A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Gregory handed the guy a twenty-dollar bill. “Thanks for the help,” he said.

  We left the store, and stood out on Forty-sixth Street. People went by on their way to see Wicked and Mamma Mia!, and we just stood there.

  “Now what?” Gregory asked.

  I had no idea.

  12

  WE couldn’t think of anything else to do, so we went to visit the other retailers on Dutton’s list. The first three were variations on the theme established at the “jewelry” store: an electronics outlet, a clothing store that specialized in “adult lingerie” where some rubber garments had been bought (Gregory came close to passing out a couple of times), and a high-end cookware outlet that didn’t seem to fit the list. None of the salespeople or managers at the stores remembered seeing Sharon, and none of the purchases were anything Gregory or I could imagine her buying, although I confess I did try to imagine the lingerie.

  At the bar in the Affinia Manhattan hotel, across the street from Madison Square Garden, we struck pay dirt. Sort of.

  “Yeah, I remember her,” the bartender said. My head broke the land speed record for swiveling in his direction. “Just a couple of days ago. Came in for about an hour. It was the busy time of the night, so I didn’t talk to her much.” The guy was maybe thirty, with the chiseled face of an actor who makes his living serving drinks to the well-off.

  Gregory and I, stunned at our sudden success, must have had eyes the size of silver-dollar pancakes. I regained the power of speech first. “How do you remember her?” I asked.

  “Well, she was pretty, but we get a lot of nice-looking women in here,” he answered. “I remember her because of what she was drinking.”

  We waited, and he eventually came to the conclusion that we would like to know what that was. The bartender smiled. “Milk and seltzer,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

  Gregory and I stared at each other. “Milk and seltzer?” Gregory asked, after a moment. “You’re sure?”

  “I don’t get much call for it,” the bartender answered. “Believe me, I remember.”

  “But you’re sure it was the woman in the picture,” I emphasized. “It couldn’t have been someone else.”

  The bartender shook his head. “No, that’s her, all right. First thing when I saw her picture, I said, ‘Milk and seltzer.’ Does she drink that all the time?”

  “No,” Gregory answered. “I’ve never seen her with that one.” He turned to me. “You?”

  I shook my head. “Never,” I said. “You should have added some chocolate syrup and made her an egg cream.”

  “I offered,” the bartender said.

  Gregory remembered something then. “We have her credit card receipt from that night,” he told the bartender. “The total was over thirty-two dollars. That’s a lot of milk and seltzer to drink in an hour.”

  “Well, the guy she was with was drinking Dewar’s,” the guy answered. “That’s most of the bill. I don’t even think I charged her for the milk.”

  I jumped in before Gregory could inhale. “The guy she was with?” I asked. “She was with a guy?”

  “Yeah, for a while. He left after a couple of drinks, and she stuck around maybe twenty minutes.”

  “What did he look like?” Gregory asked breathlessly.

  The bartender shrugged. “Nothing special; nothing I can remember,” he said. “I’d say thirties, dark hair, ladies would probably find him handsome. I don’t remember the guys as well as the women.” He smiled his devilish smile. It didn’t have much effect.

  “And he left before her?” I said. “They didn’t leave together?”

  “No. I mean, I was busy at the bar, but I don’t remember seeing him again.”

  I had to ask. “When he left, how did she say good-bye?”

  The bartender’s brow wrinkled. “I didn’t hear her say good-bye,” he said. “I don’t listen in on customers’ conversations.”

  Gregory’s lips had flattened out to a straight horizontal line. “He means, did she kiss him good-bye,” he said.

  “I think so, but just on the cheek, like a friend,” the guy said.

  “Did she have any luggage with her?” I asked. If Sharon knew she was going away for a while, she’d bring changes of clothes, cosmetics, and enough other stuff to fill a U-Haul van.

  “I didn’t see any,” the bartender answered. “Hang on, I have somebody at the other end of the bar.” And he went down to take an order from a guy who was trying to impress a woman of maybe twenty-five in a silver dress you could clean with Windex.

