For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,33
was first elected president. (I believe that if an actor can be president, there is no point in being an actor. But that’s another story.)
“Oh,” Joel said, disappointed. “Well, what have you been doing to find her?”
“Well, that’s just the thing. I don’t know what to do. I’ve asked everybody she knows. Nobody can think of a reason she’d leave.” Maybe he could, went the inference.
Alas, the child was as good at reading inferences as he was at witty exchanges. “Maybe somebody kidnapped her,” he said, with definite relish in his voice. The relish reminded me to ask him later about the barbecue sauce.
“Well, did you hear anything the night she, um, disappeared?”
“Yeah,” he said, and then sat there, staring blankly at me.
Yeah? He’d heard something? There might be a way to proceed from here? Somebody, especially this kid, was going to cooperate? How could that be?
I waited a few seconds, nodded, and looked encouraging. Then I realized that was all he was actually going to say.
“What did you hear?” I asked a little too forcefully.
“This scraping noise.”
“What scraping noise?”
“I dunno. It was late, and this noise woke me up. Sounded like some metal, or something. Kept on going. Then there was this really loud rip, and the sound stopped.”
“And you went back to sleep?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right after the car’s brakes stopped screeching.”
It suddenly occurred to me that this interview would be much more productive if Bud Abbott were putting the questions to the kid. He’d have way more experience in dealing with answers like this: “Car’s brakes? WHAT car’s brakes, Lou?” “
“The ones that screeched right before the dog started barking.”
“Dog? What dog?”
“Oh, you know, the one that started barking when my grandmother fell out the window.”
“What? Your grandmother fell out the window?”
“Well, she was startled when she noticed the fire.”
“Fire? What fire?”
“The one that got started when my uncle hanged himself and knocked over the candle.”
“What? Your uncle. . .”
You get the picture. I shook my head to get back on task. “You heard a car’s brakes screeching?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Real loud. I almost got up to see what it was, but I went back to sleep instead. And when I got up, my dad said she was missing.” Madlyn’s disappearance didn’t seem to bother him as much as having been awakened in the middle of the night. The way he said “she,” you’d think he was talking about the maid.
“About what time of night was this?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Joel said. “Must’ve been around two or three in the morning. Or four. I’m not sure.” He shrugged.
“Did your dad hear it?”
“My dad? He wouldn’t hear it if an elephant farted in his bedroom.” Joel dissolved into hysterics at the graphic word-picture he’d created. The tone of his chortling would have triggered both anger and fear in an ordinary man in his forties. I got up and opened the door.
Gary Beckwirth, to his credit, was not leaning in to listen at the door. He was in the next room—his and Madlyn’s bedroom, looking through a box of photographs he had strewn all over the chenille bedspread. He had one picture in his hand, and was silently weeping over it. I stayed in the doorway, unable to decide whether to invade his privacy.
He solved the dilemma for me by looking up and guiltily wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Sorry,” he said softly. I walked in and saw him put behind his back a photograph in which Madlyn seemed to be wearing a wedding dress. He straightened up like a soldier being brought to attention.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You care about your wife, and you’re worried. Why shouldn’t you cry?”
“I’m not being strong,” he said. “Madlyn would want me to be strong.” He sniffed, once, and regained his composure. Gary looked me in the eye, his bearing once more that of a long-suffering employer.
“What you did in there was unconscionable,” he said.
“I need Joel to trust me, and I needed you not to be in the room, so he could be completely honest with me. If you had agreed to let me talk to him alone when I asked the first time, that scene wouldn’t have been necessary.”
“You undermined my authority with the boy,” said Gary.
“Are you his father or his headmaster?”
He twisted his lip into something halfway between a sneer and an attack of gastroenteritis, and ignored my question. “What did he say to you?” he asked.