It occurred to me to point out that racial profiling was something done to ferret out drug dealers, operating under the racist assumption that non-whites are more likely than whites to be drug dealers. But the police in Midland Heights spend roughly 98 percent of their time giving out speeding tickets in a town whose speed limit never exceeds twenty-five miles per hour. As far as I knew, even the Grand Wizard of the KKK didn’t believe that being a member of a minority group made one more likely to drive forty miles per hour.
Still, I needed information from this woman, and engaging in a debate probably wouldn’t help me get it. “So she didn’t call the cops. Did Madlyn do anything else about the phone calls?”
“Well, she tried to ‘star-sixty-nine’ them, you know, but it was always out of the coverage area. And Gary wanted her to buy a gun, but she said they scared her.”
“You think whoever made those calls is responsible for Madlyn’s disappearance?”
Tears began to form in the corners of Rachel Barlow’s eyes. They appeared to be real. “I think they killed her,” she said softly.
Chapter 12
Some expressions sound exactly like what they mean. In my case, “in over my head” was precisely what I was. This is not a height joke. I was now operating in clearly alien territory, and most probably hostile territory as well. Everything I was doing, breathing included, had become a conscious and calculated effort.
Rachel Barlow, of course, was completely obsessed with her own self-importance. That was the only explanation for her thinking that someone would kill Madlyn Beckwirth because she was doing too good a job running her campaign for mayor. In a town whose main claim to fame is the only kosher Dunkin’ Donuts store in the country, even Ted Bundy wouldn’t kill someone over who the next mayor would be.
Over Rachel’s embarrassed blubbering, I made my apologies and left. I hadn’t brought the car, since I hadn’t gotten to the Y again that morning, and had decided instead to walk wherever it was necessary to go in town.
That’s probably why I noticed right away the blue minivan following me. If you’re in a car, it’s hard to tail somebody on foot. Only in suburban New Jersey would it never occur to someone trying to properly tail a pedestrian to first park his car.
This particular motorist kept his minivan far enough back that I couldn’t see into the driver’s seat, so my using “his” in this sentence was strictly conjecture. And I couldn’t very well turn around and take a good look, or he’d know I was on to him and peal away, leaving me with no chance at my first unambiguous clue in the case. So I kept walking, but I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket and called Barry Dutton. Marsha answered the phone, and I told her it was important. Dutton immediately picked up.
“What’s going on?”
“There’s a guy in a blue minivan, I think a Plymouth, following me on East Second Avenue.”
“What are you driving, the minivan or the car?”
“I’m on foot.”
“You’re on what?”
“Feet. In my case, often used along with the adjective ‘flat.’”
“You’re telling me that you’re walking through Midland Heights and somebody’s following you in a car?”
“You didn’t get to be chief of police just because you’re handsome, did you, Barry?”
He made a sound like a balloon slowly dying. “How fast is this guy driving if he can stay behind someone on foot?”
“Maybe he’s just worried about getting a ticket from the Midland Heights cops. I hear you guys are racially profiling speeders.”
The sigh turned into a groan. “Rachel Barlow?”
“Just spent the morning with her. It was swell. She offered me coffee four times. By the way, she also thinks Madlyn’s been murdered.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t get all atwitter over Rachel Barlow’s crime-fighting instincts. Let’s stay focused on your, um, alleged assailant there. You sure he’s following you?”
“Barry, there’s nobody else on the street, and this guy is staying behind me by driving three miles an hour. Either he’s thinking of buying all the property on East Second, or he’s following me. What should I do?”
“Can you get a license plate?”
I tried a sideways glance. “I don’t want to let on that I know he’s there. Should I stop and look?”
“You don’t have a mirror, do you?”
“Oh yeah, let me whip out my compact.”
Barry’s balloon let some more air out. He was clearly wondering if he should actually help me escape. “If you didn’t know he was there, you’d be even stupider than he is. Stop and look.”
