A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  The owner of the house next door had clearly boarded up for the winter and gone home, so I was relatively sure he wouldn’t mind if I used his spare tires (on rims) to boost myself into a position where I could see through the window. And if he did, I could point out that using such old tires on any moving vehicle would probably result in a horrible crash, so I was probably saving the poor man’s life.

  This is how my mind works, and yes, it is sad.

  With the added height from the tires, I could see through the downstairs window into the front room.

  But I didn’t see Sharon. Or anyone else, for that matter. From this angle, the fireplace didn’t appear to have any ashes in it, and there would surely have been some temptation to light a fire for anyone staying there recently. The house was winterized, but it wasn’t exactly cozy. A nice fire would help neutralize the chill.

  I could tell there was no one in the room, but I couldn’t see into every corner from here, and dragging the tires from window to window seemed a less-than-efficient plan. It was time to do something that would make Meg happy she hadn’t come along.

  In the driveway, near the tires’ original resting place, was a cinder block, undoubtedly used as a jack-substitute for whatever rent-a-wreck the owner of the house had taken the tires from. I hefted it; too heavy and bulky to be of real use. There had to be something else . . . There!

  It was a cliché, but an effective one. A nice handy rock, just the right size and weight. I don’t know why, but I wrapped it in my pocket handkerchief.

  Normally (as if there were a “normally” in this situation), I’d have gone in through the kitchen, but I knew there was an alarm system attached to that door, so entering that way would have made a racket.

  Instead, I stood about ten feet from the side of the house, wound up like Sandy Koufax, and hurled the rock through the window. When no alarm sounded (apparently there had been no security upgrades since I’d last been here), I climbed up carefully on the tires and knocked in the remaining pieces of glass with my elbow. Then, gingerly, I unlocked the latch, raised the frame, and climbed through the window.

  I was careful not to kill myself on the broken glass inside, but there really wasn’t very much. Getting back to my feet, I scraped myself slightly on the left forefinger, but it barely bled.

  The room was empty, as I’d thought it would be. For one thing, any people who had been inside would surely have come to investigate what the breaking glass was all about. I took a look around the room—mystery books; fireplace (indeed without ashes); pile of firewood, about half full; overstuffed chairs from the Johnson Administration (not sure if it was Lyndon or Andrew); and a throw rug that, if there had been sense, would have been thrown—away—long ago. No people, nor signs of people.

  Except my mother.

  “Didn’t I say you should wait back there?” I asked.

  “I got tired of waiting. My leg hurts.”

  “How did you get in here?” I whispered.

  Mom pointed. “Through the back door, in the kitchen.”

  My voice caught a time or two. “There’s . . . there’s an alarm on that door.”

  She shrugged. “It didn’t go off.” Then she looked at my hand, and at the broken glass on the floor. “Elliot! Did you break the window?”

  I ignored that. I was working on my ignoring skills. Perhaps I could be the captain of the Ignoring Team at the next Olympics.

  There was no one downstairs, clearly, or they would have sent a welcoming committee because of all that had been going on. I knew the house, and all that I’d find upstairs would be three bedrooms.

  “This time, I’m going to insist,” I told my mother. “You stay down here.”

  She thought about it, but after a moment said, “With my knees? Naturally. I’ll be the—what do you call it?—the lookout.”

  Having left the Jewish Squanto in the living room, where she took a book off the shelf and leaned on the easy chair (far too dusty for her to sit on), I crept up the stairs as slowly as I could, because the stairs creaked like my grandmother’s knees on a rainy day, except they didn’t yell “oy.” (To be fair, Grand-ma’s knees didn’t yell “oy,” either, but they caused the yelling, and that was close enough.) I winced with each stair, and it felt like an hour before I made it to the landing. I’d given serious thought to giving up somewhere around stair number seven, but plodded on, trying very hard not to break into a sweat, breathe audibly, or throw up before I achieved the summit.

