The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  “This is Samuel Hoenig,” I answered.

  The voice on the other end made a noise that sounded like, “pwah.” Then he said, “I can’t believe you’re calling me.”

  “I do not understand your disbelief,” I said. “You have all the evidence. The telephone rang, and I identified myself when you responded. Is this Mr. Taylor?”

  There was a wispy, somewhat guttural tone to the voice. “Yes, this is Simon Taylor. What the hell do you want, Hoenig?”

  “I wish to know why you object to Ms. Washburn working for my firm,” I told him simply. “I will pay her an honest wage and her work will be both rewarding and helpful to the clients we serve. What is your concern?”

  “You have a lot of nerve,” Simon Taylor said. “Do you know that?”

  Each human being has the same number of nerves, and the human brain has approximately one hundred billion neurons, so the number was indeed quite high. “Every person does,” I said, although I did not see the relevance to the conversation we had been having. “You have just as many.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the conversation. “Let me make this clear, Hoenig,” Simon Taylor said. “I don’t like you. I don’t like the idea that my wife worked for you even for one day. She came very close to getting her head cut off, and I really don’t like that. So when you call me up with your Ass Burger voice and ask me why I don’t want my wife to work for you again, I get mad. So you want to know why? I’ll tell you why: because of you. Is that clear enough?”

  “Quite clear,” I answered. “Thank you. Now may I make my case, please?”

  “I could just hang up and not answer when you call again,” he noted.

  “Yes, you could. But I believe I can convince you, and as a man who appears to enjoy a challenge, I am willing to presume that you think I can’t.” I had anticipated using this tactic. It was true that I had no evidence Mr. Taylor enjoyed a challenge any more than most men, but I was taking a calculated gamble. I waited for his response.

  “You wanna bet?” he asked.

  It would be foolish to include a wager in the equation; if Mr. Taylor thought there was a prize to be won by staying implacable, he would not listen to my argument. “There is more money to be made if your wife is under my employ,” I said. “Wagering funds on this conversation is counterproductive.”

  “It’s an expression,” he said, I believe wearily. It’s not always easy for me to gather information about a person’s mood from his tone of voice. I was not familiar with the axiom about wagering, and wrote it on a pad I keep next to my Mac Pro, so I could consult with Mother later for an explanation.

  I decided to press on with my argument. “I understand your objection to the danger that Ms. Washburn met with when she helped with the question of the missing head,” I said. Then, leaving no time for him to interject, I added, “but I am committed to keeping any employee of Questions Answered, including myself, out of any physical peril, and I will immediately discontinue my acceptance of the contract if—and I consider this extremely unlikely—any such situation arises. In addition, I will guarantee to you that Ms. Washburn, should she opt to continue working for the firm as I would hope, would be able to veto my answering any future question posed if, within her judgment, there is any unreasonable level of danger. Is that an acceptable situation for you?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Do you always talk like that?” Simon Taylor asked.

  I thought quickly. “There are times I try to sound like Elmer Fudd in an attempt to amuse my mother,” I said. “Other than that, this is my speaking voice.”

  “You’re a nut, Hoenig. You know that?”

  I felt it was best not to respond. When directly challenged like that, it is my experience that I have either done something to offend the other person, or I am misreading a signal. In either case, there is no helpful response. If an apology is required, it will become evident quickly.

  “I want you to know I never told Janet she can’t work for you,” Mr. Taylor went on. The need for an apology seemed less likely. “She’s not the kind of woman a husband can just order around. But I’ve told her I don’t like it, and she has chosen not to work with you again. I know you’ve asked her a bunch of times. So that should tell you something, shouldn’t it?”

  It probably should have given me some information, but Ms. Washburn’s explanation for not returning to Questions Answered had always been that her husband objected. If he had indeed only expressed an opinion, it could mean that Ms. Washburn had chosen to reject my offers for other reasons.

  I sat at my Mac Pro and felt my left hand on my forehead, massaging the temples. It was an involuntary response, but one that had been developed over long periods of time with great effort and hours of practice, under the tutelage of Dr. Mancuso.

  Before that, I had flapped my hands at my side whenever confronted with emotions I found disturbing.

  “I am not sure exactly what information I should take from what you’ve told me,” I finally said to Simon Taylor.

  “Think about it,” he answered. “To show you what a nice guy I am, I’m not going to tell Janet you called me.”

  Then he disconnected the call.

  My first impulse, after replacing the phone on its cradle, was to call Ms. Washburn’s cell phone number. But Mother’s voice in my head warned against that. “She’s a grown woman and she gets to make her own choices,” it said. Even though I knew it was a manifestation of my own thoughts, I was slightly displeased with Mother for saying that.

  Other people’s choices make very little sense to me, while mine are completely logical and seem to confuse the “neurotypical” population. It is a very difficult concept.

  It seemed that Ms. Washburn was not going to walk through the door to my office anytime soon, and that my attempts at correcting that situation had failed. The only two possible reactions I could have would be to call Ms. McInerney and rescind my acceptance of her question, or to gather the necessary data to answer it on my own.

