The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband (21 page)

In the photograph, Oliver Lewis smiled toward the camera. He wore a dark blue suit with a red tie and a white shirt. “He looks like a walking American flag,” Ms. Washburn observed. I did not agree, since flags are flat and the suit had no stars or stripes, but I understood she was being sarcastic.

The Cynthia Maholm in the photograph was the Sheila McInerney who first walked into the Questions Answered office. She appeared stunned, her eyes a little red and unfocused, as if drugged. She could easily have been unaware of her surroundings or the proceedings apparently taking place around her.

“Except for all that has happened since our first meeting, I would believe this woman's story about marrying a man she didn't know, possibly against her will,” I told my associate.

“I see what you mean. Do you want to go back?” Ms. Washburn pointed toward a passage to the far side of the kitchen, which undoubtedly led to the bedrooms, since none had been evident on our walk to this spot.

I nodded, and Ms. Washburn led the way. The hallway was paneled, which gave it a look similar to the exterior of the home, dating back to the mid-twentieth century. It was not, in my opinion, attractive.

There were three doors on the left side as we walked around the kitchen toward the rear of the house, where the bedrooms were situated. The house, I had noticed since we'd entered, was oddly quiet—more quiet even than would be expected from an empty residence.

The first bedroom we encountered had clearly never been used for sleeping. There was an acoustic guitar on a stand in one corner, two amplifiers on the opposite side of the room, and some sound-mixing equipment on the far wall under the window. There were no chairs and no bed, nor any other instruments.

“Maybe the house was being used for recording,” Ms. Washburn said. “Was Oliver Lewis a musician?”

I shook my head negatively. “This would be a very poor room in which to make a recording,” I said. “There are two windows that would brighten the sound and bring in noise from the outside, and no soundproofing on the walls. In fact, the room is barely absorbent of sound at all. The area rug on the floor is the least soundproof of any floor covering we've seen here.”

Ms. Washburn took some photographs of the room and we moved out into the hallway, then to the next door, which unlike the one to this bedroom, had been closed. She waited for me, then wordlessly looked at the doorknob. I turned it with my handkerchief, careful to keep the same side touching the knob as I had used before.

When the door swung open, Ms. Washburn gasped.

The room was certainly a place for someone to sleep; it had a queen-sized bed on the far wall, with a nightstand on either side. On the far nightstand was a paperback book of crime fiction, placed spine up to keep the page open. On the near nightstand were a prescription bottle, closed, a plastic bottle of Poland Spring water, a small bracelet, and a cellular phone. The wall to the right of the entrance had a dresser with four drawers, each of which was closed.

On the bed was Cynthia Maholm, and she was dead.

Twenty-six

“How did you get
into the house?” Detective Arthur Eastbrook of the Manville police department asked, left eye slightly more squinted open than the right.

It was a tricky question. We had called the police immediately after finding Cynthia Maholm, eyes wide open, mouth equally so, and her skin discolored and cold, on her bed. It had taken six minutes to get through to the proper dispatcher in Manville, but only four once the call had gone through for the first police cruiser to arrive.

But the fact was that we had entered the house illegally. Ms. Washburn had in fact crawled through a side window and let me in the side door. If we were called to testify in a trial, should the death be ruled a homicide, it was possible anything we said would be disallowed because of our improper method of entry.

It was also possible that we would be charged, right on the spot, with breaking and entering and taken to jail, where we had already been once in the course of this question. I was sure neither of us had any desire to be put back into that position.

“The door was unlocked,” Ms. Washburn said. “We came to see if Cindy Maholm was here, and when we called and rang, we discovered the side door was unlocked. We found her exactly that way when we came in.”

It was a lie, of course, but I saw no immediate reason to contradict Ms. Washburn's statement. Detective Eastbrook, with a battery-powered voice recorder in his hand, simply nodded.

“And what did you touch in this room?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I could say truthfully. “I had used a handkerchief to open the door, and we touched nothing once we saw Ms. Maholm's body on the bed.”

The detective's eyebrows met in the center of his forehead. “Why did you use a handkerchief to open the door?”

“Mr. Hoenig has Asperger's Syndrome,” Ms. Washburn explained immediately. “One of the ways that shows itself is in his … reluctance to touch objects he knows other people have handled.” I thought that was an excellent way to explain my feelings, and I added nothing.