  There were three bedroom doors, and they were all closed. I heard no moaning coming from behind any of them, of either the excited or tortured variety.

  I searched all three bedrooms, and to spare you the gory details, each one was empty, although one was somewhat less dusty than the other two. It was a relief to have found no one holding my ex-wife hostage, and I had to admit, not to find her Evelyn Wood speed-reading through the Kama Sutra with some guy she might have just met. But I was back to square one: Sharon was still missing.

  The trip downstairs took considerably less time than the one upstairs had taken. I didn’t have to worry about finding anyone in the house this time.

  So it was really a surprise to discover the two police officers in the front room when I hit the landing. That was bad enough, but the guns they were pointing at me were even more disturbing.

  “Nice looking out, Mom,” I said.

  “Didn’t I say you shouldn’t have broken the window?” my mother answered.

  17

  PROBABLY the best tactic here was to treat them to a smile. They can smell fear. “Hello, officers,” I said.

  “Please put your hands behind your head and don’t take another step, sir,” the officer closer to me barked. Apparently, he was trying to take a bite out of crime.

  “I just came in through the back door,” my mother said.

  “Can you tell me why you’re pointing your weapons at me?” I asked, putting my hands exactly where he suggested.

  The lead cop holstered his weapon while the other kept his trained on my head, which was an improvement, but not much of one. He found a pair of zip strips—the white plastic handcuffs that are all the rage in the cop biz these days—on his belt, and took first my right hand, and then my left, and tied them up like a Christmas present.

  “Sir, what is your name?”

  I told him. “Why are you arresting me?” I asked. He hadn’t started to read me my rights yet, but the handcuffs were a dead giveaway. I had an urge to ask why he wasn’t arresting my mother, but that seemed to be in poor taste.

  “We’re taking you in for questioning, sir,” the cop said. He was maybe twenty-four on a good day, and still practiced in what they’d taught him at the academy.

  “Questioning? About what?”

  “We’ll tell you at the station, sir,” the cop said.

  His partner, seeing my hands bound by plastic, put his gun away.

  “I don’t understand,” I tried. “Should I be calling my attorney?”

  “I think your cousin Herbie is in Acapulco on vacation,” said Mom, pulling out her cell phone, “but I can call.”

  “Why are you here, sir?” The second cop had decided he could speak now.

  “I’m looking for my ex-wife,” I said. “I thought she might be up here. Her family owns the house.”

  They opened the front door with the apparent intention of leading me out and putting me in the police car. I was determined not to let that happen unless I had no choice, but it was starting to look that way.

  “Just a second,” I said. “Why are you here? Did someone call? Did you hear from Dr. Simon-Freed?”

  “My Sharon,” Mom moaned. Perhaps the cops would appreciate her suffering.

  No luck; the cops were trying out for the Ignoring Team, too. “All I know is, we got a call from a resident across the lake that someone was breaking into this house,” the second cop, slightly older and less vehement, said. “And sure enough, there’s broken glass right by that open window.”
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  I chuckled. “Yeah, I forgot my keys, can you believe it? And I was concerned about my ex, so I decided to . . . Across the lake? Somebody saw me from all the way across the lake?”

  “The guy has a telescope, apparently.”

  “That’s rude,” Mom said.

  Great. Now I was self-conscious about the times Sharon and I had spent up here alone. “I just needed to get into the house, and I didn’t have a key,” I reiterated.

  Neither cop was buying it. “Come along now, sir, and we’ll get this all straightened out down at the station,” the older one said. They started to move me toward the door again.

  Not that I minded the odd trip to jail now and then, but I really didn’t have time for this today. “Look, fellas, this is all very innocent,” I said. “Do we really have to spend all this time and make you fill out all that paperwork? Can’t we just straighten it out here?”

  “Are you trying to bribe us?” the younger cop asked. He looked like he’d been waiting to say that all his life.

  “No, I’m not trying to bribe you. I’m just saying, you’ll have to fill out lots of reports. Just let me tell you what happened.” I know cops hate filling out forms.

