For Whom the Minivan Rolls (28 page)

“Well, she’s right about my daughter.”

Marie didn’t have time for me to come over and talk
to her right then. She was going to her job as a dance instructor
and had to be there in an hour. I heaved an inward sigh of thanks,
since I’d been going to enough people’s houses and refusing coffee
lately. We agreed to a phone interview, and Marie asked that I “cut
to the chase,” and only ask the things I hadn’t be able to find out
elsewhere. Mrs. Rossi must have told her that she’d provided enough
detail on Madlyn for a three-volume biography.

“I knew Maddie since grade school. She was my best
friend until I went to college,” Marie said. “We kept in touch, you
know. I think I was the only one in Westfield she ever spoke to
after she had the falling out with her mom.”

“That was over the abortion.”

“Yeah. Maddie didn’t want to even tell her mom she
was pregnant, but Gary insisted. And the two of them talked her
into having the baby. But when push came to shove a couple of weeks
later, she decided she was too young, and you know what? She was
right. If she’d gone to delivery, Maddie would have resented that
baby forever.”

“Did she resent her mom for making her feel
guilty?”

Marie’s voice was changing into the dreamlike
sing-song people use when they’re remembering fond friends. “No,
that was the funny thing,” she said. “Maddie always felt bad about
her mom, but she wasn’t mad at her, you know? The one she never
forgave was Gary. If he hadn’t badgered her, she’d have had the
abortion, and her mom never would have known. I don’t think things
were ever good between Maddie and Gary again.”

“Well, they annulled the marriage not long after
that.”

“That was Maddie,” Marie Aiello said. “She called me
up right before, straight shooter, ya know? ‘I’m dumping him,’ she
tells me. ‘Can’t take it anymore. He’s cute, but he’s a pain. I can
do better.’ And she did.”

“She did? She got married again?”

Marie took a deep breath. “Okay, here’s where the
story gets a little weird,” she said.

Here? Here’s
where it starts getting weird?
“I’m bracing myself,” I said in all seriousness, and she
chuckled.

“Okay. Maddie annuls the marriage, but Gary
Beckwirth keeps calling her, trying to get her to go out with him.
Maybe they can patch it up, that kind of thing. Not exactly a
stalker, but he doesn’t go away. Finally, after this goes on for,
like, years, they’re still friends. And Gary marries this Rachel
person.
” The tone on that word spoke volumes. Had she lived
in Midland Heights, Marie Aiello most definitely would not have
cast her mayoral vote for Rachel Barlow.

“So that’s good, right? Now Maddie doesn’t have to
worry about Gary anymore.” I’m now calling her “Maddie,” more from
repetition than calculation.

“Well, you’d think so,” said Marie. “But they start
double dating. Gary and his new wife,
Rachel,
and Maddie
with this guy she’s really getting to like, this guy Martin.”

My throat was dry, and what I tried to say was
“Martin Barlow?” But it came out “aaaaaaarfffilik?” Marie
chuckled.

“That’s right. Martin Barlow. Maddie was nuts for
him, like you never saw. Worshipped the ground he walked
on—couldn’t get enough of him. I don’t think they left their
bedroom even once in the next year. I barely heard from her that
year. And eventually, she wore Martin down, and they got
married.”

I’ve always enjoyed the expression, “his head was
spinning.” For me, it conjures up images of Linda Blair in
The
Exorcist.
I mean, your head isn’t really
spinning.

My head
was
spinning.

“Martin Barlow and Madlyn Rossi were
married?
”

“Yeah, they were married about five years. Actually,
depending on how you look at it, they were married close to
thirteen years.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pretend I’m a complete and
total idiot who’s just learned the English language, and you’re
going to explain this situation to me. In nice, small words that
the average goat would understand.”

Marie laughed. “Mrs. Rossi was right, you are a nice
man. Okay, let’s see if I can explain this.”

“I’ll bet you ten bucks you can’t.”

“Try me. Maybe twelve, thirteen years ago, Maddie
and Martin Barlow are married. They’re trying to have a kid. Maddie
says, at least,
she
wants one. Rachel and Gary are married,
and they
have
a kid, but Rachel really hates being a mom,
right? Because the boy gets more attention than she does.”

“Okay, so now you’re telling me that Rachel Barlow
is actually Joel Beckwirth’s mother.”

