A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  He looked relieved, but then seemed to consider the fact that he had to go tell his girlfriend she was in trouble. “Are you going to yell at her?”

  “No, but if you don’t go right now, I’m going to yell at you.”

  Jonathan left in a hurry.

  There wasn’t time even to breathe before Gregory was upon me. “I’m told you went to Sharon’s lake house. Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “Sorry. From now on, I’ll post my travel plans on the theatre’s website.” I strode as purposefully as a man who hasn’t slept in three days can stride to the entrance to my ladies’ room. It’s hard to look authoritative when you’re a man entering a women’s bathroom, but I did what I could.

  Dad turned and assessed me. “You look terrible,” he began, and if that was his opener, I couldn’t say I was looking forward to the rest of the conversation. “Have you eaten anything?” He knew he’d have to report back to my mother at some point.

  “That’s all I have done. What happened here?”

  I heard a voice from deep inside the ladies’ room. It was not a ladylike voice. “Water started shooting out of the toilets and into the air,” said the voice, which I took to be that of the plumber. “It was like you’d put in bidets on steroids.”

  “And I’m willing to bet this had nothing to do with the work you did in the men’s room yesterday,” I said.

  “ ’Course not.”

  I turned toward Dad and gestured in the plumber’s direction. “You’re overseeing?”

  “When did I not?”

  “Thanks.” I kissed him on the forehead. “Let me know if I have to close the theatre again. It’s starting to look like an attractive option.”

  “Now, if you don’t mind . . .” Gregory began.

  “Just a second,” I said, noticing Sophie and Jonathan walking downstairs from the balcony, Sophie carrying a large book in her left hand. I walked over to the landing and waited for Sophie, so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice.

  “What are you doing leaving Jonathan in charge of the popcorn machine?” I asked her. “He’s never done that job before.”

  I didn’t realize my tone would be that harsh when I set out to talk to Sophie, but fatigue was eating into my brain, and worry, its constant companion, wasn’t doing me a great deal of good, either. She looked at me as if I’d slapped her.

  “When did you become such a boss?” Sophie asked. She barreled past me and stood behind the snack bar. “I can see the problem; the line is all the way out the door!” She slammed the book down on the counter and pouted.

  “You said you weren’t going to yell at her,” Jonathan whined. Now he’d be blamed. Oh well, it would be good practice for his dealings with women for decades to come.

  “Get on the phone to my house,” I told him. “Tell whoever answers that I said Leo Munson can’t watch any more movies. I can’t afford to have my only regular customer sitting at my house watching DVDs.”

  “But, Sophie . . .” Jonathan usually had a rather flat affect, but now he looked like he was going to cry. I couldn’t feel anything but tired. I waved him away, and started toward my office. Gregory followed me there.

  We got to the door of my office, and I was reaching for the key when Chief Barry Dutton appeared at the theatre doors. He looked over at the office, and saw us standing there.

  I wasn’t at all crazy about the look on Dutton’s face as he approached me.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I’m glad you’re both here.”

  I really hated the way that sounded.

  “It doesn’t mean anything yet,” Dutton went on. “But there’s a woman’s body the medical examiner has that they can’t identify.”

  My world no longer functioned.

  21

  THE corridor outside the morgue at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick was as depressing a place as I had ever been in my life. It was institutional and bland, with absolutely nothing to distinguish it. The walls were painted green and tan, because they had to be painted something. The floor was old linoleum tile, off-white with no pattern. The dropped ceiling showed signs of water damage.

  Gregory had wanted to use his hospital ID and the fact that he was Sharon’s husband (at the moment) to get into the room, but when she had filed for divorce from him, Sharon had been clear about changing her medical and insurance forms back to indicate me as her next of kin. I remembered her telling me so at the time and explaining, particularly about the insurance, “If I die, you’ll need the money more than Gregory would. Besides, you’ll be able to handle . . . everything . . . better.”

