For Whom the Minivan Rolls (3 page)

“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.

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.

Madlyn, 44, had been a college student when she met
young Gary and fell head over heels. Problem was, every other girl
in the dorm fell head over heels for Gary, too, so she had to make
herself stand out. Madlyn wasn’t the most beautiful girl in the
dorm, or even on that floor, but she made sure she slept with Gary
first, and that had forged a certain kind of loyalty. I guess what
the beer company says is true— you never forget your first girl.
Gary had his flings, but he kept coming back to Madlyn. When he was
22 and in business school, he came back once too often, and Madlyn
got pregnant. They knew all their options, but still chose to go
the old-fashioned route, and got married. Two months later, Madlyn
miscarried.

Bucking the odds, they stayed married, Ladowski
continued. Gary worked, and Madlyn finished her degree in history,
with an eye toward law school. But they didn’t have enough money to
swing the tuition during those years. And by the time they did,
they had a son.

The little Nazi—pardon me, Joel—was born when Gary
was just starting to earn bonuses on Wall Street, and was toilet
trained roughly when his dad was getting into the computer end of
the biz. By the time Joel was in second grade, his father, already
a very rich man, continued to provide venture capital to online
businesses and invested heavily in web-related companies. He had a
good eye for a coming windfall, and generally got himself caught up
in the breeze. He also had the rare ability to know when to get out
before the roof caved in.

Madlyn, meanwhile, was doing the housewife thing,
and happily, according to her husband. She had precipitated the
move to Midland Heights five years ago, just about the time Gary
had hit the online jackpot. She doted on her son, according to
Milt, but couldn’t have any more children because of damage done to
her uterus during Joel’s delivery. In the womb, the kid was already
making sure nobody would have it as good as he had it.

This had gone on for 14 years, until now. Gary was
rich, Joel was rigid, and Madlyn was gone.

If I’d had to guess, my instinct told me she’d tired
of life with Gary and Joel and decided to move on. But who moves on
at two o’clock in the morning on an entirely ordinary Monday?
Nobody in town seemed to know anything about tension in the
Beckwirth house, Milt concluded.

I had to start somewhere, so I decided the first
order of business would be to talk to Joel. Kids see and hear more
around the house than their parents give them credit for. Maybe I
could grill him long enough that he’d have to sweat a trip to the
bathroom. Give him a taste of his own medicine. I’d have to have
Milt call Gary and make sure I could talk to everyone I needed.

First, I called Barry Dutton at borough police
headquarters. Luckily, he knows my name, and took the call. Any
other reporter calling the chief would have gotten the message
taken, and a call-back sometime around seven, when the chief was
done for the day and the reporter, in all likelihood, would be at
home, covering a municipal meeting, or catching a quick dinner.

Dutton was in the middle of something, so I asked if
he’d be around the next morning, and he said he would. I told him
I’d bring the coffee and donuts, and he said to stop making cop
jokes. I didn’t tell him my coffee would be hot chocolate. Ruins
the macho image.

It was just about six, and I had to start thinking
about dinner. I do most of the cooking for the kids, since my wife
is the commuting breadwinner and the kids get hungry early. I’ve
learned, painstakingly, over the years, to make macaroni and
cheese. Out of the blue box. She does most of the cooking for the
adults, since she is a good cook.

That was another reason I couldn’t be a private
investigator. I know about cooking what Dr. Seuss knew about the
Great American Novel—how to do it for kids. You read enough mystery
books, you find that cooking is practically a pre-requisite for a
gumshoe. Spenser cooks for himself and Susan Silverman, usually
something involving lamb and champagne, and they invariably have
sex while the lamb’s in the oven, which is a suggestive image, I
guess. What do you want from a guy with no first name?