A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “No, it’s not,” I insisted.

  “It is.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not.”

  “Boys,” Dutton said.

  “We have Russell Chapman’s fingerprints on file,” Kowalski said, looking straight at me. “He was in the Army, during peacetime. The fingerprints match. That’s him.”

  “You thought it was him the first time,” I pointed out.

  Kowalski eyed the morgue attendant with a certain disdain. “That’s what we were told,” he said, shooting words like bullets in the attendant’s direction. Even through the closed door, he could hear that.

  The attendant reddened, as he was being challenged. “The daughter came in and identified him,” he said over the monitor. “You’re lucky we did the fingerprints on him at all; normally we wouldn’t with a positive ID. Besides, Doc said it was Chapman. How am I supposed to know it’s some drunk fell on the tracks at the railroad station? It wasn’t until I checked the toxicology that I saw he’d had alcohol in his blood, and not Valium.”

  Doc! I’d seen him hand in the autopsy report, with Chapman’s name on it, at Midland Heights headquarters the night Sharon had first left for Lake Carey. It was a blue folder, too, and being delivered to Dutton. Must have been from the Middlesex County ME’s office, courtesy of East Brunswick.

  But that was beside the point. I shifted back toward Kowalski. “I don’t doubt that you did everything that needed to be done, Detective,” I told him, and noticed Dutton nodding with agreement that I was showing the other officer the respect to which he was entitled. “But I’m telling you, I know that man”—I indicated the body—“isn’t Russell Chapman.”

  “And how do you know?” Kowalski put his hands on his hips and glared. At me. It wasn’t pleasant.

  “I’ll show you.” I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a special piece of equipment I’d gotten when we’d stopped home to update Meg. Then I dragged one of the chairs in the waiting room to a spot under the monitor, and stood on it. I placed the object on the picture of the man’s face. “See?” I said to Dutton. “You met him, didn’t you?”

  “Damn,” Dutton said.

  “Hey . . .” the morgue attendant tried to say, but Kowalski, who appeared annoyed, deferred to Dutton, and held up his hand: Hold it.

  Dutton walked over to get a better look at the man on the slab. “You’re right, Elliot. I do recognize him.” He looked at the corpse, then back at Kowalski, then at me, then the corpse, then Kowalski again.

  “I don’t care what you say,” Kowalski reiterated. “That’s Russell Chapman.”

  “Maybe it is,” Dutton said. “But with the Groucho glasses on his face, I can tell you for sure that when Elliot and I met this man, he was calling himself Martin Tovarich.”

  27

  TUESDAY

  “SO Mr. Chapman was pretending to be this Tovarich guy?” Sharon and I sat inside at C’est Moi!, our favorite lunch place in Midland Heights, and she was, at the moment, halfway through a french fry dipped in cheese.

  “That’s the theory,” I answered. “It’s a good thing you’re eating for two, you know, or I’d be worried about the amount of food you’re scarfing down.”

  Sharon dropped her voice a number of decibels and said, “Let’s try and keep that just between us for the time being, all right? I haven’t said anything to the others at the practice yet.”

  “You haven’t told Gregory either, have you?”

  She blushed a little. “It’s not easy.”

  “I’ll be happy to tell him for you.”

  “No!” Her head snapped up and she stared at me. So did a few people at neighboring tables. One redheaded guy, in particular, glared. Jeez; sorry to have ruined his day.

  I stifled a laugh. “Okay. But soon, all right? My mother’s going to be mad enough that I didn’t tell her before I knew.”

  “Tovarich. Russell Chapman. Tell me what you know.” She took a bite of her California burger and listened as I updated her on everything I had heard or discovered about her dead patient. Sharon listens very well, and did not interrupt with any questions until I was clearly finished with my twisted tale.

  The redheaded guy kept glaring, but he seemed to have shifted his glare to Sharon. Which I could understand: if you’re going to fix your gaze on someone, she’s much more interesting to watch than I am.

