For Whom the Minivan Rolls (6 page)

My luck, it was Beckwirth. At least he had shaved,
and was dressed in clean clothes, but he still had that
recovering-addict look in his eyes, and his skin looked like it was
made out of vanilla Turkish Taffy that had melted on the sidewalk.
There was an upside, though. This time he didn’t hug me. You have
to accentuate the positive.

“Well, Gary, you got me. I’m not sure why you wanted
to so badly, but you got me.”

“Come in,” he said quickly. I did, and he closed the
door. His mood was not nearly as welcoming as it had been the last
time. Again, I wasn’t complaining, because it seemed there would be
no physical contact on this visit, but now that Beckwirth had
gotten me involved in finding his wife, he didn’t seem to want to
know me anymore. Familiarity, apparently, really does breed
contempt. At least in my case.

“Sit down,” Beckwirth said, pointing at a loveseat
in the adjoining room, which I guess was a study, or a library, or
a sitting room, or some other kind of a room that people in the
middle class generally don’t have. Maybe if I did find Madlyn, I’d
tell Beckwirth my fee required the moving of one of his mansion’s
extra rooms to my house. I could badly use a separate room for my
office. That morning, I’d stepped on a Working Woman Barbie getting
to my fax machine, and put a permanent dent in my right instep.

“What’s the matter, Gary? Having me isn’t as
pleasing a thing as wanting me?”
Star Trek.
Sometimes you
have to go with the classics.

“I want to go over your strategy. I want to know
everything you’re going to do before you do it.” Beckwirth, I
guess, was used to dealing with employees. Now that I was,
indirectly, working for him, he thought I was an employee.

“I can’t do that.”

He stared. No doubt his minions had never said “no”
to him before, and his body language said clearly, “You must have
misunderstood. This was not a request.” Then, with real words, he
put it to me this way, “Of course you can. Just tell me what you
plan to do.”

“No. For one thing, I don’t know that you didn’t
have something to do with Madlyn disappearing.”

Now, Beckwirth positively sputtered. It was a good
performance, though I’m no drama critic. I’m no detective, either,
so any observations I make have to be taken with a shaker of salt.
“Why would I be so anxious to have you investigate if I were behind
Madlyn’s kidnapping? That’s ridiculous.”

“You could be doing your best to divert suspicion,”
I said calmly. “Or you could be doing your best to hamper the
investigation by making sure the least competent person available
is working on it.”

Beckwirth did his best to smile a friendly smile in
a regular-guy sort of way. I’m sure most women would have ripped
off their underwear and launched themselves at him after he gave
them such a smile, with just enough teeth and a twinkle in his eye.
Well, some women. Not Abigail, I’d like to think.

“Oh, you’re just being modest,” he said.

“No, I’m not. I haven’t the faintest idea if I’m
doing the right thing. I could be hampering the investigation
myself, because I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m what you asked
for, and I’m what you got. At a bargain price for an investigator,
I hasten to add. And an inflated price for a freelancer.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that it? Not enough
money?”

I threw my hands up, exasperated. “No, that’s not
it!” I, well, screamed. “I’m telling you that if you’re really
trying to find your wife, you’re going about it in the wrong way!
You’ve hired the wrong man!
Is that clear enough?”

Apparently, it wasn’t. Beckwirth tried the ol’
regular-guy smile again. “Don’t worry. I have faith in you.”

There is nothing you can do with some people. Gary
Beckwirth was one of them. So I proceeded. First, though, just to
show him my level of irritation, I sighed.

“Ooooooooookay,” I said. “The first thing I have to
do is talk to your son.”

The businesslike frown and impersonal tone came back
to Beckwirth. He picked up a croissant from—I swear to God—a silver
tray on the coffee table, and took a bite. Apparently, he could
shift gears easily, too. I considered taking myself in for a
tune-up. “Joel? That is your son’s name, isn’t it?” I said.

He ignored me. I was getting used to being ignored.
“Joel is very upset by his mother’s disappearance. I don’t think he
would be very helpful to an investigation.”

“All right, we’ll wait a little while on Joel.”