“See, you
can
understand. So one night, the
four of them, pals that they are, are over Gary’s house—this is
when he and Rachel are living in West Windsor—and they smoke, let’s
say, a few ‘special cigarettes,’ and down a couple of bottles of
wine, okay?”

“So they’re high and tight.”

She chuckled. “Very good. And somebody—probably
Martin— says, ‘Hey, it’s back to the Seventies night, with the pot
and all. Why don’t we go all the way, and have a wife-swapping
party?”

People’s first reactions to unexpected news is
always interesting. It’s the most honest we ever really are in our
day-to-day lives because we don’t have the time to edit our
responses. And so, with great decorum and class, I just burst out
laughing. When I finally got myself back into serious reporter
mode, I said, quite clearly, “oh,
no!
”

“Oh, yes. And everybody’s for the wife-swapping but
Maddie, who very much likes being Mrs. Martin Barlow and doesn’t
want to have all that much to do with Gary Beckwirth again. But
they wear her down, and give her a few more drinks, and the next
thing you know, she’s over at Beckwirth’s place re-living the bad
old days, and taking care of a kid who isn’t hers. Meanwhile, the
not so pretty man she really loves— Professor Martin Barlow—is
having his mind blown by Rachel, a woman Maddie really can’t
stand.”

“Okay, so that’s one night,” I said. “That doesn’t
explain how. . .”

“Well, that’s what Maddie thought,” Marie said. Her
voice started getting more serious. This was the bad part she
hadn’t wanted to tell, and the fun of shocking me was not enough to
overcome that. “She figures the next day, she’ll get up, take a
really long shower, and go back to her husband Martin. The problem
is, she sleeps late, and everybody else decides this is a great
arrangement, and they should just stick to it.”

“Why?” It seemed a logical question.

“It solves everybody’s problems,” Marie said, a
tinge of disgust and anger in her voice. “Everybody but Maddie’s,
but then she’s the only one who’d truly been happy up to that
point, and they couldn’t allow that. Gary gets back the woman he
really wants, though she doesn’t much want him or his kid. Martin
gets the hot blonde he’s always wanted. And Rachel gets to ditch
Gary, who’s a loser in bed, for a guy who talks like Lord Byron and
is an up-and-comer at this big university. So everybody’s happy,
right?”

“Except Madlyn. So why doesn’t she just refuse?”

“I’ve never really been clear on that,” Marie Aiello
admitted. “She just couldn’t take on the three of them. One or the
other she could deal with, but not all three at once. Maybe she
just couldn’t bear to tell Martin ‘no.’ And I think she figured
Martin would get tired of old
Rachel
in a day or two, and
that would be that.”

Imagine living all that time with someone, hating
every minute of it, and waiting for years for the person you really
love to come to his senses and return to you. Having to endure the
thought of him in bed with someone other than you
every
night
for twelve years? It should have driven Madlyn Rossi
Beckwirth Barlow mad. Maybe it had.

“But it kept on going,” I said. “Why didn’t they
just get divorces and make it legal?”

“They didn’t just trade
wives
,” Marie said.
“They traded
families
. Maddie raised Rachel’s son for her,
because that bitch never wanted to have a kid—he was an accident.
And then, Gary suddenly hit the jackpot. At that point, there’s no
way Rachel’s divorcing him and giving up her right to all his
money. So she makes Gary pay big for getting Maddie back.”

“And,” Marie continued, “there’s no way Gary’s
giving Rachel half the money he just made. Not to mention, if
Rachel divorces Gary and marries someone else, like, let’s say
Martin, she loses alimony, too. Better for Martin and Rachel to
blackmail Gary, because he doesn’t mind trading them money in
return for the chance to keep Madlyn in his household. He starts
paying for Rachel and Martin’s house, their cars—all that stuff.
And no matter how much Maddie complains, Gary stays in the driver’s
seat, and he knows it.

“That is the weirdest story I ever heard,” I
admitted. “And I lived through Watergate.”

“You want the rest?”

“There’s a
rest
?. . . Sure.”

“Maddie’s trapped, but she has information they
don’t want her to share—mainly that she’s not Mrs. Gary Beckwirth,
and that Rachel Barlow isn’t really Mrs. Martin Barlow. Once
everybody moves to Midland Heights, reputations start to become a
really big deal, since Gary wants everything nice and tidy, and
Rachel, well, she wants to take over the world.”

