The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

by E. J. Copperman

  It took eleven minutes to fashion a sixteen-foot triple-ply extension made of duct tape, twisted into a tighter configuration able to bear more weight than it would be it if it were flat. We secured one end to a structure on the roof, very near the edge, which had no doubt once housed a fire extinguisher or some other emergency supplies. It had a hook-like handle on its door that fit the width of the duct tape improvisation quite well.

  “Now I will secure the other end to my waist and legs, and lower myself over the edge to the nearest accessible window,” I told Ms. Washburn.

  She did not look terribly confident in the plan. “Have I mentioned that this is incredibly dangerous and you shouldn’t do it?” she said.

  “Yes. Seven times, including this one.” With the “rope” of duct tape wrapped securely around me, I moved cautiously to the roof’s edge.

  “Samuel!” Ms. Washburn shouted, causing me to start and turn toward her. “Maybe … maybe I should do this. I weigh a lot less than you; the tape is more likely to hold me.”

  “I will not risk your safety,” I said. “I have calculated the physics, and the strength of the tape should be more than sufficient to bear my weight for the short drop. I will be careful. Believe me, Ms. Washburn, I have no desire to plummet to the ground, but even if I do, the fall will probably not be life-threatening.”

  “You can’t imagine how much that doesn’t make me feel better.”

  I had no response, so I beckoned to her, and Ms. Washburn walked to me immediately. She looked up. “Samuel?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to say?”

  I did not know what she might have meant, so I answered honestly. “Please watch the point where the tape meets the edge of the brick, here.” I pointed at the area most likely to suffer from stress once I was suspended over the roof. “Tell me if it starts to fray.”

  Ms. Washburn’s eyes seemed to move in an unfamiliar way. They appeared to widen horizontally rather than vertically, although that is not physically possible. “Couldn’t we just ask the people in the pizzeria if they have a key?” she asked.

  I smiled. “I doubt they would be amenable to letting someone break in above them. Please don’t worry.” I put my right leg over the side of the building that bordered an alley between two businesses. I would probably not be seen from the street.

  “This is a bad idea,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “No doubt.” I held on tightly to the bricks with both hands and lowered my left leg over the side.

  Ms. Washburn made a sound I would not classify as communicative.

  With my legs dangling, it was difficult to look down and see the gap between my feet and the second-flood ledge below them, which I had estimated at about four feet. Once I would let go of my grip on the bricks above me, I would drop that amount. The key would be to steady myself once my feet hit that ledge, and not slip down below it, which would probably create too much stress on the duct tape and drop me to the pavement at street level.

  “Don’t let go,” Ms. Washburn coaxed. “Pull yourself back up.”

  My voice sounded strained when I heard it coming from me. “I believe you have too much faith in my upper body strength,” I hissed.

  “I’m afraid,” she said quietly.

  I was too, but there was no alternative. I extended myself as completely as I could, stretching to the limit of my height, approximated in my mind what the distance would be to the ledge, took a breath, let it out, and released my grip on the upper edge of the brick.

  Thirty

  I felt the odd sensation of having no control over my body’s position, but only for a very brief moment, less than one second. My feet hit the ledge and because I had made a conscious effort to relax my legs, I did not slip off. I did feel my head pull back on my neck, and had a horrid sensation of falling backward, which could have been disastrous even at this relatively low elevation. But I had anticipated the move, and forced my hands to push forward. I saw the window in front of me, and my fingers found the inside edges of the window frame. I grabbed them and hung on very hard.

  “Samuel!” Ms. Washburn shouted from the roof. I did not look up. It seemed more important to regain my balance.

  “Yes?”

  The response came after a pause, but I did not calculate the time. “Is everything all right?”

  It seemed an odd moment to ask that question. Evaluating one’s total experience when under stress is a concept popularized by the myth that one’s entire life flashes before one’s eyes (something that is physiologically impossible) when facing an untimely end. I had not experienced that phenomenon, and so had not considered every aspect of my existence in the time it took to drop four feet to the ledge and hold on.

