Outwitting Trolls

by William G. Tapply

  “They think I did it, don’t they?” she said.

  “They’ll ask you a lot of questions about yourself,” I said, “treat you like a suspect, sure. Don’t take it personally. It’s how they think. They consider everybody a suspect until they can eliminate them.”

  “Especially the spouse. Or the ex-spouse.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Especially the spouse.”

  Sharon shook her head. “I was falling in love with him all over again,” she said. “Why would I want to kill him?”

  It was a rhetorical question, and I didn’t bother answering it.

  Five

  After a while, Officer Lloyd came over. “Mr. Coyne, Mrs. Nichols, would you come with me, please?”

  We both stood up and followed Officer Lloyd to the elevators. We took one of them down to the first floor, where she led us to a small conference room off the lobby. It was wood-paneled and empty except for a rectangular table with about a dozen leather-cushioned chairs arranged around it.

  “Have a seat, please,” said Officer Lloyd. “The detectives will be here in a minute. Can I get you something?”

  “Another coffee for me,” I said.

  “Just a glass of water, please,” said Sharon.

  Officer Lloyd nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Sharon and I sat side by side at the table. I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before one in the morning.

  Officer Lloyd came back with a cup of coffee for me and a bottle of water for Sharon. We thanked her, and she left again.

  I’d drunk about half of my coffee when the door opened and Horowitz and Marcia Benetti came in. They sat across from us.

  “I’m Detective Horowitz,” he said to Sharon. “This is Detective Benetti.”

  They all nodded to each other.

  Horowitz looked at me. “We’re gonna be here all night. There are two hundred and seventeen visiting veterinarians attending this convention. Tomorrow they’ll all go home. They come from all over the world. Japan and Argentina and Denmark and Egypt. We got to interrogate and clear every one of them.” He shook his head. “Not even to mention about fifty hotel employees on duty tonight and all the other hotel guests.”

  “Poor you,” I said.

  “My sentiments exactly.” He put his forearms on the table, leaned forward, and looked at Sharon. “We hope you can help us understand what happened here tonight,” he said. “You won’t mind answering some questions for us?”

  “I don’t mind,” said Sharon.

  “Okay, good,” said Horowitz. He jerked his head in the direction of his partner. “We’re going to record this. Save us the trouble of taking notes.” He looked at me. “Okay?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  Benetti reached into her big shoulder bag and took out a battery-run digital recorder. It was about the size of a television remote. She pressed a button on its side, said, “Just testing,” flipped another button, and we heard, “Just testing,” loud and clear.

  She put it in the middle of the table between us and said, “Okay. We’re good to go.”

  Horowitz said, “We’re here at the Beverly Suites Hotel in Natick. This is Detective Roger Horowitz. Detective Marcia Benetti is here, along with Sharon Nichols and attorney Brady Coyne. It’s, um, April twenty-one”—he glanced at his wristwatch—“no, it’s after midnight—12:42 A.M. on Sunday, April twenty-two.” He looked at Sharon and me and shrugged. “Okay, then. Mrs. Nichols. Our victim, Kenneth Nichols, he was your ex-husband, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Sharon.

  “And you were here tonight…why?”

  “We hadn’t seen each other in a long time. It was a kind of…a get-together. A chance to get to know each other again.”

  “Like a date.”

  “Sort of, yes.”

  “In his hotel room.”

  Sharon nodded.

  “Answer for the recorder, please,” Horowitz said.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’d planned to meet in Ken’s hotel room.”

  “Why in his room?”

  “It was a kind of celebration. He was going to order champagne.”

  “A celebration of what?” asked Horowitz.

  “Of our…of being interested in each other again.”

  Horowitz hesitated, then said, “You were planning on, um, having sex with him? Is that what you mean?”

  “I thought that might happen, yes,” said Sharon.

  Horowitz leaned back in his chair and looked at Marcia Benetti.

