I searched web sites with local real estate connections until I found a record of Gary Beckwirth’s purchase of the old “White House” site. I recalled that at the time (Abby and I had moved to Midland Heights about four years before Gary and Madlyn), there had been considerable talk about the great deal the new owners had gotten on the property. The “Mean Old Man” had no heirs, and the estate had been directed to dispose of the property as quickly as possible.
But it was still something of a shock to come across the purchase price of $1.2 million. Five years ago, that was a tremendous amount of money. It wasn’t exactly pocket change to me now. I looked around at the crumbling shell of my $140,000 house, and marveled at how I was still able to keep up with the mortgage payments.
Even more interesting was the fact that the transaction appeared to be solely in Gary Beckwirth’s name. Even though he was clearly supplying the money, most married couples (and even those who aren’t married) will opt to put a house in both spouses’ names, just in case. . . well, in case one of them dies, so the other will have a clear title to the home.
Could it have been that Gary knew Madlyn was going to die first? Might he have cooked up this whole kidnap subplot to put everybody off the scent? I really wanted to assume the Barlows were to blame, but I was lacking anything resembling motive, evidence, or even the suggestion of hostility from either one of them toward Madlyn.
Ethan and Leah know that even when I’m working, so long as I’m not on the phone, they are to bring completed homework to my desk so I can look at it. I’m not the teacher, but I do need to see what they are having trouble with, and in Ethan’s case especially, it had become such a routine that it wasn’t questioned anymore. I could set my pants on fire, and be leaping around the room looking for a bucket of water, and he’d bring over his math homework.
In fifth grade, Ethan was bringing home math problems I had trouble with in my sophomore year of high school. My father was very strong in math, and probably should have pursued engineering instead of house-painting, but the math gene had skipped my generation and gone right to Ethan.
He walked over, still sulking, and tossed the sheet with geometry problems onto my desk with disgust. He had, as usual, written “Math—Ethan” on the top of the paper, despite the fact that the math teacher would know it was math, what with all the numbers and the fact that she had assigned it and all, but that’s Ethan. You put the subject and your name on each assignment, and that’s that.
“There. Can I watch TV now?” he mumbled, sneering out of one side of his mouth. Despite my complete inability to decipher what this sheet might cover, I made a show of examining it for a long time, just to prove to him that homework was important and shouldn’t be rushed through, and, I admit it, to piss him off, since he was pissing me off. So withdraw the nomination for “Father of the Year.”
I handed him back the sheet and nodded, and he tromped up the stairs to his room, where I’d be sure not to set eyes on him for another two hours. Leah, deep into her “R”s, was leaning on the table, tongue sticking out the right side of her mouth, the most adorable child of the millennium.
A groan was audible in the room, and it wasn’t until Leah looked up that I realized it had come from me. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked.
“Sure, Puss. I’m fine.”
But there was no disputing it: I wasn’t being a great father to her brother, and I knew it. So I dragged my weary butt out of the chair and up the stairs to Ethan’s room.
It was its usual maelstrom of used socks, videocassette boxes with no cassettes, cassettes with no boxes, and video games. The unmade bed at least still had its sheet on, which was a welcome sight. There were crumbs on the floor, and a peeled apple from the night before had turned pectin brown in a bowl on his nightstand. I remembered I was here to make up with the boy, so I ignored virtually everything my eyes were taking in.
Ethan was sitting on the edge of his bed, Nintendo controller next to his mouth, and tongue pressed against it. He took it away long enough to growl, “aren’t you supposed to knock?”
“The door was open. Ethan. Please pause the game.” He scowled, but did as I asked.
I sat next to him on the twin bed. He didn’t like that, because he knew that meant I was going to try and be reasonable, and that would make it harder to be mad at me, which was his goal at this moment.
“Ethan, I’m sorry.”
His eyebrows raised a bit. A parent who apologizes? This must be some devious ploy, designed to lull him into a false sense of security. Besides, even if he knew that I had done a hundred things to wrong him that day alone, it was just as true that I probably hadn’t noticed them. Which of the offenses had put me over the line?
“Yeah? For what?”
“For only telling you about the things you’ve been doing wrong. For not pointing out that you’re probably the nicest boy I know when you’re not mad. And for passing on to you my temper, which I feel I should point out, I got from your grandmother.”
That really got him. “Grandma? But she’s. . .”
“You’re a grandchild. You could burn her house down, and she’d talk about how resourceful you were to find gasoline in the garage. That same woman would have put me through a wall if I so much as wore socks that didn’t match.”
“She’d really put you through a wall?”
“Well, not really, no. It’s kind of an expression I just made up.” I put my hand out. “Can we start again? Pretend you just got home, and we didn’t grumble at each other?”
He liked shaking hands. It seemed grown-up to him. “Sure,” he said, and took my hand. He gave it the exaggerated kind of shake you’d see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and I laughed and put my arm around him.
“I do love you, you know,” I said. “And Ethan, I’m sorry about the sign on the sidewalk. I’m doing my best to find out who. . .”
He pulled away. “Uh, Dad? I’d rather not talk about that, okay?”
