The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  “My point was that whoever the person was—and we don’t have the facts yet to determine his or her identity conclusively—could have been injured in a perfectly legal way, slicing vegetables for cooking or trying to open a package. We could call the authorities, but we have no evidence yet of criminal activity.”

  Ms. Washburn studied my face and her eyes looked thoughtful. “That’s technically true, Samuel, but I’m having a hard time coming up with circumstances that lead to a wounded person climbing out the window unless there was some danger in the apartment.”

  I nodded. “So am I.”

  eight

  Over Ms. McInerney’s objections—she insisted that “nobody could survive a fall like that,” out a second-story window, perhaps ten feet if the person dangled from the windowsill first—we left the building and walked around to the side beneath her bedroom window.

  “I don’t see any blood up on the window or the wall,” Ms. Washburn pointed out. “It wasn’t a really a lot of blood, even upstairs.”

  “Probably I cut myself and forgot,” Ms. McInerney said. Ms. Washburn gave her what I interpreted as a withering look, and I must have been doing the same. It was an absurd assertion. How could a person cut herself to the point of bloodshed without leaving a mark, leave a trail of blood through two rooms, and then forget?

  It seemed obvious, although inexplicable, that she was somehow covering for the person who had been bleeding and then exited by her bedroom window. I could not conjure a scenario under which that type of behavior made sense, but it unmistakably fit the facts I had to work with, and nothing else I imagined could do that.

  “Did you then go and jump out the window?” Ms. Washburn asked. Ms. Washburn is an excellent associate in part because she knows when it is appropriate to go outside the boundaries of what I had been painstakingly taught as polite behavior.

  “A pair of binoculars would be helpful,” I mused aloud. It was not a great height to the window, but small specs of blood or other physical evidence could escape me from this distance. Even with my distaste for heights, I might have considered asking the building superintendent for a ladder and then asking Ms. Washburn to climb up for a look, but she was wearing a skirt and might have objected.

  Instead, she extended her cellular phone. “Take this, Samuel,” she said. “It has an app that works like a zoom lens.”

  As I’ve said, handling Ms. Washburn’s cell phone is not something I enjoy doing. To be candid, I am not pleased about touching an object belonging to anyone else. I am not a germaphobe, and I do not believe that Ms. Washburn is at all unsanitary. Instead, it is the prospect that I might in some way damage or lose the object that concerns me, particularly in Ms. Washburn’s case. She believes in me as few people other than my mother do, and to betray her trust, even accidentally, would be very upsetting.

  Nonetheless, I needed a closer look at the area underneath Ms. McInerney’s bedroom window. “It’s okay, Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said, no doubt sensing my reluctance. “Nothing’s going to happen to the phone.” She smiled.

  I took the phone from her hand as Ms. McInerney complained again that she saw no point to staring up at her window “like Juliet,” when in fact it is Juliet standing on the balcony and Romeo at her feet in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s play. I felt it would be unproductive to correct her, so I accepted Ms. Washburn’s instructions on the operation of the zoom lens application on her phone, and aimed it at the window.

  The image was not perfect, but it was a vast improvement over the view from the ground. “What are you looking for, exactly?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  While the cliché answer might be that I would know when I saw it, I told her, “I am searching for anything that will provide us with information. Specifically, we need to know if it was indeed Oliver Lewis who chose to take a very unconventional route out of the apartment. If so, this exercise might prove helpful in answering the question at hand. If we discover proof that someone else climbed through the window, it will not be the least bit helpful.”

  “Wouldn’t knowing that it wasn’t Lewis point us in a direction, at least?” Ms. Washburn asked. “Wouldn’t that help us take a step toward finding out what happened?”

  “Certainly, but that is not the question we were hired to answer. The question is who the man claiming to be Ms. McInerney’s husband really is. If Mr. Lewis were not the person leaving by the window, the incident upstairs might have no bearing on that question at all.”

  Ms. Washburn blinked. “Samuel—”

  “Of course it was Ollie,” our client interjected. “I told you that. He was the one holding the knife.”

  “Precisely,” I said as I trained the phone’s lens on the windowsill itself and found remarkably little. “The person holding the knife and acting violently is rarely the one who ends up bleeding.” The distance and the size of the phone made it difficult to focus properly; any tiny movement of my hand was reflected in a very noticeable shift in the image I saw on the screen. But what I saw was enough to provide some information.

  “There is nothing of note on the windowsill,” I said. “No scratches, no blood, no torn fabric from a piece of clothing.”

  “That seems strange,” Ms. Washburn said. “If a person were trying to escape through the window, especially a bleeding person, wouldn’t they leave something behind?”

  “Why?” Ms. McInerney wanted to know.

  I took the phone away from my eye for a moment and faced her. “Even someone who might believe his life to be in danger would not simply leap through the window,” I said. “If he did, he would undoubtedly have injured himself, probably to the point that he would not have been able to walk away from the area. Look around here. What do you see?”

  Our client took a moment to scan the small shrub-lined area in which we stood. “Nothing,” she said.

