The Question of the Dead Mistress

by E. J. Copperman

  Rabinski’s presence certainly was not a shock. Ms. Washburn’s mouth twitched a bit when she saw him. But Melanie Mason looked positively livid.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the van?” she demanded when Rabinski had made his way to our group. “You’re drawing attention to yourself!” I did not see how Rabinski was doing that but Melanie was clearly creating more of a scene, as Mother would call it, than her supposed widower.

  “How long are you going to be?” he asked. “You should have been done with this by now. Did you get the stuff you wanted?”

  “Not yet. Get back in the van.” Melanie pointed at the van, presumably worried that her husband did not realize which vehicle she meant.

  “How hard is this?” Rabinski seemed exasperated. He turned to me. “Give me the documents you have about Brett Fontaine’s murder.”

  “Not until I see Reuben Hoenig,” I repeated for his benefit.

  “See?” Melanie said, using her open palm to gesture at me. “He won’t do what he’s supposed to.”

  “That has always been a problem of mine,” I admitted. “There was a time in school when I would not line up by height order because it made no sense. Children of shorter stature do not walk more efficiently.”

  “Enough!” Rabinski shielded his right arm from the view of the PC Richard patrons and produced a gun from his jacket pocket. “Now hand it over.”

  The weapon was not pointed at either Ms. Washburn or myself; it seemed that Rabinski was using it as a threat rather than an instrument of violence. He had it aimed between us and probably would hit a 2014 Chevrolet Tahoe behind us if he fired. Ms. Washburn gasped a little but not as much as she would have before having started working at Questions Answered, I would have wagered.

  “As I understand it, the demand was that Ms. Washburn and I refrain from doing any further research and produce any documents we have regarding the murder,” I said. “Is that accurate?”

  “That’s right,” Rabinski said. “So hand them over.”

  I looked past him at Melanie Mason. “Please listen very carefully because I have told you this more than once and I want you to understand. We have already stopped researching our client’s question because she has rescinded her contract. Now let me see Reuben Hoenig. Open the back of that van.” I did not point because I was sure everyone gathered there knew which van I meant.

  “We won’t,” Melanie said firmly.

  “You can’t,” I countered. “Reuben is not in the van. You have him in another such vehicle near here to ensure my cooperation. But that will not be effective because I will not agree to any terms until I have visual proof of life—and no, a phone call will not be sufficient.”

  Rabinski looked at his wife and put up his hands, palms up. “Well, this was your idea.”

  Melanie Mason looked disgusted. “Fine. Go get him.”

  Rabinski drew a heavy sigh and walked to the initial van, which he turned off. He left it where it was parked and walked to the other side of the ship-shaped store, out of our view.

  Ms. Washburn looked at Melanie with contempt in her eyes. “You killed Brett Fontaine. How did you manage that with me following him the whole time?” Ms. Washburn clearly had not stopped taking that detail of this question personally.

  “Trade secret,” Melanie said, making Ms. Washburn’s expression that much more annoyed.

  “They lured Mr. Fontaine into the warehouse we had found while you were waiting outside,” I told Ms. Washburn. “No doubt there was some business matter Mr. Rabinski could mention or something less professional that Ms. Mason could offer. In any event, Mr. Fontaine was bludgeoned to death inside the warehouse fairly quickly while you waited for him outside the rental property. Mr. Rabinski, aware that you could see him only from the waist down, made sure to wear the same type of shoes and trousers Mr. Fontaine had on that day. After they managed somehow to place the body in the car’s trunk he walked out, probably through the back yard of the rental property, and let you follow him to High Street. He noted that you’d had to stop in traffic and set that property up as the place where Mr. Fontaine’s body would be discovered.”

  “You knew?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “Some of it is conjecture, but it fits the facts,” I said. “Is my account accurate, Ms. Mason?”

  Melanie puffed out her lips. “So you can record me confessing to a murder? I’m not saying a word, Hoenig.”

  “And it was so you could have control of Brett’s business?” Ms. Washburn said to her. “Just for that? What was so great about a tiny real estate firm?”

  “Hardly tiny,” Melanie told her. “In two weeks it’ll be sold to Century 21 for more than six million dollars.” She fixed her gaze on my jacket, assuming (I suppose) that there was a recording device concealed there. “But I’m not saying we killed him for that or any other reason.”

  “I am not recording this conversation,” I assured Melanie. “You may speak freely.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Another white van turned the corner of the ship and headed toward us. This one bore no logos or advertising on its exterior. It had no windows except in its cab, where Leon Rabinski was clearly visible driving. There was no one in the passenger seat.

  It was reassuring that this van, the one surely bearing Reuben Hoenig, had been parked so close to the place of the rendezvous. That was an indication that the plan all along had been to return the hostage and not to do him harm. Mother and Ms. Washburn would have been very upset if anything negative had been done to Reuben.

  Rabinski parked the second van closer to where Melanie Mason, Ms. Washburn, and I were standing. He got out and with an air of impatience opened the rear doors of the van and gestured at them with his left hand. “See?” he said.