  “I thought you were the guy,” Gregory said. “I guess I was wrong.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What do you think it means?” Gregory asked.

  “I think it means she was here,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like she was being held against her will. It doesn’t sound like she was especially distraught. I can’t imagine what she was doing here in the city after the whole business with Chapman, but she hadn’t heard about his suicide yet—if he committed suicide. And it doesn’t help us at all to figure out where she is.”

  The bartender wandered back from his post, shaking his head. “Guy’s trying to get laid,” he said, “and he orders a chocolate martini. For himself. Maybe it’s me.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us about the night our . . . friend was here?” I asked him. “Anything about the other guy, anything about where she might have been going when she left?”

  He made a show of thinking, so the tip Gregory would give him could be larger. “I wasn’t looking, so I don’t know if she got into a cab or took the subway.”

  “Cab,” Gregory and I answered in unison.

  “I do remember, though, that her hands were shaking,” the bartender added. “When the guy was there, you couldn’t tell. He said he could stay if she wanted him to, and she said no, she’d be fine if she could just get away fast enough. After he left, I think there were a couple of times she started to cry, but then she pulled herself together.”

  “It’s a good thing you don’t eavesdrop on customers,” I said.

  I gave him a Comedy Tonight card. Gregory gave him a fifty.

  ON the way back in the car, I called Dutton on Gregory’s cell phone and filled him in on what we’d discovered, which really hadn’t been much beyond a mystery man in the bar whom we couldn’t identify. I’d handed a Comedy Tonight business card to virtually every cheap retailer in Manhattan and the bartender at the hotel, and Gregory was down about a hundred and fifty bucks, which didn’t bother me in the least. Dutton refused to elaborate on the strange report from the medical examiner, which I found rude, but grudgingly understandable. Then I called the theatre and got Sophie on the phone.

  “We’re just about up and running,” she said. “Jonathan is taking tickets so I can run the snack bar, and I called Anthony to get here early because you aren’t threading up the projector. He’s upstairs getting the movie on now.”

  “You’re my hero, Sophie,” I told her.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Brown University recommends the SAT and the ACT. I have studying to do.”

  “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Yeah. Some guy came in from an insurance company. Said he met you at the doctor’s today. Are you sick?”

  “Just heartsick,” I said. “Was this guy’s name Tovarich?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s here now. The movie starts in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be back before intermission,” I said. “Hold down the fort.”

  “What fort?” Sophie asked.

  I should have hung up. In retrospect, it would have been so much better. “There’s a woman here, too, looking for your ex-wife,” Sophie continued.

  Okay, that was odd. “Looking for Sharon? At the theatre?”

  “Ye-ah.” A tone indicating that I was even stupider than usual.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Elliot, I sell snacks. I’m not supposed to be your secretary.” />
  That was true, but didn’t seem relevant. “Is the woman still there, Sophie?”

  “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “Don’t impersonate my mother. You’re too young, and I’ll have strange dreams. Look. Don’t let the woman leave before I get there, understand?”

  “What am I supposed to do, physically block her at the exit?” I was starting to get nostalgic for the old monosyllabic Goth Sophie. This new one had way too much equity in the Bank of Sarcasm.

  “If she tries to leave, tell her I’m on my way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” And this time, I did hang up.

  I told Gregory what Sophie had said, and he increased his speed from a limit-obeying fifty-five miles an hour to a downright death-defying sixty. The man was an animal.

  While we were hurtling toward Midland Heights in an attempt to set a new land-slowness record, I called Meg Vidal on Gregory’s phone, which I’d decided would be my phone until he grabbed it out of my hand.

  “Well, it’s about time,” she said, after I assured her it was not Gregory reaching out to her.

  “We’ve been busy.”

  “Did you find out anything?” Meg asked.

  “A few things. I’ll tell you when I see you. Where are you now?”

