For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,10
He thinks I’m Mannix or somebody.”
“God, you are old.” She went to work with some sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, and garlic to make a pasta sauce that might once have been in a cookbook. Or not. All I know is, it involves the food processor, which means extra clean-up time for the kitchen crew, which is mostly me.
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “I could have made a passing but obscure reference to C. Auguste Dupin.”
“Edgar Allan Poe, right? The Purloined Letter? Murders in the Rue Morgue?” I started slicing two celery stalks. Abby wrinkled her nose a little. She won’t admit it, but she doesn’t much like celery. It’s one of the few vegetables I can claim an edge on.
“Very good. Keep that up, and I’ll make you stay after school.” I gave her my best Groucho eyebrow-wiggle, but she was too intent on cooking to swoon.
“So, why exactly does he think that you’re New Jersey’s answer to Elliot Ness?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. But if it means I’ll keep running into you in the middle of the day, I don’t really mind.” The lid on the pot was leaking steam, so Abigail put in the linguine and lowered the flame.
“Don’t count on it. I’ll be in the office the rest of the week.” She turned back to face me, and I slipped my arms around her waist and kissed her.
“This is my favorite part of the day,” I told her. I spend half my time trying to come up with new ways to tell her I love her. And we’ve been married 14 years. Disgusting, isn’t it?
“Well then, anything that would have happened later tonight would have been a letdown, wouldn’t it?”
“What’s this ‘would have’ stuff?”
“Well, I don’t want to disappoint you. . .”
I was just about to kiss her again when the phone rang. Abigail was standing right next to the kitchen wall phone, but simply stood and looked at me. She refuses to answer the phone at home, insisting that it’s either a business call for me or someone she doesn’t want to talk to. Luckily, I wasn’t far from her, and I reached past her head to pick up the phone.
“Hello?”
The voice was muffled, as if a cloth had been placed over the mouthpiece, and the caller mumbled, just in case the cloth wasn’t doing its job properly. The caller was definitely male, but that’s all I could tell. In fact, I barely made out a sound before I heard the name “Madlyn Beckwirth.”
“What? What did you say?”
Whoever it was spoke up just a little, as if irritated by my inability to hear him the first time. “I said you should leave Madlyn Beckwirth alone. Find her, and you’ll kill her.”
“Who is this?” Bright question. Like the guy’s going to just give me his name, address, and social security number while perpetrating what I was relatively sure was a crime. And there are people who think I’m a detective. “Hello?”
Click.
Chapter 7
I must have been staring at the phone, because Abby looked at me with concern. Her eyes kept moving from my face to the receiver in my hand.
“Somebody selling us something?”
I hung up the phone and walked to the kitchen table. I sat down. Abby walked over, worried now.
“What is it? Who was that?”
“I don’t know. Somebody said that if I find Madlyn Beckwirth, I’ll kill her.”
“WHAT? What the hell does that mean?” She sat down in another of the kitchen chairs, which creaked. I made a mental note to tighten the screws under the chairs. Somehow, that didn’t seem terribly important right now.
“I have no idea. Some guy said I should leave Madlyn Beckwirth alone, because if I found her, I would kill her.”
“Jesus!” But even then, I could see the legal mind going to work. She frowned. “Who knows you’re looking for Madlyn Beckwirth?”
I thought. “Nobody. Gary Beckwirth, Milt Ladowski, and Dave Harrington. I think we can eliminate Harrington from the suspects. Beckwirth is desperate for me to find Madlyn, so he wouldn’t call, and Milt is the one who hired me.”
“Milt Ladowski wouldn’t make a call like that,” said my wife. “His whole law practice could be ruined if he’s found making a threatening call.” One of Abby’s few failings is that she thinks everyone else thinks like her. Nobody would ever do anything irrational, or not consider the consequences, because she would never do anything irrational, or not consider the consequences.