The Question of the Dead Mistress Read online

  “Debbie said he didn’t,” Ms. Washburn answered. “She said it was Melanie who broke up with Brett. He told Debbie about it because they were that close, but he told the rest of his friends and anyone else who would listen that he couldn’t stand how Melanie clung to him, but it wasn’t true.”

  I mused on that while examining a photograph of a gravestone whose inscription was worn but still readable. “Why would he do that? Why not simply tell the truth and say that Melanie had ended their romance?”

  To my right I heard Ms. Washburn chuckle. “Some men just can’t admit to their truest emotions, Samuel. They cover up the pain and pretend it’s someone else’s fault or someone else’s problem.”

  “Odd.” The stone did not reveal anything especially useful so I moved on to the third newspaper account of Melanie Mason’s death that I had discovered. The first two had simply been reported from reading a police blotter on the accident and it showed. They were written by two separate people but were almost identical. I wondered if this one would be different.

  “It’s a lot more common than you think,” Ms. Washburn said. I don’t know how but she managed to convey wordlessly the message that she was now looking in my direction. She had stopped typing. Curious, I looked at her. “But Debbie said more than that. She told me that she thought Anthony Deane had killed both Brett Fontaine and William Klein.”

  Clearly Ms. Washburn’s interview with Debbie Sampras had been more productive than mine with Peter Belson. That was both encouraging and disturbing. “Why would he do that?” I asked. “How could Deane have even known William Klein? He was dead for years before Brett Fontaine met his wife Virginia.”

  “Anthony Deane is the link,” Ms. Washburn said, a slight grin of triumph (or what I saw as triumph) on her face. “He knew Virginia when she was married to William Klein and it was at his stand in the Metuchen farmers’ market that Brett asked Ginny to marry him.”

  “He might have known Virginia Fontaine when her name was still … ” I tried to remember the name she had included on her client intake form.

  “Virginia LoBianco,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “Yes, thank you.” I answered. “Because Anthony Deane knew Virginia LoBianco or Virginia Klein does not mean he was at all familiar with her first husband. Why does Debbie Sampras believe that he had something to do with William Klein’s death?”

  “Because Debbie says he was always in love with Virginia, was angry that she married men who weren’t him, and he visited William the day he fell off the fire escape.”

  I stood up. “I believe we should take a trip,” I said to Ms. Washburn, “assuming you are not tired of driving today.”

  She reached for her purse. “Where are we going?”

  “To the New Brunswick police station to see Detective Monroe.”

  Detective Jack Monroe did not want to have a meeting with Ms. Washburn and me, and he made that very clear when he walked into the waiting area where the police dispatcher was in touch with officers in cruisers and on the street. She had told us to wait for him and it had taken him eight minutes to walk through the locked door and say he didn’t want to see us.

  “I have a homicide to work,” he said. “I don’t need amateurs coming through here trying to solve it themselves. I already had enough information. Only one of you was on the scene when it happened and we’ve already talked to you.” He looked at Ms. Washburn. “If I have any further questions, I’ll get in touch. Now, go home.” He turned to walk back through the door to the bullpen where his cubicle was located.

  “We have a link between William Klein’s death and Brett Fontaine’s,” I said as quickly as I could. It is possible I said it more loudly than I had anticipated, since voice modulation is not something I do especially well.

  Monroe stopped in his tracks and turned to regard me. “What’s that?” he said.

  Ms. Washburn stood, perhaps to look more defiant. It certainly seemed that way to me. “We’ll tell you when we’re inside,” she said.

  Monroe took a deep breath and seemed to think. He shook his head, perhaps involuntarily. “All right,” he said. He made a sweeping gesture toward the door, which he opened when the dispatcher unlocked it from within her bulletproof compartment. “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say. But it better be worthwhile.”

