Ms. LeBlanc moved just a bit toward him.
“You’re going to want to put that down,” Mike said. “I have had practice with this thing, and before that I was a marksman for the Army. So you don’t want to go up against me with a gun.”
“I can’t take a chance,” Ms. LeBlanc reiterated.
Before she could turn more into Mike’s line of fire, I stepped forward and positioned myself between the two, effectively blocking either person with a firearm from using it on the other without hitting me.
“Samuel,” Mike said. Clearly, he was the one who would be more reluctant to fire in my direction.
“I believe I can defuse the situation with no one being hurt,” I said, although an idea was only now forming in my mind. I turned toward the younger woman and asked, “Is there something I can do to help you?”
“I’m hiding here from my ex-husband,” she said. “I need to keep him away from me until my baby is born.”
“Amy!” Ms. LeBlanc shouted. “What are you doing?”
“She is telling me her problem,” I answered before the young woman, who looked a little confused by Ms. LeBlanc’s livid response, could do so. “If I know more, I might be able to help.”
“You’re not doing anything,” Ms. LeBlanc insisted. “You’re working for him, aren’t you?”
“I am working for Cynthia Maholm,” I said, which was technically true, in that Ms. Maholm had not terminated our contract. I felt it best not to mention Detective Dickinson on the very slim chance that he was the ex-husband Amy had mentioned. If I were working for him, it would be best now to have what is called “plausible deniability.” I added, “But I can certainly help the two of you in this situation if everyone is willing to discuss it calmly.”
“Samuel, I want you to duck down right now,” said Mike, who was still aiming his shotgun over my shoulder in Ms. LeBlanc’s direction. “I don’t want to hurt her, but I’m not going back to your mother and tell her I let you get shot.”
“Aww … ” Amy said. “He has a mother.”
She did not seem to be speaking ironically, but the fact is that everyone, at least when starting life, has a mother. The fact that mine was extant, which appeared to be her point, seemed irrelevant.
“I’m not going to duck down,” I told Mike. “Because Ms. LeBlanc is not going to shoot me. Are you, Ms. LeBlanc?”
Jennifer LeBlanc was looking at Amy, not at me. She turned at the mention of her name and her face seemed almost surprised by the interruption of her thought. “No,” she said, with a tinge to her voice that I believe might have actually been sadness, as if she had been looking forward to shooting me and was now unable to do so. She lowered the gun. “Go ahead. Do what you’re gonna do.”
I nodded to Mike. “Thank you for the help. Now the ladies and I are going to sit and talk for a bit. Would you prefer to stay or go back to the cab?”
Mike lowered his shotgun but held onto it. “I think I’ll stay and hear what everybody has to say,” he said. “I’m off the meter.”
We went to the kitchen, where Ms. LeBlanc said she and Amy had been before I had arrived. There were indeed two glasses of what appeared to be red wine poured and sitting on the table in the medium-sized room that featured a small table to one side opposite the fairly new appliances. It was not a state-of-the-art facility, but it was definitely serviceable.
“Do you want some wine?” Amy asked. “Mine’s just grape juice because I’m pregnant, but you can have the real thing.”
Jennifer LeBlanc looked at her companion with an expression that appeared to merge affection with exasperation. “They’re here to kill us, Amy,” she said in a hoarse voice. “You don’t have to give them a drink first.”
“We are not here to kill anyone,” I said, trying to make my tone sound authoritative, a pursuit in which I believe I was not successful. “We are here to try to make sense of the situation, and then Mike and I are going to leave and you two ladies will go on with your evening. There was never any violent intent on our part until you produced a gun.”
“I told you,” Amy scolded Ms. LeBlanc.
Her hostess sat down heavily in her chair and took a drink from her glass, which must not have been filled with grape juice. “What do you want?” she asked wearily.
Mike leaned against the counter to the left of the stove, his hand on the shotgun, which he rested on the countertop. He did not grip it, but maintained contact in the event he might need the weapon. He is a very good listener in addition to being an extroverted taxicab driver, so I could rely on him to remember any nuance I might miss.