  “That’s weird,” she said between bites, never actually allowing anything to drip, a skill I find unnerving. “So between the first time they supposedly found Chapman’s body and the second, he was posing as Tovarich?”

  “That seems to be the consensus, yeah. But what purpose could that have served?”

  “Beats me,” said my ex, through a sip of draft root beer. “And if his disguise was so obvious that you could spot it in the glimpse of a photograph, how could his daughters miss it? They were both around when you saw ‘Tovarich.’ ”

  I nodded. “But I did notice that he ducked into the men’s room whenever he spotted Gwen or Lillian. It just never occurred to me that he was doing it because he was their dead father, and not just a guy with a weak bladder.”

  Sharon put her hand over her mouth and burped, heartily. I was starting to worry that our child would be born with a tattoo. “They are a rather opposite pair, aren’t they?” she said.

  “Gwen’s nice enough, but she seems stunned. Lillian didn’t seem to care about their father being dead so much as this mysterious endowment he was supposedly leaving you in his will.”

  Sharon made a face that indicated her low tolerance for such suggestions. “That’s absurd,” she said. “I’d never accept that kind of legacy from a patient. It’s a breach of so many ethics, I can’t begin to imagine it.”

  “So you’re actually less concerned about the insinuation that you would inherit money from a patient than the accusation from one of his daughters that you were sleeping with him to get the money?” I would have stolen one of her fries, but I’m way too classy a guy to take food from a pregnant woman. Besides, the congealing cheese was kind of grossing me out.

  “Oh, be serious. I never would have had an affair with Russell Chapman. The man was at least thirty years older than I am, and a patient.” Sharon took another swig of root beer. “I can’t begin to tell you how many different ways that’s wrong.”

  “How do you explain the PI telling me he’d followed the woman who was with Chapman at the hotel back to your house the next morning?”

  “I can’t,” she answered. “But I know it wasn’t me, and no other women live at my house.”

  “Well, Lillian thinks it’s true, and I’m a little scared of her,” I said. I looked at my own chicken Caesar salad (with low-calorie dressing) and wondered why my genes weren’t as tolerant of fat as Sharon’s. It’s a sad state of affairs.

  “The last thing I need to worry about is getting money to add on to the practice,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. This was a heartwarming tradition left over from our marriage. “As it is, sometimes I’ve consulted on Lennon and Toni’s patients as well as my own, and they do the same when I ask. In fact, Lennon consulted with me on Chapman. The idea that we’d want to add on a clinic is fantasy. I don’t know where this stuff comes from.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “What?” Sharon asked, perusing the dessert card left on the table.

  “Lennon said he didn’t know Chapman very well. He didn’t mention being consulted.”

  Sharon looked up. “That is weird,” she said.

  I paid the check (granted, with money that probably came from Sharon’s alimony, but let’s not split hairs; I was being gallant) and Sharon asked me to walk her back to the practice, something I would have suggested on my own anyway.

  Especially since the redheaded guy, now on his cell phone, was still glaring when we left.

  My head was clearing from the panic-stricken mode I’d reached when I didn’t know where Sharon was, and now I felt a need to talk to some of the people at her practice. T
he Chapman murder was going to be an albatross around Sharon’s neck until someone figured out what had happened. I was feeling an increased sense of responsibility for her well-being again, and that was enough to get me curious about Chapman’s strange medical misadventure.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said while we walked into the biting wind and proceeded up Edison Avenue. My voice fought the wind, and won by a decibel. “You told Chapman he didn’t have a malignant tumor, and he apparently went home and wrote a suicide note, then pretended to kill himself by overdosing on Valium.”

  “That would appear to be the case,” Sharon said, holding a gloved hand over her knit hat to keep it from blowing away and landing at Mary Tyler Moore’s feet in Minneapolis. “Although the coroner’s report indicates there wasn’t any Valium in his body when he finally did show up dead on Sunday.”