So I stopped and looked. And of course, that was the moment the minivan decided to take off at 60 miles an hour in the direction of Park Street.
“Was that sound I just heard the minivan accelerating at a great rate of speed?” Barry asked.
“Lord, you are a great detective, Chief. It was too hard for me to get the whole plate, but I got Thomas-Victor-seven. And there can only be one minivan doing sixty through this town’s streets. Maybe one of your crack officers can track down this dastardly villain.”
“Maybe. But only if he’s black.”
“I thought you had to say African-American.”
“I am African-American! I can say ‘nigger’ if I want to! Aaron, get over here as fast as your little white feet can carry you, okay?”
“Gotcha, you racist. I’m five minutes away.”
“And Aaron?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t call me Chief.”
Chapter 13
Gerry Westbrook was already in Dutton’s office when I got there, wearing a tie that looked exactly like the Formica top of a diner table from the ‘50s. I’m pretty sure there was a shirt under it, of a clashing pattern, but the tie was so wide, it was hard to tell. Westbrook had last seen the inside of a clothing store when John Travolta was staging his first comeback.
I figured the best way to deal with Westbrook was to ignore him, so I spoke directly to Barry. “Did your guys find the minivan?”
“In this town, you want us to find one minivan?” Dutton smiled. Westbrook scowled, probably because I hadn’t offered to polish his detective’s shield when I came in.
“You’re telling me you couldn’t find. . .”
“We found it,” Barry said. “The plates are stolen. We’re tracking the ID number. And the van was empty when we got to it.” Dutton sat back in his chair and every once in a while flipped his eyes toward Westbrook, trying to remind me to include him in the conversation.
“Did you find anyone suspicious walking nearby?”
“Gee, Tucker, you gonna tell us how to do our jobs now?” Westbrook decided that if I wasn’t going to include him, he’d include himself. As usual, he did so with the subtlety of a tank battalion.
“Yeah, that’s it, Westbrook. I’m not concerned about someone following me down the street with possible intentions of harming me. No. What I’m worried about is hurting your feelings. Always a top priority.”
“When you have twenty years in on this job, Tucker. . .”
“I’ll be about six grades above you, Westbrook.”
“You little. . .”
Barry smacked his hands on his desk, palms down, to silence us, and it worked. He stood up, glaring at both of us.
“Do I have to separate you two, and write on your report cards that you don’t play well with others?”
“Sorry, Barry,” I mumbled. I thought of looking at my shoes for a while, but decided that would be too over-the-top.
“Chief,” said Westbrook. It was hard to know what that meant. I considered telling Westbrook not to call Barry “Chief,” but decided that might not be what Barry had in mind about getting along, and all that. I stayed quiet.
“Here’s what we have,” Dutton continued. “We have a missing woman who hasn’t contacted her family in a week. We have a husband who’s not exactly cooperative. We have speculation that the woman�
��s disappearance might be tied to the Rachel Barlow campaign for mayor. We have a blue minivan with stolen license tags following a private citizen down the street for no apparent reason.”
I interrupted. “Rachel Barlow also told me that Madlyn had been getting threatening phone calls, from outside the Verizon coverage area, for a few weeks before she disappeared. That sound familiar?”
“If you hadn’t interrupted,” Dutton added with the trace of a gleam in his eye, “I was about to say that we have all those things I listed, plus a call to your home the other night, Aaron, from the cellular phone of a Mr. Arthur P. MacKenzie of Emmaus, Pennsylvania.”
I searched my brain, taking in the information. “Who the hell is Arthur P. MacKenzie of. . . where?”
“Emmaus, Pennsylvania.”
“Emmaus? Sounds like a cyber-rodent.”
“Come on, tell the truth,” Dutton said. “You just needed the time to think up that joke, didn’t you?”
“No, I honestly can’t think of an Arthur MacKenzie. Why in God’s name would he call me up and threaten me?”
“The very question we’ll ask when we get the Pennsylvania State Trooper to go out and talk to him,” Westbrook said.