“So what does Maddie get for her silence?”

“She gets vacations. Every once in a while, she just
takes off, rents herself a hotel room, and calls Martin Barlow. He
shows up, they go at each other like a couple of bulldogs in heat
for a few days, and she goes back to Gary, flaunting it over him
that she likes Martin better in bed, and making sure that Rachel
knows she’s using Martin up over and over again.”

Martin Barlow, sex machine. Go figure. “Is that the
end?” I asked.

“No, but I don’t know the end. Maddie always calls
me every week, except when she’s on what she calls her ‘Martin
breaks.’ Well, she doesn’t call two weeks ago, and she doesn’t call
last week, so I figure she must be on some kinda break. Then I read
in the paper that she’s dead.”

“That must have hit you right in the gut.”

“Tell you the truth, all I could think was, at least
it doesn’t hurt her anymore. She had what she wanted, and they took
it away from her. And the guy she really loved was one of those who
did it to her. That must’ve really hurt.”

“I would guess.”

“So who killed her?” Marie Aiello asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but if you call me
tomorrow, I might have another answer.”

“Well then, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“I hope I’m here to answer the phone,” I said. “Oh,
and Marie, I owe you ten bucks. You
could
explain it after
all.”

When he opened his front door to my knock, I blew
past Gary Beckwirth and shouted over his protestations that Milt
Ladowski had told him not to talk to me. He looked drugged. He
might very well have been on a number of different
tranquilizers.

“I know it all, Gary, every bit of it,” I rattled
on. “I know that Madlyn wasn’t really your wife. . .”

“She
was
. . .”

“You’re not talking now.
I’m
talking. She
wasn’t your wife. Rachel Barlow, or whatever her real name is now,
is your wife. You guys decided to play Swinging Seventies one night
and swapped families. It’s not unheard of. A couple of Yankee
pitchers did it in the
real
Seventies.”

Beckwirth was now looking nervously toward the
staircase. He motioned, palms down, for me to lower my voice. But I
was in full annoyance mode, and would have none of it.

“What’s the matter, Gary? You afraid Joel will hear?
Doesn’t he know Madlyn wasn’t his real mother?”

Beckwirth sagged into a chair in the hallway, his
face impassive. “He knows,” he said. “He knows.”

“So what’s to hide?” I asked. “I know, you know, he
knows. There’s no reason for secrets anymore. The thing that I
don’t get is why you’re not defending yourself. You know you didn’t
kill Madlyn. You never could. You loved her too much, didn’t
you?”

Gary started to cry. He buried his face in his hands
and sobbed, but he nodded “yes” just the same. I sat down next to
him.

“But it ate at you, didn’t it? That you loved her so
much, but she didn’t love you. She loved
him.
She loved
Martin Barlow. Her real husband. And when she’d go off on her
little holidays, it probably tore you up inside. It bothered you so
much you hired a private detective with a blue minivan to watch her
day and night, but he drove her off the road the night she left.
Right? Because you loved her so much?” I thought of him going
through the photographs in his bedroom and weeping.

“So if you knew where she was, why in the name of
Anthony Quinn did you send me after her? Why, Gary? It doesn’t make
sense.”

He looked up, his cheeks wet. His eyes were
disbelieving. “You don’t know? You don’t understand?”

“No. I’m asking you,” I said, voice gentler now.

Beckwirth didn’t even try to compose himself. The
combination of prescription drugs and strain was too much to
battle. “She used to go away for two days, maybe three. But this
time. . . she just disappeared in the middle of the
night. I really did think she was kidnapped the first day, until
Martin called.” The way he said “Martin” was similar to the way
Marie Aiello had said Rachel Barlow’s name. “By then, I’d already
talked to the police. And then it dragged on and on, and I thought
she might never come back. The thought of her. . . you
know,
with
him like that. . . I needed someone to
make her come back. I knew you could do it.”

That was it? I was supposed to deliver Madlyn
Beckwirth, um, Barlow, from the seductive grip of Martin Barlow,
and then back to Gary? I was supposed to convince her that she
really loved Gary, even though she knew she didn’t? Who the hell
did he think I was, a combination of J. Edgar Hoover and Dr.
Ruth?