  “Why did you prescribe Valium for him when he didn’t have cancer?” I asked. “What did he have to be nervous about?”

  “I gave it to him before the tests, when there was just a suspicion,” Sharon said. “He was nervous then.”

  I put up the hood on my parka and fixed the Velcro under my chin. It might have made more sense to worry about how to walk into the wind, but alas, Marcel Marceau was dead, and therefore unavailable for technical assistance.

  “What I don’t understand is why he’d say explicitly in the note that he didn’t want his illness to be a burden to his children, when he knew for a fact that he wasn’t seriously ill,” Sharon said.

  It wasn’t enough that we were walking into gale-force winds on a twenty-degree day; apparently we were being punished for even more sins, as the sidewalk took a decidedly steep upturn that I hadn’t noticed in times when the climate was somewhat more forgiving. I was glad Sharon’s practice was only two more blocks away.

  “You’re sure he understood that; he didn’t walk out of your conference unclear on that point?” I asked. If Sharon wasn’t going to acknowledge our arduous trek, I certainly wasn’t going to be the one.

  She shook her head. “No, he understood perfectly. He was downright thrilled with it, said he’d gotten a whole new lease on life. It doesn’t make sense.”

  We were almost halfway up the hill, which peaked at the street corner, and I was about to answer when I noticed something heading in our direction as we made our assault on the corner of East Third Street. Actually, it was the sound I noticed first: a rumbling of metal on concrete that sounded familiar and yet menacing at the same time.

  With the hood on my parka pulled over my head, my vision was a little limited, but as the rumbling got louder, I looked up. Looking directly into a strong wind is like looking into a bright light: You can’t do it for long, and your eyes immediately start to water. But the large, heavy, fast-moving object was unmistakable.

  It was a supermarket cart, and it was headed directly at us at a very respectable speed. Sharon, looking at her feet to avoid staring into the wind, was only a few feet from it, and it was accelerating. No one was pushing it.

  I reached out for her without saying anything; there just wasn’t time. My arms got around Sharon, and pulled her toward me. I sat down hard on the pavement as the cart zoomed by us, but the seventeen layers of clothing I was wearing prevented any serious injury.

  “You pick the strangest times to get frisky,” Sharon said, entangled in my arms on the sidewalk.

  “I think I landed on my coccyx,” I said.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  The cart, having reached a speed that seemed too fast even for a heavy metal object traveling downhill with a strong wind behind it, crashed into a light post about ten feet from where we sat. It hit with unexpected force, and something flew out of it and onto the sidewalk. Luckily, Sharon and I were the only two people stupid enough to be on this stretch of Edison Avenue at the moment, so no one else was in danger of being hurt.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “That thing could have killed you.”

  She stood up and dusted herself off, then held out a hand to help me up, which I declined for serious macho reasons. “I’m okay,” she said. “How about you?”

  I got to my feet and looked down. “Nothing important seems broken,” I said. “How about the baby?”

  Sharon smiled a smile that combined her “men just don’t get it” expression with her “people who aren’t doctors just don’t get it” expression, to doubly make me feel stupid. “I fell on you, butt first,” she said. “It was a soft landing.”

  “Forgive me for being concerned,” I said, and marveled at how much I sounded like my mother.

  “I didn’t see it at all until you grabbed me,” Sharon said. “You really saved me, Elliot.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I held her a couple of seconds too long.

  We were shouting against the wind. “Where did it come from?” I asked. “The supermarket is six blocks from here.”

  “People take them home for stupid reasons,” Sharon said, shaking her head. “Then they abandon them in the street somewhere. I guess one just got loose in the wind.”

  I frowned. “It had to go uphill to make it over the top,” I said. “There’s no way that was a random accident.”

  “Elliot, you’re starting to sound like Oliver Stone,” she said. “It’s a shopping cart. Don’t get paranoid on me.”

  But I was already walking toward the cart. The lamppost was practically undamaged except for a scratch, but the cart had suffered a large dent right in the front, and as I got close, I could see why.

