The Question of the Felonious Friend

by E. J. Copperman

  “Sandy knows about it,” Tyler said. “You don’t have to tell her.”

  “Tyler,” his older sister scolded. “Don’t be rude.”

  “Was that rude?”

  Despite Ms. Washburn’s introduction, I felt it was reasonable to approach Sandy and say, “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Samuel Hoenig, the principal operator of Questions Answered.” Before Ms. Washburn had become a full-time employee, I had introduced myself as the proprietor, but since she was now working with me and had become a vital part of the operation, I had altered my title accordingly.

  Sandy reached for my hand. Despite my usual slight revulsion at the thought, I took it and said, “I was not offended, Mrs. Webb.”

  “It’s Clayton Webb, with no hyphen,” she said. “The fact is, I divorced Mr. Webb last year.” I am not sure why she thought that information was relevant to the answering of Tyler’s question. I resolved to ask Ms. Washburn what she thought after Tyler and his sister left.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ms. Washburn said. She was in the process of divorcing her husband, Simon Taylor. I did not ask Ms. Washburn about the proceedings unless it was completely necessary, as when she once had to take off half a day of work when consulting an attorney.

  Sandy waved a hand. “Don’t be. Best thing I ever did.”

  “Really?” Tyler asked. “You cried for three hours when you told me about it.”

  Sandy hid the grimace well but not so well that it was invisible. “I think it’s time for us to go,” she said. “You have group in an hour, Tyler.”

  Tyler looked at me. “I go to social skills therapy in a group session that includes three other people who have autism spectrum disorders,” he said. “Jim O’Malley, Ken Martel, and Molly Brandt. What part of the spectrum does your disorder fall on, Mr. Hoenig?”

  “Tyler!” his sister admonished.

  I chose not to explain that I saw no shame in the question, nor that I do not consider myself to have a disorder. “I was classified in high school as having Asperger’s Syndrome,” I told Tyler.

  “That’s not a diagnosis anymore.”

  “I am aware of that. It was eliminated in the DSM-V.”

  Sandy looked positively mortified. “I am so sorry, Mr. Hoenig,” she said.

  “There is no reason to be,” I assured her. Then I looked at her brother. “Tyler,” I said, “there is a very important question I must ask you if I am to help you answer the one that brought you here. What is your favorite song by the Beatles?”

  This is a tactic I use frequently when meeting new people; it helps me understand their personalities in ways I would not normally be able to access. My knowledge of the music recorded by the Beatles helps me make assumptions about the strangers I meet. Some people find the question odd, but it always serves me well.

  “Beetles don’t sing songs,” Tyler said. He looked confused.

  Clearly he was taking me too literally, which is not unusual among those with personalities that are classified as on the autism spectrum.

  “Not the insects,” Ms. Washburn explained. “The band called the Beatles.”

  Tyler stole a glance at his sister and his hands flapped a little at his sides. Sandy started to shake her head negatively.

  “There’s a band called the Beatles?” Tyler asked.

  That was the moment I decided to answer Tyler Clayton’s question. Clearly, he needed my help much more than I had previously understood.

  Three

  “So this young man wants you to find out if some other young man is his friend?” My mother stood up from the kitchen table and walked to the sink. She placed her dinner plate on the counter and reached for the faucet.

  “Mother,” I said, “you cooked. I’ll wash the dishes.” We own an automatic dishwasher, but Mother rarely uses it. She says it does not do the work adequately. I stood and brought my plate to the sink, then began to wash the dinner dishes. “And yes, Tyler Clayton wants me to find out whether Richard Handy is actually his friend.”

  “Why doesn’t he just ask?” Mother smiled a bit as she sat back down. No doubt it had been her intention to draw my attention to the dinner dishes by pretending to wash them herself. She sometimes uses subtle methods to focus me on a task.

  “As I explained, Tyler is a young man with behaviors that—”

  “Behaviors that would place him on the autism spectrum,” Mother said. There were only two dinner plates, two glasses, and two sets of utensils to wash. Mother had cooked a pasta dinner, and since I do not eat mine with sauce, the pots were mostly clean. Mother’s bore the marks of the Paul Newman sauce she favors, which I tried to block out. It makes my stomach a little queasy to see leftover food. “But you said he can speak.”

  “Tyler is capable of spoken language, yes. But that does not immediately lead to the conclusion that he is socially adept enough to ask another person that question.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Mother said as I began to dry the dishes with a towel we keep for just that purpose in the cabinet under the sink. “That will answer Tyler’s question and you’ll be done with it.”

  I nodded. “That would be true, if I were to try to do a fast job instead of a thorough one. Suppose Richard lies about being Tyler’s friend. My job is to answer the question, not to get Richard to answer the question.”

  I placed the last dried dish in the drainer on the counter. I could have put it away in the cabinet above, but Mother says even a towel-dried dish still has some moisture on it and needs a little time to become completely dry. I do not argue with her on issues of housekeeping.

  “What does Janet think?” she asked as I sat down again.

