Instead, there were aisles and aisles of nondescript hotel room doors, and they didn’t seem to be numbered in any recognizable pattern, or maybe it was just my level of anticipation. My heart was racing a bit, I was sweating (despite the air conditioning, which brought the hallway to a comfortable Antarctic level), and my mind was reeling. All the way down here in the car, my only thought was to get to Madlyn Beckwirth’s door. Now I was practically there (if I could ever figure out the pattern), and I had absolutely no idea how to proceed beyond knocking.
In my mind’s eye was a picture of me walking into Gary Beckwirth’s living room, more or less carrying his errant wife by the scruff of the neck like a truant child, and depositing her on his incredibly expensive Persian rug. But first I had to persuade the elusive Mrs. Beckwirth to return, since I had no intention (nor, in all likelihood, ability) to force her physically. And Madlyn had sounded on the phone very much like someone who was not in any hurry to come home.
If I were Elvis Cole, I could just get Joe Pike to stand guard at the door, and if Madlyn got past me and tried to run out, he could give her a casual forearm to the forehead and we’d both carry her (or Joe could sling her over his shoulder) to the car and drive her home, all the while philosophizing about how a woman’s place is with her husband and child, and how we sometimes had to bend the rules a little to suit our own unique moral code.
But I wasn’t Elvis Cole. I wasn’t even Nat “King” Cole, and I’ll bet he would have had a better plan to get Madlyn out of the room, even if he has been dead since the 1960s. Anyone who could sing “The Ballad Of Cat Ballou,” “Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer,” and “Mona Lisa” all in one career was clearly a man of broad and varied talents.
Lost in these deep and helpful thoughts, I flinched a bit when I looked up and saw the number “2203” to my immediate left. Through sheer chance, I had found the correct room. Great. Now all I had to do was formulate a plan, convince Madlyn Beckwirth to come with me, and then figure out how in the name of Ferdinand Magellan to get back to the elevators. Maybe I should have stopped at the $6.99 all-you-can-eat buffet for some bread crumbs to drop.
I had gotten this far without a plan, so I decided to proceed without a plan, and raised my hand to knock on the door. But I froze. Suppose someone else was in there with Madlyn. I mean, suppose someone else was in there, you know, with Madlyn. I guess that’s why God invented knocking, so he’d have time to find his pants. The guy with Madlyn, I mean, not God.
On the second try, I managed to get my knuckle to make physical contact with the door. What I didn’t expect was that the door would actually open inward, and that made me take a step back in surprise. It had been left open a crack, like Cary Grant used to do when he was expecting room service and couldn’t be bothered to walk across the room to answer the door. Maybe there was somebody in there with Madlyn.
I knocked on the open door again, which is not terribly easy to do—you have to reach. It’s especially hard to knock loudly, but that’s exactly what I did, bruising a knuckle or two in the process.
“Um. . . Mrs. Beckwirth?” I called inside.
It had that feel to it. A room in which there are no people. I don’t know how you can tell, but you can. I took a step inside. It wasn’t dark—the room-darkening curtains were open. There was a very nice view of the Boardwalk, and the beach and ocean beyond. Must have cost a considerable amount, this room.
Another few steps inside and I could see the whole suite. It was extremely well appointed, with understated carpeting, and real wood furniture. In addition, there was a sitting room, where a TV armoire was open, a coffee table in front of the overstuffed sofa and two armchairs, and French doors leading out to a veranda, where there was a table and two wire chairs.
In the bedroom was a walk-in closet, whose door was also open. There was virtually nothing inside—just empty hangers. Even in this high-priced suite, they were the kind of hangers you can’t take off the closet bar. Some companies don’t trust anybody. A table and two chairs sat next to the other set of French doors, and brilliant sunshine was streaming into the room and onto the huge king-size bed.
On the bed was Madlyn Beckwirth. She was dressed in a very short black lace teddy that I would have recognized from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, had I been the type who reads such things. Under different circumstances, she might have looked quite appealing in it, but it was hard for me to summon that mental image right now.