  It had been loaded with cinder blocks, which had been placed at the front of the cart to weigh it down and give it increased momentum and increased impact. Sharon walked slowly over as I picked up the object that had been jettisoned, which turned out to be one of the cinder blocks, now severed in two on the pavement.

  “This thing was made to cause damage,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” Sharon asked.

  “Because of this,” I said. I held up the broken cinder block and put it back together to show her what it had looked like before its aborted journey.

  Painted on the side of the cinder block were the words DOCTOR warning.

  28

  CHIEF Dutton met us at the practice after Sharon called him. We’d considered calling on Sharon’s cell from the scene of the crime, but it was just too damn cold. I’d brought the offending cinder block with me, and we’d walked to Sharon’s office in record time. I told Dutton where the incident had taken place, and he sent over a patrol car to investigate.

  “So let me get this straight,” Dutton said after we’d finished giving our statements, which sounded sillier and sillier as we went on. “You’re thinking someone knew you two would be walking up that street at that time, went and got themselves a shopping cart and some cinder blocks, grabbed themselves a big black Magic Marker, wrote a message on one of them, and then pushed it up over the top of the hill at just the right time to knock you down. That’s the premeditated attack you have in mind, is it?”

  My opinion of Dutton was on a real roller-coaster ride these days. “I suppose you find that hard to believe,” I said.

  “Hard to believe? No,” Dutton shook his head slightly. “I wouldn’t say hard to believe. Impossible, maybe, but not hard.”

  “I’ll admit, it doesn’t seem like the most logical plan ever devised,” Sharon tried, “but to be fair, you weren’t on Edison Avenue just now, Chief.”

  Dutton sat down, and thought it over. “I’m not trying to trivialize what happened to you, Doctor,” he said. “I just don’t know that it falls into the category of a major crime, as opposed to a really nasty prank that went too far.”

  “A prank?” I said, my voice doing a really awful job of masking my impatience. “A prank? A fifty-pound shopping cart with a hundred pounds of cinder blocks front-loaded in it comes screaming down a hill on a forty-five degree angle, which adds momentum and creates a harder impact heading straight for a woman who’s . . .”


  “Elliot,” Sharon said quietly.

  “. . . not looking, and you call it a prank?”

  “I realize you’re upset, Elliot, and you should be. Either of you could have been badly hurt. But how am I supposed to file a report of attempted murder with an unmanned shopping cart?” Dutton’s manner, as it had been since Sharon’s disappearance, was sympathetic, but slightly concerned, as if he thought I’d benefit from some mood-altering medication. “We don’t even know that there was intent.”

  I held up the cinder block with the message written in thick black marker. “This means it was intentional, doesn’t it? It means it was aimed at Sharon.”

  “DOCTOR warning? Isn’t that a nineteen-fifties horror movie?” Dutton smiled.

  I looked at him and aggressively didn’t laugh.

  “I’ve been a cop twenty-seven years,” Dutton said, “and I’ve never before heard of people being attacked by a grocery cart. This kind of stuff usually happens to you, doesn’t it, Elliot?”

  “What about the redheaded guy I saw at C’est Moi!?” I asked.

  “It’s a crime now to look at the two of you in a restaurant?” Dutton responded. “I’m sorry, Elliot. That would have to be at least thirty percent better just to qualify as circumstantial.”

  I ignored that crack and asked, “What can you do to ensure Sharon’s safety?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “We’re the police, Elliot. We’re not a private bodyguard service.”

  “I’m serious, Chief. Someone made an earnest attempt on Sharon’s life, and I want to know what’s going to be done.”

  I swear, Dutton and Sharon exchanged a look questioning my sanity.

  “We’re going to do what we can,” Dutton said slowly, looking at Sharon and not at me. “We’ll increase drive-bys to the house and here at the office. But you have to understand, Doctor, that I can’t assign you your own police officer every time a shopping cart gets loose in a windstorm.”