had been robbed the previous day. Wouldn’t you know it, yes it was. About $200 was stolen from petty cash boxes in several offices. The thieves snuck into the building, but the security guard spotted them. Well, he spotted their feet as it turned a corner up the stairs. The guard went to chase them, but when he reached the top of the stairs, they knocked him out. When he regained consciousness, he saw a service truck for Mac’s Service Station – the same truck Tyrone saw – drive away out of the parking lot. The guard called Mac’s and found out that Pete Stetson normally drove the truck on Sundays, and some days he took his little brother along on some calls.
This is an open and shut case for the Idaville PD, right? No. Because when Pete and Stingy returned to the station, they were wearing shoes.
Are you kidding me? That’s their alibi? No, the thieves were barefoot and these two were seen several minutes later wearing shoes. There’s no way they would have been able to put on their shoes at any point between leaving the Medical Building and returning to the service station. It looks like this one is unsolvable.
Well, no. Encyclopedia figured out that the reason why they were walking along the white lines of the parking lot was because they were barefoot. They walked along the lines to keep from burning their feet on the hot blacktop.
To review, this kid planned to steal some money from a bunch of doctor’s offices and decided the best partner for that kind of crime would be his 10-year-old brother, the little brother used the money stolen to pick up chicks and the only reason why they got caught was because a horny 10-year-old was pissed about losing his would-be girlfriend. Also, the Idaville PD is enormously terrible at police work.
But we already knew that.
