Abby nodded. After she left, Leah and I had our Dad-and-daughter time, when she usually gets silly with me and plays some game like “move your arm like this.” But today, she just wanted me to sit next to her on the living room couch.
“Daddy, why did somebody write something about Ethan on the sidewalk?”
“I don’t know, Sweetie.”
“Is it something bad?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s something bad the way they used it. And as far as I can tell, they did it just to be mean.”
“Is that why you and Ethan got into a fight?” Leah hated it when voices were raised in the house. I sometimes wondered how she’d gotten into this family to begin with.
“We didn’t get into a fight, Leah. Ethan was upset, and I got upset with the way he showed it. A fight is where people try to hurt each other, and we never do that.”
“But that’s why he’s upset, right?”
“Right, Baby.”
She sat still for a very long time, which is not at all Leah’s style. “I don’t like who did that to Ethan.” She rested her head on my knee and stared at the TV set, which was turned off.
“Neither do I, Honey.”
After Leah got on the school bus, I got out a bottle of chlorine bleach from the basement laundry room and poured some over the sidewalk. Let it set, and I’ll come back later to hose it down. Maybe that’ll get rid of the stain. Then I packed a lunch for Ethan and walked over to the Buzbee School, where all Midland Heights children—those who attend public school, anyway—go from third to sixth grade. This was Ethan’s third year there, and both he and I are well known in the Buzbee hallways.
I walked up the front steps of the two-story brick building, which stretches all the way across a city block. At the lobby, I made a quick right turn into the main office.
Ramona the school secretary was behind her desk, Jersey hair a foot in the air, drinking an orange soda at 8:20 in the morning. Ramona, it was rumored, had once been the receptionist at an Atlantic City brothel, and, having dealt with all sorts of juvenile behavior, was perfectly suited to her work in an elementary school.
“What’s up, Mr. Tucker?”
“He forgot his lunch, Ramona.” I waved the bag in front of her. Ramona nodded.
“I thought maybe Mrs. Mignano had called you,” she said, taking the lunch bag out of my hand. Ramona flashed me a look, then glanced quickly into the principal’s office behind her.
My lips tightened around my teeth. “Did something happen?”
“Ethan tried to choke someone.”
“He tried to what?”
“Before school, Justin Hartman was getting on Ethan in the playground, and Ethan went for his throat.” Ramona’s voice lowered from its usual glass-breaking pitch to a tone that could only be heard across a football field.
“On the playground? Why wasn’t he in the Before-School Club?” Joan Delbert, a teacher who’s displayed more patience in a single minute than I have in an entire lifetime, runs the Before-School Club for kids who are, frankly, better off not staying on the playground when they don’t have to be there. And Ethan has been in the club every morning for two and a half years.
“I don’t know. He’s usually there.”
“Was his aide there?” I saw Anne Mignano, Buzbee’s principal, approaching the office, and figured we were about to have a conference.
“Wilma hadn’t gotten here yet. She’s used to Ethan going to the club.” Ramona spotted the principal, too, and smiled at me to pretend we were discussing her recipe for chocolate soufflé.
Anne wasn’t taken in. She smiled when she saw me, but wasn’t convincing. Her well-tailored gray suit gave her a starched appearance, but we’d been through a few battles together, and I knew her to be a warm-hearted administrator (if those words can be placed next to each other) who cares deeply about the students in her school.
“I was going to call you,” she said, extending her hand, which I took. “I imagine Ramona has filled you in.”
“Yeah. Have you got a minute?”
“No,” she said. “But for this, I don’t have a choice.”
We walked into Anne’s office. She closed the door behind us, and motioned me to a chair behind her disturbingly neat desk.
“It seems we have a problem,” she said.
“We have more than one problem. One of the reasons he’s on a short fuse is that somebody wrote ‘Fuck Ethan’ in barbecue sauce on the sidewalk outside our house last night.”
She didn’t flinch. “Aaron, I know that’s upsetting, but it doesn’t mean he can grab people by the throat.”
