The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  “Mr. Hoenig is not being sarcastic,” Ms. Washburn told them. “He has a form of high-functioning autism.”

  As I expected, that brought exaggerated nods from the detectives, indicating that what Ms. Washburn had said explained quite a bit for them. I am never sure exactly how to react to such a gesture.

  While the technicians began to videotape, photograph, and otherwise examine the area in which Lewis’s body lay, Detective Esteban indicated we should move outside the cordoned-off area so the police could question each of us separately. My mother was assigned to one of the uniformed officers, Ms. Washburn to Esteban, and Detective Dickinson volunteered—not very enthusiastically, I felt—to interview me.

  Mother must have asked to be taken outside, because the officer opened the door for her and I saw them walking toward a bench two doors down, at the craft store Sew It Up. Esteban ushered Ms. Washburn to the far corner of the office near the drink machine.

  Dickinson, perhaps believing it would better coerce a confession out of me, sat backwards on the spare folding chair I keep for situations with more than one client. He was very near the yellow police tape surrounding Lewis’s body. I sat in Mother’s recliner, although I felt slightly uncomfortable usurping her traditional position.

  “So tell me again how you know Oliver Lewis,” he began. It is a standard tactic in interrogation to ask questions more than once. This helps to determine if the subject’s responses are consistent, and it can sometimes serve to annoy the subject into saying something unguarded. Since I had no reason to guard my responses, Dickinson was using the incorrect strategy.

  I felt it best not to mention that to him.

  “I didn’t know Mr. Lewis beyond having a professional interest,” I said, explaining again about the question Ms. McInerney had originally asked me to answer for her.

  “So she wanted to know if they were really married, or if he roofied her and then told her they were?” Dickinson said.

  “That was the gist of it, yes,” I told him.

  “And what did you find out?” Again, a question that had already been answered, but not into the voice recorder Dickinson was holding toward me now.

  “I have not adequately answered the question, although I am not sure that is still relevant. After being accused of breaking into her home, I am not certain that I will retain Ms. McInerney as a client.”

  “You think she’ll fire you?”

  “No. I am in the process of deciding whether or not I will continue to honor the contract.”

  Dickinson’s mouth twisted in an unusual position. “You answer questions for a living?” he said with a tone that indicated some astonishment at the suggestion.

  Resisting the temptation to point to the sign in my window, I answered, “That is what I do, yes.”

  “And people pay you for that?”

  It was my turn to squint, I believe. The question he asked seemed to have already been answered, and there was in this case no point in asking it again; it was a yes/no question. “They do,” I said after a moment.

  “Why?”

  Mother has repeatedly admonished me on what she calls my “really?” face, but I could tell I was making that expression now because the answer to Dickinson’s question was so obvious. “Because they want the question to be answered, and I provide the service.”

  “What makes you so special?” he asked.

  “What does this have to do with Mr. Lewis’s murder?” My patience had been tested, and I confess it had been found wanting.

  “Just answer the question, please. After all, that’s what you do.” I did not understand the emphasis Dickinson placed on the word do, but was fairly certain it was not meant to be complimentary.

  “I am not special. I have a talent for observation and research. Most people have some talent. That happens to be mine.”

  “How many questions have you answered?” Dickinson asked. Once again I had to question the relevance of this line of questioning, but I could assume only that I would receive the same response if I noted that another time.

  “In the six months since I have opened in this location, I have answered eighty-two questions,” I told him.

  “You don’t have to look that up?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Dickinson was holding a pencil, although he did not have any paper and therefore was not using it, relying on the voice recorder for his notes. Ms. Washburn could tell him that such devices are untrustworthy and that batteries tend to lose power at inopportune moments, but it was his choice. Now, he pushed the eraser into his forehead, resting his head on the end of the pencil.

  “How many questions have you not answered?” he asked.

  I did not understand, and told him so.

  “How many times has someone asked you a question that you could not answer?” Dickinson said.

  “Never,” I reported.

  “Never?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You’re saying that no one has ever walked in here with a question you couldn’t answer,” he said. The redundancy of the conversation was becoming an irritant.

  “Yes,” I said. I believe I did not betray my feelings through tonality.

  “That’s impossible,” Dickinson said.

  “It is possible, and it is the truth.” I cannot guarantee my voice remained neutral that time.

  Suddenly Dickinson’s demeanor changed. His brows dropped, he leaned forward toward me, and his voice lowered considerably in volume.

  Then he reached over and turned off the voice recorder.

  “Do you think you could answer a question for me?” he whispered.

  “Is that the question?”

  “Shh!” Dickinson seemed panicked. “Quiet. No, that’s not the question. The question is: Who killed Oliver Lewis?”

  I considered that. “Are you asking me to consult with the Piscataway police department?” I asked.

  Dickinson glanced briefly at Esteban, who was talking to Ms. Washburn and did not notice his look. I could not read the expression on his face, making me wish Ms. Washburn had been there to see it and explain it later.

