A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “Chief,” I said, trying to banish any number of unpleasant thoughts from my mind, “what if the person who broke into my place didn’t have anything to do with Sharon’s disappearance?”

  “Wasn’t that the theory you were espousing?” A police chief who says “espousing.” That’s Midland Heights for you. The town probably requires an IQ test of potential residents.

  “I’m still espousing it, but just in case. I’m thinking out loud. Aside from the coincidence, it doesn’t really add up to much. Breaking into my house doesn’t get a kidnapper, a blackmailer, or anybody else anything they could use against Sharon.”

  Dutton’s eyes narrowed. “So?”

  “So, let’s guess for a moment that the person who has a grudge against Sharon is a member of Russell Chapman’s family, or someone who doesn’t appreciate the idea that he’d leave her some money.”

  “It’s a stretch, but okay, let’s guess that.” Dutton, as he often does when thinking, put his hands together in a pyramid, index fingers and thumbs touching. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “What does that person get from breaking into my house?”

  “Nothing, apparently,” Dutton said. “So, what does that tell us?”

  I stood up and started to pace. “That maybe the person who broke into my house was looking for Sharon.”

  Dutton opened his eyes. The phone rang, and he picked it up, listened for a moment, and offered me the receiver. “It’s for you,” he said.

  I pondered that, since no one but Dutton and I knew I was there. But I took the phone.

  “Elliot?” Sophie’s voice asked.

  “How did you know I was here, Sophie?”

  “Caller ID from when you called me, duh.” Nobody can make you feel as terminally stupid as a teenage girl.

  “What’s up?”

  “The guy says he needs to break the floor.”

  I considered the possibility that Sophie was speaking in code, and remembered she was dealing with the plumber. “What do you mean, ‘break the floor’?”

  “He says the pipes are set in concrete, and he needs to break the floor to get at the broken part.”

  “Tell him no,” I said. “He can’t break the floor.”

  “Elliot, I don’t have time to fool around with this. I’ve got to start setting up college tours, and work on a comparison of myself to other candidates for the same academic slots.”

  “Put the guy on the phone,” I said.

  Now in the field, the A-OK Plumbing representative sounded even younger. His voice almost squeaked. “Mr. Freed, the pipes in your bathroom are set in concrete. If you want me to stop the leak . . .”

  “I want you to exhaust every possibility before you start with something like that, you understand?” I said. “I’m in no mood to spend weeks with a closed theatre and pay thousands of dollars in repairs because it’s your first week on the job.”

  The guy took a moment. “I’m the owner of the business, Mr. Freed,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years. And the damage to your floor will be so minimal, you might not have to replace as many as two of the tiles.”

  “Break the floor,” I said. Then I told him to put Sophie back on the phone. “From now on, just decide,” I told her. “If I say you’re in charge, be in charge.”

  “That’s what your dad said,” she answered.

  “He’s there?”

  “Yeah. He got here before I did.”

  I hung up on her again, and looked at Dutton.

  “I need to do something,” I told him. “What can I do?”

  “See what I’m doing?” he asked.

  “You’re sitting behind your desk,” I observed.

  “Exactly.”

  I wasn’t going to do that.

  8

  I was at the front door of Sharon’s practice, with my bike out of Dutton’s trunk and locked securely on a rack to one side, when Betty the receptionist (and her Playboy magazine figure) opened up at eight forty-five. Patients, I knew, wouldn’t start showing up until nine, unless there was an emergency, and the practice would close as near to noon as possible. It was, after all, the weekend.

  “I’m not surprised to see you,” she said when I came in (literally) out of the cold.

  “You still haven’t heard from her?” I asked. No sense in bothering with formalities. Betty has known me for years, since before Sharon and I divorced.

  I reflexively curb my lust at the door whenever I enter the practice, and today, I wouldn’t have been interested even if Betty had welcomed me wearing a black lace teddy and locked the door behind me. But she did bear a passing resemblance, I noted, to a Latina version of Thelma Todd, who played the “college widow” (don’t ask me; maybe she was married to a college that died) opposite the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers.

  “No,” she said. “Still not a word, and she’s not answering the cell. I’m kind of worried.”

  “Tell me about Russell Chapman,” I said.

  “I’m not allowed to talk about a patient’s medical records,” she answered. “You know that, Elliot.”

  “I don’t care about his medical condition,” I told Betty. “I’m concerned about the sequence of events. What happened when?”

  She walked behind the glassed-in counter and I could see her through the window, looking up records. “Mr. Chapman came in two weeks ago, and underwent some tests,” she said, careful to leave out any details. “He came back Thursday afternoon to get the test results, and that was all we knew until the police called about his suicide.”

  “Did you answer the call about that?” I asked.

  Betty nodded. “Yeah, but Dr. Westphal was the one who actually spoke to the police. You know, I just shepherd the calls. I knew it was the police, but I didn’t know what it was about.”

  “Why Dr. Westphal?” I asked. “Why not Sharon?”

  “Dr. Simon-Freed was gone by then,” Betty said.

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  Betty puckered her lips, and not in the way Lennon Dickinson would have appreciated. “Yeah, Elliot. She said specifically where she’d be, and I just haven’t told anybody until you asked.”

