For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,69

me, but I managed to nudge my way toward the stairs and the still-moving group. It was almost funny, the way they all moved like a hive, like the whole cast of the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the final episode, taking tiny steps toward a box of Kleenex.

“Milt, is Gary confessing to his wife’s murder?” I shouted as they neared us.

“Who the hell let him in?” Dutton yelled at the cops. Good move, Barry.

“Shut up, Barry, I’m press.” Why not give Colette the whole show? But I’d better be careful not to go over the top and protest too much. She’d get suspicious.

Barry, knowing when to quit, gestured to the cops, who walked over and stood intimidatingly over my shoulder, making sure I couldn’t reach Beckwirth.

“Milt, did you hear my question? Is Gary confessing?”

Ladowski didn’t answer, but Gary Beckwirth seemed to wake up on hearing my voice. He looked over at me, still wearing his Rod Serling smile.

“Aaron,” he said. “Aaron’s here.”

“Gary, are you. . .”

“Don’t talk to him!” Ladowski yelled. “Don’t say a thing!”

They’d almost made it to the door, when Beckwirth turned to talk to me, as calm and peaceful as I’d ever seen a man.

“It’s all right, Aaron,” he said. “It’s really better this way. Madlyn will understand. Don’t worry. She’ll understand.”

They practically pushed him out the door. Colette Jackson gave me one last sneer before leaving the house. I stood rooted to the spot.

I just couldn’t move until I knew Gary Beckwirth had been driven away. The sight of that smile again would have been more than I could bear.

Chapter 15

“The murder weapon?” Abby asked. “To arrest him that fast, they must have Gary’s fingerprints all over it and a match on the bullet.”

The kids were in bed and I was having a bowl of cereal, the finest nighttime snack ever invented. How this whole breakfast thing got started is anybody’s guess. Abby, meanwhile, was eating a piece of melon with a spoon. A visitor to our kitchen would have assumed that there had been a total eclipse of the sun and it was actually seven o’clock in the morning.

“Barry Dutton called me after he got home,” I told her. “They have a match on the bullet, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson police special, which they said is probably the most popular gun on the planet. They found this particular gun under a bush in the backyard, where he’d thrown it. Registered legally to Gary Beckwirth three months ago.”

“I thought Madlyn wouldn’t let him have a gun,” Abby said, wiping some melon juice from the corner of her mouth. “I thought they scared her.”

“As well they might,” I said. “Maybe Gary just didn’t tell Madlyn he had one.”

“So did Gary confess?”

“No, not according to Barry. But he’s not exactly saying he didn’t do it, either. He just keeps smiling that psychotic smile of his and saying ‘it’s all for the best.’ I’m telling you, he looked like Tony Perkins at the end of Psycho, sitting there in the hallway with that weird grin on his face.”

“At least Gary hadn’t dressed up like his dead mother.”

“Not that we know of,” I said.

“Well, they have the gun, they have the bullet, they have Gary acting nuts. That might be enough, but I can’t see them moving on it that fast unless they had something else,” Abby said, in full attorney mode.

“Like what?”

“A witness, maybe. Someone willing to testify they saw Gary shoot Madlyn, or heard him say he was going to shoot Madlyn.” She looked at the kitchen ceiling for a moment, apparently in deep and sober thought. “We could use a dropped ceiling in here to cover the water damage,” Abby said.

I laughed in spite of myself. She gave me a glance, realized how quickly, and without notice, she’d moved from one subject to the other, smiled guiltily, and shrugged. If she got any more adorable, I might have to throw myself on the kitchen floor and let her take advantage of me.

“I’d like to talk to Lawyer Abby now, please,” I said.

“Wait,” she said, doing her best imitation of Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve. She rolled her eyes back in her head, allowing her head to fall back. Then, Abby “came to,” and looked me in the face, dropping her voice a full key lower on the musical scale.

“Ask your question.”

“What advantage is there for a couple to buy a very expensive property and only put one name on the mortgage and