But Detective Eastbrook seemed unsatisfied. “Uh-huh,” he said as Ms. Maholm's body was wheeled out of the room behind us. Ms. Washburn chose to look away; I watched, but gained no useful information. “So you were here looking for Cindy and you just found her like this?” It is not unusual for detectives and police officers to ask the same question in a number of varying ways, trying to elicit something other than the uniform response.

“That's right,” I said. “She was in exactly that state when we arrived. How long do you estimate she has been dead?”

“About six hours,” a medical technician behind me answered, perhaps believing I was part of the investigative team. “I can't be a hundred percent sure, but no more than twelve. I'd bet my job on that.”

Detective Eastbrook looked annoyed, possibly because the technician had answered to me and not to him. “You just did,” he said. The technician stopped, frowned, and left the hallway where we were standing, presumably for the front door and his vehicle.

“Do you honestly believe, detective, that we came here, somehow killed Ms. Maholm, inexplicably stayed in the house for up to twelve hours, and then called the police?”

“Honestly? I don't know what to believe, but I'm willing to bet the door wasn't unlocked when you got here,” Eastbrook said. He glanced at Ms. Washburn, who continued to avert her glance. “There are footprints in the dirt near the side window and the screen in that window is a little bit crooked, like someone put it back down in a hurry.”

“Very well. We did gain entry through that window,” I admitted.

Ms. Washburn looked at me. “I want my lawyer,” she said to the detective.

“You have to wait until I arrest you,” he answered, “and I'm not doing that. Your pal here is right. It would be stupid for you to kill Cindy and then call us to come and get you. I've seen it done, but you're not the type. I think you're just nosy and you needed to find out what was going on. You found out, and you let us know. We'll have more questions over the next couple of days, but as of right now, you're free to go.”

Ms. Washburn immediately turned to leave, but I stayed put and made the effort to look Eastbrook in the eye. “Do you have a suspicion as to Ms. Maholm's cause of death?” I asked.

He smiled a bit. “Yes. I do.” But he said no more.

Ms. Washburn took me gently by the arm, and we left the house. “I'm not sure it was a smart move to tell him we broke into the house,” she said quietly to me as we walked.

“It was the truth.”

“It can get us thrown in jail,” she countered.

“I doubt it will. If this is an issue with your husband—”

Ms. Washburn stopped walking and held up her hand to stop me. “My marriage is not an appropriate topic of conversation between us, Samuel,” she said. “Am I making myself clear?”

I must have stood silent for a long moment because her apparently angry suggestion had caught me unexpectedly. “Yes,” I said when I had considered a number of alternative responses.

“Good.”

The technician who had answered my question about Ms. Maholm's time of death was loading a black station wagon with equipment not far from where we were standing. When he saw me nearby, he walked toward us.

“Was Detective Eastbrook serious?” he asked. “Is my job really on the line on this call?”

I thought quickly about how to answer him honestly without revealing that I did not work for the Manville police department. “I believe the detective was simply expressing some irritation, but I'd be very surprised if your job was in jeopardy,” I said.

Ms. Washburn smiled faintly. I was doing well, apparently.

“That's a relief,” the technician said. “I don't know what got him so mad.”

“It is a perplexing case,” I said. “Can you make a guess about the cause of death?”

He hesitated. “I don't want to get myself into any more trouble.”

Ms. Washburn put a hand to her mouth, perhaps stifling a small laugh.

“I promise you,” I said, “anything you say will stay between us. I will never mention it to Detective Eastbrook.”

That seemed to relax the young man. “If I had to guess, I'd say she OD'd,” he said. “But whatever it was hit her pretty fast and pretty hard. Her eyes were open and she looked surprised. There's just one thing.”

That is always significant. “What?” Ms. Washburn asked.

“The pill bottle on her bedstand was for thirty pills. There were twenty-eight pills in the bottle. She didn't OD on that.”

“So it might have been something else,” I suggested.

“Could be almost anything,” the technician answered.

“What is your favorite Beatles song?” I asked him.

He didn't hesitate, the sign of someone not easily unnerved by a question he did not expect. “‘Doctor Robert,'” he said.

Workaholic.

“This makes it much more difficult to answer the question,” I told Ms. Washburn as we drove to the Questions Answered office.

