For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “I’ve been sitting here all night wondering,” Abby said. “That is, when I wasn’t worried sick about some stupid man who wouldn’t call from the car.”

  I let it pass. “Wondering what?”

  “Who do you think did it?” she said, the smile of a ruthless criminal lawyer spreading across on her face. Abby, never the literary snob, has been known to pick up one or two of my mystery novels after I’m finished reading them. She enjoys the mental exercise required, and admires the work of Robert B. Parker, particularly his Spenser novels, though she thinks Susan Silverman (the girlfriend) is a pain in the ass.

  “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought,” I told her. “All I’m sure of right now is that I didn’t do it.”

  “Good. I didn’t take you in the office pool.”

  “The way I see it,” I said, “it all hinges on whether Madlyn was really having an affair, and if so, whether it was with Martin Barlow. Because that means either Gary was so jealous he went nuts and shot her himself. . .”

  Abigail frowned. “That doesn’t seem logical,” she said. “He’s more the type who would kill the male offender.”

  I was so grateful to her for having dinner waiting that I didn’t mention I’d already considered that. “Or,” I said, “it could mean that Martin killed Madlyn so Rachel wouldn’t find out, or that Rachel did find out her campaign manager was screwing her husband and decided to eliminate the competition.”

  “Say screwing again,” Abby said in an exaggeratedly deep voice. “You know how it makes me crazy.”

  “There are any number of other expressions I could have chosen,” I said. “If you have a preference, I’d certainly like to know about it, for future use.”

  “I’ve always liked. . .” and she stopped, of course, because Ethan, in his undying quest for snacks, chose that moment to wander into the room. He marched directly to the snack cabinet and began rummaging.

  “Hello to you, too,” I said sarcastically. “You know, I haven’t seen you all day.”

  “Uh-huh. Mom, where are the Nutter Butters?” Nutter Butter cookies are Ethan’s snack of choice, and he will eat them day in and day out an hour before bed, until he inexplicably decides they are inedible and moves on to some other calorie-laden goodie. This will happen with no warning at all, but by rule of thumb, it’s usually a day or two after we break down and buy the super-humongous size box of Nutter Butters. Leah is a chocolate fiend and will not touch the Nutter Butters. All the remaining stock will be left to the only other person who has 24-hour access to the kitchen (that is, the only resident who doesn’t leave for work or school every day). His task is to eliminate all traces of the current snack of choice. It’s a dirty rotten job, but somebody’s got to do it.

  “Um, actually, I think we’re out of Nutter Butters, Ethan,” Abby said, and we both braced ourselves.

  His brow furrowed for a moment. “Oh. Okay,” he said, and walked away from the cabinet. I never would have predicted anything less than a raging tantrum and an emergency trip to the supermarket. Abby and I exchanged an incredulous stare. Ethan started for the living room (after all, Spongebob Square Pants wasn’t getting any younger), but I grabbed him by the arm playfully as he passed.

  “Okay, who are you, and what have you done with my son?” The phone rang. Abby, sitting next to it, stared at me.

  “What do you mean? I am your son.” It rang again. Not a muscle moved on my wife. I sighed and stood up. The break must be over.

  “I was just kidding, Ethan.” I walked to the phone and picked it up, as my wife grinned her cat-with-canary grin. As I suspected, the call was from Milton Ladowski, Juris Doctor.

  “We just left the casino, Aaron,” he told me. “I put Gary in his car and sent him home.”

  “Why didn’t you drive him there? Didn’t they call you after they called Gary?”

  “Yes, but I was out,” said Milt. “I was in a conference with another client, and my secretary didn’t let me know until after I came out. By then, Gary was already on his way to A.C.”

  “So, what’s the story?” I asked him, wondering silently what would be a big enough emergency for Ladowski’s secretary to call him out of a meeting. “Godzilla laying waste to Midland Heights? Hope the lot’s still there. He’ll get back to you after the real estate closing. Try and keep Mr. Zilla away from North Seventh.”

