For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “Wow. Nobody ever does that.”

  “Not even your mom? They don’t ever argue?” Am I subtle, or what? The kid neither curled up into the fetal position nor began to suck his thumb at the mention of his mother. You want to talk experienced interviewer. . .

  “No.” Joel’s face closed. He started looking past me to the poster behind my head. I regrouped. I pulled out a chair from behind the desk. As a concession to the 21st century, the boy had been allowed a desktop computer, but used it, no doubt, for nothing but homework.

  “Not ever? All married couples argue once in a while.”

  He sputtered, a kind of laugh. “Married couples,” he said. “Argue.”

  “Was your mom unhappy lately?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Would she say anything to you if she was?” I sat backwards on the chair, just a friendly guy asking friendly questions. Joel’s diamond-shaped face was doing its best not to look in my direction.

  “Probably not.”

  I concentrated on what Spenser would do in this case. Probably he’d go to his office and wait for a gangster to show up and explain the whole thing to him. Or he’d go down to the gym and work out with his friend Hawk while discussing whether Jersey Joe Woolcott was really better than Felix Trinidad.

  Personally, I didn’t see how Spenser’s approach would help me here, but then, I’m not equipped to outpunch. . . well, anybody, to be completely honest. So I guess I couldn’t criticize the guy. Besides, he’s fictional, and that’s always an edge.

  I decided on another approach. I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, trying my best to look perplexed. Problem was, I also dislodged my left contact lens, and spent a couple of minutes blinking at Joel while he stared, mystified, at this insane man who had decided to come to his room and poke his own eyes out.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, less out of concern than simple curiosity.

  I stopped rubbing, and did my best to look like I was in deep despair. “I’m okay,” I sniffed, “it’s just that I’m. . . well, never mind. . .”

  “You’re what?” He was hoping I was going to say that I was dying of an inoperable brain tumor, or distraught because his father was so much richer than me. He leaned forward, elbow on a knee, listening intently.

  “I’m just worried about your mom,” I said. “I’m supposed to find her, and nothing’s going right.” I did my best to sound on the verge of tears, although my acting experience ended with “House of Halvah,” roughly the time Ronald Reagan was first elected president. (I believe that if an actor can be president, there is no point in being an actor. But that’s another story.)

  “Oh,” Joel said, disappointed. “Well, what have you been doing to find her?”

  “Well, that’s just the thing. I don’t know what to do. I’ve asked everybody she knows. Nobody can think of a reason she’d leave.” Maybe he could, went the inference.

  Alas, the child was as good at reading inferences as he was at witty exchanges. “Maybe somebody kidnapped her,” he said, with definite relish in his voice. The relish reminded me to ask him later about the barbecue sauce.

  “Well, did you hear anything the night she, um, disappeared?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and then sat there, staring blankly at me.

  Yeah? He’d heard something? There might be a way to proceed from here? Somebody, especially this kid, was going to cooperate? How could that be?

  I waited a few seconds, nodded, and looked encouraging. Then I realized that was all he was actually going to say.

  “What did you hear?” I asked a little too forcefully.

  “This scraping noise.”

  “What scraping noise?”

  “I dunno. It was late, and this noise woke me up. Sounded like some metal, or something. Kept on going. Then there was this really loud rip, and the sound stopped.”

  “And you went back to sleep?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right after the car’s brakes stopped screeching.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that this interview would be much more productive if Bud Abbott were putting the questions to the kid. He’d have way more experience in dealing with answers like this: “Car’s brakes? WHAT car’s brakes, Lou?” “

  “The ones that screeched right before the dog started barking.”

  “Dog? What dog?”

  “Oh, you know, the one that started barking when my grandmother fell out the window.”

  “What? Your grandmother fell out the window?”

  “Well, she was startled when she noticed the fire.”

  “Fire? What fire?”

  “The one that got started when my uncle hanged himself and knocked over the candle.”

