A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Meg and my mother shot me exactly the same look; it was eerie.

  “It was important I see your face when I tell you this, Mr. Freed,” Lillian said. “My father’s body was discovered in his study this afternoon at one. The medical examiner is still investigating, but it appears that his throat was cut. With a scalpel.”

  19

  “OH, yeah,” Chief Barry Dutton said. “I knew there was something I’d forgotten to tell you.”

  I sat in his visitor’s chair, a municipal mail-order beauty of chrome and vinyl, squeezing my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Maybe if I pressed hard enough, I could push each eye into the opposite socket and see life differently. “Something you’d forgotten to tell me?” I asked. “Is that the police version of wit?”

  “Let’s recap a little,” Dutton said, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head, lacing the fingers. “You chose not to mention that you drove up to some postage-stamp town in Pennsylvania looking for a woman whose disappearance we’re investigating, that you broke into a house and damn near got yourself arrested, that you discovered something you chose not to tell the officers at that postage-stamp town in Pennsylvania, and now you’re chiding me about not promptly disclosing everything I have no obligation to tell you?”

  I stopped rubbing my eyes and fixed my sleep-deprived, bloodshot gaze on him. Both of him. “Chiding?” I asked.

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  I put my head down on his desk. I realized that I hadn’t really slept since . . . Thursday. That seemed a very long time, now. “You’re right,” I said. “I should have told you all that stuff. I had reasons I didn’t, and at the time, they seemed really good.”

  “Apology accepted. When Meg gets back from the prosecutor’s office, I might even let you stay in the room.”

  I didn’t answer. Since I wasn’t looking at Dutton (or anything except the insides of my eyelids), I can’t be sure, but I think he actually stood and leaned over the desk to see if I was asleep. “Elliot, I’ve never seen you like this,” he said.

  His desk tasted like furniture polish. “Due respect, Chief, you haven’t known me very long. I’ve never seen me like this.”

  “You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he said. “Sharon wouldn’t want you to . . .”

  My head popped up off his desk like it was on a spring. “Don’t you do that!” I shouted. “Don’t talk about her like she’s dead!”

  Dutton’s eyes widened, for about a third of a second. He nodded slowly, then leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. There’s absolutely no reason to think she’s in any danger at all.”

  “That’s better.” I realized I was acting like a petulant eight-year-old, and I didn’t care. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  “I won’t.” And I believed him. Dutton inspires confidence, and I’ve never seen him do anything he said he wouldn’t. I tried to remember if I had him on my holiday card list. His eyes were still moving around a little, as he tried to think of how to deal with this wreck of a man before him.

  “What’s going on with Russell Chapman?” I asked him, mumbling. “Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he a zombie?”

  “He’s dead, all right.” Meg Vidal must have entered through Dutton’s office door. I hadn’t opened my eyes, so I couldn’t tell you when. “The ME made a positive identification. He’s dead, and he’s got a big slit in his neck that’s not attractive.”

  “You saw him?” Dutton asked.

  “No, but I saw pictures.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “The guy’s dead. Then we think he’s dead, but he’s missing. Then he’s alive, because he calls his lawyer. Then he’s dead again. I can’t keep up.”

  “What do we know about the lawyer?” Meg asked Dutton. I didn’t see her, but I could be sure she wasn’t asking me.

  “She’s a perfectly legitimate estate planner working in Spotswood,” Dutton said. “I’ve never heard a word about her that wasn’t professional and efficient, and I’ve dealt with her before. She called because she didn’t want to be involved in whatever deception there was regarding Chapman being dead when he wasn’t.”

  “And now he is,” Meg said. “Again.”

  “And Sharon’s back on the suspect list,” I said. “She probably wasn’t at the lake house when Chapman died, if it was today.” I raised my head. A little. “Do we know when Chapman died this time?”

  “His daughter Gwen found him in the study at one this afternoon,” Meg said. “ME isn’t done yet, but thinks it was between six and eleven in the morning when he died.”

