A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Luckily, we had reached what I always thought of as “Sharon’s house,” and Gregory parked the car in the driveway. He rushed around to open Sharon’s door for her before I could even unbuckle my shoulder harness.

  He needn’t have hurried. It never would have occurred to me to open her door. I’m a Neanderthal at heart.

  Sharon seemed a little confused by the (now embarrassing) competition between Gregory and me, and shot me a look as he did everything but take her arm and escort her to the front door. I shrugged. So my shoulders weren’t in an especially articulate mood. But I decided to stop competing. We were both ex-husbands; we were equal. I couldn’t help it if I was more equal than Gregory.

  We sat in the living room, Sharon on the couch, Gregory trying as hard as he could to sit close to her, and me on the overstuffed chair facing them. No one said anything for a very long moment.

  “Tell me . . .” I began.

  Sharon turned toward Gregory with the speed of a frog’s tongue going after a fly. “Gregory, could you do me a favor?”

  He puffed himself up until he looked like the Gregory balloon from the Macy’s parade. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I sincerely believe if the answer had been “jump up and touch Pluto,” he wouldn’t have hesitated, other than to ask if she meant the former planet, or Mickey Mouse’s dog.

  “Elliot and I need . . .” Sharon saw Gregory’s face harden. He glared at me with serious violence in his eyes, and I did my very best not to put a gloating grin on my face. Honestly, I tried. Sharon began again, “I need something to . . . take the edge off, you know? With all the excitement of the past few days? Do you think you could call Toni and ask her to prescribe something for me?”

  Gregory’s expression couldn’t possibly have been more smug. “Of course, darling,” he said, and stood up to walk into the kitchen. He reached for the phone.

  “And could you go to the pharmacy and fill it right away?” Sharon continued.

  Gregory didn’t read between the lines, and nodded. “I’m on my way,” he said, and within seconds, his coat was on, his cell phone was in his hand, and he was indeed on his way.

  The moment the door closed, Sharon turned to me with urgency in her eyes. “We don’t have much time,” she said, “and we have a lot to talk about.”

  I leaned forward on the chair, which wasn’t easy on a microfiber overstuffed special. My pants wanted to stick to it. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me. What happened with Chapman? How come he thought he was going to die? Who were you with at the bar in the city? And what’s this about Chapman leaving you money in his—”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  25

  I blinked. A number of times; I can’t tell you how many. There was so much information in those two words that I’m not entirely sure how much time went by before I could respond.

  “You’re . . . wow,” I said. Oh, and I suppose you’d be more articulate under the circumstances.

  “Yeah,” Sharon replied. “And before you ask, no, I have no doubt, and yes, it’s your baby. There weren’t any other candidates.” I knew I was right about Sharon and Russell Chapman. Either Konigsberg was crazy, or just bad at his job.

  I stood up. I think better on my feet. Normally when dealing with my ex-wife, I have found myself trying to anticipate her reaction to whatever I was saying or doing. I didn’t want to make a wrong move, or be misunderstood. But now, with this in my head, my thought patterns were scrambled. I’m not sure I knew I was speaking out loud.

  “This is . . . great!” I said, wandering around the room, not looking at anything in particular. “This is amazing.”

  “Well, I’m glad you feel that way,” Sharon grinned. “I wasn’t sure exactly how you’d react. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was reacting.”

  “It’s just—it’s so much to think about. We have to plan. Tell me when your divorce from Gregory is going to be final, and then we can get married again.”

  She looked like I’d hit her with a cream pie, minus the cream. “We can get . . . what?”

  “Sure. Then you can sell the house, and I can sell the town house, and we’ll find a place to raise the kid in, you know, like our old place. Midland Heights has a good school system, doesn’t it? I mean, I went to the schools here, but that was a while ago.” The room was a blur, but I wasn’t really focusing on anything, so that was to be expected.

  Sharon stood up and grabbed me gently but firmly by the forearms. “Elliot,” she said. “Slow down. It’s the adrenaline you’re feeling right now.”

