For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,89
she said. “I told you.” Then she turned to me. “How much do you want?”
“Four hundred thousand dollars.”
Rachel laughed. Martin looked like he was going to swallow his tie. “Four hundred thousand?” she asked. “Why not ask for an even half million?”
“Okay.”
“We don’t have that kind of money,” Martin managed to say.
“You have a decent amount stored away,” I said. “You don’t pay for your house. You don’t pay for your cars. Your son is being raised by a man who’s considerably wealthier than you. I don’t care where you get it. Just get it. By tonight. Or I’ll be calling Barry Dutton and a few of my newspaper editors in the morning. And Martin?”
“Yes?” he asked bravely.
“That whole wife-swapping thing? The ‘you-take-mine-I’ll-take-yours-and-don’t-tell-anybody’ plan? That is, without question, the dumbest arrangement I’ve ever heard of in my life. What in the name of Charles Dickens made you think you could keep it a secret forever?”
Saying that felt especially good. It’s one thing to stumble across an intricate, brilliantly conceived, maddeningly logical, ruthlessly executed plan. It’s another to dig for weeks on a story and find out it’s about a plot that Isaac Asimov would have rejected as too far-fetched, and executed by a group of egos that put Chuck Barris to shame. It was insulting to have uncovered it.
I turned on my heel, careful to make sure that Rachel Barlow didn’t have a dagger in her hand, and walked through the door.
Once outside, I felt a tight pull inside my stomach. My plan had gone just the way I’d thought it would.
Damn it.
Chapter 25
It surprised me how little time it takes to annoy a bunch of murder suspects. Back in my office, I was trying to get my screenplay characters into that inevitable argument that would threaten their budding romance. I had been staring at the screen for an hour, and written for fifteen minutes, when Ethan got home from school.
He was in “oblivious boy” mode, seeing nothing but the place to leave his backpack and the jar in which we keep the sharpened pencils. Ethan barely said hello before he was at the table, doing his homework at the speed of light so he could get upstairs and log Nintendo time before Pinky and the Brain came on. Ethan leads a very full life.
I struggled further with the two obstinate bastards I’d been writing when Leah came in from school, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and headed straight to her homework, too. It was just about that time that Barry Dutton called.
“Tucker, are you out of your mind?”
Cool! Somebody had called to complain! Maybe we could eliminate a suspect. “Who called you?” I asked.
“Called? Nobody called. I’m just wondering why you’re dialing nine-one-one when there’s a little brown bat in your house.” Oh, that.
“I didn’t know it was a little brown bat. I thought it was a large menacing person of undetermined color.”
Ethan walked over and dropped his homework on my desk, then turned and ran up the stairs. He knew if I found anything wrong, I’d be up to discuss it with him when I got off the phone.
“It’s nice,” said Barry, “that you don’t discriminate against large intruders of one skin tone or another. Now, why did you think someone called me about you?”
I picked up the top sheet of Ethan’s homework. Right up at the top, he’d written his usual “Math—Ethan,” in near-perfect block letters, but his numbers below were barely legible. He spent more time practicing his name than he did his numbers. It’s part of his Asperger’s— the kids tend to have in fine motor skills deficits, and writing is a problem best dealt with by occupational therapy, or compensated for with a computer keyboard.
“Lately, you haven’t been calling during business hours,” I told Barry. “I thought maybe you were calling now because there’d been complaints. I haven’t been leaving everyone alone like I’m supposed to.”
I did the calculations on Ethan’s math, and as usual, he had gotten the problems right. At least, the ones I could figure out myself. See, I was an English major. . .
“Who haven’t you been leaving alone?” Barry’s voice took on a long-suffering tone.
Ethan’s next page was for social studies, and of course on top it read, “The Civil War—Ethan.” A number of questions about the Civil War were below, and this time, I could figure out the answers all by myself. He had gotten only one answer wrong.