For Whom the Minivan Rolls

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “So what does Maddie get for her silence?”

  “She gets vacations. Every once in a while, she just takes off, rents herself a hotel room, and calls Martin Barlow. He shows up, they go at each other like a couple of bulldogs in heat for a few days, and she goes back to Gary, flaunting it over him that she likes Martin better in bed, and making sure that Rachel knows she’s using Martin up over and over again.”

  Martin Barlow, sex machine. Go figure. “Is that the end?” I asked.

  “No, but I don’t know the end. Maddie always calls me every week, except when she’s on what she calls her ‘Martin breaks.’ Well, she doesn’t call two weeks ago, and she doesn’t call last week, so I figure she must be on some kinda break. Then I read in the paper that she’s dead.”

  “That must have hit you right in the gut.”

  “Tell you the truth, all I could think was, at least it doesn’t hurt her anymore. She had what she wanted, and they took it away from her. And the guy she really loved was one of those who did it to her. That must’ve really hurt.”

  “I would guess.”

  “So who killed her?” Marie Aiello asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but if you call me tomorrow, I might have another answer.”

  “Well then, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I hope I’m here to answer the phone,” I said. “Oh, and Marie, I owe you ten bucks. You could explain it after all.”

  Chapter 24

  When he opened his front door to my knock, I blew past Gary Beckwirth and shouted over his protestations that Milt Ladowski had told him not to talk to me. He looked drugged. He might very well have been on a number of different tranquilizers.

  “I know it all, Gary, every bit of it,” I rattled on. “I know that Madlyn wasn’t really your wife. . .”

  “She was. . .”

  “You’re not talking now. I’m talking. She wasn’t your wife. Rachel Barlow, or whatever her real name is now, is your wife. You guys decided to play Swinging Seventies one night and swapped families. It’s not unheard of. A couple of Yankee pitchers did it in the real Seventies.”

  Beckwirth was now looking nervously toward the staircase. He motioned, palms down, for me to lower my voice. But I was in full annoyance mode, and would have none of it.

  “What’s the matter, Gary? You afraid Joel will hear? Doesn’t he know Madlyn wasn’t his real mother?”

  Beckwirth sagged into a chair in the hallway, his face impassive. “He knows,” he said. “He knows.”

  “So what’s to hide?” I asked. “I know, you know, he knows. There’s no reason for secrets anymore. The thing that I don’t get is why you’re not defending yourself. You know you didn’t kill Madlyn. You never could. You loved her too much, didn’t you?”

  Gary started to cry. He buried his face in his hands and sobbed, but he nodded “yes” just the same. I sat down next to him.

  “But it ate at you, didn’t it? That you loved her so much, but she didn’t love you. She loved him. She loved Martin Barlow. Her real husband. And when she’d go off on her little holidays, it probably tore you up inside. It bothered you so much you hired a private detective with a blue minivan to watch her day and night, but he drove her off the road the night she left. Right? Because you loved her so much?” I thought of him going through the photographs in his bedroom and weeping.

  “So if you knew where she was, why in the name of Anthony Quinn did you send me after her? Why, Gary? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He looked up, his cheeks wet. His eyes were disbelieving. “You don’t know? You don’t understand?”

  “No. I’m asking you,” I said, voice gentler now.

  Beckwirth didn’t even try to compose himself. The combination of prescription drugs and strain was too much to battle. “She used to go away for two days, maybe three. But this time. . . she just disappeared in the middle of the night. I really did think she was kidnapped the first day, until Martin called.” The way he said “Martin” was similar to the way Marie Aiello had said Rachel Barlow’s name. “By then, I’d already talked to the police. And then it dragged on and on, and I thought she might never come back. The thought of her. . . you know, with him like that. . . I needed someone to make her come back. I knew you could do it.”

  That was it? I was supposed to deliver Madlyn Beckwirth, um, Barlow, from the seductive grip of Martin Barlow, and then back to Gary? I was supposed to convince her that she really loved Gary, even though she knew she didn’t? Who the hell did he think I was, a combination of J. Edgar Hoover and Dr. Ruth?

