For Whom the Minivan Rolls (7 page)

The hook was in, and I actually managed to attach
the spring without any outside help. “Since you decided to belittle
my fee,” I told him. “You want to mock me, you can at least help
me, too.”

“I do all the work around here.” He started
attaching the hook to the door, and neither of us tried to
perpetuate the myth that I was actually doing anything useful in
this project. I sat down.

“Let’s assume for the moment that I can’t talk to
the kid and I can’t get the phone records,” I said. “Where does
that leave me? I have no options.”

“Sure you do.” Mahoney had the hook embedded in the
door securely and was stretching the spring to meet it. This door
would close faster than a frog’s tongue going after a fly. “You can
still talk to the friends of the family, you can go after this girl
who’s running for mayor, you can get the cops to run Madlyn’s
credit cards and see if she’s charging up a storm in Vegas on the
old man’s Visa.”

He attached the spring to the hook, and tried the
door. Sure enough, it closed perfectly, with a satisfying SNAP!
that would undoubtedly become tiresome this coming summer. “I don’t
want to talk to the woman who’s running for mayor,” I said
thoughtfully.

“Why not?”

“Because the rich guy wants me to. That’s what this
whole maneuver has been all about. He wants to control the way I
track down his wife.”

Mahoney set about measuring for the doorknob. “You
got any coffee?” he asked. That was it—I’d been relegated to
kitchen duty. I got up. He chuckled as I walked away from the front
door and toward the kitchen.

“Rich people suck,” he said to himself.

Rachel Barlow sat in her kitchen, which was bright
and airy and had nice white lace curtains on the windows. Plants
hung from the space over the sink, where they’d be sure to get
plenty of light and moisture. The wallpaper was a subdued pattern
of milk pails and straw piles. The floor was ceramic tile. The
chairs and table were country oak. There was absolutely nothing out
of place. It was like being in the Museum of Suburban Kitchens.

Rachel herself, every inch the political candidate,
subsection: female, was in a very sensible skirt and blouse, not
showing anything above the knee or below the shoulder blades. Thank
goodness, or my uncontrollable male urges might have moved me to
throw her down on the center island and have my way with her. She
was tall and blonde, and looked like she really wished she could
wear a beehive hairdo, because it would have made her more
comfortable.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked in a voice
that sounded very much like that of a Barbie doll who had grown up
and gotten her MBA. “We have regular and decaf.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I think we should just
get going on this.”

I know. I had just told Mahoney I wasn’t going to
talk to Rachel Barlow, and here I was, talking to Rachel Barlow.
Well, there were good reasons for changing my mind. For one, I had
already checked with Dutton, who had nothing on Madlyn’s credit
cards, but expected word back on my telephone records by that
afternoon. And I had talked to two of Madlyn and Gary’s friends
(actually, Madlyn’s), both of whom reported no problems in the
marriage and absolutely nothing unusual of late. I had decided,
also, that my petty feelings about Gary shouldn’t impede the
investigation, so I shouldn’t exclude a whole avenue of inquiry
just because it came from him. Besides, I didn’t have any other
ideas.

Rachel Barlow had decided to run for mayor, I found
out through Harrington’s clip morgue, because she felt it was time
for “a new voice” in Midland Heights. Seeing as how the old voice,
Mayor Sam Olszowy, had been in office for more than fifteen years
at the time, it was a safe bet that the town liked hearing the
voice it had now.

But Olszowy had made several potentially critical
errors. He had seriously underestimated Rachel Barlow, dismissing
her out of hand as a credible threat in the Democratic primary.
There are no more than 200 registered Republicans in town, so the
Democratic primary, assuming Hitler isn’t nominated, will pretty
much decide the general election.

In office and in his campaign, Olszowy was ignoring
the town’s changing demographics, too. He continued to cater to the
senior citizens, who didn’t want the school budget passed, and
weren’t interested in bringing more businesses to the downtown,
either. But ignoring young parents in Midland Heights is like
running for office in New York and announcing that you’re a big
Atlanta Braves fan.

