For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Juanita the TV reporter widened her eyes to roughly the size of garbage-can lids. And then the worst thing that could have happened to Rachel Barlow followed: the microphone was pulled from her face.

  “What did you say? Who are you?” said Juanita.

  “I’ve been investigating Madlyn Beckwirth’s murder, and I’m saying Rachel and Martin Barlow know more than they’re telling!” I had, of course, nothing more than a suspicion, but what the hell, this was, as they say, “great television.”

  Meantime, I watched Martin and Rachel Barlow. They weren’t surprised or shocked. They weren’t even unnerved. Their eyes narrowed, their mouths tightened, their nostrils flared.

  The Barlows were good and angry.

  But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Just at that moment, I had one of those moments of acute observation that Sherlock Holmes himself would have treasured. I looked past the Barlows, past the reporters, who were now clamoring for my name and shouting questions at me, past the other voters who thought they were coming for a political event and showed up for a homicide analysis. I looked past the bandstand, the campaign signs, and even the bagels and marble cake.

  Behind Martin Barlow was his prized rose bush, in full bloom, affording an office seeker the finest background for the finest photo-op in American political history. If you looked carefully, you could see the tiny specks of blue in the pink petals, almost in the shape of diamonds.

  Martin Barlow had gotten his rose bush from Arthur P. MacKenzie.

  Chapter 18

  “Did you really say, ‘give me a by-line or give me death’?” Abigail asked. She and Mahoney were staring blankly at me across the kitchen table as I finished our chicken and couscous. I kept eating, having devoted most of the day to not eating.

  “You had to be there,” I told her. “It was more a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.”

  “What were you thinking?” Mahoney wanted to know. “You don’t have anything on these people. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I wanted to make them think I did. I wanted to force them into a stupid move that I can exploit.”

  “And you wanted to piss them off,” Abby added.

  “Well, yes, that too.”

  Abby stood up to clear her plate, and picked Mahoney’s up while she passed, since he had finished as well. He nodded thanks.

  “I don’t know that I’m crazy about this, Aaron,” she said, scraping couscous into the garbage so she could put the plates in the dishwasher. “If the Barlows were involved in killing Madlyn Beckwirth, and you make them think you can prove it, they might come after you.”

  “That’s why he’s here,” I said, pointing at Mahoney. “While I’m taking my little drive tonight, the galoot here will be watching you and the kids.”

  “Galoot?” Mahoney said, raising his eyebrows.

  “I meant it in the most affectionate way possible,” I said.

  “You stay on that side of the table, Pal,” he said. “I still have my knife.”

  Abby put the dishes in the dishwasher and sat back down at the table. “So you were just trying to irritate the Barlows today?”

  “Well, there were plenty of news organizations there, too. If somebody wants the complete story, they now know there’s a reporter who has the inside track.”

  “Oh yeah,” said my wife. “Screaming ‘Don’t vote for Mayor Murder’ while you’re being thrown out of a suburban backyard cookout is going to look really good on your resumé. Not to mention I don’t know how I’m going to get through the supermarket now. Everyone will be staring at me.”

  I stood up. “They all stare at you now, Honey,” I said. “At least the men do.”

  At the door, she kissed me a little more passionately than she normally would. “Drive safe,” Abby said. I gave Mahoney the eye over her shoulder. He understood the message, and I left.

  The ride to Emmaus seemed a lot longer this time, even though I could listen to A.J. Croce, Elliott Smith, Janis Ian, and Ella Fitzgerald on the way. But Mahoney’s absence meant two things: no friendly banter, and possible danger at home. It was difficult to resist the urge to call home on the cell phone every three minutes. But I managed to call only twice en route, and things were fine both times, although Leah couldn’t make up her mind whether to take a bath or a shower. Some decisions are just too big to be made quickly.

  I had wanted to talk to MacKenzie on the phone, but his number was unlisted. And I didn’t have time for Barry Dutton to come home (where he wouldn’t be overheard consorting with the enemy), get the number from Verizon, and call me back with it. But this way, MacKenzie wouldn’t know I was coming beforehand, and with his hearing, it could be a while before he knew someone was at the door, especially if he was in the greenhouse.

