Unrevealed by Laurel Dewey Read Free Book Online Page A

ambush. “Do you have a few minutes, Jane? I’d like to talk to you about your sobriety!” No thanks.
    Am I keeping my sobriety a secret? Well, no, obviously not, since I’m writing about it and you’re reading it. Did I keep my drinking a secret? Well, yes, in fact, I sure as hell tried. But I had a little trouble keeping the hangovers under wraps and my frequently bloodshot eyes tended to tip my drunken hat. But even so, there were still a few acquaintances who didn’t quite appreciate how far I’d fallen into the bottle. But I’ll say it again: they weren’t observant . Just like Mike’s Jewish “shaman,” all I had to do was come up with a good cover story and more than one schmo bought this shiksa’s lame excuses.
    As they say in AA: “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” And let me tell you, there are a lot of people out there keeping a whole helluva lot of secrets. Our secrets often stalk us, continually reminding us that we’re one revelation away from having our human frailties or youthful transgressions laid bare. Some of our secrets are minor, but other secrets
take on their own identity, framing and defining an individual’s cloaked life. For those souls, their secrets haunt them, holding them hostage to the fear that one day they will be discovered. The mere thought of being exposed is enough for a few of them to kill; for others, it’s enough to make them take their own lives rather than face disgrace.
    As I’ve commented many times while working in Homicide, people kill for one of three reasons: sex, money or gettin’ even. When you think about it, secrets inhabit each of those motives: Sexual secrets, financial secrets and sundry secrets that force a person to seek revenge. I had to keep all of that in mind when I worked a case recently involving Mr. Winston Gambrel.
    I was paged at 2:22 a.m. a few weeks ago and summoned to Mr. Gambrel’s upscale home after Mr. Gambrel hysterically called 9-1-1 to get help for his wife. She had fallen down their circular staircase and sprawled in her lilac nightgown on the Italian tile near their front door. When the paramedics arrived, 65-year-old Gambrel answered the door nude, hyperventilating and sweating profusely. His 59-year-old wife, Abbey, showed signs of serious trauma on her chest and shoulders. Tossed across the entryway, under an 18thcentury secretary from Britain, 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