For Whom the Minivan Rolls (17 page)

On the second try, I managed to get my knuckle to
make physical contact with the door. What I didn’t expect was that
the door would actually open inward, and that made me take a step
back in surprise. It had been left open a crack, like Cary Grant
used to do when he was expecting room service and couldn’t be
bothered to walk across the room to answer the door. Maybe there
was
somebody in there with Madlyn.

I knocked on the open door again, which is not
terribly easy to do—you have to reach. It’s especially hard to
knock loudly, but that’s exactly what I did, bruising a knuckle or
two in the process.

“Um. . . Mrs. Beckwirth?” I called
inside.

It had that feel to it. A room in which there are no
people. I don’t know how you can tell, but you can. I took a step
inside. It wasn’t dark—the room-darkening curtains were open. There
was a very nice view of the Boardwalk, and the beach and ocean
beyond. Must have cost a considerable amount, this room.

Another few steps inside and I could see the whole
suite. It was extremely well appointed, with understated carpeting,
and real wood furniture. In addition, there was a sitting room,
where a TV armoire was open, a coffee table in front of the
overstuffed sofa and two armchairs, and French doors leading out to
a veranda, where there was a table and two wire chairs.

In the bedroom was a walk-in closet, whose door was
also open. There was virtually nothing inside—just empty hangers.
Even in this high-priced suite, they were the kind of hangers you
can’t take off the closet bar. Some companies don’t trust
anybody
. A table and two chairs sat next to the other set of
French doors, and brilliant sunshine was streaming into the room
and onto the huge king-size bed.

On the bed was Madlyn Beckwirth. She was dressed in
a very short black lace teddy that I would have recognized from the
Victoria’s Secret catalogue, had I been the type who reads such
things. Under different circumstances, she might have looked quite
appealing in it, but it was hard for me to summon that mental image
right now.

From what I could tell, she had been shot twice—once
in the stomach, which had bled considerably, and then once in the
head. Whoever shot her had been aiming for her forehead and missed.
The wound was through her left cheek, and had taken a considerable
amount of the back of her head off. I’m no detective, but I could
tell from all the way across the room that she was dead.

There are times in your life when your mind reacts
to events in ways totally opposite to the way you would hope. These
are times you bury in the back of your memory, but they resurface
periodically, just to remind you that you are a dreadful, shameless
creature barely worthy of the name “human.”

For me, this was one of those times. My first
thought on seeing Madlyn laid out on the bed, gut-shot, murdered,
her young life wasted, was, “this is going to make one helluva
great screenplay.”

After a few seconds, I was able to regain my senses,
and that’s when reality set in. My hands started to shake, and a
cold sweat appeared on my forehead. I forced myself to look away
from the bed to avoid vomiting on a crime scene.

The first thing that always occurs to me when I’m in
a difficult situation is to call Abigail. Luckily, that made superb
sense in this case, since my wife is an attorney, and a former
criminal attorney at that. I reached into my inside jacket pocket
and pulled out the cell phone, hit “redial,” and prayed she hadn’t
left the office yet.

Abby has caller ID on her office phone, so she could
see the number of my cell phone before she picked up the phone. “I
swear, I’m on my way out the door,” she said in lieu of a
greeting.

“Actually I’m glad you’re still there,” I told her.
“I have a situation.”

The smile left her voice. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Room 2203 of Bally’s Casino Hotel, and
Madlyn Beckwirth is here. She’s dead.”

Abby had once told me, in another context, that a
lot of people go to hotels to commit suicide. “Suicide?” she
asked.

“Not unless she found a way to shoot herself in the
belly and the head and then throw the gun out the window before she
died.”

“Jesus,” my wife offered.

“So, what do I do now?” I asked her.

Lawyer-Mode clicked in—even though she hadn’t done
criminal work in years—and Abby’s voice dropped an octave. “Have
you called the Atlantic City police?”

“I haven’t called anybody yet. I called you. The
police may think my behavior a bit suspicious. The door to her room
was slightly open, but I did push my way in. And I didn’t let Barry
or Westbrook know in advance I was coming here to get her. I don’t
think they would have approved.”