  He took a couple of minutes to answer my ring, and did seem surprised when he saw me at his door. The trip had taken twenty minutes less than the first time, mostly because this time I knew where I was going. MacKenzie invited me into the living room for coffee, but I asked if we could talk in the greenhouse. He seemed puzzled, but agreed. He didn’t walk as quickly as he probably had at fifty. Or sixty. The walk to the greenhouse was probably more than he was prepared for, but he didn’t complain.

  Once there, he asked if I was here to buy some flowers or a shrub, assuming that I’d asked to come into the greenhouse to choose the one item I wanted to take home. I assured him that wasn’t the reason for my trip.

  “Then I can’t say I completely understand,” he said slowly. “I’ve already told you I can’t help with the matter of the phone call.”

  I walked to the drawer where he had gotten the cell phone on the last visit, and asked if I could take it out. MacKenzie nodded, but still seemed puzzled. I turned the phone on and pushed a couple of buttons.

  “You see, Mr. MacKenzie, you and I were both thrown off the track the last time. Could you do us a favor, and get for me the card with your cell number on it?”

  He thumbed through the index cards again, and retrieved the card while I talked. “We forgot to think that someone might have wanted to deceive both of us, that they’d know we’d check the phone number on the threatening phone call.”

  MacKenzie found the cell phone number on his card, and I walked to him to get it. “I don’t see why that would make a difference, Mr. Tucker,” he said. “I still know I didn’t make that call.”

  “And I don’t think you did, sir, but I do think that someone you know made it.”

  His eyebrows jumped up. “Really? But the only ones who come back here are me, my daughters. . .”

  “. . . and the people who come to buy your plants,” I said.

  There’s a button on every cell phone that will tell you what phone number it’s using. That is, if you forget your own phone number, it will be glad to show it to you. And when I pressed that button on MacKenzie’s phone, and compared it to the number on the index card. . .

  “They don’t match,” MacKenzie said, his voice confused. “What does that mean?”

  “That means this isn’t your cell phone,” I told him. “It means someone who has the same model phone came here, switched phones with you when you weren’t looking, and took yours home with him. Since you never use the cell phone, you’d probably not even notice the one or two calls he made using your phone—it would hardly stand out on your bill. If you were scrupulous enough to check the bill when it arrived, it would be so long ago that you wouldn’t remember this guy being here.”

  “I did notice an increase of a dollar or so on the bill the last time,” MacKenzie said. “But I didn’t bother to call. I figured the rates had gone up again. Goddam phone company, you know.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why would someone do that?” he asked as I checked the number on the phone in MacKenzie’s drawer again, wrote it down on the back of an ATM receipt in my pocket, and handed the phone back to MacKenzie.

  “Because they didn’t want the calls to be traced to them,” I said. “They knew there’d be an investig
ation, and they knew that you were far enough away and unlikely enough a suspect to confuse everybody.”

  MacKenzie nodded. “Very clever. But you said you think I know who might have done this. Who was it?”

  “I was at a party yesterday in Midland Heights, New Jersey, and I saw a pink rose bush whose petals had little blue specks in the shapes of diamonds, Mr. MacKenzie.” “Do you know Martin Barlow?”

  MacKenzie sat on a stool near a workbench, and slowly nodded. “I met him through my attorney, Milton Ladowski,” he said.

  “That figures.”

  “Mr. Barlow?” MacKenzie marveled. “Who’d have thought it? He speaks so well.”

  “Has he been up here in the last month or two to buy a plant?”

  Again MacKenzie nodded. “Yes, yes he was. He bought one of the rose bushes, and a rhododendron. Didn’t know how he was going to get them home, but he had a minivan, and they just fit in the back.”

  “Yes,” I said to MacKenzie, who was still a little glassy-eyed over all the revelations. “Everybody in Midland Heights has a minivan. Even me.”

