Unrevealed

she had ingested twice the recommended dose of the sleeping pill approximately two hours before she fell. Sleepwalking is my guess.” Gambrel closed his eyes. “Furthermore, based on lividity, it appears that she lay there for at least an hour, dead, before you found her. The trauma on her body shows it was incurred post-mortem, when you were performing CPR.”
    Gambrel broke down in tears. “I felt such guilt that I didn’t feel her get out of bed or hear her fall. The love of my life lay there dying on a cold tile floor while I’m asleep upstairs!” He pulled his fingers through his hair. “I just happened to stir and see she wasn’t in bed and that’s when I got up in the dark and bumped into the bed and the side table, cutting my hip. When I saw her lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs, I thought, Please, God! Don’t take away another person I love so deeply in the blink of an eye! I pounded on her chest and I tried to breathe life into her, but it was no use.”
    “And that’s when you called 9-1-1.”
    He wiped his tears off his face with his large hand. “Yes.”
    “But you felt guilt about something else, didn’t you? Before the paramedics showed up, you removed these.” Opening the manila folder, I lifted the plastic Kapak that held the bloody white panties and set them on the table in front of Gambrel. He stared at them in stony silence. “I was the only person on the scene who secured these in the Kapak. Nobody else bothered to check the tag. Size extra large. And your wife probably wore a small.” Gambrel buried his head
in his hand. “The paramedics came to the door. You remembered you had them on and so you tore them off and hid them under the furniture. The blood came from you when you cut yourself walking around the bed in the dark.” I leaned closer to Gambrel. “You were willing to confess to murdering your wife to keep your secret fetish under wraps? My God, man. How does that become the better option?”
    “Don’t you see? You know how this tabloid world operates! Everything about my past would come out. My entire life would be up for ridicule. I would be the punch line on every late-night talk show. My image as the burly Brit who runs the landmark English pub and gives back to his community…all that would vanish. Nobody would care why my life turned out like this. They’d be too busy laughing and judging me. And all the good Abbey and I have done for forty years would be forgotten. I never told Abbey the truth about my roots but she did know about this.” He glanced to the panties. “And she didn’t care. John Lennon had his eccentricities and so do I. But the world will not be as kind as my dear wife was.”
    I glanced back at the two-way mirror and then turned back to Gambrel. “You see this writing on the Kapak? That shows who submitted the panties into evidence. That’s my signature. And when I signed them out of evidence, I also left my signature. As you can see, nobody else signed them in or out. So I’m the only one who’s really…intimately connected to them. And since your wife’s death was ruled accidental,” I broke the seal on the Kapak, “I have the authority to return your property to you.” I handed him the panties. “You can throw them away or put them in the drawer on your side of the closet with the others.”

    He looked at me, genuinely thankful. Still, there was trepidation. “How can I trust them ,” he jutted his chin toward the two-way glass. “That journalist scored a story from some cop at the scene — a story that was pure conjecture. How can I be so sure that one of those people on the other side of the glass won’t chitchat with a reporter?”
    I turned to the two-way glass. “Because…there’s nobody back there.”
    Gambrel was confused. “But — ”
    “And those cameras? If they were on, there’d be a red light indicating that. This interrogation room is actually out of commission while they remodel it.”
    Gambrel pointed to the tape recorder that was still on. “And that?”
    “Oh, that’s real. But it’s just a prop. All secrets need sturdy props to make them more realistic.” I turned off the tape recorder. “Look, when I saw you by the elevator, I was about to tell you what I’d learned from the coroner and give you back the panties. But then you confessed to murder and so I had to shift gears.”
    He tried to wrap his mind around everything. “So…just to be clear…you are the only one who knows