For Whom the Minivan Rolls (4 page)

Elvis Cole is always making venison for himself and
Lucy Chenier, but his partner, Joe Pike, is constantly crashing the
party, and that means Elvis has to switch to something vegetarian.
So all your big detectives cook. Probably Sherlock Holmes could
make a steak and kidney pie that would knock your eyes out.

I put a large pot of water on to boil. I wasn’t sure
exactly what I was making for the kids, but hot water is the basis
of virtually everything they eat.

One of the problems with Asperger’s kids is that
they tend to have somewhat limited menus. Some will eat the same
thing, at the same time, every day, just like Woody Allen and
Alfred Hitchcock. Others, not being famous filmmakers, are not
indulged quite this completely, and will accept two or three
variations on a theme at any given meal. That’s the way Ethan is.
So my creative choices here were somewhat limited.

I took out some boneless chicken breasts from the
meat compartment of the refrigerator, and in a bowl, mixed matzo
meal, garlic salt, bread crumbs, and onion powder. I cut the
chicken into strips, dredged the strips in the coating mixture, and
made sure each piece was covered completely. Then I got a piece of
aluminum foil, sprayed it with cooking spray, and put it on the top
rack of the oven, which in a triumph of foresight, I had previously
turned on. The chicken went onto the aluminum foil.

That would be for Leah. Ethan wouldn’t hear of a
piece of chicken that wasn’t cooked at Burger King, so I decided
against having the “you’ve-got-to-try-new-foods” argument tonight
and stuck a couple of hot dogs in the broiler. So call the child
welfare people. At least he eats.

Ethan, up in his room with his Nintendo, wouldn’t be
coming down until called, but Leah wandered into the kitchen, bored
with Nickelodeon and looking for someone to talk to.

“Daddy?” She always asked, like she wasn’t really
sure it was me. “I can think of six words that rhyme with
‘bat.’”

“No kidding.” The water was boiling, so I got out a
box of Ronzoni elbow macaroni—the biggest bang for your pasta
buck—and dumped the entire box into the water. Well, okay, it was
just the macaroni. The box I put in the recycling bin under the
sink.

“Yeah. Cat, sat, fat, rat, hat and. . .
um. . .”

I stirred the pasta in the hot water to keep it from
becoming one huge ball of elbow, then put the top back on the pot
and lowered the flame considerably.

“‘Mat’?” I asked, reflexively. Big mistake.

“Daddy! I’m supposed to do it myself!” Leah,
although the most adorable child in the tri-state area, has
developed a whine that could decalcify the spinal column of the
strongest adult. I bent down to look her in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What word were you thinking
of?”

“You used mine!” J’accuse!

Just then the front door opened with its customary
creak and Abigail Stein walked into the house. Her legs still
looked every bit as good after a long day.

“Mommy!” Leah yelled, and ran to the door. She did
her best to take Abigail down in a flying tackle, and came damn
close, but my wife managed to put down her briefcase and drape her
raincoat over the railing on the stairs in time to avoid hitting
the deck.

“Hello, my love,” she said to Leah. “How was your
day?”

“Good.”

Abigail looked at me. “So. Trying to pick up women
at Borough Hall again, huh?”

“I couldn’t resist, Honey. She had these great
legs. . .” I walked over and gave her a welcome home
kiss. Any excuse will do.

“Oh, knock it off. They’re not
that
good.”

Trust me, they are.

The kids had eaten by the time Abby came downstairs.
We long ago gave up on the idea of a nice family dinner during the
week, since for Ethan, eating is merely a quick snack to be gulped
down as quickly as possible between cartoon shows, and Abigail gets
home on the late side for the kids, so there’s no sense in delaying
dinner. They’re dangerous when hungry. On weekends, or the days
when Abby gets home early enough, or when the kids have late
snacks, we eat together.

I was cutting up salad stuff when Abigail walked
into the kitchen, having changed into a pink T-shirt and gray
sweatpants. She frowned, because I was cutting lettuce with a
knife. I frowned, because the sweatpants prevented me from seeing
her legs.

“You know you’re supposed to tear lettuce.” She had
passed both children on the way in, and they were so deep into the
umpteenth rerun of
Hey Arnold
that neither could be bothered
to turn around and talk to her. The thrill of her homecoming, like
every night, had been brief. For them.

