The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  “It is difficult to calculate based on traffic patterns, but the trip should take thirty-nine to forty-four minutes,” I said, “at this time of day.”

  Ms. Washburn looked at me and smiled, not happily. “It’s just that sort of thing I missed,” she said quietly.

  I did not understand, but I knew enough not to answer.

  Officer Duncan and his partner Officer Patel had not been unsympathetic, but their bureaucracy had demanded we be arrested, booked, and then arraigned, which had taken two hours and seventeen minutes. We had made our phone calls, and now Ms. Washburn was concerning herself mostly with the reaction her husband would have if he were told of her ordeal on her first day back at Questions Answered.

  I saw no conflict. Simon Taylor need never know that his wife had been held briefly on charges that were true from a technical standpoint—we had entered Ms. McInerney’s home without her permission, largely because we had been awaiting her return—but were groundless by any other measure. Clearly, we had not burglarized the apartment, nor had we any intentions other than the gathering of information to answer the question Ms. McInerney herself had hired me to research.

  After my twenty-third circumnavigation of the cell, I stopped my efforts to raise my heart rate and stood next to the bench where Ms. Washburn sat, chin rested in her palms. “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why Ms. McInerney would have hired us if she did not want us to answer her question.”

  Ms. Washburn looked up at me. “It is curious, isn’t it?” she said. “The day after she asks you about her husband, she gets us arrested by way of defending her husband. There doesn’t seem to be any sense behind it.”

  These were precisely the areas in which I most needed her help. “Could they have reconciled overnight?” I asked. “Found some common ground in whatever misunderstanding they’d had?”

  But Ms. Washburn shook her head. “It doesn’t fit. She never said they had an argument; she said she didn’t know who he was and doubted they were really married. There’s no reason to set us up that’s going to help that.”

  “It’s true,” I agreed. “And even if there had been some kind of understanding reached, why would Ms. McInerney call me and say her husband was outside the bathroom door brandishing a knife? Why would she … ” My thought process began to speed up, which is what happens when I apply myself singly to a task.

  Ms. Washburn’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “The only reason for Ms. McInerney to insist on my being there, if the goal really was not to determine if Oliver Lewis is her lawful husband, was that she wanted me there and nowhere else,” I mused aloud.

  “That doesn’t make sense.” Ms. Washburn stood up and tilted her head to one side, as people sometimes do when trying to comprehend what another person is saying. “How does getting you to her apartment help the situation with her marriage?”

  I found myself touching my nose, which is another stimulation move I make subconsciously when deep in thought. I resolved to work harder to stop doing that, and dropped my hand to my side. “It doesn’t,” I said. “It is possible that none of this was ever about the marriage, if there was a marriage.”

  “You’re miles ahead of me, Samuel. Slow down and come back to the station.” My face must have looked very confused, because Ms. Washburn smiled and added, “I’m just saying that you should explain yourself more completely.”

  “Of course. This comes to a question of motivation.” I did start pacing around the cell, but more slowly this time. “As you said, there was no reason to claim you and I had been unlawfully violating Ms. McInerney’s apartment. There was nothing to gain from that. Unless the reason was that Ms. McInerney wanted to be certain I—and by extension, you, because she had never met you before—were in that apartment, and then in this cell, for a number of hours.”

  Ms. Washburn held up her hand. “So this was a ruse to get you to a spot where you’re no longer able to leave? She wants you detained?”

  “I believe so. The idea was to occupy me with the bogus notion of a man with a knife who somehow cut himself and then jumped out the window, to get me to consider that for a long period of time. When that did not work, because the elaborate scene that had been staged did not pertain to the question I’d been asked, Ms. McInerney put her backup plan into action, and that involved immobilizing us here.”

  Ms. Washburn shook her head again; this time it seemed out of a sense of befuddlement. “I don’t get it. Why would Sheila want to keep you stuck in a cell for hours? April Fool’s Day was months ago.”

  “April Fool’s Day?” I asked. “How does a strange unofficial holiday relate to the predicament in which we find ourselves?”

  She chuckled lightly. “I was saying that this seems like a very bad idea for a joke, Samuel.”

  I nodded. “It is indeed. But the only possible explanation is somewhat disturbing, and—oh good. Mother!”

  Indeed, my mother was walking toward the holding cell, which was not far from the main reception area of the Edison police headquarters. “Samuel, I never thought I’d be putting up bail for—Janet!” Mother clucked her tongue. “How did he get you involved in this? I thought you’d decided to be sensible.”

  “I had, Vivian. But the prospect of working with your son was just too enticing.”

  “Don’t joke, dear. You’re in jail.”

  “Mother,” I said, “does your arrival indicate that I am free to go? It’s imperative that I get out of this cell immediately!”

  Mother looked around the cell. “Why immediately? Is there a spider in there?” Mother knows I have arachnophobia, although she believes it to be more severe than it really is.

  “No.” There was no time to argue the point about spiders. “We have to get back to Questions Answered as soon as possible!”

