For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

None of this was helped by the use of the word “fuck,” which I’m not terribly comfortable saying in front of people I’ve just met, particularly when they’re offering me brownies.

  “Well, Vinnie did mention your son, once,” she said uncomfortably. Christine got up and walked to a coffee maker on the counter, but I noticed her cup was still half full. She was doing what I had done at Gary Beckwirth’s house, just using the coffee as a prop to kill time.

  “I take it he mentioned Ethan in a negative way.”

  She filled up the coffee cup again, and was about to ask me if I wanted more, but remembered I had declined the offer to begin with. Christine put the pot back in place and sat down.

  “Well, you know what kids say about each other. . .”

  “Christine—may I call you Christine?”

  “Sure. Chris, really.”

  “Chris, let me tell you something that may make you feel better. My son can be a colossal pain in the ass sometimes. He annoys me on a daily basis, and I love him dearly. So whatever Vincent said, believe me, is in all probability true. He may even have watered it down for you.”

  It worked. She visibly relaxed. Some parents think their children are incapable of anything other than good intentions, and it disarms other adults when you prove to them you’re not like that. Besides, Ethan really can be a pain in the ass if he puts his mind to it.

  “Well, then I can tell you,” Chris said. “Vinnie said Ethan called him an asshole, and tried to pull out some of Vinnie’s hair.”

  “That sounds like Ethan,” I told her, “except the ‘asshole’ part. Why didn’t you call me when this happened?”

  Chris blushed just a bit. She had a round face, and looking at it was like looking at one of the Campbell’s soup twins. But in a nice way.

  “Tell the truth, I was afraid to. I thought maybe you were an ass-hole, too.”

  We both laughed over that one, and I took a bite of the brownie in front of me. Dammit, it was really good. Of course, a bad brownie is like a bad orgasm—still better than a normal day of existence.

  “Well, now that I’m here, I’ll tell you that Ethan will be warned against doing anything like that again. But my question stands: do you think Vinnie held enough of a grudge against Ethan to write that on the sidewalk?”

  She frowned, and seemed to be thinking deeply. “No. No, I really don’t. It’d be more Vinnie’s style to beat Ethan up in the schoolyard or yell. . . that. . . to his face. He wouldn’t go to the trouble of stealing barbecue sauce and writing it on the sidewalk. For one thing, he’d want to see Ethan’s face when he found it.”

  I finished the brownie, considered asking for another, and decided I’d best flee this place as quickly as possible. I thanked Chris for her candor, and for the brownie. As she walked me to the door, she shook her head and chuckled.

  “You know, it sounds like we have two sons who act out in the same inappropriate ways,” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s a wonder they don’t get along better.” I said my good-byes and left.

  Outside, it was cool, but with a whiff of spring in the air. I stepped out of the house and stood on the sidewalk a moment, appreciating the breeze.

  I’d still need to change my shirt before the next parent, though. This one was soaked clean through.

  Chapter 11

  Let’s just say that the next interview didn’t go as well. For one thing, David Meckeroff, the father of the boy in question, had no brownies on hand. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have offered them to the likes of me.

  What he did suggest, in no uncertain terms, was that I had a son who was “a menace” to the school, and who should never have been included in a “normal” class. Apparently, Ethan even went so far as to suggest that Meckeroff’s son, Warren (you think I make these names up, don’t you?), was, and I’m quoting now, “a moron.”

  There were about fourteen photographs of Warren, all in the same pose, on a table in Meckeroff’s living room. I recognized the envelope they were sitting on. It was from the school’s photographer. Meckeroff had actually been cutting the one large sheet into individual photographs. Not that this is so unusual, but he was cutting up the tiniest photographs—the ones that come about thirty-two to an 8"x10" sheet and that nobody ever uses.

  Warren Meckeroff’s school picture looked like that of, well, a moron. He had the most vacant eyes imaginable in a living person, and had a haircut that was reminiscent of that intellectual giant, Alfalfa Switzer. That can be cute when you’re six, but doesn’t work nearly so well when you’re twelve.

