For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,72

share his last name, or that Joel was born in another county, or something else I hadn’t thought of. I’d have to examine some statewide records to find that out. Of course, if Joel had been born in New York City, for example, it might be more difficult to find his birth certificate. For all I knew, he had been born on a kibbutz in Haifa. Or maybe he hadn’t been born at all, but was actually the product of a laboratory experiment gone horribly wrong.

It led to a whole slew of new questions: if Madlyn and Gary’s marriage had been annulled so soon after they were married, more than twenty years ago, who was Joel’s father? Why were they still living together? Was that even Madlyn who had been killed in the hotel in Atlantic City?

I was getting tired of every lead producing more questions than answers. And I was more tired of the feeling, growing since I first talked to Milt Ladowski, that the whole kidnapping scenario had been staged for my personal benefit, that someone decided it would look suspicious if nobody cared that Madlyn ran off, so a patsy had to be found. A credible one, but one who wasn’t a good enough investigator to actually find anything out. The more I protested, the better I must have seemed for the job.

They hadn’t wanted somebody good. They had wanted somebody gullible.

I knew I should have been devastated by this conclusion. It should have bothered me that I couldn’t rise above the dismal expectations of my manipulator (or manipulators), that I had played directly into unseen hands. But for some reason, it was a liberating epiphany. I had been walking around with the weight of Madlyn’s death on my shoulders. The idea had been holding me back—the idea that somehow her death was my fault, that I should have done something to prevent it, and hadn’t thought of it in time.

Now, I didn’t have to worry about that anymore. There had been no expectations. I didn’t owe anybody anything.

That freed me up to act in any way I saw fit. I had my assignment now, and it came from me.

When I got home, I called the main number at the Press-Tribune and asked for the obit desk. Rory Anderson picked up, and I smiled, although he couldn’t see. Rory is maybe twenty-three, has hair that looks like he’s trying out for N’Sync, and knows me from his days at the Rutgers Daily Targum. The Targum was, technically, my first employer, back in the days I was an undergraduate and “employer” didn’t necessarily translate into “paycheck.”

I had done a little advising for the Targum a few years back, hadn’t reveled in my return to campus, and left by mutual agreement. But I’d met Rory, and actually written a letter of recommendation for him to the Press-Tribune. He was a good reporter who, in true Press-Tribune fashion, was being wasted on the obituary desk.

We had a brief verbal reunion, and I asked him to look up Madlyn Beckwirth’s obit.

“Why don’t you just pick up the paper, Dude?” he asked.

“Didn’t ‘Dude’ go out with, like, Pauly Shore?” I asked. “And, for your information, I don’t get your rag. I subscribe to the New York Times.”

“Snob.” I could hear him clicking on his keys to call up the obit. “You know, you could probably get this off the web site.”

“You don’t keep obits more than a day.”

He stopped typing. “How come you’re not getting this yourself, Aaron? You work for us, don’t you?”

“Hell, no. They fired me two days ago. I’m working for the enemy now.”

“Cool!” Like all obit writers, Rory deeply and truly detested his employer. Anything that could conceivably hurt the paper would give him nothing but pleasure. “Got it,” he said.

“I need a little information. Survivors?”

“Husband Gary, son Joel. . .”

“Yeah. . .”

“Mother, Mrs. Charlotte Rossi of Westfield. A sister, Mrs. Angela Cantucci of Toms River. That’s it.”

“You got where she went to high school?”

“No, but I’ll bet it was St. Joe’s.”

“Why?” I asked, startled that he’d come up with a guess so quickly.

“That,” he said, “is where all the good Italian girls go in Westfield, man.” I thanked him profusely, and hung up. After gathering my courage, I called Mrs. Rossi in Westfield, told her who I was, and asked if I could come over to talk about Madlyn. She was unexpectedly calm, and agreed to see me the next day, which was Saturday. It wasn’t until