Two officers, both in uniform, both with guns drawn, entered the offices. They were not wearing bullet-resistant vests, but were holding their service weapons out in front of them, taking Ms. Washburn’s warning seriously, as well they should.
They were the two men from the Ford Escape.
“Drop the gun!” the shorter one shouted. “Now!”
Amy looked at him and immediately lowered the weapon to the floor. When instructed to by the officer, she kicked it toward him. The taller one reached down and picked it up with a pencil from his pocket. He put the gun in an evidence bag while his partner held his own weapon on the four women.
“What took you so long?” I asked.
Thirty-two
“It was the number of wives that confused me,” I told Officer Ron Carbona.
Carbona (“Magical Mystery Tour”), the shorter (and, it appeared, more intelligent) of the two policemen who had doubled as the men in the Ford Escape, was sitting behind a desk at the police station after the WOOL members had been arrested and taken away and Ms. Washburn and I had been unbound and brought in to make statements. “That would confuse anybody in this case. But you knew how many wives there were,” he said.
“Yes, but in my mind, there had always been one extra because I had not immediately associated Hazel Montrose with Terry Lambroux and Sheila McInerney. I was counting five when I should have counted four, and that meant the four methods of murder became the most telling clue. The members of WOOL had killed Oliver Lewis almost in a ritualistic fashion, each one taking part in her own way. I should have thought of four ex-wives, but I was assuming Cynthia Maholm, the current wife, had a role, and that Sheila McInerney was a separate person.”
Carbona stared blankly for three seconds. “Uh-huh,” he said.
Ms. Washburn, sitting in the other chair on my side of the interrogation table—the only open space to take our statements was in an interrogation room, and Carbona had eschewed police procedure in not separating us—told the officer, “What Samuel means is that he was miscounting the number of ex-wives because Sheila McInerney had taken on so many aliases.”
Carbona nodded. His partner, Officer Pasquale, was in another interrogation room with one of the members of WOOL, although it was unclear in the shuffle which one he’d be questioning. “There are enough loose threads on this case to make a three-piece suit,” he said. That conjured up a jumbled image in my mind, and I ignored it.
“How did you and Officer Pasquale become involved with surveillance of the OLimited offices?” I asked.
“It was authorized by the county prosecutor,” Carbona answered. “They knew there was something fishy going on there, and they wanted two cops who want to make detective and don’t mind sitting through hours and hours of blank footage. We fit the bill.”
“You must have thought you’d hit the jackpot when we showed up,” Ms. Washburn said. “But why didn’t you show up faster tonight? Samuel had to keep those crazy women talking for what seemed like an hour.”
“It was eleven minutes,” I noted.
“We weren’t watching the feed,” Carbona answered. “We were on duty on the streets. It wasn’t until we got your nine-one-one call that we knew what was up and we hustled over there.”
Ms. Washburn looked at me. “You dialed nine-one-one?”
“I had Cynthia Maholm’s cellular phone in my pocket,” I told her. “I thought you saw that when we were in the restroom.”
“But you didn’t say anything.”
“When the emergency line is activated, someone is sent immediately,” Carbona said. “It’s assumed that the person calling might not be able to talk.”
“I couldn’t have explained it better myself,” I told him.
Carbona gave me another look that indicated some puzzlement, but he was intent on understanding the arrests he had just made. “So let’s sort this out. All four ladies killed their ex-husband? That’s new. He must have been a beaut.”
“They did it mostly for the money,” I told him. “There was quite a bit of it, apparently, and Oliver Lewis was holding out on the amount he’d told his ex-wives they would get. Each one had taken out an insurance policy on him while they were married that was not revoked in any of the divorces. So his death would pay off nicely in at least two ways.”
“Plus, they seemed to really hate his guts,” Ms. Washburn added.
“Why dump his body in your office?” Carbona asked. “They barely knew you.”
“It was a public place,” I said. “Cynthia Maholm had been told only that the WOOL members were planning to scare Oliver Lewis into paying up his share. She came to Questions Answered to cover their activity, establish Lewis’s pattern with his wives, and determine if I would be able to get close enough to get their ex-husband agitated. I did. He showed up in my office, and that established a certain credibility I, as a disinterested outsider, could provide to the police.
“But when the ladies, minus Cynthia, murdered Mr. Lewis, it frightened her enough that she retreated to his house to decide whether she would turn in her fellow WOOL members. Not long after, Amy Stanhope managed somehow to give her a large overdose of a drug for women experiencing excessive nausea in pregnancy, and it killed her.”
“Where was Lewis getting all the money, and how much?” Carbona asked. “It had to be millions to get all those women mad enough to kill him.”
“I never found out,” I said.
“Sometimes money isn’t the only thing that gets women angry,” Ms. Washburn told the officer.
Carbona shook his head. “All those wives.”
“He had a lot of love,” Ms. Washburn said. I do not believe she meant that to be taken sincerely.