From what I could tell, she had been shot twice—once in the stomach, which had bled considerably, and then once in the head. Whoever shot her had been aiming for her forehead and missed. The wound was through her left cheek, and had taken a considerable amount of the back of her head off. I’m no detective, but I could tell from all the way across the room that she was dead.
There are times in your life when your mind reacts to events in ways totally opposite to the way you would hope. These are times you bury in the back of your memory, but they resurface periodically, just to remind you that you are a dreadful, shameless creature barely worthy of the name “human.”
For me, this was one of those times. My first thought on seeing Madlyn laid out on the bed, gut-shot, murdered, her young life wasted, was, “this is going to make one helluva great screenplay.”
Chapter 3
After a few seconds, I was able to regain my senses, and that’s when reality set in. My hands started to shake, and a cold sweat appeared on my forehead. I forced myself to look away from the bed to avoid vomiting on a crime scene.
The first thing that always occurs to me when I’m in a difficult situation is to call Abigail. Luckily, that made superb sense in this case, since my wife is an attorney, and a former criminal attorney at that. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out the cell phone, hit “redial,” and prayed she hadn’t left the office yet.
Abby has caller ID on her office phone, so she could see the number of my cell phone before she picked up the phone. “I swear, I’m on my way out the door,” she said in lieu of a greeting.
“Actually I’m glad you’re still there,” I told her. “I have a situation.”
The smile left her voice. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Room 2203 of Bally’s Casino Hotel, and Madlyn Beckwirth is here. She’s dead.”
Abby had once told me, in another context, that a lot of people go to hotels to commit suicide. “Suicide?” she asked.
“Not unless she found a way to shoot herself in the belly and the head and then throw the gun out the window before she died.”
“Jesus,” my wife offered.
“So, what do I do now?” I asked her.
Lawyer-Mode clicked in—even though she hadn’t done criminal work in years—and Abby’s voice dropped an octave. “Have you called the Atlantic City police?”
“I haven’t called anybody yet. I called you. The police may think my behavior a bit suspicious. The door to her room was slightly open, but I did push my way in. And I didn’t let Barry or Westbrook know in advance I was coming here to get her. I don’t think they would have approved.”
Abby sucked in on her front teeth, her way of indicating to me that I was being a moron. “You’ve seen too many Hitchcock movies, Aaron. Don’t worry about what seems suspicious. Nobody’s going to think you killed Madlyn. You don’t have a motive. But think about everything you’ve done since you entered the room. Did you move anything, touch anything, do anything that would disturb the scene?”
I had already replayed the past two minutes in my head about fifteen times. “I pushed the door open. My hand might have brushed the table, you know a side. . . what’s the word?”
“A sideboard.”
“Right. Sideboard, in the hall, on my way in. Besides that, I haven’t touched anything.”
“Look down,” Abby said. “Did you step in, you know, anything?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. If there had been blood on the rug, would I have seen it? I didn’t want to look, but
now I had no choice. I examined the carpet from the door to the spot in which I was standing.
“No. I didn’t step in anything.” There was a faint “beep” in the phone. “I’m going to lose you in a second, Abby. The battery’s running out. . .”
“Don’t worry. Go down into the lobby and get casino security. The state has troopers who work in the casinos, and they’ll deal with this.
I’ll call Barry Dutton and let him know what’s going on. Tell the troopers everything you know. And Aaron. . .” “Yeah, Baby?” “It’s okay. I love. . .” The battery on the goddam phone died.
Chapter 4
The state troopers assigned to casino security were, as Abby had predicted, completely uninterested in me after confirming a few things with Barry Dutton. Their lack of interest, however, didn’t stop them from keeping me for three hours. They took me to a bare office in the bowels of the hotel and did the usual checks on my driver’s license to make sure I was who I said I was (who else would want to be me?), questioned me a couple of hundred times about how I’d come to be there, went over my phone conversation with Madlyn to the point where I could recite it in my sleep, and determined beyond a shadow of a doubt (never mind how) that I didn’t have a firearm in my possession.