  “On my way to your house,” she answered. “You dad gave me his key. I assume it’s okay if I stay the night.”

  “Stay as long as you want, but if you expect hanky-panky, I’ll have you know I’m not that kind of boy,” I answered. “Dammit.”

  “Thank goodness for small favors,” Meg said. “Listen. The hospital is a zoo; every cop in the county is tearing the place apart looking for Chapman’s body. There wasn’t much point in sticking around there, so I spent the afternoon working with Barry and making a few phone calls. I’ve found out a few things, but nothing astonishing.”

  “I’ll be the judge of what’s astonishing,” I told her. “What’d you find out?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Are you on your way to the theatre?”

  I assured her I was. “We’re racing there to meet a mysterious woman who might be the key to the entire mystery,” I told her, to make it sound important. “It’s possible Gregory is actually exceeding the speed limit by a mile or two.” Gregory scowled at me. It’s the simple pleasures that make life worthwhile.

  “I’ll wait up,” Meg said. “Call if you need me.”

  We got back to Comedy Tonight in a record (for Gregory) hour and fifteen minutes from door to door. It would have taken a normal person forty-five minutes, but one must make allowances for the adrenaline-deficient. I was out of the car and at the door of the theatre pretty much before he declared his vehicle parked.

  It was warmer inside, but not that much. The heating system had probably been built while Hope and Crosby were filming Road to Morocco, and had not responded well to being dormant for the better part of a day. I touched the radiator in the lobby on the way in, just to make sure it was hot. Well, warm.

  Not cold, anyway.

  Sophie was behind the snack bar, sitting on her stool and reading The Real ACT Prep Guide. Jonathan, without any tickets to tear in half, stood by her, adoringly and silently. He was the perfect lapdog.

  I unlocked the office and put my parka inside. Then I wasted no time getting to Sophie. “Where is she?”

  Sophie looked up. “Who?” Twenty-two sixty. I’m asking you.

  “The woman who was asking for Sharon. Where is she?”

  “Oh. Near the back, I think.” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the auditorium, and went back to her book, putting a pencil in her mouth.

  “Sophie,” I said, as Gregory walked up beside me. “What does the woman look like?”

  “Oh, she’s old,” Jonathan volunteered, doing his best to keep us from disturbing Sophie. “She’s got to be at least forty.”

  Gregory, who is forty-one, coughed. “You saw her?” I asked Jonathan. “Can you show me where she is?”

  Jonathan whispered, gesturing to the ever-concentrating Sophie. “Sure. Come on.”

  He practically tiptoed away from Sophie, who was highlighting passages in the book with an expression of seriousness I had only seen on her once before, when she was deciding whether her new ringtone should be Marilyn Manson or vintage Megadeth. Manson had won, but it had been close.

  Jonathan led us to the auditorium door, which he opened slightly. On the screen, John L. “Sully” Sullivan was at his low point, confined to a chain gang for a murder he didn’t commit, and the guards were allowing the inmates their one and only pleasure: Pluto cartoons shown in a church. It is Sullivan’s epiphany: the moment he realizes that making silly comedies might just be a high calling after all. That one always gets to me, and for a moment, I was caught up in the film. Jonathan tapped me on the shoulder.

  “There she is,” he said, pointing.

  I followed his finger and saw the woman he was indicating: She was in her late thirties, by my estimate, and overdressed for a night at Comedy Tonight, as anyone not in jeans and a flannel shirt (and tonight, a parka) would be. This woman was wearing an actual dress and a hat, of all things, and was watching the screen with no facial expression.

  People were starting to look around to see why there was light in the auditorium, so I crept in and closed the door after Gregory followed me inside. I walked slowly to the woman, and since there was no one else seated nearby, I spoke quietly to her (I would never talk during the movie if it would disturb another patron, and would appreciate it if you would follow the same code the next time you’re seated near me).

  “Were you looking for Dr. Simon-Freed?” I asked.

