The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband (15 page)

“Who did it?” Ms. LeBlanc asked.

“I do not know,” I said. “But I have been contracted to answer that question.”

“Cindy Maholm hired you to find out who killed Ollie?” Ms. LeBlanc said. “That doesn't sound like Cindy.”

“It was not,” I explained. “Another party asked me to look into that question.”

To her credit, Ms. LeBlanc did not ask the identity of my second client. “That's not what you said when you came in,” she said. “You said Cindy had asked you to answer a question.”

“She did,” I assured her. “But it was not that question. I have not seen Ms. Maholm since before Mr. Lewis died.”

“Oh my god,” Amy said, seemingly to Ms. LeBlanc. “Do you think Cindy killed him?”

I did not respond, since that question was not aimed at me. But it did open some interesting possibilities, and established a connection I had not previously known to exist. “Do you also know Cynthia Maholm?” I asked Amy.

“Oh, yeah,” came the answer. “She's also a wool.”

I looked at Mike to see if this was an expression I should have been familiar with, but he shrugged and shook his head. “A wool?” I repeated.

Jennifer LeBlanc looked somewhat sharply in Amy's direction, but the younger woman did not notice or chose not to take the expression into account. “A WOOL,” she said, as if it were obvious and she could not understand why I seemed confused. “A Wife Of Oliver Lewis. Like Jenny and me.”

nineteen

It took quite some
time—fifty-seven minutes—to sort out the story. Apparently Hazel Montrose had not been accurate nor honest in her accounting of Oliver Lewis's wives. Besides herself and Cynthia Maholm, there had been three more women who had married, and divorced, the dead man.

“We all got to know each other,” Amy Stanhope said after a series of rebukes from Jennifer LeBlanc that she was divulging privileged information. Ms. Stanhope had countered with the idea that since Mr. Lewis was dead, there was no harm in revealing the small subclass of women belonging to the exclusive club they had named WOOL. “Jenny started it. She tried to reach out to Rachel—that's Rachel Vandross, Ollie's second wife—to try to warn her about him. But Rachel had already married Ollie, and then there was Hazel, and then there was me, and then there was Cindy … well, you know how that went. We all got together. But you had to be divorced from Ollie to join WOOL, and Cindy was still married to him, so she couldn't come and hang with us.” She stopped and considered. “I guess now she can. Does a widow count, Jenny?”

Jennifer LeBlanc, with an air of resignation, waved her hands in a gesture of futility. “What the hell. Maybe Cindy offed the bastard and did us all a favor. Sure, she can come and have a glass of wine.”

Mike had spent the past three minutes intermittently blinking in what must have been astonishment. He looked at me, then at Ms. LeBlanc, then at Ms. Stanhope, and then at me again. “There were five of you? You all married the same guy and you all divorced him?”

“Not Cindy,” Ms. Stanhope reminded him.

Ms. LeBlanc ignored Mike's confusion and went on. “That's the kind of guy Ollie is—was,” she said. “You actually needed a support group after he was done with you. He'd make you feel like the center of the universe, and then he'd leave you by the side of the road without so much as a toothbrush.”

The information was coming at me quickly. “Why would he not allow you a toothbrush?” I asked.

“I didn't mean it
literally
.” But I continued to muse over the concept of a figurative toothbrush for a few moments.

When I could focus again, Ms. Stanhope was saying, “It wasn't a regular thing. Like, there weren't WOOL meetings or anything. We just kept in touch and we'd get together for a drink or coffee or something. Not all of us at the same time ever, I don't think. Whoever happened to be around and need some cheering up or whatever, you know?”

“When was the last time you saw Oliver Lewis?” I asked.

It was significant that the two women looked at each other before answering. I wondered if it were necessary for them to coordinate the response, to set their story. But I did not suggest that as it would undoubtedly lead to a confrontation about the possibility of a false answer, and that would not be a productive strategy.

“At least a year ago,” Ms. LeBlanc said. “Probably longer. After he's done with you, he's done with you.”

“Yeah, at least that,” Ms. Stanhope concurred.

We all stared a bit in her direction. “You are pregnant by Mr. Lewis?” I asked.

Ms. Stanhope's eyes wandered up and to the right; she was thinking. “Oh, yeah. So I saw him maybe four months ago. But that was the last time.”

