For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “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.

  Chapter 10

  “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 gen
erally 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?”

  The hook was in, and I actually managed to attach the spring without any outside help. “Since you decided to belittle my fee,” I told him. “You want to mock me, you can at least help me, too.”

  “I do all the work around here.” He started attaching the hook to the door, and neither of us tried to perpetuate the myth that I was actually doing anything useful in this project. I sat down.

  “Let’s assume for the moment that I can’t talk to the kid and I can’t get the phone records,” I said. “Where does that leave me? I have no options.”

  “Sure you do.” Mahoney had the hook embedded in the door securely and was stretching the spring to meet it. This door would close faster than a frog’s tongue going after a fly. “You can still talk to the friends of the family, you can go after this girl who’s running for mayor, you can get the cops to run Madlyn’s credit cards and see if she’s charging up a storm in Vegas on the old man’s Visa.”

  He attached the spring to the hook, and tried the door. Sure enough, it closed perfectly, with a satisfying SNAP! that would undoubtedly become tiresome this coming summer. “I don’t want to talk to the woman who’s running for mayor,” I said thoughtfully.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the rich guy wants me to. That’s what this whole maneuver has been all about. He wants to control the way I track down his wife.”

  Mahoney set about measuring for the doorknob. “You got any coffee?” he asked. That was it—I’d been relegated to kitchen duty. I got up. He chuckled as I walked away from the front door and toward the kitchen.

  “Rich people suck,” he said to himself.

  Chapter 11

  Rachel Barlow sat in her kitchen, which was bright and airy and had nice white lace curtains on the windows. Plants hung from the space over the sink, where they’d be sure to get plenty of light and moisture. The wallpaper was a subdued pattern of milk pails and straw piles. The floor was ceramic tile. The chairs and table were country oak. There was absolutely nothing out of place. It was like being in the Museum of Suburban Kitchens.

  Rachel herself, every inch the political candidate, subsection: female, was in a very sensible skirt and blouse, not showing anything above the knee or below the shoulder blades. Thank goodness, or my uncontrollable male urges might have moved me to throw her down on the center island and have my way with her. She was tall and blonde, and looked like she really wished she could wear a beehive hairdo, because it would have made her more comfortable.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” she asked in a voice that sounded very much like that of a Barbie doll who had grown up and gotten her MBA. “We have regular and decaf.”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “I think we should just get going on this.”

  I know. I had just told Mahoney I wasn’t going to talk to Rachel Barlow, and here I was, talking to Rachel Barlow. Well, there were good reasons for changing my mind. For one, I had already checked with Dutton, who had nothing on Madlyn’s credit cards, but expected word back on my telephone records by that afternoon. And I had talked to two of Madlyn and Gary’s friends (actually, Madlyn’s), both of whom reported no problems in the marriage and absolutely nothing unusual of late. I had decided, also, that my petty feelings about Gary shouldn’t impede the investigation, so I shouldn’t exclude a whole avenue of inquiry just because it came from him. Besides, I didn’t have any other ideas.

  Rachel Barlow had decided to run for mayor, I found out through Harrington’s clip morgue, because she felt it was time for “a new voice” in Midland Heights. Seeing as how the old voice, Mayor Sam Olszowy, had been in office for more than fifteen years at the time, it was a safe bet that the town liked hearing the voice it had now.

  But Olszowy had made several potentially critical errors. He had seriously underestimated Rachel Barlow, dismissing her out of hand as a credible threat in the Democratic primary. There are no more than 200 registered Republicans in town, so the Democratic primary, assuming Hitler isn’t nominated, will pretty much decide the general election.

  In office and in his campaign, Olszowy was ignoring the town’s changing demographics, too. He continued to cater to the senior citizens, who didn’t want the school budget passed, and weren’t interested in bringing more businesses to the downtown, either. But ignoring young parents in Midland Heights is like running for office in New York and announcing that you’re a big Atlanta Braves fan.