Next thing you know, Rachel Barlow, with her “we’ll
set up a committee and investigate it” platform, and her strong
advocacy of a healthy school budget, despite having no children of
her own, was running close to even with Olszowy in the polls
(assuming one can take accurate polls in an election this
insignificant). Who the mayor of Midland Park might turn out to be
would have as much an impact on my life as what brand of liquid
soap they chose to put in the men’s room at New Jersey Turnpike
rest stops. Maybe less.

“What is it you want to know?” Rachel asked, her
hands folded in her lap, like the last contestant at a fifth-grade
spelling bee waiting for the word “extraneous” to be called
out.

“Well, to start, how well do you know Madlyn
Beckwirth?”

Rachel shifted gears to that of a beauty pageant
contestant asked how bikini waxing could actually help end hunger
in Third World countries. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets,
looking for an answer lodged tightly in her left frontal lobe.

“Madlyn is my campaign manager. We moved to town
just about when she and Gary did, five years ago. I asked her to
manage my campaign because she’s my best friend, and I trust her.
Also because she brings an impeccable record to public service,
having been a past president of the PTO at Roosevelt School and
treasurer of the Boy Scout troop her son used to belong to.” Rachel
rolled her eyes back down to look into mine, with all the charm of
a department store mannequin.

“That’s fine,” I said, in my best reporter style,
“but I’m really not looking for her resumé, and I’m not asking
essay questions, either. This isn’t a shadow-debate with Mayor
Olszowy. Just relax and talk to me.”

“I thought that was what I was doing.” Rachel’s eyes
bored in just a bit, and widened maybe a millimeter. There was a
side of her that you didn’t want to cross. She was hiding it, but
not well.

“You are, but you need to relax. We’re just having a
conversation. You’re not being questioned by the grand jury.” I was
trying my best to smile, but the cold front that had drifted over
the kitchen table was hard to get past. I was pretty sure I could
see my breath. “Now. Have you noticed Madlyn acting unusual
lately?”

“
Unusual
?” Rachel said the word like it would
be visible coming out of her mouth, and would be ugly and hairy.
Anything that wasn’t usual clearly wouldn’t be welcome in this
kitchen.

“Not ordinary,” I said. “Something she wouldn’t do
under normal circumstances.”

“I know what ‘unusual’ means.” Rachel didn’t exactly
spit the words out at me, but she would have liked to. Only her
terrific political instincts prevented a harsh, adversarial tone
from kicking in. Great warming up the source, Tucker. The Pulitzer
committee will no doubt reward your interviewing techniques
someday. “No,” added the mayoral hopeful. I waited.

“That’s it? No?”

“No. I didn’t see anything
unusual
in the way
Madlyn’s been acting lately.”

“She didn’t seem at all anxious or nervous?”

“No.”

“Excited about something?”

“No.”

“Worried about anything?”

“
No.”

“Mention anything to you about trouble in her
marriage?”

“Good lord, no.”

I stood up. “Well,” I said, reaching for my denim
jacket, “I’m sorry to have taken your time.”

Rachel looked surprised. “That’s it? You’re not
going to ask me about my campaign?”

“That’s not what this interview is about, Rachel. I
thought Milt explained that I’m looking into Madlyn’s
disappearance.”

“But the campaign is the reason for Madlyn’s
disappearance,” said the I-wanna-be-the-mayor.

I stopped, midway through shrugging the jacket onto
my shoulders. “You know that for sure?”

“Absolutely. Madlyn said she’d been getting phone
calls, anonymous ones, threatening her if she kept managing my
campaign. She didn’t take them seriously at first, but when they
started coming every night, she got upset.”

I sat back down. “Did she call the police?”

“No. Gary doesn’t trust Chief Dutton. He believes
the town police force is guilty of racial profiling.”

“Has Gary ever
met
Chief Dutton?”

Rachel smiled tolerantly. She was dealing with a
mental midget, and she knew it. But one must keep up appearances,
especially if one wants to gain high elected office. “Just because
the chief is an African-American doesn’t mean he wouldn’t tolerate,
even encourage, racial profiling if he thought his arrest rate
would go up and his reputation would be enhanced.”