  “They questioned Gary for a good few hours,” Milt said. “I tried to get them to wait until tomorrow, you know, give him some time to absorb his loss, but they plowed ahead immediately. Said they wanted it while it was still ‘fresh in his mind.’”

  “Wanted what? Do they think Gary killed her?”

  I could practically hear Milt’s mustache bristling—it was that hard for him to contain his irritation. “Of course they think he killed her. It’s the easiest theory, and the cops always go for the easiest theory. Their problem is, he didn’t do it, so they have no evidence. Otherwise, he’d be behind bars already.”

  “So what did he tell them?”

  “The truth. He was at his office, he has witnesses by the dozens, and he has no reason to want Madlyn dead. But does that slow them down, even one bit? Of course not!”

  I considered explaining to Milt that the conduct of the Atlantic City police wasn’t necessarily my responsibility, but he was on a roll. “They don’t even bother looking into the matter enough to find the real killers, so they’ll probably get away scot free.”

  “Easy, Milt. You’re starting to sound like O.J.”

  He cleared his throat. I knew he had his car phone on hands-off, because the noise in the car was almost too loud to hear Milt. “Listen. Aaron. I’d appreciate it if you could keep this out of the papers for the time being.”

  Okay, I admit it. This caught me off guard. “What?” I practically screamed. “The man who dragged me kicking and screaming onto this story is asking me to keep it out of the papers now? Tell me you’re kidding, Milton, please, or I may be forced to tell the cops about the rumors that Madlyn was having an affair.”

  “That’s horseshit, Aaron,” Milt said, clearly annoyed. Good. “Madlyn never slept with anyone outside her marriage. That’s just preposterous. But think of the boy for a moment. Reading in the papers about what happened to his mom. . .”

  “Oh come on, Milt, you can do better than that. The kid never picked up a newspaper in his life other than to read the TV listings. Besides, the police report is going to be all over the place by the morning. I’m surprised my editor hasn’t called me already. I couldn’t keep it quiet if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.”

  Milt cleared his throat for so long it would have been quicker to just send the Roto Rooter guy down there to see what the problem was. “I’m asking you as a friend, Aaron. Please.”

  I wondered when Ladowski and I had become friends. “Does this have anything to do with your name being on Madlyn’s hotel bill?” I asked. What the hell, maybe Diane Woolworth had gotten the headline right and the details wrong. Maybe Madlyn had been having an affair with Milt Ladowski.

  “Oh, for Chrissakes, Aaron!” he shouted. “This is a simple matter of human kindness. I don’t want to read the gruesome details of Madlyn Beckwirth’s death in the paper tomorrow morning. Is that so much to ask?”

  Maybe I could get something out of him another way. “Okay,” I told him. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. But you have to tell me, can you explain your name on Madlyn’s hotel register?”

  Milt didn’t talk for a long time. I knew I hadn’t been disconnected, because the car sounds were still there. There was a click when he picked the phone up to hold it next to his face.

  “Honest to God, Aaron,” he nearly whispered. “I haven’t got a clue how that happened.”

  Well, that didn’t help much, but I told Milt I’d call him in the morning.

  When I put down the phone, Abby and the kids were nowhere to be seen. She had to be upstairs getting them into bed. I could call Barry Dutton, or. . .

  I went
upstairs. Abby was watching Ethan floss his teeth—something I hadn’t seen since the days of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers— and everything seemed under control. I walked into Leah’s room. The light was out, but I could see the mountain made in her blanket by her fully bent knees, and it was moving around. When she heard me come in, Leah sat up.

  “Daddy?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just walked over and held out my arms. Leah sat up and reached out, and I got my first Leah hug of the day. I held it for a very long time.

  It had been, after all, a very long and unsettling day.