  “Ms. Washburn suggested we ask Richard Handy the question, as you did,” I reported. “But after I explained why that would not provide us with an accurate answer to the question, she said one of us should watch Richard and Tyler together when neither of them was aware of our presence and observe the interaction.”

  “So that’s what you’re going to do?”

  It was a difficult question. “Not necessarily. That would at best provide us with an opinion about the question. It might be correct, but it might not. Tyler requires a factual answer. He especially needs to be shown objectively whether Richard is or is not his friend.”

  Mother looked puzzled. “Is that possible?” she asked. “Is friendship something that can be measured and proven mathematically? Isn’t it just a feeling?”

  It is often helpful to use Mother as a sounding board for a question that ventures into areas with which I am not especially comfortable. In that way, she serves much the same function as Ms. Washburn, but she has her own perspective. I can frequently present both women with the same set of facts, and even if they have the same opinion, they will present it differently.

  In this case, I was entering into two areas with which I am not always sure-footed: emotional interaction between people and others identified as having an autism spectrum disorder. I have some difficulty dealing with those who are classified in a similar way as I, and it is not clear to me why that is the case.

  “Friendship can be considered a feeling a person has when interacting with someone else,” I said, agreeing with Mother. “But it is also an accepted state of relationship. I can say that Mike the taxicab driver is my friend because he has proven to be helpful to me on numerous occasions without asking for anything in return.”

  Mother’s eyes sharpened. “So that’s what a friend is? Someone who serves a purpose for you and doesn’t require payment?”

  This was dangerous territory. Mother has made no secret of her opinion that I should “mingle,” as she says, with more people than the few I trust. She believes it is a failure of mine that I have only two people—Ms. Washburn and Mike the taxicab driver—whom I consider friends. I see no reason to populate my life with more people than I need. When I was in scho
ol, I found that many peers considered me odd and were wary of me. I was wary of them because they seemed shallow and inconsequential. Since earning my degree I have almost always worked on my own. That was true until Ms. Washburn became an associate at Questions Answered.

  “You know perfectly well that we have differing opinions of the merits and dangers of friendship,” I told Mother. “I’m not going to let you start that conversation again for two reasons.”

  “One is that the Yankees have a game starting in ten minutes and you want to watch it,” Mother said. “What’s the other?”

  She was right about that, of course.

  “The other is that I dislike arguing with you, and since we have had this conversation to the same impasse on more than one occasion, I see no reason to repeat the experience.” I stood up, prepared to walk into the den where I could watch the baseball game with the sound turned off. The chatter of the announcers and the roar of the fans distract me from the sequence of situations that make up a baseball game.

  “You don’t think I can change your mind?”

  “I think not.”

  Mother chuckled. “You’re probably right.”

  The Yankees lost the game, five runs to two.

  “I thought you said we weren’t going to do this,” Ms. Washburn said.

  We were sitting in her car across the street from the Quik N EZ convenience store in Somerset, New Jersey, that Tyler Clayton had specified was the one where he had met Richard Handy. Having found an online photograph of Richard, we had a general idea of his appearance. We were waiting for Tyler to appear, as he had said he did every day at eleven a.m., according to the form Ms. Washburn had created for him to fill out.

  “Sometimes it is best to enact a somewhat flawed plan than to have no plan at all,” I noted from the passenger seat. I have an active license to drive a vehicle, but I rarely do so. Ms. Washburn drives when we have to leave the Questions Answered office.

  “You mean you couldn’t think of anything else,” she said.

  “That would be another way to characterize the situation, yes.”

  Ms. Washburn had a camera ready with a telephoto lens attached. We did not have access to any sound equipment that could pick up conversation from this far away, and I was not sure I would have used it if we had. The idea of eavesdropping on a private talk—and we had not told Tyler we would be watching because we did not want our presence to alter his behavior at all—was distasteful. I did wish I could, as Ms. Washburn had put it, think of something else to try.

  She must have been thinking along the same lines as I was, at least in part. “If we can’t hear them, how will we be able to answer Tyler’s question?” she asked.

  “For the time being, we will observe body language and other visual cues,” I said.

  “That’s not your strong suit, is it?” Ms. Washburn asked sincerely.

  “No. My Asperger’s Syndrome makes it difficult for me to interpret the attitude a person exudes through behavior,” I admitted. “But my social skills training over the years and my work with Dr. Mancuso have helped me develop that skill to some extent. And I have another asset.”

  “Me,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “Precisely.”

  A short silence followed lasting seventeen seconds. “Samuel, I want to tell you about my divorce,” Ms. Washburn said.

  My fingers might have fluttered a bit, although I have taught myself to use my left hand, thumb and middle finger at the temples, to deal with stress, replacing the hand flapping I had done as a younger person. I am not comfortable discussing personal issues with anyone, and perhaps less so with Ms. Washburn, with whom I work every weekday.

  “I don’t mean to make you fidgety,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell you anything intimate.”

  That was a relief, but her use of the word fidgety was troublesome; was that how she saw me?