  I’d probably made some joke about how I’d blow it all on DVDs and a new popcorn machine, but now, standing in the corridor that would have been cold even if it had been the Fourth of July and not less than two weeks before Christmas, I wasn’t thinking about the money.

  I was thinking about how much better it would have been if Gregory could have been the one to do this.

  Dutton, as a courtesy from the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s office and the New Brunswick Police Department, stood to my left. He watched me study the floor, waiting for the door to open when we’d have to go in.

  “They found the body in a burning car on Ryders Lane in Milltown, the same model and year as Sharon’s,” he said. “Apparently the fuel line had ruptured and the driver hit a tree. Car burst into flames.” The two cops who had met us at the hospital entrance and escorted us here had told me virtually the same thing, but Dutton had seen the look on my face, and wasn’t sure I’d absorbed the information.

  “Are they sure it was an accident?” I asked. My voice didn’t seem to be emanating from my own body, and it sounded shaky.

  “Nobody’s sure of anything yet,” he said.

  Before I could respond, the door opened, and a man in blue scrubs walked out, picked up Dutton first in his line of sight, and then looked at me. He was short, curlyhaired, and wore thick glasses; if you were casting the part of “Nerd” in a Hollywood comedy of 1986, he’d be your guy.

  “We’re ready” was all he said.

  I might have stayed rooted to the spot if Dutton and the cops hadn’t started walking. I followed them into the room, which appeared to be an average operating room, except that the form lying on the table was covered entirely by a sheet.

  They had asked if I’d prefer to “view the remains” on a video monitor from the next room, but I didn’t want distorted color or lighting to get in my way; if I had to see Sharon this way for the last time, I wanted to see Sharon, not a TV image of her.

  “Okay,” said Nerd Guy. “Are you ready?” He looked me in the eye.

  I bit my lips, and nodded.

  “Keep in mind the body is pretty badly burned.” It was nice he was softening the blow. “But the face isn’t too bad.”

  He walked to the table and gently reached over to the top of the form lying prone on the operating table. He looked at me again, to be sure I was watching, and he lifted the sheet just enough to see the face. I looked.

  And then the tears began to flow.

  I put my head in my hands, covered my eyes, and felt the sobs emanate from my chest. I hadn’t cried this hard before in my life. My body shook as if I were convulsing.

  Dutton walked toward me, and held out his arms. “My god,” he said. “I’m sorry, Elliot.” I opened my eyes and saw him, and thought he was going to lead me out of this awful room, but he spread his arms and reached out to embrace me. I appreciated the gesture, unexpected as it was, but I stepped back and shook my head. Dutton froze in his tracks.

  I couldn’t do anything but shake my head back and forth: no, no, no.

  Gently, Dutton leaned down (the man is very tall) and said, “Let’s get out of here. You don’t want to see this anymore.” Again, he reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, and I backed off. I did everything I could to regulate my breathing. I bore down. I had to stop crying.

  “You . . . don’t . . . understand,” I managed.

/>   Dutton nodded. “I know. I’ve never had to face it, but I can—”

  “No!” It came out more forcefully than I’d intended. “You don’t understand!”

  Dutton looked like he might pick me up and carry me out of the room. “I don’t understand what?” he asked.

  “That’s . . . not . . . her!”

  22

  IT took me a while to get my emotions under control: the lack of sleep, the constant worry on the edge of panic, the combination of enormous relief and continued panic had all hit me at the same moment when the medical technician had raised that sheet. I wasn’t sure how to get back to what passes for normal with me.

  But after a few moments my eyes felt puffy and my breath was coming naturally. I stopped shaking. Dutton led me out of the morgue and, after a few questions from the uniformed cops, out of the hospital.

  “It doesn’t answer anything,” I said when we were getting back into his car. “This might just postpone the inevitable.”

  Dutton started the car up and began driving back to Comedy Tonight. “It’s true that we don’t know anything more than we did before,” he admitted. “Except that wasn’t Sharon.”

