For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,76

that button on MacKenzie’s phone, and compared it to the number on the index card. . .

“They don’t match,” MacKenzie said, his voice confused. “What does that mean?”

“That means this isn’t your cell phone,” I told him. “It means someone who has the same model phone came here, switched phones with you when you weren’t looking, and took yours home with him. Since you never use the cell phone, you’d probably not even notice the one or two calls he made using your phone—it would hardly stand out on your bill. If you were scrupulous enough to check the bill when it arrived, it would be so long ago that you wouldn’t remember this guy being here.”

“I did notice an increase of a dollar or so on the bill the last time,” MacKenzie said. “But I didn’t bother to call. I figured the rates had gone up again. Goddam phone company, you know.”

“Exactly.”

“Why would someone do that?” he asked as I checked the number on the phone in MacKenzie’s drawer again, wrote it down on the back of an ATM receipt in my pocket, and handed the phone back to MacKenzie.

“Because they didn’t want the calls to be traced to them,” I said. “They knew there’d be an investigation, and they knew that you were far enough away and unlikely enough a suspect to confuse everybody.”

MacKenzie nodded. “Very clever. But you said you think I know who might have done this. Who was it?”

“I was at a party yesterday in Midland Heights, New Jersey, and I saw a pink rose bush whose petals had little blue specks in the shapes of diamonds, Mr. MacKenzie.” “Do you know Martin Barlow?”

MacKenzie sat on a stool near a workbench, and slowly nodded. “I met him through my attorney, Milton Ladowski,” he said.

“That figures.”

“Mr. Barlow?” MacKenzie marveled. “Who’d have thought it? He speaks so well.”

“Has he been up here in the last month or two to buy a plant?”

Again MacKenzie nodded. “Yes, yes he was. He bought one of the rose bushes, and a rhododendron. Didn’t know how he was going to get them home, but he had a minivan, and they just fit in the back.”

“Yes,” I said to MacKenzie, who was still a little glassy-eyed over all the revelations. “Everybody in Midland Heights has a minivan. Even me.”

Chapter 19

I didn’t attend Madlyn Beckwirth’s funeral. I know it’s something that Miss Marple would have done. Just as Sam Spade would have been there, or Dashiell Hammett’s nameless Continental operative from all the short stories. Any of them would have gone, to observe the suspects and various untoward glances back and forth, but it wasn’t for me. I hadn’t been a friend of Madlyn, and I don’t think she would have appreciated my presence.

Besides, I was going to visit her mother only a little while after the service. That was enough of a nervy move, I thought, and if the annals of investigative reporting judged me harshly for not watching Madlyn’s “closed casket” (I later confirmed that) lowered into the earth, so be it. Instead, I woke up early, checked my email, and starting about nine o’clock made some phone calls.

Naturally, when Barry Dutton checked the number I had written down from MacKenzie’s cell phone against Verizon’s records, it matched Martin Barlow’s. And according to the Verizon Wireless records, Barlow’s was the same model as MacKenzie’s cell phone.

It was Saturday, so I didn’t have to worry about Colette Jackson or Westbrook being with Barry when he called from his office with the news. But when I suggested that this link should put a crimp in their case against Gary Beckwirth, Dutton chuckled.

“You want me to let Beckwirth off the murder charges because a nasty phone call to your house was made on Barlow’s cell phone?” He laughed. “How do you know Beckwirth didn’t just borrow Martin’s phone? Or that anybody else on the planet did? Besides, there’s no proof that whoever made that call was the person who shot Madlyn Beckwirth. And guess what? I have a credit card found in Beckwirth’s wallet that bears the name Milton Ladowski. I still have a gun with Beckwirth’s fingerprints on it. I have rumors that Madlyn was sleeping around on Beckwirth. And I have Beckwirth acting very much like somebody who shot his wife.”

“I can tell you for certain that Beckwirth didn’t shoot his wife,” I told Barry. “He might have killed Madlyn, but she wasn’t his wife.” I then told him about the annulment records