At that point I had a decision to make. Calling out Ms. Stanhope on the obvious lie could lead to her confessing the truth, but if Ms. Washburn were here, she would probably say it might alienate Ms. LeBlanc and that would be the price to pay. However, letting the statement go without any expression of skepticism might convince the two women that I was gullible and therefore easily manipulated.

It was hard to make the choice without Ms. Washburn's advice.

“What were the circumstances under which you saw your ex-husband four months ago?” I asked Ms. Stanhope. The question did not betray any disbelief in her statement, and I took pains to say it with the least inflection I could offer. I don't always know when my tone communicates some unintended emotion.

Again, Ms. Stanhope looked to Ms. LeBlanc, presumably for some signal that would convey a possible response, but her compatriot was looking at me, and probably could not have communicated the thought anyway.

“Um … we had sex,” Ms. Stanhope said.

Mike stifled a laugh behind me.

“Did you meet often for that purpose?” I asked.

Her face seemed tense. “No. Just that once,” she said.

“So your ex-husband, who you knew had frequently married and left women when he tired of them, left you, but at some point you and he reunited one time to have intercourse?” I confess I would have preferred another word at the end of the question, but could think of none at the time. Given a few more minutes, I might have said, “an intimate encounter.”

“I think that's enough,” M. LeBlanc said as Ms. Stanhope's eyes pleaded with her for relief. “We've told you everything you're going to find out here. It's everything we know. We had no idea Ollie was dead, so we can't help you with that. And we don't know where Cindy is, so we can't help you with
that
. I'm not going to shoot you and your pal here isn't going to shoot us. So what do you say we call it a night?”

“Yes,” Ms. Stanhope concurred. “Go back home and see your mom.”

At the mention of Mother, my instinct had me look at Mike, who knew what I was thinking. “It's close to nine,” he said.

“I must be going,” I told the women. “I am late for dinner.”

“No kidding,” Ms. LeBlanc agreed.

Mother was not upset when I walked through the back door into our kitchen. “I knew you were with Mike,” she said. “I was sure nothing bad would happen.”

Mike had, as was his custom, dropped me off in the driveway and then driven home himself. He thanked me for “an interesting evening,” and was grinning and shaking his head as he backed out of the driveway. I did not have the time to ask him why he was doing that.

Mother opened the oven door and reached in with a potholder. “The plate is very hot, so be careful,” she said, removing a heavy ceramic oblong plate with slices of turkey breast separated neatly from a baked potato and green beans. “You must be starving.”

I knew she did not mean that I was in danger of having my body attempt to nourish itself on its own tissue, so I did not correct her. Besides, I was quite hungry and sat down at the table to eat.

“Janet called twice while you were out,” Mother said. “I'm starting to think it wouldn't be an awful thing if you tried getting a cell phone again.”

Three years earlier I had acted against my natural impulse and purchased a cellular phone because Mother had been ill and I did not want to be out of touch in the event that she needed me at any moment. But I had lost the phone after two days, and had not replaced it, confident that the same thing would happen again. I do not pay attention to objects when I am engrossed in a question, and I tend to misplace them.

I chose not to address Mother's comment because the idea of carrying such an easily lost item still made me uncomfortable. “What was Ms. Washburn calling about?” I asked her.

“She heard from Detective Dickinson,” she answered. “Something about Oliver Lewis's wives.”

I knew Mother was usually much more thorough than that, and concluded that she wanted me to return Ms. Washburn's call, but I was not sure about doing so. “It is almost ten,” I said. “Do you think I might disturb her?”

“I'm a lot older than her, and I'm not in bed yet,” Mother pointed out, although I did not see the correlation between age and bedtime. It was something that Mother understood, I concluded, and not really worth the time to explore at this moment.

I went to the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed Ms. Washburn's number, which I had memorized. I have memorized the telephone number of every person I have ever called, with the exception of some businesses whose computerized services call Questions Answered on occasion to ask if I am a senior citizen in need of medical insurance or a new mother interested in a diaper service. I call them to ask firmly to be taken off their lists of potential clients.

Ms. Washburn answered on the second ring and said I had made the correct choice by calling and had not interrupted anything important at her home. I did not hear Simon Taylor at all, so I assumed he was not in the room, as he might be otherwise telling his wife again what a poor decision it was to resume working with me. I was a bit intimidated by Simon Taylor, despite our never having met.

