For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,56

I didn’t want to spend time on the phone with Dutton. I forced myself to look away from Abigail and opened a reporter’s notebook sitting on my desk.

“Can’t it wait until the morning, Barry? I’ve been. . .”

“No, it can’t wait until the goddam morning! This isn’t a woman running out on her husband anymore, Aaron. This is a murder! I’m going to have the Atlantic County prosecutor’s people here in the morning, and I have to be able to tell them something.”

I hate it when Dutton is right. There wasn’t any way around it. I gave him the shortest possible version of the facts while Abby continued to lounge, finished her drink, and picked up the TV Guide.

“That’s it,” I said when I finished. “Now, what have you found out?” I took out a legal pad and pen to take notes.

“Well, the autopsy won’t be available for a couple of days, but I don’t think there’s any doubt she died of gunshot wounds.”

“I was there. There isn’t any doubt.”

“And Gary’s identification confirms that it was Madlyn,” Dutton added. The thought had occurred to me during the long ride home that, given my great memory for faces, I might have looked at someone of Madlyn’s general physical type and wrongly assumed it was her. So that was that.

“Do the state troopers really think Beckwirth did it?”

“Aaron, almost every time someone is killed, it’s done by someone they knew, usually a family member. When a married woman is killed, the first logical suspect, given no obvious outside motive, is the husband.” Barry didn’t sound especially convinced himself. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Abby reach for the remote control.

“Well, let me come in tomorrow morning, and we’ll talk about it,” I suggested.

“Okay,” Dutton sighed. “But I want you here first thing, as soon as the kids. . .”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and hung up. I practically flew across the room, spilling a little of my now watered-down drink (the ice had melted) on the musty carpet in my office.

“Hold it right there,” I said to Abby. I slithered in next to her on the couch and grabbed the remote out of her hand. “Don’t touch that dial.” She grinned, and I gave her the kiss I had been waiting for all day.

And what happened after that is, quite frankly, none of your business.

Chapter 7

Later that night, I called the Press-Tribune, got the night editor, and told her about Madlyn Beckwirth’s death. The night editor, maybe two years out of college and still struggling not to say “y’know” after every phrase, got very excited and insisted I write the story myself and email it to her immediately. I told her the writing would take me about an hour, and she promised to find space for the story on the front page.

Life is funny. There once was a time when writing a front-page story would have been a great professional thrill for me, but that time had come and gone, along with the beard I wore in my twenties. Now, the only thing that would have gotten my professional blood flowing rapidly would be a call from a two-bit producer promising to turn one of my 120-page fantasies into a bad movie that some director straight out of film school would hack up, with maybe three lines of my original dialogue intact. And I’d get paid maybe ten grand.

I again promised the nice night editor that I would send the story as quickly as possible, so I sent Abigail up to bed to minimize her ability to distract me and sat down at the Macintosh to turn what I knew into what I hoped would be a coherent news story.

The next day, with minimal editing, the front page of the Central Jersey Press-Tribune featured (above the fold) the following article whose headline, I hasten to interject, I didn’t write.

Local Woman Found Murdered Killing May Be Tied To Midland Heights Mayor Election

By Aaron Tucker

Madlyn Beckwirth, 44, was found shot to death yesterday at an Atlantic City hotel. Beckwirth, a resident of Midland Heights, had been reported missing by her husband, Gary Beckwirth, last week.

She had been campaign manager for the Middle Heights mayoral campaign of Rachel Barlow. Barlow is attempting to unseat long-time mayor Sam Olszowy in a Democratic primary election less than two weeks away.

Beckwirth was shot in the stomach and the head, and an autopsy confirmed that the shots were the cause of death. Gary Beckwirth, president of