The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  “Was it a … difficult job?” Ms. Washburn asked. She seemed to be struggling to avoid looking at the spot where Oliver Lewis had lain.

  “Actually, no,” Hazel Montrose responded. “I’ve seen a lot worse, believe me.”

  It occurred to me that talking to someone with Hazel’s experience might provide some direction in answering the question at hand. “Do you have to leave immediately?” I asked. “I have a few questions, if that is all right.”

  I could not read Hazel’s expression through the respirator mask, the clear shield covering her eyes, and the blue repellent hood over her head, so when it took her a moment to answer, I wondered if I had said something that could have been misconstrued. It would not be unusual for me to do so, although it is rarely my intention.

  “Do you see an area we might have missed?” Hazel asked.

  Ms. Washburn, as she often does, reacted to the situation more quickly than I did. “No, Samuel isn’t saying that. Our business is to answer questions, and since the question we’re currently researching involves the … job you just did, he believes you might be helpful if you can spare the time.” I could not have articulated nearly as well.

  Again there was a pause as Hazel considered the proposal. “Do you need both of us?” she asked.

  This time Ms. Washburn deferred to me. “It is better to hear more than one perspective when possible, but if one of you is inconvenienced by the suggestion, the other will certainly suffice,” I told Hazel.

  “Jonah has a one-man job next, and he was going to drop me off,” she replied. “Can you give me a lift when we’re done?”

  I looked to Ms. Washburn, who supplies the transportation for Questions Answered. “Of course we can,” she said.

  “Let me go change and I’ll be right back,” Hazel suggested, and she did not wait for a reply before walking out to the company van. She climbed into the back of the vehicle, out of my line of sight.

  Ms. Washburn sat in her traditional spot, in the chair near Mother’s recliner and next to my desk. It occurred to me that since she would now be working here on a more permanent basis, it would make sense to procure a second desk for her. One advantage would be that she could answer the company telephone, something that has always been a source of some anxiety for me.

  “They did a nice job,” she said, surveying the room. “I’d never know anything had happened here, and besides, a lot of the dust is gone.”

  “I examined the area before they arrived this morning,” I said, “so any information I could have seen on first glance was not removed before I could make note of it.”

  I sat behind my desk and turned on the Mac Pro, which was notably free of dust for the first time in recent memory. Still, the idea that someone other than me had been handling the items on my desk was somewhat disturbing; I did my best to focus on the task at hand.

  By the time I had run a simple Google search on the name Terry Lambroux, Hazel Montrose had walked back into the Questions Answered office. She was no longer wearing the protective clothing or mask, and was now in a pair of casual trousers and a blue polo shirt which bore the logo for Extra Safe Cleaning.

  Her face was now much more visible, and it was clear-eyed and open, to the extent that I could interpret it. I could not speak for most other people, but when conforming to the standards set by society, Hazel was an attractive woman in her early thirties, about my age. That was, however, clearly outside the scope of the question I needed to answer, and so therefore irrelevant.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Hoenig?” she asked as she settled, with the prompting of Ms. Washburn’s gesture, into the client chair in front of my desk.

  “First, allow me to compliment you on the quality of your work,” I said. “The office is completely free of any reminder that something unusual occurred here.” I glanced at Ms. Washburn in an attempt to elicit her reaction because she had been concerned about, as she had put it, “unpleasant images” our office might now harbor. But she was looking at Hazel, and not at me.

  “Thank you,” Hazel said. “It’s difficult work, but very satisfying when it’s done. Jonah does the really hard stuff.” She did not elaborate.

  “Did you notice anything unusual about this scene?” I was attempting to ask without prejudicing the answer. There were specifics I could have asked about—like blood spatter and bone fragments—but there was no point in asking for information I had observed on my own, and leaving the question more open-ended allowed Hazel to provide anything she had seen. Too often one asks about a specific detail and misses out on more useful data because the topic was never raised.

  “Well, it was a pretty easy cleanup, and that seemed odd,” she answered after a moment. I noticed Ms. Washburn’s notepad and pen were out of her bag and in her hands. I had not needed to prompt her.

  “Why is that odd?” Ms. Washburn asked. “What should have made it harder?”

  “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not sorry there wasn’t more to do. What I meant was, you expect there to be more work in a room that clearly had a dead body, and not one who died of natural causes.”

  “You could tell that from the outline on the floor,” I suggested.

  “Yes, and from the bloodstain. But that’s what I meant. Someone dies of an injury, one that seemed to have been from the area of his throat, and you don’t see much blood. That’s strange.” Hazel did not flinch at the mention of blood; this was her line of work. Just another day at the office, Mother would say.

  “We assume then that the victim was killed somewhere else and brought here to be discovered,” I said.

  “Probably right. And we found no blood trail coming into the room. That might mean that the body was somehow contained, in a bag or something, before being dumped in the middle of the floor,” Hazel suggested.

  I had considered that, but I complimented Hazel on her observational skills anyway. “Was there anything out of the ordinary anywhere else in the room?” I asked. “I assume you had to consider the entire space.”