  She looked up, sharply. It wasn’t so much that she had been intent on the film as that she simply wasn’t expecting to hear that question at that moment. But she recovered quickly. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Are you him?” I decided not to correct her grammar.

  Gregory and I exchanged a glance. “No,” I said. “Dr. Simon-Freed is a woman. I’m her ex-husband.”

  “Simon is a woman’s name?” she demanded, apparently intending to prove to me that I was Dr. Simon-Freed.

  I motioned toward the door. “Let’s talk out there,” I suggested. The woman nodded, and we all went back into the lobby.

  Once we could speak at a normal volume again, I explained to her who I was and why Sharon’s name sounded like a man’s. Then I asked the woman for her name, and she gave it to me.

  “Gwen Chapman,” she said. “My father died Thursday night, and your ex-wife was his doctor.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  13

  “DON’T get me wrong,” Gwen Chapman said. “I don’t think Dr. Simon-Freed was involved in my father’s death.”

  That was a relief—a member of the Chapman family who wasn’t accusing Sharon of murder. I was starting to like Gwen.

  “That’s refreshing,” I told her. “I met your sister, and . . .” Gwen made a face. “Lillian,” she said. “I imagine you got an earful.”

  I smiled. “Both ears.”

  She laughed. “Lil’s always been like that,” she said. “Everybody’s out to do her wrong, even people she’s never met. I imagine it’s a hard way to live.”

  “Harder for the people who live with her, I’ll bet,” I offered.

  Gwen shrugged. “My father loved her,” she said.

  “How do you know your father’s dead?” I said to Gwen. “The last I heard, they couldn’t find a body.” It hadn’t sounded so unfeeling in my head.

  “He would have gotten in touch by now,” she said with a catch in her voice. “It’s been two days.” That struck to my heart, because it was the same period of time since anyone had heard from Sharon. Just about forty-eight hours.

  “Besides,” Gwen Chapman continued, “my father left a suicide note.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in, but Gwen went on. “It said that he couldn’t live with the idea of deteriorating before our eyes, of the excruciating pain he woul
d be experiencing. He didn’t want to end up in a bed waiting for someone to turn off the machine.”

  Behind her, I saw the auditorium doors open, and a few people wandered out. Sullivan must have concluded his travels. Among the stragglers was Martin Tovarich, who grinned as he caught my eye and then veered right and headed for the men’s room. The urge hits fast when you’re over seventy.

  “Ms. Chapman, believe me, I’m very sorry your father was so upset, and I understand why he would be under the circumstances.” I would have bet the farm I was saying those words, but the voice was actually coming from a little to my left, and belonged to Gregory. Doctors know what to say when somebody dies; it’s like when your mechanic tells you that the transmission on your fifteen-year-old Buick has gone belly-up, and offers you the phone number of his brother’s junkyard. “But I don’t think we know exactly what happened yet.”

  Gwen Chapman did what might be described as a classic double take, and then settled her gaze on Gregory. “I’m sorry; who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Dr. Gregory Sandoval.” He probably had monogrammed boxer shorts that said “Dr. Gregory Sandoval” on them, but it was better not to think about that. “I’m Sharon’s husband.”

  “Soon-to-be ex-husband,” I answered, as a reflex.

  Gwen looked like she was getting a headache. “I thought you were her ex-husband,” she said to me.

  “Who says you have to be limited to one?”

  Gwen, wisely, let that go. I asked her why she’d come to Comedy Tonight.

  “I called Dr. Simon-Freed’s practice, to see if there were anything I could find out about my father’s diagnosis, and whether it would have affected his brain—you know, suicide might have been the outcome of a drug-induced depression, or something of that nature—and I was told the doctor wasn’t in. The woman on the phone suggested I check with you.” I mentally cursed Betty for sending a distraught, if pleasant, woman to me when I was at least as distraught, if not as pleasant. I guess Betty hadn’t known what else to do.