  Come to think of it, his father looked roughly the same, but he was at least thirty-eight. And considerably rounder. Still, the biceps bulging in his T-shirt were impressive enough for me not to argue the point too strenuously with him. Clearly, his son was incapable of writing such a vile thing with something intended for human consumption.

  I would have gotten into a heated argument with the man, but it was obviously fruitless to try. And there were those biceps to consider. Besides, I wanted to get out the door as quickly as possible with the photograph of Warren that I’d palmed while listening to his father’s lecture.

  My next stop was back at Big Bob’s, where once again the proprietor was the only human present. This place was clearly a front for the mob, or it would be out of business by the end of the week.

  Bob took one look and started laughing when I walked in. If my screenplays were as funny as my face, I’d be a wealthy man today.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said. “What is it this time, pal? You got a salt shaker you want me to identify? Somebody steal a pack of Sweet’N Low, and you want me to dust it for fingerprints?” He was clearly warming up for a gig at the local comedy club and wanted to try out his new material. But I maintained my Cary Grant-like cool.

  “Good,” I said, “you recognize me.”

  He managed to suppress his hilarity long enough to bark out, “how could I forget?”

  “So maybe you’ll remember this face, too,” I said, and whipped out the picture of Warren Meckeroff. Big Bob stopped laughing for a moment and considered the tiny image.

  “Geez, did you bring a. . .” I produced a magnifying glass I had picked up at home. Okay, so this wasn’t exactly the next stop after Meckeroff’s. I had gone home and changed shirts again. Looked like tomorrow was going to be a big laundry day.

  “Mm-hmmm. . .” said Big Bob, and he used the sleuth’s best friend to examine the picture.

  “He a regular customer of yours?” I asked.

  “See, now, bringing a picture was definitely the way to go,” he said. “I don’t get to know their names, but I never forget a face. No sir, when somebody comes in here for the second time, a year could go by, and I’ll remember him—might even remember what he ordered. . .”

  It occurred to me that Big Bob being in business for a full year would merit miracle status, but I held my tongue. He did not hold his.

  “Yessir, always remember a face. Every face. Big, small, men, women. Some guys remember a woman’s tits. Not me. The face. That I’ll remember every time. Now, names. . .”

  “Bob,” I came close to hollering. “Do you know this kid or not?”

  He took another long look, and shook his head up and down.

  “Nope,” he said. “Never seen him before in my life.”

  This was not turning out to be a good day.

  Chapter 12

  When I whipped the softball across the long, spacious family room, Mahoney just barely managed to stick his hand out and snare it from his armchair. “Watch it,” he said. “You could have knocked out a window or something.”

  We began this softball thing in high school. I don’t remember exactly how. Mahoney used to live in the attic of his parents’ house, in a room roughly three times the size of mine. And whenever we needed to solve the problems of the world—which usually involved the seventeen-year-olds we described as “women”—I’d climb up the three flights of stairs to his lair, and we’
d toss this old softball back and forth. We never solved any problems, but our hands got surer, and my fielding percentage went up in our after-school pickup games—of softball.

  Our first high school softball, Mahoney says, is in a box in his present attic, where, as far as we know, nobody actually lives. It shares that space with our old tripod, some movie lights, a Super 8 sound movie camera for which nobody on this planet makes film anymore, and a deer skull Mahoney found in the woods in 1974, which he named “Elmo.” Don’t ask.

  I can’t explain it, but throwing the softball around gets our brains into problem-solving mode, and that is exactly what I needed today. After Big Bob’s, where I ordered a black-and-white milk shake and received a black-and-white ice cream soda, I called Mahoney on the cell phone, intending to leave a message asking if we could meet later. Instead, I got the man himself, since he’d finished his last job of the day a couple of hours early (“the power of being the best at what you do”) and had come home. I said I needed to throw the softball. He said come on over. And here I was. But it wasn’t like the old days. Now Jeff Mahoney, of all people, was worried that I’d break some household item or fixture with an errant throw.