  Hazel nodded. “Yes, including the bathrooms and the—I guess it used to be a kitchen, where they made pizza. There are two ovens.”

  “Was there anything related to the crime in either of those areas?”

  “No. But there were also no scratches in the floor or the door. There was no broken glass anywhere. There was no smell of burned wiring. Aside from the area where the dead guy was lying, this was a perfectly innocent office.” Hazel’s gaze was almost competitive; it was as if she and I were trying to see how much the other had been able to observe and what each of us could deduce from the observations.

  “So there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever deposited Oliver Lewis’s corpse at Questions Answered had a key or the combination to—” I stopped when I saw the look on Hazel Montrose’s face.

  Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open and breathing with a shallow sound, as if she’d just come out of the water after an easy swim but was regulating her breath to normalize it. She swallowed, hard. “Did you say Oliver Lewis?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Ms. Washburn said without looking up from her notes. She had not seen Hazel’s reaction and was sitting too far from her to hear the slight change in her breathing. “Oliver Lewis was the name of the man who was killed yesterday.”

  There was only one explanation that fit the facts, but it was extremely unlikely. “Did you know him?” I asked Hazel, and Ms. Washburn looked up and reacted, startled, to Hazel’s shocked look.

  “No. I mean, it’s such a common name,” Hazel said. “I’m sure it’s someone else.”

  “Describe the Oliver Lewis you know,” I suggested.

  “It’s silly.”

  “Please. It would be a great help.” In truth, the probability was that her information would not contribute to answering the question at all, but even with my difficulties reading faces, there was no mistaking Hazel’s express
ion—she thought the Oliver Lewis she knew was the one who had ended up on my office floor. And while she was shocked, she was not surprised.

  Hazel looked at me, then at Ms. Washburn, who appeared concerned but whose pen was poised over her notepad, then back at me. She waited a moment that seemed long but lasted only four seconds.

  “All right,” she said. “He’s big, about six-two, but he’s solid, you know? Not like six pack abs or anything, but not heavy. Big eyes, brown. Tends to dress up a little. Wears his hair slicked back straight, thinks it makes him look like a Wall Street sharpie or something.”

  “And what did you observe about the body in this room when you were cleaning up?” I asked.

  “Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said. Her voice seemed to have some rapprochement in it, but I could not understand why it would.

  “Well, the body was gone when we were working,” Hazel pointed out.

  “But you could determine the man’s height and approximate proportions,” I suggested.

  “Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said more forcefully.

  Hazel sat back in the chair and gasped. “It was him, wasn’t it? It was Ollie who got killed.” She did not cry, but I believe she might have wanted to do so.

  “I’m afraid so,” Ms. Washburn said before I could speak. “I’m so sorry. How did you know him?”

  Hazel looked stunned, and stared straight ahead. “Until a little more than two years ago, he was my husband,” she said.

  fourteen

  I tried to gather my thoughts quickly, but realized it was best to forego speed and concentrate on logic and accuracy. The idea that Hazel Montrose had been Oliver Lewis’s wife before he married Sheila McInerney (Cynthia Maholm) was disruptive to every train of thought I’d had on the question at hand, and on the one Cynthia herself had posed only two days earlier.

  “You were married to Oliver Lewis?” Ms. Washburn said, her voice suddenly hoarse.

  Hazel, eyes moist, nodded. “What happened?” she asked.

  “His carotid artery had been severed,” I told her. “We are attempting to answer the question of who did that. Part of the answer will be to understand why it was done.”

  Ms. Washburn gave me what I have known to be a stern look. I suddenly understood that I had seemed insensitive to Hazel’s pain, assuming she was upset by the death of her ex-husband.

  “My apologies,” I said. “I am sorry for your loss.”

  Hazel held up both hands, palms out, and shook them. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s just that it came so out of left field.”

  I am something of a baseball aficionado, and understand that “out of left field” is an expression that indicates a concept is unexpected or hard to understand. But why such a thing comes from left field and not center field or right field baffles me. I chose not to express that feeling to either Hazel or Ms. Washburn at the moment. The fact that the message had been received and understood was enough.

  “Of course,” I responded. “You had merely done your job cleaning up. You were unaware that you were removing traces of your ex-husband.”

  Ms. Washburn’s eyes rolled a bit, but she remained silent. I would have to ask her later why what I’d said was inappropriate when it was accurate and, I thought, empathetic.

  Hazel dabbed at her eye and sniffed briefly, then seemed to rally her thoughts. She sat up straighter in the chair, looked me in the eye and asked, “How can I help?”

  “Tell me how you met Oliver Lewis and married him,” I suggested.

  “I met him through a friend we both knew,” she said. “About three years ago, in the spring. We started dating and got married only two months later. We were married for a year but lived apart after only about six months. It took a while for the divorce to be finalized.”

  “What is the friend’s name?”

  “Roger Siplowitz. I went to college with him, and Ollie … I honestly don’t know how Ollie knew Roger.”

  Ms. Washburn, pad back in hand, leaned toward Hazel. “Do you have current contact information for Roger?” she asked. Ms. Washburn is very efficient, and knew I would be asking that very question next.