  I opted for the latter.

  Six

  The Darien, Connecticut, town clerk could not have been less helpful.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Hoenig, but we do not give information about marriage certificates out over the phone,” Diana Febrizzi said. “If you don’t have a copy, you and your wife will have to fill out the form for a certified copy. I can give you the web address.”

  “I am not married,” I told her.

  “Then you don’t need a certificate.” That was technically true, but not in the least bit useful to me.

  “How long should it take to receive a copy once the form is submitted?” I asked. Getting Ms. McInerney to send in the proper paperwork, while an inconvenience, would probably not be difficult.

  “When did the marriage take place?”

  That hardly seemed relevant to my question, but bureaucracies have their eccentricities, just as people do. I understood that well. “Within the past month,” I said, not having an exact date.

  “Then you can’t get the copy of the certificate from me,” Ms. Febrizzi said with a tone that I believe indicated I should already have known that. “For anything that took place within the past four months, you go through the state’s vital records office. That should take about six weeks.”

  Forty-two days seemed an inordinate amount of time to generate one document through a printer, but I knew there would be no benefit to pointing that out to Ms. Febrizzi. It would likely yield nothing more than an explanation of the process, a recitation of the number of requests processed each day, or a rebuke for expecting special treatment, whereas my point would be that everyone should be able to obtain vital records more quickly than in six weeks.

  I thanked her for her time (because effort had not seemed to be her strong suit) and went back to my Mac Pro to continue the research I’d begun before the phone call.
While I prefer Internet searches to talking with other people, the official website for Darien, Connecticut, had been taken offline for “system upgrades” that morning, according to the message on my screen.

  A basic background search on Oliver Lewis yielded little. The name was not an uncommon one, so the best way to narrow the investigation was to look for images of the man and match them to the person I had met the day before. The most common photo matches for “Oliver Lewis” were a magician, a model, a cyclist and a man who played the part of Gummo in a production of the musical Minnie’s Boys, about the early days of the Marx Brothers.

  (The coincidence of a Marx Brothers reference after Ms. McInerney’s costume of Harpo Marx was interesting, but not as statistically unlikely as it might at first seem.)

  The Oliver Lewis I had met was not evident.

  Searches focusing simply on the name had come back with the same four men and a novel written in 1977 by John Fowles. Since I had not discovered what Ms. McInerney’s nominal husband did for a living, it would be difficult to narrow the search by profession. Doing so geographically, to the address Ms. McInerney had supplied on her client intake form, was equally frustrating. There were no such listings, probably because the man I knew as Oliver Lewis had only been living at Ms. McInerney’s address for a few weeks.

  I needed to talk to my client again to fill in more of the information I did not yet possess, but calls to her cell phone were sent directly to voice mail. The only recourse was to wait until she called back.

  In some desperation, I searched marriage announcements on sites local to the area for any involving Oliver Lewis and Sheila McInerney. While such things would hardly be conclusive—anyone can say they’ve been married—they might offer some data that I did not yet possess, and that is always a benefit.

  Searches of the local newspaper sites, including the Home News-Tribune and The Star-Ledger, showed no announcement. But there was one in the Metro Jewish News, which was surprising, as neither Lewis nor McInerney would be considered a traditional Jewish surname. I have found that it never aids an answer to assume anything without facts to prove the assumption true.

  The listing, although brief, did contain some new information:

  Marriages

  Lewis/McInerney

  Oliver Lewis, proprietor of OLimited Investments in Piscataway, married Sheila McInerney, a graphic designer with Hunger, a Manhattan-based advertising firm, Sunday. The civil ceremony was performed by a municipal court judge in Darien, Connecticut.

  The bride’s parents, Michael and Tina McInerney of Freehold, and the groom’s parents, Lewis and Roslyn Markowitz, did not attend the ceremony. The couple will reside at the bride’s residence in Edison.

  From this copy (the only such announcement I was able to find after a thorough search), I had learned Lewis’s profession and the names of his parents. Also, the revelation that a municipal court judge, and not a justice of the peace or other official, presided over the ceremony created an avenue to investigate.

  I was about to look into OLimited Investments of Piscataway when the office phone rang. Caller ID indicated Sheila McInerney was on the other end of the line.

  “Questions Answered,” I said. Even when I am aware of the caller’s identity, it is important to maintain the demeanor of a business.

  The voice coming through the receiver was breathless, gasping, but definitely that of my client. “Mr. Hoenig,” she said, “this is Sheila McInerney.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m at my apartment,” she went on, with no indication she had heard me. “I’m in the bathroom.”

  That seemed an inappropriate place from which to make a telephone call, and an even more inappropriate place to announce as the location of a telephone call. I had no response, but I might have made a sound in the back of my throat.

  “It’s Ollie,” she whispered. “He’s gotten violent. He says he told you to stay out of our marriage and you refused, and he’s coming after me with a knife!”

  “Hang up,” I said. “Disconnect this call and dial 911 immediately. Get the police there.” There was no time to explain that I believed I had not provoked Lewis. The objective now was to secure Ms. McInerney. But she did not end the phone call.