  “Very good,” I told her. People like to be praised; it gives them a sense that their contribution is valuable, even on those occasions when it is not at all. “So what does that tell you?”

  Sheila McInerney stared blankly in my direction for seven seconds. That was really not a long time, but she looked as if it felt like an eon to her.

  “Ms. McInerney is not going to answer, Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said quietly. “She is waiting for your explanation.”

  Ah. “The grass is undisturbed. There is no evidence of trampling or impact at the base of the building underneath the window. In short, there is absolutely no sign of a person, injured or not, falling from the window and then extricating him or herself from this area.”

  “But the window was open,” Ms. McInerney protested. “Why would someone go and open the window and the screen, and then walk away? And if that’s what he did, then how did Ollie get out of the apartment?”

  That seemed simple enough. “The most likely explanation is that he walked through the door, down the stairs, and then to his car,” I said.

  “But he was bleeding.” Our client seemed to want her husband, however disputable their wedding might have been, to have jumped out her bedroom window.

  “I sincerely doubt that,” I told her. “There is no evidence that was the case.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ms. McInerney demanded. “There’s blood all over the place up there.”

  “Well, not ‘all over the place,’” Ms. Washburn accurately pointed out. “There were a few drops of blood in a trail … ” She did not finish the sentence, but stood with a thoughtful look on her face for a few moments. “Samuel, did someone stage that scene upstairs?”

  I nodded. “I would not rush to that conclusion based on the evidence just yet, but it certainly seems to be the most likely explanation at this point.”

  “But the window,” Ms. McInerney reiterated. “The blood.” Her hands flailed a little the way mine still sometimes do when I am upset. I wondered if Ms. McInerney had some neurological issues
.

  “The fact that there is no sign of disruption at the window is significant,” I told our client. “If a person were indeed to dangle from the window and then drop down, it would be reasonable to expect some scratching, some scuffs from shoes, at the very least finger marks. There would be something. And if that person was indeed injured and bleeding, even slightly, it is very likely there would be some blood on the sill or the side of the building. But there is nothing, not even variations in the level of dirt.”

  Ms. Washburn stood, arms crossed, listening. Ms. McInerney, however, simply stared at me.

  “So?” she said.

  “So the physical evidence we are able to find at the scene of the incident very clearly indicates that no one left the apartment through that window,” I explained, although I believed I had made my point adequately.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ms. McInerney spat. “There’s a trail of blood and an open window, and Oliver is gone. The only explanation is that he left through the window.”

  I started to walk from the scene, having taken in all the information I would be able to gather there. Ms. Washburn fell into step with me as we headed toward the building, but Ms. McInerney stood still in the center of the grassy area, looking astonished, from what I could see as we retreated.

  “That’s it?” she demanded. “You take one quick look through a cell phone and you’ve decided the whole thing?”

  “The physical evidence is clear.” I stopped to look back at her. “This is not aiding in answering your question.”

  “But what about the blood?” she said.

  “I do not see the blood, if it is blood, as relevant physical data,” I said. “But I would like one more look upstairs. Trying to decipher this scene has distracted me from the task at hand. The key is to reexamine your apartment, which should not take long, and then we will be out of your way.”

  Ms. Washburn and I walked toward the stairwell that had led us from Ms. McInerney’s apartment to this area. As we walked, Ms. Washburn leaned toward me, speaking softly, I believed, because she preferred our client not hear.

  “What do you mean, ‘if it is blood’?” she asked.

  “As you suggested,” I said, my voice probably somewhat louder because volume modulation is a challenge for me, “the supposed injury and flight of a mysterious person upstairs was probably staged for Ms. McInerney’s benefit. It is possible that the person doing so could have cut himself to produce a few drops of blood, but the more likely possibility is that something less painful was used to create the effect.”

  “Why would somebody do that?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “It is a mistake to try to discern motive through raw data,” I said. “We don’t have enough facts yet, and the ones we thought we had are now suspect.”

  Ms. Washburn looked at me quizzically but did not speak as we climbed the stairs to the apartment door. We waited a few moments for Ms. McInerney to appear, assuming she had followed us. It did not seem appropriate to enter her apartment without her present, even though she had tacitly given us permission to do so by letting us in before.

  She did not arrive.

  “What should we do?” I asked Ms. Washburn, grateful again that she had returned to Questions Answered. Her counsel in such matters—which would be extremely difficult on my own—was invaluable.

  “Damned if I know,” she said.

  We waited for three minutes, neither of us saying anything, fully anticipating Ms. McInerney’s arrival at any moment, but it did not occur.

  “The door is unlocked,” Ms. Washburn said. “We could just go inside and wait for her there. It’s more comfortable, and her neighbors might wonder why two people are just standing outside her door.”

  “I have not seen any neighbors observing us,” I pointed out.

  “Those are the ones you have to watch,” Ms. Washburn asserted, and opened the apartment door.

  We walked into the living area, and Ms. Washburn immediately turned to me and asked, “What is it we’re looking for? How do we answer the original question about who her husband is, or something?”