  “I am uninjured,” I said, since I believed that was the real intent of Ms. Washburn’s question. I pulled lightly on the duct tape harness; it was intact. “Is there great stress on the tape up there?”

  “No. It looks pretty secure.”

  “Good,” I said. “Wait two minutes and then walk down the stairs to the door of OLimited. I will admit you.”

  “Why the two minutes?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “In case I encounter any difficulty in getting inside, like slipping off the ledge,” I said.

  Her voice was much lower in volume when she responded: “Oh.”

  But there was no obstacle to my progress. I reached down and opened the window to the OLimited office from the outside, then had barely enough slack on the makeshift rope to get inside before I disentangled myself safely and walked to the office door. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed since my last visit.

  I opened the door and Ms. Washburn stood in the hallway. For a moment. Upon seeing me inside, she reached over and embraced me tightly with great speed. Normally I resist such contact with others—it is uncomfortable and has a great number of unspoken rules I do not understand about what is and is not appropriate—but under these circumstances I allowed Ms. Washburn as much time as she needed (six seconds) to control her emotions.

  “I was very worried,” she managed. I believe she might have wiped her right eye when she relaxed her arms and we separated.

  “There was no reason to be concerned. The strategy worked as planned. We should be very pleased indeed if the same is true of our other strategies for this evening.”

  Ms. Washburn half smiled. “Of course.”

  I began my preparations by asking Ms. Washburn for the can of aerosol paint she had put into her bag. In rapid succession, I sprayed paint over the lens of each security camera mounted in the office suite. I was careful to be sure the lenses were covered completely and that the black paint was thick enough to block any images the cameras might have recorded from this moment forward.

  “That should keep the two men in the Ford Escape from seeing anything that goes on here tonight,” I said when I had completed the task.

  “But they’ll know we’re here,” Ms. Washburn countered. “Won’t that bring them here to find out what’s going on?”

  “I am counting on it.” I looked around the empty room to assess it in context of the situation I expected to unfold here shortly. “It’s too bad we didn’t think to bring a few folding chairs,” I said. “We’ll all have to stand for the duration.”

  “That’s the least of our worries.”

  “It is five thirty-two,” I said. “We should be expecting the members of WOOL soon. Would you like to go downstairs for some food?”

  Ms. Washburn regarded me with a look that indicated I was making an odd suggestion. “This is a gathering of murder suspects, Samuel,” she said. “I don’t think catering is necessary.”

  “I meant to ask if you wanted something for yourself.”

  She smiled. “I’m a little too nervous for food right now. But it was nice of you to think of me.” I had considered asking Ms. Washburn to p
urchase a bottle of spring water for me, but this was hardly an atmosphere in which I would be comfortable eating.

  We sat down on the floor after I had found a broom and cleaned off a large enough area. Then we waited.

  I went over the list of possible suspects in the murders of Oliver Lewis and Cynthia Maholm, and determined through the observations I’d made when I’d met each one that Rachel Vandross would be the third to arrive. The first, I surmised, would be the duo of Jennifer LeBlanc and Amy Stanhope, who would arrive together because they were living in the same house.

  The last to enter the office, I believed, would be Hazel Montrose, because I assumed that Hazel was at this moment watching the entrance to observe everyone else as they entered, and that she would want to enter only after she could be certain the others had arrived.

  At five fifty-two, I heard footsteps on the stairs outside the office. As we had discussed earlier, Ms. Washburn and I stood up and walked to the office restroom, which we—to be fair, mostly Ms. Washburn—had cleaned to the degree that I would be able to stay there.

  We had left the office door unlocked. There would be no point to listening in on the WOOL meeting if the women involved were not capable of entering the room. I had no idea if any of them owned a key to the OLimited offices, although someone did. The door had not been locked on our first visit and had been locked when we’d arrived today.

