For Whom the Minivan Rolls Page 2

  I gave the front door a backward kick with my left heel so the neighbors wouldn’t think Gary and I were having an illicit liaison. Then I raised my hands to his shoulders, and gently pushed away, normalizing the flow of oxygen to my lungs. “Gary,” I gasped. “Nice to meet you.”

  He ushered me into a living room that could have come out of the 19th century. In fact, I’m not sure it didn’t. Every piece of furniture was an antique, every rug an Oriental. The room was devoid of televisions, stereos, computers, or any device other than lamps requiring electrical power. If they’d been able to get gas jets up and running there, they likely would have gotten rid of the lamps, too. The Beckwirths probably had a home theatre set up elsewhere, but this was the main room, and they kept it this way so they could tell their friends they never watched TV, and then sneak off to catch Nash Bridges when nobody was looking. Was I being judgmental?

  Beckwirth managed to control his weeping until we were inside. He actually had coffee in a silver urn on the coffee table, and poured me some without asking. I don’t drink coffee, but I mimed taking a sip and put the cup down as he composed himself.

  “I don’t know how much Milton told you. . .” he began.

  “He told me that Madlyn hasn’t come home in a few days,” I offered. “And you’re worried. That’s certainly understandable, but. . .”

  Beckwirth nodded, and ignored the “but.” “That’s why you’ve got to help me, Aaron. You’re the only one I could think of.”

  I was the only one he could think of? I could think of dozens. In fact, I’d sooner go to the dry cleaner for help than a freelance writer. At least he’d know whether she took her clothes with her. What the hell was I supposed to do about the guy’s wife leaving him? Pitch a story to Redbook on ways to lose those last 10 pounds before running away from your husband?

  “Can you think of any reason Madlyn might want to. . . take a few days off without telling you?”

  It took him a couple of seconds to absorb what I was saying. “You think she went away on purpose?”

  “I don’t think anything. I haven’t the slightest idea what happened. I’m just asking.”

  For a moment, his face darkened, his eyebrows lowered, and his voice gained authority. This must be the Beckwirth his employees saw. “My wife did not leave me, Aaron. She was taken away against her will.”

  This time it took me a moment. “She was kidnapped?”

  “Exactly. She was kidnapped. And I want you to find out who did it, and why, and get her back.”

  I pretended to take another sip of coffee. Lord, that stuff smells great, but it tastes foul. “Gary, this really isn’t my line of work. What you need is. . .”

  “Don’t tell me about the police, Aaron,” Beckwirth said with a voice that must cause young stockbrokers, or whatever the hell he is, to tremble in their boots. “I’ve spoken to our esteemed chief of police, and he’s barely raised a finger. The lazy bastard sends out a fax to other police departments and thinks that’s going to get my wife back. An affirmative action appointment if ever I saw one.” Barry Dutton is African-American.

  “If you think the police aren’t doing enough, Gary, get yourself a private investigator.”

  Beckwirth smiled his best “aren’t-we-all-friends-here” smile and leaned toward me. “I’ve got something better. I’ve got you.”

  “I’m not better. I’m worse. I write articles about cellular phones for a living, Gary. If my wife didn’t have a full-time job, I would be considered indigent.” I figured the allusion to money would impress him.

  Once again, I had underestimated the depth of Beckwirth’s fantasy life. “You know investigation, Aaron. You’re an investigative reporter.”

  “Was. I was an investigative reporter. I used to be a teenager, too, but that doesn’t mean I can come up with a cure for acne.”

  He got up and sat next to me on the couch. In another minute, I might have to scream and otherwise fight for my virtue. Beckwirth’s tone was hushed and intimate. I searched the coffee table for a butter knife, or something I could use to fend off his advances, should it come to that. I found nothing. Just to give myself something to do, I picked up the cup, with two sips taken out of it, and made a big deal out of “freshening” it with hot coffee. If I had to drink the whole thing, I’d be a raving caffeine addict by lunch.