  “The question remains who the man was who claimed to be Ms. McInerney’s husband,” I reminded her. “We should be looking for a marriage certificate or any state-issued identification. Any photographs from the wedding of Oliver Lewis with the woman he said was his bride might be helpful.”

  “Where do you want me to start?” she asked.

  “Please go through the bedroom a little more thoroughly,” I suggested. “Don’t open drawers, but see what is on display. We are technically not authorized to perform a search since Ms. McInerney is not here. So be sure not to disturb anything—just observe.”

  “Right.” And she was gone.

  I had done a reasonably complete scan of the living area when we had first entered the apartment, so I decided to concentrate my efforts on the kitchen and then the bathroom, two sections we had not examined at all so far.

  The galley kitchen was fairly standard but, like the rest of the apartment, it seemed oddly underused. The built-in dishwasher was empty and showed no signs of usage. The sink was clear of used dishes, glasses, or utensils. The one knife was indeed missing from the set of knives on the counter, and was not visible anywhere else in the room.

  Even a dishtowel, hanging from the handle of the oven door, was clean and folded.

  My mother keeps her kitchen very carefully and I do my best to help, so there is rarely a great deal of detritus visible in that room of our house. But even when Mother is especially concerned with its appearance, as when we are to receive company, there would be no room in our home that looked this pristine.

  I had once toured a model home when answering a question about the water table in Somerset County, and this kitchen—in fact, this entire apartment—reminded me of that.

  It was like no one lived here.

  Having had that thought, it was difficult to banish it and concern myself strictly with facts I could verify. But I have a talent for focused thought, so after a few moments I decided to look for any relevant data in the apartment’s bathroom, the only unviewed area left in the unit.

  Again, there was not much to see. The bathroom was functional. A plain shower curtain hung from the rod over the bathtub. There was no mildew or discoloration of the grout around the tub. There were no wet towels or anything out of place. Ms. McInerney had said she’d been hiding from her husband—if he was indeed her husband—in this room, but there was no indication anyone had been in here at all.

  In hotels, the first piece of paper hanging from the roll next to the toilet is often folded by the housekeeping staff into a triangle shape. It was something of a surprise that hadn’t been done here.

  The immaculate condition of the apartment (aside from the rather theatrically arranged “blood” stains) was irritating. It was difficult under normal circumstances to find any relevant information simply by observing a scene. When it appeared that the area had been staged, then sanitized, there was little one could possibly discover beyond the fact of the sanitization itself.

  It was tempting to open the medicine cabinet installed on the wall over the double sink. While such a fixture is usually a very fertile source of information, opening it without Ms. McInerney’s permission would constitute a serious invasion of privacy. I hesitated at the thought, keeping in mind that it was still possible, even with the strong evidence that nothing criminal had happened here, the apartment could be a crime scene, so keeping my fingerprints to a minimum was still advisable.

  I was mentally weighing my options when I heard Ms. Washburn’s voice from the hallway outside the bathroom. “Samuel,” she said. “I don’t know if this is anything, but—”

  She stopped speaking when the apartment door opened and two uniformed police officers entered, each with a hand on his holstered weapon. Behind them was Sheila McInerney, looking o
ddly pleased with herself when the officers’ eyes were not focused on her.

  “That’s them,” she told the officers. “Those are the people who broke into my apartment.”

  nine

  “This is absurd,” I said, power walking around the cell and raising my arms for added aerobic activity. “There is no reason for us to be held. We explained to the officers exactly how and why we were in Ms. McInerney’s apartment.”

  Ms. Washburn, sitting on the bench of the holding cell, drew a heavy breath and made a sound in the back of her throat. “This is not how I pictured the day going either, Samuel. But they’ll sort it out and we’ll be out very soon. You heard what the sergeant said.”

  No amount of explanation, including even showing the Edison police officers my copy of the contract between Ms. McInerney and Questions Answered, had convinced them the burglary call they’d gotten was simply a misunderstanding. Of course, it was not at all a misunderstanding—Ms. McInerney, for reasons we could not begin to determine, had clearly set up Ms. Washburn and myself to be arrested at her apartment for, as Officer Duncan had explained before reciting our Miranda rights, “criminal trespass and suspicion of burglary.” He had mentioned something about “theft” as well, since when they’d arrived, Ms. Washburn had been holding a wedding band that was not her own. But I had not heard anything about thievery mentioned when we were processed upon arrival at the police station at the Edison municipal complex.

  The wedding band, which was inscribed “O.L. to S.M.,” had been confiscated as evidence.

  Throughout, Ms. McInerney had insisted that Ms. Washburn and I were unwelcome guests in her home, that we had “barged in” with a wild story about her beloved husband Oliver, and that she had asked us to leave repeatedly and we had refused. She’d had no recourse, she said, but to go outside—afraid for her own safety—and notify the police.

  “How long should it take to get here from Montclair?” Ms. Washburn asked me in the cell. She had called her brother Mark rather than her husband, she said, because “if Simon hears about this, he’ll never let me out of the house again.”