For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,63

salt shaker you want me to identify? Somebody steal a pack of Sweet’N Low, and you want me to dust it for fingerprints?” He was clearly warming up for a gig at the local comedy club and wanted to try out his new material. But I maintained my Cary Grant-like cool.

“Good,” I said, “you recognize me.”

He managed to suppress his hilarity long enough to bark out, “how could I forget?”

“So maybe you’ll remember this face, too,” I said, and whipped out the picture of Warren Meckeroff. Big Bob stopped laughing for a moment and considered the tiny image.

“Geez, did you bring a. . .” I produced a magnifying glass I had picked up at home. Okay, so this wasn’t exactly the next stop after Meckeroff’s. I had gone home and changed shirts again. Looked like tomorrow was going to be a big laundry day.

“Mm-hmmm. . .” said Big Bob, and he used the sleuth’s best friend to examine the picture.

“He a regular customer of yours?” I asked.

“See, now, bringing a picture was definitely the way to go,” he said. “I don’t get to know their names, but I never forget a face. No sir, when somebody comes in here for the second time, a year could go by, and I’ll remember him—might even remember what he ordered. . .”

It occurred to me that Big Bob being in business for a full year would merit miracle status, but I held my tongue. He did not hold his.

“Yessir, always remember a face. Every face. Big, small, men, women. Some guys remember a woman’s tits. Not me. The face. That I’ll remember every time. Now, names. . .”

“Bob,” I came close to hollering. “Do you know this kid or not?”

He took another long look, and shook his head up and down.

“Nope,” he said. “Never seen him before in my life.”

This was not turning out to be a good day.

Chapter 12

When I whipped the softball across the long, spacious family room, Mahoney just barely managed to stick his hand out and snare it from his armchair. “Watch it,” he said. “You could have knocked out a window or something.”

We began this softball thing in high school. I don’t remember exactly how. Mahoney used to live in the attic of his parents’ house, in a room roughly three times the size of mine. And whenever we needed to solve the problems of the world—which usually involved the seventeen-year-olds we described as “women”—I’d climb up the three flights of stairs to his lair, and we’d toss this old softball back and forth. We never solved any problems, but our hands got surer, and my fielding percentage went up in our after-school pickup games—of softball.

Our first high school softball, Mahoney says, is in a box in his present attic, where, as far as we know, nobody actually lives. It shares that space with our old tripod, some movie lights, a Super 8 sound movie camera for which nobody on this planet makes film anymore, and a deer skull Mahoney found in the woods in 1974, which he named “Elmo.” Don’t ask.

I can’t explain it, but throwing the softball around gets our brains into problem-solving mode, and that is exactly what I needed today. After Big Bob’s, where I ordered a black-and-white milk shake and received a black-and-white ice cream soda, I called Mahoney on the cell phone, intending to leave a message asking if we could meet later. Instead, I got the man himself, since he’d finished his last job of the day a couple of hours early (“the power of being the best at what you do”) and had come home. I said I needed to throw the softball. He said come on over. And here I was. But it wasn’t like the old days. Now Jeff Mahoney, of all people, was worried that I’d break some household item or fixture with an errant throw.

“You afraid Susan will yell at me if I knock over a vase?” (I used the flat “a” pronunciation to show how classy I am.)

“My wife actually likes you,” he countered. “You knock something over, she’ll give you a hug and blame me for the broken glass.”

“Can I help it if I’m irresistible?” I grinned.

“That’s not what Janet Marsden thought,” Mahoney shot back. A painful memory. Old friends know the most about you. They remember how you got all your scars.

“ANYWAY,” I moved on, “I don’t understand anything that’s happened on this story. I have nothing to go on, and everybody’s telling