  “What? Your uncle. . .”

  You get the picture. I shook my head to get back on task. “You heard a car’s brakes screeching?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Real loud. I almost got up to see what it was, but I went back to sleep instead. And when I got up, my dad said she was missing.” Madlyn’s disappearance didn’t seem to bother him as much as having been awakened in the middle of the night. The way he said “she,” you’d think he was talking about the maid.

  “About what time of night was this?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Joel said. “Must’ve been around two or three in the morning. Or four. I’m not sure.” He shrugged.

  “Did your dad hear it?”

  “My dad? He wouldn’t hear it if an elephant farted in his bedroom.” Joel dissolved into hysterics at the graphic word-picture he’d created. The tone of his chortling would have triggered both anger and fear in an ordinary man in his forties. I got up and opened the door.

  Gary Beckwirth, to his credit, was not leaning in to listen at the door. He was in the next room—his and Madlyn’s bedroom, looking through a box of photographs he had strewn all over the chenille bedspread. He had one picture in his hand, and was silently weeping over it. I stayed in the doorway, unable to decide whether to invade his privacy.

  He solved the dilemma for me by looking up and guiltily wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Sorry,” he said softly. I walked in and saw him put behind his back a photograph in which Madlyn seemed to be wearing a wedding dress. He straightened up like a soldier being brought to attention.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You care about your wife, and you’re worried. Why shouldn’t you cry?”

  “I’m not being strong,” he said. “Madlyn would want me to be strong.” He sniffed, once, and regained his composure. Gary looked me in the eye, his bearing once more that of a long-suffering employer.

  “What you did in there was unconscionable,” he said.

  “I need Joel to trust me, and I needed you not to be in the room, so he could be completely honest with me. If you had agreed to let me talk to him alone when I asked the first time, that scene wouldn’t have been necessary.”

  “You undermined my authority with the boy,” said Gary.

  “Are you his father or his headmaster?”

  He twisted his lip into something halfway between a sneer and an attack of gastroenteritis, and ignored my question. “What did he say to you?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Beckwirth looked like he was going to swallow his lips. His eyes narrowed, his neck appeared to widen to twice its original size, and his veins stuck out. “Oh, really?” he said.

  “Yes, really. Joel is a source for an article I’m writing, and I will not reveal to you what he said to me.”

  “He’s my son!”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said in my most soothing “we’re-both-dads-here” voice. “But you have to understand, Gary, that Joel is also a confidential source, and he needs to know that what he tells me in confidence is going to stay that way. If he doesn’t trust me, I won’t get any more information from him.”

  “I don’t see where your information is making my Madlyn reappear,” he said coldly.

  “Neither do I,” I admitted, “
but then, I didn’t apply for this job. I was drafted. By the way, the night Madlyn disappeared, did you hear anything?”

  “I’ve already told you, no!” said Beckwirth, almost as if he were vibrating. “I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. Now, are you going to find Madlyn or not?”

  “I have no idea if I’m going to find her,” I said. “But I will keep looking. At least until Thursday.”

  He started scooping up the pictures and placing them back into the box, but not before sorting them for size and shape—ever the Distraught Anal-Retentive Husband. “What’s Thursday?”

  “My deadline,” I told him. “I have to submit copy to the paper on Thursday, and so far, on this story, I don’t have anything to write.”

  “They’ll extend your deadline,” Beckwirth said. “I’ll make a phone call. . .”

  “Gary, if I don’t find anything by Thursday. . .” I didn’t know how to say the rest.

  “What?”

  “If I can’t find her after she’s been gone ten days, Gary, well. . . I think maybe you’d better get used to the idea that she might not want to come back.”

  Beckwirth looked like I’d slapped him in the face. With a sledgehammer. He clamped his teeth together and spoke through them in a voice more reptile than human.