  “But somebody killed her. Was it you?”

  Beckwirth looked as if I’d suggested he’d jumped up one morning and landed on Mercury. “Me? Kill the woman I loved? You alread said I didn’t do it.”

  I shrugged. “It’s happened before. Jealousy, crime of passion. It’s not a new thing.”

  Gary shook his head violently. And started to cry again. “Not me,” he said. “Not me.”

  “Then who?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Are you telling me you’re still covering up for them? After they permanently took away the one person on this earth you loved, you’re going to let them get away with it? What do you owe these people, Gary?”

  He vibrated in the chair, but said nothing. I decided that playing good cop wasn’t working, and I’d have to switch into bad cop mode. So I raised my voice again. A lot.

  “Fine!” I screamed. “This whole thing is coming down tonight, Gary! And if you don’t do what’s right, it’s going to come down right on your head! I know all I need to know, and tomorrow morning, you can kiss this pretty house of yours goodbye! Enjoy your last day as a wealthy man!” I all but ran for the door and let myself out, fully aware that I had no idea what I was yelling about.

  First, I scared Milt, then I threatened Gary, so next were the Barlows. Pissing them off again proved to be considerably more fun than dealing with Gary. Just the sight of me at their front door was enough. Martin tried to slam it in my face. But I had seen enough traveling salesman cartoons. I wedged my foot inside the door. It hurt a little, but New Balance makes a damned sturdy little shoe, and Dr. Scholl will be getting a new customer as soon as I can get to the drug store.

  “If you want to win this election, you’re letting me in. Otherwise, you can hear what I have to say nice and loud on your doorstep, where everybody else on the block can be in on it, too,” I told him, and I saw Rachel, behind him, nod her head. Martin relieved the pressure on my foot, and I walked into the house. Martin made a point of closing the door as quickly as possible. I did my best not to limp.

  “Say what you have to say,” Rachel said, biting her upper lip. It gave her the rather dubious appearance of a chimpanzee in a polyester doubleknit.

  “I know all about the goofy wife-swapping deal with you and the Beckwirths,” I started. Martin’s eyes widened, but Rachel simply watched me with practiced calm. “It probably wouldn’t play well with Martin’s tenure petition, would it? Or with the voters. But then, neither would a murder conviction.”

  “Murder?” Rachel spat. “We didn’t kill Madlyn. Gary did. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Gary Beckwirth enjoyed his suffering way too much to end Madlyn’s life that way,” I countered. “He loved her. If he was going to kill anybody, he’d have killed Martin for having better sex with Madlyn than he could.”

  Martin flushed and made some stammering noises. Rachel, again, was icy cool, but the lines around her mouth were showing just a little bit.

  “We didn’t kill anyone,” she repeated, “and I don’t hear you proving otherwise.”

  “I have all the proof I need,” I said, knowing I had none. “I know that Martin called me and threatened me on a cell phone he stole. By the way, Marty, Mr. MacKenzie wants his cell phone back, and he expects you to pay the long distance charges on his bill. But I doubt there were any threatening, anonymous calls to Madlyn. You just made those up, didn’t you, Rache? I
know all that. And I’ll hand it all over to the cops tomorrow unless you two decide to cooperate.”

  Rachel turned to the man everyone thought was her husband. “It all comes down to money,” she said. “I told you.” Then she turned to me. “How much do you want?”

  “Four hundred thousand dollars.”

  Rachel laughed. Martin looked like he was going to swallow his tie. “Four hundred thousand?” she asked. “Why not ask for an even half million?”

  “Okay.”

  “We don’t have that kind of money,” Martin managed to say.

  “You have a decent amount stored away,” I said. “You don’t pay for your house. You don’t pay for your cars. Your son is being raised by a man who’s considerably wealthier than you. I don’t care where you get it. Just get it. By tonight. Or I’ll be calling Barry Dutton and a few of my newspaper editors in the morning. And Martin?”

  “Yes?” he asked bravely.

  “That whole wife-swapping thing? The ‘you-take-mine-I’ll-take-yours-and-don’t-tell-anybody’ plan? That is, without question, the dumbest arrangement I’ve ever heard of in my life. What in the name of Charles Dickens made you think you could keep it a secret forever?”