  We got a very brief glimpse of Reuben, sitting on an overturned bucket and looking rather surprised to see other people. He almost stood before Rabinski slammed the van’s back doors again.

  There was something about the way he’d looked. Frightened, helpless and confused, Reuben was no longer the man who had left my mother and me. He was a man who needed my help. I could not explain it then and I cannot explain it now.

  “We held up our end,” Melanie Mason said. “Now hand over your research.”

  “I can’t,” I told her.

  I felt Ms. Washburn move closer to my left side and stand by me. Her shoulders were positioned a little more squarely than usual as she projected an attitude of defiance. We had discussed this possibility before leaving the Questions Answered office.

  Rabinski reached into his pocket again, no doubt planning to brandish the handgun he had there. “What do you mean you can’t?” he growled.

  “There are no documents. There is no printed research,” said Ms. Washburn, pointing to her head. “Everything we have we have here.”

  I nodded mine in an attempt to be less obvious.

  “You’re lying,” Melanie said.

  “We’re not,” I assured her. “We sometimes take notes but most of our research is done online and we do not print out the results until we have an answer. We did not reach a definitive answer on the question of who killed Brett Fontaine until you confessed it to us here in this parking lot.”

  “I confessed nothing,” Melanie told me. “You made some accusations but you’re not getting me to speak into your recorder.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head slowly. “There is no recorder, Ms. Mason.” I opened my jacket to prove there was no device in any of my pockets.

  “Brett Fontaine deserved to die,” Rabinski said. “He was obsessed with my wife and he stood in the way of my success. Him dying did nothing but good.”

  “For you,” Ms. Washburn pointed out.

  “Why not for me? I worked for that guy for ten years and all I ever heard was how I wasn’t good enough. Well, now I’m good enough. I run his company and I�
�m doing it better than he did. I worked out the way to cash in Mel’s insurance policy and get some working capital and all that happened was an old drunk died in a car accident. What do you know, a half a bottle of bourbon in her and she couldn’t make it on Route 22. Go figure. Right over there.” He pointed at a spot in the distance next to an outlet of the Home Depot.

  “Shut up, Leon,” his wife said.

  “Why? They’re not recording it and they can’t prove anything. Yeah, Mel and I killed Brett with a grappling hook in an old warehouse and we dumped his body where you’d find it, lady.” He gestured at Ms. Washburn. “Some people improve the world when they die.”

  “How and why did you make such a spectacle of the false ghost at the gravesite where you are clearly not buried, Ms. Mason?” I asked.

  “The cop wouldn’t leave the accident alone,” Rabinski answered. “He kept coming by and staring at the headstone like he knew something. And we wanted Brett to think the ghost of his old girlfriend was coming back for him. So we set up a few little electronics and played a game. Got the cop to go away and shut up, and it got Brett hooked. Then you showed up.” Rabinski scowled at me. “You didn’t see the cameras because they’re so small but we saw you.” I had assumed there was some sort of Wi-Fi device operating visual surveillance equipment but had been unable to locate it on the scene.

  “For the love of—will you shut up, Leon?”

  That was when Ms. Washburn stepped forward. “We already know all this,” she told Melanie. “What I don’t understand is why. Why did you concoct this elaborate ruse just to get Brett Fontaine to follow you into a warehouse? You probably could have gotten him just by wearing the right sweater.”

  Anger flashed in Melanie Mason’s eyes. “It wasn’t like that,” she said.

  “I’ll bet. Then what was it like?”

  “He loved me but he was married to … her. And he wasn’t going to cheat on her. But I was dead as far as he knew. We did that for the insurance money. I was living in an apartment in New Brunswick that Leon found for me, not one of those dumps Brett put the students in. Since I was dead, it wasn’t really cheating, was it? So he followed me right into that warehouse thinking he was with a ghost, and when he came out, he was a ghost himself.”

  That was all I’d needed to hear. “Grapefruit,” I said into my collar, and within seconds sirens were audible in the near distance. Three patrol cars and an unmarked unit bearing Detective Monroe were surrounding us almost immediately.

  Melanie Mason looked at me with fury. “You said you weren’t recording the conversation.”

  “I wasn’t. Detective Monroe was.” I walked to the van and opened the doors. Reuben, looking none the worse for wear, stepped out and I helped him down. “He put the wire on me before we drove here.”

  Monroe nodded toward Melanie and Rabinski and the uniformed police officers from one of the cruisers began the process of putting handcuffs on them. “We told you not to call the police,” Rabinski said.

  It seemed a moot point at this moment but I was bound to answer. “I didn’t,” I said.

  Melanie glared at Ms. Washburn. “She wasn’t supposed to either.”

  “I didn’t,” Ms. Washburn said. She smiled a bit; she was enjoying watching Melanie being taken away, alive and guilty as per her own confession.

  “Then who did?” Rabinski demanded.

  “I did,” Reuben said. “Samuel texted me the time and place of the meeting. You shouldn’t have left me in there with my phone.” He held up his cellular phone for emphasis.

  “A lesson learned,” Ms. Washburn said. “What do we have to do next?” she asked me.

