The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband (28 page)

What was important, however, was to observe the other women when I said, “One of the others killed Cynthia. Was it because she was threatening to tell the police about what happened to Oliver Lewis?”

“Of course not,” Hazel answered. “Now, enough. I have to burn you up and then get on with my life.” Once again she reached for the matches.

Having observed, I had one last tactic to try: “So it was Amy. I had suspected, but until this moment, I did not have it confirmed.”

Hazel stopped her motion and the other women looked at her.

“Cynthia Maholm died of an overdose of Reglan, a drug commonly given to pregnant women for nausea. The person who would obviously have had access to that would have been Amy. And when I suggested that you were not the culprit, Hazel, each one of you stole a glance at Amy.”

“Amy?” Ms. Washburn was clearly shocked.

“Yes. Interesting how appearances can be deceiving, but I pay little attention to appearance. It made sense that all the women had a stake in Oliver Lewis's illicit fortune, and each one had a grudge against him,” I explained. “But when Cynthia Maholm was killed, it was a panicked act, something unplanned, by one of the WOOL members who did not consult the others. Hazel did not mention Cynthia's death when we went to dinner last night. If she had known, she would have said so, if only to distance herself from the crime. She didn't know it had occurred.”

Hazel stopped and moved her mouth but said nothing.

“Amy was the real mastermind, wasn't she? I'll bet Oliver Lewis isn't even really the father of her child.”

Amy walked over to me, looked me in the eye, and in a voice unlike the one she had been affecting since I'd met her, said, “Of course he wasn't. But that's enough. Light them up, Hazel.”

I believe this time there would have been nothing I could say that would have distracted Hazel from her task, but the sounds I had expected throughout this entire ordeal became audible from the stairwell outside the OLimited offices. Loud footsteps were getting louder as they approached. From my position I could not see the window, but I did see blue and red lights reflected on the walls of the offices.

Ms. Washburn drew in a long breath. “Finally,” she said.

The four WOOL members looked around the room in disbelief as a voice came from the direction of the door: “Police! Open the door!”

“We are in here, officer!” Ms. Washburn shouted.

Amy turned toward Jenny and said, “Shoot them.”

Jenny looked at the pistol, then at me, then at Ms. Washburn, then back at Amy. “Forget it,” she said. She handed the gun back to Amy.

I wished she hadn't done that.

But Amy seemed more astonished and angry at Ms. LeBlanc than intent on shooting Ms. Washburn and myself. “What did you say?” she asked. Clearly, she knew what Jenny had said, but the question is sometimes asked as a pejorative, a way to disagree with the statement just made. I believe that was what Amy was doing at that moment.

Jenny did not answer, and Amy raised the pistol in her direction.

“She's got a gun!” Ms. Washburn shouted.

In less than a second, the door to the offices opened forcibly, and behind it was a police officer in uniform, his leg still raised from kicking the creaking door in. I expected the door had been unlocked and could have been opened easily, but police officers do enjoy some drama, I have observed.

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 outside, 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
.”