Unfortunately, all this took time, and they had called Gary Beckwirth almost immediately upon my reporting the murder. So by the time they were done talking to me, Gary was sitting in the security waiting room, waiting his turn to be questioned. He was on a metal folding chair—the hotel, which had blown its budget on wallpaper and crystal chandeliers in the casino, had spared considerable expense in its security section. It had the curious effect of reminding me how Jews, when we are mourning, sit on the least comfortable things we can find to remind us of our loss.
I had to walk right past Gary to get to the door. But he didn’t cause the scene I was expecting. He didn’t leap out of his chair, burst into tears, and accuse me of killing his wife. He didn’t scream that I had botched my job and led violent criminals to his defenseless spouse’s bed. He didn’t even take a swing at me. What he did was worse.
Gary Beckwirth watched me walk through that room, never taking his dead, expressionless eyes off me. Milt Ladowski was sitting next to him, and Milt stood when he saw me. But Gary never acknowledged my presence other than to stare unblinking into my face the whole time we were in the same room. I wondered where Joel was, and whether he cared that his mother was dead.
I walked over to Milt, who offered me his hand.
“Aaron.”
I gently shook Milt’s hand, and tried to avoid looking at Gary. “We need to talk,” I said, with an exaggerated sense of urgency in my voice.
Milt nodded. “I’ll call you when we’re. . . through here.”
I couldn’t avoid it. I had to talk to Gary, too. I stepped to the side, in the square-dance move you make when you’re proceeding down a receiving line. Gary did not stand up, but he kept staring at me.
“Gary, I’m so sorry.” For once, I wouldn’t have minded if he’d stood up and hugged me.
Instead, he stared. That’s all. Just those big matinee-idol eyes, devoid of any feeling, only beginning to understand the hole left in his life, staring. At me.
“Don’t be,” he rasped, and then turned away. He sat with his chin resting on his fist, like Rodin’s “Thinker,” but it wasn’t a comical pose. It was the position of a man who literally couldn’t hold his own head up without assistance.
I nodded back at Milt, and walked out of the casino as quickly as I could without running.
Facing a two-hour drive in the dark, I plugged the cell phone into the cigarette lighter in the car, but I didn’t need to talk at this point. I needed to think. I’d just spent hours talking to the police, and that hadn’t gotten anybody anywhere.
I can’t listen to music while I’m thinking, so I kept the cassette player turned off. A.J. Croce would have to wait until I was in a less stressful situation. He plays a nice piano, but he couldn’t help me figure out what had happened.
The facts were easy to recite. The hard part was discerning what they meant. Madlyn Beckwirth had left her house in the middle of the night a week and a half ago, apparently of her own accord. Her neighbor may or may not have seen her hit by a minivan, but she certainly wasn’t injured seriously, since she was able to call me and ask me to leave her alone a mere ten days later.
Somehow, she had made it to Atlantic City, checked into an expensive hotel room, and charged the whole thing to Milt Ladowski. Where she’d gotten clothes or money, if she had indeed left with just the T-shirt and shorts she slept in, as Gary had said, was anybody’s guess. All I knew for sure was that she had called me this afternoon, sounding quite healthy, and asking to be left alone. But I hadn’t left her alone. I had come looking for her, and now she was dead.
It was just like the guy on the phone had said: I found Madlyn, but I found her dead. In some way, I must have contributed.
Guilt is instilled in my people pretty much at the start of our lives—probably through cells or DNA or something like that. If we can figure out some, even far-fetched, way we’re responsible for the bad stuff that happens in life, we root it out, or die trying. But in this case, I didn’t have to look very hard. I had taken on an investigation I knew I was ill-equipped to conduct. Oh sure, I’d protested myself blue in the face, but I’d agreed to do it, for the money and for the personal challenge. I had dismally failed the test.
