For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,17
my case). In admiration for his personal integrity, I took off my shoes and spent the rest of the evening in my stocking feet. Strangely, neither of us ever heard again from our prom dates. Women, we theorized, just didn’t understand codes of honor.
Now, Mahoney was six-foot-three and built roughly like that big hunk of rock that confounds everybody in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Needless to say, during our little home maintenance chore, he was concentrating on the upper hinge of the door, while I knelt down to deal with the lower one. We each had a cordless screwdriver. I found this amusing, since I’ve never seen a corded screwdriver.
“I’m stuck,” I said.
“What, did the shims come out?”
“No. On the story.” Mahoney works as a mechanic for one of the larger car rental agencies at Newark International Airport, and travels around the state fixing their broken-down junk-heaps. He is also a disciple of Bob Vila, so whenever I need to do anything more complicated than change a light bulb in the house, he gets a call. It’s a ritual: I ask him how I should do it, he suggests using a tool I don’t have, and the next thing I know, he’s at my house, “helping” me with the repair, which means I hand him tools while he does the work. Sometimes I actually hand him the proper tools.
“Well, I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would the guy ask you to find his wife, and then stop you from finding her?”
“Maybe it’s a love/hate relationship.”
Mahoney looked down. “No, move a little bit to your left.” I thought my hinge was in exactly the right place, but since he is right about these things roughly 100 percent of the time, I asked no questions, and moved it slightly to the left. “Good. Right there.”
“Maybe he really doesn’t want me to find his wife. Maybe he’s glad she’s gone, but doesn’t want to admit it. Maybe he’s just a rich guy who’s used to having everybody do everything his way, and he doesn’t like me insisting on doing it my way.”
I pressed the button on my cordless screwdriver, but the screw didn’t go in. Sheepishly, I noted that I had the machine set for “reverse.” Changing it, I looked up to see that Mahoney had driven in all three of his screws already.
“Rich people suck,” he said, and laughed. At a much younger age, Mahoney and I, along with three of our friends (these days, they’d be called our “posse”), used to drive around Millburn, Short Hills, and Upper Saddle River, proclaiming that very slogan (“Rich People Suck”) out our car windows at an amplified volume. It was a sentiment that came straight from our hearts. One of those “posse” guys is now a state assemblyman.
“Maybe so, but this particular rich guy is indirectly paying me a grand to find his wife.”
“That’s all?” Mahoney started driving in the screws I wasn’t working on. He wasn’t showing me up. He just does everything better than I do.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s all?’” I said. “That’s like five times what I’d usually get for a newspaper story like this.”
“Hell of a lot less than V.I. Warshawski would take.” Mahoney was a fan of the female detectives. He was especially fond of Kay Scarpetta, the snoopy coroner, and Kat Colorado, the L.A. detective with (surprise) a bad love life. I was more partial to Stephanie Plum, the Trenton-based bounty hunter. She readily admitted not knowing what she was doing.
We stepped back to admire his handiwork. It looked perfect. But when I opened the door to try it, it flew open and almost clocked me in the forehead. I jumped back in alarm while Mahoney practically had a seizure, doubling over in laughter. It’s nice to have a best friend.
“You’ve. . . gotta. . . put on the. . . spring,” he managed between roars of hilarity. I snatched the spring and two O-hooks out of his hand and let him see me measure exactly where on the door jamb I intended to put them.
Mahoney stopped laughing, eventually, and watched me with the eye of a proud teacher. I must have been doing something right.
I made a pencil mark on the jamb at the level of the door’s wooden divider (no sense trying to screw the spring into the screen), and used the drill to make a pilot hole in the wood. Then I attached the spring to the hook and set about screwing the