  Chapter 19

  I didn’t attend Madlyn Beckwirth’s funeral. I know it’s something that Miss Marple would have done. Just as Sam Spade would have been there, or Dashiell Hammett’s nameless Continental operative from all the short stories. Any of them would have gone, to observe the suspects and various untoward glances back and forth, but it wasn’t for me. I hadn’t been a friend of Madlyn, and I don’t think she would have appreciated my presence.

  Besides, I was going to visit her mother only a little while after the service. That was enough of a nervy move, I thought, and if the annals of investigative reporting judged me harshly for not watching Madlyn’s “closed casket” (I later confirmed that) lowered into the earth, so be it. Instead, I woke up early, checked my email, and starting about nine o’clock made some phone calls.

  Naturally, when Barry Dutton checked the number I had written down from MacKenzie’s cell phone against Verizon’s records, it matched Martin Barlow’s. And according to the Verizon Wireless records, Barlow’s was the same model as MacKenzie’s cell phone.

  It was Saturday, so I didn’t have to worry about Colette Jackson or Westbrook being with Barry when he called from his office with the news. But when I suggested that this link should put a crimp in their case against Gary Beckwirth, Dutton chuckled.

  “You want me to let Beckwirth off the murder charges because a nasty phone call to your house was made on Barlow’s cell phone?” He laughed. “How do you know Beckwirth didn’t just borrow Martin’s phone? Or that anybody else on the planet did? Besides, there’s no proof that whoever made that call was the person who shot Madlyn Beckwirth. And guess what? I have a credit card found in Beckwirth’s wallet that bears the name Milton Ladowski. I still have a gun with Beckwirth’s fingerprints on it. I have rumors that Madlyn was sleeping around on Beckwirth. And I have Beckwirth acting very much like somebody who shot his wife.”

  “I can tell you for certain that Beckwirth didn’t shoot his wife,” I told Barry. “He might have killed Madlyn, but she wasn’t his wife.” I then told him about the annulment records I’d found. Barry stammered for a moment, but held his ground.

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t shoot her,” he said.

  “No, but it sure is interesting,” I told him. “First I’m hearing about this credit card, too. Do you think Milt Ladowski knows?”

  Barry’s voice dropped about one and a half octaves. “Mr. Ladowski does not take me into his confidence very often,” he said.

  Since I wasn’t the chief of police, I figured there was no reason Mr. Ladowski couldn’t take me into his confidence, but it was Saturday, and I couldn’t go to his office and be annoying now. I’d have to put off that pleasure for two days. I hung up the phone and sought out my wife, who was sitting on our back steps looking out over the tiny expanse of concrete and cheap flagstone we call a backyard.

  “What we need,” she said, “is grass.”

  I sat down next to Abby and kissed her on the shoulder. “As an officer of the court, you should know that pot smoking is illegal,” I said. She did not smile.

  “This backyard is depressing,” she said.

  “So is our bank statement,” I said. “And the phone hasn’t exactly been ringing off the hook with editors offering me plum assignments— only cranks who want me to come and explain the Madlyn Beckwirth murder to their tiny groups for free.”

  “You couldn’t explain it for money, either,” she reminded me sourly.

  “Wrong side of the bed this morning?”

  “I’m not crazy about having to have Mahoney play bodyguard here while you’re away,” she said. “I don’t like worrying that you’ve gotten us into a situation that could endanger the kids, and you didn’t even talk to me about it first. You worry me sometimes. You think you know how to control or fix everything, and you really don’t. How do you know that whoever killed Madlyn Beckwirth isn’t going to show up here tonight with a gun?”

  “I don’t,” I admitted, “and I should have talked to you first. I’m sorry. But the Barlows seem like such a couple of pompous asses, I felt I had to annoy them just to keep myself sane. I don’t like being manipulated, especially by people who consider me insignificant. I reacted emotionally instead of thinking it through, and I was wrong to do that. I’m a very emotional guy, you know.”

  She finally smiled at me. “I know. So what’s on the agenda for today?”

  “Going up to visit Madlyn’s mom in Westfield,” I said. “That’s about it.”

  “How do you know the gunman won’t shoot me and the kids while you’re away?”