  Before Monroe could say we had to go to his headquarters to make a statement, I said, “We have to go save Virginia Fontaine’s life.” Then I looked at the detective and added, “So that you can arrest her.”

  thirty-three

  Virginia Fontaine’s Highland Park home was still a work in progress. Although construction on the building had clearly ended some months previously and the walls and floors were all completed, there was remarkably little Virginia (and presumably her deceased husband) had done to personalize the living area.

  Our goal at this moment, however, was not to assess the décor. Ms. Washburn and I had broken into the house, after it had been agreed that Detective Monroe would be occupied for some time while he helped process the two prisoners taken into custody at the Flagship. We were searching for some sign that Virginia might have left behind as to her state of mind and her intentions.

  But so far our search had been fruitless. Everything in the house was in its place and nothing was particularly idiosyncratic.

  “I wish I knew what I was looking for,” Ms. Washburn said. She was speaking to me from the master bedroom upstairs, while I was searching the living room beneath her.

  “If we knew what we were looking for, we would have already found it,” I answered.

  “Why do you think Virginia’s life is in danger?” Ms. Washburn appeared at the landing above me and opened the door of a linen closet. She did not touch anything inside.

  “Because someone has been trying very hard to make her seem responsible for her second husband’s death and that person or those people could be very upset seeing their plans disrupted now that Ms. Fontaine has discontinued our employment.” There was not even a thin coating of dust on anything in the living room. Virginia had not been gone long and was a very meticulous housekeeper.

  “Not to mention the two arrests that have been made in that murder,” Ms. Washburn pointed out. She moved to the end of the hallway upstairs and opened a door to a second bedroom.

  “The people angry with Ms. Fontaine have probably not heard about those just yet,” I said. “Have you tried calling her again?”

  Ms. Washburn emerged from the smaller bedroom and closed the door behind her. “Yeah, her phone is still going right to voice mail. Why don’t you think it was the same people? How come Leon Rabinski and Melanie Mason didn’t want to frame Virginia? It would take the suspicion off them. And if she was arrested, Leon would get pretty much full control over Fontaine and Fontaine.”

  “Because the rage, as we can tell by the phone call from Anthony Deane to Virginia Fontaine that resulted in her terminating our contract, was not about the death of Brett Fontaine. Are there any antidepressants in the medicine cabinet?”

  Ms. Washburn looked down at me. “I was sort of shy about looking. And I’m not a pharmacist.”

  I was relatively sure no such medications would be found anyway, but confirmation would have been helpful in disposing of the notion. I was about to start for the stairs so I could check the evidence myself when the side door opened and Virginia Fontaine walked into her house.

  Ms. Washburn and I made no effort to conceal ourselves. In fact, Ms. Washburn walked down the stairs, noting Virginia’s shocked expression, and stood by my side.

  “What are you doing here?” our former client gasped.

  “I believe there might very well be an impending attempt on your life,” I told Virginia. “It is our intention to remove you to a safe place until the threat can be neutralized.”

  Virginia did not seem to fully absorb the information I had given her. “How did you get in?” she demanded.

  “I picked the lock on the back door,” Ms. Washburn told her. “We looked for a spare key but you didn’t seem to have one anywhere.”

  Virginia put down the bag of groceries she was carrying on a side table in the front hallway. “Right, because I didn’t want anybody except me to get into the house when I’m not around,” she said. “You broke into my house.”

  I walked toward her. “I believe you are missing the point,” I said. “Someone might very well be planning to kill you as we speak. It is necessary for us to leave and go somewhere they would not expect to find you.”

  “Nobody’s trying to kill me
,” Virginia said. “You’re just trying to get me to hire you again. I’m going to call the police.”

  “The police are aware of this,” Ms. Washburn told her. “And we’re not trying to get you to do anything except leave so you can stay alive.”

  Virginia stopped walking and stared at her. “The police know you broke into my house?”

  We had agreed with Detective Monroe that there would be no acknowledgement of any activity Ms. Washburn and I might undertake before he arrived on the scene. Mentioning the awareness of a law enforcement agency was a misstep on Ms. Washburn’s part. “No! Um … they just know … that someone’s after you,” she told Virginia.

  That did not placate our former client. “Why would someone be after me?”

  I was certain we would be alone with Virginia for only another few minutes now. “May we please discuss this in the car?” I said. “Time is very much a factor here.” I pointed toward the front door. “Please come with us and we can keep you safe.”

  Virginia did not respond as I would have hoped or expected. If someone had informed me that my life was in danger if I did not leave the premises, I would not have to be told more than once. I had already mentioned that very circumstance to Virginia three times and Ms. Washburn had referred to it once. But our former client merely stood in the room with her hands on her hips looking defiant.

  “I’m not moving until I get an explanation about all this. For all I know you just want to pack me into a car and take me somewhere for your own reasons.” That made virtually no sense at all but there was no time to debate the point with Virginia.

  I spoke very quickly, which is not my typical rhythm. Because I usually concern myself with speaking in a socially acceptable set of parameters, I tend to speak slowly and think more carefully about each word than most people do. But in this case I felt the pressure of time and wanted to simply satisfy Virginia’s curiosity enough to convince her she should come with Ms. Washburn and me.