That made sense. “Sure.”
“Can I go back to the game now?” We had made progress, and he didn’t want to undo it. But hey, Nintendo must take precedence.
“Okay.” I heard the phone ringing. “You go ahead. And let me know if you do want to talk. . .”
“I don’t.” He was already putting the controller back to his mouth again. How he could move the controls with his fingers while sucking on the controller at the same time is beyond me, but there it was.
I ran to get the phone before the machine got it. Of all people, Barry Dutton was on the other end of the line, and he sounded like he was calling from Beirut.
“Barry? Where the hell are you? I can barely hear you.”
“I’m in the car. Look, Aaron, I didn’t want to call from the office. Colette Jackson and the troopers are all over me there.”
“So I take it you still love me?”
“As much as I ever did,” he said sourly. “But I can’t give you special privileges in front of all them. Look, I’m coming up on a tunnel, and I haven’t got much time. But you should know that the prosecutor thinks there’s enough evidence to arrest Gary Beckwirth for the murder.”
“What? One day of investigation and they’re already making an arrest?”
“Shut up and listen! They found a gun in Beckwirth’s house, and it matched the. . .” Static overwhelmed the line.
Once again, modern technology at its best.
Chapter 14
Sure enough, when I got to the Beckwirth compound the next morning, two Midland Heights police cars and one county police car were positioned out front. Next to them were two state trooper cruisers and an unmarked car. Nobody was taking Gary Beckwirth lightly, which under normal circumstances would probably have made him feel great. A uniformed cop was at the front door, which was open. Clearly, the arrest was going down. And Madlyn Beckwirth’s body wasn’t even in the ground yet.
I don’t have a press card. The state of New Jersey requires that you get one from a publisher. All the newspape
rs and magazines in the state are allotted a certain number, every last one of which goes to one of their staff members. So freelancers are, in effect, frozen out of press cards.
New Jersey driver’s licenses don’t necessarily have photographs of the driver in question attached. So I went into my wallet, took out my only photo ID, which happened to be my membership card for the local YM/YWHA, and held it up in front of the cop at the door. “Press,” I said. He stepped aside, and I walked in.
The place was in shambles. Police call the process of going through a residence for evidence “tossing,” and that is exactly what it is. Every drawer, every cabinet, every closet door in Beckwith’s mansion, was open. Items of clothing were strewn about the floor, next to tennis rackets, books, umbrellas, videocassettes (I knew Beckwirth had a VCR somewhere!), towels, and all the packaged food in the kitchen. But for the fact that the videocassettes were all ballet and opera performances, it looked like my house.
The only other difference was the police. I didn’t see Barry Dutton, but I knew he had to be there somewhere. Westbrook was probably in the house, too, wedging the uniformed cops into corners and stumbling over valuable evidence, rendering it unusable.
I saw at least four uniforms, not counting the one at the door. State troopers were, well, trooping through, and a couple of plainclothes detectives I hadn’t seen before were loitering in the living room, talking to each other.
Colette Jackson was in the room off the living room, downstairs from where Gary Beckwirth had “advised” me to return to his house only if I had cheerful news to report. This was not a day for cheerful news. Gary hadn’t had many of those days lately.
I walked over to Colette and waited while she told one of the uniforms to make sure to dust the master bathroom for prints and to tag and inventory the contents of the medicine cabinet. The trooper nodded, suppressed the urge to salute, and headed for the stairs, double-time.
“There must be some serious evidence for all this to be going on less than forty-eight hours after the crime itself,” I said by way of a greeting.
Colette smiled the smile that will one day get her a state judgeship, and said, “we believe we have sufficient evidence to get an indictment, and a conviction, Mr. Tucker.”
“And that evidence would be. . .”
“I see absolutely no reason to release that information to the press right now,” Colette said. “Besides, if I recall correctly, you have no media affiliation as of this moment, do you?”
A low blow, calling me a freelancer like that. “I understand a weapon was found. Was it here in the house?”
She didn’t like at all that I knew about the gun. And she didn’t like not knowing that I knew. That meant someone had told me something, and now she had to determine who that might be. To protect my source, I’d have to make sure to let Barry Dutton show his natural contempt for me when he was in Colette’s presence.
“I don’t recall saying anything about a weapon, Mr. Tucker.”
“I didn’t say you said it. I asked if it was found here.”
“I can’t confirm or deny any information at this point. You can call my office tomorrow morning if you like.”
“I’m sure you’ll be happy to tell me all about it, if you’re actually in the office when I call,” I said.
“Count on it,” she answered, and walked toward the main staircase, where a group of men was descending from the second floor.
In a cluster were three troopers, Dutton, Milt Ladowski, and Dan Crawford, a uniformed Midland Heights cop I recognized. In the center of the cluster was Gary Beckwirth, wearing the scariest expression I had ever seen on a human face.
He was smiling.
Beckwirth had the wide, satisfied grin of a child who has just mastered “Chopsticks” on the piano. With all the law enforcement personnel gathered around him, each saying something at the same time, all wearing tense expressions and stealing glances at the front door, Beckwirth was resplendent in handcuffs and a beatific smile. It was a chilling look—something you see imprinted on the insides of your eyelids for days afterward.
