The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  I needed to clarify her statement. “But you are not suggesting that Mr. Lewis told you he was someone he was not, or married you while he was still in a marriage with Hazel Montrose, are you?” I asked.

  Her eyes took on a confused look. “Who’s Hazel Montrose?” she asked.

  Ms. Washburn looked up, startled, then wrote on her notepad. She and I exchanged a look and she showed me what she’d written. It read ANOTHER ONE?

  “Are you not a member of the informal group known as WOOL?” I asked Rachel. “Jennifer LeBlanc identified you as a member.”

  “Sure, I know Jenny and Amy and Cindy and Slim,” she said. “Who’s Hazel Montrose?”

  “Who’s Slim?” Ms. Washburn said.

  Rachel’s expression indicated that we must both be mad. “Slim McInerney,” she said, as if it were evident and we should have known all the time. Then she shook her head and laughed lightly. “That’s her nickname. Her real name is Sheila.”

  That made no sense. Sheila McInerney was the alias Cynthia Maholm had used when she came to Questions Answered and hired me to provide some validation of her marriage to Oliver Lewis. But Rachel had mentioned Cynthia when she listed the WOOL members and had added Sheila McInerney as if they were two separate people.

  “So who’s Hazel Montrose?” she asked again.

  Ms. Washburn and I explained our belief, based on what we had been told, that Hazel Montrose had been Oliver Lewis’s first wife, that she was second, and had been followed by Jennifer LeBlanc, Amy Stanhope, and finally Cynthia Maholm, posing as Sheila McInerney.

  Rachel shook her head. “No. You got it right that I was second, and you got Jenny and Amy right, but Cindy was last under her own name. His first wife was Slim, or Sheila. I know she was first because Ollie always used to tell me how I wasn’t as good a wife as she was, and I kept asking him how come he divorced her if she was so great. It was one of the things that split us up.”

  I found myself concentrating so hard on the question at hand that I was not paying attention to my physical being, which meant my hands were moving rapidly, albeit lightly, at my sides. The “stimming” was once quite pronounced, but now even when it was completely involuntary, it was not as noticeable. Rachel did not react, but Ms. Washburn touched her cheek casually, a visual reminder. I nodded and stopped the movement, letting my hands fall into my lap.

  “Have you met Sheila McInerney?” I asked. “Through WOOL or privately in some way?”

  “Sure. I saw Slim for a drink once or twice, and after I divorced him too, we got to be friends, sort of. Veterans of the same war from different platoons, you know?”

  The military metaphor was not a complex one, so I nodded. “Can you describe Sheila McInerney to me?” I asked.

  “Well, her nickname is Slim, and it’s not ironic,” Rachel answered. “She’s about five-eight and really slender—not skinny, but just angular, almost. It’s the first thing you notice about her. She has dark hair and blue eyes, which might be colored contacts, I don’t know. And she has very long legs, which makes her popular with guys. Probably the thing that got Ollie after her to begin this whole merry-go-round.” She laughed without mirth.

  I did not feel like laughing because I felt like Sheila McInerney had taken me in with a false story once again. What Rachel told me increased my sense of frustration and made me question the validity of my qualifications to answer questions on a professional basis.

  The woman she had described was undoubtedly the one Ms. Washburn and I knew as Hazel Montrose.

  Twenty-four

  “You have Hazel’s number,” Ms. Washburn said. “Call her and ask her out. When she shows up, you can either confront her with what you know or try to lead her into a discussion about Oliver Lewis. She’ll slip up somewhere.”

  We were once again in the Questions Answered office. Ms. Washburn would be leaving in a few minutes; I had told her I’d call Mike for a ride home as I had on the previous evening. She needed to get back to her husband for tonight, I felt, because there had been a tension surrounding her that one’s spouse should be able to alleviate. If I noticed it, it must have been fairly obvious.

  “I do not intend to ask Hazel Montrose or Sheila McInerney out socially,” I said, not for the first time. This discussion had been going on since the drive back to Piscataway. We’d called—that is, Ms. Washburn had called and I had spoken on speakerphone—Detective Dickinson and informed him of what I could not reasonably call “our progress.” He informed us that there was no record of Sheila McInerney using the name Hazel Montrose, only that Cynthia Maholm had been using the name Sheila McInerney since she had married Oliver Lewis. The swirl of names in the research of this question was becoming quite thick and difficult to understand.

  “I don’t know what I’m getting for my money so far,” Dickinson had noted, although it was true that he had not yet paid Questions Answered any money at all. “All you keep doing is calling me for information that I’ve gotten myself.”

  It is not good business practice, Mother has explained to me, to argue with a client, particularly about the value of the service being offered. But since I felt the information offered would be more reliable if it had come from one of two sources, it did seem reasonable to me to say, “Have you gathered the information, or has Detective Esteban?”

  Ms. Washburn winced a little, which told me my question might not have been communicated in the manner I had intended. And when Dickinson’s voice came back over the speakerphone, it was deeper, with a bit of a gravelly tone to it. “It’s official police information I shouldn’t be sharing with you, Hoenig. Keep that in mind.”

