For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,43

off the oil—well, some of it, anyway. “Has it got a naked picture of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on it?” He laughed at his own Shavian wit.

“Just take a look, will you?”

Big Bob gave me a very skeptical look, took the burger off the grill, and brought me my lunch. The burger was still bleeding onto the roll. I handed Bob the bottle.

“So?” I asked.

“You’re right!” he marveled. “It is different! It’s. . . it’s. . . it’s barbecue sauce!”

Bob laughed so hard, he practically suffered the heart attack his food had been promising everyone else. He doubled over behind the counter and guffawed himself into a quivering mass.

“All right, all right,” I mumbled. “You don’t have to rub it in.”

When he could finally straighten up again, he leaned on the counter in front of me. “What do you think I do, specially mark each one in case it gets robbed?” he said, still grinning.

I took out the slip of paper with Anne Mignano’s handwriting on it. “Well, how about this, then?” I said. “You recognize any of these kids? They might come in here after school.”

Bob didn’t even bother to look at the paper. “What, you think I know their names?” he said, starting to chuckle again. “You think I’m, like, the local malt shop owner, and when Archie and Jughead and Veronica come in, I call out their names, and they say, ‘hi, Pops!’? Is that what you think?” He started laughing again, and I tried a french fry. It was still cold on the inside.

Bob composed himself again while I contemplated sending my lunch back to the chef with a negative review. “Geez, Mister, you made my day, I gotta tell you,” he said. “Think I’d recognize a squeeze bottle.” Chuckle. I was thrilled to bring a little levity into what must obviously be a drab and dreary life. “What do you want to know for, anyway? You a cop or something?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m not a cop. Or anything.”

I picked up the burger and took a bite. It was barely cooked, and juice dripped down my chin.

“How’s the burger?” Bob asked.

“Perfect,” I said. “Now, where’s the Diet Coke?”

Chapter 25

After eating maybe a third of Big Bob’s elegant repast, I retreated to my office and spent the afternoon wrestling with a love scene, which is the hardest thing to write for a movie. There have been so many such scenes that it’s nearly impossible not to repeat something that’s been done before, and virtually every line of dialogue you can think of sounds like a cliché. But this is the kind of work I desperately want to do, and so I toiled away at it for a couple of hours, writing all of a page and a half, which I’d probably delete tomorrow. Nobody ever accused writers of being rational.

Maybe I wasn’t up to snuff because it was a tad early. Under normal circumstances, I can’t write a word of screenplay before three in the afternoon. I don’t know why. I can know exactly what I’m trying to accomplish as early as ten in the morning, but I can’t bear to bring myself to the keyboard and create something new before that clock hits three. Then, of course, I am wildly inspired, clear in my vision, unbridled in my enthusiasm. And that’s when my kids get home from school. So I periodically try to force myself to write earlier in the day, but it’s never much of a success.

Today, however, I didn’t think that was the problem. The Beckwirth story was invading my mind, and it was hard to concentrate on the fiction I was trying to create. There was something vaguely spooky about the look on Martin and Rachel Barlow’s faces, that eerie laugh when I’d suggested that what Diane Woolworth had heard was true. There was more to it than simple amusement. They were enjoying Madlyn’s predicament. And that didn’t jive, at least for one of them.

I gave up on the love scene because my characters just wouldn’t cooperate. Ungrateful little bastards. You give them life, you name them, you point them toward each other and make their lives interesting, and they repay you by going off on their own and screwing up your plans to exploit them. At least you don’t have to pay their college tuition bills.

Why hadn’t Westbrook called yet? If he’d found something, would he deliberately hold back? If he hadn’t found something, would he deliberately take the rest of