  Chapter 6

  Once the kids were officially “in bed” (meaning Leah was in bed and Ethan was playing games on his computer), Abby and I went downstairs. Without a word, she walked to the dining room, reached down and opened the door on our sideboard (I had recalled the word since this afternoon), the one we use as a liquor cabinet, and started rummaging through the bottles. I went into the kitchen, took out two glasses, and got a tray of ice from the freezer. I cracked the ice tray, causing cubes to fly all around the room, and corralled enough to almost fill the glasses. The rest went into the sink. What the hell, I’m decadent.

  Abby walked in, carrying a bottle of vodka. She knows I don’t care much for the taste of alcohol, so she also carried a bottle of Kahlua. She mixed a Black Russian for me and poured herself a vodka on the rocks. During law school, my wife supported herself as a bartender in Chicago. She learned every drink ever invented, but says she never had to pour anything except Jack Daniels for boilermakers. This was before the Wrigley Field area was gentrified.

  We adjourned to the living room, glasses in hand. Each of us took our traditional seat on the couch. I put my drink on the coffee table (okay, the Black Russian table) for a moment, put my arm around Abby, and pulled her close to me. She stayed that way for a sublime moment.

  And then the phone rang.

  I sighed, but took my drink with me. I already knew it was Barry Dutton, and he had waited as long as his patience would tolerate, hoping that I had developed enough sense to check in with him after having spent much of the day at the scene of a murder. He should have known better.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Atlantic City. It’s lovely there this time of year. And you?”

  “This is the worst possible time to be funny, Aaron. Now, I want to hear the whole thing, from the beginning.”

  I glanced across the room at my wife, who was plying herself with alcohol and stretching out on the couch, not turning on the television. Strangely, I didn’t want to spend time on the phone with Dutton. I forced myself to look away from Abigail and opened a reporter’s notebook sitting on my desk.

  “Can’t it wait until the morning, Barry? I’ve been. . .”

  “No, it can’t wait until the goddam morning! This isn’t a woman running out on her husband anymore, Aaron. This is a murder! I’m going to have the Atlantic County prosecutor’s people here in the morning, and I have to be able to tell them something.”

  I hate it when Dutton is right. There wasn’t any way around it. I gave him the shortest possible version of the facts while Abby continued to lounge, finished her drink, and picked up the TV Guide.

  “That’s it,” I said when I finished. “Now, what have you found out?” I took out a legal pad and pen to take notes.

  “Well, the autopsy won’t be available for a couple of days, but I don’t think there’s any doubt she died of gunshot wounds.”

  “I was there. There isn’t any doubt.”

  “And Gary’s identification confirms that it was Madlyn,” Dutton added. The thought had occurred to me during the long ride home that, given my great memory for faces, I might have looked at someone of Madlyn’s general physical type and wrongly assumed it was her. So that was that.

  “Do the state troopers really think Beckwirth did it?”

  “Aaron, almost every time someone is killed, it’s done by someone they knew, usually a family member. When a married woman is killed, the first logical suspect, given no obvious outside motive, is the husband.” Barry didn’t sound especially convinced himself. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Abby reach for the remote control.

  “Well, let me come in tomorrow morning, and we’ll talk about it,” I suggested.

  “Okay,” Dutton sighed. “But I want you here first thing, as soon as the kids. . .”

  “I’ll be there,” I said, and hung up. I practically flew across the room, spilling a little of my now watered-down drink (the ice had melted) on the musty carpet in my office.

  “Hold it right there,” I said to Abby. I slithered in next to her on the couch and grabbed the remote out of her hand. “Don’t touch that dial.” She grinned, and I gave her the kiss I had been waiting for all day.

  And what happened after that is, quite frankly, none of your business.

  Chapter 7

  Later that night, I called the Press-Tribune, got the night editor, and told her about Madlyn Beckwirth’s death. The night editor, maybe two years out of college and still struggling not to say “y’know” after every phrase, got very excited and insisted I write the story myself and email it to her immediately. I told her the writing would take me about an hour, and she promised to find space for the story on the front page.

