The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband (20 page)

“She is female, according to court documents.”

Mike nodded, as if that made sense in his estimation, which I did not understand. “The cops can't find her?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Well, can't you ask her friends? Somebody must have been at her house at one time or another.”

I had already asked the only friends of Terry Lambroux I knew of, the members of WOOL. “They all said they'd never met Terry anywhere but at a party, and most of them knew of her only by name, had never actually met her, and could not confirm her gender.”

“This is somebody trying very hard not to be found,” Mike observed.

“Indeed.”

“So it seems to me that the best way to find her is to get her to come looking for you,” he said.

It was the best idea I'd heard all day. The first thing I did when I got home, after greeting my mother and having the dinner she'd cooked, was to call Hazel Montrose and ask her out to dinner the next night.

She agreed.

Twenty-five

“You took my advice,”
Ms. Washburn said. She sounded surprised.

We were in her car, driving toward Oliver Lewis's most recent address in what I feared would be a futile attempt to locate Cynthia Maholm. I was taking a great deal of care to be sure that the black Ford Escape with the two off-duty policemen in it was not following us, and so far, it certainly was not.

“I often take your advice,” I reminded her. “I find your advice invaluable. Why do you consider this instance to be unusual?”

“Because I was advising you to do something you really didn't want to do,” she answered. Her Global Positioning System indicated we would be in the car for another fourteen minutes. “And then you went ahead and called Hazel Montrose for a date. I know that's very frightening for you, so it does surprise me that you did it.”

“I was operating on Mike's suggestion that we find a way to get Terry Lambroux to come to us because we have not been able to find her as yet,” I explained.

“Mike is the cab driver?”

“Yes.”

“What's his last name?”

“I don't know,” I said.

Ms. Washburn's eyebrows undulated a bit. “You don't know? This guy comes and drives you home a few times a week and you don't know his last name? That's very uncharacteristic of you, Samuel.”

“Mike has never given me any reason to mistrust him,” I said. “He comes whenever I call him, and he drives me wherever I need to go. I don't need to know anything more than that.”

“You do have a valid driver's license,” Ms. Washburn reminded me.

“As a means of identification and for use in extreme emergencies,” I answered. “I got it because Mother was worried about her health and felt I might need to transport myself if something incapacitating happened to her. I accepted her reasoning and did as she asked. But I never use the license. You know that.”

“You should keep in practice in case you need it. Maybe I should let you drive the car once a week or something.”

The idea of it led to a band of perspiration at my rear hairline. “I don't think so,” I said.

We sat silently for forty-one seconds. “How?” Ms. Washburn said.

“How?” I echoed.

“How does your buddy's saying you should get Terry Lambroux to come to us lead to you asking out Hazel Montrose?”

“Ah! That is the interesting part.” Ms. Washburn turned onto Route 22, one of the most notoriously dangerous roads in New Jersey, and I refrained from speaking for fear of distracting her. She did not ask me to explain myself, understanding my concern, for the seven minutes and eight seconds we remained on the road.

When she turned off again, I resumed my thought. “Since Terry Lambroux has been so careful about maintaining her anonymity, it was clear that she has some involvement in the death of Oliver
Lewis, or in some matter that she prefers no one discover. ‘Smoking her out,' as Mike would say, is difficult. And since whoever sent the two men in the Ford Escape after us certainly did not want to be identified, we might put Terry on the list of possible suspects for that.”

“That doesn't get to your date with Hazel,” Ms. Washburn noted.

“Not yet, but consider this: Assuming that Terry is the person who sent the two men—or at least who is having Oliver Lewis's business watched—the only contact, however indirect, we have had with her is through them.”

Ms. Washburn said nothing. That sometimes means the other person is waiting for you to speak. I realized I had not yet explained the connection to Hazel, which was certainly indistinct, but undeniable.

“Add to what I've said that Hazel is the only member of WOOL who Rachel does not know, and of whose existence Rachel seems ignorant. According to Rachel, there is no such person as Hazel Montrose, but there is such a person as Sheila McInerney. Clearly, Hazel is the crux of this deception, even if she herself is not aware of it.”