“The fact that she's dead?” she asked. “Doesn't it suggest some pattern to you? Something that can bring us closer to figuring out who killed Oliver Lewis?”

“It suggests a number of possibilities,” I answered. “I meant that Ms. Maholm's death makes it much more difficult to answer her question about Mr. Lewis.”

“I think that ship has sailed, Samuel.” It was a metaphor. She was not referring to an actual ship. I'd heard the reference before, and Mother had explained that it meant some things were simply too late to reverse. Death does that.

“I suppose so,” I said. “Our focus should now be firmly on Detective Dickinson's question.”

“You said Cindy Maholm's death suggested a number of possibilities,” she reminded me.

That was true; I'd said that. But it seemed that Ms. Washburn was expecting some sort of response. After seven seconds, she added, “What are those possibilities?”

“Two things seem clear,” I answered, grateful for her intuition and understanding of my train of thought. (That is also a metaphor, but one that visually makes sense to me—thoughts do travel in a linear fashion from one to the next, as a train travels on a track but can be diverted when someone throws a switch. I had a special interest in train travel when I was six years old.) “First, it appears that Oliver Lewis's marriages and his business interests were in some way intermingled. Both were certainly unconventional and provided motives for someone to want him dead. Second, Cynthia Maholm, who approached me as Sheila McInerney, must have been closer to the center of the intrigue than the other ex-wives, since she is the one someone decided to eliminate.”

“Do you think it's possible the other WOOL members are in danger?”

“I do. And that is one of the reasons I am glad I will be seeing Hazel Montrose later today.”

Ms. Washburn, even in profile, could not hide her smile.

When we arrived at Questions Answered, Detective Dickinson was waiting in the parking lot. He got out of his car when he saw us arrive, and approached us as I unlocked the office door.

“I saw the bulletin from Manville,” he said. “Why didn't I hear it from you first?”

“We were being questioned by Detective Eastbrook,” I explained as we walked inside. “The case is outside your jurisdiction, detective. I'm not sure what the information would have told you.”

“The
information
is enough to make me think it's linked to Oliver Lewis's murder, don't you?” Detective Dickinson said. His voice had a confrontational tone I found difficult to hear. I resisted the impulse to put my hands to my ears in an effort to muffle the sound.

Ms. Washburn must have seen me wince. “I'm sure Mr. Hoenig agrees,” she said. “But you got everything off the dispatch you would have gotten from us, I'm sure. Now, we can give you a report if you like, but we don't have an answer to your question yet.” She motioned toward the client chair, but Detective Dickinson was not showing signs of calming down.

“One of the key witnesses, a woman we've been searching for since the body showed up on your floor, just died, possibly murdered, and you want to give me a report but you don't have an answer?” he bellowed. I could no longer resist and put my left hand up to my ear. “It's been
days
!”

“Could you please lower the volume of your voice, detective?” I asked as I began to walk the perimeter of the office. I had not exercised enough times today, and there was the added benefit of being farther from the detective as I walked most of the room.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. He did lower his voice by a factor of approximately one third.

“I am exercising to maintain my health,” I told him. “Now, here is what we know: Oliver Lewis was a serial monogamist who seduced women, possibly with date rape drugs, married them and then ignored them until they filed for divorce. He might be the father of Amy Stanhope's child, but we have no proof of that yet. After posing as Sheila McInerney and contracting me to discover who the man calling himself her husband really was, Cynthia Maholm claimed she was being threatened by her husband, set up a strange scene for Ms. Washburn and myself to witness, then insisted we be arrested for trespassing on her property.

“She vanished, and now has been discovered in Oliver Lewis's home, dead in the bedroom from what appears to be a drug overdose, although quite likely not an accidental one or a successful suicide attempt.”

“It was definitely a murder?” Detective Dickinson asked. “That wasn't in the dispatch.”

“It is not confirmed, but it is probable,” I told him. “And the most likely person to ask about it is Terry Lambroux or the real Sheila McInerney, neither of whom we have yet been able to locate.”

“That's not a great report,” Dickinson groused. “The only thing I know now that I didn't know a minute ago is that Cindy Maholm was probably murdered, but the MO is different from Lewis's murder. I don't know what to make of that.”

“Neither do we,” Ms. Washburn said.

“Don't worry,” I told them both. “We should know more by tomorrow morning.”

“You have a plan?” Dickinson asked.

“No. I have a date.”