  “You afraid Susan will yell at me if I knock over a vase?” (I used the flat “a” pronunciation to show how classy I am.)

  “My wife actually likes you,” he countered. “You knock something over, she’ll give you a hug and blame me for the broken glass.”

  “Can I help it if I’m irresistible?” I grinned.

  “That’s not what Janet Marsden thought,” Mahoney shot back. A painful memory. Old friends know the most about you. They remember how you got all your scars.

  “ANYWAY,” I moved on, “I don’t understand anything that’s happened on this story. I have nothing to go on, and everybody’s telling me to quit, so I feel like I have to keep at it.”

  “And you don’t have anybody paying you for it, right?” he said, not needling now, just clarifying.

  “Right.”

  “Well, it’s obvious you have to investigate further. They’re trying to keep you from finding out something.”

  He pitched the ball back at me, and of course it landed right in my unmoving hand, chest high. And I was easily ten feet away on a low sofa. That’s what I hate about Mahoney. He never loses his touch.

  “Who? Who’s trying to keep me from something? And what? I don’t have any clues. I have nowhere to go.” I tried tossing him a curve ball, and it bounced, but Mahoney still managed to scoop it up.

  “Before you get the answers, you have to figure out what the questions are,” he said, and tossed another one that swerved directly into my hands. The swine.

  “Oh thank you, Grasshopper, but I think I know what the question is. The question is, who killed Madlyn Beckwirth?” Now I managed one he could catch without moving too much. He nodded encouragement.

  “No, you’re looking at too big a picture,” Mahoney said. “Look at the little things. Check out the pieces of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle. What things that you have found out don’t add up?”

  I caught his next throw and held it, thinking. “That’s just it— nothing adds up. Somebody killed Madlyn after she left her bed and her house in the middle of the night and went to Atlantic City. What doesn’t add up? I could give you a laundry list of what doesn’t add up.”

  He sat and looked at me, patiently. Like Master Yoda, he has the patience of the ages.

  I let out a long breath. “Okay. In no particular order: Who called me to warn me off looking for Madlyn? Why do that? Why does the phone number match the cell phone of a little old man in a greenhouse in Emmaus, Pennsylvania? Who sent somebody to follow me in a minivan, and why? How come Madlyn decides to call me out of the blue, and why is she killed immediately thereafter?”

  Mahoney closed his eyes. I considered smoking him one at that very moment, but he’d probably just put up his hand and catch it out of reflex, and I’d be even more outclassed. Then he wrinkled his brow, and I sat back. Here it came.

  “What’s interesting,” he said, “is that all the clues in this story seem to center around an outside party.”

  “Who?”

  “You. Whoever killed Madlyn spent an awful lot of energy trying to keep you away. What does that tell you?” I tried a new gambit, and rolled the softball across the hardwood floor Mahoney had sanded and refinished. The ball rolled straight, with no bumps. Naturally.

  “That I have an inflated sense of my own importance,” I suggested.

  Mahoney smiled because he is smarter than me. “No. What’s interesting is that the biggest concern of the person—or people—who killed Madlyn Beckwirth is that you don’t find out about it,” he said. “Every move they made since she disappeared seemed to be designed to keep you away—not to keep the cops or her husband away—but you.”

  I waited, but nothing more came. “So, what does that tell us?” I said.

  He picked up the softball and examined it. “This one isn’t as good as the old one,” he said. “Too rubbery.”

  “Jeff,” I said, “what does all that tell us? Am I in danger from these people, too?”

  “Only if you get close to finding something out,” he said.

  “Well, then I have nothing to worry about.” He added zip to his throw this time, and my hand stung when I caught it.

  “People kill other people for two reasons,” Mahoney offered. “Sex or money.”

  “Kay Scarpetta teach you that?” I asked.

  “Nah. She just deals with the dead body. She’d tell you what was in the intestines. I’m telling you. Sex or money.”