  “So you’re saying that’s why you went to your ex-husband’s room,” Benetti said to Sharon. “To have sex with him.”

  “Maybe,” Sharon said.

  Horowitz leaned forward. “You’ve been divorced for how long?”

  “Ten years. It’ll be eleven next September.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” asked Sharon. “Why did we get divorced?”

  Horowitz nodded.

  Sharon shook her head. “We didn’t love each other anymore. We were unhappy.” She shrugged. “No dramatic reason, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “I wasn’t looking for anything,” Horowitz said.

  “It was mutual,” she said. “Nobody’s fault.”

  “Mr. Coyne here was your divorce lawyer?”

  “No,” Sharon said. “Mr. Coyne handled our veterinary business. My husband’s and mine. When we were married. Brady did not do my divorce, but he’s my attorney now.”

  “Kids?”

  She frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “You and your husband,” he said. “Ex-husband, I mean. Did you have children?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Two. A girl and a boy. Ellen and Wayne.”

  “How old?”

  “Then or now?”

  “Now.”

  Sharon frowned for a moment, then said, “Ellen’s twenty-five. Wayne’s twenty-two.”

  “And where are they now?”

  “Both in school,” she said. “Ellen’s getting her master’s at BU. Wayne’s a junior at Webster State College in New Hampshire.”

  “So how did they get along with your—with their father?”

  She shrugged. “They had the normal issues, I guess.”

  “Normal?” asked Horowitz.

  “They resented him,” she said. “They resented both of us, really. For splitting. For wrecking our lovely little family. They were angry.”

  “Did they keep in touch with him?”

  “Ken, you mean?”

  Horowitz nodded.

  “I don’t honestly know about that,” Sharon said.

  “How about you?”

  “I haven’t talked with Wayne for a while. Ellen and I have remained close.”

  “How long is a while?”

  Sharon glanced at me, then looked at Horowitz. “A couple of years.”

  Horowitz’s eyebrow went up. “You haven’t communicated with your son for two years?”

  Sharon nodded. “Maybe a little longer than that, actually.”

  “Can you tell us how to reach Wayne and Ellen?”

  “You consider my children to be suspects?” Sharon asked.

  “Everybody’s suspects,” said Horowitz.

  “I can give you their phone numbers and addresses, sure,” she said.

  “Give her something to write on,” Horowitz said to Marcia Benetti.

  Benetti slid a pad of paper and a pen across the table to Sharon, who took an old-fashioned hand-sized address book from her purse and copied out some information on the pad of paper, which she then pushed back to Benetti.

  “Thank you,” said Horowitz.

  Sharon shrugged.

  “Okay, good,” said Horowitz. “So, back to your husband—your ex-husband, I mean, Kenneth—he was living in Baltimore? That right?”

  She nodded. “His office was in a suburb just outside the city.”

  “His veterinary office.”

  “Yes.”

  �
�How would you characterize your relationship with your ex-husband for the past ten, almost eleven years?”

  “We were divorced,” she said. “We lived in different states. We had occasional long-distance telephone conversations or an exchange of e-mails, mostly about our children. Otherwise, until last fall, Ken and I didn’t have any kind of relationship.”

  “What happened last fall?” Horowitz asked.

  Sharon turned and looked at me.

  I nodded.

  “We began talking on the telephone,” she said. “We discovered that we still liked each other. Or I should say, we liked each other all over again. We were talking about getting back together.”

  “Neither of you had remarried?”

  “No.”

  “Or was in a relationship?”

  “No,” said Sharon. “Well, I wasn’t, and Ken said he wasn’t.”

  “But you don’t know if he was telling you the truth?”

  “No, I suppose I don’t,” she said. “I believed him, but I don’t know it for sure.”

  “He could have been lying to you,” said Marcia Benetti. “By way of seducing you. To get you into his hotel room tonight. Is that what you mean?”