  Next thing you know, Rachel Barlow, with her “we’ll set up a committee and investigate it” platform, and her strong advocacy of a healthy school budget, despite having no children of her own, was running close to even with Olszowy in the polls (assuming one can take accurate polls in an election this insignificant). Who the mayor of Midland Park might turn out to be would have as much an impact on my life as what brand of liquid soap they chose to put in the men’s room at New Jersey Turnpike rest stops. Maybe less.

  “What is it you want to know?” Rachel asked, her hands folded in her lap, like the last contestant at a fifth-grade spelling bee waiting for the word “extraneous” to be called out.

  “Well, to start, how well do you know Madlyn Beckwirth?”

  Rachel shifted gears to that of a beauty pageant contestant asked how bikini waxing could actually help end hunger in Third World countries. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets, looking for an answer lodged tightly in her left frontal lobe.

  “Madlyn is my campaign manager. We moved to town just about when she and Gary did, five years ago. I asked her to manage my campaign because she’s my best friend, and I trust her. Also because she brings an impeccable record to public service, having been a past president of the PTO at Roosevelt School and treasurer of the Boy Scout troop her son used to belong to.” Rachel rolled her eyes back down to look into mine, with all the charm of a department store mannequin.

  “That’s fine,” I said, in my best reporter style, “but I’m really not looking for her resumé, and I’m not asking essay questions, either. This isn’t a shadow-debate with Mayor Olszowy. Just relax and talk to me.”

  “I thought that was what I was doing.” Rachel’s eyes bored in just a bit, and widened maybe a millimeter. There was a side of her that you didn’t want to cross. She was hiding it, but not well.

  “You are, but you need to relax. We’re just having a conversation. You’re not being questioned by the grand jury.” I was trying my best to smile, but the cold front that had drifted over the kitchen table was hard to get past. I was pretty sure I could see my breath. “Now. Have you noticed Madlyn acting unusual lately?”

  “Unusual?” Rachel said the word like it would be visible coming out of her mouth, and would be ugly and hairy. Anything that wasn’t usual clearly wouldn’t be welcome in this kitchen.

  “Not ordinary,” I said. “Something she wouldn’t do under normal circumstances.”

  “I know what ‘unusual’ means.” Rachel didn’t exactly spit the words out at me, but she would have liked to. Only her terrific politi
cal instincts prevented a harsh, adversarial tone from kicking in. Great warming up the source, Tucker. The Pulitzer committee will no doubt reward your interviewing techniques someday. “No,” added the mayoral hopeful. I waited.

  “That’s it? No?”

  “No. I didn’t see anything unusual in the way Madlyn’s been acting lately.”

  “She didn’t seem at all anxious or nervous?”

  “No.”

  “Excited about something?”

  “No.”

  “Worried about anything?”

  “No.”

  “Mention anything to you about trouble in her marriage?”

  “Good lord, no.”

  I stood up. “Well,” I said, reaching for my denim jacket, “I’m sorry to have taken your time.”

  Rachel looked surprised. “That’s it? You’re not going to ask me about my campaign?”

  “That’s not what this interview is about, Rachel. I thought Milt explained that I’m looking into Madlyn’s disappearance.”

  “But the campaign is the reason for Madlyn’s disappearance,” said the I-wanna-be-the-mayor.

  I stopped, midway through shrugging the jacket onto my shoulders. “You know that for sure?”

  “Absolutely. Madlyn said she’d been getting phone calls, anonymous ones, threatening her if she kept managing my campaign. She didn’t take them seriously at first, but when they started coming every night, she got upset.”

  I sat back down. “Did she call the police?”

  “No. Gary doesn’t trust Chief Dutton. He believes the town police force is guilty of racial profiling.”

  “Has Gary ever met Chief Dutton?”

  Rachel smiled tolerantly. She was dealing with a mental midget, and she knew it. But one must keep up appearances, especially if one wants to gain high elected office. “Just because the chief is an African-American doesn’t mean he wouldn’t tolerate, even encourage, racial profiling if he thought his arrest rate would go up and his reputation would be enhanced.”