I immediately decided that was a bad idea, but I couldn’t be sure if I thought that just because it was Westbrook’s. I looked at Dutton.
“Barry,” I said, “could we maybe keep the Pennsylvania boys out of it for the time being? We don’t really know what we’re looking for, and a trooper at the door is going to scare off this MacKenzie guy before we find out anything.”
Barry’s eyes narrowed. “Well, I can’t spare Westbrook to drive all the way out to Pennsylvania. You know, someone else might commit a crime while he was gone. Not to mention the travel voucher that the new mayor, if she’s elected, might consider a waste of the taxpayer’s money.”
“I was thinking maybe I’d go myself,” I said.
Westbrook snorted.
“What was that, Gerry?” I said. “I couldn’t hear you over your tie.”
Westbrook started to tell me what an ass I was making of myself, sticking my nose in police business and all those other clichés he was undoubtedly ready to trot out. But Dutton was too fast for him.
“You really want to drive all the way out there to see a man who made what could be construed as a threatening call to your house? Without a police backup?” He seemed surprised when I grinned at him.
“I don’t need the police,” I told Barry. “I’ve got a rental-car mechanic.”
Chapter 14
“I should get my head examined,” Mahoney said. We were tooling down the highway in his rental car van—he calls it “The Trouble-Mobile,” and refers to himself as “Chief Troubleshooter” for the rent-a-car guys. Sorry, but I’m not allowed to mention the name of the company. But remember the last time you rented a car, and they couldn’t find the two-door sedan you had reserved two months in advance? It’s them.
“Why a head examination now,” I asked. “You getting that bad dandruff again?”
“No, because I let you talk me into driving out to some hick town in Pennsylvania to get shot at by a guy who likes to make phony phone calls to freelance writers.”
“Yeah, if he’d just stuck with ‘do you have Prince Albert in a can’, we’d all be better off,” I said. “But nobody said you had to come.”
“Abby did. She said if I didn’t protect you, she’d never let me forget it when your body was discovered.”
I sighed. “Abby spent three years working in the county prosecutor’s office,” I told him. “She’s seen too much crime.”
“Well, she married you, didn’t she?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d let it go.”
We drove in silence for a while because we had obviously hit a valley in the wit department. Mahoney stuck an Electric Light Orchestra eight-track into the “Trouble-Mobile’s” tape-deck. He insists that eight-track is a misunderstood technological miracle, that having four program tracks makes it easier to hear your favorite song fifty-seven times during a four-hour drive, and that outweighs any acoustical inferiority. Of course, he disputes the acoustical inferiority as well, saying that “it’s just numbers the guys in Hifi Magazine make up. You can’t hear it.” Maybe he should skip the rest of his head and get just his ears examined.
What he laments is how hard it is to get eight-track cassettes of recently recorded music. Since he doggedly sticks to that ancient audio format, we are therefore stuck, when in his vehicle, with music that at best was current when we were in high school. A lot of the tapes, of course, have worn or broken, so there are what Mahoney calls “flat spots,” where the music is interrupted by scotch tape and 8-millimeter movie splices (Mahoney doesn’t believe in videotape, either).
So Jeff Lynne and ELO sang most of “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” as we made our way west, over the “Trenton Makes—the World Takes” Bridge into Pennsylvania. It could have been worse, I guess. Mahoney could have gotten stuck on Quadraphonic sound.
By the time we passed a sign reading “Welcome to Emmaus,” ELO had gotten through “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” four more times, and they were currently halfway through the “Concerto for a Rainy Day,” crooning out lyrics I actually claimed to understand for a week in college after my sophomore year girlfriend dumped me. Might have been the tequila, but I digress.