  “I should call Gregory,” I said.

  “I already have,” Dutton told me. “When you were talking to the officers. He’s relieved, and still at the theatre.”

  “Swell. I can’t wait to see his cheery face.”

  We drove in silence for a while. I had to adjust my level of fear, since it had reached epic proportions a short while before, and now had to lower back down to that constant nagging in the stomach and the hint in the back of your mind that you can’t ever relax, because the next time the phone rings, they might not be wrong.

  “Maybe the way to approach this is to concentrate on Chapman,” I said, more to myself than to Dutton. “Maybe by talking to Chapman’s family and following the trail through him, I can figure out what happened to Sharon.”

  “You are not a police officer, a private investigator, an investigative reporter, or even a skip tracer,” Dutton said, just to remind me of everything I’m not. “You have no authority to approach those people and ask them for anything more than directions to the bus station.”

  “Who needs to approach them?” I asked. “They keep coming to my theatre. If I stand still long enough, one of them will show up.”

  “I’m telling you, Elliot,” Dutton said in his best chief-of-police voice. “You can’t investigate Chapman’s death. The East Brunswick police are doing that, and they’re good. They’ll get the county involved if they have to, but even I’m not doing a thing about Chapman right now. I’ll keep you informed on anything about the case that’s not sensitive, but you can’t go blundering in there and hope to find a clue to Sharon’s whereabouts. It doesn’t work that way, and you could easily be cited for interfering in a criminal investigation.”

  I hate it when he’s right.

  We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride, which admittedly was only about six minutes. But it gave me time to wonder if most ex-husbands would have been that frantic about the lives of their ex-wives. Maybe I just couldn’t let go. Maybe I was afraid of moving ahead with my life.

  Maybe Sharon really was dead. Would I be able to deal with that if it hit me in the face? This most recent episode had suggested that I might not. And that was, by any normal standard, weird. Most ex-husbands would greet the news of their former spouse’s demise with a shrug, a wince, or barely disguised glee. But there weren’t many whose lives would be devastated. What was wrong with me?

  When we pulled up to Comedy Tonight, I was already onto my next plan, which involved going door-to-door and asking people if they’d seen Sharon recently, starting on the block around the theatre, and continuously widening the search until, theoretically, an ocean voyage could be necessary. I admit, it wasn’t much, but it was all I had.

  We arrived after the matinees were finished, but before it would be time to reopen for the evening showings. Meg had returned, with a message from Leo that he would be back in time for “Sully’s Travels.” Apparently my steadiest customer and the fictional hero of Preston Sturges’s comedy were on a nickname basis.

  The nozzle of the red hose leading out of the ladies’ room was rolling across the lobby toward the restroom as I entered, leading me to hope against hope (what does that expression mean?) that Mr. A-OK Plumbing had succeeded in his task and was packing up. I could hear Dad’s voice emanating from the ladies’ room, giving him instructions I couldn’t make out, presumably on how to best roll the hose for efficient transport back to his truck.

  Mom and Gregory were sitting on the balcony steps, chatting. Clearly Gregory had spread the word about my trip to the morgue. I was, at least, grateful that I didn’t have to repeat that one; perhaps Gregory was useful for something after all. Other than playing pinochle.

  At the snack bar, Sophie was cleaning off the glass case with one hand while using the other to type on a laptop computer perched atop a carton of popping corn. Perhaps she really was a genius.

  Anthony, with nothing to do, was stretched out on the balcony steps, asleep. College students aren’t like the rest of us.

  And to one side of the lobby, standing completely by herself, was Gwen Chapman, looking a little dour. I couldn’t imagine why Gwen would be here.

  Meg noticed Dutton and me first. “Elliot, I’m so glad,” she said, and gave me an industrial-strength hug. “You must have been terrified.”

