A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Number five: find out who trashed my house and Sharon’s (and you thought I’d forgotten about that one);

  Number six: do laundry.

  The laundry thing seemed least important, and while protecting Sharon was certainly my highest priority, that could probably best be served by taking care of item number four, the unmasking of Chapman’s killer. It would be good to get that one off the agenda.

  I wondered how one went about doing so.

  The facts I had so far amounted to the following: Russell Chapman had been murdered, a few days after having staged a fake suicide, when someone cut his throat with a scalpel, which the killer had not been considerate enough to leave at the scene.

  Inside the room where Chapman had been found, there were signs of a struggle. There was some blood on the rug and on Chapman’s desk, not all of which was his, to indicate he might have injured his attacker. There appeared to be drag marks on the carpet, which could have come from Chapman’s feet or the wheels of his desk chair.

  Chapman’s elder daughter appeared to be very concerned about the inheritance they might receive after his death. His younger daughter was concerned with making everyone play nice, an admirable goal that I am convinced is rarely achieved. Neither appeared to be terribly hostile toward the other, but they didn’t appear to be best friends, either. Then there was Lillian’s husband, a repellent man named Wally. But it’s hard to be seriously concerned about a man named Wally.

  It was also true, according to Chapman’s attorney, that his will had been altered very soon before his death, after he had spent three days disguised as an insurance investigator for the distinct purpose of determining how much his daughters loved him, if at all.

  Chapman had also been having a platonic but personal relationship with Grace Mancuso, the nurse at Sharon’s medical practice. It was possible, however unlikely, that someone might have told Grace’s husband about the suspicious-looking “affair,” driving him into an uncontrollable rage, but considering that even the crack PI Konigsberg had thought it was Sharon until yesterday, confronting Mike Mancuso would be a bad idea. The last thing I needed to do was blow Grace’s cover for her. And I’d met Mike a couple of times; he didn’t strike me as the “uncontrollable rage” type.

  All of which left me feeling like I was in a dark room, searching for the doorknob I couldn’t see. And my head still hurt a little, even though I’d changed to a smaller bandage.

  The best plan of action I could come up with—and keep in mind, eleven in the morning is early for me—was to go to Chapman’s house and see for myself. I admit, it’s not much, but maybe by seeing the room where the murder took place I could better picture how it happened, and that might lead to why it happened, and that might lead to who was there when it happened.

  I said it wasn’t much.

  And that, finally, was what led me to Moe Baxter.

  When I need a car, I go to Moe’s repair shop and test drive something he wants checked. I give him a full report on returning from the trip. It’s a great arrangement, unless you ask Moe.

  Moe, for reasons I’ve never fully comprehended, believes that I am merely mooching off his business for a free ride whenever I need one. Apparently, the auto repair business tends to make one cynical. So when I approached Moe’s shop, after a bracing bike ride in twenty-degree temperatures with a wind chill of four (but with snow tires), I girded myself for the usual argument.

  I marched into Moe’s office without knocking, and he barely looked up from his desk. “Elliot,” he said. “Long time, no see, which suited me just fine.”

  “Where were you on August 19, 1977?” I asked him, and that made him look up.

  “Probably on summer vacation from college,” he said. “Why?”

  “That’s the day Groucho Marx died,” I told him. “I thought perhaps his soul had migrated to you. You’re such a wit.”

  Moe blew a raspberry. “I assume you’re here for a car,” he said.

  “Yeah. And I know how you feel about this, but . . .”

  “Is this about the Sharon thing?” Moe asked. Things get around quickly in a small town.

  “Yeah.”

  “Take mine,” he said.

  Before I knew it, I was tooling along in Moe’s tricked-out Mitsubishi Galant, enjoying the state-of-the-art sound system playing Corinne Bailey Rae. Normally when embarking on such a mission, one might contact the investigator in charge of the case, but Kowalski would only use that whole “we’re the police and you’re not” defense, and what good was that going to do anyone?

