The Question of the Felonious Friend

by E. J. Copperman

  It was extremely unlikely they would become different people, but I was certain Ms. Washburn knew that, so I asked instead, “When do you think you will know? About the divorce.”

  “I don’t know, Samuel. I’m sorry. I know uncertainty bothers you.”

  That was true, but in this case I felt divided by my knowledge of Simon Taylor’s having had at least one other woman in his home while he was separated from his wife. If I told Ms. Washburn I could hurt her and overstep my boundaries as her employer. If I did not and she chose not to tell me of her decision-making process, she could easily make a serious mistake because she would not have vital information. It was a frustrating conundrum, but for the moment I decided Ms. Washburn’s emotions should take precedence over my own. “I will survive … Janet,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Go back to Ms. Washburn,” she said. “It doesn’t sound natural the other way. Now about the question. What about the S and S die? I can’t figure out why it’s important that Richard had it in his hand, or at least on his body, when he was shot, but I get the feeling it is.”

  “You are correct up to a point,” I told her. “I think Richard had the Tenduline with him at all times, that it was a talisman for him as it would be for many role-playing gamers. He went to great trouble to obtain it, which would indicate it held a lot of significance for him.”

  “So then it’s not important that he had it with him,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “No, but as you pointed out, the Tenduline was discovered away from Richard’s body but close enough that we can be fairly sure it was Richard who was holding it. So the importance lies in the fact that it was not in his pocket or somewhere he might keep it normally. It was probably in his hand when he died and fell out when he hit the floor.”

  “Do you think the person who shot him wanted the die?” Ms. Washburn asked. “Then why not pick it up after the shooting?”

  “Precisely why I think theft was not the motive,” I answered. “No, I think the die next to Richard’s body delivered another type of message entirely. I think it was a warning.”

  Ms. Washburn thought that over. “A warning to whom?” she asked.

  “To Tyler.”

  Now in Mason’s living room, with the sounds of Tyler’s movements audible from a room upstairs, Ms. Washburn had asked whether an interview with Mason’s brother would be possible. “I don’t think he’ll talk to you,” Mason answered.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  But the answer was forthcoming. Tyler’s footsteps—indeed more like stomping—could be heard on the stairs to our left. Before he was visible, however, his vocalization of “nnnnnnn” preceded him into the room.

  “That’s why not,” Mason said.

  Tyler walked into the room, saw us, and started to shake violently. Clearly Ms. Washburn and I did not hold especially pleasant memories for him. It was technically understandable, but not logical. We were simply the bearers of news he had disliked.

  I had no idea how to placate him to a point that he could communicate with us. I have experienced moments during which I was too agitated to speak coherently. But I have not had the kind of difficulty Tyler had clearly been living with since Richard Handy was shot. Seeing Ms. Washburn and me seemed to exacerbate the problem.

  Luckily, she has some experience dealing with those of us with autism spectrum behaviors. “It’s okay, Tyler,” she said. “We’re not here to do anything but help. Can you tell us how we can help you?”

  “Nnnnnnnnnnnnn … ”

  “Okay,” Ms. Washburn continued, not acknowledging any special difficulty with Tyler’s speech. “We can’t do it that way, so maybe there’s another way. Can you write for us on that pad there?” She pointed to a legal pad that had been left on the table in the adjacent dining room. No doubt Mason had been trying to work out either Tyler’s best course of defense or how he would pay Swain to provide it.

  But Tyler shook his head violently; no, there would be no writing. His hands went to the sides of his head and vibrated with frustration. It was a feeling I could recognize.

  “Wait,” Mason said quietly. “What about the iPad?” He walked to a cabinet nearby and extracted the tablet computer from a drawer. Mason brought the tablet to Tyler and extended his hand. “Want to talk on that for a while?”

  Strikingly, Tyler stopped his frantic motion and looked at the iPad. He reached his hand out and took it from his brother. He immediately sat on a bench in front of a piano that did not look like it had been played in some time and began tapping the screen with a great air of purpose.

  When he stopped, he turned the iPad toward Ms. Washburn. I moved to her side to see the message he had typed.

  It read, I shot Richard. I shot him with the gun.

  Mason shrugged. “We’ve been getting that a lot.” Then he turned to his brother. “Tyler, is Molly your girlfriend? Why didn’t you tell me?” Even in the light of Tyler’s impending trial for murder, this seemed to be the priority for Mason.

  Tyler stared at him, then pointed at the iPad again. He was focusing on the issue and insisting he had shot Richard Handy.

  “No, you didn’t,” I told Tyler. “You didn’t shoot Richard. You were on the other side of the store when that happened. So tell me, why are you taking the blame for a terrible crime you didn’t commit?”

  Tyler stared at me for three seconds, the longest he had ever made eye contact in my experience. Then he pointed at the iPad again as if to reinforce the message he had keyed in.

  I shook my head. “That is not the truth. Please do not insult my intelligence.”

  “Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said softly. Mason Clayton looked at me as if I had slapped his brother’s face.