“I know. Believe me, he’s not going to be rewarded for his behavior when he gets home. But Anne, I need some help. Is this Hartman kid a particular enemy of Ethan’s? Might he have written something like that in front of my house?”
Anne’s face, more attractive, not less, because of the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, seemed to narrow in a frown as she thought. “No, he’s not the type,” she said. “You know, there’s nothing I can do about that, since it happened outside the school, not during school hours.” Her eyes looked right into me, and I got the impression she could make an educated guess as to who our graffiti artist might be.
“I’m not asking you to do anything, but if you have any ideas, let’s just say nobody’s ever going to know who my source is.”
Anne Mignano nodded. She thought for a few seconds more, and reached for a sheet of blank paper in a Lucite box on her desk. She wrote a few words on the paper and put it back in the Lucite box. Then she coughed, surprisingly daintily, twice.
“Excuse me for a moment, would you, Aaron? I need a drink of water. Won’t be gone a minute.” Anne got up and walked out of her office, but closed the door behind her.
I reached over and took the paper from the Lucite box. On it were written three names. I pocketed the paper and waited a moment until Anne returned.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you with your investigation, Aaron,” she said.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Mignano.”
“Now. About Ethan’s behavior. . .”
“How is the school dealing with it?” I asked.
“He’s getting three days detention and a special homework assignment.”
I nodded. “Does Mrs. Turner know he needs his medication?”
“Yes,” Anne said. “I think he’s already had it.”
“Good. Then his behavior should improve— somewhat—in a little while.” I walked to the door and opened it, then turned to her. “And rest assured, Anne. He won’t be seeing his Nintendo game for a good long while.”
“Good luck, Aaron.”
On my way out, I waved at Ramona, who was finishing her orange soda.
Ethan at home with no Nintendo, extra homework, and detention. I took the slip of paper out of my shirt pocket and looked at it. One of the names was Joel Beckwirth’s.
Good luck, indeed.
Chapter 18
When I got home, I finished up a piece on “How To Shoot Your Baby,” which—honestly—was a home video article for American Baby Magazine, and emailed it to my editor. I took a deep breath, sat back in my prized swivel chair, closed my eyes, and tried to summarize my progress, if you could call it that, on the Beckwirth story.
Gary Beckwirth didn’t want me to speak to his son, who might have been the kid who wrote epithets on my sidewalk with barbecue sauce. These two facts, of course, immediately heightened my suspicion of Joel Beckwirth, and made me wonder what it was his father was trying to hide. Probably a secret stash of plastic squeeze bottles in the basement, along with copies of “Catcher in the Rye” written entirely in condiments.
At this point, I decided that since every other single thing I could think of doing was more pressing, I’d work on my latest screenplay.
I’ve been writing movie and TV scripts since high school, when Mahoney and I filmed three epics: “Unseen Enemy,” a war movie in which we had only enough actors for one side (Mahoney
refers to it as “Unseen Enema”—I counter with the fact that if you can see an enema, they’re not doing it right); “House Of Halvah,” which we billed as “the world’s first (and hopefully last) detective/horror/musical/comedy”; and “Marriage Contract,” the story of a guy who hires a hit man to almost kill his girlfriend, so he can rescue her and impress her so much she’ll agree to finally marry him.
I’ve been a movie freak since my parents took me to see Pinocchio when I was four. Because I knew I couldn’t act, but could write, screen-writing has been a professional goal since I was roughly nine. Mahoney saw it as a hobby. I thought of it as a career path. We spent a few thousand dollars making those three movies, and were in pre-production on “Far Trek,” our science fiction epic, when Mahoney had to go get married and spoil everything.
After college, I began writing screenplays with an eye towards actually selling one. I’ve written 22 now, and still have the same eye. Hollywood, in my opinion, is just playing incredibly hard to get.
Comedies, dramas, westerns, sci-fi’s, fantasies, and romances have all come tumbling out of my printer. One actually made it as far as a three-year option from a very, very big production company (no names, but a frog’s involved), but ended up being returned to its original owner (that’s me) unproduced.
