For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,52

spent hours talking to the police, and that hadn’t gotten anybody anywhere.

I can’t listen to music while I’m thinking, so I kept the cassette player turned off. A.J. Croce would have to wait until I was in a less stressful situation. He plays a nice piano, but he couldn’t help me figure out what had happened.

The facts were easy to recite. The hard part was discerning what they meant. Madlyn Beckwirth had left her house in the middle of the night a week and a half ago, apparently of her own accord. Her neighbor may or may not have seen her hit by a minivan, but she certainly wasn’t injured seriously, since she was able to call me and ask me to leave her alone a mere ten days later.

Somehow, she had made it to Atlantic City, checked into an expensive hotel room, and charged the whole thing to Milt Ladowski. Where she’d gotten clothes or money, if she had indeed left with just the T-shirt and shorts she slept in, as Gary had said, was anybody’s guess. All I knew for sure was that she had called me this afternoon, sounding quite healthy, and asking to be left alone. But I hadn’t left her alone. I had come looking for her, and now she was dead.

It was just like the guy on the phone had said: I found Madlyn, but I found her dead. In some way, I must have contributed.

Guilt is instilled in my people pretty much at the start of our lives—probably through cells or DNA or something like that. If we can figure out some, even far-fetched, way we’re responsible for the bad stuff that happens in life, we root it out, or die trying. But in this case, I didn’t have to look very hard. I had taken on an investigation I knew I was ill-equipped to conduct. Oh sure, I’d protested myself blue in the face, but I’d agreed to do it, for the money and for the personal challenge. I had dismally failed the test.

Having worked myself into this state, it was now easy to wallow in it. Before I made it into Mercer County, I had convinced myself I was responsible for Madlyn’s death, Joel’s future psychotherapy bills, Gary’s inevitable lonely life, Ethan’s alienation from his classmates, Abby’s having to live in an income level beneath that of most of her friends, and Leah’s inability to rhyme more than four words with “cat.” If the ride got any longer, I might throw in the Johnstown Flood and the Bombay Bread Riots.

What was missing from this internal soliloquy was any concern for Madlyn Beckwirth. By all reports a decent and loving woman of less than 45, she was lying on a cold slab in the Atlantic County medical examiner’s office, awaiting transport back to Midland Heights for burial, after some pretty extensive cosmetic work was done or a closed casket was ordered.

Once I realized I was worried more about my own role than Madlyn’s death, I made a point of feeling guilty about that, too.

But, wait a second! I hadn’t pulled the trigger. If, as I suspected, somebody had been playing me for a fool the whole time, and I had played the role perfectly, I had to find out who was doing the manipulating. There was an awfully good chance it was the same person—or people—who had killed Madlyn Beckwirth.

And there were plenty of suspects. Why was Milt Ladowski’s name on Madlyn’s hotel bill? If Madlyn was having an affair in that hotel with someone, and Gary found out about it, could it have driven Gary crazy enough to do this to her? Wouldn’t he more likely go after the other guy? What about my mysterious phone caller? Madlyn had been receiving calls similar to the one I had gotten, threatening her life if she continued to manage Rachel Barlow’s campaign. Suppose the caller hadn’t just been some prankster who got his kicks from phoning the local bar and asking the bartender for “Amanda Hugandkiss.”

But more than anything else, there was the tight-lipped, teeth-clenched amusement of Martin Barlow when I’d suggested that he and Madlyn were sneaking around behind Rachel and Gary’s backs. And the cold-hearted stare of Rachel Barlow, mayoral candidate and high-school cheerleader gone bad, as she alternately suggested Madlyn was already dead, or laughed at the idea that Madlyn might be sleeping with Rachel’s husband.

My grip on the steering wheel got a little tighter, and I felt my jaw