  We wasted no time following him back to the area designated as his workspace. Once there he gestured, somewhat limply, toward the two chairs in front of his desk and Ms. Washburn and I sat. Monroe maneuvered himself through the cramped space and sat behind his desk looking stern. “What’s the link?” he asked.

  “A man named Anthony Deane. He was a member of the same fraternity at Fairleigh Dickinson University as Brett Fontaine and he introduced Mr. Fontaine to his wife, Virginia. We have a source who says Mr. Deane visited William Klein the day he died, so he knew both of Virginia’s husbands. He bridges the gap.”

  Detective Monroe sat back in his chair and looked at the rather badly stained ceiling. There had clearly been some kind of incident involving water in this building sometime in the past, probably three to five years. He made a discontented noise softly as if feeling a mild ache and then turned his gaze toward Ms. Washburn and me.

  “Why do you people come here and ruin my perfectly good case with outside facts?” he asked.

  I could not answer because I had no idea what an outside fact might be. Ms. Washburn, who I’d noticed had been watching the detective with a look in her eye that indicated she might not hold him in the highest regard, crossed her arms. That was never a sign that Ms. Washburn was pleased.

  “Why do you just want to confirm your suspicions and not find the truth?” she asked.

  “Hey.” Detective Monroe tilted his chair forward and rested his elbows on the desk in front of him. “I follow the case where it goes.” There was no evidence he had been doing so, but we had not been able to watch him constantly since Ms. Washburn found Brett Fontaine’s body on High Street. The detective picked up a ballpoint pen from his desk and fished a notebook from his top drawer. I noticed the open file regarding Brett Fontaine’s murder on his desk and examined what I could from this distance and vantage point. It was difficult to see clearly. “What’s the name of your source on this?” he asked.

  “We keep our sources confidential,” Ms. Washburn told him. I was aware of no such policy and almost pointed that out to her, but she spoke again quickly, perhaps anticipating my impulse. “But we don’t want to impede an ongoing police investigation. I’ll tell you what: We’ll be glad to trade the information for some of yours.”

  The detective, beginning to understand the person he was dealing with, looked cross. “You realize I can go to a county prosecutor and get a subpoena compelling you to tell us,” he said.

  “Do you really want to go through all that paperwork?” Ms. Washburn asked. Her tone was concerned, empathetic. It was interesting to watch her bargain with the detective.

  Detective Monroe clearly was no fan of doing paperwork, which Ms. Washburn must surely have concluded by looking at his paper-covered desk and the piles of forms on either side of him. His mouth twisted a little. “What is it you want to know? And you realize my asking that does not mean I’m saying I’ll trade.”

  Ms. Washburn and I had discussed this possibility during traffic light stops on the way to the police station. “We would guess you had officers canvass the whole street where Brett Fontaine’s body was found,” she said. “I was the one who discovered his body, but it isn’t possible absolutely no one else saw anything. We want any relevant information your officers collected from the street canvass. We don’t need all the names and addresses, just the ones that saw something. For that we’ll give you the person who knew Anthony Deane and Brett Fontaine well enough to connect the two and place Deane on High Street the day William Klein died. If your records show someone meeting his description on the street when I was followi
ng Brett Fontaine, you might very well have your killer all wrapped up in a neat package.”

  “I still think the wife did it,” Monroe said.

  “It is not wise to reach a conclusion when there are not sufficient facts,” I told him. “What you have regarding Ms. Fontaine is circumstantial evidence, which I will admit is compelling but has considerable weakness if you were to arrest and charge her. I’m sure the prosecutor would tell you that if he or she has not already.”

  Monroe took a thumb drive out of his desk drawer an inserted it into a USB port on his desktop computer. “She had motive and she could have had opportunity,” he said in something very close to a mumble.

  “But there are no witnesses I know of who are saying she was at the scene when Brett Fontaine’s body was left there,” I pointed out. “And there is the issue of height. Ms. Fontaine is not a small woman but she stands only about five-foot-five. If Mr. Fontaine was tall, and my records indicate he was six feet, she would have had a very difficult time inflicting the kind of wounds that killed him.”