  “No. I’m asking just for myself. Can you answer the question?”

  “I am able to, yes. The issue here is whether I will agree to do so.”

  Dickinson looked stumped. “What do you mean, whether you’ll agree to?”

  “Just that. I answer only those questions that interest me.”

  His eyebrows rose dramatically. “This murder doesn’t interest you?”

  “I did not say that. I said I have not yet determined whether I will answer the question. Are you willing to pay me my standard fee?”

  To be honest, the question about my fee had two purposes, neither of which was entirely based in a desire for money. First, it was a way of determining how dedicated Dickinson was to the idea of hiring Questions Answered in lieu of doing the investigating on the crime himself. And just as importantly, asking about money gave me time to sift the situation in my mind.

  I had promised Ms. Washburn there would be no danger if she returned to Questions Answered. So far, there had been the suggestion of a man with a knife (although no such person was ever spotted), we had been arrested on suspicion of burglary, and we had discovered a dead body in our office.

  Now one of the detectives on the case was asking us to answer the central question for him, which seemed odd and ill advised. How could I keep the promise I’d made to Ms. Washburn and her husband under such circumstances?

  That was not to mention the idea that if there were danger, I would prefer to be uninvolved in the question myself.

  “How much do you charge?” Dickinson asked, which was exactly what I wanted, since it provided me with more time to consider.

  I told him the amount of my usual fee. I am told that some businessmen, when the
y are not interested in taking a job, will overstate their fees, hoping that either the potential client will decide against hiring the firm, or that the extra money will make the proposed work more palatable.

  Still, I found it difficult to inflate my fee in an effort to evade the question. If I didn’t want to answer for Detective Dickinson, the money would make no difference—I could simply refuse based on my own lack of interest.

  Dickinson nodded. “I can pay that,” he said.

  “Is it ethical to ask someone else to determine the culprit?” I asked. “Would you hire a private investigator to solve a crime for you?”

  Mother walked back inside the building but saw that Dickinson was still talking to me. She must have assumed I was still being interrogated, and chose to stay at the other side of the office.

  Dickinson’s eyes flashed a moment of anger, then softened. “This is a special circumstance,” he said, his voice even more subdued than before. I had to strain to hear him. “My close rate on cases has been … a little down lately. We don’t get a lot of murders in this town. I am interested in getting this case out of the way quickly, and making sure that I get the credit for it. Is that sufficient to interest you?”

  Truthfully, it was not enough, and based on that incentive alone, I would have felt perfectly justified in refusing to answer Dickinson’s question. In fact, I came very close to doing so at that moment.

  But then it occurred to me that I had already been involved in the question against my will. Whoever had killed Oliver Lewis had done so with me as a central element in mind. He, she, or they had decided to remove me from my place of business, make sure I was detained against my will, and then place the body at the exact center—I hadn’t measured, but I could tell—of my place of business.

  A gauntlet had been thrown down in front of me. And my psyche demanded I find out who had thrown it, and why. If it was possible to earn my usual fee while satisfying my own curiosity, that was sufficient.

  “I will answer your question, detective,” I said to Dickinson.

  eleven

  Detective Esteban, who was not soliciting Ms. Washburn to solve the crime on her behalf, took longer in interrogating her subject than Detective Dickinson had spent speaking to me. It was close to five p.m., then, when Mother, Ms. Washburn, and I were once again alone in the Questions Answered office.

  Oliver Lewis’s body had, naturally, been removed, but there was still yellow crime scene tape blocking off an area of the room. Not much belonging to the business—and by extension, to me—had been removed, since the perpetrators (I assumed it took more than one person to carry the cadaver into the room) had touched very little, and left a minimum of physical evidence aside from the victim himself.

  “Detective Dickinson asked you to find out who killed Mr. Lewis, and you agreed?” Mother sounded surprised, or disappointed.

  “I agreed because I realized I would have tried to answer the question simply for my own edification,” I responded. “Since I was going to do so anyway, I saw no harm in collecting a fee for my efforts.”

  Ms. Washburn, hand rubbing her chin, paced around the cordoned-off area. “We can’t let them get away with this,” she said. It was unclear whether she had been following the conversation; she seemed lost in her own thoughts.

  Mother looked stunned. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  Ms. Washburn turned toward her, perhaps startled. She took a moment and her eyes focused more clearly. “I said, we can’t let them get away with this. Sheila McInerney and whoever is working with her have spent the past two days making a fool of Samuel and all of today making a fool of me. That is not okay. We have to—”

  Her cellular phone rang, and she pulled it from her pocket and pushed a button. “I’ll be home soon, Simon,” she said. Then she listened for a moment. “Oh you saw that, huh? Yes, it was here, but—No. Simon, no. I wasn’t in any trouble, nobody came after me. I don’t care what you thought, it’s— Can we talk about this later? Please? I promise, I’ll be home in an hour. Chicken parm. Okay.” She disconnected the call.

  “I must apologize,” I said to Ms. Washburn. “I made a vow to keep you away from any danger, and now your husband believes that vow has been broken.”