“Gary,” Ladowski was saying, “I’ll have you out in two hours. Just stay quiet and calm, and we’ll make sure that you. . .”
“Watch your step, Mr. Beckwirth,” one of the uniforms said, and Gary paid him as much attention as he seemed to be paying to Ladowski. It was a wonder he didn’t trip over the bottom step.
Colette Jackson tried to stand in front of me and block me, but I managed to nudge my way toward the stairs and the still-moving group. It was almost funny, the way they all moved like a hive, like the whole cast of the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the final episode, taking tiny steps toward a box of Kleenex.
“Milt, is Gary confessing to his wife’s murder?” I shouted as they neared us.
“Who the hell let him in?” Dutton yelled at the cops. Good move, Barry.
“Shut up, Barry, I’m press.” Why not give Colette the whole show? But I’d better be careful not to go over the top and protest too much. She’d get suspicious.
Barry, knowing when to quit, gestured to the cops, who walked over and stood intimidatingly over my shoulder, making sure I couldn’t reach Beckwirth.
“Milt, did you hear my question? Is Gary confessing?”
Ladowski didn’t answer, but Gary Beckwirth seemed to wake up on hearing my voice. He looked over at me, still wearing his Rod Serling smile.
“Aaron,” he said. “Aaron’s here.”
“Gary, are you. . .”
“Don’t talk to him!” Ladowski yelled. “Don’t say a thing!”
They’d almost made it to the door, when Beckwirth turned to talk to me, as calm and peaceful as I’d ever seen a man.
“It’s all right, Aaron,” he said. “It’s really better this way. Madlyn will understand. Don’t worry. She’ll understand.”
They practically pushed him out the door. Colette Jackson gave me one last sneer before leaving the house. I stood rooted to the spot.
I just couldn’t move until I knew Gary Beckwirth had been driven away. The sight of that smile again would have been more than I could bear.
Chapter 15
“The murder weapon?” Abby asked. “To arrest him that fast, they must have Gary’s fingerprints all over it and a match on the bullet.”
The kids were in bed and I was having a bowl of cereal, the finest nighttime snack ever invented. How this whole breakfast thing got started is anybody’s guess. Abby, meanwhile, was eating a piece of melon with a spoon. A visitor to our kitchen would have assumed that there had been a total eclipse of the sun and it was actually seven o’clock in the morning.
“Barry Dutton called me after he got home,” I told her. “They have a match on the bullet, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson police special, which they said is probably the most popular gun on the planet. They found this particular gun under a bush in the backyard, where he’d thrown it. Registered legally to Gary Beckwirth three months ago.”
“I thought Madlyn wouldn’t let him have a gun,” Abby said, wiping some melon juice from the corner of her mouth. “I thought they scared her.”
“As well they might,” I said. “Maybe Gary just didn’t tell Madlyn he had one.”
“So did Gary confess?”
“No, not according to Barry. But he’s not exactly saying he didn’t do it, either. He just keeps smiling that psychotic smile of his and saying ‘it’s all for the best.’ I’m telling you, he looked like Tony Perkins at the end of Psycho, sitting there in the hallway with that weird grin on his face.”
“At least Gary hadn’t dressed up like his dead mother.”
“Not that we know of,” I said.
“Well, they have the gun, they have the bullet, they have Gary acting nuts. That might be enough, but I can’t see them moving on it that fast unless they had something else,” Abby said, in full attorney mode.
“Like what?”
“A witness, maybe. Someone willing to testify they saw Gary shoo
t Madlyn, or heard him say he was going to shoot Madlyn.” She looked at the kitchen ceiling for a moment, apparently in deep and sober thought. “We could use a dropped ceiling in here to cover the water damage,” Abby said.
I laughed in spite of myself. She gave me a glance, realized how quickly, and without notice, she’d moved from one subject to the other, smiled guiltily, and shrugged. If she got any more adorable, I might have to throw myself on the kitchen floor and let her take advantage of me.
“I’d like to talk to Lawyer Abby now, please,” I said.
“Wait,” she said, doing her best imitation of Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve. She rolled her eyes back in her head, allowing her head to fall back. Then, Abby “came to,” and looked me in the face, dropping her voice a full key lower on the musical scale.
“Ask your question.”
“What advantage is there for a couple to buy a very expensive property and only put one name on the mortgage and the title?”
She got up to throw out the melon rind. I pinched her on the butt as she passed, and Abby said, “hey,” involuntarily, not even really thinking about anything but my question. It’s my gift of irresistibility. Don’t ask me to explain it.
“Well, if they weren’t married, or thought they wouldn’t stay married, the one with more money might not want the house to revert back to the partner in case. . .”
“Exactly. In case one died prematurely.”
“But Madlyn wasn’t the one with the money,” said Abigail.
“That’s the confusing part. Are there any other reasons, legal reasons, to do it that way?”
“Well, the only thing I can think of is that one of the people might not want their name to show up on a legal document.”
For Whom the Minivan Rolls Page 17