  “I’d forgotten how nice it is to have a competent detective on staff,” Dutton said. “I might hire you full-time, Meg.”

  “You don’t have enough homicides,” she said.

  “Nonsense. We have one wherever Elliot goes.”

  Dutton thought I’d laugh at that, but I wasn’t in the mood to be amused. “What about Sharon?” I moaned. “This gets worse every minute.”

  “You sound like your mother,” Meg told me.

  Suddenly, it occurred to me again that sleeping wasn’t the only thing I hadn’t done since Thursday. “I think I need food,” I told Dutton.

  “Come on. I’m buying.”

  BELINDA McElvoy, the brilliant, beautiful waitress at Big Herbs, took one look at me as Dutton and I sat down and shook her head. “My god, Elliot, you look like you’ve been hit by a bus. I guess there’s no news about the doc yet?”

  I shook my head. “Everybody in this town knows everything about everybody else, don’t they?” I asked her.

  “Not everybody. Just me.” Belinda could see that I was in no condition to read a menu, so she said, “How about a nice veggie burger, Elliot? If they cook it long enough and put lots of toppings on it, you can’t tell it’s really seaweed.” Big Herbs is a vegetarian restaurant, but Belinda is a steak-and-potatoes (with a side order of steak) kind of girl.

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Are the fries real?”

  “Potato’s a vegetable, isn’t it?”

  Dutton asked for a Caesar salad, and Belinda was off to put through a rush order.

  Meg had begged off, saying she was going back to the town house to pry Leo away from my video collection and maybe get a little Internet research done. Meg doesn’t always tell you everything she’s thinking, but I got the impression she’d had an idea about Sharon she needed to track down, and didn’t want to get my hopes up.

  “What do you think it means, Chief?” I asked. “Why would Russell Chapman pretend to be dead? Or was someone pretending to be Russell Chapman when he was already dead?”

  “Slow down,” Dutton said. “We don’t even know if the body in the morgue is Chapman this time. We don’t know that it wasn’t the first time. You could fill an encyclopedia with what we don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Chief,” I said. “I don’t care who killed Russell Chapman. I never met Russell Chapman. For all I know, the guy was a heartless swine. I only care about Chapman as his case relates to Sharon’s. And it has to relate, somehow.”

  “We don’t know that until there’s more evidence,” Dutton said.

  “Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Holmes,” I said. “May I call you Sherlock?” Dutton made a face that said droll. “Do you know the detective who took the lead in East Brunswick?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. His name’s Kowalski, and he’s good. If there are any ties to Sharon, he’ll call me.”

  Belinda brought the plates over. I could tell she’d given me extra fries and she placed a chocolate milk shake I hadn’t ordered on the table next to my plate. I almost said something about it, but she was gone before I could open my mouth.

  “Some people like you,” Dutton said.

  “I’ve never been able to figure out why,” I told him.

  Dutton nodded. “Don’t think too hard. You’ll hurt your head.”

  I covered the burger with as many different
toppings as the table would hold, and then concentrated on eating the fries. Through a mouth full of potato, I said to Dutton, “I don’t get it. A guy leaves a suicide note on Thursday and then dies Sunday morning? He didn’t cut his own throat, did he? What did the note say, anyway?”

  “Why should I even . . .” Dutton looked at me for a moment, and decided to skip the argument. “Basically, it said that he couldn’t live with the idea of a long, protracted illness, that he didn’t want to be a burden to his children, and that this was the best way.”

  “Did he sign the note?”

  “Nope. It was on the computer screen in his study, right next to the open terrace doors. Open terrace doors, in this weather.”

  “I guess it didn’t matter if he was cold. So, if Chapman was alive last night, that means the dead guy Gwen identified in the morgue wasn’t him, right? So who was it? And how did the body get lost? It’s one thing to have a clerical error with the toe tags, but to lose an entire corpse?”