  “Oh my.” Mother produced a yellow form from her purse. “This is the paper. It says you’ve posted bail.” She beckoned to the officer at the desk beyond us. “Officer? My son has to leave.” He nodded and waved a hand, in a gesture I believe was to mean that he would be there after a short wait.

  “Officer!” I shouted. “This is an emergency!” He repeated the gesture, slightly more emphatically.

  “I don’t get it, Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said. “I mean, I want to get out of here at least as much as you do, but you seem almost frantic.”

  “I am frantic! Don’t you see? How could you not see?” My mind was racing. I knew that Ms. Washburn and Mother hadn’t reached the same realization as I had, but I was not in a mood to try to understand others’ feelings right now; there was something far more important to attend to, and it might already be too late to do any good.

  “See what?” Mother asked, her tone reminding me to breathe.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and reflected, as Dr. Mancuso has often instructed me to do. I did not take deep breaths, but I concentrated on respiration for ten seconds. It had the desired effect, the one that would get me out of my cell most quickly.

  “Ms. McInerney went out of her way to lure me to her apartment, and then she deliberately implicated Ms. Washburn and me in crimes that had never taken place so that we would be brought and detained here. The only logical motivation to do those two things, in that order, was that she wanted us—specifically me, since she did not know Ms. Washburn was coming—to be away from Questions Answered for a period of hours. That means something has happened at our office that she did not want me to see. And if it is what I believe it to be, the result could be very serious indeed.”

  Ms. Washburn had heard this tone in my voice before, and she tensed in her shoulders and around her mouth. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” she asked.

  “I make no assumptions. It is possible that the offices have been searched for some artifact or piece of information the intruders believe they need, although I cannot imagine what that might be.” Feeling the emo
tion welling up in me again, I struggled to sound calm. “But it is also possible that when we arrive, we will find a dead body in the office.”

  Mother turned toward the desk. “Officer!” she shouted. “We need you now!”

  ten

  “This was what we were afraid of,” Mother said.

  We stared down at the body of Oliver Lewis, his carotid artery slashed, on the floor of the Questions Answered office. The positioning of the body, like everything else I could observe in the room, indicated that he had been murdered elsewhere and deliberately brought to my place of business to be discovered.

  The Piscataway police, because the Edison officers we’d spoken to on the way out of jail did not share my belief in the urgency of the situation, had already been called, and would be here shortly. Mother, a handkerchief in her hand and covering her mouth, was standing in the far corner, by the pizza oven, to avoid being near Lewis’s corpse. I stood over the body, but was now scanning the room for additional data to process. Ms. Washburn, looking more angry than upset (if I were reading her expression correctly), was in the client chair, notepad in hand, watching me and taking notes. Ms. Washburn does not trust portable voice recorders.

  Mother had posted bail for Ms. Washburn once it had become obvious we were heading toward a very difficult situation. “I can’t just leave her sitting here, and I really don’t think she’s going to skip town and I’ll be stuck for it,” she’d told me. “Besides, bail for this crime wasn’t very much money at all.” Ms. Washburn’s brother, who had not yet left his home in Upper Montclair, sounded “relieved” not to have to make the trip, she’d told me after calling him, and would reimburse Mother for the bail money the next day.

  “Simon’s certainly going to find out about this,” Ms. Washburn said now.

  “I imagine so,” I told her. “The news crews should be arriving just after the police, if not before. They have scanners that broadcast the messages the dispatcher sends to patrol cars, so any mention of a homicide will undoubtedly result in a great deal of news coverage. Your husband will definitely be seeing reports of this on the Internet, probably before you arrive home today.”

  “You’re not making me feel better,” she said.

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “I was not attempting to make you feel better,” I said.

  “You succeeded.”

  Mother’s arms flapped a bit at her sides as mine used to do when I was less in control. “When are they getting here?” she said. “Shouldn’t someone do something about that poor man? Cover him up or something?”

  “We must leave the crime scene as untouched as we can,” I told her. “Covering the body could contaminate the investigation for the Piscataway detectives.”

  Ms. Washburn’s glance told me I was missing a “human element,” as she would put it later. “Do you want to wait outside, Vivian?” she asked gently. “They’ll want to talk to you, but it doesn’t have to be in here.” Apparently she felt the location of the interrogation would make the situation less upsetting for Mother.

  Mother sniffed once and then stood her ground. “I’ll stay here, but thank you, Janet.”

  It became a moot point because we saw Piscataway police cars arriving in the strip mall parking lot, one cruiser and one clearly a pool car for detectives. The police tend to buy the same models across departments, and they are more conservative than most passenger cars bought by consumers in an effort to “blend in.”

  There were four of them. Two uniformed officers got out of the cruiser and immediately walked to the unmarked vehicle, where a man and woman in business dress were standing and stretching as if after a long drive. It would have taken five minutes to drive from the Piscataway police headquarters, which would coincide with the time Ms. Washburn had called the police. The detectives waited for the uniformed officers to arrive at their vehicle. They appeared to issue orders to the uniforms for thirty-two seconds, then pointed toward the Questions Answered storefront. The two officers walked to my door looking determined. They entered without knocking, which made perfect sense.