“I don’t see how it tastes any different torn, and
this is faster.” She did one of her “you’re-such-a-guy” eye-rolls,
and reached under the counter for a pot, which she filled with
water and put on the stove. I guess she didn’t know what she was
going to cook yet, either.

“So this guy wants you to, what, find his wife?”
Abby squeezed in between me and the countertop to reach up for some
of what we call “the adult noodles.” The flavored pastas we keep in
an upper cabinet. I didn’t make much of an effort to get out of her
way, and she smiled. She knew I liked being squeezed next to
her.

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous. He thinks I’m Mannix or
somebody.”

“God, you
are
old.” She went to work with
some sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, and garlic to make a pasta
sauce that might once have been in a cookbook. Or not. All I know
is, it involves the food processor, which means extra clean-up time
for the kitchen crew, which is mostly me.

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “I could have
made a passing but obscure reference to C. Auguste Dupin.”

“Edgar Allan Poe, right?
The Purloined Letter?
Murders in the Rue Morgue?”
I started slicing two celery
stalks. Abby wrinkled her nose a little. She won’t admit it, but
she doesn’t much like celery. It’s one of the few vegetables I can
claim an edge on.

“Very good. Keep that up, and I’ll make you stay
after school.” I gave her my best Groucho eyebrow-wiggle, but she
was too intent on cooking to swoon.

“So, why exactly does he think that you’re New
Jersey’s answer to Elliot Ness?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. But if it means I’ll
keep running into you in the middle of the day, I don’t really
mind.” The lid on the pot was leaking steam, so Abigail put in the
linguine and lowered the flame.

“Don’t count on it. I’ll be in the office the rest
of the week.” She turned back to face me, and I slipped my arms
around her waist and kissed her.

“This is my favorite part of the day,” I told her. I
spend half my time trying to come up with new ways to tell her I
love her. And we’ve been married 14 years. Disgusting, isn’t
it?

“Well then, anything that would have happened later
tonight would have been a letdown, wouldn’t it?”

“What’s this ‘would have’ stuff?”

“Well, I don’t want to disappoint
you. . .”

I was just about to kiss her again when the phone
rang. Abigail was standing right next to the kitchen wall phone,
but simply stood and looked at me. She refuses to answer the phone
at home, insisting that it’s either a business call for me or
someone she doesn’t want to talk to. Luckily, I wasn’t far from
her, and I reached past her head to pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

The voice was muffled, as if a cloth had been placed
over the mouthpiece, and the caller mumbled, just in case the cloth
wasn’t doing its job properly. The caller was definitely male, but
that’s all I could tell. In fact, I barely made out a sound before
I heard the name “Madlyn Beckwirth.”

“What? What did you say?”

Whoever it was spoke up just a little, as if
irritated by my inability to hear him the first time. “I said you
should leave Madlyn Beckwirth alone. Find her, and you’ll kill
her.”

“Who is this?” Bright question. Like the guy’s going
to just give me his name, address, and social security number while
perpetrating what I was relatively sure was a crime. And there are
people who think I’m a detective. “Hello?”

Click.

I must have been staring at the phone, because Abby
looked at me with concern. Her eyes kept moving from my face to the
receiver in my hand.

“Somebody selling us something?”

I hung up the phone and walked to the kitchen table.
I sat down. Abby walked over, worried now.

“What is it? Who was that?”

“I don’t know. Somebody said that if I find Madlyn
Beckwirth, I’ll kill her.”

“WHAT? What the hell does
that
mean?” She sat
down in another of the kitchen chairs, which creaked. I made a
mental note to tighten the screws under the chairs. Somehow, that
didn’t seem terribly important right now.

“I have no idea. Some guy said I should leave Madlyn
Beckwirth alone, because if I found her, I would kill her.”

“Jesus!” But even then, I could see the legal mind
going to work. She frowned. “Who knows you’re looking for Madlyn
Beckwirth?”

I thought. “Nobody. Gary Beckwirth, Milt Ladowski,
and Dave Harrington. I think we can eliminate Harrington from the
suspects. Beckwirth is desperate for me to find Madlyn, so he
wouldn’t call, and Milt is the one who hired me.”