  “Because you’re all coming with me.”

  And three hours later, in Charlotte Rossi’s living room, a very brown place with lace curtains and framed high school graduation pictures of two girls, my son slumped in an armchair, engrossed in Gameboy as only an Asperger’s child can be, oblivious to all else going on around him. Leah sat very quietly on Abigail’s lap, on a couch opposite Mrs. Rossi’s television. Leah’s attention was on the tape of The Little Mermaid that we had brought, and that Mrs. Rossi had graciously agreed to play on her VCR. Abby’s attention was on Charlotte Rossi, and on me, since I was sitting next to Abby and asking the questions of Mrs. Rossi.

  That is, I had offered condolences, declined an offer of coffee (which Abigail had considered accepting, but had a girl on her lap), and asked one question: “tell me about Madlyn,” and Mrs. Rossi was off and running. After much talk and any number of old photographs, I managed to get a word in edgewise.

  “How did you feel when she got married?”

  Mrs. Rossi, a slim, vibrant woman with hair that might not have been its natural color (jet black) and large, very aware eyes, sat back in her armchair just a bit. This was not the memory she wanted to dredge up today.

  “Well, I thought they were too young, you know. Madlyn was, what, twenty, twenty-one? But she was”—her voice dropped to a whisper for Leah’s benefit—“pregnant, and she wanted the pretty boy.” Charlotte turned to Abigail, with whom she clearly felt more comfortable. “At that age, you can’t tell them anything.”

  “At any age,” Abby agreed, and Charlotte chuckled, the black dress she had worn to the funeral in sharp contrast to the laughter.

  “You got that right,” Mrs. Rossi agreed. “Later on, when they got it annulled, I thought she had come to her senses, but. . .”

  “You knew about the annulment?” I asked.

  Charlotte looked offended. “I’m the mother,” she said. “Of course I knew. But by then, well, Maddie and I weren’t really talking all that much.”

  Leah looked up from “Under The Sea” long enough to look amazed. “You didn’t talk to your own daughter?” She looked at Abby, who hugged her and said, “watch the movie.”

  Mrs. Rossi put a hand to her mouth, and lowered her voice again. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hope I didn’t upset her.”

  “
Not at all,” I told her. “Leah likes to be dramatic. But I am curious. What came between you and Madlyn, if I may ask:?”

  Charlotte didn’t want to answer, but she knew I was trying to do right by her daughter, and she knew her response would help. She bit her lower lip for a moment, and kept her voice to a barely audible whisper.

  “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “But I’m a good Catholic.”

  Yeah, and I was a Jewish agnostic, but what did that have to do with anything? “So. . . did Madlyn want to convert?” I asked.

  “No,” Charlotte said. “She still considered herself a Catholic. But, you know, the Church frowns on how she. . . ended her pregnancy.”

  Huh? “Madlyn had an abortion?” I said stupidly.

  Leah looked up at Abby again. “Mommy, what’s an abortion?”

  Abby smiled at her and said, “watch the fish.”

  “He’s a crab.”

  I leaned forward, and probably blushed at my own indiscretion. “But I thought Madlyn miscarried the first baby.”

  “First? Only baby. And that was just what they told people—she miscarried. She. . . actually terminated the pregnancy. And after that, we didn’t talk very much. I would hear things from her sister, and then after the annulment, we really didn’t hear from Maddie very often at all. A card at Christmas, my birthday, that sort of thing. She never called, and when she moved out, she didn’t let us know where she was living. I found out about. . . this from the newspapers.” Her eyes misted.

  “Was there anyone who did hear from her regularly?” I asked, and Charlotte nodded, although she seemed to find it hard to speak.

  “She kept in touch with Marie Aiello,” she managed, and opened the 1974 high school yearbook on the coffee table to a picture of Marie, a very attractive girl with dark hair and eyes. “I think Ree-Ree heard from her quite often.” Her voice was getting shaky, and she was staring bravely at Leah. Charlotte was trying very hard not to break down in front of my daughter. I thought that was too much to ask of her.