“So great,” Detective Andrew Dickinson said. “You answered my question, and gave the collar to a couple of uniforms.”
“It was not under my control who responded to the nine-one-one call,” I said. “It seemed more urgent to save Ms. Washburn’s life and my own than to assign credit for the arrests.”
“Well, that doesn’t improve my close rate,” Dickinson noted. “I have nothing to add to the collar; I know nothing about anything that the uniform cop doesn’t already know. I don’t know about Oliver Lewis’s shady business or where he hid his money. I’ve got nothing. I’m not going to pay you.”
We were standing in Dickinson’s “office,” which was a cubicle set up in a larger area of the police station. Because we were standing, I could see the top of Detective Esteban’s head in her adjoining cubicle, but I could not see her face. She was sitting at her desk.
“Yes, you will,” Ms. Washburn told him. “The agreement was that Samuel would answer the question. He has. There was no provision that you had to get the arrests on your record.”
“We’re done,” Dickinson said. “If you want to sue me, Hoenig, you feel free.” He sat down and very ostentatiously began writing on a pad on his desk. He did not look up.
“Oh, we’ll sue all right,” Ms. Washburn said. “I don’t get my life threatened more than once, almost get burned to a crisp after having a gun waved in my face, and then not get paid for it. You’ll hear from our lawyer.” She turned on her heel and left the cubicle.
I stopped to see that Dickinson was in fact drawing a cartoon picture of a police officer on his pad.
I followed Ms. Washburn, who was walking quickly, toward the main entrance of the Piscataway police department when Detective Esteban appeared to my right and held up a hand. She spoke quietly. “Do you have a minute, Mr. Hoenig?”
The question is one I have heard before, of course; it is of common usage. But it always takes me a moment to consider—does any of us know how much time we have?
“Do you have a question, detective?” I asked.
“Not one I need you to answer professionally,” she said. “Please.” She gestured outside the building, so I walked outsi
de, where Ms. Washburn was waiting on the sidewalk.
Once outside, Detective Esteban walked to the side of the building; apparently this was to be another of our clandestine conferences. “I just want to clarify something,” she said, still not raising the volume of her voice to a level a passerby might hear. “You were clearly answering a question about the Oliver Lewis murder, is that right?”
If that were the extent of the detective’s question, this would not be a difficult question to answer. “Yes, it is,” I said. I nodded at the detective and took a step toward the parking lot where Ms. Washburn’s car was now parked. Officer Carbona had allowed us to drive to the police station in the civilian car rather than a police cruiser, which was a courtesy.
“Hang on,” Detective Esteban said. Perhaps this was not going to be so simple after all. “I’m just wondering who might have asked you about that murder.”
That was the problem. Detective Esteban was curious about our involvement, and she was intelligent enough to know that Detective Dickinson was possibly our client, which probably violated a number of department policy guidelines, if not laws.
“I’m sorry, detective,” I said. “I am not at liberty to divulge my client’s name.”
Ms. Washburn shook her head slightly. “I don’t think that applies, Samuel.” She turned toward the detective. “You want to know who paid us to find out about Oliver Lewis being murdered? It was—”
“Detective,” I said, “we may not disclose that information, even if we want to. Our clients pay us for confidentiality.” I looked at Ms. Washburn. “And they will get it.”
Detective Esteban considered that for a moment, then nodded. “You’re a man of integrity, Mr. Hoenig. I respect that. Thank you for your help.” She nodded again as a way to indicate the conversation had ended, and took a step away.
Ms. Washburn’s lips pushed out a little. “I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it.”
“Detective,” I said. She stopped walking and looked at me. “If anyone asks you, Oliver Lewis was selling fraudulent bonds and stocks that did not exist, chiefly to senior citizens who would often die before the scheme was supposed to pay off. He made at least nineteen million dollars doing that and indulging in insider trading as well as other violations. And he would have lived much more opulently, but he had agreed to pay three million dollars to each of his ex-wives. And if he had done so, he might be alive today and we would not have met.”
Ms. Washburn smiled, slowly. She looked at Detective Esteban.
The detective, without taking notes, waited and then nodded once more. “Just so you know, I got the warrant and there was some blood in the back of that cleaning van. We were looking for Hazel Montrose before you called. You should have let me know where you were going.”
“I regret that I didn’t, believe me,” I said.
“And we got a call from a Roger Siplowitz. Says you’re harassing him about a lawsuit that was withdrawn.”
Ms. Washburn let out a breath. “If two phone calls constitutes harassment, I guess we were, but we’ll stop now.”
Detective Esteban laughed lightly. “I told him to go away.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “The lawsuit was meant to goad Oliver Lewis into marrying Hazel Montrose, and it worked. And that set this whole unfortunate affair into motion.”
“But I thought Siplowitz’s problem was with the wedding pictures, that he didn’t want us to see those for some reason,” Ms. Washburn said. “What was in the pictures, Samuel?”