  Ms. Washburn quietly closed the restroom door. The walls were thin enough that hearing any conversation would not be an issue. Keeping our presence secret might be more of a challenge, as the walls were indeed porous and there was very little space to maneuver in the small restroom. It would be necessary in this old building to stand very still in an attempt to avoid leaning too heavily on an unstable, creaky floorboard.

  I leaned on the sink, with a handkerchief between my palm and the surface. Ms. Washburn, less visibly alarmed by our surroundings, sat on the lid of the toilet. We were as stable and silent as would be possible under these circumstances.

  As I had suspected, the first voice I heard after the squeak of the office door was that of Jennifer LeBlanc. “—doesn’t make sense that it’s Siplowitz. He’d just call if he needed to talk to one of us, and he wouldn’t need us all in the same place at the same time. It’s got to be the cops.”

  Amy Stanhope, who must have entered with Jenny, answered in a tempered, quiet voice. “Wouldn’t the police just arrest us if they thought we’d done something?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “How does it work?” Amy asked.

  Ms. Washburn looked at me with a quizzical expression. I shrugged, largely because I did not know what she meant, and could not speak. I assumed that, since she had never met Amy, she was wondering about the younger woman’s naïveté.

  “They have to have evidence before they do anything. They don’t have any evidence that I know about, so they can’t just arrest anybody.” Jenny spoke to Amy as if to a child, and she did not speak to others that way, in my experience. Amy did invite that sort of treatment. But others have sometimes spoken to me that way because of my Asperger’s Syndrome, and I know how it feels. It is not the way I would address another person, not even a child.

  “Well, that’s good,” Amy answered. “I wouldn’t want to see anybody get arrested.”

  “Neither would I.” More footsteps, this time in high heels if I was interpreting the sound accurately, were audible in the room, and the voice was that of Rachel Vandross. “Hello, Jenny. Amy.” She, too, spoke as if to a small child, drawing out the long “a” in the younger woman’s name.

  They had indeed met before, much as I’d expected.

  “Rachel!” Amy’s voice rose three full tones and there was a scuffle of feet, no doubt evidence of an embrace between the two women. “Excuse my belly. I’m getting big.”

  “Yes, you are, aren’t you?”

  Ms. Washburn made a spinning motion with her right forefinger extended, expressing the wish that the ladies would get to a more relevant topic.

  “Hello, Rachel,” Jenny said in a noticeably less joyous tone. “You want to take a guess at who’s sending us all mysterious texts?”

  “I figured it was Terry Lambroux,” Rachel suggested. “It would be in character for that mysterious bitch.”

  Ms. Washburn tilted her head slightly—so Rachel didn’t know who Terry Lambroux really was! I didn’t know if that was a relevant fact, but it certainly seemed like one. Hopefully the ensuing conversation would clarify matters somewhat more.

  “Oh, Rachel.” Amy giggled. “Such language.”

  Perhaps more talk would not be as enlightening as I hoped.

  “I don’t think it matters as much who called this meeting as why,” Jenny said. “Is someone trying to blackmail one of us?”

  I nodded; that would be a logical supposition if I did not already know who had summoned the women to this spot and why. Ms. LeBlanc was clearly one of the more intelligent members of the group.

  But the most intelligent—and potentially most dangerous—was just entering the room now. “Blackmail?” Hazel Montrose said. I heard the office door close behind her and saw Ms. Washburn’s shoulders tense just a bit. “I don’t see how there can be blackmail when there’s no evidence of a crime.”

  “Slim,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe there is evidence,” Ms. LeBlanc suggested. “Maybe somebody’s found something. Maybe the fact that there are now two bodies instead of one was a mistake.”

  Just that—the idea that they were discussing among themselves that killing Cynthia Maholm could be a tactical error—sent a chill up my spine. I put my finger to my nose without thinking about it. I had not considered this possibility, but I realized that was simply an error in arithmetic getting in the way of my process. I had made a very grave error indeed.