  “Piscataway police,” the taller officer announced upon entering. His gaze was fixed on the three living people in the room and not the dead man who was at a much lower angle. He did not look down. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “It’s the dead body, Ed,” his partner told him, walking quickly toward Oliver Lewis’s corpse. “What happened?”

  “Clearly, he was either garroted or slashed across the throat with a very thin knife, severing the carotid artery,” I answered. “He was murdered somewhere other than here—I would estimate at least a twenty-minute drive in the trunk of a car—and then deposited on the floor of my office, where we found him here six and one-half minutes ago.”

  “Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said slowly, “the officer is asking what we saw.”

  The two officers were now staring rather openly at me, and the two detectives, standing just inside the doorway, studied the body more closely. They walked to the center of the room where Oliver Lewis lay.

  “What happened?” the male detective echoed. I chose not to repeat my statement, a decision I reached mostly through reading Ms. Washburn’s expression.

  “We walked in and found that man there,” Mother said. “Samuel thought we might, and then we did.”

  The detective looked at me. “You’re Samuel?”

  I held out my hand. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Samuel Hoenig, and this is my business, Questions Answered.”

  The man didn’t take my hand, but his partner did. “I’m Detective Maria Esteban, and the rude man who didn’t introduce himself is Detective Andrew Dickinson,” she said. “Why did you think you would find this man here, like this?”

  Not wishing to be considered rude, I introduced Mother and Ms. Washburn, and then told Detective Esteban about the odd encounter between Ms. Washburn, myself, and Sheila McInerney earlier in the day. Before I had completed the story, I saw Detective Dickinson nod toward one of the uniformed officers, who began operating a tablet computer he carried, no doubt in an attempt to verify my account of the events, particularly our brief incarceration in Edison.

  “I get all that,” Esteban said. “But how does that lead to an expectation of finding a dead man in your office?”

  “The only reason Ms. McInerney could possibly have to maneuver Ms. Washburn and myself into her apartment, and then into a holding cell in Edison, was to keep us away from here,” I explained. “Given that she had manufactured an emergency that didn’t exist at her apartment, and that it had allegedly involved violence to the point of bloodshed, the logical conclusion to reach is that she wanted us to testify to her ‘husband’s’ tendency toward violence. So given those two facts, the idea that someone affected by violence, probably deceased because he would be unable to confirm or deny the account she wanted us to deliver, would be discovered here was not a difficult one to arrive at. I had hoped we’d find him before it was too late, but the plan that had been executed had succeeded.”

  Dickinson was now chewing on his lips as if they were itchy. The uniformed officer looked up from his tablet and nodded in Dickinson’s direction, but I could not tell whether the detective had seen the gesture or not.

  “That’s a pretty big leap,” Esteban said. “Just because you and your assistant—”

  “Associate,” I corrected.

  “My apologies—you and your associate were held on what I’ll admit were pretty flimsy charges, you concluded that Oliver Lewis was going to be murdered here and you’d find him?”

  “I could not have accurately predicted the identify of the victim, but I knew there would be one, yes,” I said. “But Mr. Lewis was not murdered here, that much is obvious. He was killed elsewhere and brought here to be discovered.”

  Esteban took a moment, but nodded. “You’re right. There isn’t enough blood on the floor for a guy whose throat has
been cut like that. But how do we know you didn’t clean it up? How do we know you didn’t kill Oliver Lewis, if that’s who this is?”

  A small white van, no doubt carrying a crime scene investigation team summoned by the uniformed officers, appeared in the strip mall parking lot outside my window. I was relieved; the physical evidence in the room had been in danger of contamination until they could document everything. I had been careful not even to shift my feet since we had found Lewis’s body, and my legs were weary from the effort.

  “This is Oliver Lewis, or at least the man who identified himself as Lewis when he came to my office yesterday.” I watched the four crime scene members walk in without introduction and begin to cordon off the crime scene, even as we stood inside it. “I can identify him positively as such. I am sure you will find identification somewhere on his person, because I can only assume the killer or killers want you to know exactly who he is. You will be able to prove that no one here is the murderer because you have logs of our departure time from the Edison police headquarters and these clinicians will surely establish the time of death as during the time we were being held. Whoever did do this killing is being very careful not to implicate myself, my mother, or Ms. Washburn in the crime, although I cannot begin to explain why they would want to avoid that.”

  “You could be covering for the killer,” Dickinson suggested.

  My mother looked positively insulted. “My son would never do that.”

  “What motivation would we have to mislead you about a body we found in my place of business?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” Dickinson said.

  “It was an honest question. I really have no answer for it. I thought you might.”

  I often see people squint at me, as if I were an especially bright source of light, after I have said something that seems quite simple and reasonable to me. Both detectives were looking at me like that at this moment.