The Question of the Dead Mistress

by E. J. Copperman

  “What about him? Is he a ghost too?” She stood up and leaned over my shoulder. Her presence was not lost on me, but I had found a significant piece of information and that provided a more immediate priority.

  “Perhaps,” I said. I did not literally mean that I thought William Klein had become a vengeful spirit who was haunting his widow. I was being figurative. “Ms. Fontaine failed to tell us an important detail about her husband’s death.”

  “Which husband?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  Of course; I had not taken the circumstances of the conversation into account. Ms. Washburn is invaluable at keeping my focus on the subject. “Brett Fontaine,” I answered. “We might have an answer as to why his body was left in front of that house on High Street, even if we don’t know where he was killed.”

  Ms. Washburn leaned over farther so that when she spoke her voice sounded louder than it should. “Don’t make me play guessing games, Samuel,” she said. “What’s the big clue?”

  I indicated a point on the screen. “It’s the house in front of which you found Brett Fontaine’s body,” I said. “It’s the same house in which Virginia and William Klein were living when he fell off the fire escape to his death.”

  “That’s crazy,” Ms. Washburn said, I believe mostly to herself.

  “That is only half of it,” I said. “The police report indicates there were three bolts missing from a coupling on the fire escape. In short, it appears that someone wanted Mr. Klein—or someone—to fall three stories.”

  ten

  “Yes, I am aware that Brett was found … in front of … that house.” Virginia Fontaine dabbed at her right eye with a facial tissue. She was a very skilled liar, I had decided, and therefore it was difficult to know when she was telling the truth. In this case, the deception might not have been in her words as much as her demeanor. She was very much the grieving widow right now, but that might have simply been for our benefit. “It sends a shiver up my spine to think about it.” That part was definitely a lie.

  “And the missing bolts on the fire escape?” I asked. Ms. Washburn looked at me, indicating I had been too abrupt.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Virginia said. “I was at work when William fell and the police told me it was an accident. Maybe the bolts just fell out.”

  Ms. Washburn and I had not suggested a visit to Virginia’s home one day after her husband had been found dead on a street in New Brunswick. In fact, I had thought we should simply confront her with the growing cache of circumstantial evidence in a phone call, but Ms. Washburn had suggested we email Virginia and ask when she might be available.

  Virginia had said she wasn’t doing anything and we should come over immediately.

  For a new second-time widow it seemed strange that Virginia would have so little on her agenda. Once we’d arrived at her Highland Park home—a newly built “McMansion” as the ruder real estate agents might say—she had explained that relatives of her late husband were flying in from California and the funeral home would be handling all the arrangements for a final service the next day, assuming the medical examiner’s office had completed an autopsy by then.

  “What connection is there between your second husband and that house?” I asked. “Did he own the property?”

  Virginia shook her head. “He owned one up the street, but not that one. I wouldn’t even let him bid on it. But leaving his body there? It seems cruel. As if there were any question what he died from. They found the tire iron in the street next to him. What do they think happened? That Brett had a heart attack and the welts on his head were an accident?”

  “A great deal of information can be uncovered in an autopsy,” I assured her. “Much of it might very well help in determining who killed your husband and why.” I trained my eyes on her face against my natural impulse. I wanted to see her expression, but she continued to have a neutral look in her eyes and on her face.

  “I don’t care who killed my husband, or why they did it,” she said after a long exhalation. “He’s dead. What difference does it make?”

  “You hired us to answer those very questions,” Ms. Washburn reminded Virginia.

  “I probably shouldn’t have done that. It seemed like a good thing to do in front of that detective. He thinks I had something to do with Brett’s … with what happened to Brett.”

  I looked up, just then realizing I had trained my gaze on the floor, no doubt in reaction to having to search our client’s face for so long. “Does that mean you wish to terminate our agreement?” I said. Ms. Washburn glanced at me with a somewhat disapproving look in her eye. Perhaps my tone had been too hopeful.

  Virginia made quite the display of thinking about what I’d asked. “No,” she said. “I didn’t mean it when I said I don’t care. I do care. I care because the police think I did it and I need you to prove I didn’t.”

  Clearly the veneer of the grieving widow had been removed.

  “We don’t actually do that,” Ms. Washburn told Virginia. “We can’t answer a question if you already have an answer you want us to find. We go where the facts lead us.”

  Virginia Fontaine’s eyes reminded me of a woman in a film I’d seen as a child. That character had wanted to skin Dalmatian puppies to make a coat, as I recalled. I had been very disturbed by her when I was four and my mother never showed me that film again.

  “You think I killed Brett too?” she growled at Ms. Washburn.

  I do not respond well when people show my associate hostility, but in this case Ms. Washburn spoke before I could. “We don’t think anything yet,” she answered. Her statement was not technically true; both of us had a great many thoughts, but our opinions on the outcome of her question were not yet formed, and that was what Ms. Washburn was attempting to communicate. “But I can’t guarantee for you that you’ll get the answer you want. We tell that to every client we take on.” She smiled at Virginia.

  I noticed that Virginia did not smile in return. “But you do think I killed Brett,” she repeated.