  “You know the tricks, Aaron. You know who to call. You know where to look. You can find my Madlyn and save her from these people.”

  “Gary, I have trouble finding my car keys in the morning. I don’t know how to save anybody. Try and listen to me. I’m a freelance writer. I send query letters to editors, they give me assignments, we agree on a rate, which means they tell me how much they’re going to pay me and I say ‘okay,’ and then I call people up and ask them questions. When my deadline’s approaching, I write up the information the best way I can and I send it to the editor, who then does whatever he wants to it, and prints it in a magazine or a newspaper. That’s what I do. I don’t save people, I don’t find missing wives. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. I just don’t have any idea at all what to do. You understand?”

  He stared into my face, wheels turning in his head. Then Beckwirth decided on a strategy. He drew a deep breath and sighed painfully.

  “Fine. Don’t help me. Let me live through this experience alone, with no one to end my suffering and no chance of bringing my Madlyn home.”

  “Gary, doing an impression of my mother isn’t going to help. I told you. I’m a freelancer. I do freelancer stuff. Look in the Yellow Pages, find a detect. . .” I stopped just from the expression on his face.

  Beckwirth’s face was made of stone. But it started to crack, and tears began to fall silently from his eyes. I felt like I was telling Charlie Brown that Snoopy had been run over by a bus. Beckwirth stood, turned, and walked out of the room.

  I guessed the job interview was over. So I left. Outside Beckwirth’s house, a sixty-ish woman walking her dog scowled at me as I headed back to my minivan. Probably thought Gary and I were having an illicit liaison.

  Chapter 4

  It was after noon when I walked through the front door of my own house. The place was in its usual state of disarray. Ethan had left his socks the night before on the floor in front of the living room couch, and Leah had simply taken off her pajamas while watching The Wild Thornberrys that morning, and left them on the couch. Toys and school papers obscured the coffee table, which was not an antique but was old, and there was a distinct smell of cooking oil in the air, because I’d made some french fries to go with the hamburgers I’d cooked for dinner. Two nights ago.

  Home, sweet home.

  I took off my jacket and hung it on the banister at the bottom of the stairs, then took a left and walked past the $25 thrift store armchair into my office, otherwise known as the playroom, where action figures and fax machines co-existed peacefully as an example to objects worldwide. It made one proud to work at home.

  The answering machine light was flashing, and there were three messages. One from the pediatrician’s office, confirming Ethan’s check-up for the next day at 4:30. One from my mother, who in fact doesn’t nag like Gary Beckwirth, but sometimes you have to exaggerate to make your point. The last was from Dave Harrington, an editor I’d worked with before at the Press-Tribune. My mother was fine, and wondered why I wasn’t in my office at 11 a.m. on a Thursday.

  I called Harrington back first, since it was unlikely that talking to either the pediatrician or my mother would result in a paycheck. And I got him on the second ring.

  “City desk. Harrington.” My eyes wandered to the lithograph of the Marx Brothers over my desk. Once, I’d had this idea for a screenplay where Groucho had to solve a murder mystery. Then some guy actually started writing Groucho Marx detective mysteries. All my best ideas have been used by other people. It can wear you down after a while.

  “Explain to me how you can have a city desk when all you cover is suburbia.”

 
“You’re not starting this again, are you, Aaron?”

  “Just doesn’t make sense, that’s all. There’s no city. What’s the desk for?”

  “Holds paper clips, stuff like that. Without it, I’d just be sitting in a swivel chair with nothing to do.” City editors are damn witty people.

  “How you doing, Dave?” Next to the Marx Brothers lithograph, which my parents had bought me when I was 14 and probably didn’t think I’d keep for 29 years, was a Bullwinkle clock. How would Rocky the Flying Squirrel solve this puzzler? Hell, there were only two criminals in his known universe. If Boris and Natasha hadn’t kidnapped Madlyn Beckwirth, I was out of luck.

  “Not bad. You up for a feature?”

