For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Something about that made me sit up and ignore my Golden Grahams for a moment. “Why wouldn’t they want that?”

  “If they own a business, they wouldn’t want the property in their name because it could be claimed in a suit against the business. Or maybe they’re using an alias, they have outstanding warrants, they don’t want their name to show up in a computer somewhere,” Abby said, completely in hypothetical mode now. “If the other one can afford to assume the debt all alone, why risk putting up a red flag?”

  I got up and kissed my wife with a passion I usually reserve only for. . . well, my wife, actually. But this time, it took even her by surprise.

  “What was that for? Not that I didn’t like it, but. . .”

  “You may have just given me my first actual, bona fide idea in this story.”

  “What story? You don’t have an assignment.”

  “Don’t sweat the details. There’s only one thing that bothers me, though.”

  Abby’s eyebrows crinkled. “Only one thing? I’d have thought there’d be hundreds.”

  “Yeah. If you were going by an alias, would you choose to be called Madlyn Beckwirth?”

  Chapter 16

  The Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick is tall, white, and old, and looks like it should house the National Widget Corporation. One summer, when I was a student at Rutgers University, a friend clerking in the building got us up to the roof to watch Fourth of July fireworks from six neighboring towns simultaneously. That’s the best use I can think of for that courthouse.

  Strangely, it has the look of a building in which nothing much happens. And for the most part, that’s true. Criminals come and go, jurors are shown the “welcome film” daily in the basement, then spend their day reading paperback novels and the local newspapers until three o’clock comes around and they can go home.

  If you walk into the County Courthouse, you have to make a choice in the lobby. To the right is the court system, and to the left, the county government’s offices. The birth certificates for those born in the city’s two major hospitals or anywhere in Middlesex County are kept there, along with death certificates, marriage licenses, some automobile records, and other governmental dross. Much of it is on paper, since the county is still hoping that this whole computer thing will just blow over, and everybody can get back to work.

  The County Building side, specifically the county clerk’s office, is where I found myself late the next morning. I had already fielded a call from Barry Dutton, who was making it a point to keep me informed whenever he was not in his office, and treating me like the political leper I am while he was in his office. Dutton said Gary Beckwirth had made bail after an arraignment (big surprise), and was now at home.

  Madlyn Beckwirth’s funeral was scheduled for the next morning. At one o’clock this afternoon, however, the Barlow campaign was still going ahead with its scheduled fundraising “coffee” (nobody wants to go to a tea anymore, apparently) in Martin and Rachel Barlow’s backyard. All the best Democrats would make an appearance, but there would be no music, out of respect for poor departed Madlyn. Matters of life and death come and go, but the race for mayor in Midland Heights must go on, you know.

  Standing in front of the clerk’s window, I was patiently explaining for the third time why I was not the person whose records I was requesting.

  “I’m a member of the press,” I said. “This is a matter of public record. I don’t want a copy of anything. I just want to see the public record. It’s very simple.”

  Apparently, not that simple. The very large lady behind the window scowled at me as if I had requested her underwear size, so I could publish it in the newspaper the next morning.

  “This isn’t your marriage license,” she said. “Right?”

  Eye-rolling wouldn’t be sufficient here to make my point. I would have to do a dramatic double-take. Lucky for her, no glass of water was handy, or she would have gotten a spit-take that would have made Mel Brooks jealous.

  “Look, I’ve explained this three times. Is there a problem, or is there someone else back there I can talk to? Is the great Oz behind the curtain? One of his minions? Somebody?”

  Somehow, my natural charm was eluding this woman, and she made a sound very much like a growl before saying, “I’ll check.” Then she turned and walked away, probably to check the job postings on the bulletin board so she’d never have to come back. The three people behind me in line grumbled—that’s New Jersey for you. If you stand in a line long enough, somebody will stand behind you, figuring there must be something good at the front of the line, or you wouldn’t be bothering. But the real pleasure in lines is complaining about their length and the amount of time you waste standing in them.