  “She could have stood on a box.” Monroe, having moved his mouse and saved a file to the drive, removed it from his computer. He held it up in front of Ms. Washburn. “Now, who’s this mysterious source of yours?”

  “We want to see the file you put on there first,” Ms. Washburn responded. “For all we know you just gave us snapshots of your trip to the Grand Canyon.” That seemed unlikely but I did think confirmation was a vital component of the bargain she had made.

  “I gave you what you asked for.” Monroe sounded offended. “Check it for yourself.” He handed Ms. Washburn the thumb drive. She removed her laptop computer from her tote bag and handed it to me. I inserted the drive as soon as the computer was functioning. After a very cursory look, I nodded to Ms. Washburn; the file was what Monroe had promised.

  “Our source is a woman named Debbie Sampras,” Ms. Washburn said. She had called Debbie before we left the Questions Answered office and obtained permission to give her name to Monroe. Debbie, she said, had been eager to tell her story but had not been contacted by any member of the New Brunswick Police Department. “She was a high school friend of Brett Fontaine’s and she stayed in touch with him until he died. She was at his memorial service. She knew him and she knew Virginia. She believes Anthony Deane was in love with Virginia Fontaine but she wasn’t interested in him. Debbie thinks he killed both of Virginia’s husbands.”

  Monroe listened to Ms. Washburn first with an air of interest and then, as she continued, a look of skepticism. Or at least that was what Ms. Washburn told me his expression had meant when I asked her about it hours later.

  “She thinks?” he said. “How does she know any of this?” It was not unreasonable for a detective to ask for evidence that would be useful in court. But Monroe’s tone was belligerent, almost mocking. I have become better at recognizing the modulations people use in speech than the meaning of their facial expressions. I am not always capable of expressing those modulations myself, Mother has told me.

  “Debbie was around the whole time,” Ms. Washburn explained. “I only spoke with her once, today, but she was very close to Brett and he told her things that apparently even his other friends didn’t know. She’s convinced Anthony Deane is the killer. I don’t know about that, but I think it’s at least worth talking to her.”

  Monroe stood up. I did not understand the maneuver until Ms. Washburn stood as well. Apparently it was the detective’s way of signaling that the meeting was concluded and we should leave. I got to my feet but did not walk toward the bullpen.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Monroe said as Ms. Washburn took three steps and then turned to look at me questioningly. “But I’m telling you, the wife did it.”

  “I have one last question,” I said as Monroe noticed Ms. Washburn’s look and followed it to me. I did not give the detective an opportunity to say he was too busy or that we’d already gotten as much information from him as he was willing to give. “Did the medical examiner find any traces of olive oil at the scene where Mr. Fontaine’s body was discovered?”

  Detective Monroe’s eyes almost closed and his eyebrows moved toward each other. “How did you find that out?” he asked. “The ME’s report hasn’t been made public yet.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That was all I needed to know.”

  eighteen

  “Olive oil?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  She had just driven her Kia Spectra into the driveway of the house I now shared with both of my parents. Ms. Washburn had declined to join us for dinner, largely I believed because it had been a long day and she knew I would probably be talking about Ms. Fontaine’s question until I could put the pieces of the puzzle together in my head. That was a metaphor. There were no pieces of a puzzle in my head. I assume you knew that.

  “I believe olive oil might be the key to discovering where Brett Fontaine was actually killed,” I explained. “There were photographs of the scene on Detective Monroe’s desk which he did not attempt to conceal from us.”

  “I saw them,” Ms. Washburn said. The car was still running but she had safely placed it in the Park gear and engaged the parking brake. We were not in danger of moving. “They were pretty gruesome, but I didn’t get any connection to olive oil out of them.”

