For Whom the Minivan Rolls (29 page)

“But somebody killed her. Was it you?”

Beckwirth looked as if I’d suggested he’d jumped up
one morning and landed on Mercury. “Me? Kill the woman I loved? You
alread said I didn’t do it.”

I shrugged. “It’s happened before. Jealousy, crime
of passion. It’s not a new thing.”

Gary shook his head violently. And started to cry
again. “Not me,” he said. “Not me.”

“Then who?”

He shook his head again.

“Are you telling me you’re still covering up for
them? After they permanently took away the one person on this earth
you loved, you’re going to let them get away with it? What do you
owe these people, Gary?”

He vibrated in the chair, but said nothing. I
decided that playing good cop wasn’t working, and I’d have to
switch into bad cop mode. So I raised my voice again. A lot.

“Fine!” I screamed. “This whole thing is coming down
tonight, Gary! And if you don’t do what’s right, it’s going to come
down right on your head! I know all I need to know, and tomorrow
morning, you can kiss this pretty house of yours goodbye! Enjoy
your last day as a wealthy man!” I all but ran for the door and let
myself out, fully aware that I had no idea what I was yelling
about.

First, I scared Milt, then I threatened Gary, so
next were the Barlows. Pissing them off again proved to be
considerably more fun than dealing with Gary. Just the sight of me
at their front door was enough. Martin tried to slam it in my face.
But I had seen enough traveling salesman cartoons. I wedged my foot
inside the door. It hurt a little, but New Balance makes a damned
sturdy little shoe, and Dr. Scholl will be getting a new customer
as soon as I can get to the drug store.

“If you want to win this election, you’re letting me
in. Otherwise, you can hear what I have to say nice and
loud
on your doorstep, where everybody else on the block can be in on
it, too,” I told him, and I saw Rachel, behind him, nod her head.
Martin relieved the pressure on my foot, and I walked into the
house. Martin made a point of closing the door as quickly as
possible. I did my best not to limp.

“Say what you have to say,” Rachel said, biting her
upper lip. It gave her the rather dubious appearance of a
chimpanzee in a polyester doubleknit.

“I know all about the goofy wife-swapping deal with
you and the Beckwirths,” I started. Martin’s eyes widened, but
Rachel simply watched me with practiced calm. “It probably wouldn’t
play well with Martin’s tenure petition, would it? Or with the
voters. But then, neither would a murder conviction.”

“Murder?” Rachel spat. “We didn’t kill Madlyn. Gary
did. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Gary Beckwirth enjoyed his suffering way too much
to end Madlyn’s life that way,” I countered. “He loved her. If he
was going to kill anybody, he’d have killed Martin for having
better sex with Madlyn than he could.”

Martin flushed and made some stammering noises.
Rachel, again, was icy cool, but the lines around her mouth were
showing just a little bit.

“We didn’t kill anyone,” she repeated, “and I don’t
hear you proving otherwise.”

“I have all the proof I need,” I said, knowing I had
none. “I know that Martin called me and threatened me on a cell
phone he stole. By the way, Marty, Mr. MacKenzie wants his cell
phone back, and he expects you to pay the long distance charges on
his bill. But I doubt there were any threatening, anonymous calls
to Madlyn. You just made those up, didn’t you, Rache? I know all
that. And I’ll hand it all over to the cops tomorrow unless you two
decide to cooperate.”

Rachel turned to the man everyone thought was her
husband. “It all comes down to money,” 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.

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.

“Don’t worry, Barry,” I said. “Your job isn’t in
jeopardy.”

“No,” he said. “But if you get killed, I’ll have two
murders on my hands, and how will that look when it comes to salary
review time?”

“I’ll do my best to avoid that,” I said, and hung
up. I picked up Ethan’s last page, an English assignment called
“Ethan’s Favorite Time.” It was an essay about the child’s favorite
time of the day, and of course at the top, he had written, “Ethan’s
Favorite Time—Ethan,” like Mrs. Fisher didn’t know that Ethan had
written something called “Ethan’s Favorite Time.” I started to
read, and then looked at the top of the page again. And I stared at
it for a few moments.

Oh, for crying out loud!

I got up and walked up the stairs to Ethan’s room.
The door was open, so I didn’t knock. He was sitting at his
computer, not at the Nintendo.