  The older cop rolled his eyes a bit at his partner’s behavior, but he shook his head slightly. “We have to do the paperwork whether we arrest you or not,” he said. “Nice try, though.”

  “Look,” I said to him, ignoring the younger cop entirely, “you can see I haven’t stolen anything. I haven’t damaged anything, except the window. And that was just because . . . Officer, please. My ex-wife is missing. I’m seriously worried about her, and I . . . I guess I wasn’t using my best judgment. I had to see if she was okay.” I don’t like to admit it, but I think my eyes were starting to moisten.

  I’m willing to bet the older cop would have cut the cuffs off at that moment, but the younger one said, “You’re breakin’ my heart, pal. But you divorced her for a reason, right?”

  “She divorced me.”

  “Imagine that.”

  They moved me toward the door, and my secret weapon finally became useful. Mom stood up.

  “You’re not really going to arrest my son, are you?” she asked.

  The cuffs were off in seconds.

  The cops made sure I cleaned up the broken glass and plugged the hole in the window with some paneling I found in the crawl-space under the kitchen. Then they led Mom and me outside, and watched us get into my car. They followed us to the town limits, which was just about the time Mom’s cell phone rang.

  The cops were watching, and I didn’t want to get fined for using a cell phone while driving, so I pulled over when Mom told me it was Meg.

  “She wasn’t here, but I think she might have been recently,” I told her.

  “Well, she hasn’t shown up here, either,” Meg said. “But there has been a development.” And my adrenaline started its roller-coaster trip around my body again.

  “What kind of development?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “Mr. Chapman’s lawyer called,” Meg said. “She got a call from him last night. He’s alive.”

  18

  THE drive back to Midland Heights was pretty much like the drive up to Lake Carey. I wasn’t thinking much about the road, and my speed was probably ten to twenty miles an hour faster than I normally would do in any borrowed car, let alone Mom’s ancient Olds. But she didn’t make me stop for food this time, and we were back at Comedy Tonight in about two and a half hours, just in time to watch Sophie scowling at having to set up for the matinee.

  “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” she said when Mom and I walked in. “Do you think I have time to do my job and yours and still get through two separate practice tests in the next twenty-four hours?”

  “No, I don’t,” I answered, and kept walking, despite her annoyed cries of “Elliot!” as I found Meg and Dad at the entrance doors to the auditorium. Mom gave me a look that indicated her disapproval of the way I treated Sophie, but I ignored it. I took a mental inventory: Anthony would be in the projection booth, and Jonathan was probably cleaning up the auditorium.

  Dad hugged me, something he’d been doing more often lately, and said, “Nothing?” I shook my head and turned toward Meg. I told her our story. Even the part about almost being arrested, which led to a cry of “I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” something I’m used to hearing from my mother, but not a homicide detective. My mother, to my right, just rolled her eyes and let her face speak volumes on the embarrassment and suffering she endured on my account.

  “She was there,” I said. “Sharon was at the lake house. Recently. Maybe yesterday.”

  “Sharon?” Dad said, his eyes widening. “How do you know?”

  “One of the rooms wasn’t covered in dust,” I said. “The rest of the place looked like Vincent Price’s dungeon.”

  Mom made a face. “That’s disgusting.”

  I decided to ignore that, too, and talked to Meg again. “She was there. I don’t know how recently, or if she was alone or not, but she was there.”

  “You should have told that to the cops,” Meg said. “They could be on the lookout for her now.”

  “I couldn’t risk it. Next thing you know, they’d be accusing me of chopping her up and dumping the body in the lake. I couldn’t give them an excuse to hold me there.”

  “Elliot!” my mother said. I put an arm around her shoulder, and she looked at me like I must be in need of some strong mood-altering drugs.

  “I’ll call them in an hour or so,” Meg said. “If there’s a chance they can find Sharon up there, we should take it.”