  She waved a hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Don’t worry about Simon,” she said. “He acts like he’s more worried than he really is. I can handle it.”

  “Are you sure you want to?” Mother asked. “Your first day back, and there’s a dead body on the floor.”

  Ms. Washburn’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what’s making me sure I have to stay. They’re not getting away with this while I’m on the job.” She turned toward me before I had a chance to absorb her change of heart. “What’s our first step?”

  Knowing Ms. Washburn had promised her husband she would be home in an hour, and that her drive home to Cranford would take twenty-seven minutes in rush hour traffic, I condensed my answer. “Tomorrow, we will make a trip that I fear has already been rendered pointless, and once we confirm that, we will begin our search for the records that I believe will prove conclusively that Oliver Lewis and Sheila McInerney were indeed married, although much less recently than our client—that is, our previous client—had led us to believe.”

  Ms. Washburn did not say anything for a moment, looking at me. “Sounds like a date, then,” she said. She picked up her tote bag and left the office.

  Mother folded her arms. “You know she didn’t mean a real date, don’t you, Samuel?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  After checking via text message with Detective Dickinson, I spent a short while researching crime scene cleaning services on the Internet. Given there was only one in Middlesex County, I contracted with it to restore my office to its condition prior to the deposit of Oliver Lewis’s body on my floor. Then Mother and I went home and had dinner. I watched the New York Yankees play a baseball game against the Toronto Blue Jays (which the Blue Jays won, seven runs to two) and, feeling unfulfilled, went to my room to sleep.

  I found it difficult to fall asleep, however. I am not accustomed to being manipulated or outguessed, and I had been both those things on this day. While my ego was not especially bruised, as Ms. Washburn’s appeared to be, I was taken by surprise. I thought for two hours and sixteen minutes about the events of the past two days and how I had failed to anticipate the turn of events that had taken place and led to Oliver Lewis’s murder.

  Finally, I got out of bed and walked downstairs to the kitchen. I was not especially hungry or thirsty, but I could not think of another room to visit. I decided I would take one of the sleeping aids Dr. Mancuso had prescribed, which I usually avoid. I am not fond of medication and resisted it the entire time I was in school, but I knew that the next day would be unusually taxing, that I would need to be sharper of mind, and that sleep would help produce that condition.

  It was a mild surprise to find Mother already in the kitchen, preparing a cup of decaffeinated tea. “So you couldn’t sleep either,” she said when I walked in.

  “Is something troubling you?” I asked as I sat at the table. The medication could wait, I decided.

  “It’s not easy to get that image out of my head,” Mother answered, sitting down while she waited for the water to boil. “That poor man laid out on his stomach like that. Why would they arrange him that way? Why bring him to your office? It’ll give me nightmares, for sure.”

  I patted her hand. The last thing I would want to do would be to disturb my mother. “We will answer all those questions when we answer the larger one,” I said. “Who killed Oliver Lewis?”

  Mother looked mildly surprised. “Isn’t it obvious that his wife killed him?” she asked. “She went so out of her way to keep you from the office. She’s the only one we know of who had a grudge against him, and she seemed to be afraid of him.”

  The water started to bo
il, and before Mother could stand, I did so, turning off the burner and pouring the water carefully over the tea bag in her mug. “I think we must operate under the assumption that everything Sheila McInerney told me was a lie,” I said. “So we have no idea how she felt about Mr. Lewis, or if she truly had a reason to want him removed from her life permanently.” I brought the mug to the table and set it down in front of Mother, who thanked me. “We need to gather a great deal more information before I can begin to formulate a theory.”

  Mother drank some of the tea, although from her expression I could tell the water was hot. “This is good,” she said.

  “It isn’t. It’s too hot,” I told her. She smiled.

  “You’re too honest sometimes.”

  “It is not possible to be too honest. Although I have learned that it is possible to tell the truth too often.”

  “Why can’t you sleep?” Mother asked. “Questions don’t bother you this much. Not even that other time at the institute.” She was referring to the other questions Ms. Washburn and I had answered involving a murder.

  “I don’t like being predictable. It worries me that Ms. McInerney, having met me just once, could rely on the idea that I’d do just what she wanted when she called the next day. It is troubling that I involved you and Ms. Washburn in an unfortunate incident simply by doing what was expected of me.”

  Mother blew on the tea and licked her lips. She took another sip and nodded. “You don’t like being taken,” she said. “Nobody does. But don’t succumb to the danger.”

  “What danger is that?” I asked.

  “Don’t let it cloud your judgment. Don’t stop making decisions based only on facts. Don’t try to get even, Samuel.”

  The possibility had not occurred to me. “Have I ever done that before?” I asked.

  Mother’s mouth twisted into a half-smile. “You got kicked out of three nursery schools because you were exacting revenge on children who didn’t play the games by the rules.”

  I had been told this story before, although I have no recollection of it. “So you said. What did ‘exacting revenge’ consist of when I was three?”