  Saying that felt especially good. It’s one thing to stumble across an intricate, brilliantly conceived, maddeningly logical, ruthlessly executed plan. It’s another to dig for weeks on a story and find out it’s about a plot that Isaac Asimov would have rejected as too far-fetched, and executed by a group of egos that put Chuck Barris to shame. It was insulting to have uncovered it.

  I turned on my heel, careful to make sure that Rachel Barlow didn’t have a dagger in her hand, and walked through the door.

  Once outside, I felt a tight pull inside my stomach. My plan had gone just the way I’d thought it would.

  Damn it.

  Chapter 25

  It surprised me how little time it takes to annoy a bunch of murder suspects. Back in my office, I was trying to get my screenplay characters into that inevitable argument that would threaten their budding romance. I had been staring at the screen for an hour, and written for fifteen minutes, when Ethan got home from school.

  He was in “oblivious boy” mode, seeing nothing but the place to leave his backpack and the jar in which we keep the sharpened pencils. Ethan barely said hello before he was at the table, doing his homework at the speed of light so he could get upstairs and log Nintendo time before Pinky and the Brain came on. Ethan leads a very full life.

  I struggled further with the two obstinate bastards I’d been writing when Leah came in from school, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and headed straight to her homework, too. It was just about that time that Barry Dutton called.

  “Tucker, are you out of your mind?”

  Cool! Somebody had called to complain! Maybe we could eliminate a suspect. “Who called you?” I asked.

  “Called? Nobody called. I’m just wondering why you’re dialing nine-one-one when there’s a little brown bat in your house.” Oh, that.

  “I didn’t know it was a little brown bat. I thought it was a large menacing person of undetermined color.”

  Ethan walked over and dropped his homework on my desk, then turned and ran up the stairs. He knew if I found anything wrong, I’d be up to discuss it with him when I got off the phone.

  “It’s nice,” said Barry, “that you don’t discriminate against large intruders of one skin tone or another. Now, why did you think someone called me about you?”

  I picked up the top sheet of Ethan’s homework. Right up at the top, he’d written his usual “Math—Ethan,” in near-perfect block letters, but his numbers below were barely legible. He spent more time practicing his name than he did his numbers. It’s part of his Asperger’s— the kids tend to have in fine motor skills deficits, and writing is a problem best dealt with by occupational therapy, or compensated for with a computer keyboard.

  “Lately, you haven’t been calling during business hours,” I told Barry. “I thought maybe you were calling now because there’d been complaints. I haven’t been leaving everyone alone like I’m supposed to.”

  I did the calculations on Ethan’s math, and as usual, he had gotten the problems right. At least, the ones I could figure out myself. See, I was an English major. . .

  “Who haven’t you been leaving alone?” Barry’s voice took on a long-suffering tone.

  Ethan’s next page was for social studies, and of course on top it read, “The Civil War—Ethan.” A number of questions about the Civil War were below, and this time, I could figure out the answers all by myself. He had gotten only one answer wrong.

  “Don’t worry, Barry,” I said. “Your job isn’t in jeopardy.”

  “No,” he said. “But if you get killed, I’ll have two murders on my hands, and how will that look when it comes to salary review time?”

  “I’ll do my best to avoid that,” I said, and hung up. I picked up Ethan’s last page, an English assignment called “Ethan’s Favorite Time.” It was an essay about the child’s favorite time of the day, and of course at the top, he had written, “Ethan’s Favorite Time—Ethan,” like Mrs. Fisher didn’t know that Ethan had written something called “Ethan’s Favorite Time.” I started to read, and then looked at the top of the page again. And I stared at it for a few moments.

  Oh, for crying out loud!

  I got up and walked up the stairs to Ethan’s room. The door was open, so I didn’t knock. He was sitting at his computer, not at the Nintendo.

  Ethan writes poetry. Two years ago, he wrote a poem for a school assignment, and got enough positive feedback from adults that he just continued to write poems. And he’s actually pretty good. I’ve never had much use for poetry myself, but my son communicates through his poetry in ways he can’t always manage in ordinary conversation.