  “You’d be amazed,” Dutton said. “The things I’ve seen go missing. There was this toe, once . . .”

  “Chief. I’m eating.”

  I swallowed, and drank some of the shake. It was delicious (I’m sure Belinda made it herself), but I was going to need coffee soon if I would make it through two complete double features. “Chief,” I said, “something’s been bothering me.”

  “Just one thing?” Dutton speared a crouton.

  “Suppose Sharon isn’t just out there on her own. Suppose she’s not just trying to get over the Chapman thing.”

  He frowned. The chief had already lived through one of my pre-adolescent outbursts at the suggestion that all wasn’t right with my ex, and now I seemed to be setting him up for another, in a public place. He clearly had to consider how to respond honestly, without prompting a meltdown. “Okay, I’ll suppose. I don’t think that’s the case, but I’ll suppose. What are you getting at, Elliot?” Nice dodging. The man was a pro.

  “If that’s true, and Sharon is being held against her will, we have to concentrate on the people who are angry enough at her to do her harm.”

  “The Chapman family has been under a certain amount of surveillance since this began,” Dutton said. “None of them has been doing anything other than what a family does when they’re preparing for a funeral. The son-in-law is on his way back from Japan, and should be at Newark Airport in about four hours. And Chapman’s wife, the girls’ mother, died five years ago, of liver cancer. Believe me, Elliot, they’re not acting like people who have a woman held hostage somewhere.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the Chapmans,” I said.

  20

  IT’S amazing how few Konigsbergs there were in the Yellow Pages under “Investigators.” But once I got past the voice mail and the answering service and the phone rang, Allen Konigsberg sounded friendly enough. A little oily, and I found myself wiping off the earpiece of the phone every now and again, but with private investigators, this sort of thing is to be expected.

  “Mr. Freed,” he said. “Tell me how I can help.”

  “First of all, sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but this couldn’t wait.”

  “I understand completely,” Konigsberg, ever the businessman, had a concerned tone. “Please, tell me what I can do.”

  “I understand you did some work for Lillian Mayer recently,” I began.

  He sounded pleased. “Yes, I did. Did Ms. Mayer recommend me?”

  “Sort of. I need to know what you found out about her father possibly having an affair with my ex-wife.”

  The smile in his voice faded, as he realized that no new business was coming his way today, and on a Sunday to boot. “That’s confidential,” Konigsberg said. “I can’t tell you anything about that.”

  “Dr. Simon-Freed is missing,” I said.

  “Would you like me to find her for you?”

  “I trust the police, and they’re looking,” I said. “But I need to know why Lillian Mayer thinks Sharon was fooling around with her father.”

  “Sorry.”

  Jonathan ambled by my office door, inadvertently reminding me to keep my voice down. “Listen,” I said, breathing just a little too heavily. “A woman I care about a great deal hasn’t been heard from since Thursday, and you have information that might help clear that up. You’re going to tell me what you found, or I’m going to become unreasonable.”

  Konigsberg laughed. “Are you threatening me?”

  “You don’t know me, Mr. Konigsberg. These might be the only circumstances in my life to this point for which the answer to that question would be yes. And believe me, I’m in a state where I don’t care anymore. You can sue me, you can threaten to have me arrested. But before the cops come and haul me away, I’m going to find out what you have on my ex-wife.”

  He considered. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of divorce work. I’ve testified at a lot of divorce hearings. But you are the first ex-husband I’ve ever heard of who cares that much about the woman who took him for half of what he owns.” I didn’t feel the need to tell him that it had been the other way around; it felt like things were starting to go my way in this conversation. “I shouldn’t do this . . .” Konigsberg hesitated.

  “Here’s what I know. Every week for three months, Russell Chapman drove from his house in East Brunswick to your ex’s practice in Midland Heights. He got there at six thirty, exactly, because that was when the office closed. I didn’t follow him in, because the office is small, and he’d have seen me. But I parked across the street every week, and took some pictures.