Beckwirth stood, to better intimidate me. It wasn’t
working, largely due to the croissant crumbs on his shirt. “I don’t
think you understand. I don’t want you to involve Joel at all.
Besides, there’s no reason to talk to Joel. This is a case of
kidnapping, and it’s tied to the campaign for mayor. Joel has
nothing to do with it.”

“You think that people would resort to abduction
over a $20,000-a-year part-time job?”

“You have no idea, Aaron. The corruption in this
town is rampant. And the other side will stop at nothing to keep
what they have.”

The other side?
I wasn’t interested in
playing this role. I wasn’t interested in being in this movie. I
had no response to the torrent of clichés he had just tossed at
me.

“When do I get to talk to your son, Gary?”

“I just don’t see the point to that,” he said, his
face impassive.

I stood. Two could play this standing-up game. My
intention, however, was not to intimidate Beckwirth. My intention
was to leave.

“Mr. Beckwirth. . .”

“Gary.”

Oy gevalt
.
“Mr. Beckwirth,”
I began.
“I’m a reporter following a news story. I’m under contract to the
Central New Jersey
Press-Tribune
to investigate, and write
about, the disappearance of your wife. I’m under no obligation to
you whatsoever. So we’re either going to proceed by my rules, or I
will go home, call my editor, tell him I’m unable to find out
anything, and your wife will remain missing. Until such time as the
police find her, which in all probability they will. Now. Am I
going to get to talk to your son, or am I going to turn down the
assignment and get back to something I know how to do?”

“Joel isn’t here.”

In retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t go for his
throat at that moment. I certainly
wanted
to go for his
throat. It would have made me feel better. It would have been the
right thing to do. Probably visions of arraignments and prison
terms danced in my head. I’ve not been married to an attorney all
these years for nothing, after all. In any event, I didn’t give
Beckwirth the throttling he deserved.

I didn’t even ask why he hadn’t mentioned his son’s
absence throughout this conversation. I merely stared at him a
moment, hoping my eyes would convey contempt and astonishment at
his behavior, and pressed on.

“Fine,” I said a little too forcefully. “I’ll talk
to him later.” I didn’t give Beckwirth time to interject. “Now, may
I see your last three months’ worth of phone bills?”

Beckwirth put down the croissant and turned away to
look out the window. I half expected him to walk to a wet bar and
pour himself a brandy from a crystal decanter, like they do on all
the soap operas when the director can’t think of any other way to
communicate tension.

“I don’t see what benefit that would have,” he
said.

I turned and left.

Oy gevalt
.

“So this guy wants you to find his wife, but he
doesn’t want you to ask questions or anything. Is that it?” Jeff
Mahoney stuck another shim under the screen door we were both
holding up, and tapped it in with a hammer. It stayed, and we each
went to work on a hinge, screwing each into the door jamb. “What,
are you supposed to throw a dart at the map and start looking, or
drive up and down the Turnpike yelling her name?”

Mahoney has been my best friend ever since he wore
sneakers to our senior prom. He’d lost a bet to me at the high
school cafeteria lunch table (it hinged on the name Gummo Marx, but
that’s a whole other story), but I had never intended to hold him
to it. Prom night, he showed up in a cream-colored tuxedo, light
green shirt, brown bow tie, and high-top Converse tennis shoes (it
was the ‘70s—get off my case). In admiration for his personal
integrity, I took off my shoes and spent the rest of the evening in
my stocking feet. Strangely, neither of us ever heard again from
our prom dates. Women, we theorized, just didn’t understand codes
of honor.

Now, Mahoney was six-foot-three and built roughly
like that big hunk of rock that confounds everybody in
2001: A
Space Odyssey.
Needless to say, during our little home
maintenance chore, he was concentrating on the upper hinge of the
door, while I knelt down to deal with the lower one. We each had a
cordless screwdriver. I found this amusing, since I’ve never seen a
corded screwdriver.

“I’m stuck,” I said.

“What, did the shims come out?”

“No. On the story.” Mahoney works as a mechanic for
one of the larger car rental agencies at Newark International
Airport, and travels around the state fixing their broken-down
junk-heaps. He is also a disciple of Bob Vila, so whenever I need
to do anything more complicated than change a light bulb in the
house, he gets a call. It’s a ritual: I ask him how I should do it,
he suggests using a tool I don’t have, and the next thing I know,
he’s at my house, “helping” me with the repair, which means I hand
him tools while he does the work. Sometimes I actually hand him the
proper tools.