  “No, I lost touch with him after the divorce,” Hazel answered. “You know how the wife gets some of the friends and the husband gets the others? Ollie got Roger.”

  The thought continued to nag at me. Life does contain coincidences, but the idea that Oliver Lewis’s first wife had simply chanced to be the crime scene cleaner I had contracted to remove the traces of his murder was too unlikely to ignore. There had to be a connection somewhere.

  “When is the last time you saw Oliver Lewis?” I asked Hazel.

  “When we signed the divorce papers in his lawyer’s office, about two and a half years ago. We had no reason to get in touch after that. We didn’t have any kids. We didn’t even have a dog.”

  I closed my eyes, which sometimes helps divert me from the visual stimulus in front of me—in this case, Hazel—and focus on the deeper problem at hand. Oliver Lewis had been married twice. His first wife had divorced him, and the second one (assuming Dickinson’s information was correct and Cynthia Maholm really had been married to Lewis) had hired me ostensibly to discover who her husband was and whether the marriage he claimed to have with her was legal.

  Opening my eyes, I asked Hazel, “Were you aware your ex-husband had remarried?”

  For a moment it looked like Hazel was trying to translate the strange language I was speaking to her into something more recognizable. “No,” she said simply. “Who was he married to?”

  Ms. Washburn caught my eye with a glance, drew in her lips and spread her hands a bit, a gesture I have learned indicates one should speak carefully. “His current wife”—I eschewed the term widow—“is a woman named Cynthia Maholm, who sometimes goes by the name Sheila McInerney. Do you know her?”

  Hazel’s brow furrowed, but she shook her head to indicate a negative response.

  “Was … ” Ms. Washburn seemed to hesitate, as if wondering whether she would cause Hazel some sadness by continuing, but the question was begun. “Was Oliver ever married before you met?” she asked.

  The thought had not occurred to me that there might be more ex-wives in Oliver Lewis’s past. Should any of them be women I had met before, I would have to seriously reconsider my notion about the plausibility of coincidence in daily life.

  “No,” Hazel answered. “I was Ollie’s first wife.” That simplified matters and I was grateful for it. More ex-wives would have increased the number of uncomfortable interviews I would have to conduct in answering the question.

  “What was it about him that made you want to marry him?” I asked. I cannot say for certain that the question was directly related to my work; the subject has always puzzled me. I do not understand how a person can feel so strongly about another, be so certain, that he or she would commit every remaining moment of life to the other. It is irrational and improbable, which is likely why so many marriages end in divorce. Or in this case, murder.

  Hazel smiled, but I was sure Mother would say it was a sad smile. Her lips did not curl upward symmetrically and her eyes looked down a little.

  “The cliché is supposed to be that he made me laugh, right?” she said, but neither Ms. Washburn nor myself answered her. “Well, Ollie didn’t make me laugh. He was never a very happy guy.”

  Ms. Washburn, perhaps against her better judgment, asked, “Then what was it?”

  Hazel’s attention seemed to focus. But she looked at me, not at Ms. Washburn, when she said, “I think he made me feel like I was the center of his world. Until I wasn’t anymore.”

  “There were other women?” I said. I did not look to Ms. Washburn for a reaction.

  Hazel tilted her head to one side and nodded slightly, flattening her mouth. “Probably,” she said. “All I know is that after we were married and he’d gotten what he w
anted, I wasn’t a priority anymore. I think for Ollie, the pursuit was more important than the possession, if you know what I mean.”

  I did not, but I trusted that Ms. Washburn did.

  Hazel had little to say after that, and Ms. Washburn offered to drive her home. Hazel accepted the ride. I opted to stay in the office for several reasons: I was behind on my exercise, which was a concern; Mother would be arriving to drive me home for lunch in forty-seven minutes (or forty-eight—Mother is not always precise); and I presumed that if Hazel had more information to add to our ongoing work, she might be more likely to tell it to another woman without a man present. I am not certain about the motivation, but people of both genders tend to be less circumspect when among members of their own sex.

  They left after Hazel bid me farewell, and Ms. Washburn said she would return within the hour. I mentioned that Mother would probably pick me up for lunch shortly and Ms. Washburn said she would meet me at the house I share with my mother. I nodded. It occurred to me after she left that Mother would have wanted me to invite Ms. Washburn to lunch with us. I felt it would be unwise to call her cellular phone while she was driving, however, so I left it unsaid.

  The time alone gave me an opportunity to research a few of the multitude of loose ends hanging from this question. (I try to use metaphors occasionally in an effort to incorporate them into my natural speech pattern.) I began where I had been interrupted when Hazel had returned from the van, investigating the name Terry Lambroux.

  Google is not the best way to search for something, but it is the simplest, and to begin an inquiry, simplicity can be a gateway to more substantial information. So I started with a straight search of the name as an attempt to find a direction.

  There were no entries.

  It is extremely unusual for a name to have generated absolutely no hits in a search on the most wide-ranging search engine in the world. I should have expected to find at least some erroneous links, to dishes made with lamb or other people named Terry. To get no results was in some ways unsettling; it had never happened to me before.