Unrevealed

Abbey’s lacy white underwear lay torn and slightly bloody around the lace edge. Mr. Gambrel had surface cuts on his upper thighs. He told the paramedics he didn’t know how he got them but assumed it was from scraping against the bedroom furniture as he sleepily made his way through the darkness after he heard a loud thump outside the upstairs bedroom door.
    When his wife was pronounced dead, Mr. Gambrel went into what I would best describe as catatonic shock. A deep and soulful wail that cannot be manufactured by anyone
except those who honestly feel it in their bones followed that. “ She’s my world ,” he wept. As I stood there in the entryway, sealing the torn and bloodied lacy white underwear in a plastic Kapak evidence bag, I watched the world he knew crumble around him. Amid his grief, a gallery of suspicious eyes observed his every move. Among the paramedics and the other cops on the scene there was a sense that everything was not what it seemed. Mr. Gambrel’s story of what happened also changed.
    First he said he had awakened to a loud thump outside their bedroom, stumbled in the darkness toward the landing, turned on the light and saw his wife sprawled on the entryway tile floor. At that point, he claimed to have raced down the stairs and begun CPR, tearing off and discarding her underwear in the process because he thought he saw a puncture wound in her pelvis. The problem was that her lilac nightgown was not torn or bloodied, only her panties. There was also the question of the distance between where her body lay and the location of the panties under the secretary. When you fling lacy panties aside, they tend not to travel far, due to their weight. Also, a rough tile floor, such as the one in the Gambrels’ entryway, prevents items such as lacy panties from scooting too far. Additionally, when I recovered said panties, they were pretty well hidden under the piece of furniture. It was that observation that generated a change in Mr. Gambrel’s telling of the story.
    With head bowed and eyes never locking with mine, Mr. Gambrel said that the lights in the house were already turned on when he awakened to find his wife missing from their bed. While he still maintained that he cut his nude body en route to the landing because of being half asleep, he claimed that when he descended the stairs, he had no recollection of
removing her panties and tossing them aside. All he recalled was doing CPR and frantically trying to revive her. When I pressed him, asking why her panties were bloodied and seemingly hidden under the secretary, he maintained that he had no memory of removing them.
    No memory . That’s never a good answer, especially after you’ve already stated something else. But I’m patently aware of shock and how it can wreak havoc with recall. Shock can also create gaps in stories big enough for trains to chug through. Furthermore, interviewing a shock victim — especially someone who has just witnessed a loved one’s death — can be problematic, since the shock tends to suspend one’s reality, often making a person feel as if he is viewing the event from outside his body. The story is told from a more generalized point of view, rather than rife with detail, simply because shock creates a cloudy wash over the trauma. The mind says that “this can’t be happening” and, thus, detachment begins to shield an individual from further emotional damage. It’s the body’s way of protecting itself, but it creates huge problems for a detective who is trying to piece together the puzzle.
    One of the local cops on the scene made a comment out of Gambrel’s hearing about what a “fine, upstanding guy” Gambrel was and how it was “too damn bad” that this event would fuck up that reputation. It was then that I realized who in the hell Winston Gambrel was. He and his wife owned and operated Abbey’s Road Pub, a Denver downtown landmark. The name of the place was a play on words, combining the title of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album with the name of Gambrel’s wife, Abbey. The couple had no children and so their business became their “baby.” Abbey’s Road Pub celebrated all things British, from the ceiling that sported a
painted wall-to-wall Union Jack to the bevy of commemorative plates that adorned each booth, with the Queen, Prince Charles, the Queen Mother and Princess Diana featured. But what I remembered most about his pub was the incredible collection of Beatles memorabilia that