  This time I felt it was my responsibility as the proprietor of Questions Answered to state the business’s philosophy. “We have not yet formed a theory about the way your husband died,” I told Virginia. “We have the question to answer and we will do so based strictly on empirical evidence and not emotional prejudices. At the moment all the circumstantial evidence points in one direction, but the research is in a very early stage. I have answered many questions that seemed certain to have one possible solution and found they were in fact based in another one completely. The facts will lead us to a conclusion. We make no judgments.”

  That was a very clear statement in my opinion. Virginia did not seem to share that view, however. She looked toward Ms. Washburn. “What did he just say?”

  “The same thing I just said. We don’t have an opinion. We won’t answer the question in any way except accurately.” Succinct, but true.

  Virginia Fontaine, if I understand the expression, heaved a sigh and put up her hands palms out. “Fine,” she said. “Do what you do. But I didn’t kill Brett.”

  Having been adequately informed of our client’s declared innocence, Ms. Washburn wisely decided to move the conversation in another direction. “Why would someone leave your husband’s body in front of the house where your first husband died?” she asked. “Was there some sort of question about what happened to William that might make a person you know feel justice had not been served?” Revenge is not an uncommon motive for violence.

  “I don’t know,” Virginia said, looking at something on her leg rather than Ms. Washburn’s face. “There was an investigation by the police after William fell but it was determined that his death was accidental. I wasn’t there when it happened so I didn’t have much to tell them.”

  I had in fact found the police report of the incident when I was researching William Klein’s death the night before. The conclusion had
been reached that there was no evidence of foul play but did not specify the fall could definitively be classified as an accident. There was some question about missing hardware on the fire escape, but it had never been revisited as far as I could tell.

  I felt it would be unwise to point that out to Virginia at the moment, however. Her mood was so defensive that we could receive no useful information from a woman who might react as I would anticipate she would if I suggested she had been even slightly evasive regarding her first husband’s death.

  “Your husband, Brett, was involved in real estate,” Ms. Washburn said. I thought it odd that she would give Virginia a piece of information the woman clearly knew, but I said nothing. “Was there anything in his business that might have made him some enemies?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Virginia Fontaine’s immediate reactions to all our questions seemed to be defensive.

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Ms. Washburn assured her. “I’m asking a question. I need some direction in researching your question and thought as his closest confidante he might have mentioned something to you.”

  Virginia, apparently remembering she was a new widow for the second time, sniffed rather obviously. “No. He didn’t say anything about enemies at work.”

  “What were his business practices like?” I asked. “Was he a decent landlord, or did he raise the rent without providing basic services?” I had seen a news report about such a property owner only three nights previous.

  Virginia’s back straightened. “He was a great landlord. Brett would come out in the middle of the night if one of those kids needed something. They don’t know how to change the battery on a smoke detector, I swear. Can you imagine calling the landlord for something like that?”

  I could imagine literally anything. Imagination is limitless. But I doubted if that was what she was truly asking. “Did your husband—Mr. Fontaine—have any people who disliked him enough to do this to him?” I asked. I believed that do this was a more sensitive phrase than hit him repeatedly with a tire iron until he died.

  “Brett had no enemies,” Virginia Fontaine said with an air of superiority in her voice. “None. Everybody loved him.”

  “Clearly not everyone,” I pointed out.

  Virginia’s head swiveled in my direction, but Ms. Washburn was quick enough to prevent what was clearly about to be an unexpectedly emotional response. “If no one was especially angry with Brett, maybe we need to look at this from another angle,” she said. “Who would benefit from his being … out of the picture?”

  I was unsure which picture Ms. Washburn meant, but I had read enough crime fiction to understand after a moment that she meant to ask if there were those who would do well financially or in some other way because Brett Fontaine was dead. Someone might indeed have decided to accelerate the moment when that would have occurred naturally. People can be extremely impatient when something they want is being withheld from them.

  “Nobody,” Virginia said. “Not even me. I mean, I was already his wife, so all his money was partially mine anyway. We never worried about whose bank account something came from. If we needed to buy something, we just bought it.”

  This meeting had proven especially fruitless. “So if you had to guess,” Ms. Washburn said, “who would you think might have done this to your husband? Brett.”

  “I know exactly who killed him,” Virginia said. “It was that bitch he was cheating with.”

  Some people use the term for a female dog as a pejorative. It is also considered an inappropriate word to many, but I am not certain why. Still, that did not seem to be the most pertinent issue here.

  “But Melanie Mason has been dead for years,” Ms. Washburn reminded Virginia. Ms. Washburn looked as if she was afraid her client was having some sort of health-related episode.

  “Her ghost did it,” Virginia said with a confident tone. “She wanted Brett all to herself.”

  eleven

  “The wife is crazy,” Detective Monroe said. “Plain and simple. She bashed her husband’s head in and now she’s blaming it on a ghost. Either she’s really nuts or she’s pretending to be so she can plead unable to stand trial. Doesn’t matter. She did it.”