  “Don’t ever walk through my door again unless you have something cheerful to say to me about my wife,” he said. “Cheerful”—that’s really the word he used. “The next time you say something like that in my presence, Mr. Tucker, I will most certainly kill you.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded a bit, digesting the soliloquy. I turned toward the door, then back to Beckwirth. “By the way, Gary, does Joel like barbecued ribs?”

  Gary Beckwirth tried as hard as he could not to speak to me, but his pride at having raised his son correctly won out over his determination. “Joel,” he said with a triumphant shake of his head, “is a vegetarian. Why?”

  I walked out the door, mumbling. “Figures,” I said. “It figures.”

  Chapter 20

  When I got home from Beckwirth’s house, I checked the sidewalk carefully for further messages—there were none. The other good news of the moment was that, even though it hadn’t quite shown up on my sidewalk, I finally might have a lead to work with in this Beckwirth story.

  The possibility of a car driving by, loud enough to wake Joel Beckwirth, at some time after midnight, raised a number of possibilities. It could mean somebody had driven off with Madlyn against her will—the squealing tires and screeching brakes would certainly support that theory. At the very least, someone had been in a great big hurry.

  But I wasn’t ready to accept Beckwirth’s sinister theories yet. It was equally possible that Madlyn had planned her own disappearance. Suppose she’d decided to leave in the middle of the night, knowing that Gary couldn’t be roused easily. True, Beckwirth had pointed out that neither her car nor his had been moved, but that didn’t mean Madlyn hadn’t driven away. She could have rented a car, or reserved a taxi, and arranged to have it waiting outside for her, or—more likely—have a friend pick her up. The driver might still be in a hurry, giddy with Madlyn’s new-found freedom.

  It was also entirely possible that Madlyn had gone out to investigate the noise, and been eaten by a passing bear. But I wasn’t going to mention that cheerful theory to Dutton, nor especially to Beckwirth. I had no bear tracks to back me up. You write something in the newspaper, you need evidence.

  I opened my front door wearily and walked into the living room. Abigail hadn’t been able to leave the house for her nightly run because I was out, so she was exercising on the cardio-glide contraption we have in front of the television, which I’ve unaffectionately nicknamed “The Thing.” The look on her face—tired, pinched, beaten-down—was enough to tell me what kind of night it had been.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “The boy.” She rolled her eyes. “You’ll hear him banging around up there in a minute.”

  I glanced involuntarily up the stairs, sagged onto the couch, and exhaled, rubbing my eyes. “He’s been a joy since his banishment from Nintendo,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  I wasn’t expecting that, and sat up, my eyes widening. It wasn’t enough that other people’s families were beating me up. Now mine had to get in on the act? “Well, what did you want me to do? He grabbed another kid by the throat.”

  “It would have been nice to have been consulted before you laid down the law. That’s all.” Abby got off “The Thing” and wiped the sweat off her face and neck with a towel she’d brought in from the bathroom. She picked up a bottle of spring water from the coffee table— pardon me, the spring water table—and opened it.

  “That’s the advantage of my being here, Abby, and the disadvantage. I’m the one who’s here, so I have to react to stuff as it happens. We didn’t have time to discuss this one.”

  She put down the water after a long swallow and nodded. “I know. But then you go out and leave me to handle the consequences. You haven’t been home many evenings lately.”

  “It’ll all be over by Thursday. Then I can go back to being a writer again.” She sat next to me on the couch, and I couldn’t resist putting my hand on her slightly moist thigh. She wears shorts when she exercises in the house and sweatpants when she goes out. There are advantages to having her stay home.

  Abby nestled her head onto my chest and sighed a little. “So what’s with Joel?” she asked.

  I caressed the skin on her leg a little more. “He heard something. Says there was a car spinning its wheels outside the house on the night Madlyn left.”

  She looked up at me, interested. “So, where does that lead?”

  “Well, first, I’ll call Westbrook in the morning and ask if he checked the outside of the house for tire marks or anything like that.”