  “There was more blood on the pavement than there should have been,” I pointed out. “The medical examiner concluded Mr. Fontaine had been beaten to death somewhere other than the sidewalk on High Street. That meant he was probably not bleeding at all when his body was arranged there. The consistency of the blood on the pavement was wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Ms. Washburn bit her lower lip, thinking. “You believe it wasn’t blood at all? They used something that looked like blood? Wouldn’t the ME have figured that out immediately.”

  I nodded. “That is why I believe that there was blood on the sidewalk. But not as much as there would have been if Brett Fontaine had been killed there. I think the killer or killers collected some of his blood—so it could properly be identified as his when his body was found—and mixed it with something to make it appear to have more volume than it actually contained.”

  It took Ms. Washburn a few moments—six seconds—to absorb the information I’d given her. “And you think what they mixed it with was olive oil? Why?”

  “I don’t think it was pure olive oil; that would have been too easy to spot and would not have looked authentic,” I said. “But there was a spot very near Mr. Fontaine’s right hand where the pool of liquid took on an appearance very much like that of consumer olive oil. I think it had started to separate from the solution, or had not been mixed into it adequately.”

  “So if we find olive oil, we’ll find the place where Brett Fontaine was killed?” Ms. Washburn looked perplexed. “You think somebody beat him to death with a tire iron in the cooking oil aisle of a supermarket?”

  “I most certainly do not. I believe there was a somewhat secluded alternative location nearby. Tomorrow, I propose we retrace your route from that day and see if there are any likely venues.”

  Ms. Washburn pondered that. “Okay. But I also want to go talk to Virginia Fontaine and maybe Brett’s mother tomorrow.”

  “Then we should get started early. Can you pick me up at eight?” I reached for the car door release.

  “You leave the house every day at eight, Samuel. That’s not early.”

  I stopped in my motion. “But most days we do not drive directly to the route we wish to follow,” I pointed out.

  “Of course.” Ms. Washburn’s voice had an air of something like sadness in its tone.

  I stopped and looked at her. “Ms. Washburn, is something wrong? Is there something that is troubling you?”

  There was a two-second hesitation. Most people would not have noticed. “No, Samuel. I’m just tired and tomorrow is going to be a long day. I want to get home and relax.”
r />   I was somewhat suspicious of her response but realized I had no fact-based reason to doubt her word. I opened the door and got out of the car. “Rest well, Ms. Washburn,” I said.

  “You too, Samuel.”

  I closed the car door and Ms. Washburn had the vehicle in motion before I had reached the flagstone path to the front door.

  Once inside I found my mother preparing dinner as usual and Reuben sitting at the kitchen table watching her do so without offering to do so much as set the table. I did that without being asked but set it for two people.

  My mother glanced over and frowned. “You haven’t left a place for yourself, Samuel.”

  “I am not hungry, Mother. Thank you for cooking dinner for me, but I believe I won’t be eating right now.”

  She stopped what she was doing at the stove and walked to me. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

  “I am perfectly healthy,” I told her. “I simply need to think about some things and they are occupying my full attention at the moment. Food is not something very high on my list of priorities this evening.”

  Mother searched my face but did not seem to find what she was looking for. She glanced at Reuben. “Is there a reason you don’t feel like eating with us?” she asked.

  “None other than the one I’ve already stated. I believe I will go upstairs to my apartment and work. If I feel the need to eat later, I will come downstairs and heat up the chicken you have prepared, Mother. Thank you again.”

  I turned to walk to the stairs but Reuben stood up and touched me on the arm, something I would have preferred he not do. I stopped and turned to face him mostly because I wanted him to remove his hand, and he did.

  “Is it me?” he asked.

  The question was nonsensical. Was what him? I had no context to formulate an answer. “I do not understand,” I said.

  That should have been clear enough, but apparently it was not. “I meant, is it me?” he responded, doing nothing but repeating himself. After four seconds during which I did not respond, he added, “Am I the reason you don’t want to eat dinner?”