  “The thing is, I want you to know you didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Simon and I broke up,” Ms. Washburn went on. “My working at Questions Answered just supplied the last reason to argue. We’d been in a bad place for a while.”

  I had been concerned because Ms. Washburn had told me of her divorce almost immediately after accepting full-time employment at Questions Answered. I knew her husband Simon Taylor was opposed to her working with me, as he had told me so in very specific terms. But the timing appeared to be too large a coincidence to accept.

  “Are you saying that because you want to spare me any feelings of responsibility?” I asked. “I assure you, I did not try to cause your marriage to end.” My mother believes I harbor romantic feelings for Ms. Washburn and had, until recently, admonished me fairly regularly that she was “another man’s wife.”

  “That’s exactly the opposite of what I’m doing,” Ms. Washburn assured me. “I’m telling you it had nothing to do with you at all. If I hadn’t come to work at Questions Answered, I’m certain I would still be going to court in two weeks to divorce Simon. Wait.”

  I was not aware I had been ready to do anything that required waiting. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Tyler.” Ms. Washburn pointed across the street. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

  I followed the path of her finger toward the Quik N EZ across the street and there was a young man resembling Tyler approaching the store. “Check through your lens,” I suggested.

  Ms. Washburn picked up the camera and looked through the viewfinder, not at the LCD display on the back of the unit’s body. She has told me she can get a clearer look that way, and as a professional photographer, her judgment is certainly the one to which I would defer in all things related to imagery.

  “That’s him all right,” she said. “He’s going inside.”

  I could see that the young man across the street had been entering the convenience store, so that comment was not especially useful. The pertinent information was that the young man was indeed Tyler Clayton. “Can you see through the window if Richard is visible?” I asked.

  “I checked before. If he stays at the counter, I can see him.”

  I waited twelve seconds before asking, “What can you see?”

  “Tyler’s second in line. He’s behind a Hispanic woman with a package of diapers.”

  “Did Richard acknowledge his presence?”

  “Not yet. But he might not have seen Tyler. He’s concentrating on the cash register and the woman.”

  I considered the task we were undertaking and a thought occurred to me. “If I were watching you and your husband through a window, would I know you were divorcing?” I asked Ms. Washburn.

  To her credit, she did not turn away from the viewfinder. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “The usefulness of body language. In some cases it can help interpret an encounter between or among people. In others, it can distract or misinform. It is difficult to know which we are witnessing at the moment.”

  Ms. Washburn continued to look through the lens. “Tyler’s about to reach the front of the line,” she said. “Do you want me to shoot pictures?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” I answered. “We will not have to provide Tyler with evidence that he saw Richard. He will know that occurred.”

  Ms. Washburn did not answer directly. “He’s at the counter and talking to Richard,” she said.

  “How is Richard reacting?”

  “He said something back, and the other guy at the counter laughed a little,” Ms. Washburn replied. “I wasn’t watching Tyler directly at that moment, but I don’t think he was laughing.”

  “Not a good sign,” I said. There have been times in my life—principally in school—when peers would say something either to or about me intending to be amusing. Others have sometimes agreed with that assessment, but I rarely have.

  “Tyler is buying a soda,” Ms. Washburn rep
orted. “And he is paying with a card, probably a debit card, because he had to punch in a PIN number.”

  I understood the impulse to avoid using cash—you never know who has handled it before you obtained the bill or coin—but even I wouldn’t have bothered with an alternate form of payment for something so inexpensive. “I assume Tyler does not want to handle cash, or is considered too careless to have any with him,” I told Ms. Washburn. “Is he trying to engage Richard in conversation?”

  “Yes, he is, and it’s a problem,” she said. “There are people behind him in line, and Richard is pointing to them. I think he’s telling Tyler to get out of the way.”

  “Is Tyler doing so?” I asked. It was frustrating not being able to see at the same time Ms. Washburn could. Perhaps if we ever tried this again I would bring a pair of binoculars.

  “Finally, yes. But he does have some cash on him, because he’s leaving a bill in the tip jar on the counter.” Ms. Washburn gasped. “Whoa.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Tyler just tipped Richard a hundred dollars on a soda that cost a buck and a half.”

  Four

  “We have circumstantial evidence, and we need more than that,” I told Ms. Washburn.

  “I don’t think it is just circumstantial,” she countered. “I think there’s no other explanation.”

  We were back in the office of Questions Answered, each at our assigned desk. After Tyler had left his enormously generous tip for his assumed friend Richard Handy, he had left the Quik N EZ market and walked away. Tyler had a part-time job at a local electronics shop but would not be working this week except on Saturday, he had told us.

  There had been no further contact between the two young men, although Ms. Washburn reported that Richard had quickly snatched the $100 bill Tyler had left in the tip jar—really a small plastic cup left on the convenience store counter—and pocketed it for himself. His colleague behind the counter, she said, had not appeared to protest the move at all. “It’s like they have it down to a science,” she said. “It’s happened before.”