  Life is funny. There once was a time when writing a front-page story would have been a great professional thrill for me, but that time had come and gone, along with the beard I wore in my twenties. Now, the only thing that would have gotten my professional blood flowing rapidly would be a call from a two-bit producer promising to turn one of my 120-page fantasies into a bad movie that some director straight out of film school would hack up, with maybe three lines of my original dialogue intact. And I’d get paid maybe ten grand.

  I again promised the nice night editor that I would send the story as quickly as possible, so I sent Abigail up to bed to minimize her ability to distract me and sat down at the Macintosh to turn what I knew into what I hoped would be a coherent news story.

  The next day, with minimal editing, the front page of the Central Jersey Press-Tribune featured (above the fold) the following article whose headline, I hasten to interject, I didn’t write.

  Local Woman Found Murdered Killing May Be Tied To Midland Heights Mayor Election

  By Aaron Tucker

  Madlyn Beckwirth, 44, was found shot to death yesterday at an Atlantic City hotel. Beckwirth, a resident of Midland Heights, had been reported missing by her husband, Gary Beckwirth, last week.

  She had been campaign manager for the Middle Heights mayoral campaign of Rachel Barlow. Barlow is attempting to unseat long-time mayor Sam Olszowy in a Democratic primary election less than two weeks away.

  Beckwirth was shot in the stomach and the head, and an autopsy confirmed that the shots were the cause of death. Gary Beckwirth, president of Beckwirth Investments, identified his wife’s body late last night.

  Madlyn Beckwirth had been missing since last Monday, when her husband filed a report with Midland Heights Police Chief Barry Dutton. An investigation into the disappearance by Detective Gerald Westbrook had proved fruitless until yesterday, when a Press-Tribune reporter received a phone call from Mrs. Beckwirth and traced her to Bally’s Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.

  There is still no explanation for Madlyn Beckwirth’s disappearance, and no arrest was made in connection with her murder. Her husband was questioned last night, but was not held or charged.

  “When a woman is killed, the first logical suspect, given no obvious outside motive, is the husband,” Dutton said last night. He added, however, that he knew of no evidence tying Gary Beckwirth to his wife’s death.

  Prior to her disappearance, Madlyn Beckwirth had been receiving threatening phone calls tied to the mayoral campaign, according to Rachel Barlow.

  Questioned about her disappearance yesterday hours before her body was discovered, Madlyn Beckwirth said only that she was “fine,” and would “be back in a few days.


  “This really isn’t a big deal,” she said.

  Gary and Madlyn Beckwirth have a son, Joel, who is 14. According to Milton Ladowski, the Beckwirth family attorney, the investigation into Madlyn’s murder will be conducted by New Jersey State Troopers, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Midland Heights police.

  The story went on to detail the political infighting in Midland Heights and the tension between Barlow and Olszowy, strictly because the night editor had asked me to include it. I thought the odds that Madlyn Beckwirth had been killed because of the mayor’s race in Midland Heights to be awfully long.

  Of course, I had also thought Madlyn was a simple runaway wife who’d charge up the credit cards and be back in a few days. What I thought didn’t seem terribly relevant right at the moment.

  The next morning, I got the kids out to school and myself out of the house as quickly as I could, successfully avoiding the inevitable phone call that would result when Milt Ladowski, the morning paper in hand, choked on his egg white omelet and decaffeinated coffee. I walked over to police headquarters and Marsha immediately pointed me toward Barry’s office.

  “He’s in there,” she said. “He’s not happy.”

  “You think I should have brought donuts?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “You could bring the whole Drake’s bakery in there today,” she said. “Wouldn’t help you.”

  I took a deep breath and knocked on Barry’s door. The guttural grunt from within indicated that I should enter, and against my better judgment, I did.

  The first thing I saw in the office was the Press-Tribune on Dutton’s desk. It was turned to the inside page that my story on Madlyn had jumped to. Barry, reading half-glasses in his hand, was behind the desk, doing an imitation of a college professor in the body of an angry grizzly bear. His eyes were wide, and his hands were clenched. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him chewing through a two-by-four.