  I turned to the one woman and two men standing behind me and let a frustrated sound out between my lips. “Civil service,” I said.

  “I’m civil service,” said the burlier of the two men. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be back at my desk.” The woman didn’t look especially pleased, either. I turned back toward the window, properly chastised.

  After several eternities, the large window woman returned with another, older woman dressed in a suit from J.C. Penney. “I’m the supervisor,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

  I moaned and explained the situation to her again. “You want the county archives,” she said. “Not the clerk’s office. That’s upstairs on Three.” She pointed at the ceiling, so I’d know which way was up.

  I thought the two men and the woman, now joined in line by two other women, would break into applause as I left. I considered coming back to do an encore, but humility prevented me.

  Upstairs on Three, amazingly, was a room marked “County Archives,” in which a very helpful woman named Louise listened to my spiel, showed me the proper computer, and explained its operation in words designed for a backward nine-year-old. Within minutes, I was deep into the records of other people’s lives (okay, so I looked up Leah and Ethan’s birth certificates to see my name listed as father).

  Turning my attention to the task at hand and not my own personal history, I very quickly located the title on the property. Sure enough, Gary Beckwirth’s was the only name listed under “purchaser.” Current ownership records on the property showed the owner (or lien holder) as the Summit Bank Corporation, and Beckwirth again as the sole mortgagee.

  That much I had already known. But when I dug back further, I found a marriage certificate for Gary Beckwirth and Madlyn Rossi from February 2, 1978, from a ceremony performed right across the street in New Brunswick City Hall by Judge H. Raymond Jones. The couple listed their address as Middlesex Borough.

  What’s scary, looking back on it, is how close I came to missing what was important. After checking the marriage license, I started to search for the next milestone in Gary and Madlyn’s lives. And that meant Joel’s birth, fourteen years ago. So I scanned through a considerable amount of material, and was gaining speed when something in the back of my brain noticed the name “Beckwirth” go by. I almost didn’t go back, thinking I’d only imagined seeing it, but a good reporter doesn’t take anything for granted, and neither, in this case, did I.

  And there it was: on June 1, 1978, less than four months after they were married, there appeared in the court of Judge Roger C. Lienhart a petition for the annulment of the marriage of Gary Beckwirth and Madlyn Beckwirth, née Rossi. The petition had been granted the same day.

  That’s why Madlyn Beckwirth’s name didn’t appear on the title to Gary Beckwirth’s home. She wasn’t his wife, and hadn’t been for more than 20 years.

  Chapter 17

  Stunned, I started searching for more bombshells, but there was no record of other marriages for either Gary or Madlyn. Oddly, I couldn’t find a birth certificate for Joel Beckwirth, either. That meant that Joel was not Beckwirth’s son, and therefore didn’t really share his last name, or that Joel was born in another county, or something else I hadn’t thought of. I’d have to examine some statewi
de records to find that out. Of course, if Joel had been born in New York City, for example, it might be more difficult to find his birth certificate. For all I knew, he had been born on a kibbutz in Haifa. Or maybe he hadn’t been born at all, but was actually the product of a laboratory experiment gone horribly wrong.

  It led to a whole slew of new questions: if Madlyn and Gary’s marriage had been annulled so soon after they were married, more than twenty years ago, who was Joel’s father? Why were they still living together? Was that even Madlyn who had been killed in the hotel in Atlantic City?

  I was getting tired of every lead producing more questions than answers. And I was more tired of the feeling, growing since I first talked to Milt Ladowski, that the whole kidnapping scenario had been staged for my personal benefit, that someone decided it would look suspicious if nobody cared that Madlyn ran off, so a patsy had to be found. A credible one, but one who wasn’t a good enough investigator to actually find anything out. The more I protested, the better I must have seemed for the job.

  They hadn’t wanted somebody good. They had wanted somebody gullible.