  Sharon looked at Benetti for a moment. The hint of a smile played on the corners of her mouth, as if she were acknowledging her bond with this other woman, their gender’s ancient understanding that men were manipulative pigs. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I wanted to believe him. I might have been deluding myself. He seemed sincere, but I guess he could have been lying. I didn’t know him well enough anymore to tell.”

  Marcia Benetti nodded and leaned back in her chair.

  Horowitz had been smiling as he followed this exchange between the two women. He cleared his throat. “In all of your telephone conversations,” he said, “did Mr. Nichols ever mention anybody he was having problems with? Any kind of enemy?”

  Sharon frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “Not that I remember.”

  “Would he have been likely to tell you if there was such a person in his life?”

  She glanced at Benetti. “I think he would have, yes,” she said. “We talked about everything.”

  “What about a man named Clem?” asked Horowitz.

  Sharon looked at me.

  “I asked her already,” I said.

  He shrugged. “So’d I.”

  Sharon shook her head. “Like I told Brady, I don’t remember Ken mentioning anybody named Clem.”

  “What about the man in the hood?” Horowitz asked. “Who you saw tonight. Did you recognize him?”

  “No,” Sharon said. “I did not.”

  “Did your husband—your ex-husband—ever talk about selling illegal drugs?”

  Sharon turned to me, bit her lip.

  I shrugged. “Just answer his question.”

  “No,” she said to Horowitz. “He said nothing about that to me.”

  “So as far as you know, he had no problems,” Horowitz said.

  “Oh, he had problems,” Sharon said. “I don’t know anything about drugs, but Ken had plenty of problems. He was lonely, for one thing. He didn’t like Baltimore very much. He didn’t get along very well with his partner at the veterinary clinic. There was always the pressure of money. I think he was having financial problems. I don’t think he was very happy.”

  “Did he talk to you about his financial problems?”

  Sharon shook her head. “Not really. We didn’t talk about problems. It was kind of implied, that’s all.”

  “Implied how?”

  Sharon lifted her hands, let them fall. “I can’t really explain it. Nothing specific. Just an impression I got.”

  Marcia Benetti cleared her throat. Horowitz glanced at her, then nodded and sat back in his chair.

  “So, Mrs. Nichols,” said Benetti, “what’d you do with the knife?”

  Sharon frowned. “Knife?”

  “The murder weapon. How did you dispose of it?”

  Sharon turned and arched her eyebrows at me.

  “Don’t say anything,” I said to her. I looked at Benetti. “You want to rephrase that question?”

  Horowitz had his arms crossed over his chest and a big smile plastered on his face.

  Benetti glowered at me for a moment, then looked at Sharon and said, “Mrs. Nichols, did you notice a knife in the hotel room where you found your…Mr. Nichols’s body?”

  “No,” said Sharon. “I didn’t see any knife.”

  “It would’ve been a steak knife,” Benetti said, “such as would be included in a room-service delivery along with a fork and a spoon. A serrated steak knife with a blade about five inches long.”

  Sharon shook her head. “I didn’t see any kind of knife.”

  “When people finish their room-service meal,” said Benetti, “they put the tray with the dirty dishes outside their door. You could have taken a steak knife from one of those trays.”

  “I guess anybody could have done that,” said Sharon, “but I didn’t.”

  Benetti flashed a quick, humorless smile. “The medical examiner tells us that your husband was stabbed twice with a serrated knife,” she said. “Once in the abdomen and once under the rib cage. The wound in his chest penetrated his heart and caused him to die instantly. The wound to his abdomen punctured his liver and bowel and would’ve probably killed him eventually.”

  Sharon was staring at Benetti. Her eyes were brimming.

  “So what about the knife?” asked Horowitz.

  “My client already answered the question about the knife,” I said. “Is there anything else? Because it’s really late and we are exhausted.”

  “One more thing,” said Horowitz. “Mrs. Nichols, you said you came here tonight to, um, meet with your husband, is that right?”

  “He was my ex-husband,” Sharon said.

  “Right. Excuse me.”