  “Either one of which could apply here,” I said. “Madlyn was expecting something more than croissants from her room service, if you know what I mean. And Gary has piles of cash.” I threw the ball back, harder, and he caught it as if it were a Nerf ball.

  Mahoney grumbled. He stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “I want some potato chips,” he said. “You?”

  I shook my head. The ice cream soda had been bad enough. But there had also been a brownie in the morning. I would have to do six thousand sit-ups to burn it all off—tomorrow.

  Mahoney opened one of the kitchen cabinets he had hung from the cathedral ceiling he raised in the kitchen. You had to be as tall as a tree to get any food in this house, but luckily Mahoney’s wife was close to six feet tall herself. I had to rely on the kindness of strangers.

  “But nobody ever called Beckwirth to ask for his money,” he said, grabbing a family-sized bag of Ruffles from the cabinet and tearing it open carefully. “Madlyn wasn’t kidnapped. She went away on her own.”

  “So we focus on the sex?” I suggested.

  “Nah,” Mahoney said through a mouthful of Ruffles. “That’s just what they want us to do. Remember what Woodward and Bernstein said.”

  “Follow the money.” I gave him back what he wanted to hear.

  “Exactly. Follow the money.” Suddenly grabbing the softball again, he rifled it toward me, and I caught it neatly and without pain. “Now you’re getting it,” Mahoney said.

  Chapter 13

  I got home just in time to receive a lecture from my son about the continued necessity of being inside the family residence whenever he got home from school in the afternoon. He’d actually had to use his key to get in the door, and had been watching television himself for an entire eight minutes. For crying out loud, what kind of father was I, anyway?

  It got worse when I turned off the TV and reminded him that he had homework to do. He leapt at the remote control, switched the set back on, and screamed, “I was WATCHING that!” just as Ren and Stimpy appeared to sing “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy.” This was what happens whenever you throw him off his routine. His discipline collapses like a house of cards.

  “I don’t care what you were watching,” I said. “It’s time to do your homework.” And, because I was born towards the middle of the twentieth century, walked over to the TV and actually knew how to turn the set
“off” manually—by pressing the power button.

  He stood, dramatically, knowing that the remote’s infrared beam couldn’t reach the TV through the all-too solid body of a father. And he was about to wail when he saw my face, which must have resembled that of the Devil, and my hand, which was in the perennial parent pose—forefinger pointing directly upward, at God, since he/she/it is the one who created this whole parenting system in the first place, and therefore deserves all the blame.

  Ethan stopped, considered his options, and in a rare display of common sense, decided against trying to knock me over and turn the television back on. He made a screeching noise, then stomped over to his backpack and began getting his books out.

  It was going to be another great day at the old homestead, and Abigail had already let me know she’d be home late tonight. One of the partners in her firm was retiring, and there was a dinner that night, attendance mandatory.

  While Ethan slammed his books down and started working, talking to himself all the while, Leah walked in the door, gave me the customary hug and kiss, and started in immediately on that most odious of tasks, penmanship. Today’s assignment was to write about 154 “R”s on a page for no particular reason. She smiled through it, on the opposite side of the coffee table (excuse me, the homework table) from her brother, who was working himself into a lather over having to read a chapter from a book that he actually liked. A study in contrasts, from the same set of parents. Go figure.

  I decided to start following the money, but I couldn’t go out and do that just now, so I’d have to follow it from my office. This was difficult, since I didn’t know where the money had gone, or indeed what money we were discussing. It’s very hard to follow something when you haven’t a clue what it is or where it started. They don’t teach you that in journalism school—I’m pretty sure—but it’s still true.

  Since I am not, never have been, and never will be a business reporter, I didn’t have a prayer of deciphering Gary Beckwirth’s finances. And since Beckwirth was the only person involved in this whole mess who seemed to have an inordinate amount of money, he would be the logical jumping-off point. So instead of rooting around in his business and its dealings, which could have been swindling every person in the entire state of California for all I’d know, I decided to start with what I could understand.