  I knew I should have been devastated by this conclusion. It should have bothered me that I couldn’t rise above the dismal expectations of my manipulator (or manipulators), that I had played directly into unseen hands. But for some reason, it was a liberating epiphany. I had been walking around with the weight of Madlyn’s death on my shoulders. The idea had been holding me back—the idea that somehow her death was my fault, that I should have done something to prevent it, and hadn’t thought of it in time.

  Now, I didn’t have to worry about that anymore. There had been no expectations. I didn’t owe anybody anything.

  That freed me up to act in any way I saw fit. I had my assignment now, and it came from me.

  When I got home, I called the main number at the Press-Tribune and asked for the obit desk. Rory Anderson picked up, and I smiled, although he couldn’t see. Rory is maybe twenty-three, has hair that looks like he’s trying out for N’Sync, and knows me from his days at the Rutgers Daily Targum. The Targum was, technically, my first employer, back in the days I was an undergraduate and “employer” didn’t necessarily translate into “paycheck.”

  I had done a little advising for the Targum a few years back, hadn’t reveled in my return to campus, and left by mutual agreement. But I’d met Rory, and actually written a letter of recommendation for him to the Press-Tribune. He was a good reporter who, in true Press-Tribune fashion, was being wasted on the obituary desk.

  We had a brief verbal reunion, and I asked him to look up Madlyn Beckwirth’s obit.

  “Why don’t you just pick up the paper, Dude?” he asked.

  “Didn’t ‘Dude’ go out with, like, Pauly Shore?” I asked. “And, for your information, I don’t get your rag. I subscribe to the New York Times.”

  “Snob.” I could hear him clicking on his keys to call up the obit. “You know, you could probably get this off the web site.”

  “You don’t keep obits more than a day.”

  He stopped typing. “How come you’re not getting this yourself, Aaron? You work for us, don’t you?”

  “Hell, no. They fired me two days ago. I’m working for the enemy now.”

  “Cool!” Like all obit writers, Rory deeply and truly detested his employer. Anything that could conceivably hurt the paper would give him nothing but pleasure. “Got it,” he said.

  “I need a little information. Survivors?”

  “Husband Gary, son Joel. . .”

  “Yeah. . .”

  “Mother, Mrs. Charlotte Rossi of Westfield. A sister, Mrs. Angela Cantucci of Toms River. That’s it.”

  “You got where she went to high school?”

  “No, but I’ll bet it was St. Joe’s.”

  “Why?” I asked, startled that he’d come up with a guess so quickly.

  “That,” he said, “is where all the good Italian girls go in Westfield, man.” I thanked him profusely, and hung up. After gathering my courage, I called Mrs. Rossi in Westfield, told her who I was, and asked if I could come over to talk about Madlyn. She was unexpectedly calm, and agreed to see me the next day, which was Saturday. It wasn’t until later that I remembered Madlyn’s funeral would be Saturday morning. Mrs. Rossi was very brave.

  And, yes, I know our interview was set for a weekend, when I should be spending time with my kids, but hey, if you can go talk to a woman about her dead daughter, what better way to spend a Saturday? I asked where Madlyn went to high school, and after a startled pause, Mrs. Rossi said, “St. Joe’s.” Score one for Rory.

  Right then, though, I realized I was out of ideas, and there’s no better place to go for someone with no ideas than a political rally.

  That is how I came to walk again through the perfect white trellis behind the perfect white picket fence and into the perfect backyard of Martin and Rachel Barlow. “Barlow for Mayor” signs were hung all over the house, the trellis, the fence, the trees, and the sturdier of Martin Barlow’s hedges and bushes he had installed all around the backyard.

  There were maybe fifty people milling around, eating Portobello mushroom canapés and drinking coffee from insulated, specially printed “Barlow For Mayor” paper cups. The plates had the same imprint. The forks and spoons managed to avoid the logo, but were red, white, and blue, just in case anybody thought that Rachel was anti-American and would try to subvert the system from the great seat of power known as the Midland Heights mayor’s office.