“As I said, I am here to try to ascertain the whereabouts of Cynthia Maholm,” I said. “But I meant it when I said that I would help with any situation you and Amy might be involved with if I can. Do you know where Cynthia is?”
Both women shook their heads. “I haven’t heard from Cindy in at least two months,” Ms. LeBlanc said. “We’re not really close or anything. We just keep tabs on each other when there’s a major change in our lives. When I met Amy, that was a big change. So after a few weeks I got in touch with Cindy. But like I said, that was a couple of months ago.”
Amy, who seemed content to be a spectator, merely nodded in agreement.
“Have you known Cynthia for a long time?” I asked. Perhaps Ms. LeBlanc would have contact information for other old friends who might be more in touch with my erstwhile client than she.
“No, less than a year,” she answered. “I didn’t meet Cindy until she was already getting married. But I was too late to change her mind.”
That must have piqued Mike’s interest, because he stood a little straighter and asked, “You tried to talk her out of getting married?”
Both women laughed, seemingly in surprise. “Of course!” Ms. LeBlanc said. “You see someone, even if you don’t know them, driving at top speed in the wrong direction on a one-way street, you try to warn them, don’t you?”
I believed there was some point I was missing, so I looked at Mike. He shrugged. It was not my Asperger’s Syndrome that was making this situation a confusing one. “I don’t understand. Please start at the beginning. You say the two of you met only two months ago?” Amy and Ms. LeBlanc seemed like an established couple in my eyes.
“Maybe a little longer,” Amy said. Mike looked at her quickly; I think he had forgotten she was in the room. “I had just found out about the baby, and that’s when I came to find Jenny. She’s been great to me, protecting me, keeping me here in her house.”
“You are living here?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. For about four or five weeks now. Jenny said it would be safe.”
Ms. LeBlanc’s face became stern again. “It was, until you two showed up.”
“We bring you no danger, I assure you.”
“Even if you didn’t mean to, you will,” Ms. LeBlanc responded. “Someone’s probably following you.”
The deliberate vagueness had begun to irritate me. “What is this danger? Who would be coming after you, and why?”
Ms. LeBlanc looked at Amy, who nodded. “Ollie Lewis,” she said. “He’s definitely looking for Amy, and if you’ve been in touch with him, he probably has someone watching you. So once you showed up on my doorstep, he’ll follow up. You say you weren’t looking for Amy, but you’ve found her, and that’s what he wants.”
“I can assure you that Oliver Lewis is definitely not following me,” I said. “He is dead.”
It was a moment in which I made sure to watch Jennifer LeBlanc’s reaction to my statement. If she were pretending to be unaware of Oliver Lewis’s death, it would be difficult for her to hide that knowledge now. Still, I was no expert, and some people are better at pretending than others, which is why some people are actors.
It was a problem that I could not watch both Ms. LeBlanc and Amy at the same time, because while Ms. LeBlanc’s rea
ction was probably the more relevant, Amy’s would most likely be more genuine. Amy seemed to have very little natural ability to deceive.
But I had to admit, Ms. LeBlanc’s reaction was quite telling on its own. It was not what I would have expected under any circumstances.
She laughed.
“You’re kidding,” she said after a moment during which she seemed to collect herself.
“I assure you, I am not. I was one of the people who discovered his body. He is unquestionably deceased.”
Ms. LeBlanc looked toward Amy, so my eyes naturally drifted toward the younger woman as well. Amy was not laughing; she looked stricken. Her face was pale, her eyes were wide and her mouth was open, but not emitting sound.
“Oh honey,” Jennifer LeBlanc said. “You can’t be that upset about this guy. He’s not worth your tears.” She stood up and walked to Amy, putting her arms around the other woman and patting her shoulders, which shook a little, although Amy did not appear to be weeping. “If it’s true, this makes our lives a whole lot easier.”