  This was a bit of a surprise. So far, the best I’d gotten out of Harrington had been a business profile on a company that makes lottery tickets. They had made me sign a non-disclosure agreement when I entered the building. Imagine asking a reporter to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It’s my job to disclose things. But, I digress.

  The point is, the lottery company story was just a sidebar, nothing major, since I hadn’t worked with the Press-Tribune very much yet and they didn’t know if they could trust me with something bigger. A feature, a longer piece with better placement, meant more money, and was definitely a step up on the paper’s pecking order.

  “Sure. What’s it about?”

  “It’s an investigative piece.” Harrington’s voice sounded funny, and I don’t mean ha-ha funny. “Woman from your town went and got herself missing and her husband thinks the cops aren’t looking into it enough.”

  Wow. And it’s only a five-minute car-ride from Beckwirth’s house to mine. If I hadn’t stopped at the supermarket for a gallon of one-percent milk, I’d probably have gotten Dave’s call live. That Beckwirth sure moved fast for a guy consumed with worry.

  “Madlyn Beckwirth?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  I groaned. “I’m incredibly intuitive. Who gave you this piece, Dave? Who mentioned my name? It wasn’t your idea, was it?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. I got it from the exec editor maybe ten minutes ago. Funny, because I’ve been talking you up for weeks, trying to get you something better, and today they ask for you by name.”

  Beckwirth must have walked straight out of the room with me, picked up a phone, and called Harrington’s publisher. Money knows money. The rest of us are from Central Casting.

  “It figures. What does your exec want me to do?”

  “The way I hear it, he wants you to forget the cops and find the wife. Apparently the guy thinks she’s been kidnapped, even though he has no note, no phone call, nothing from any supposed kidnappers. And for some reason, he thinks you are Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, and Woodward and Bernstein all rolled up into one. So, you want to write it for us, or what?”

  “What’s the deadline?”

  “I can give you a week.”

  “A week!”

  “Yeah, with a breaking story it would have been less, but I don’t think anybody else has this yet. A week’s as far as I can go.” He actually thought he was giving me a break. In a week, I might find my way back out to my minivan.

  “How much?”

  “Money?”

  “No, how much sour cream fits into Tom Cruise’s swimming pool? Yeah, how much money?”

  “I’ve been told, uh, to go to a thousand dollars.”

  I stared at my headset for a moment. A thousand dollars? That was about five times the average paycheck from a local newspaper.

  “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me, Aaron. You can draw from that whatever conclusions you choose. Now, do you want the story or not?”

  I don’t think well on my feet. And the fact that I was currently sitting down didn’t help.

  “Sure,” I said, idiot that I am.

  Chapter 5

  I called my mother back about an hour later. It took me that long to recover from the shock of my latest journalistic assignment. She was physically well, but emotionally shook up. Apparently the Shop-Rite near her house was selling orange juice after the stamped expiration date, and she had given them hell about it. It was almost on par with the lawn service fertilizer scandal of ’97.

  I still had a couple of assignments with deadlines approaching, and I made phone calls on them until the kids got home. Ethan barreled in first, flinging the front door open, stomping into the house and hanging his backpack on one of the banister rungs currently unoccupied. We run a tidy household around here.

  Normally, I don’t like to brag, mostly because I have so little bragging material when I’m talking about myself. But my son is a different story. He is a remarkably handsome boy, having inherited his mother’s big brown eyes, thank goodness, and her even, pleasant features. He even stood a chance, according to his pediatrician, of achieving something nobody in my family had ever dreamed of—average height.

  Right now, Ethan’s face was expressionless. He was thinking about something other than being home. He didn’t notice me until I hung up the phone. Nobody can ignore you better than an 11-year-old boy. Except maybe a 13-year-old girl, but I’ll get back to you on that in six years.

  “Hey, Skipper. How you doin’?” Best to show them you’re their friend. They can smell fear.

  “Hi, Dad.” Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, like Ethan, tend to have unusual vocal expressions. Some speak with little inflection. Others mumble. Ethan’s voice is unusually high. Nobody knows why.