Abby sucked in on her front teeth, her way of
indicating to me that I was being a moron. “You’ve seen too many
Hitchcock movies, Aaron. Don’t worry about what seems suspicious.
Nobody’s going to think you killed Madlyn. You don’t have a motive.
But think about everything you’ve done since you entered the room.
Did you move anything, touch anything, do
anything
that
would disturb the scene?”

I had already replayed the past two minutes in my
head about fifteen times. “I pushed the door open. My hand might
have brushed the table, you know a side. . . what’s the
word?”

“A sideboard.”

“Right. Sideboard, in the hall, on my way in.
Besides that, I haven’t touched anything.”

“Look down,” Abby said. “Did you step in, you know,
anything?”

That hadn’t occurred to me. If there had been blood
on the rug, would I have seen it? I didn’t want to look, but now I
had no choice. I examined the carpet from the door to the spot in
which I was standing.

“No. I didn’t step in anything.” There was a faint
“beep” in the phone. “I’m going to lose you in a second, Abby. The
battery’s running out. . .”

“Don’t worry. Go down into the lobby and get casino
security. The state has troopers who work in the casinos, and
they’ll deal with this.

I’ll call Barry Dutton and let him know what’s going
on. Tell the troopers everything you know. And
Aaron. . .” “Yeah, Baby?” “It’s okay. I
love. . .” The battery on the goddam phone died.

The state troopers assigned to casino security were,
as Abby had predicted, completely uninterested in me after
confirming a few things with Barry Dutton. Their lack of interest,
however, didn’t stop them from keeping me for three hours. They
took me to a bare office in the bowels of the hotel and did the
usual checks on my driver’s license to make sure I was who I said I
was (who else would want to be me?), questioned me a couple of
hundred times about how I’d come to be there, went over my phone
conversation with Madlyn to the point where I could recite it in my
sleep, and determined beyond a shadow of a doubt (never mind how)
that I didn’t have a firearm in my possession.

Unfortunately, all this took time, and they had
called Gary Beckwirth almost immediately upon my reporting the
murder. So by the time they were done talking to me, Gary was
sitting in the security waiting room, waiting his turn to be
questioned. He was on a metal folding chair—the hotel, which had
blown its budget on wallpaper and crystal chandeliers in the
casino, had spared considerable expense in its security section. It
had the curious effect of reminding me how Jews, when we are
mourning, sit on the least comfortable things we can find to remind
us of our loss.

I had to walk right past Gary to get to the door.
But he didn’t cause the scene I was expecting. He didn’t leap out
of his chair, burst into tears, and accuse me of killing his wife.
He didn’t scream that I had botched my job and led violent
criminals to his defenseless spouse’s bed. He didn’t even take a
swing at me. What he did was worse.

Gary Beckwirth watched me walk through that room,
never taking his dead, expressionless eyes off me. Milt Ladowski
was sitting next to him, and Milt stood when he saw me. But Gary
never acknowledged my presence other than to stare unblinking into
my face the whole time we were in the same room. I wondered where
Joel was, and whether he cared that his mother was dead.

I walked over to Milt, who offered me his hand.

“Aaron.”

I gently shook Milt’s hand, and tried to avoid
looking at Gary. “We need to talk,” I said, with an exaggerated
sense of urgency in my voice.

Milt nodded. “I’ll call you when
we’re. . . through here.”

I couldn’t avoid it. I had to talk to Gary, too. I
stepped to the side, in the square-dance move you make when you’re
proceeding down a receiving line. Gary did not stand up, but he
kept staring at me.

“Gary, I’m so sorry.” For once, I wouldn’t have
minded if he’d stood up and hugged me.

Instead, he stared. That’s all. Just those big
matinee-idol eyes, devoid of any feeling, only beginning to
understand the hole left in his life, staring. At me.

“Don’t be,” he rasped, and then turned away. He sat
with his chin resting on his fist, like Rodin’s “Thinker,” but it
wasn’t a comical pose. It was the position of a man who literally
couldn’t hold his own head up without assistance.

I nodded back at Milt, and walked out of the casino
as quickly as I could without running.

Facing a two-hour drive in the dark, I plugged the
cell phone into the cigarette lighter in the car, but I didn’t need
to talk at this point. I needed to think. I’d just spent hours
talking to the police, and that hadn’t gotten anybody anywhere.