I took a moment to look in Mike’s direction. He seemed not to have moved; he was watching the scene with a face that betrayed no emotion at all to me. It was like looking into the eye of a camera. I began to wish I owned a cellular phone, so I could have called Ms. Washburn and asked her to assess the situation. Mike would have an opinion, I knew, when he drove me home, but it might lack the insight my associate brings to such matters.
“I just … I was afraid of Ollie,” Amy said to Ms. LeBlanc. “I didn’t hate him. I didn’t wish that he would die. What happened?” I could not see her face, as Ms. LeBlanc’s embrace had obscured it from my view, but I assumed the question was directed at me.
“Someone murdered him,” I said, and suddenly I was able to see Amy again, because Jennifer LeBlanc had stood up stiffly, straight and surprised.
She turned and looked at me. “You’re kidding,” she repeated, but this time she did not laugh.
I did not understand why she would believe that I had such a macabre sense of humor, but this was the second time she had insisted my report of Oliver Lewis’s death was a joke. “I am assuredly not,” I told her.
“Expression,” Mike mumbled from his corner of the kitchen. I had actually understood that point, but the expression itself made little sense. Telling someone he or she is kidding is ridiculous; of course the person would know if what was being said was meant to amuse.
“Who did it?” Ms. LeBlanc asked.
“I do not know,” I said. “But I have been contracted to answer that question.”
“Cindy Maholm hired you to find out who killed Ollie?” Ms. LeBlanc said. “That doesn’t sound like Cindy.”
“It was not,” I explained. “Another party asked me to look into that question.”
To her credit, Ms. LeBlanc did not ask the identity of my second client. “That’s not what you said when you came in,” she said. “You said Cindy had asked you to answer a question.”
“She did,” I assured her. “But it was not that question. I have not seen Ms. Maholm since before Mr. Lewis died.”
“Oh my god,” Amy said, seemingly to Ms. LeBlanc. “Do you think Cindy killed him?”
I did not respond, since that question was not aimed at me. But it did open some interesting possibilities, and established a connection I had not previously known to exist. “Do you also know Cynthia Maholm?” I asked Amy.
“Oh, yeah,” came the answer. “She’s also a wool.”
I looked at Mike to see if this was an expression I should have been familiar with, but he shrugged and shook his head. “A wool?” I repeated.
Jennifer LeBlanc looked somewhat sharply in Amy’s direction, but the younger woman did not notice or chose not to take the expression into account. “A WOOL,” she said, as if it were obvious and she could not understand why I seemed confused. “A Wife Of Oliver Lewis. Like Jenny and me.”
nineteen
It took quite some time—fifty-seven minutes—to sort out the story. Apparently Hazel Montrose had not been accurate nor honest in her accounting of Oliver Lewis’s wives. Besides herself and Cynthia Maholm, there had been three more women who had married, and divorced, the dead man.
“We all got to know each other,” Amy Stanhope said after a series of rebukes from Jennifer LeBlanc that she was divulging privileged information. Ms. Stanhope had countered with the idea that since Mr. Lewis was dead, there was no harm in revealing the small subclass of women belonging to the exclusive club they had named WOOL. “Jenny started it. She tried to reach out to Rachel—that’s Rachel Vandross, Ollie’s second wife—to try to warn her about him. But Rachel had already married Ollie, and then there was Hazel, and then there was me, and then there was Cindy … well, you know how that went. We all got together. But you had to be divorced from Ollie to join WOOL, and Cindy was still married to him, so she couldn’t come and hang with us.” She stopped and considered. “I guess now she can. Does a widow count, Jenny?”
Jennifer LeBlanc, with an air of resignation, waved her hands in a gesture of futility. “What the hell. Maybe Cindy offed the bastard and did us all a favor. Sure, she can come and have a glass of wine.”
Mike had spent the past three minutes intermittently blinking in what must have been astonishment. He looked at me, then at Ms. LeBlanc, then at Ms. Stanhope, and then at me again. “There were five of you? You all married the same guy and you all divorced him?”
