For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,30
my suspicion of Joel Beckwirth, and made me wonder what it was his father was trying to hide. Probably a secret stash of plastic squeeze bottles in the basement, along with copies of “Catcher in the Rye” written entirely in condiments.
At this point, I decided that since every other single thing I could think of doing was more pressing, I’d work on my latest screenplay.
I’ve been writing movie and TV scripts since high school, when Mahoney and I filmed three epics: “Unseen Enemy,” a war movie in which we had only enough actors for one side (Mahoney refers to it as “Unseen Enema”—I counter with the fact that if you can see an enema, they’re not doing it right); “House Of Halvah,” which we billed as “the world’s first (and hopefully last) detective/horror/musical/comedy”; and “Marriage Contract,” the story of a guy who hires a hit man to almost kill his girlfriend, so he can rescue her and impress her so much she’ll agree to finally marry him.
I’ve been a movie freak since my parents took me to see Pinocchio when I was four. Because I knew I couldn’t act, but could write, screen-writing has been a professional goal since I was roughly nine. Mahoney saw it as a hobby. I thought of it as a career path. We spent a few thousand dollars making those three movies, and were in pre-production on “Far Trek,” our science fiction epic, when Mahoney had to go get married and spoil everything.
After college, I began writing screenplays with an eye towards actually selling one. I’ve written 22 now, and still have the same eye. Hollywood, in my opinion, is just playing incredibly hard to get.
Comedies, dramas, westerns, sci-fi’s, fantasies, and romances have all come tumbling out of my printer. One actually made it as far as a three-year option from a very, very big production company (no names, but a frog’s involved), but ended up being returned to its original owner (that’s me) unproduced.
Writing my latest screenplay, the story of a doctor who falls in love with a woman who ages only one year for every ten she lives, was proving to be a struggle. I was aiming for romantic comedy, but the characters, those vicious little scamps, kept turning serious on me, and I was afraid I’d end up with an unhappy ending. To a writer who’s “new” in Hollywood parlance (despite 20 years of experience), a dark curtain-closer would be the kiss of death. That is, unless you’re selling to the New York independent film crowd, who love unhappy endings, but then everybody in the movie would have to wear black and live in converted warehouse space, and at least one of the main characters would have to be a heroin addict. I wasn’t sure I could write that.
Anyway, I began as I always do, by re-reading what I’d written the day before, and had fingers poised over my keyboard when Milt Ladowski called. He was in his high-priced office, you could tell, since a secretary came on first, asking me to hold for Mr. Ladowski. Mr. Ladowski, after all, couldn’t be bothered taking sixteen seconds out of his life to talk to an answering machine, had I not been in.
“How’s the Beckwirth investigation going, Aaron?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “Mr. Tucker’s in the john right now. If you’ll hang on a moment. . .” I took the cordless phone into the bathroom and flushed.
“Very amusing, Aaron.”
“Amusing, hell. I had shredded wheat for breakfast.”
Milt allowed a long silent period to destroy our fastpaced and sparkling repartée. No doubt he was trying to figure out how to bill Beckwirth for the conversation.
“Beckwirth, Aaron. What’s going on with Beckwirth?”
“Milt, your client and close friend is tying my hands. He wants me to perform the ceremonial wife dance and have her fall into his arms from the sky. He won’t let me talk to his son, he won’t give me his phone records or his credit card bills, and he won’t tell me anything about his marriage, other than it is blissful as all get-out. Now you tell me, how do you think the Beckwirth investigation is going?” I put my feet up on the desk and waited. It was fun letting somebody else worry about this thing for a while.
“This isn’t good, Aaron. Gary’s expecting me to call him with progress.” I could picture Ladowski’s pinched face frowning behind his $6,000 desk. Luckily, I could focus my mind’s eye on the desk.