  “Well, that’s sort of unusual, isn’t it? Doesn’t Sharon usually let you know where she’ll be, in case there’s an emergency?”

  Betty took in a good deal of air through her nose. “She was upset,” she said.

  My head must have jerked up. “Upset? Like the other day? About what?”

  “What am I, her mother?” Betty asked. Then she saw the look on my face, and shook her head. “Sorry. She got a set of test results back right before she left, and it really seemed to shake her.”

  “Additional test results for Russell Chapman?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get the stuff from the lab that afternoon; it came when I was on break. I think Grace took them.”

  “Is she around?” I asked.

  Betty nodded. “But she’s in with Dr. Westphal, in conference about a patient. You’ll have to wait.”

  “Where’s Lennon?” I asked.

  “Dr. Dickinson is dealing with a patient emergency,” Betty answered.

  I sat in one of the patient chairs in the waiting room, and pretended to read a magazine. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in “10 Tips That Will Drive Him Wild!” but I might have been just a little preoccupied. I didn’t even try the fragrance sample included in the centerfold.

  I’ve been lucky enough never to have a serious medical problem, and I was married to a physician, so I’ve never really been nervous in a doctor’s waiting room. But today I wasn’t able to do anything but stare at the door to the back offices and wonder when the hell it would open and let me in. Not that I actually thought the key to Sharon’s whereabouts was back there, but I certainly didn’t have much else to go on.

  After about ten minutes of waiting, I was sure the door would never open, and to be honest, it still didn’t. But the main office doo
r did swing open, and a little man, about seventy years old by my estimation, shuffled in, wearing an overcoat that looked like it weighed a little bit more than I did. He had his coat closed over the lower part of his face, braced against the cold.

  It took him a while to get to the reception desk, and when he did, he spoke so quietly that I heard Betty asking “Excuse me?” a few times before she could get a decent bearing on what the man was saying. Betty’s replies became progressively louder, until I could hear every word she said, and nothing of what the man told her.

  “She’s still in the back, in a patient conference,” Betty almost shouted. “But it’ll just be a few minutes, if you wouldn’t mind waiting.” She gestured toward me, and the man nodded and shuffled over. He sat down next to me, in a room filled with empty seats, and let out an oof as he landed in his chair.

  The man was small and trim, and wore thick glasses that made his eyes look like they were far away and also wore a hearing aid in each ear. Finally he opened the top button of his coat and exhaled. He had a thick black mustache and bushy eyebrows, bringing to mind Groucho’s look. But I’ll bet he touched them up with black dye. Groucho used grease-paint.

  I tried to look preoccupied, since I was, but the little man bumped me on the arm and said, “That’s some receptionist, huh?” I nodded inconclusively, not wanting to insult Betty by intimating that she wasn’t gorgeous, but also not wanting to reduce her to a sex object, at least not today. The man was undaunted. “They named the room right, huh? Waiting room. Doctors.” He waved a hand to indicate disgust. If he’d had a Yiddish accent, he could have been my late grandfather. But his voice was weaker; he was barely audible in normal conversation.

  “Well, they don’t want to rush people through like a factory,” I said. I felt it necessary to defend Sharon’s practice, with words she’d used on me many times.

  “Sure, sure.” The man wasn’t going to disagree. “But it’s not efficient.”

  “I guess not.” I went back to looking preoccupied, but the little guy wasn’t buying. He stuck out a hand. “Martin Tovarich,” he said. “I’m with East Coast Insurance.”

  I shook his hand. “Elliot Freed,” I said. “I own Comedy Tonight. It’s a movie theatre—”

  He cut me off. “It shows only comedies; I know,” Tovarich said. “I haven’t been yet, but I’ve been meaning to go. I love the classics, but mostly the serious stuff: Bergman, Fellini, von Stroheim. People like that.”

  I was amazed. It’s rare that I don’t have to defend my business upon meeting someone new (“You do what?”), and I almost always have to at least explain it. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Tovarich. You live around here?”

  “East Brunswick,” he said. “Close enough that I see your ads, but not so close that I can just walk in without thinking about it first. Sorry about that.”

  “You should try it,” I said. “You seem like you could appreciate a classic comedy.”

  “Perhaps I will,” Tovarich said.

  “I’m flattered you even know about the theatre. Which doctor do you see here, Mr. Tovarich?” If he was waiting for Sharon, I figured to tell him he had a long stretch in front of him.

  “Oh, I’m not a patient,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m here on business.”

  “Insurance business?”

  “Yeah. One of their patients . . . passed away a couple of days ago. I’m looking into it from an insurance point of view.”

  Oops.

  “Really?” I said. So it wasn’t original. Maybe he didn’t mean Chapman. Did insurance companies investigate medical practices for suicides? Maybe they did, if malpractice was considered a cause. I must have looked worried.

  “Are you a patient here, Mr. Freed?” he asked.

  Well, that left me with a dilemma. I was a patient here, but I was also the ex-husband of the doctor he was presumably investigating. On the one hand, I’d just as soon not incriminate Sharon, but then, I’d rather not withhold information, either.