  I have spent enough time being talked about while present in a room with other people. I have known what it is like to be given “special treatment” that was sincerely intended to “soften the blow” of my “disability” but ended up simply solving the short-term problem and doing nothing to help me develop useful skills. Mother never treated me like someone with an affliction, but doctors, teachers, administrators, and even some personnel at the college I attended would choose to follow their own instincts without ever challenging mine. The progress I have made has been largely attributable to Mother, Dr. Mancuso, and myself. And Dr. Mancuso insists that I have done most of the hard work on my own.

  So when I did not coddle Tyler Clayton it was not out of cruelty, although his feelings were not my paramount concern. I needed the answers to questions if I could answer the one I had been commissioned to research. Tyler held some if not all of them. Getting through his defenses, including those that others were encouraging, was imperative.

  I pointed again to the iPad. “Please. Tell me why you are taking the blame.”

  Tyler took the tablet and began using it again. When he turned the screen back toward me this time, it read, I was angry because Richard was not my friend. I shot him.

  I repeated shaking my head. “You did not. Your voice is too far away from the directional microphones recording sound when Richard was shot. You were not close enough to have done it. What were you doing?”

  Ms. Washburn and Mason seemed mesmerized, although concern showed on their faces. I imagine they did not know whether they should intervene, but for the first time since coming home from jail, Tyler’s answers were more than the simple repetition of his confession.

  Angrily he grabbed the iPad from its position and started typing again. Perhaps this time his emotion getting the best of him, which was what I was hoping would happen. If Tyler did not have the time to censor himself, it was more possible to get accurate information.

  This time when he turned it back, it read, I didn’t see who shot him.

  “Show that to your brother,” I suggested, even as Ms. Washburn was craning her neck over my shoulder to see it.

  Mason walked toward Ty
ler, who did as I had said. Upon seeing the words, his eyes watered a bit and he seemed to reach toward Tyler, who backed away instinctively. Mason held up his hands to show he knew better than to try to hug his brother.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “What were you doing?”

  Tyler’s mouth twitched. He looked at the iPad, put a determined look on his face, and then looked intently at the floor. “I … I went to the counter,” he said.

  That was a breakthrough, certainly, but I didn’t have time for Tyler’s personal progress at this moment. “But you weren’t close enough to the security camera on that side to be heard more clearly,” I said, mostly explaining the discrepancy to myself.

  “Yeah.” Tyler wasn’t going to start reciting soliloquies anytime soon. His work to begin speaking spontaneously again would be a long one and require a good deal of work, but he had taken a very large step in the past minute.

  The best strategy, then, was to word questions in a way that would require the least effort on Tyler’s part to answer. “Were you looking the other way when the shots were fired?” I asked.

  Tyler nodded.

  “Were there any other customers in the store at the time?”

  Tyler nodded and held up his fingers: Two.

  “Did you know them?”

  He shook his head.

  I was operating completely on speculation at this point, and that was not going to be a fruitful avenue of questioning. I could not determine how to construct a question that could be answered in one syllable on the subject, so I pointed to the iPad again and said to Tyler, “How did you end up with the gun in your hand standing over Richard Handy’s body?”

  His eyes narrowed with effort. He touched areas on the screen again, this time taking longer than he had before. This was going to be a longer message, I assumed.

  But my hopes were not borne out. I don’t know was what Tyler had typed on the screen.

  That led to one conclusion but it was not one I could pursue at this moment. “Thank you, Tyler,” I said. I started for the door, hearing Ms. Washburn make our socially conventional farewells to Mason and promising he would hear from us soon. I noted that she did not make the same assurance to Tyler, but she did say good-bye to him on the way to the door.

  Once we were outside, she spoke to me quietly but urgently. “You know something now, don’t you?” she asked.

  I had always known some things, so I extrapolated her question as one asking if Tyler’s information had been helpful in the research of Mason’s question. I nodded.

  “Care to share?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  I had nothing to share, as I do not carry chewing gum or any other such treat with me, so I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Mason Clayton’s house. “Share?”

  “The conclusion you have reached,” Ms. Washburn said. “Sorry for not being precise in the way I asked. What did you learn from Tyler just now?”

  “I did not learn much but I was able to confirm some suspicions I have had for some time,” I said.

  We reached Ms. Washburn’s Kia and settled into our traditional seats. She started the engine. “Such as?” she asked. That I understood.

  “There was someone else in the store whom Tyler knew, someone he is trying to protect with his story,” I said. “He knows how he ended up holding the murder weapon but he is not explaining, despite the fact that it could exonerate him.”

  Ms. Washburn began to drive back to Questions Answered. “How do you know that?”

  “Detective Hessler said there was one other patron in the Quik N EZ when the shooting occurred,” I reminded her. “Tyler admits there were two. Whoever actually shot Richard Handy managed somehow to escape the scene before anyone could see. But Tyler knew who it was and decided the only way to protect the other person was to pick up the gun and take the blame for the murder.”

  “So who was it?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “An excellent question,” I said. “Something we will have to ask Molly Brandt. May I have the GPS unit, please?”