“I said that very thing before,” Ms. Washburn reminded me as she stopped the car on a suburban street in Manville, the last address Oliver Lewis had registered as a residence.

“Yes, but now it is part of an effort to find Terry Lambroux,” I answered. “When I meet with Hazel in public, I will be sure at least one other WOOL member knows it, and that, we can probably assume, will lead to it being common knowledge among them. I think we can assume our two stalkers in the Ford Escape will be in the area as well. If I can make it look like I'm getting new information from Hazel, Terry Lambroux will be forced to reveal herself and we can start to make real progress toward answering Detective Dickinson's question.”

Having turned the car's engine off and applied the parking brake, Ms. Washburn removed her seat belt and turned toward me, making sure I was looking into her face. “You wanted to ask out Hazel Montrose,” she said. “Why not just admit that's why you're doing it?”

This was puzzling. Clearly she had been listening when I detailed the reasons for my action, and yet she was assuming another motivation entirely was responsible for the plan. “I assure you, my interest in Hazel is entirely within the context of the question,” I said.

A moment passed, then Ms. Washburn opened the driver's side door. “Okay,” she said. “Let's go talk to Cindy Maholm.”

I considered it extremely unlikely we would, but that was the purpose of our visit, so I got out of the car and followed Ms. Washburn to the house.

It was a ranch style home, all on one level, appearing by the architecture to date to the 1960s. The house had been maintained, but not improved, so the casement windows and the original siding, which was probably made with asbestos, were intact. I hesitated for a moment, thinking about the danger of inhaling near the exterior of this house, but the fact is that asbestos is probably most dangerous when being removed, and we had come for a reason. I waited for Ms. Washburn to press the doorbell button, but she did not.

“Go ahead,” she said, pointing to the button. “Push it.”

I did not understand. “Why?” I asked.

“Because sometimes I won't be here and you'll have to. Go ahead, Samuel. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” She pointed at the button once more.

“Honestly, I would rather not.” The thought of what could be living on that device was enough to make me rethink the whole trip. I am not a germaphobe, but I do like to minimize my exposure to illnesses. I do not enjoy being sick, and Mother says I am an especially bad patient.

“It's not about what you'd rather. It's about what you need to know you can do.” She crossed her arms. This is a signal in body language that one is firm in one's convictions and unwilling to bend on the subject.

Finally it became a choice between what was more disturbing: pushing a button or prolonging my exposure to asbestos. I reached into my hip pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and covered my finger with it, pressing the doorbell button, which initiated a sound inside the house.

Ms. Washburn did not smile smugly, and I appreciated that.

We waited for thirty-seven seconds, during which Ms. Washburn said, “I'm glad you did that, Samuel. If I'm not there, you know now that you can handle it.”

I did not respond, but my mind was racing through possible scenarios under which Ms. Washburn might not be present. The most obvious, of course, was a decision to stop working at Questions Answered because her husband, Simon Taylor, disapproved. But people in films and on television sometimes speak of situations in which they might not be present when they know they have a short time to live. I did not want to consider that possibility for Ms. Washburn.

Before I could ask her about it, however, she looked at me and said, “I don't think anybody's home.”

“Certainly no one who wishes to let us in,” I acknowledged. “Would you try the doorknob, please?”

Ms. Washburn seemed to consider the question and nodded. “This time,” she said quietly. But when she tried to turn it, the doorknob would not move. “Locked.”

“Perhaps a back door.” I started around the left side of the house, where the driveway extended from the street to the back yard. Ms. Washburn, understanding my desire for thoroughness, walked around to the right side of the house, where there was grass.

I did not encounter any promising signs, and there was no back door, but there was one on the side of the house, where Ms. Washburn joined me. This door was also locked, and she told me there was none on the opposite side. It appeared the front door and this one were the only entrances.

“I don't suppose you know how to pick a lock,” I said as a joke. It would never occur to me to enter someone's house without permission; that is the very definition of rudeness.

Ms. Washburn, apparently thinking I was serious (something that happens to me quite often when I'm trying to amuse), shook her head. “No. Sorry.”

It would be pointless and perhaps insulting for me to tell her I had not been in earnest, so I simply looked up at the house. “Perhaps we should try the doorbell again.”