Ethan writes poetry. Two years ago, he wrote a poem
for a school assignment, and got enough positive feedback from
adults that he just continued to write poems. And he’s actually
pretty good. I’ve never had much use for poetry myself, but my son
communicates through his poetry in ways he can’t always manage in
ordinary conversation.

On his computer screen was the beginning of a new
poem, called “Wavelength.” Of course, it said “Wavelength—Ethan” at
the top. And it read: “Nobody else is on my wavelength, I know/It
bothers me sometimes, but I try not to show.” That was as far as
he’d gotten.

He saw me reading over his shoulder. “No one, I
think, is in my tree,” I said. “I mean, it must be high or low.”
Ethan stared up at me, confused. Was the old man going off the deep
end?

“Did I get something wrong?” he asked. He assumed if
I had come upstairs, it was about homework. I sat down on his bed
and looked at him. Ethan was puzzled, and swiveled back and forth
in his chair absent-mindedly.

“It was you, wasn’t it?”

“What was me?” Now he figured he was in trouble over
something, and got ready to explain how it was really Leah’s
fault.

“It was you with the barbecue sauce. You wrote ‘Fuck
Ethan’ out on our sidewalk, didn’t you?”

He looked down at the floor and shrugged.

“It wasn’t until just now that I figured it out,” I
told him. “First you wrote the word ‘fuck’ on the sidewalk, and
then you signed it with your name. Just like you do on all your
homework.”

He shrugged again, wondering what punishment he
would now face. Ethan stole a quick involuntary glance at his
Nintendo machine, knowing that inappropriate behavior usually
resulted in a loss of video game time.

“Did you just learn the word?” I asked. “Was that
what it was, and you just felt like using it?”

He tried shrugging again, but saw from the look on
my face that shrugging wasn’t going to be enough. “I guess,” he
said. “But I didn’t just learn the word. I just felt like writing
it.”

“Where’d you get the barbecue sauce?”

Ethan’s eyes were still avoiding me, but he doesn’t
make eye contact much under the best of circumstances. “Matthew
stole it from Big Bob’s, this place by school. And he kind
of. . . dared me.”

Good old Matthew. The kid who had taught Ethan how
to make the fart noise under his arm. You could always count on
Matthew.

“You did it to show Matthew?”

He started to shrug, and decided to nod instead.
“And some of the other guys. Warren Meckeroff, Avil, and Thomas.
They said I was a baby and I wouldn’t do it. When they saw me write
my name, they ran, and I didn’t know what to do with the barbecue
sauce, so I threw it by the garbage cans, because Mom was
coming.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us this?” I asked, and
immediately realized how stupid that sounded. “Because you figured
you’d get punished?”

He nodded, and slowly started to cry. I kneeled next
to his chair and put my arm around him. “It’s never easy being
Ethan, is it?” I said. He stopped crying and looked at me.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I smiled. “Forget it.” I got up and started to leave
the room.

“Dad?”

At the door, I stopped and turned. “What is it,
Pal?”

“Am I. . . do I. . . um, what
punishment. . .”

I smiled a crooked smile. “Don’t worry about it,
Chief. Just don’t do it again. And Ethan. . .”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Don’t tell your mother, okay? Oh, and one more
thing.” He looked up. “Your printing is getting much better.”

I walked out as he was shaking his head at his
unexpected good fortune.

“Are you really sure this is the best way?” Abigail
asked. “I don’t like it.”

“I’m not nuts about it myself,” I admitted. “But as
far as I can see, it’s the
only
way. Besides, I’ve already
spent the day irritating people.”

“As only you can.”

I ignored her. “And the die is cast.”

She doesn’t often look at me the way I look at her:
a little dewy-eyed, smiling wistfully. So when I caught that
expression across the kitchen table, I knew what she was
thinking.

“Relax. This isn’t the last time you’ll ever see
me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Unless you get hit by a bus on the
way to Mahoney’s house,” I said, although I wasn’t the least bit
sure of anything these days. Since yesterday, I’d followed an
attorney and threatened him physically, been given a magical
mystery tour through marriages, annulments, wife-swapping,
child-swapping, and for all I knew, dog-swapping (although I hadn’t
seen a dog at either house), I’d yelled at a murder suspect, I
tried to blackmail a couple of political wannabes out of a half a
million dollars, and I figured out that my son had cursed himself
on our own sidewalk. This kind of stuff tends to shake one’s belief
system just a tad.