“Nothing. Mr. Siplowitz was concerned we would discover the lawsuit with which he was involved, and he thought it was the key to the scheme Oliver Lewis was perpetrating,” I explained. “He was wrong, but his anxiety led us in the right direction.”
Detective Esteban regarded me for a moment. “You wouldn’t make a bad detective,” she said.
“I have no such ambition, and I believe I would not be as skilled as you are,” I answered.
“Thank you, Mr. Hoenig,” she said.
“I believe the expression is, ‘no charge,’ detective.”
Detective Maria Esteban smiled and turned away. She walked around the corner, presumably back to the police station to begin making phone calls to verify what I had said.
Ms. Washburn walked over to me and linked her arm through mine. Since we were both wearing long sleeves, there was no contact, which she knew would have made me uncomfortable. We started toward her car.
“I thought there was all that stuff about upholding the contract no matter what, even if the client refuses to pay us,” she said as we walked.
“Ms. Washburn,” I said, “I told our client I would answer his question, and have answered it. There was nothing in the agreement that said I would tell him first.”
Thirty-three
“The woman had three names.” Mother sat in her traditional easy chair at the Questions Answered office and shook her head, still disbelieving what had been proven. “Why would she do that?”
I looked up from my work on the question at hand, which dealt with the probability that global warming would create a new west coast of North America somewhere in Utah within seventy-five years.
“Ms. McInerney found it best to have a few identities behind which she could hide,” I said. “It was convenient to have separate credit card accounts, for example, when she overspent her limit and could not make payments. Once she decided—and it was she who decided—that Oliver Lewis should die, being able to not be Sheila McInerney was quite helpful, I’m sure. She could even send Cynthia Maholm here under that name and create what I believe is called a ‘smokescreen’ for herself.”
“It still doesn’t make sense that Cindy would come to us at all,” Ms. Washburn said. She was doing her best to organize the files of questions I had answered in her absence. I’m afraid my filing system, particularly with hard copies, was not efficient. Ms. Washburn said she was also in the early stages of creating an advertising campaign for Questions Answered that she hoped would generate enough business to pay her salary, as she put it.
“It does from the perspective of a woman who thought she was going to scare her husband,” I said. “And from Hazel Montrose’s viewpoint, it was a very efficient way to enforce unity among the other WOOL members. The deeper they got into the plot, the harder it would be to break ranks.”
Mother clucked her tongue a bit and shook her head again, I think to herself, without thinking. “That was a strange group of wives. But who am I to judge?” My father left us when I was four years old and had not contacted Mother or me since. Mother doesn’t say so, but I think the difficulty of raising a child who wasn’t like other children was a factor in his decision to abandon his wife and son.
“You’re not judging, Vivian,” Ms. Washburn said. “You just never know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage.” Her voice got fainter and she was not looking at either of us when she added, “You’re lucky if you know what’s going on in your own.”
Mother appeared to find some significance in that remark, as she stood and walked to the vending machine and stood admiring the selections. I knew she was not going to buy a diet soda or a mineral water—she never has—and she had no money with her; her purse was back at the chair.
She was giving Ms. Washburn and me a chance to talk privately. The difficulty was in determining exactly what the issue might be.
Ms. Washburn looked at Mother a moment and clearly understood what her gesture had meant. She turned to me and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Since I was not sure what the implied topic might be, I nodded. “All right.”
“I mean, you knew there was trouble in my marriage.” Apparently, despite her protestations, Ms. Washburn did want to talk about it, and the subject was her marriage.
I thought. “I knew what you told me,” I said. That seemed safe.
“Wel
l, I didn’t tell you everything, and I’m not going to now, either.” I’ll admit to some relief at that declaration. “But it’s very possible that I’ll be getting a divorce.”
Mother’s shoulders rose and fell quickly.
I was trained in social skills from the time of my “diagnosis” at sixteen, so I had a response ready. “I’m very sorry to hear that.” I was not terribly sorry, as I had never met Simon Taylor and only spoke with him on two unpleasant occasions, but that is what one is supposed to say. “But you will be staying on at Questions Answered?” I did not especially care if the timing was appropriate; I needed to have the information.
Ms. Washburn smiled. “Yes, Samuel. I’ll probably be needing the job more than ever. Don’t worry.”
She seemed about to reach out to me, perhaps to embrace, but she stopped herself. It was possible she thought the gesture would make me uncomfortable. I’m not sure whether it would have or not.
“Then everything is all right,” I said.
Ms. Washburn shook her head slightly and smiled with an odd expression. “Yes, Samuel,” she said. “Everything is all right.” She paused. “So. What’s next on our agenda?”
“I believe I would like to purchase a cellular telephone,” I said.
the end
about the author
E.J. Copperman is the author of the Haunted Guesthouse series (Berkley Prime Crime), with more than 100,000 copies sold. Jeff Cohen is the author of the Aaron Tucker and Comedy Tonight mystery series. He also wrote two nonfiction books on Asperger’s Syndrome, including The Asperger Parent.
The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband Page 26