Being an up-to-the-minute 21st century technologist, I consulted my MapQuest directions to the home of Arthur P. MacKenzie, who all evidence suggested had called me a few nights ago and said that Madlyn Beckwirth would be dead if I kept looking for her. After a couple of wrong turns precipitated by Mahoney’s refusal to turn down one of his favorite songs—“Mr. Blue Sky”—we pulled into the driveway of a rather large, lonely ranch-style house with a backyard that looked like it easily took up three acres. By Midland Heights standards, this was (the Beckwirth estate excepted) the largest piece of property in the world.
The house itself was unremarkable except for a greenhouse, attached to a back room, that jutted out from the house at a 90-degree angle. Not the kind of thing you generally see in suburban Pennsylvania, but not horribly unusual, either. MacKenzie clearly liked his flowers. The greenhouse had no broken windows, and the open skylights on either side of the structure indicated that the owner kept it active. Perhaps this was where he hatched his evil plots, cultivating orchids, while he planned to abduct helpless housewives and thereby take over the world when husbands were left to do the laundry. I dismissed this idea, since I already do the laundry at my house.
We had decided that, on this visit, Mahoney would stay back, out of the way, and observe. If I looked like I was getting into trouble, he’d advance, but otherwise, we’d make it look like I was here alone. Before I rang the doorbell, Mahoney trudged off to one side of the gravel driveway. The crunch of the gravel made me wince. I hoped MacKenzie’s hearing wasn’t acute.
As Mahoney ducked around the side of the house, I pushed the doorbell button and started to open the storm door. It was still too early to take out the glass and put in the screen. Could get cold again any day now. In fact, this evening was getting a bit chilly, and I was glad I had brought my jacket.
The front door took its sweet time opening, and eventually revealed a tall, thin, elderly man with enough bearing to be minor royalty. Forget Ian Wolfe or John Gielgud. If I ever needed someone to play a butler, this gentleman would be exactly the right choice. I couldn’t dismiss the possibility, though, that MacKenzie could afford a butler. On the other hand, most people in this neighborhood couldn’t afford a greenhouse, and I was willing to bet that the majority of them didn’t threaten people’s lives on the telephone. So who was I to judge?
“Hello,” he said, with a question in his voice. The voice itself was a little rheumatic, but otherwise he appeared to be in perfect shape. I should look so good when I’m 103 years old.
“I’m looking for Arthur P. MacKenzie,�
�� I said, in my best gruff voice. When you’re 5’5” (I was doing my intimidating stance, and my calf muscles were feeling it), a gruff voice, however incongruous, is your first line of defense.
“Yes?” he said. Maybe the old guy wasn’t as healthy as he seemed. The hearing was definitely going.
I spoke up a little more, but fell down on my heels. I wasn’t intimidating him anyway. I was just pissing him off. “I’m looking for Arthur P. MacKenzie,” I came close to shouting.
“Yes?” Ah. Not deafness. Alzheimer’s. A shame.
“Is Mr. MacKenzie home?” I just about screamed.
He looked at me with a mixture of pity and aggravation. “Yes, he is,” the old man said. “I’m Arthur MacKenzie.”
There was nothing else to do. I signaled for Mahoney to come out from around the corner.
Chapter 15
Arthur P. MacKenzie was as surprised by the reason we were there as we were at finding out he was Arthur P. MacKenzie. He offered us hot coffee, which Mahoney accepted, and served it in the greenhouse, where MacKenzie had been working when we arrived. Vivaldi played on a stereo system he had set up in the large structure, with speakers situated strategically throughout the room. The plants were getting very clear, very well amplified musical nourishment. MacKenzie was, among other things, about six decibels off of deaf. But the sound system, it had to be noted, was quite a step up from “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” in Mahoney’s “Trouble-Mobile.”
We spoke up and over “The Four Seasons” to be heard.
“This is your phone number, isn’t it, Mr. MacKenzie?” I showed him the police printout that Dutton had given me. Verizon clearly showed the number of the call at exactly dinner time on the evening in question. I hadn’t received a phone call for an hour before or after, so there wasn’t any way to make a mistake.
For Whom the Minivan Rolls Page 6