I can’t listen to music while I’m thinking, so I
kept the cassette player turned off. A.J. Croce would have to wait
until I was in a less stressful situation. He plays a nice piano,
but he couldn’t help me figure out what had happened.

The facts were easy to recite. The hard part was
discerning what they meant. Madlyn Beckwirth had left her house in
the middle of the night a week and a half ago, apparently of her
own accord. Her neighbor may or may not have seen her hit by a
minivan, but she certainly wasn’t injured seriously, since she was
able to call me and ask me to leave her alone a mere ten days
later.

Somehow, she had made it to Atlantic City, checked
into an expensive hotel room, and charged the whole thing to Milt
Ladowski. Where she’d gotten clothes or money, if she had indeed
left with just the T-shirt and shorts she slept in, as Gary had
said, was anybody’s guess. All I knew for sure was that she had
called me this afternoon, sounding quite healthy, and asking to be
left alone. But I hadn’t left her alone. I had come looking for
her, and now she was dead.

It was just like the guy on the phone had said: I
found Madlyn, but I found her dead. In some way, I must have
contributed.

Guilt is instilled in my people pretty much at the
start of our lives—probably through cells or DNA or something like
that. If we can figure out some, even far-fetched, way we’re
responsible for the bad stuff that happens in life, we root it out,
or die trying. But in this case, I didn’t have to look very hard. I
had taken on an investigation I knew I was ill-equipped to conduct.
Oh sure, I’d protested myself blue in the face, but I’d agreed to
do it, for the money and for the personal challenge. I had dismally
failed the test.

Having worked myself into this state, it was now
easy to wallow in it. Before I made it into Mercer County, I had
convinced myself I was responsible for Madlyn’s death, Joel’s
future psychotherapy bills, Gary’s inevitable lonely life, Ethan’s
alienation from his classmates, Abby’s having to live in an income
level beneath that of most of her friends, and Leah’s inability to
rhyme more than four words with “cat.” If the ride got any longer,
I might throw in the Johnstown Flood and the Bombay Bread
Riots.

What was missing from this internal soliloquy was
any concern for Madlyn Beckwirth. By all reports a decent and
loving woman of less than 45, she was lying on a cold slab in the
Atlantic County medical examiner’s office, awaiting transport back
to Midland Heights for burial, after some pretty extensive cosmetic
work was done or a closed casket was ordered.

Once I realized I was worried more about my own role
than Madlyn’s death, I made a point of feeling guilty about that,
too.

But, wait a second! I hadn’t pulled the trigger. If,
as I suspected, somebody had been playing me for a fool the whole
time, and I had played the role perfectly, I had to find out who
was doing the manipulating. There was an awfully good chance it was
the same person—or people—who had killed Madlyn Beckwirth.

And there were plenty of suspects. Why was Milt
Ladowski’s name on Madlyn’s hotel bill? If Madlyn
was
having
an affair in that hotel with someone, and Gary found out about it,
could it have driven Gary crazy enough to do this to her? Wouldn’t
he more likely go after the other guy? What about my mysterious
phone caller? Madlyn had been receiving calls similar to the one I
had gotten, threatening her life if she continued to manage Rachel
Barlow’s campaign. Suppose the caller
hadn’t
just been some
prankster who got his kicks from phoning the local bar and asking
the bartender for “Amanda Hugandkiss.”

But more than anything else, there was the
tight-lipped, teeth-clenched amusement of Martin Barlow when I’d
suggested that he and Madlyn were sneaking around behind Rachel and
Gary’s backs. And the cold-hearted stare of Rachel Barlow, mayoral
candidate and high-school cheerleader gone bad, as she alternately
suggested Madlyn was already dead, or laughed at the idea that
Madlyn might be sleeping with Rachel’s husband.

My grip on the steering wheel got a little tighter,
and I felt my jaw clench involuntarily. Finally, I had a story to
investigate. And this time, I thought I knew just how to go about
doing it. It wouldn’t make me feel better about what had happened
to Madlyn, but maybe it could set one-tenth of this whole mess
right again, and certainly would be worth accomplishing.