“Yeah, or maybe we could do this.” Ms. Washburn walked to the left of the door and reached for the window, which was not high off the ground. She raised the screen meant to keep insects from flying into the house, and lifted herself from the concrete step to the windowsill before I could protest. She let herself into the room just inside the entrance, which appeared to be a sunroom or an enclosed patio, and vanished.

I was dumbfounded. I could not even call her name for fear of being discovered. I felt my hand reach up to touch my nose. How could I get inside and keep Ms. Washburn away from any danger that might confront her? What if something were happening to her right now? Should I climb through the window? Wouldn't that be a serious breach of social interaction, in addition to being illegal?

Standing paralyzed by indecision was no answer. I took one step toward the window, telling myself I did so just to examine the window more closely and determine if Ms. Washburn was inside and safe. But I did not have time to consider that, or even to take another step.

Ms. Washburn opened the side door from the inside of the house and beckoned to me. “Come on,” she said in a low volume. I had no decibel meter, but I could tell it was not as loudly as she might normally speak from this distance. “It's okay.”

I walked to the door and shook my head. “That was an extremely reckless action,” I told Ms. Washburn. “We should leave before the police come and arrest us for breaking and entering.”

“We haven't broken anything. I even put the screen back down. And you haven't entered yet. But this is the way you can find out if anything fishy is going on in Oliver Lewis's house.” She turned back and headed inside the house, then stopped and looked at me. “Well? Come on!
Oliver
's not going to file a complaint, and anybody else who's in there is just as guilty as we are.” She walked inside without looking back again.

Ms. Washburn had made some salient points, but the fact remained that walking into the house would be an illegal act. The real question was whether the information I might gain from entering would be valuable enough to justify the risk. And there was no way of determining that ahead of time.

In short, I walked into the house and followed Ms. Washburn, largely to keep my promise to shield her from any possible dangers.

Under analogous circumstances, Mother might say that was my story, and I was sticking to it. Although one doesn't actually stick to a story, as it is not a physical object.

Ms. Washburn was waiting for me in the sunroom, which was bordered on one side by windows that could be insulated to make the room usable during the winter. Now they all had insect screens pulled down. They were also, with the exception of the one Ms. Washburn had used for entry, closed, and it was stuffy and warm inside the room. The other three walls were bare except for one bookshelf, which held nothing but six compact discs, all by bands that were not the Beatles.

“I didn't see anything important in here, but maybe you'll notice something,” she said as soon as I was near enough to hear. This was, I understood, Ms. Washburn's way of starting the conversation and refraining from teasing me about coming inside when I believed it to be the wrong thing to do.

The room was unremarkable except for being somewhat under-furnished. If Oliver Lewis had lived here, either he had not lived here long, or he had not used this room very extensively. There was an old, somewhat threadbare sofa under one bank of windows, a standing pole lamp next to it and a stereo system, covered in dust, opposite. Hardly the kind of place a man with seventeen million dollars might live.

“This is certainly not the hub of activity for a man living here anytime recently,” I said, mostly to myself. Ms. Washburn's notebook was out and she was writing in it. “Oliver Lewis might not have been using this as his residence, but if not, it was somewhere other than the apartment in Edison where Cynthia Maholm staged his escape. That was never a residence for either of them.”

I moved through the room, taking in each angle, although I knew Ms. Washburn, a photographer by trade before she became my associate, was using a small digital camera she carries with her to preserve the site just as we saw it. She does not trust photographs taken with cellular telephones, she has told me. “Something that's not made expressly to take pictures doesn't take very good pictures, Samuel.” It seemed logical.

Similar sights awaited us in a small dining area with no table but a chandelier, a kitchen with nothing in five of the six cabinets (the sixth held three cereal bowls, a plate, two beer mugs, and a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes of Corn), and a living room with a somewhat incongruous large-screen high-definition television with impressive surround-sound speakers, a reclining chair, wall-to-wall carpet that appeared to have been vacuum cleaned recently, and a photograph on the mantelpiece of Oliver Lewis and Cynthia Maholm at what must have been their wedding.