Writing my latest screenplay, the story of a doctor who falls in love with a woman who ages only one year for every ten she lives, was proving to be a struggle. I was aiming for romantic comedy, but the characters, those vicious little scamps, kept turning serious on me, and I was afraid I’d end up with an unhappy ending. To a writer who’s “new” in Hollywood parlance (despite 20 years of experience), a dark curtain-closer would be the kiss of death. That is, unless you’re selling to the New York independent film crowd, who love unhappy endings, but then everybody in the movie would have to wear black and live in converted warehouse space, and at least one of the main characters would have to be a heroin addict. I wasn’t sure I could write that.
Anyway, I began as I always do, by re-reading what I’d written the day before, and had fingers poised over my keyboard when Milt Ladowski called. He was in his high-priced office, you could tell, since a secretary came on first, asking me to hold for Mr. Ladowski. Mr. Ladowski, after all, couldn’t be bothered taking sixteen seconds out of his life to talk to an answering machine, had I not been in.
“How’s the Beckwirth investigation going, Aaron?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “Mr. Tucker’s in the john right now. If you’ll hang on a moment. . .” I took the cordless phone into the bathroom and flushed.
“Very amusing, Aaron.”
“Amusing, hell. I had shredded wheat for breakfast.”
Milt allowed a long silent period to destroy our fastpaced and sparkling repartée. No doubt he was trying to figure out how to bill Beckwirth for the conversation.
“Beckwirth, Aaron. What’s going on with Beckwirth?”
“Milt, your client and close friend is tying my hands. He wants me to perform the ceremonial wife dance and have her fall into his arms from the sky. He won’t let me talk to his son, he won’t give me his phone records or his credit card bills, and he won’t tell me anything about his marriage, other than it is blissful as all get-out. Now you tell me, how do you think the Beckwirth investigation is going?” I put my feet up on the desk and waited. It was fun letting somebody else worry about this thing for a while.
“This isn’t good, Aaron. Gary’s expecting me to call him with progress.” I could picture Ladowski’s pinched face frowning behind his $6,000 desk. Luckily, I could focus my mind’s eye on the desk.
“What do you want me to do, Milt? Everything I’ve turned up so far has been a dead end. But Barry Dutton is. . .”
“I’ll get you in to see Joel,” said Milt.
“What?”
“I said, I’ll make sure Gary lets you talk to Joel. Give me an hour.”
I gave him maybe ten minutes before he called back. I was right. “It’s all set. But Gary has to be in the room with him, and you only get fifteen minutes.”
“For crying out loud, Milt, I’m not asking for an audience with the pope!”
He ignored me as only a man with a manicure can. “You can do it today at three.”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “I have an 11-year-old coming home after detention and a seven-year-old getting off the bus. If Beckwirth wants, I’ll come over after dinner, when Abby’s home.”
Ladowski grumbled a bit, but saw the logic in my reasoning. Either that, or my voice told him that I wouldn’t budge. Ladowski is an experienced mediator. “I’ll clear it with Gary,” he said. “Be there at seven-thirty.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “And Milt?”
“Yeah?”
“Does Joel like barbecue sauce?”
Chapter 19
There were pictures of professional wrestlers on Joel Beckwirth’s walls, and that surprised me. In a house that had no visible TV set (and no Nintendo or Playstation in Joel’s room), I didn’t expect pictures of “The Rock” or “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. I expected pin-up posters of Mozart or Pierre Cardin.
The room, except for the posters, was just like the rest of the house—impeccable. No socks on the floor—no potato chip crumbs, either. The bed was tightly made. The large boy sitting on it was tightly wrapped.
Joel Beckwirth had inherited from his handsome father only his blue-green eyes. In fact, judging from the picture of Madlyn now prominently displayed on the piano downstairs, Joel didn’t much resemble either of his parents. His face was mostly chin, some forehead, and not much in the middle. He looked like Humpty Dumpty in an Eminem T-shirt.