  My hands started to flap at my sides. Ms. Washburn’s expression became one of concern, but she could not say anything to calm me down, nor could she make a move beyond very small gestures without attracting attention. I was becoming, rapidly, a liability.

  I felt my head begin to shake, or more accurately, to vibrate. I was trying desperately to contain the anger with myself and the disappointment in my mind for placing Ms. Washburn in such a dangerous situation because of a simple miscalculation. And I was compounding the problem by threatening to give away our position and place us in a terrible situation.

  “Two bodies?” Amy asked. “What do you mean, two bodies?”

  That was an interesting response. In retrospect, had I been thinking along my normal patterns and not in a growing state of panic, I would have processed it more quickly.

  “Ollie and Cindy,” Hazel told her. “That’s two.”

  “Cindy’s dead?” Amy sounded shocked. “What happened?”

  “She OD’d on some Reglan,” Hazel said. “Can you imagine? She must have been really nauseous.” And she laughed lightly.

  I was shaking from head to toe now, furious with myself for increasing the danger to Ms. Washburn and knowing I was about to reveal to the women outside that we were secreted in the restroom. Ms. Washburn looked over at me and flattened her hands, pushing them toward the floor, urging me to calm down. But it was too late for that.

  “Sheila!” Amy scolded. “How can you say that?”

  The information was coming quickly now and in my present state, I was aware that I could not absorb it rapidly enough to act upon it. That increased my sense of failure and frustration, which made me clench my teeth hard and shake more violently. I could not control my movements, especially those of my hands, which flapped wildly at my sides in the narrow restroom. Ms. Washburn’s eyes moved from side to side rapidly; she was trying to think of some strategy to return me to a more rational state. And I could tell she was coming up with no useful tactics to apply.

  I tried to stop the shaking by shoving my hands
into the pockets of my trousers. It did not stop the shaking. I pulled my left hand out and looked at it; perhaps concentrating on that could provide the necessary calm. It did not. My right hand was my last chance. I put it in my pocket.

  “Sheila?” Rachel asked. “Who’s Sheila?”

  “The real point here,” Hazel interrupted, “is that Samuel Hoenig got us all to show up. Now, why do you think he’d want to do that?”

  I felt my knees get weak. If I fell to the floor, our plan would be exposed and Ms. Washburn would be exposed to danger far beyond anything I would have anticipated. I should never have accepted this question. Perhaps I should never have coaxed Ms. Washburn back to Questions Answered.

  I should never have opened that business at all. I was a failure.

  “What makes you think it was the retard?” Jenny asked. “That guy’s got something wrong with him.”

  Hazel blew out some air. “He’s the only one who would have thought of it, getting us all in one room so someone would confess. Well, it’s not gonna be me.”

  I felt a scream catch in my throat. I could not control my limbs. There was pressure inside my head that felt like it would cause a hemorrhage. I could not stand another second of this.

  “The only way that works would be if he was in the room to get the confession,” Rachel said. “He’s not here. But what I want to know is why Amy called you Sheila.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Hazel said. “But I’m willing to bet Hoenig has some recording device in this room. So watch what you say. He’s a retard, but a smart one.”

  That was the moment I lost my battle. My knees buckled and I hit the filthy restroom floor. Pieces of linoleum tile scattered where I fell. I heard a scream emanate from my throat but had no control over my voice. My head struck the sink in a glancing blow—hard enough to bruise but not to draw blood. I saw Ms. Washburn look around the restroom, see me fall, and pick up a piece of two-by-four that had been discarded in the room.

  “Samuel,” she said quietly. “Stay down.”

  The door flew open seconds later, but I was too distraught to count the time. I saw only feet at first. But after my head began to clear, with the distant sound of Ms. Washburn’s voice repeating, “Stay down. Stay down,” I felt the scream stop. I was breathing heavily. And I could see there were three pairs of women’s feet in the doorway.