“Milt Ladowski wouldn’t make a call like that,” said
my wife. “His whole law practice could be ruined if he’s found
making a threatening call.” One of Abby’s few failings is that she
thinks everyone else thinks like her. Nobody would ever do anything
irrational, or not consider the consequences, because she would
never do anything irrational, or not consider the consequences.

“Wait a second. . .” I got up and walked
to the phone, picked it up, and punched *69. If I knew the number
from which my last call had come, I’d be able to
trace. . .

“This service cannot be activated, because the
telephone number is not in our service area.” I hung up. Abby
looked at me with that same concern, as I must have looked
completely baffled.

“What?”

“The call came from outside Verizon’s coverage area.
That means that unless Beckwirth or Ladowski got into a car and
drove west at 80 miles an hour from the moment they last saw me, it
wasn’t either of them.”

Now Abby looked baffled. “So who else knows that
you’re looking for Madlyn Beckwirth?”

“Apparently, somebody who doesn’t want me to find
her.”

The sun-dried tomatoes sizzled on the stove, and
Abby took a moment before walking over to deal with them.

We exchanged tense glances all through dinner.
Fortunately, the kids managed not to crack under the strain,
because
Catdog
was now on.

The next morning, after making lunches and
breakfasts and kissing my wife good-bye and making sure all the
homework was in backpacks and walking Ethan through the ritual of
putting on his shoes and picking up his stuff and putting on his
jacket and walking out the door, (then coming back in to say
good-bye, then forgetting to close the door on the way), and after
putting my daughter on the schoolbus, I walked into Barry Dutton’s
office carrying a Dunkin’ Donuts bag.

“Morning, Chief.”

“Don’t call me Chief!” We laughed at the joke from
the old (and I do mean
old
)
Superman
TV series. We
are both George Reeves fans.

Barry is a year older than me, which would make him
44. He stands about six feet tall, and isn’t fat. I stand
considerably under six feet tall, and I could lose ten pounds.
Okay, fifteen. But we go back a long way, and he doesn’t scare me.
Anymore.

He gestured to the chair in front of his metal desk
(with maple woodtone top, of course), and I walked to it. Before I
sat, though, I opened the bag, carefully checked the two cups, and
gave him the one with the coffee. Light, no sugar. Like it changes
the taste of that stuff at all.

Dutton saw me take another hot cup out of the bag,
and snickered.

“Is that cocoa?”

“We who have taste prefer to call it hot
chocolate.”

“Hot chocolate is two adjectives. You work with
words, you should know that. Hot, chocolate
what?”

I sat down and sighed. “You’re a real pain in the
ass, Barry. You should have been a freelance writer.” He laughed.
The really intelligent people laugh all the time at what I say.

“I assume you’re not here just to buy me a cup of
coffee, are you?” Dutton walked to his desk and sat on the edge. I
shook my head “no,” and then reached into the bag. I took out two
donuts: a regular cruller for me, and for Dutton, a creme-filled
chocolate. His eyes widened. His wife had been after him to lose
weight (like he needed to) for months, and he hadn’t seen a
creme-filled chocolate (you’ll notice they don’t spell it “cream,”
and there’s a reason) since roughly last spring.

“This
is
serious, isn’t it?” He considered,
almost walked away, then picked up the donut and smelled it,
inhaling deeply, a man enthralled. “You know I’m on the
Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, don’t you? I’m not supposed to have
anything like this.”

“You gonna let Donna push you around? Who wears the
gun in your family?”

“Oh, what the hell.” He bit greedily into it, and a
little of the chocolate stuff masquerading as cream squished out
from the hole they put in the donut for exactly that purpose. There
was a low rumble, something like a small earthquake, which I came
to realize was Barry enjoying the donut. He smiled, and sat down in
his swivel chair.

I took a napkin out of the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and
threw it at him. “Here. You got powdered sugar all over yourself,
and you’re going to lose the respect of your men.”

“It’s worth it,” he said. At least, I
think
that’s what he said. He could barely get a sound out through the
mouthful of donut. What actually came out sounded more like “iss
worf id.” With the donut nearly consumed, Dutton’s eyes narrowed,
he swallowed one last time, sat up, and considered me. “You’re
plying me with a donut.”