  Moe’s GPS told me (in a British woman’s voice, which was somehow reassuring) when to turn. I became hooked on the thing during the drive, and wondered whether it was worth putting one on the bicycle I use mostly to go back and forth to the same place every day.

  Probably not.

  In less than half an hour, it had directed me to the large house, hardly an estate and not the kind of place you’d expect a guy with forty-seven million dollars to live. The home had no gate, but did have a circular driveway. The house was built of light-colored brick, three stories high. I parked the car right at the entrance and zipped up my parka for the ten-yard walk to the door.

  I rang the bell, expecting a butler at least as formal as an archduke to answer. Instead, I got Wally Mayer.

  “What do you want?” he growled by way of a greeting.

  “A steady income, a warm girl by my side, and the six missing minutes of Horse Feathers in a thirty-five-millimeter print,” I said. “But at the moment, I’ll settle for being let in the door.”

  “Why?” Wally’s conversational skills had not improved since our last meeting.

  “Wally, it’s four degrees out here if you count the wind chill. Even a somewhat less-evolved being like yourself must feel the cold. How about we discuss this indoors?”

  He thought that over for an uncomfortably long moment, since thinking was not Wally’s strong suit, and finally stood to one side so I could walk in. He closed the door behind me.

  “Now,” Wally said, “what do you want?”

  “I thought I made that clear. A steady income, a warm . . .”

  “Why are you here?” He’d made the leap of logic. If I’d had a liver treat in my pocket, I’d have slipped one into his mouth as a reward. “This is our house now, and we don’t have to let you in if we don’t want to.”

  “Wow, Wally,” I said, savoring the alliteration. “You didn’t wait long to move your stuff into the old place, did you?”

  “He was Lil’s dad,” Wally said, actually trying to justify his actions. “He’d want us to be here.”

  “That remains to be seen, by registered mail,” I told him. “I was wondering if I could have a look around.”

  Wally’s eyes became slits. “Why?” he growled.

  “I’m looking for a new place, and I heard this one might be on the market,” I told him. I took a quick look around the foyer. “Do those drapes absolutely have to go with you?”

  “We’re not going anywhere, and neither are the drapes,” he snarled. Good lord, the man was taking me seriously—what were the odds?

  “Oh, that will be awkward,” I said. “I’m not really looking for a live-in couple just at the moment.”

  “You’re not moving in,” he said, as if he were actually telling me something I didn’t know. “So what do you want to look around for?”

  “Honestly, I want to see the room where Mr. Chapman died,” I said. “I think maybe I can help figure out what happened if I see the room.”

  “The cops have been there,” Wally said. “What do we need you for? Somebody cut the old man’s throat. Lil thinks it was your wife, since he was killed with a scalpel.”

  “There are so many holes in that theory you could fill the Albert Hall with them,” I said in an obscure Sergeant Pepper reference. “Sharon has no motivation to want Chapman dead—she’s not listed in his will.” (Okay, I didn’t know that for sure, but I was willing to bet it was true.) “
Second, there was blood on the floor and the desk, and it wasn’t all your father-in-law’s, so someone is running around with a very incriminating wound. And third, you’re stupid.”

  “Your ex-wife was humping the old man,” he said, then did a double take Joe E. Ross would have thought was over-the-top. “Hey . . .”

  “No, she wasn’t,” I said. “But that’s not important, either way. Somebody cut Russell Chapman’s throat. You’re strong enough and dumb enough to do it, if your wife told you to. You know if she did it, she’ll claim you were in on it, even if you weren’t. Why not protect yourself?”

  “Hey . . .” he repeated. The man could out-quip Oscar Wilde.

  “Just let me up into the room,” I said. “In fact, come with me. If I find something there, I want you to be present to corroborate.”

  “I’m not an accountant,” Wally said. It was a miracle he could brush his teeth in the morning.

  I dropped my voice half an octave. “I know where you were when you were supposed to be in Japan,” I lied.