  “We had planned to get together tonight, yes.”

  “In his hotel room.”

  Sharon nodded. “That’s right. I already explained that.”

  “Not down in the lobby or in one of the bars or coffee shops or restaurants in this hotel or somewhere nearby. In his room.”

  Sharon nodded. “In his room, yes.”

  “Why in the room?” asked Horowitz.

  “I told you. We were probably going to have sex.”

  “You hadn’t seen each other in, what, ten years?”

  “Since the divorce,” she said. “Almost eleven years.”

  “And what time did he expect you to arrive in his room?” asked Benetti. “To have sex.”

  “Nine o’clock,” said Sharon. “We agreed to meet there at nine. There was a banquet tonight, and afterward there were going to be speeches. He felt he had to be there for part of it, but he was planning to sneak out early.”

  “To meet you.”

  “Yes.”

  “In his hotel room.”

  Sharon nodded.

  “To have sex.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You look nice,” said Benetti. “You dressed for the occasion.”

  Sharon looked at me. “How am I supposed to answer that?”

  “It wasn’t a question,” I said. “No answer required.”

  Sharon turned back to Marcia Benetti and smiled. “Thank you. I wanted to look nice for him.”

  “So what time did you arrive here at the hotel?” asked Benetti.

  “A little before eight thirty.”

  “Even though you weren’t meeting him until nine.”

  “That’s right,” said Sharon. “I was early.”

  “So did you go straight to the room?”

  “No,” Sharon said. “I didn’t want to appear to be too…too eager. Plus, I didn’t know if he’d be back from the banquet. So I sat in the lobby until nine o’clock. It was maybe five after nine when I got to his room.”

  “Did you talk with anybody while you were in the lobby?” asked Benetti.

  Sharon shrugged. “No, I don’t think so. I j
ust sat there in one of the chairs and read a magazine.”

  “Because,” said Benetti, “it would help if you could account for your time before nine o’clock.”

  “Somebody might’ve noticed me,” Sharon said, “but I couldn’t tell you who. I just sat there by myself reading my Newsweek and waiting for nine o’clock to arrive, and it seemed to take a long time. Then I went up to his room. The door was ajar, so I pushed it open and went inside, and that’s when I…” She shrugged.

  “You were eager,” said Benetti.

  “I was pretty excited,” Sharon said.

  “According to the ME,” said Horowitz, “Mr. Nichols died somewhere between six thirty and eight thirty tonight. We have witnesses who are willing to testify that he was still at the banquet at seven fifteen, when they began clearing the tables, and that he was gone before eight o’clock, when the speeches began. So we’ve got that hour between eight, when he was gone from the banquet, and nine, when you said you went to his room.” He looked at Sharon and pursed his lips.

  “Well, I already told you, I didn’t go to his room until nine,” said Sharon. “So I guess I couldn’t have done it.”

  “But,” said Marcia Benetti, “you could have gone to his room, say, at eight, and you could have stabbed him with a room-service knife, and then you could have ditched the knife and gone down to the lobby at, say, eight thirty, then back up to the room again at nine.”

  “I could have,” said Sharon, “but—”

  “Whoa.” I put my hand on Sharon’s arm. “This is getting out of line. My client is answering your questions fully and honestly. She told you where she was and what she was doing at the times you asked her about.” I looked at Horowitz. “I think that’s enough for tonight.”

  He glanced at Benetti.

  “I’ve got one more question,” she said.

  “One more question,” Horowitz said. “Okay?”

  I looked at Benetti. “Be nice.”

  She smiled quickly, then turned to Sharon. “When you went to your husband’s room, you told us that you found the door ajar, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right,” said Sharon. “He was my ex-husband.”

  “Yes, sorry.” Benetti cleared her throat. “So you just pushed the door open and went inside.”

  “I knocked and called Ken’s name first,” Sharon said. “When he didn’t answer or come to the door, I pushed on it and it opened. So I went in.”