  “He came out with a woman, every time, and they took Chapman’s car. They were, let’s say, tastefully affectionate. Nothing overly physical. He drove her, every week, to the Hyatt Hotel in New Brunswick, where they would have dinner and then go up to a room Chapman booked in his own name.

  “Sometimes they’d come down a couple of hours later, and once or twice they spent the night. Chambermaid said they ordered the odd bottle of champagne from room service, and the bed was always well worn when they left. They were not up there discussing real estate deals or playing gin rummy.”

  “Are you sure the woman was Sharon?” I asked.

  “She was the only doctor at the office a few of the nights I saw them,” he said. “I have pictures, which you’re not going to see, but even from a distance, it’s clear that the woman sure as hell isn’t the hot-as-a-pistol receptionist.”

  “There are other women who work there.”

  “Yes, there are,” Konigsberg answered. “But the fact is, last Thursday morning when they got out of the hotel and Chapman drove her back to the office, I followed her instead of him, like I usually did. And she drove to this address.” He read the address, and it was Sharon’s house.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “I get that a lot,” Konigsberg said.

  THE phone call with Konigsberg had not been as helpful as I’d hoped, and I tried to clear my head by stepping out into the lobby. This turned out to be the wrong strategy: I could hear the beginnings of Train Trippin’ from behind the screen, but there was another sound I didn’t recognize—and it didn’t sound good.

  It was something like a gorilla being strangled by a boa constrictor underwater, although I doubted that could be the case in the theatre. I wasn’t ruling it out entirely, however—at Comedy Tonight, anything can happen. Get your tickets early.

  The gorilla sound was coming from the ladies’ room, and the large red hose was extended from inside the restroom to the basement stairs. Dad was standing in the doorway looking less confident than when I’d last seen him. I stopped in my tracks.

  Jonathan was behind the snack bar, reading from a ragged piece of paper on the top of the candy counter. He had the top of the corn popper open—we use the real thing, with actual corn oil and real butter—and had the very same look on his face that would be there if someone asked him to build a space shuttle out of a cantaloupe and three mustard seeds.
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br />   There was no sign of Meg or Mom, but Gregory was standing at the door to the auditorium, looking at his watch and tapping his foot. I wondered who’d invited him.

  Since the popcorn machine was not an inexpensive item, and the plumbing was already costing me money by the minute, I decided to head for Jonathan first. He did not look up when I approached.

  “Where’s Sophie?” I asked.

  “In the projection room,” he answered, as if that explained anything.

  “Why, is Anthony away?” Maybe Sophie was needed to make reel changes. I wasn’t sure she knew how, but it was possible.

  “No.” His tone indicated that my question was not only stupid, but in a language other than the one Jonathan and I normally spoke.

  “Then what’s Sophie doing in the projection room?” It was one of those conversations where you know it’s never going to get any better, but you keep plowing through anyway, defying all logic and every experience you’ve had up to that point in your life.

  “She says with all the noise going on in the bathroom, that’s the only place quiet enough to study, as long as Anthony turns the sound monitor off.” He twisted his torso around to look for something. “Do you know where we keep the popcorn oil?”

  “Jonathan. Stop.” He doesn’t like to look me—or anyone besides Sophie—in the eye, so he stopped and stared at his sneakers. “How large is the house?” I asked, gesturing toward the auditorium doors.

  “Small. Maybe thirty people.” Thirty people who were trying to hear a stoner comedy through the cacophony of plumbing noises. Great. And I wondered why I got small crowds. Maybe it wasn’t worth fixing the plumbing, and I should just abandon the building and let someone turn it into the world’s most cavernous Carvel.

  “Then don’t you think maybe we have enough popcorn made already?” I asked.

  “There’s another show tonight,” Jonathan argued.

  “We can make more later. Wait for us to get close to running out before you go filling it up; go upstairs and ask Sophie to come down and see me.”