  Wally’s face turned white as a sheet bleached for a Ku Klux Klan meeting. “No, you don’t,” he said.

  “Yes. I do.”

  “I . . . I . . . I . . .”

  “Come on,” I offered, gesturing toward the winding staircase.

  Surprisingly, he followed me. As we climbed the stairs, he said, “I heard they let your wife walk.”

  “Ex-wife, and yes, mostly because she’s innocent.”

  Wally rolled his eyes, and then, in a triumph of sensitivity on his part, said, “What happened to your head?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  At the top of the stairs, Wally guided me to the door at the far left of the hallway. I was beginning to suspect that he’d given in a little too easily when we reached a dark wooden door. “This was the old man’s study,” he said.

  I stood there until he turned the doorknob. I was determined not to touch anything I didn’t have to touch.

  The room was large, but not ostentatious. Chapman hadn’t done it up in thick oak paneling, and didn’t have a bear’s head mounted over his desk. It looked more like the office of a mid-level executive, but for the gleaming, pristine chemistry set of test tubes, beakers, and burners sitting on a very tasteful shelf behind the desk, which had an iMac on it. Chapman was an Apple man, like me. But his was newer and fancier, naturally.

  “Has anything been moved or changed since Sunday?” I asked Wally.

  “Huh?” he responded.

  I started to act the movements out with my hands, and spoke veeerrrrry slooooowwwlyyyy. “Has anything been moooooved or chaaaaanged since Sunday?” I repeated.

  “No. The police had yellow tape up until yesterday, and I don’t think anybody’s been in here since then.” Wally was watching the office door, like it was going to do something interesting.

  I looked mostly at the desk and the area around it. “Has anyone looked at his computer?” I noticed it was turned off.

  “Cops took the hard drive,” Wally answered. He wasn’t looking at me, just the door. Either he was waiting for someone—probably Lillian—to show up and give him his instructions for the day, or that was one hell of a fascinating door.

  I walked behind the desk. There was indeed a dark stain, although not a large one, on the carpet, near the right-hand corner of the desk as Chapman would have been sitting at it, if he were facing the computer screen. I looked for the other spot Kowalski had mentioned on the desk, but it wasn’t there.

  “The police said there was more blood on the desk,” I said, not really to Wally.

  “I dunno,” he answered. A wellspring of knowledge, that man. It was amazing he’d found the office on the first try.

  The carpet, where Kowalski had said there were drag marks, must have been vacuumed, because the marks were gone. Apparently someone had been in this room after the police had cleared it.

  I sat down behind the desk. So this was what it felt like to have forty-seven million dollars. Well, not really: This was what it felt like to sit behind the desk of a guy who had forty-seven million dollars.

  There was no rush of megalomania or a sudden urge to mess with the lives of ordinary people. There was no assumption that all my needs and wants would immediately be satisfied. In fact, the chair’s wheels squeaked a little when I moved around. I didn’t immediately feel the need to get a white cat to stroke as it sat on my lap, nor to shave my head and start wearing a monocle.

  It was, however, a vast improvement on the shoebox I called an office back at Comedy Tonight. I had to admit that.

  I turned my attention to the desk, which was large, possibly antique, made of dark wood, maybe mahogany (what did I know about wood?). The middle drawer, where a man keeps all the things he might need immediately, formed a picture of a terribly well-organized mind. Everything was neat, ergonomically situated, and absolutely typical. Paper clips in a box. Business cards in a folder (the one facing front was from Comedy Tonight, which I’d given him in his guise as Tovarich). Pens. Pencils. Erasers.

  It looked like a sample desk drawer, furnished jointly by Staples and Mrs. Muransky, my second-grade teacher. “Everything in its place, Elliot.” Freak.

  But enough of this rose-colored nostalgia; there was work to be done. I turned my attention to the two larger drawers on the right side of the desk. One held hanging folders, presumably with investments, portfolios, and other words that financially astute people would understand. For me, they might as well have been in Swahili.