  I stood still, because I liked her hands on my arms, but I didn’t really stop. “No, it’s perfect,” I said. “We have enough time before the baby is born to get it all done. And I guess I’ll even buy a car, you know. Can’t take Junior to pediatrician appointments on the handlebars of a Schwinn. Maybe a hybrid, so I can still feel like I’m conserving fuel. I’ll ask Sophie about her Prius.”

  “Elliot,” Sharon started, but I was on a roll.

  “You’re going to have to take some time off when the baby is born. Will you go back to the practice? I could sell the theatre and get a real job, if I have to.”

  “Elliot!” Sharon shouted, I think just to get my attention. “Focus. Listen to me.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m listening. What?”

  “No.”

  That didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t asked anything. “No?”

  Sharon made sure we maintained eye contact. I’ve seen her do that with patients who weren’t entirely mentally stable. “That’s right. No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, we’re not getting married again.” She let go of my arms. “Not that your proposal wasn’t charming, in its own completely self-absorbed way. I’m sorry, but no.”

  Keep in mind that at this point I hadn’t really gotten a good night’s sleep since roughly April. “Why not?” I asked, but my voice sounded softer than I’d expected.

  “For any number of reasons, like for example that we’ll still have the same problems we had when we were married, but we’ll be adding a child to it. That’s one thing. But mostly because I’ve been married or living with a man for more years than I care to think about, and I want to see what it’s like on my own for a while.” Sharon sat down and looked at me with a sad expression. “Not that I’ll be alone, exactly. I’ll have another person in the house with me.”

  “Who?” Sometimes, I can be monumentally dense.

  She gave me a look that reiterated my previous sentence. “The baby,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Look, Elliot, I know I’m dropping a lot on you all at once, but Gregory will be back in a few minutes, and I wanted you to know before anyone else. The test reports that came back Thursday night weren’t Russell Chapman’s; they were mine. I already knew—I’d done the home test, and those are almost always accurate—but seeing it on paper made it real for me. So I spent a few days up at the cottage to think, and believe me, I thought about all the options. But I know I want this baby. And I’d like you to be involved with it, but if you don’t feel like you can . . .”

  I stared at her, and my expression must have been enough to silence her. “Don’t you even think that,” I said. “That’s my baby, and you’re my . . . ex-wife. I love both of you. Of course, I’m involved. Whether you want it or not, I’m the father.” The thought made me sit down. “Jesus, Shar—I’m the father!”

  Naturally, that’s when Gregory walked in.

  Sharon, being something approaching a genius, and having had more time to absorb the situation, shifted gears like a Ferrari on the Autobahn. “There never really was an arraignment,” she said. “Gregory knows, because he thought he’d have to put up the money for bail. Right, Gregory?”

  What? Bail? Arraignment? Who were these people, and what were they talking about? I felt like I’d wandered onto the set of an Ingmar Bergman film, and nobody was translating from the Swedish.

  “That’s right, honey.” Gregory still th
ought we were still playing the “Who Wants to Be the Best Ex-Husband” game, and sat down next to Sharon. He handed her a small pharmacy bag. “Here you go.”

  “Thank you.” Sharon put the bag on the coffee table and ignored it. Gregory’s eyes narrowed, but Sharon plowed on, talking just to me. “You see, Chief Dutton saw Gwen Chapman at the theatre when I arrived, and he considered it an opportunity. If he arrested me as a suspect in her father’s murder, she and the rest of the family would hear about it and figure they weren’t under suspicion. The chief thinks that will lead them to make a mistake. He thinks one or more of them is involved in Russell’s death.”

  “Of course.” I nodded. Sure. Death playing chess with a guy on the beach. Nobody notices. Whatever.

  “That’s why he never transferred me to East Brunswick, or the county,” Sharon continued, pretending I was absorbing what she said. “The fact is, I came home last night and had a really good sleep.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” I managed. I don’t know what I was complaining about; with my worrying, I’d gotten in a healthy ten or twelve minutes of sleep the night before.