It occurred to me to point out that racial profiling
was something done to ferret out drug dealers, operating under the
racist assumption that non-whites are more likely than whites to be
drug dealers. But the police in Midland Heights spend roughly 98
percent of their time giving out speeding tickets in a town whose
speed limit never exceeds twenty-five miles per hour. As far as I
knew, even the Grand Wizard of the KKK didn’t believe that being a
member of a minority group made one more likely to drive forty
miles per hour.

Still, I needed information from this woman, and
engaging in a debate probably wouldn’t help me get it. “So she
didn’t call the cops. Did Madlyn do anything else about the phone
calls?”

“Well, she tried to ‘star-sixty-nine’ them, you
know, but it was always out of the coverage area. And Gary wanted
her to buy a gun, but she said they scared her.”

“You think whoever made those calls is responsible
for Madlyn’s disappearance?”

Tears began to form in the corners of Rachel
Barlow’s eyes. They appeared to be real. “I think they killed her,”
she said softly.

Some expressions sound exactly like what they mean.
In my case, “in over my head” was precisely what I was. This is not
a height joke. I was now operating in clearly alien territory, and
most probably hostile territory as well. Everything I was doing,
breathing included, had become a conscious and calculated
effort.

Rachel Barlow, of course, was completely obsessed
with her own self-importance. That was the only explanation for her
thinking that someone would kill Madlyn Beckwirth because she was
doing too good a job running her campaign for mayor. In a town
whose main claim to fame is the only kosher Dunkin’ Donuts store in
the country, even Ted Bundy wouldn’t kill someone over who the next
mayor would be.

Over Rachel’s embarrassed blubbering, I made my
apologies and left. I hadn’t brought the car, since I hadn’t gotten
to the Y again that morning, and had decided instead to walk
wherever it was necessary to go in town.

That’s probably why I noticed right away the blue
minivan following me. If you’re in a car, it’s hard to tail
somebody on foot. Only in suburban New Jersey would it never occur
to someone trying to properly tail a pedestrian to first park his
car.

This particular motorist kept his minivan far enough
back that I couldn’t see into the driver’s seat, so my using “his”
in this sentence was strictly conjecture. And I couldn’t very well
turn around and take a good look, or he’d know I was on to him and
peal away, leaving me with no chance at my first unambiguous clue
in the case. So I kept walking, but I pulled the cell phone out of
my pocket and called Barry Dutton. Marsha answered the phone, and I
told her it was important. Dutton immediately picked up.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s a guy in a blue minivan, I think a
Plymouth, following me on East Second Avenue.”

“What are you driving, the minivan or the car?”

“I’m on foot.”

“You’re on
what?”

“Feet. In my case, often used along with the
adjective ‘flat.’”

“You’re telling me that you’re walking through
Midland Heights and somebody’s following you in a car?”

“You didn’t get to be chief of police just because
you’re handsome, did you, Barry?”

He made a sound like a balloon slowly dying. “How
fast is this guy driving if he can stay behind someone on
foot?”

“Maybe he’s just worried about getting a ticket from
the Midland Heights cops. I hear you guys are racially profiling
speeders.”

The sigh turned into a groan. “Rachel Barlow?”

“Just spent the morning with her. It was swell. She
offered me coffee four times. By the way, she also thinks Madlyn’s
been murdered.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t get all atwitter over
Rachel Barlow’s crime-fighting instincts. Let’s stay focused on
your, um, alleged assailant there. You sure he’s following
you?”

“Barry, there’s nobody else on the street, and this
guy is staying behind me by driving three miles an hour. Either
he’s thinking of buying all the property on East Second, or he’s
following me. What should I do?”

“Can you get a license plate?”

I tried a sideways glance. “I don’t want to let on
that I know he’s there. Should I stop and look?”

“You don’t have a mirror, do you?”

“Oh yeah, let me whip out my compact.”

Barry’s balloon let some more air out. He was
clearly wondering if he should actually help me escape. “If you
didn’t know he was there, you’d be even stupider than he is. Stop
and look.”

So I stopped and looked. And of course, that was the
moment the minivan decided to take off at 60 miles an hour in the
direction of Park Street.