  I nodded. That was all I could do, as the emotion was starting to overwhelm my reason again. I didn’t want to break down in front of virtually everyone I knew, and I certainly didn’t want to appear weak in front of Gregory. Yes, it was adolescent and petty, but it kept me going; what was your question?

  Before Meg could say anything else, Mom spotted me, and she and Gregory were up and on their way to the office door, which I had not yet managed to unlock. Gregory, of all people, stuck out his hand and took mine.

  “Thank you, Elliot,” he said. “I’m not sure I could have handled it.”

  “You should be proud of Elliot,” Dutton told Mom after I introduced them. “He was very brave.” I never knew the chief could lie so convincingly.

  “I am,” Mom answered. “But Gregory was brave, too.” I considered ordering DNA tests to see which one of us was her son.

  “I’m sure,” Dutton said.

  Gwen Chapman sort of wandered onto the scene, as if she’d somehow gotten lost and found herself in Comedy Tonight’s lobby entirely by accident. She stood a little outside the group that had encircled me, and looked very much like a little girl who’d gotten invited to a birthday party where she didn’t know any of the other kids.

  “I was glad to hear about Dr. Simon-Freed,” she said to me.

  “Thank you, Gwen,” I said. “What brings you here?”

  Gwen seemed embarrassed; looked down toward my knees. “I’m here to apologize for my sister,” she said.

  “There’s no need for that,” I said.

  “Yes, there is. You’re still worried about the doctor, and Lillian was here practically reveling in your pain. She told me about it, and I’m ashamed for my family. My father raised us to take responsibility for our actions, not to blame everyone else.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to do but take her hands and make her look me in the eye. “Apology accepted,” I said. “And I’m very sorry about your father.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry; I have a funeral to plan. But I might come back in a few days.” She turned to walk toward the door. “I think a comedy might be just the thing by then.” And with that, she left.

  Meg, diplomat that she is, stood back and took a look at the shell of a man where I used to stand. “You look terrible,” she said. “Go home and get some sleep.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea; maybe if I were functioning normally, I’d start getting better ideas. I nodded. “Yeah, maybe I will,” I said.

  But from the snack bar, I heard a scream. “Oh, no,
you don’t!” Sophie shouted. “You’re not leaving me to supervise another double feature when I have real work to do!” She stormed out from behind her station—which was just as well, since there would be no customers to serve for another two hours—and advanced on me like a rhino on a first-time safari hunter armed with nothing but a camera. The hunter, not the rhino.

  “Sophie,” I said. “I haven’t slept since . . .”

  “I don’t care! You’ve been blowing me off for days now! It doesn’t matter to you if I get into a good school—you just care about your theatre! Well, if that’s the way you’re going to be about it, I quit!”

  Don’t ask me to explain it, but that was the death blow. I sat down on the floor of the lobby right where I’d been standing, as if she’d knocked me out with a vicious left hook. I looked up at the crowd gathered around me—Mom, Gregory, Dutton, Meg, Sophie—all staring at me like they would a harmless but pathetic mental patient. Except Sophie probably wouldn’t have used the word “harmless.”

  “You can’t,” I croaked.

  Jonathan came running over from . . . somewhere . . . and stared pleadingly at Sophie. “You’re not serious,” he said. “You’re not leaving.”

  “Sure I am! If you can’t even take my suffering seriously . . .” That was directed at me.

  “Your suffering?” Anger took on despair inside my head, and it wasn’t a fair fight. I got shakily to my feet. “Your suffering? You’re a teenage girl with every advantage, a first-class brain and good sense, who’s going to get into every single college she applies to without all the courses and strategy, because she’s brilliant! Do you have any idea what we’ve been going through for the past few days?” I asked Sophie, gesturing at the gathered group, which now somehow included my father.

  Sophie blinked. “You think I’m brilliant?”

  “I always have. But you’re not the one who’s suffering. We are!”

  Sophie blinked twice. “Why?” she asked.