  “Me, too,” Gregory said. “She came in so quietly, and left so early, I never even knew she was here.” Gregory hadn’t gotten over sleeping in the guest room yet. He wasn’t a professional ex-husband, like me. He hadn’t even moved out yet. The poor kid. Someone ought to take him aside and show him the ropes. Someone other than me, since I’d be likely to wrap the ropes around his neck.

  “So now the East Brunswick detective and Chief Dutton can watch the Chapmans without them knowing they’re under surveillance.” Sharon was determined to get the whole story out. “I don’t know if it’s a good plan, but it’s the best one they had, I guess.”

  “I’m going to owe Dutton an apology,” I told her. “But that is a pretty nutty plan.”

  “Gregory,” Sharon said, managing not to bat her eyelashes, “would you mind getting me a cup of tea? I think it would help me relax.”

  And god bless him, the poor sap fell for it again.

  Once he was out of the room, Sharon said, “Look. Go home. Rest. Take a day or two and think about this. It’s a huge decision and it’s not something you should commit to when you’ve been going through hell all this time. We’ll have a chance to talk later.”

  “Lunch at C’est Moi! tomorrow?” I asked.

  Sharon smiled. “Sure.”

  “But let’s be clear, Shar,” I said. “I don’t need the time to think. I need time to get used to the idea, but I’m not going to change my mind. I’m this baby’s father, and I’m going to be part of its life.” I stood up, and so did she.

  Sharon walked over and kissed me lightly. “I never really doubted it,” she said. “No matter what I was thinking, as I went over it again and again, that part was never in question. You’re going to be a great dad.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “And you’re going to be a great . . .”

  Gregory pushed open the kitchen door. “Regular or herbal?” he asked.

  “OKAY, so I owe you an apology,” I said.

  I’d had to walk back to police headquarters to get the bicycle anyway, so making amends with Dutton immediately was probably the best way to go. I’d said things that, in retrospect (it had been close to two hours ago, after all, so now I had time to think more objectively) were a little harsh.

  “Yeah, you do,” the chief said. “But I can understand that you were pretty emotional at the time.”

  “And by all appearances, you were railroading my ex-wife,” I said. “What kind of crazy, twisted, bizarre logic led to . . .”

  “You’re not very good at apologizing,” Dutton pointed out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s been a rough week.”

  “For everyone,” he answered. Dutton can sometimes come across as Superman’s older brother and other times like your aunt Mildred. It can be difficult to keep track.

  “Are you convinced one of the Chapmans is responsible for Russell’s death?” I asked him.

  “I’m not convinced of anything, but it’s the best theory for the time being,” he responded. There was a file on his desk labeled Chapman, which was blue, as opposed to all the other files, which were green. He opened the blue one and leafed through it idly. “None of them seemed to like him much. He had a lot of money that he won’t be needing now. There were rumors that he was leaving a chunk of it to the medical practice that seemed—and you’ll pardon me, but I want to emphasize that seemed—to have bungled his case. Yeah, there were a few angry people in that family, and that’s always a good breeding ground for violence.”

  “What about the son-in-law, Wally?” I asked. “Did he ever get back from Japan?”

  Dutton’s eyelids fluttered a bit, but he said, “Wally showed up last night, jet-lagged and cranky. At least, he said it was the jet lag that made him so cranky. I get the feeling Wally is cranky most of the time, jet lag or no.”

  “You questioned him?”

  He shook his head. “No, East Brunswick is doing the investigation. But I was sitting in. Kowalski let me watch from behind one-way glass. He did a good job.”

  “Wally, or Kowalski?”

  “Actually, both. Kowalski asked all the questions I would have asked, and Wally dodged most of them without looking like he was dodging anything. It was an interesting interrogation to watch.”

  I watched him closely. “So you think our pal Wally knows more than he’s saying.”