“Well, I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would the guy
ask you to find his wife, and then stop you from finding her?”

“Maybe it’s a love/hate relationship.”

Mahoney looked down. “No, move a little bit to your
left.” I thought my hinge was in exactly the right place, but since
he is right about these things roughly 100 percent of the time, I
asked no questions, and moved it slightly to the left. “Good. Right
there.”

“Maybe he really
doesn’t
want me to find his
wife. Maybe he’s glad she’s gone, but doesn’t want to admit it.
Maybe he’s just a rich guy who’s used to having everybody do
everything his way, and he doesn’t like me insisting on doing it my
way.”

I pressed the button on my cordless screwdriver, but
the screw didn’t go in. Sheepishly, I noted that I had the machine
set for “reverse.” Changing it, I looked up to see that Mahoney had
driven in all three of his screws already.

“Rich people suck,” he said, and laughed. At a much
younger age, Mahoney and I, along with three of our friends (these
days, they’d be called our “posse”), used to drive around Millburn,
Short Hills, and Upper Saddle River, proclaiming that very slogan
(“Rich People Suck”) out our car windows at an amplified volume. It
was a sentiment that came straight from our hearts. One of those
“posse” guys is now a state assemblyman.

“Maybe so, but this particular rich guy is
indirectly paying me a grand to find his wife.”

“That’s all?” Mahoney started driving in the screws
I wasn’t working on. He wasn’t showing me up. He just does
everything better than I do.

“What do you mean, ‘that’s all?’” I said. “That’s
like five times what I’d usually get for a newspaper story like
this.”

“Hell of a lot less than V.I. Warshawski would
take.” Mahoney was a fan of the female detectives. He was
especially fond of Kay Scarpetta, the snoopy coroner, and Kat
Colorado, the L.A. detective with (surprise) a bad love life. I was
more partial to Stephanie Plum, the Trenton-based bounty hunter.
She readily admitted not knowing what she was doing.

We stepped back to admire his handiwork. It looked
perfect. But when I opened the door to try it, it flew open and
almost clocked me in the forehead. I jumped back in alarm while
Mahoney practically had a seizure, doubling over in laughter. It’s
nice to have a best friend.

“You’ve. . . gotta. . . put on
the. . . spring,” he managed between roars of hilarity. I
snatched the spring and two O-hooks out of his hand and let him see
me measure exactly where on the door jamb I intended to put
them.

Mahoney stopped laughing, eventually, and watched me
with the eye of a proud teacher. I must have been doing something
right.

I made a pencil mark on the jamb at the level of the
door’s wooden divider (no sense trying to screw the spring into the
screen), and used the drill to make a pilot hole in the wood. Then
I attached the spring to the hook and set about screwing the hook
into the pilot hole.

“Hold it,” Mahoney said. I stopped immediately, and
he took the hook out of my hand and removed the spring from the
hook. “Put the spring on
after
you’ve got the hook in. It’s
easier.”

I did just that. “Anyway,” I said, trying to regain
a little self-respect, “I don’t care what V.I. would have gotten
for the job. I’m not a detective, and her movie was boring.”

“Bad script,” said Mahoney. “Kathleen Turner was
good to look at, though.”

“She generally is,” I agreed, “but the
aforementioned lack of script definitely sunk the movie.”

“What do you know?” he said, with just the hint of a
twinkle in his eye. “You’re not a detective.”

The goddam hook wouldn’t get started in the hole,
and I was getting frustrated. “I’m a screenwriter.”

“I thought to be considered a screenwriter, you have
to get paid for it.” That’s what the twinkle was about. He was
looking for a place to stick the needle in, and he’d found my soft
spot. Right where he knew it would be.

I didn’t rise to the bait. “I’ve gotten some option
money,” I said. “Besides, I’m living three thousand miles away from
the right place for that kind of work. And how is this helping me
find Madlyn Beckwirth?”

He knelt down, taking the hook out of my hand and
starting it himself. Of course, for him, it went in like it was
dying to start its new life as a spring anchor. “I thought I was
helping you put up a screen door. Since when am I supposed to help
you find Madlyn Beckwirth?”