Gary ushered me into the room, speaking in hushed tones, as if we were about to enter the presence of the great Oz and should speak only when spoken to. He had informed me, through tight lips, that Milton Ladowski had “strongly recommended” he allow me to speak to his son, but that Joel was still “extremely upset” over his mother’s disappearance and should be handled with great care. I believe “kid gloves” were mentioned once or twice.
I did my best to smile and fought a natural urge to ask about Joel’s preference in fast-food toppings. “Hi, Joel,” I said. Mr. Rogers couldn’t have been less threatening.
“Uh.” The boy was clearly a witty conversationalist.
“You know why I’m here?”
“Uh-huh.” My God, the lacerating brilliance of it all! I considered asking Gary if the boy had been to Professor Henry Higgins for diction lessons. Once again, though, I forced myself to remember the task that had brought me to this Ozzie-and-Harriet-Meet-Goldberg place.
“You’re worried about your mom, huh?” Now he had me saying “huh.”
“I guess.” Words! Who could possibly have hoped for more?
“Well, do you know why she might have gone away?”
The boy’s eyes narrowed, and Gary stepped in before he could say anything. “Do you really think it’s necessary to be asking. . .”
Just what I’d been waiting for. “Gary, I’m here to do a job. One which, as I recall, you were pretty set on me doing, even when I told you I didn’t know how. Now, you’re either going to let me do that job, or you can do it yourself. But if you leave it to me, you must stand back and be quiet.” I glanced at Joel. Had challenging his father’s authority at my very first opportunity produced the desired effect? It had. Joel was grinning nastily.
But Gary wasn’t done. “I don’t have to listen to. . .”
“That’s right, you don’t,” I said. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you’d wait outside so I could talk to Joel privately.”
Beckwirth positively gasped at the very notion, and his face took on color, making him look like a remarkably handsome strawberry. “I absolutely forbid it!” he shouted, and Joel snorted, trying to suppress a giggle.
“Fine,” I said. “It’s been nice meeting you, Joel. Good night, Gary.” And I headed for the exit. Beckwirth senior was harrumphing even as I turned away
from him. He came close to actually choking on his own words when I placed my hand on the bedroom doorknob and began to turn it.
“Where are you. . . going?”
“Home. I’d like to see my daughter before she goes to bed, and there’s nothing here that’s holding me back.”
Beckwirth’s eyes were the size of silver-dollar pancakes. The irises looked like blueberries. A little maple syrup, and I’d have had one super-delicious snack right here.
“But, what about Madlyn?”
“I don’t know. What about Madlyn?” Beckwirth started to point a finger at me, but I cut him off. “If you’re really that concerned about her, and you really think I’m the best man to find her, then Gary, get the hell out of this room, and let me do my job.” I folded my arms and looked at him.
So did Joel. He was watching his father with a look of rapt fascination. Clearly, he’d never heard anyone stand up to Gary Beckwirth before, and he was enjoying it as much as a body slam from Sable. Well, maybe not quite as much.
Beckwirth spoke very softly and quickly. “I’ll be just outside,” he managed, and walked out. I turned toward Joel after the door had closed behind me. There was no keyhole for Beckwirth to listen through—I had checked. And because the house was old, there would be no listening through the door or the walls. At that very moment, Gary Beckwirth was no doubt cursing his homebuilder’s fine craftsmanship.
“So,” I said to the boy on the bed, who was now lying back on his pillows and grinning. “What do you want to talk about?”
“How did you do that?” His voice, now that it was actually producing words, was that strange combination that only occurs in the newly pubescent boy—deep and light at the same time.
“Do what?”
“Make my dad go away.”
“You saw,” I said. “I told him I didn’t want anything from him. If I don’t want anything from him, he has no power over me.” It occurred to me that I wouldn’t be thrilled with anyone teaching Ethan this particular lesson, but what the hell, Beckwirth was no friend of mine.
For Whom the Minivan Rolls Page 8