  “I have been,” I said.

  Tovarich looked me up and down, assessing. “Of course. Freed. You’re the doctor’s ex-husband.”

  My dilemma was no longer relevant.

  I realized that the insurance company would have had my name, and so admitted to my identity, but I kept stealing glances at the door in the hope that Toni Westphal and Grace would finish their conference and let me in. No such luck.

  Then, Tovarich said the absolute last thing I would have expected. “Your ex-wife is a fine doctor, Mr. Freed.”

  My eyebrows probably circled my head a couple of times: Everybody seemed to think Sharon was somehow at fault in the Chapman situation, and yet, the deceased’s insurance company, which would seem to be the party that would most want to hang the blame on her, was singing her praises.

  So the hesitation on my part was understandable, if unfortunate. Before I could respond, Tovarich said, “Is that the men’s room?” and got up to excuse himself faster than I would have thought he could move. I guess when you’re seventy, you don’t argue with your digestive system.

  I was not alone long, though, because the front door had already opened to admit a woman in her early forties, wearing all black, into the waiting room.

  She and Betty spoke in tones I couldn’t pick up for a minute or so, and then I heard Betty tell the woman that she could speak to Dr. Westphal as soon as the doctor emerged from the private office in the back. The Woman in Black protested for a moment, in a slightly more aggravated voice, but eventually sat down two chairs from where I was seated.

  I smiled my best conspiratorial smile at her and said, “I think we should make them wait once in a while. Go in there and read a magazine when they come in, and then tell them to hang on until we finish the crossword puzzle.”

  The woman gave me a less-than-enthralled look.

  Undaunted—even though I should have been—I went on. “Maybe there should be a waiting room for doctors,” I tried. “We could make them wear a paper gown with their butts hanging out and then call them in for an examination.”

  There are sculpture exhibits that react more dramatically. Tovarich had gotten me into a conversation with less material than this.

  I reverted to my junior high school personality, and sat back in the uncomfortable metal frame chair. “Didn’t mean to bother you,” I mumbled.

  The Woman in Black smiled, tolerantly, which I hadn’t expected. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a low, almost musical tone. “I have a lot on my mind. My father died the other night.”

  That sort of thing had never happened in junior high school; it took me a long moment to regain the power of speech. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her. “Was he a patient here? Not a great advertisement for the place.”

  “He certainly was,” the woman said. “And make no mistake.” Then her voice dropped to a whisper. “One of the doctors here killed him,” she said.

  9

  LILLIAN Chapman Mayer introduced herself, and I think I might have tried to do the same, but she wasn’t listening. She was not reticent in her judgment of Sharon, Sharon’s practice, the medical profession in general, the American Medical Association, and anyone wearing a white coat, especially after Labor Day. But mostly Sharon.

  This time, the dilemma about identifying myself did not present itself, since I never managed to get a word in edgewise. Lillian began with the serious breach of ethics involved in “a business arrangement with a patient,” and then moved on to the crass disregard for a patient’s emotional state, the lack of communication among doctors working on the same patient, the high cost of medical insurance in America, Michael Moore’s Sicko, something about avian flu, and after that I sort of lost consciousness with my eyes open for a while.

  I did notice Tovarich shuffling out of the restroom and into the hallway, where he appeared to be having a professional conversation with Betty. She nodded a lot. He watched her face, which, even for an elderly gentleman, is an effort when talking to Betty. One’s eyes tend t
o wander.

  When I came to, Lillian was working up a head of steam over Dr. Simon-Freed’s obvious use of “feminine wiles” to coerce her father into leaving her money, and that was when I spoke over her long enough to be heard.

  “Hold on a second. You’re suggesting that Sharon seduced your father so he would include her in his will?” I think my tone more than my words betrayed me.

  Lillian, eyes wide, sat still for a moment. “Sharon?” she asked. “Do you know the doctor personally?”

  “You could say that. We used to be married.” What the hell.

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times before she managed, “Well! You might have said so sooner!”

  “I didn’t have enough duct tape to keep you from talking that long,” I said. This wasn’t a good day to get on my bad side.

  “Well, you should feel lucky you got out when you could. Your ex-wife was clearly seeing my father, and I don’t mean as a patient.”

  I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. He used to make sure he was here at least one evening a week, always when the office was closing. And I know he didn’t make it home for hours after, sometimes not at all.” Lillian grinned at me with the smug satisfaction of someone who enjoys the discomfort of others.

  “And you think he was . . . seeing Sharon?” I would have known. There was no way I wouldn’t have known. Sharon would have told me. And even then, there wasn’t any way. I didn’t believe it.

  “I know it.” She stabbed her finger at me. “I had them followed.”

  I came close to swallowing my lips. “I beg your pardon?”

  Lillian nodded. “I hired a private detective, a guy named Konigsberg. When there’s that much money on the line, someone like me needs to be on the lookout for every little slut like your ex-wife.”

  I considered going for her throat, but there were witnesses. And besides, Lillian didn’t give me the time before she started talking again.

  “Thank god my husband’s out of town,” she said. “If Wally knew everything I know about this, you’d be dealing with your ex-wife’s murder, not my father’s.”