  Twenty-Two

  Molly Brandt was the young woman I’d seen leaving Dr. Shean’s office and seemed an unlikely candidate to be Tyler Clayton’s girlfriend, only because she never seemed to talk to anyone except Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John McIntyre, and B.J. Hunnicutt.

  Although she had been obviously concerned with biblical verse when I’d seen her outside the therapist’s office, that did not seem to be Molly’s primary special interest, which was helpful, as I am not well schooled on the subject. Instead, today she seemed to be especially intrigued with the television program M*A*S*H, which was something of a phenomenon in the 1970s and ’80s.

  “Hawkeye came from Maine and fell in love with Carlye Breslin when he was in his surgical residency in Boston,” she informed us without being prompted. “When she arrived at the four-oh-seven-seventh, Hawkeye said his heart started beating again.”

  We were seated in the very tidy family room of the home owned by Molly’s parents, Jack and Evelyn Brandt. Evelyn sat on a sofa nearby, hands folded in her lap, her face just a little tense at what her daughter might do or say. I have seen that kind of anxiety before. Molly did not seem to notice it.

  Ms. Washburn had parked the car on the side of the road and telephoned Evelyn when I’d suggested we divert our route to include a trip to Molly’s home. Evelyn had informed her that Jack was away on business at the moment, but agreed to the visit, although she had warned Ms. Washburn that Molly would probably not be of much help. She rarely had conversations, Evelyn said. Molly preferred to lecture.

  “But Carlye was married and didn’t want to cheat on her husband,” Molly went on. Ms. Washburn, in a recliner she had chosen not to recline, was taking notes, although I could not determine exactly what might be useful to us in answering Mason’s question.

  “That is true,” I answered. “But she and Hawkeye did renew their romance and Carlye resolved to ask her husband for a divorce.” I avoided looking at Ms. Washburn when I mentioned the dissolution of a marriage and when Molly had brought up a cheating spouse.

  Molly looked at me for the first time. Ms. Washburn and Evelyn also seemed somewhat surprised by my contribution to the conversation. I went through what Mother would have undoubtedly described as a “M*A*S*H phase” during my high school years.

  “But Carlye didn’t want to compete with Hawkeye’s work, so she applied for a transfer,” Molly pointed out. “Hawkeye could not change who he was, even for the woman he loved.”

  That last phrase referred to a comment the character made in a much later episode, but an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject was to be expected in such an area. I know a great deal about the New York Yankees and the Beatles because those subjects have piqued my interest, so I absorb a good deal more about them than I would about something in which I am not as completely engaged.

  Because I understood the concept of a special interest in a topic, I could try to relate her fascination with the information I wanted to obtain. “Is that what happened between you and Tyler Clayton?” I asked.

  Molly looked at me, seeming less stunned than surprised. “Hawkeye and Carlye were in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea decades before I was born,” she said. “At the time of their affair, they were under the command of Colonel Sherman Potter and the spiritual guidance of Father Francis Mulcahy.”

  “They were also fictional,” I noted. “I am asking about you and Tyler Clayton, two people who are real.”

  “A lot of people think Hawkeye was in love with Major Margaret Houlihan, but I believe Carlye was his true match,” Molly volunteered. It was not a response to my question or to my remark about Tyler and her, but I wondered whether there was a message Molly was trying to deliver.

  “Why do you think he did not love Margaret?” I asked, eschewing the crude nickname “Hot Lips” that the character was given in the novel, film, and t
elevision series. “Did you see something about the way he acted with her that was different than his manner with Carlye?”

  “He told Carlye he loved her,” Molly said without hesitation. “He never said that to Margaret.”

  Ms. Washburn, who had been watching intently, said, “How did Hawkeye know Margaret?” I understood that she was asking about Molly and Tyler, but that was not going to be an effective strategy in this context. Molly might be speaking in metaphor, but she would answer any questions about her special interest in a literal sense.

  Indeed, she looked positively contemptuous when she said, “She was assigned to the four-oh-seven-seventh when he got there.”

  “Of course,” Ms. Washburn said. “Sorry.”

  Molly’s mother was squinting at her daughter and me as if he were speaking a language she did not understand. “Why are we talking about M*A*S*H?” she asked. “Molly, Mr. Hoenig has questions for you. Please answer them.” Sometimes parents are anxious to have their children with behaviors on the spectrum show off that they can act without those “quirks.” But it is often more effective to indulge the idiosyncrasies and work with the personality.

  “When M*A*S*H aired its final episode in 1983, it attracted the largest viewing audience in broadcast television history with the exception of some special events like the Super Bowl,” Molly said. She was drifting further from the conversation. Evelyn grimaced but did not respond.

  I decided the metaphor would be most helpful. Where talking bluntly would be the more useful tactic with Tyler, Molly needed to communicate in her own fashion, which appeared to be through her own agenda and specialized information. “What did Father Mulcahy think about the fact that Hawkeye and Carlye were not married to each other, and she was in fact married to someone else?” I asked.

  “It didn’t matter that they weren’t married because she was really his true love,” Molly said. It was not an answer to my question, but it gave me information that was going to be helpful. But I wanted to know one thing more.