  Now I had a problem: Dickinson’s tone convinced me I’d said something wrong, but he had failed to adequately answer my question. Pressing the issue would probably be seen as rude, but I had to know if Detective Esteban was the source of the data, in which case it would be considered trustworthy, or if it had been Detective Dickinson, which would at least make me wonder about its accuracy and depth.

  I looked at Ms. Washburn, who was driving and not available to make eye contact. I could have muted the call, but that would have required touching the phone, and since it was a model with which I was not terribly familiar, I was not sure which button was the correct one for the function. Ms. Washburn stole a very quick glance in my direction, and I believe she shook her head horizontally to indicate I should not press further.

  “I appreciate that, detective,” I said. Ms. Washburn nodded slightly in approval. “But I need to know who I should thank for the privilege.” That seemed the flattering way to approach the question, and I have learned over time that people respond well to being told they are owed appreciation for something, even if they had little to do with it.

  “Just thank me and I’ll pass it along,” Dickinson said, and that gave me the answer I needed. The data about Hazel Montrose was from Detective Esteban, and therefore could be assumed more reliable. That was good, because it was useful information, but troubling, since it indicated Hazel had been lying to us. And her appearance at Questions Answered seemed even less coincidental, and more worrisome.

  “I’m not saying you have to marry her,” Ms. Washburn continued now, back in the Questions Answered office. “But you can ask her out. She seemed interested in you; you were certainly interested in her. Even if you don’t find something out, you might have a pleasant evening. Is there something wrong with that?”

  I could think of numerous things wrong with it, but there was the possibility that a person in a social setting might be more relaxed, and therefore more apt to provide useful information because she would be less guarded about her words. But it seemed somehow dishonest to use a social invitation as an excuse to interrogate a subject about a question. It was a difficult dilemma.

  With such things, I usually rely on Ms. Washburn’s judgment, or Mother’s. Since Ms. Washburn was the person pressing the idea, I deci
ded to ask Mother about it when I returned home. “I will consider it,” I told Ms. Washburn before she left the office. She gave me an odd look when I said that, which I interpreted as a combination of skepticism and disappointment. I did not understand the expression, and knew I would not be able to adequately describe it to Mother at dinner. It was a lost opportunity.

  Once Ms. Washburn left, I sat down to finally focus on the elusive Terry Lambroux. The many variations on the name had proven to be a dead end, but I felt that with the proper amount of concentration, I could find a thread to pull on, to use a common investigative expression, that would eventually unravel the mystery surrounding the person, if indeed Terry Lambroux existed.

  The last time I had searched, it had occurred to me to think of the type of person who would invent the name Terry Lambroux as an alias. As there were no records of arrests associated with the name, it was not one that had been assumed strictly for criminal purposes, or the criminal assuming it was crafty enough never to have been arrested.

  It was not a typical, unobtrusive name. It would be easy to hide with an alias like Robert Mason or Susan Wells. The person using the name Terry Lambroux was adopting something with a more distinctive tone, one which through use of the “oux” suffix might be related to the Cajun or Creole regions in Louisiana. That might be a place to start.

  On the other hand, the name “Lambrou” seemed, after a fairly thorough search, to be one originating largely in the United Kingdom or Australia. If Terry were interested in covering her British roots, she might have altered the spelling on her last name to something more closely associated with the American South.

  Then I thought the name might be an anagram. I do not have a special talent for anagrams, so I consulted a very helpful source meant to be used for something considerably more devious: An Internet site devoted to helping people cheat at Scrabble and related games. I will not repeat the name, but it proved to be an invaluable resource in my efforts.

  Even with its help, however, the best I could do was “MORTUARY LERX.” That was not terribly helpful. It seemed to me, anyway, that criminals rarely try to put their mark on a false identity by making it from the letters in their real names. It would seem counterproductive.

  This perplexing problem was raising my level of frustration, not a terribly rare thing in those whose behavior is classified as being on the autism spectrum. The circumstances of this question seemed to be extending in every direction, with no discernible pattern and therefore no logical path to follow toward a successful conclusion.

  Oliver Lewis had been asphyxiated, stabbed, and poisoned and his throat had been cut. His body had been left in my office specifically for me to discover. The slightest investigation into the dead man indicated he had been married at least five times, never for long, to women who found him charming at first and then cold once he had married them, apparently finding the pursuit of his prey more interesting than having caught each one he chased.

  He had been operating a business, ostensibly from an empty space over a pizzeria (not unlike the office I kept in such an establishment that had closed the year before). The purpose of OLimited appeared to have been to entice people to invest in nonexistent companies offering insurance policies that did not pay back on the event of their holders’ deaths.

  Two men in a Ford Escape had followed Ms. Washburn and me from Lewis’s office to a coffee shop. They had claimed to be operating some kind of surveillance on the OLimited office, but had offered no explanation as to why watching an empty suite would be necessary, or who was paying for their services.

  Of the four ex-wives Oliver Lewis had at the time of his death (Cynthia Maholm, who had engaged my services while calling herself Sheila McInerney, was a widow, not an ex-wife), one, Hazel Montrose, was unknown to another, and the last for us to meet was apparently really named Sheila (although sometimes called “Slim”) McInerney, which brought me back full circle (as Mother would say) to my musing about the many contradictions in this question.

