Read Online For Whom the Minivan Rolls by JEFFREY COHEN - Free Book Online

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.

Chapter 12
    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