  “Come here,” she said in a quiet, tense voice. “Come here right now.”

  “I do not drive,” I said. “Call the police.”

  “You can stop him,” Ms. McInerney pleaded. “Just get here. You have the address. Hurry!”

  And then she hung up.

  I hoped she was in the process of dialing the police, and wondered if I should do the same. Unfortunately, Ms. McInerney lived in Edison and I was in Piscataway, approximately a fifteen- to twenty-minute drive, assuming I could summon Mother soon enough to make a difference. Her need to drive to Questions Answered to pick me up would add another eight minutes to the trip.

  I was reaching for the phone to call her when Janet Washburn walked through the door to Questions Answered.

  “I don’t know what happened, but my husband said I should make up my own mind about working here,” she said before I could explain the situation. “So I’m here. You said we have a new question to answer. But it’s not dangerous, right?”

  Clearly, a decision had to be made. While I had promised both Ms. Washburn and her husband, Simon Taylor, that she would never be in any physical danger, there was the growing feeling that something very bad might happen to Ms. McInerney if I did not answer her pleas to come to her home quickly. I would have to choose between lying to Ms. Washburn—something I would never consider doing if I could avoid it—or endangering my client. In addition, admitting to Ms. Washburn that there was indeed a chance of violence attached to this question would likely jeopardize any chance I had of her working with me, probably ever again.

  “There will be no danger to you at all, I promise,” I said. “But it is very important that you drive me to Edison immediately.”

  Ms. Washburn searched my face for a moment, seemed to consider something, and then turned toward the door.

  “Let’s go, then,” she said.

  The trip took only eleven minutes, but while Ms. Washburn was driving, I was considering whether I had been honest with her. She followed the instructions being spoken by her Global Positioning System device and was concentrating on the road, so there was very little conversation, which is usually my most comfortable option. But this time, being left with my own thoughts was not as desirable as it would be under typical circumstances.

  Ms. Washburn had not asked for an explanation of the question we were about to research. I knew from past experience that when she was driving, her attention was very difficult to divide—she would watch the road very carefully, probably because she knows that eases my anxiety about riding in a motor vehicle. While we’d walked to the car, I had told her only that the question involved a wife who was unsure of her husband, and that I needed her help because the interactions between couples were a mystery to me, so I might miss an important fact she would easily notice.

  I waited until there was a pause in the directions being issued by the device that would allow for some talk and said, “Ms. Washburn, I am glad you decided to work with me again.” I was about to add that the promise of a completely danger-free assignment might have been hasty, but Ms. Washburn stopped me by putting up the index finger on her left hand.

  “I’m not saying it’s permanent, Samuel,” she interjected. “Let’s see how this question goes, and then we can talk about it after that, okay?”

  That was a disturbing turn; if this were to be a trial question for her continued employment, the situation to which we were racing (at the regulated speed limit) might very well cause Ms. Washburn to decide against any future association. I was determined not to let that happen, so I returned to my thoughts as she drove.

  We arrived on Evergreen Road and located the bui
lding which contained Ms. McInerney’s apartment, according to the intake form. I noted that there were no police cruisers parked in front of the building, but I could not determine whether that meant that I should relax and assume there was no further complication, or be especially concerned because Ms. McInerney had not heeded my instruction to call the police.

  Ms. Washburn parked the car across the street from the building, a nondescript brick-faced garden apartment building of two stories that, from the floor plans I had taken from the renting firm’s website, would hold four apartments. Ms. McInerney’s would be on the upper floor, on the side opposite the street. There were, therefore, no windows into which I could look from my current position to determine the situation inside the residence.

  “Please stay here in the car,” I said to Ms. Washburn when she had extinguished the engine. “I will investigate on my own.”

  Ms. Washburn’s face rearranged itself; if I were reading her expression properly, she was looking skeptical. “Why?” she asked. “I’m not just the driver, am I?”

  “Perhaps in this instance,” I answered. “I promised that you would face absolutely no danger while finding an answer to this question. I am not able to guarantee that if you come with me to the apartment, so I am living up to my promise by asking you to stay here.”

  I opened the car door and stepped out, but Ms. Washburn did the same, which puzzled me.

  “I’m coming with you, Samuel,” she said.

  That seemed unwise. Perhaps I had not explained myself adequately. “I believe there is a possibility of violence in the apartment, although I cannot be sure,” I told her. “If you come in with me, you might encounter something that would controvert the promises I made to you and to your husband. And then you might leave and not come back, and I would do anything to prevent that.”

  I could not read Ms. Washburn’s expression. She cocked an eyebrow and leaned her head toward me. “You spoke to Simon?” she asked.

  Mr. Taylor had said he would not tell his wife we had spoken, but he had not suggested I refrain from mentioning it—in fact, he’d said he would conceal the fact as a favor to me. I required no such consideration, so it had not occurred to me that revealing the fact of the conversation would be a miscalculation. With that look on Ms. Washburn’s face, I was reconsidering that decision, but it was too late.