For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,20

didn’t exactly spit the words out at me, but she would have liked to. Only her terrific political instincts prevented a harsh, adversarial tone from kicking in. Great warming up the source, Tucker. The Pulitzer committee will no doubt reward your interviewing techniques someday. “No,” added the mayoral hopeful. I waited.

“That’s it? No?”

“No. I didn’t see anything unusual in the way Madlyn’s been acting lately.”

“She didn’t seem at all anxious or nervous?”

“No.”

“Excited about something?”

“No.”

“Worried about anything?”

“No.”

“Mention anything to you about trouble in her marriage?”

“Good lord, no.”

I stood up. “Well,” I said, reaching for my denim jacket, “I’m sorry to have taken your time.”

Rachel looked surprised. “That’s it? You’re not going to ask me about my campaign?”

“That’s not what this interview is about, Rachel. I thought Milt explained that I’m looking into Madlyn’s disappearance.”

“But the campaign is the reason for Madlyn’s disappearance,” said the I-wanna-be-the-mayor.

I stopped, midway through shrugging the jacket onto my shoulders. “You know that for sure?”

“Absolutely. Madlyn said she’d been getting phone calls, anonymous ones, threatening her if she kept managing my campaign. She didn’t take them seriously at first, but when they started coming every night, she got upset.”

I sat back down. “Did she call the police?”

“No. Gary doesn’t trust Chief Dutton. He believes the town police force is guilty of racial profiling.”

“Has Gary ever met Chief Dutton?”

Rachel smiled tolerantly. She was dealing with a mental midget, and she knew it. But one must keep up appearances, especially if one wants to gain high elected office. “Just because the chief is an African-American doesn’t mean he wouldn’t tolerate, even encourage, racial profiling if he thought his arrest rate would go up and his reputation would be enhanced.”

It occurred to me to point out that racial profiling was something done to ferret out drug dealers, operating under the racist assumption that non-whites are more likely than whites to be drug dealers. But the police in Midland Heights spend roughly 98 percent of their time giving out speeding tickets in a town whose speed limit never exceeds twenty-five miles per hour. As far as I knew, even the Grand Wizard of the KKK didn’t believe that being a member of a minority group made one more likely to drive forty miles per hour.

Still, I needed information from this woman, and engaging in a debate probably wouldn’t help me get it. “So she didn’t call the cops. Did Madlyn do anything else about the phone calls?”

“Well, she tried to ‘star-sixty-nine’ them, you know, but it was always out of the coverage area. And Gary wanted her to buy a gun, but she said they scared her.”

“You think whoever made those calls is responsible for Madlyn’s disappearance?”

Tears began to form in the corners of Rachel Barlow’s eyes. They appeared to be real. “I think they killed her,” she said softly.

Chapter 12

Some expressions sound exactly like what they mean. In my case, “in over my head” was precisely what I was. This is not a height joke. I was now operating in clearly alien territory, and most probably hostile territory as well. Everything I was doing, breathing included, had become a conscious and calculated effort.

Rachel Barlow, of course, was completely obsessed with her own self-importance. That was the only explanation for her thinking that someone would kill Madlyn Beckwirth because she was doing too good a job running her campaign for mayor. In a town whose main claim to fame is the only kosher Dunkin’ Donuts store in the country, even Ted Bundy wouldn’t kill someone over who the next mayor would be.

Over Rachel’s embarrassed blubbering, I made my apologies and left. I hadn’t brought the car, since I hadn’t gotten to the Y again that morning, and had decided instead to walk wherever it was necessary to go in town.

That’s probably why I noticed right away the blue minivan following me. If you’re in a car, it’s hard to tail somebody on foot. Only in suburban New Jersey would it never occur to someone trying to properly tail a pedestrian to first park his car.

This particular motorist kept his minivan far enough back that I couldn’t see into the driver’s seat, so my using “his” in this sentence was strictly conjecture. And I couldn’t very well turn around and take a good look, or he’d know I was on to him and peal away, leaving me with no chance at my first unambiguous clue in the case. So I kept walking, but I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket