For Whom the Minivan Rolls by JEFFREY COHEN

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 hook
into the pilot hole.
    “Hold it,” Mahoney said. I stopped immediately, and
he took the hook out of my hand and removed the spring from the
hook. “Put the spring on after you’ve got the hook in. It’s
easier.”
    I did just that. “Anyway,” I said, trying to regain
a little self-respect, “I don’t care what V.I. would have gotten
for the job. I’m not a detective, and her movie was boring.”
    “Bad script,” said Mahoney. “Kathleen Turner was
good to look at, though.”
    “She generally is,” I agreed, “but the
aforementioned lack of script definitely sunk the movie.”
    “What do you know?” he said, with just the hint of a
twinkle in his eye. “You’re not a detective.”
    The goddam hook wouldn’t get started in the hole,
and I was getting frustrated. “I’m a