  Asperger’s is a form of high-functioning autism. The kids speak quite well, compared to more severely autistic children, but their social skills are underdeveloped. They don’t read body language. They don’t understand idioms. They tend to have physical “tics,” or what the experts called “stimming,” which is a way of saying that they flap their arms or continually run their fingers through their hair as a way of getting the physical stimulation they lack in everyday life. They need more sensory input than the average person, and so they create as much of it as they can, wherever they can. But the worst thing is that they don’t really read another person’s tone of voice in a conversation, so they can’t understand sarcasm. It is a huge handicap for a child growing up in my household.

  Ethan was diagnosed with Asperger’s when he started kindergarten, and since then, we’ve attended conferences, enrolled him in a yearlong transitional class between kindergarten and first grade, learned the meaning of an “IEP” (Individualized Education Plan), something that school systems do for children with “special needs,” asked for and gotten an adult aide (called a “para-professional”) to help get him through the school day, and gotten him Occupational Therapy for his slowly developing fine motor skills, and social skills training and speech therapy, so he can learn how to use speech in a conversation. He also takes Ritalin twice a day to help him concentrate, and anybody who thinks we’re unnecessarily medicating our kid can share a week with him with no medication and see what they think when they’re done.

  He is the sweetest 11-year-old on the planet 85 percent of the time. But when the Asperger’s kicks into overdrive and he gets into a dark mood, you’d better give him a wide berth and lock away the sharp objects. An Asperger’s tantrum is like a regular tantrum, but on Jolt! Cola.

  “How’d the day go?” I asked him.

  “Fine.” A tornado could tear through his school, killing half his classmates, and he’d say “fine.” On the other hand, let him lose one Pokémon card he has 14 copies of, and the day is “terrible.” So I’ll take “fine.”

  He took his books out of his backpack and got straight to his homework. Like most kids with autism, Ethan is a creature of ritual. He does his homework as soon as he gets home. Let him wait until later, even a half-hour later, and there will be a scene resembling King Kong’s rampage after the infamous flashbulb incident. Ritual can be good.

  By this time, Leah had also made it home. She goes to a so-called primary school. In a year, she’ll begin attending
Ethan’s elementary school. She gets to and from school on a bus. When the bus lets her off in the afternoon, she walks the two doors down from the corner “all by herself,” since she is now, at seven, officially “a big girl.”

  When Leah enters a room, she takes it over through sheer force of personality. This afternoon, she slammed the door behind her, hung up her backpack on the last remaining banister hook, and smiled. “Hi, Daddy.” She need do no more—that child has me wrapped around all ten of her fingers and a number of her toes. I have extracted from her a solemn agreement that she always call me “Daddy,” no matter how old either one of us gets. In return, I have agreed never to call her “Pussycat” in front of her friends. I got the better end of the deal on that one.

  Leah is a peanut—in the fifth percentile for height in her age group. It actually suits her beautifully, since she has raised being cute to an art form, and being small adds to the effect.

  “How’s my girl today?”

  “Good.” See previous observation re: comments on the day. I don’t think she’s ever said anything except “good.” A couple of times she’s come home in tears, and when I asked how the day had been, she said, “good.”

  She was already working away on her homework when I forced her to come over and give me a hug. Leah hugs are renowned in my family as the best hugs in the Western Hemisphere, and they are a highlight of any day. She certainly wasn’t getting away without one today.

  Once they were busily ensconced in homework, I decided I’d better get to work on what I had decided to call the Beckwirth story. Calling it “the Beckwirth case” would have been just too Jim Rockford. I started by calling Ladowski in his law office—not the borough office—and telling him that I was investigating. He tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the smirk out of his voice. He also filled me in on some of the details.

  He said Gary Beckwirth had been a web specialist for a brokerage house in “The City” (nobody in New Jersey ever actually says “New York”) until hitting on exactly the right dot com to invest in and make himself a pile of money. At the age of 46, he was handsome and rich, but I had to work for him anyway.