“Not Cindy,” Ms. Stanhope reminded him.
Ms. LeBlanc ignored Mike’s confusion and went on. “That’s the kind of guy Ollie is—was,” she said. “You actually needed a support group after he was done with you. He’d make you feel like the center of the universe, and then he’d leave you by the side of the road without so much as a toothbrush.”
The information was coming at me quickly. “Why would he not allow you a toothbrush?” I asked.
“I didn’t mean it literally.” But I continued to muse over the concept of a figurative toothbrush for a few moments.
When I could focus again, Ms. Stanhope was saying, “It wasn’t a regular thing. Like, there weren’t WOOL meetings or anything. We just kept in touch and we’d get together for a drink or coffee or something. Not all of us at the same time ever, I don’t think. Whoever happened to be around and need some cheering up or whatever, you know?”
“When was the last time you saw Oliver Lewis?” I asked.
It was significant that the two women looked at each other before answering. I wondered if it were necessary for them to coordinate the response, to set their story. But I did not suggest that as it would undoubtedly lead to a confrontation about the possibility of a false answer, and that would not be a productive strategy.
“At least a year ago,” Ms. LeBlanc said. “Probably longer. After he’s done with you, he’s done with you.”
“Yeah, at least that,” Ms. Stanhope concurred.
We all stared a bit in her direction. “You are pregnant by Mr. Lewis?” I asked.
Ms. Stanhope’s eyes wandered up and to the right; she was thinking. “Oh, yeah. So I saw him maybe four months ago. But that was the last time.”
At that point I had a decision to make. Calling out Ms. Stanhope on the obvious lie could lead to her confessing the truth, but if Ms. Washburn were here, she would probably say it might alienate Ms. LeBlanc and that would be the price to pay. However, letting the statement go without any expression of skepticism might convince the two women that I was gullible and therefore easily manipulated.
It was hard to make the choice without Ms. Washburn’s advice.
“What were the circumstances under which you saw your ex-husband four months ago?” I asked Ms. Stanhope. The question did not betray any disbelief in her statement, and I took pains to say it with the least inflection I could offer. I don’t always know when my tone communicates some unintended e
motion.
Again, Ms. Stanhope looked to Ms. LeBlanc, presumably for some signal that would convey a possible response, but her compatriot was looking at me, and probably could not have communicated the thought anyway.
“Um … we had sex,” Ms. Stanhope said.
Mike stifled a laugh behind me.
“Did you meet often for that purpose?” I asked.
Her face seemed tense. “No. Just that once,” she said.
“So your ex-husband, who you knew had frequently married and left women when he tired of them, left you, but at some point you and he reunited one time to have intercourse?” I confess I would have preferred another word at the end of the question, but could think of none at the time. Given a few more minutes, I might have said, “an intimate encounter.”
“I think that’s enough,” M. LeBlanc said as Ms. Stanhope’s eyes pleaded with her for relief. “We’ve told you everything you’re going to find out here. It’s everything we know. We had no idea Ollie was dead, so we can’t help you with that. And we don’t know where Cindy is, so we can’t help you with that. I’m not going to shoot you and your pal here isn’t going to shoot us. So what do you say we call it a night?”
“Yes,” Ms. Stanhope concurred. “Go back home and see your mom.”
At the mention of Mother, my instinct had me look at Mike, who knew what I was thinking. “It’s close to nine,” he said.
“I must be going,” I told the women. “I am late for dinner.”
“No kidding,” Ms. LeBlanc agreed.
Mother was not upset when I walked through the back door into our kitchen. “I knew you were with Mike,” she said. “I was sure nothing bad would happen.”
Mike had, as was his custom, dropped me off in the driveway and then driven home himself. He thanked me for “an interesting evening,” and was grinning and shaking his head as he backed out of the driveway. I did not have the time to ask him why he was doing that.
The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband Page 14