  “Tell me about Chapman,” I said.

  Sophie had turned the “closed” sign in the front window to “open,” so a few people were starting to drift in for the early show of Sullivan’s Travels. I half expected to see Martin Tovarich come back for a second viewing, just to get his mojo back, but he didn’t arrive. When customers started reaching the auditorium doors, I motioned my posse (as I was now thinking of them) back toward the office door. We couldn’t all sit, or, for that matter, enter, but we could be out of the way near there.

  “All I know is, the word came in to Barry Dutton either late last night or early this morning,” Meg said. “Chapman’s lawyer, a woman named Angie Hogencamp, called the county prosecutor to let him know Chapman had gotten in touch with her over a legal matter, so that meant he was alive. She’d spoken to Chapman himself, and there was no mistake.”

  I hadn’t slept nor eaten in a long time (my exercise in teaching my mother a lesson had been a miscalculation, I was realizing), and my brain didn’t seem to be functioning at its normal level. “Is it me, or does that not add up? Why didn’t Dutton send someone out to see Chapman when he got the call?”

  “It’s not his jurisdiction,” Meg said. “No crime was committed in Midland Heights. The East Brunswick cops have been investigating, so they might have gone, or the prosecutor may have sent an investigator, but I don’t know that for sure.”

  “What about Sharon?” my mother insisted. “What does this do for her?”

  “Not very much, Mom,” I told her. “We still don’t know where she is, or why.”

  “At least she’s not a murder suspect anymore,” my father offered. Dad is a walking ray of sunshine.

  But there was a walking veil of darkness approaching from the left, and it had a voice. “Yes, she is,” said the voice.

  Lillian Chapman Mayer, resplendent in a black business suit, had slithered into the theatre when nobody was looking, and stood, hands-on-hips, surveying us with the same expression I imagined she’d give Charles Manson if he’d decided to drop by for an evening’s entertainment.

  “So this is where you work,” she said to me, with what I perceived to be a sneer in her voice. (I don’t often get to hear genuine sneers, so I might be out of practice.) “It’s cozy.”

  “I don’t care for that word,” I answered. “I like inviting.”

  Meg g
ave me a questioning look. “This is Lillian Chapman Mayer,” I said to the group. “We met at Sharon’s practice yesterday morning.”

  “And you were rude, and didn’t tell me who you were until it was too late,” Lillian added.

  “Nonsense. I merely pointed out that you don’t stop talking very often. You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” Groucho. If you steal, steal from the best.

  “Elliot!” My mother, more offended than Lillian Chapman, would have swooned or taken the vapors if she’d been a Southern woman. Instead, she was from Eastern European stock (by way of the Bronx), and with her delicate constitution, could no doubt have pulled a plow through the lobby if that had become necessary. Luckily, it did not.

  Dad, ever the diplomat (salesmen are peacemakers by nature, and Dad was an excellent salesman: never pushy, always ingratiating), shifted the conversation back into drive. “What brings you here, Mrs. Mayer?” he asked.

  Meg tried to bring order where there was no order; that’s her nature. “There’s no point in looking for Dr. Simon-Freed here,” she said. “We have no idea where she is.”

  “Yeah, she’s flown the coop; my sister told me that,” Lillian responded. “Just a little suspicious, don’t you think? Right after the doctor gave my father a death sentence that she knew was wrong, she disappeared.”

  I considered pointing out that Lillian herself could disappear without making much of a dent in America, but Meg was quicker—and saner—than me. “I don’t think it’s relevant,” she said. “We were told your father is still alive, so the doctor’s whereabouts don’t have anything to do with him.”

  Lillian actually smiled. She looked like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons. I think I preferred her not smiling.

  Finally, I drew in my breath, swallowed, and said, “Miss Chapman, shouldn’t you be plotting the end of civilization at your evil lair? Why aren’t you visiting the father you thought you’d lost? Now that your inheritance isn’t imminent, aren’t you his loving daughter anymore?”