  Ms. Washburn and I had called the detective after meeting with Virginia Fontaine with two purposes in mind: I wanted to hear Monroe’s thinking on Brett Fontaine’s death in relation to that of Virginia’s first husband William Klein. Ms. Washburn appeared to be on a mission to convince the detective that there should be more suspects in the case, despite the fact that we had no information to which we could refer and no names we might offer as possible killers besides that of Virginia Fontaine. I was not trying to impede Ms. Washburn so much as I wanted to speak only about empirical evidence.

  “Isn’t it a little early to come to that conclusion?” Ms. Washburn asserted.

  I had to admit she had a valid point. Monroe had been investigating Brett Fontaine’s death for less than a full day and seemed to have decided the outcome of his research in a very short time.

  “Just because the solution is easy doesn’t make it wrong.” Monroe was sitting behind a rather battered wooden desk that was separate from the rows of desks the uniformed officers used. Here in the Major Crimes unit, there were fewer investigators and less hectic quarters. I found that beneficial since loud noises and cacophony of sounds tend to distract or disturb me. “In a case like this, you look at the wife first. Did she think he was cheating on her? Yes, she did. Does she think he was cheating on her with a ghost, which makes her crazy? As a matter of fact, she does, and it does. Did she have access to a tire iron? Pretty much anybody who owns a car has one. Could she have bashed her husband over the head a bunch of times? You bet. Are there any other suspects who seem obvious? There are not. So you tell me: Why shouldn’t I think the crazy lady killed her husband?”

  “A few reasons,” I said. “Ms. Fontaine would have had to assault her husband with a heavy tire iron numerous times until he was dead. Based on the evidence from the medical examiner’s office, she then would have had to lift Mr. Fontaine’s body, place it in a car or trunk, drive it to the scene where it was found and pull it out to arrange it, with fresh bloodstains, in the time between when her car turned the corner and when Ms. Washburn, who was following the car and probably would have seen her dragging the body into it, turned onto High Street only seconds later. I have met Ms. Fontaine and believe she does not possess the upper body strength necessary to perform those tasks.”

  Monroe looked at a file on his desk. I felt he was trying to avoid eye contact. “I don’t believe the theory the ME is using about him being killed somewhere else,” he said. “There was plenty of blood at the scene. How’d it get there if he wasn’t killed there?”

  It was a fair point and one for which I had no answer yet.

  “What about Virginia’s alibi?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “She said she was at the mall. She didn’t buy anything so there are no credit card records. She said she bought a soft pretzel but she paid cash. She didn’t keep the receipt; go figure. And I don’t have the security records from the mall yet, but I’m willing to bet she won’t show up on those video files.” Monroe redirected his attention from the file to Ms. Washburn, no doubt to reassert his authority. “She’s crazy. She believes in ghosts. She killed him.”

  There was no point in trying to change Monroe’s mind and that was not why I had come here anyway. “Have you looked into Mr. Fontaine’s business dealings?” I asked.

  “It’s been less than a day and I have other open cases. No, I haven’t actually found out much about how he rents houses to college kids who trash them on a regular basis. Not yet. But who’s your suspect there? Some sorority girl who saw a roach and decided to take revenge on her landlord?”

  “I was thinking it might be a rival who wanted one or more of his properties or believed Mr. Fontaine had somehow did him or he
r wrong in a business deal,” I told him. The idea of a frightened student had not occurred to me and seemed implausible. That was the impetus for a phone call to the landlord, not a murder. Perhaps Monroe had been joking.

  “There’s no evidence other than what we have on the wife,” Monroe reiterated. “So why am I talking to you, again?”

  “I am wondering about the fact that the body was found in front of the very house from which Ms. Fontaine’s first husband, William Klein, fell to his death some fourteen years ago,” I said. “Surely you must admit the coincidence is too severe to ignore.”

  Ms. Washburn’s face looked slightly tense. I wondered if she believed I should not have mentioned that aspect of the question we were researching.

  “That just proves my point,” the detective said. “She probably killed the first husband too. Who else would go to the trouble of killing the second husband in exactly the same spot?”

  “Did you look into the death of William Klein?” Ms. Washburn asked. “Was there any evidence that someone killed him?”

  “I have a cop researching that now,” Monroe answered. “But I’m willing to bet you someone pushed him off that fire escape. A woman doesn’t lose two whole husbands this way with no connection whatsoever.” He seemed to find some pleasure in what he’d said and leaned back in his chair in a pose of relaxation. I decided not to bring up the missing bolts because that would only have fueled Monroe’s suspicions about Virginia Fontaine, and he obviously had not researched the incident energetically.

  “One last thing,” I said. “The angle of the blows to Mr. Fontaine’s head. Has there been any analysis of the height of the assailant, and how tall he or she might be?”

  Monroe’s relaxed disposition evaporated in a blink. He leaned forward. “We haven’t done the math yet,” he said. He sounded oddly defensive, as if I were accusing him of something. I was simply asking a question that might have aided in the answering of Ms. Fontaine’s question. “I can tell you that Fontaine was about six feet but pretty light for a guy that size. So she might have been able to drag him around the way you said, but I don’t think that’s what happened.”