For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,37
about what they might be. She was vigorously chewing a piece of gum. At least I hoped it was gum. Tobacco stains the teeth, and no spittoon was visible in the room.
Clearly, her father was a Satan-worshipping, heroin-addicted, alcoholic Hell’s Angel, since not one chromosome in this young woman could possibly be traced to Diane Woolworth. But then I looked on the baby grand piano and saw a picture of Diane standing next to a man in his fifties wearing a seersucker suit and bow tie, with close-cropped hair and tortoise-shell glasses.
Maybe Diane had put her wild past behind her. Maybe Jane had been adopted. Maybe she’d been raised by wolves, and Diane and her husband had been jungle missionaries who had taken her back to civilization, about, I don’t know, two weeks ago, and were still teaching her about the ways of living among humans. Or maybe I was making a snap judgment based on appearance.
“Where’s the car keys?” she said to her mother, not even glancing in my direction. Jane held out her hand to Diane, palm up. Give me the keys, Lady, and there won’t be no trouble. She blew a bubble. Thank goodness it was gum after all.
“Jane, do you know Mr. Tucker? Mr. Tucker, this is my daughter Jane. Jane, Mr. Tucker is looking into poor Mrs. Beckwirth.” Clearly, Diane was going to keep her Merchant-Ivory fantasy alive at all costs. Jane more or less turned her head in my direction and grunted, which I assumed was a sort of greeting among her people.
“Yeah. The car keys.” She chewed more violently now, perhaps a subtle threat to hand over the keys and let her be on her way. I figured I had virtually nothing to lose.
“I don’t suppose either one of you heard anything in the middle of the night, Monday before last?” I asked, eyes wide to show my complete non-threatening innocence.
Jane grunted again, but Diane, who had stood and walked to the adjoining kitchen so as to get the car keys off a calico-covered ring on the wall, stopped and put a finger to her chin. This was obviously a gesture she had learned by watching “Masterpiece Theatre.”
“Jane, didn’t you say you’d heard a motorbike or something the night before we heard that Mrs. Beckwirth had gone missing?”
“CYCLE, Mother! MotorCYCLE! How many times do I have to. . .” Jane composed herself as best she could, which meant she took two steps toward Diane and stuck out her hand again. “NOW can I have the car keys?”
“You heard a motorcycle that night, Jane?” I asked in my coolest, most grownup voice.
“Nah.” She turned toward me and sized me up, clearly determined I was an inferior member of the species, and curled her lip into a sneer. “I thought it was a bike, but it turned out to be a minivan with a bad muffler. I went to the window and saw it.”
“Did you see Madlyn Beckwirth?”
“I dunno.”
Diane brought Jane the keys, which she pocketed without a word to her mother. Jane headed for the door, and I stood.
“You don’t know?”
Jane stopped, and the sneer became a look of impatience and disgust I didn’t think was possible in a girl over the age of seventeen. “I saw something, you know. I’m not sure it was her. This minivan peals out, you know, like ninety miles an hour, and I see something fall over the railing, backwards, you know, down the hill over there next to that great big house. Coulda been her, you know. Coulda been a sack of shit too.”
“Jane! Really!” I thought Diane might actually put her hands to her ears, but she managed to avoid the urge.
“Did you tell the cops what you saw?” I asked.
“What, that fat guy with the tie from 1972? Nah. He didn’t ask, you know.” I knew. She turned and walked out the side door without so much as a backward glance. Diane sat back down at the dining room table and took a sip of tea.
“You sure you won’t have another crumpet, Mr. Tucker?”
That was odd, in a way. I’d heard what Jane had said, and that would seem to be the only useful information available in the Woolworth home today. Would Diane continue the conversation just to have someone to talk to, or did she have something eating away at her that she wanted to spill? I didn’t want another crumpet, but I sat down.
“Did you hear anything that night, Mrs. Woolworth?” What the