Read For Whom the Minivan Rolls for Free Online Page B

door.
    Westbrook managed to extricate himself from the
chair, while I contemplated how a system of pulleys and
chain-hoists might be more efficient. He walked out first, and I
turned at the door to face Dutton.
    “ The full power of the legal system ?” He
chuckled. “That’s right. I’ll tell your wife on you.” You gotta
love funny cops.

Chapter 9
    Gerry Westbrook knew roughly as much about Madlyn
Beckwirth’s disappearance as I know about Organic Chemistry, and
that’s a course I assiduously managed to avoid in high school.
    Westbrook had faxed the State Police and the
surrounding cops about Madlyn, checked the morgue and the
hospitals, and then gone out to Denny’s and forgotten the whole
thing.
    After the necessary 30-second conversation with
Westbrook to find this out, I walked out of the police/fire
building and inhaled as much air as my little lungs could hold.
We’d been experiencing typical March weather—one day of
unseasonable warmth, followed the next day by a slap in the face of
late-winter chill. This was one of the warm days, so I decided to
walk to Gary Beckwirth’s house from the police station.
    I had stuck the cell phone in my jacket pocket on
the way out. Flush with a $6,000 paycheck sent me by the online
service of a cable entertainment network, I had bought myself a
wireless phone a couple of months before. Abby had had one for a
few years already. Since I’d covered the wireless industry for
years, I got a deal. I was still trying to figure out how to pay
the monthly rate, but what the hell, I looked cool talking while I
walked, like I was negotiating a three-picture deal with Paramount
on the way to the Foodtown. On a whim, I whipped the phone out and
tried Abigail’s office number. Surprisingly, she answered.
    “Abigail Stein.”
    “How dare you defile my wife’s name like that?”
    “I know. I feel so cheap. How are you?”
    “Fat,” I told her. “I just bribed the chief of
police with fried dough.”
    “You should go to the Y.”
    “Can’t. I have to go talk to Beckwirth. I only have
until next Thursday on this, and right now I’m nowhere.”
    Abby was silent. She was probably in her
problem-solving mode, frowning.
    “I can hear you frown,” I said.
    “You should be here. It’s quite fetching,
really.”
    “I had a dog once who was quite fetching.”
    She groaned. I have that effect on women. “Was there
a point to this call, or are you just trying out awful puns and
figured I didn’t have anything else to do but listen?”
    “I’m strolling up Edison Avenue in the warm March
sunshine, and the blue sky made me think of you.” There was more
silence on the line. “Now I can hear you smile.”
    “It’s even better than hearing me frown.”
    I smiled. “I know.”
    I usually change topics in a conversation like a
1986 Dodge pickup in need of a ring job. Abby shifted
conversational gears smoothly, like a BMW. “What did Barry have to
say about the phone call?” she asked. She was already calling it
“the phone call.” Eventually, it would become “The Phone Call,” and
then I’d really be in trouble.
    “He’s going to get our phone records from Verizon.
He’ll trace it.”
    “Good,” she said. “I shudder to think what would
have happened if one of the kids had answered the phone.”
    “I’d have died of a heart attack. They don’t answer
the phone when they’re sitting right next to it. They inherited
that gene from their mom.”
    I was now passing the supermarket. Industrious
Midland Heights residents were jockeying for parking spaces in the
store’s woefully inadequate lot. Of course, because this is New
Jersey, nobody was walking, not even the people who lived across
the street from the supermarket. So naturally the parking lot was
woefully inadequate. Because I was counter-culture, and walking
outside to get to my destination, I might have patted myself on the
back for my commitment to the environment, but then, to be a
complete