“Detective Dickinson called before for a progress report,” Ms. Washburn told me now.

“It has only been hours since the last time we spoke,” I pointed out. “The detective must be unusually anxious about this question.”

“He is. When I told him I'd left you after we'd talked to Hazel and then Roger Siplowitz, he asked about Oliver Lewis's other wives. Did you know he had other wives?”

“Yes. Five in all, I believe. I just left two of them in a house in Fords.”

There was a silence of four seconds on the other end of the line. “You went to someone's house in Fords?” Ms. Washburn asked. “How did you get there?”

“My friend Mike the taxicab driver took me there. He served as a very adequate backup when one of Mr. Lewis's ex-wives was holding a gun on me.”

Mother's head turned sharply toward me, and she and Ms. Washburn chorused at the same instant, “Samuel!”

“No shots were fired,” I pointed out, and told Ms. Washburn—and by extension, Mother—the entire story of my visit with Jennifer LeBlanc and Amy Stanhope. I did not leave out any details, since the one that Mother (and, it appeared, Ms. Washburn) would find most disturbing was the one I had mentioned first.

“What did the detective say besides pointing out Mr. Lewis's rather colorful marital history?” I asked Ms. Washburn when my tale had been completed.

“He mostly grumbled about doing more work on this case—his words, not mine, Samuel—than we are,” was her reply. “It's very strange to me that he hired us on this question when he seems to be doing the same things we're doing. Why would he pay for that when he can do it himself?”

“Only one of many contradictions and puzzlements surrounding this question,” I agreed. “I wonder if Detective Esteban is really the one doing the work for the Piscataway police department, and our client is merely reporting what she has accomplished as if it were the fruit of his own labors.”

“Good question,” Mother said. I had forgotten about the dinner she had served for me, and looked at it. I realized I was hungry.

“Well, thank you for the report,” I told Ms. Washburn. “I believe I will eat some turkey now.”

“Hang on, Samuel,” she said. “There was one more thing the detective said that I think you need to know.”

“What is that?” I was focusing on the food and had to force myself to pay attention to the voice on the telephone, which now seemed more disembodied because my mind was elsewhere.

“He said the preliminary report from the medical examiner showed that the cut to the throat was not the cause of Oliver Lewis's death. He said Oliver had also been poisoned with something called Metoclopramide, or Reglan, stabbed in the ribs with a smaller sharp object, possibly a scissor or nail file, and probably suffocated.”

That stopped my thinking about the turkey for a moment. “Four causes of death?” I said, mostly thinking aloud.

“Technically, the poison was what did him in. They found it in his stomach, not just in his esophagus, which would indicate it had been swallowed and made it into his bloodstream. The others were either inflicted on him after he was already poisoned or maybe someone cut his throat just before he died. That could have something to do with the relatively small amount of blood found on the scene.”

“Indeed. Whoever killed Mr. Lewis was being remarkably thorough.”

Mother looked at me with a questioning expression, but said nothing. She considers it rude to speak to someone when he or she is talking on the phone, and knew I would inform her of my findings—or in this case, Ms. Washburn's recitation of the findings from either Detective Dickinson or (more likely in my estimation) Detective Esteban.

“Did the detective say what Reglan is?” I asked. I had no immediate access to my Mac Pro, so I could not do the research now.

“It's a medication for nausea,” Ms. Washburn said. “Ironic, no?”

I had no idea if that was ironic; the concept is a difficult one for me. “Nausea. Is it a prescription medication?”

“Yes. It's given for acid reflux, for some diabetics, and for a number of other conditions. How can that kill?”

“An overdose of almost any medication, in sufficient quantity, can be fatal, Ms. Washburn.” My dinner was now utmost in my mind; my attention was flagging.

“What do you think we have to do next?” Ms. Washburn asked.

“I have to go eat some turkey,” I answered. “I believe you should go to sleep. In the morning, we are going to redouble our efforts to find Cynthia Maholm, and I believe I know how to begin.”

“How?” she asked.

“We need to find the address at which Oliver Lewis was living before he married Ms. Maholm. Good night, Ms. Washburn.”

“Good night, Samuel,” she said.