  All that, and Terry Lambroux was still nowhere to be found, in person or online.

  The keys, because they were so mysterious, appeared to be Lambroux, whoever she might be, and Cynthia Maholm, who had first engaged my services and then vanished almost the instant Oliver Lewis had been murdered.

  And now Ms. Washburn was suggesting I call crime scene cleaner Hazel Montrose and ask her on a date. That was perhaps the most unnerving of all the elements of this matter.

  I decided not to let Terry Lambroux get the best of me. Mike knew I would call whenever I was ready to leave, but there was time before Mother would consider me late for dinner, something I assiduously try to avoid. It is rude to Mother and unsettling to me, as straying from routine is not something I enjoy doing. It allows for too many unexpected occurrences, which I accept only when absolutely necessary.

  The only thing left to do was determine what I knew about my quarry, and work backward from that. Terry Lambroux was probably female, although that fact had yet to be confirmed. But operating under that assumption, her breach of promise lawsuit against the dead man was especially puzzling. It was somewhat antiquated as a concept—the idea of a woman going to court because the man she intended to marry had canceled the wedding. And that scenario broke with Oliver Lewis’s usual pattern of intense interest in a woman until she married him, at which time he was likely searching for the next object of his desire.

  Detective Esteban had faxed the filed suit papers to Questions Answered, so I now had them on my desk. I picked them up and read them in six minutes.

  The suit hinged, as well as I could extrapolate the legalese, on the idea that after a prenuptial agreement had been signed between the two parties, Oliver Lewis had called off the planned marriage three days before it was scheduled to take place. Terry Lambroux (and the legal papers listed her as “Terry,” and not any longer form of the name) had asserted that even without the wedding, she was entitled to the amount of money specified in the prenuptial agreement to be paid to her if the couple were to divorce.

  That seemed odd; there was no contract signed joining the two people together other than a document meant to secure each one’s interests for the period after the wedding, which had not taken place. I am not an attorney because I have never sat for the bar exam in New Jersey, but any rudimentary knowledge of the law would indicate Terry Lambroux had no standing—she could not be awarded money for a divorce if there had never been a marriage.

  Still, the suit had been pending in civil court in New Brunswick until the day before Oliver Lewis married Hazel Montrose, when it had been withdrawn.

  What made the document more interesting and more relevant to Detective Dickinson’s question, however, was not the odd nature of the suit. There were two elements of the document that bore immediate interest: First, a prenuptial agreement included as evidence in the suit specified that Terry Lambroux, should she and Oliver Lewis divorce, would be awarded sixty percent of his total estate. That by itself was fairly interesting, as the percentage seemed high for such an agreement, but it was not glaringly odd.

  But the amount of the estate’s estimated worth demanded more attention: The man with the empty office in which no phone was connected, no employees were stationed, and no clients were served had admitted in a legal document to holdings worth seventeen million dollars.

  That was surprising enough, but to add an air of mystery to an already perplexing question, the attorney who had filed the suit on behalf of Terry Lambroux was Roger Siplowitz, the dead man’s supposed friend.

  The office door opened and Mike walked inside, hands on his hips. “I’ve been honking for five minutes,” he said. “What are you so engrossed in?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” I told him, although I did not see how I could have avoided the problem, since I had not ignored his car horn intentionally. “I have been considering how to locate a person whose only known address is
from a lawsuit filed more than two years ago. I checked, and the address is a false one—a Dairy Queen actually stands on that spot, according to Google Earth.”

  “Oh no, Samuel,” Mike said. I had no idea to what he was referring. “I’m not taking you anywhere but home tonight.”

  I waved a hand to indicate he was mistaken. “I have no intention of going anywhere else,” I said. “But the problem has been weighing on me.”

  “How do you find a person who doesn’t want to be found?” Mike leaned against the doorjamb and crossed one leg in front of the other, the very picture of relaxation.

  “Usually the person leaves a trail,” I answered. “Documents, business transactions, marriages, births, deaths. This person, Terry Lambroux, has not left any of those things as far as I can discover on my own.”

  We agreed Mike would drive me home, but Mike would listen to my ideas along the way. He is a skilled enough driver that I can have a conversation from the back seat of his taxicab and not be distracted by thoughts of automobile crashes. I locked the door to Questions Answered, got into the taxicab, and strapped on my safety harness. Mike started the vehicle and began to drive toward Mother’s house and my home (Mother holds the title to the house, and I live there).

  “Is this Terry a guy or a girl?” Mike asked as he made a right turn onto Stelton Road.

  “She is female, according to court documents.”

  Mike nodded, as if that made sense in his estimation, which I did not understand. “The cops can’t find her?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, can’t you ask her friends? Somebody must have been at her house at one time or another.”

  I had already asked the only friends of Terry Lambroux I knew of, the members of WOOL. “They all said they’d never met Terry anywhere but at a party, and most of them knew of her only by name, had never actually met her, and could not confirm her gender.”