  On his computer screen was the beginning of a new poem, called “Wavelength.” Of course, it said “Wavelength—Ethan” at the top. And it read: “Nobody else is on my wavelength, I know/It bothers me sometimes, but I try not to show.” That was as far as he’d gotten.

  He saw me reading over his shoulder. “No one, I think, is in my tree,” I said. “I mean, it must be high or low.” Ethan stared up at me, confused. Was the old man going off the deep end?

  “Did I get something wrong?” he asked. He assumed if I had come upstairs, it was about homework. I sat down on his bed and looked at him. Ethan was puzzled, and swiveled back and forth in his chair absent-mindedly.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What was me?” Now he figured he was in trouble over something, and got ready to explain how it was really Leah’s fault.

  “It was you with the barbecue sauce. You wrote ‘Fuck Ethan’ out on our sidewalk, didn’t you?”

  He looked down at the floor and shrugged.

  “It wasn’t until just now that I figured it out,” I told him. “First you wrote the word ‘fuck’ on the sidewalk, and then you signed it with your name. Just like you do on all your homework.”

  He shrugged again, wondering what punishment he would now face. Ethan stole a quick involuntary glance at his Nintendo machine, knowing that inappropriate behavior usually resulted in a loss of video game time.

  “Did you just learn the word?” I asked. “Was that what it was, and you just felt like using it?”

  He tried shrugging again, but saw from the look on my face that shrugging wasn’t going to be enough. “I guess,” he said. “But I didn’t just learn the word. I just felt like writing it.”

  “Where’d you get the barbecue sauce?”

  Ethan’s eyes were still avoiding me, but he doesn’t make eye contact much under the best of circumstances. “Matthew stole it from Big Bob’s, this place by school. And he kind of. . . dared me.”

  Good old Matthew. The kid who had taught Ethan how to make the fart noise under his arm. You could always count on Matthew.

  “You did it to show Matthew?”

  He started to shrug, and de
cided to nod instead. “And some of the other guys. Warren Meckeroff, Avil, and Thomas. They said I was a baby and I wouldn’t do it. When they saw me write my name, they ran, and I didn’t know what to do with the barbecue sauce, so I threw it by the garbage cans, because Mom was coming.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell us this?” I asked, and immediately realized how stupid that sounded. “Because you figured you’d get punished?”

  He nodded, and slowly started to cry. I kneeled next to his chair and put my arm around him. “It’s never easy being Ethan, is it?” I said. He stopped crying and looked at me.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Forget it.” I got up and started to leave the room.

  “Dad?”

  At the door, I stopped and turned. “What is it, Pal?”

  “Am I. . . do I. . . um, what punishment. . .”

  I smiled a crooked smile. “Don’t worry about it, Chief. Just don’t do it again. And Ethan. . .”

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Don’t tell your mother, okay? Oh, and one more thing.” He looked up. “Your printing is getting much better.”

  I walked out as he was shaking his head at his unexpected good fortune.

  Chapter 26

  “Are you really sure this is the best way?” Abigail asked. “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not nuts about it myself,” I admitted. “But as far as I can see, it’s the only way. Besides, I’ve already spent the day irritating people.”

  “As only you can.”

  I ignored her. “And the die is cast.”

  She doesn’t often look at me the way I look at her: a little dewy-eyed, smiling wistfully. So when I caught that expression across the kitchen table, I knew what she was thinking.

  “Relax. This isn’t the last time you’ll ever see me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Unless you get hit by a bus on the way to Mahoney’s house,” I said, although I wasn’t the least bit sure of anything these days. Since yesterday, I’d followed an attorney and threatened him physically, been given a magical mystery tour through marriages, annulments, wife-swapping, child-swapping, and for all I knew, dog-swapping (although I hadn’t seen a dog at either house), I’d yelled at a murder suspect, I tried to blackmail a couple of political wannabes out of a half a million dollars, and I figured out that my son had cursed himself on our own sidewalk. This kind of stuff tends to shake one’s belief system just a tad.