  There was, as advertised, no music, which meant we were not being subjected to the string quartet that had obviously been intended for one corner of the yard. A bandstand of sorts had been set up, comprised of two pallets underneath the tops of two discarded Ping-Pong tables. It was ringed in red, white, and blue bunting and emblazoned with—you guessed it—“Barlow For Mayor” signs, in case you’d wandered back here and thought it was just a boring neighborhood cook-out.

  Barry Dutton was not there, which was not a surprise, and most of the borough council members had also avoided the event, since they were still betting on Sam Olszowy to pull this thing out of the fire with a last-minute miracle. Besides, Rachel had managed to piss off enough of them throughout the campaign that even if she won, they might not attend any council meetings at which she appeared.

  Other reporters were present, some of whom I recognized. Others were identifiable as press strictly by their reporter’s notebooks or microphones. Local radio stations had sent their reporters to get some news on the murder, not the campaign event, and there was even a satellite truck outside from News 12 New Jersey, the system set up by the local cable provider and two area newspapers. Rachel Barlow was getting the coverage she so sincerely craved, but not for the reason she would have preferred.

  The candidate herself was quite the vision in a blue pants suit from about 1988, reconstituted for the new millennium by cutting the pants a couple of inches above the ankle. Either that, or Rachel Barlow had grown since the last time she’d worn these pants. If she wore her blonde hair in a flip, it evoked flips from circa 1966. In sum, here was a mayoral candidate projecting herself as a complete throwback in time, as an object of nostalgia, in effect.

  She was standing at the far end of the yard, near a perfectly bloomed rose bush (Martin was clearly a very accomplished gardener), answering questions for the News 12 reporter, and wearing an expression of concern and seriousness, despite the fact that, since the murder, she’d probably jumped seven sympathy-and-name-recognition points in the polls.

  Martin was standing near Rachel, but not too near, dressed in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a pair of khakis pressed to the point where the pleats could probably cause a deep cut in anyone unfortunate enough to brush against him. He was one of the few men I’d ever met who actually would have looked more comfortable in a suit and tie. (They said the same thing about Richard Nixon, but I never met him.)

  I hadn’t been to the Y that morning, and I was trying to watch what I ate, so I b
ravely avoided the canapés. It was quite a trial, but I managed. On one table near the bandstand were bagels, slices of marble cake, and blueberry muffins (no doubt low-fat ones). That table was harder to avoid, so I decided to concentrate on the task at hand, and approached the Barlows.

  When Martin saw me closing in, he put on a face like he’d smelled something bad, and I don’t think it was the Portobello mushrooms. Rachel caught me out of the corner of her eye as she was saying to the TV reporter, “Well you know, Juanita, the saddest part is that she died so needlessly, just when she was about to share in the great victory we’re going to accomplish here in Midland Heights.” Martin caught me before I could get to Rachel, and steered me to one side, which made me mad. If he got me too close to that marble cake, there was no telling what could happen.

  “What are you doing here?” he hissed. “After all you’ve done. . .”

  “I’m a voter in Midland Heights, Martin,” I said, a mocking smile on my face. It was nice to be the one wearing the smug expression for a change. “I came to hear the candidate speak on the issues.”

  “It’s speak to the issues.” He couldn’t resist.

  Neither could I. “You’re wrong this time, Marty. The issues are not here listening to Rachel. She can speak about the issues, or she can speak on the issues, but speaking to the issues is incorrect. You’re slipping. Have you gotten enough sleep lately?”

  He recoiled as if I’d slapped him. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

  I didn’t know what he thought I meant, but it clearly worried him. I upped my vocal volume from the stage whispers Barlow and I had been exchanging. “I mean there’s more to this murder than meets the eye,” I said, and then, louder, “and you know it!”

  Heads turned. Reporters pulled notebooks out of their pockets. Rachel’s head turned, too.

  “I know what happened to Madlyn Beckwirth,” I said, coming within a single decibel of shouting, “and you know more than you’re telling, Martin! So does Rachel!”