Having worked myself into this state, it was now easy to wallow in it. Before I made it into Mercer County, I had convinced myself I was responsible for Madlyn’s death, Joel’s future psychotherapy bills, Gary’s inevitable lonely life, Ethan’s alienation from his classmates, Abby’s having to live in an income level beneath that of most of her friends, and Leah’s inability to rhyme more than four words with “cat.” If the ride got any longer, I might throw in the Johnstown Flood and the Bombay Bread Riots.
What was missing from this internal soliloquy was any concern for Madlyn Beckwirth. By all reports a decent and loving woman of less than 45, she was lying on a cold slab in the Atlantic County medical examiner’s office, awaiting transport back to Midland Heights for burial, after some pretty extensive cosmetic work was done or a closed casket was ordered.
Once I realized I was worried more about my own role than Madlyn’s death, I made a point of feeling guilty about that, too.
But, wait a second! I hadn’t pulled the trigger. If, as I suspected, somebody had been playing me for a fool the whole time, and I had played the role perfectly, I had to find out who was doing the manipulating. There was an awfully good chance it was the same person—or people—who had killed Madlyn Beckwirth.
And there were plenty of suspects. Why was Milt Ladowski’s name on Madlyn’s hotel bill? If Madlyn was having an affair in that hotel with someone, and Gary found out about it, could it have driven Gary crazy enough to do this to her? Wouldn’t he more likely go after the other guy? What about my mysterious phone caller? Madlyn had been receiving calls similar to the one I had gotten, threatening her life if she continued to manage Rachel Barlow’s campaign. Suppose the caller hadn’t just been some prankster who got his kicks from phoning the local bar and asking the bartender for “Amanda Hugandkiss.”
But more than anything else, there was the tight-lipped, teeth-clenched amusement of Martin Barlow when I’d suggested that he and Madlyn were sneaking around behind Rachel and Gary’s backs. And the cold-hearted stare of Rachel Barlow, mayoral candidate and high-school cheerleader gone bad, as she alternately suggested Madlyn was already dead, or laughed at the idea that Madlyn might be sleeping with Rachel’s husband.
My grip on the steering wheel got a little tighter, and I felt my jaw clench involuntarily. Finally, I had a story to investigate. And this time, I thought I knew just how to go about doing it. It wouldn’t make me feel better about what had happened to Madlyn, but maybe it could set one-tenth of this whole mess right again, and certainly woul
d be worth accomplishing.
When I reached the end of the long drive, my front door opened and Abigail Stein was standing in the doorway, a concerned expression on her face. It is what makes the most difficult of days worth getting through.
I had barely made it out of the car before she had run down the porch steps and into my arms, hugging me tighter than I could remember for quite some time. I stroked her hair and found time to exhale. Abby sniffed a little.
“You could’ve called,” she finally said.
“No, I couldn’t,” I told her. “I had some thinking to do.”
Chapter 5
It was after nine, and I hadn’t eaten since noon. Abby, who made a pasta salad for me, actually sat me down and served it to me while I gave her the rundown on my late afternoon and evening. She gave me her undivided attention, asked very few questions, and nodded at several points. I didn’t tell her about my brainstorming in the car. Abby doesn’t embrace self-pity the way artists like myself do.
“How’d I do?” I asked when the story was finished.
“Perfectly,” she said. “You couldn’t have handled it better if I were there to guide you every step of the way. By the way, Barry Dutton wants you to call him when you get home.”
“I am home.”
“Yeah, but only technically. You haven’t eaten yet,” she said.
She wouldn’t let me call Barry until I’d eaten. Frankly, I was more interested in the pasta than the salad, but Abby was sitting there with me, and it was hard to avoid the tomatoes. I hate raw tomatoes—they don’t look finished. So I went after the romaine, green and red peppers, scallions, and other greens (Abby had even included celery, since this was for me and not for her) until I declared myself full. I wasn’t completely full—nothing the odd package of Yodels couldn’t fix later.
For Whom the Minivan Rolls Page 13