  The upper drawer, however, seemed like the place where Chapman had kept his more personal belongings, or at least, the ones he’d have in an office drawer. These were more idiosyncratic, and therefore telling. Here, he had a compass (I guess to figure out which direction he was sitting in), a crossword puzzle dictionary (a man after Meg Vidal’s own heart, no doubt), a pair of binoculars (no comment), a pocket watch, a small copper replica of the Liberty Bell, a harmonica (and a really good one, from what I could tell), and a baseball—not a special baseball, not autographed or anything, just a baseball.

  There was also an object I could not identify. It was about the size of a pair of salad tongs, but narrower. The thing appeared to be homemade, with pieces taken from various objects: It looked like it had the handle of a delicate pair of scissors, but could not be made to open wide because of a strong band of black rubber, used as a restraining piece around the center that limited its range of motion. Its two arms extended out, but only for a few inches, and their tips were coated in a dull gray metal. They were extremely sharp, as if they’d been made out of the best steak knives available, but narrower. The arms holding them were extremely narrow and rounded. One of them had a red LED readout soldered onto it, for reasons that weren’t at all obvious. The readout wasn’t activated, and had a tape over it marked PTYPE.

  I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what that thing might have been, or what it might be used for.

  “What do you suppose this is?” I asked Wally.

  There was no answer. I picked my head up from the drawer and looked. Wally was nowhere to be seen.

  I got up with the bizarre artifact in my hand and walked to the center of the room, in an insane attempt to see if there were some alcove, some hidden corner in the perfectly open space, where a man might hide and then leap out at you when you weren’t paying attention. There was none.

  Enough of this: I headed for the office door and reached for the doorknob.

  It didn’t turn. While I was exalting in my mental superiority over Wally Mayer, he had simply walked out of the room.

  And locked me in.

  35

  IT didn’t make sense. There was no upside to locking me in Russell Chapman’s study. What did they (I assumed Lillian had to be pulling Wally’s leash) think they could accomplish with this little ploy? Surely they weren’t going to hold me prisoner and try to beat the information out of me. There was no information. There had to be some other benefit to them in my staying in
one place.

  Of course.

  I walked back to the desk and picked up the telephone. There was a dial tone; my “captors” weren’t terribly good at this game. I dialed Sharon’s cell phone. She answered on the first ring, which isn’t at all like her.

  “Who is this?” she said. That replaced “hello,” and seemed strange.

  “Sharon, it’s me.” I hate to belabor the same point, but is there a sentence that exists with less information in it?

  “Elliot!” she exploded. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Chapman’s house,” I told her. “I’m fine. Did they call you?”

  “Yes, I’m in my car on the way there.”

  That’s what I’d figured. Lillian and Wally weren’t interested in taking out revenge on me; they wanted Sharon. That’s why Wally had let me up into Chapman’s study so easily. He figured that as soon as Lillian showed up, he could ask her for permission to incarcerate me there, then call Sharon, tell her I was being held against my will, and lure her to the house to torture her in some twisted way. It was a stupid plan, but then, it was Wally and Lillian. What should one expect?

  “Turn around,” I said. “Go back to your practice.”

  “But Elliot, they said if I didn’t come . . .”

  “Trust me, Shar. I’ll be fine. They want you. Don’t give them what they want. Call Dutton.”

  “They told me if I called the police . . .”

  “You’re listening to them now? Call Dutton or Meg. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they turn off the phone. Tell them to get in touch with Kowalski. This is how we get them, Sharon. The cops come and arrest them for holding me against my will. I’m going to make myself cozy in Chapman’s office and wait for it to happen. But call now, and go back to the office.”

  Sharon thought about it, and I never interrupt when she’s thinking. “Okay,” she said.

  “Good. I’ll call you as soon as I get out of here.”

  Another long pause. “I love you,” she said.