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with the Justice Department.
     Your late husband was interviewed a few years ago about one of your tenants, and I wanted to ask him a few more questions.”
    “Who was the tenant? Maybe I could help you. We’ve got only two rental apartments, and I remember most of our tenants.”
    “The tenant was Marshall Stuart Lennox. Ring a bell?”
    “Of course I remember him.” She paused. “If you don’t mind me saying, I never really liked the guy.”
    “Why?”
    “He was a real oddball. Never opened his mail.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “I saw unopened envelopes in the garbage bin a few times. Back then, we were living in an apartment we own in the same building.
     And I never saw him use his mailbox to leaveletters for the mailman to collect.” She let it sink in. “He also installed a telephone line under a different name.”
    “And how did you come across that?”
    “After he left, a bill came to that address with a strange name on it. I opened it, and the telephone number was the same
     as Lennox’s. I have no idea why he did it, but he never left a forwarding address—just took off.”
    I sat up in my chair. “Do you still have that phone bill?”
    “Nope, I threw it out ages ago. The charge was for, like, $6, so I guess the phone company just wrote it off.”
    “So what name did he use for the bill?” I asked, trying to keep too much interest out of my voice.
    She sighed. “It’s been forever—I really couldn’t tell you. But I think it was just a regular American name, nothing special.
     You know, Jones, Brown, Evans.”
    “Your husband mentioned that Lennox had an accent. Did you notice that too?”
    “No, but Louis was always the one who dealt with him. I know he had one, though. Louis used to teach drama and English, so
     he always did notice accents. I did hear about it. Louis liked to identify people’s origin and background by listening to
     them talking. After listening to a person’s dialect, Louis could tell where the person grew up, and sometimes how educated
     he was. He loved doing that.”
    “Did he discuss Lennox’s accent with you, or just mention it?”
    “Well, he said Lennox definitely didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, which is what he told us.”
    “What made him say that?”
    “Louis used to go every summer to Wisconsin to teach drama to local kids in a summer camp. He could do that accent really
     well. So, one day he mentioned to Lennox that he’d been teaching in Oconomowoc, in the lake country. Lennox tried to change
     the subject, and he mispronounced
Oconomowoc
. Then Louis made a joke about people from Wisconsin saying ‘cripes’ a lot, but Lennox didn’t seem to get it either. Louis
     thought it was really weird. But I told him, ‘What do we know? MaybeLennox left Wisconsin when he was young. Anyway,’ I said, ‘why should we care? He pays rent on time and doesn’t damage our
     property.’ ”
    It wasn’t much, but was at least something. “Did your husband continue to be suspicious of Lennox?”
    She thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I’d call it suspicious. He was just a little uneasy about him. He thought maybe
     Lennox had made it all up—had this crazy idea that maybe he was on the run from the police. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s important,
     but Louis said something once about how Lennox stretched his
a
’s and
h
’s.”
    “What, like a Southern drawl?”
    “No, not like any American accent he knew. He’d taught speech for years, so Louis really knew his accents. Once he said he
     was sure that Lennox wasn’t even American. But you know, that was before nine eleven. What did we know?” That was an attention-grabbing
     remark. I picked up on that.
    “Why do you mention nine eleven?”
    “Well, you know…” She sounded reluctant to pursue the point. “He had sort of dark skin. Not like he was black or Latino.
     Just a little darker than your typical Wisconsin dairy farmer, I guess, who’s as white as his cows’ milk.”
    I