  Abigail curled her lip, and her voice took on a sarcastic tone. “And after he tells you he didn’t?”

  “I canvass the neighborhood. Ask the people who live around there if anybody else heard anything. See if some busybody happened to look out the window at the right time. There’s a yenta on every street. Somebody’s bound to have seen something.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “It’s a hundred percent more than I had before I talked to him.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” Abby said. Her expression changed, and now she was looking at me in an altogether more agreeable manner. She snuggled closer. “Maybe you’re cut out for this gumshoe stuff, after all.” She gave me a kiss that was more than agreeable, and I responded with one of my own. We sank down into the couch.

  And that, of course, is when my son decided to come stomping down the stairs from his room, unannounced, a look on his face that would unnerve General Patton. Luckily, Ethan is an Asperger’s kid, and didn’t take any notice of what his parents had almost been doing.

  The kid has a great sense of timing, though—I’ll give him that.

  “Dad?”

  I removed my hands from where they wanted to be and sat up straight on the couch, groaning just the way my father used to when he sat up. When I was 22, I never groaned when maneuvering on, onto, or off chairs and couches.

  “Whatever it is, Ethan, the answer is ‘go to bed.’”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Read.”

  “There’s nothing to read.”

  Abigail sat up now, grinding her teeth just a little. It was clear this was the same argument they’d been having before I got home.

  “You have a million books up there, Ethan,” she said. “Pick one out and read it.”

  Ethan stopped, truly thinking about what she’d said. “I don’t have a million books up there. They wouldn’t all fit.”

  Abby took a deep breath and let it out, the only technique she had retained from Lamaze class when she was pregnant with, well, Ethan. “That’s right. I was exaggerating. But you have a lot of. . .”

  “I don’t FEEL like read
ing!” Ah, so it was going to be one of those arguments. I stood up and pointed a finger at my son.

  “You’re not playing video games tonight. You’re not playing video games tomorrow night. And you’re not playing video games the night after that. You choked somebody at school, and you have to pay the price for it. Now, go to your room and shut up!” Abby was frowning at me. She thought this was her argument and didn’t want to see it degenerate into what she calls “a scene.”

  Ethan, despite having heard this speech before, had the nerve to look surprised. “It’s not FAIR!” he bellowed, and ran back up to his room. Abby folded her arms and looked at me, a 43-year-old man pointing a menacing finger at a pre-teen no longer in the room, his eyes wide, his teeth tightly clenched. I couldn’t see them, but I would have bet that the veins in my neck were sticking out about four inches. I was moments away from hyperventilating.

  “Nice work, Dad,” she said.

  Chapter 21

  Diane Woolworth was a fifty-ish woman who clearly wished she had been born in a Jane Austin novel. Her home was awash in dark maroons, royal purples, doilies, and tea sets, and her manner was that of a woman who should have been living in England, but by accident had been set down in suburban New Jersey. If she had been able to pull it off, she would have spoken with a British accent, like Madonna.

  I had spent the bulk of Wednesday morning ringing doorbells on Beckwirth’s street, and being told politely by local residents that they hadn’t heard a damn thing on the night in question.

  Once in a while, I’d hit a house where the doorbell was not answered. These were generally the ones with no vehicle in the driveway, indicating either that some rich people in Midland Heights actually work for a living, or need two incomes to be rich.

  Occasionally, the residents who answered the door were not quite so polite, like the guy who told me to “get lost” because he was “sick and tired of snooping assholes asking questions about the bitch across the street.” Not Noel Coward, I’ll grant you, but certainly to the point.

  Diane Woolworth’s doorbell was the third-from-the last one on the block, but the first whose owner had invited me in for a cup of tea (which I declined—if anything, tea actually tastes worse to me than coffee). And—I swear on all that is pure and decent—she also offered me a “crumpet.” I don’t mean the Tastykake kind with the butterscotch frosting on the top, either.