  “I don’t think anything. I just watch.”

  “I think you know more than you’re saying,” I tried.

  Dutton looked as coy as an eighth-grade girl when you ask if she, you know, likes you likes you. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Come on, spill.”

  “Meg Vidal checked the airline records. The only reason Wally took so long to get back from Tokyo was that he had to fly out there yesterday.”

  He got the response he’d been seeking: “Huh?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Wally was somewhere else when he was supposedly doing business with the Kyoto Blue Fin consortium. Russell’s death caught him off guard, and he hightailed it to Tokyo yesterday, to make it look good, never left the airport, and flew right back.”

  “Lucky for him he doesn’t have deep vein thrombosis,” I said. “So, where was he?”

  “Meg’s working on that.”

  He started to close the blue file, and I caught a glimpse of something that flashed by, and did a double take. “Wait a second,” I said.

  Dutton looked up. “What?”

  “Let me see that.”

  “Elliot, this is a file I got from another police department. I’m not even supposed to have it. If you think for one second I’m going to let a civilian see it . . .”

  “The picture, Chief. The picture from the autopsy. Just let me see the picture, okay?” It would nag at me for days if I didn’t get to figure it out.

  Dutton considered, but saw the look on my freshly shaved face. He was very careful about extracting the photo without showing me anything else in the file. He took it out gingerly and held it up for me to see without handing it to me. I leaned over to take a close look. My throat suddenly felt dry.

  “If you’re not used to seeing autopsy photos, it can be . . .”

  “It’s not that, Chief. I mean, it’s probably not the best picture he ever took, but that’s not what’s bothering me.”

  “What is bothering you?” Dutton knew how to deliver a straight line when it would further his own agenda.

  “That’s not Russell Chapman,” I said.

  Dutton withdrew the picture and put his head down on his desk blotter. “Not again,” he said.

  26

  BEFORE this trip to the morgue at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, I stopped at home to pick up an item I thought I’d need and give an update to Meg, who was staying in my guest room for the duration. Homicide detective that she is, Meg couldn’t give up on the Chapman case until she was at lea
st satisfied that she’d done everything possible, and that hadn’t happened yet.

  She was also working out of my house half the time because someone needed to guard the door against Leo Munson, who had abused the privilege of watching DVDs. Leo came by every three hours, and Meg would block the door. I wasn’t sure if Leo was really deluded enough to think I’d given him a lifetime pass to my home, or if he just liked seeing Meg.

  In any event, I told her everything I knew, and Meg went to work on the phone while Dutton and I drove to the hospital for another corpse viewing.

  It still wasn’t a comfortable place to be, but I didn’t feel like all my internal organs were melding into one, as I had the last time I was here. Yes, I was going to view a dead body, but there was absolutely no possibility it was that of a woman I had loved at any time in my life. There’s a feeling of security that goes with that knowledge.

  The procedure, however, was very similar: Dutton and I stood outside the room with Detective Eugene Kowalski of the East Brunswick Police Department until the same little curly-haired guy came out and told us the corpse was ready for his close-up. But this time we stayed in the waiting room, at the ME’s insistence, since none of us was the next of kin, and viewed the body on the video monitor.

  Of course, the body was covered with a sheet, presumably to allow the morgue attendant his moment of high drama as the sheet was lifted to reveal the face of the victim. The face itself was largely undamaged, but there was the equivalent of a scar on his throat. I tried to focus on the facial features.

  The man was not tall, although it was hard to tell on a video screen, even if he’d been in HD. He was almost bald, in his late sixties or early seventies, and clean-shaven. His face was lean, and he reminded me of photographs I’d seen of the Marx Brothers when they were “off duty” and not wearing the familiar makeup.

  “That’s not Russell Chapman,” I said.

  Kowalski, who at first glance seemed a trifle peeved at all the people in the room who weren’t from the East Brunswick Police Department, sighed. “Yes, it is,” he said.