For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,80
of the house. Crawford took the key I had given him and slowly turned it in the lock. When the door was unlocked, he took his gun out of the holster on his hip, and Leah’s eyes grew wide. Crawford checked the gun, put his hand on the doorknob, and his lips started to count: one, two. . .
Abby, her car window open, reached out and grabbed my hand.
Crawford abruptly slammed open the front door, holding the flashlight in one hand and the gun in the other. “Police!” he shouted, and started moving the light around the room. His head turned abruptly, and Morgan came in from the back, also with his flashlight on. They both scanned the living room with their lights, and suddenly, Crawford shouted, and held open the screen door as wide as it could go.
Just then a little brown bat flew out through my open front door. He headed directly for the trees across the street, then toward the park, and was out of sight in a matter of seconds.
The cops turned on the living room light and looked around. Morgan even went upstairs and turned on the lights in all the bedrooms.
“Did we make the bed this morning?” Abby asked me quietly. I shrugged.
Crawford walked out the front door, smiling. Morgan, behind him, merely waved, got into his car, and drove off. Crawford couldn’t resist the temptation. He walked over to me.
“Got rid of your intruder, Mr. Tucker,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said sincerely. “Glad nobody was hurt.”
“Better get a cap for your chimney. And next time, before you call the cops, try the old tennis racket bit,” he said. “I hear that works real well with flying rodents.”
He got into his car and drove off.
“Bats aren’t rodents,” Ethan said in the back seat. “They’re chiroptera mammals.” Abby just stared at him, then turned her head to me.
“I guess we were worried for nothing,” she said.
“No, we weren’t,” I told her. “We just weren’t right this time. And I’m tired of it.”
“Next time we’ll know better,” she said as she opened the car door for Leah.
“There’s not going to be a next time,” I said. “I’m putting an end to this show right now.”
Chapter 21
This time, I wasn’t going to devise a plan, much less put it in motion, without first discussing it with Abby. And I did. She said she wasn’t crazy about the particulars, but overall didn’t see any other way to end this whole mess. So she finally consented. Secretly, I’d been hoping she’d suggest some improvements.
I couldn’t start anything on Sunday, but I could prepare. Abby took the kids to a children’s museum we like in Staten Island so I could do some research.
The freelance writer’s best friend used to be the public library. Now it’s the Internet. You point your browser toward any keyword you happen to like, and the next thing you know, all sorts of information about your friends and neighbors pours into your living room.
In this particular case, I used a search program called Copernic, which consolidates a number of search engines, to get me some background on “Respa, Worthington and Mattingly,” the Wall Street firm that Gary Beckwirth worked for before hitting it big in the Internet stock lottery. A number of the search engines that Copernic uses found sites that mentioned the firm, and eventually I was able to come up with the information I wanted, which was a personnel list for the years Beckwirth worked there.
I printed out that screen, then went to Beckwirth’s current company’s web site, and compared the personnel roster against the paper. There were three matches. One was Beckwirth. The other two were Miriam Lybond, a bond trader, and William Ryan, who worked in the accounting department.
I was willing to bet that Miriam knew Beckwirth better personally, and that Ryan knew more about his finances. As it turned out, Beckwirth’s finances were not the most interesting part of this story, so I looked up Miriam Lybond on the Internet White Pages, and found her in North Brunswick, New Jersey. I called the number, and found Miriam at home.
When I told her I was a reporter working on the Madlyn Beckwirth story, she almost hung up. “I don’t believe for one minute that Gary had anything to do with her death,” Miriam said boldly.
“Neither do I,” I told her. “I’m working on the story to see if I can prove he didn’t do it.”