A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  I exhaled, and looked at Dad. “Thanks. But even with the family discount . . .”

  “One problem at a time, Elliot,” he said. “Sandy needs to stew for a while, and then decide that it doesn’t need as much work as he thinks it does. But you would be better off with circuit breakers than these fuses.”

  “The theatre thinks it’s nineteen thirty-seven,” I told him. Only ten in the morning, and I was already wondering if we’d be able to open tonight. Dad went downstairs to work on his friend some more.

  I went into my office to make some phone calls. Grace’s suggestion that Dr. Toni Westphal had been having an affair with the late Russell Chapman threw a strange monkey wrench into the questions in my head. Toni and Sharon had always gotten along, but were never close friends. Since it seemed to follow that the person who was involved with Chapman was also trying to make Sharon look guilty, I had to know what the state of their relationship was like.

  Sharon had been backlogged with patients and paperwork the day before, and still had the minor detail of informing Gregory about her pregnancy, so I hadn’t bothered her about it last night. Instead, I’d come to the theatre to listen to Sophie apologize for not knowing about Sharon’s disappearance, again, despite the fact that I realized I’d never told anyone on the theatre staff.

  Today I sat down in the desk chair and called Sharon’s practice. She was in with a patient, Betty told me, and would call back. So I decided to call Detective Kowalski in East Brunswick. Despite my telling the dispatcher who I was, Kowalski took the call.

  “Got any more party favors you want to put on a murder victim, Freed?” he asked by way of a greeting.

  “I put it on his video image,” I said. “There’s a world of difference.”

  “Is there a reason I’m talking to you?”

  “I’m just trying to help out my ex, Detective,” I told him. “What can you tell me about the weapon that killed Russell Chapman?”

  “I see no reason to tell you anything,” he said.

  I’d been anticipating that response. “How about because I talked to Doc the night Chapman was supposed to have killed himself the first time?” I asked.

  Kowalski’s voice went up a full register. “You’ve been withholding information for almost a week, and you want an accommodation for that?” he asked. “You tell me right now what you know, Freed.”

  Since I didn’t actually know anything, a bluff seemed the right way to go. “You get nothing from me until you tell me about Chapman. Was it really a medical instrument that cut his throat?”

  There was a light moan from the earpiece. “You know, Chief Dutton warned me about you the first time he called about this Chapman thing. He said you were a pain in the ass, and you wouldn’t ever let up.”

  “Chief Dutton is a flatterer,” I said. Kowalski was lying; Dutton wouldn’t use the phrase “pain in the ass,” even under extreme duress. The worst he would say about me was that I was “an inflammation in the posterior.” It’s the same idea, but expressed in more genteel terms. That’s Dutton.

  There was an uncomfortable silence for a long moment. To be specific, the silence was uncomfortable for Kowalski; I could have waited all day, quite happily. I opened the file on the computer for MacBrickout. Level Eleven is a bitch.

  Finally, Kowalski said, “All I’m saying to you is that it was a surgical instrument, but that doesn’t mean much. That’s all I’m saying.”

  There are these water pipes, see, that hide the bricks you’re trying to hit, so sometimes you don’t even know you should be aiming at something. And these annoying bubblegum balloons float in the air and gum up the works.

  Kowalski couldn’t take the silence anymore. “There had been a little bit of a struggle. Chapman wasn’t drugged, but there were definite drag lines on the carpet, which would indicate he might have been unconscious before he was killed or moved afterward. I’ll bet you it was noisy, either way.”

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, some of the bricks are really close to the bottom, so if you don’t get the paddle down low enough (which requires a special ability that you acquire through catching a black-and-green capsule that drops from the sky at random moments), you could be shooting against something that will spit the ball back at you very quickly without warning.

  “Okay,” Kowalski went on. “There was also blood on the carpet and on the desk, which might indicate a struggle, or that Chapman injured his killer before he died, because the blood on the carpet wasn’t all his.”

  It was time to let him off the hook. “So he was killed with a scalpel, but not before he tried to fight his killer off, with some level of success,” I said.

  “Yes or he was attacking someone who killed him in the ensuing struggle,” Kowalski added.

  “So Sharon would seem to be off the hook for this one,” I suggested.

  “Nobody ever thought your ex-wife killed her patient,” Kowalski scoffed. “What was suggested before was that she wanted to drive him to suicide to get at his will. Now that’s out the door, too.”

  “Has anyone read the will yet?” I asked. “I want to make sure nobody has a motive to hurt Sharon.”

  “Probate has been filed by Chapman’s lawyer, but she hasn’t made it public yet,” he answered. “We probably won’t know for a couple of weeks exactly what’s in there.”

  “Thanks, Kowalski,” I said. I was about to hang up, but he remembered how the conversation had begun.

  “Now, you tell me what you know. What did Doc say to you the night Chapman was supposed to have offed himself?”

  “Actually, pretty much nothing,” I admitted. “He basically said that he was bringing Chapman’s autopsy report, and I said I wasn’t interested.”

  This time, the long silence was Kowalski’s doing. “That’s it?” he asked finally.

  “That’s it.”

  He used language not suitable for a family newspaper, reiterated that Dutton was right about me, and hung up. I decided to get up and stretch my legs, as they seemed too short just at the moment.

  But the phone rang, and thinking it might be Sharon, I turned to answer it. The caller ID indicated Sophie’s cell phone.

  “What’s up, Sophie?” I said. “I thought you weren’t supposed to call from school.” There’s some fascist rule about not using your cell phone during AP Psychology class.

  Her voice sounded odd. “I’m just calling because . . . I won’t be coming in.” I realized the problem with her voice—I’d only heard Sophie cry once before.

  “You don’t have to come in; it’s your day off,” I reminded her. “Sophie, tell me. What’s wrong, honey?”

  “I won’t be coming in, like, ever,” she went on. “My parents say I can’t go to work anymore.”

  “What? Why won’t they let you come to work?”

  “They say it’s interfering with my preparing for college,” she croaked. “They say I won’t get into the Ivies if I keep spending my time at the theatre.”

  “That’s silly,” I said. “You’ve already applied everywhere you’re going to apply, right?”

  “Pretty much,” she agreed.

  “And you’ve gotten this great score on the SATs, so what else do they want from you?”

  “The ACTs, or something. I don’t know. I can’t do it. They want me to be perfect. They want me to stop working. I don’t know what to do, Elliot.” The poor kid sounded like she was at the end of her rope.

  “Why don’t you just tell them no?” I asked. “You’ve done it before.”

  “Now they say they’re paying for college, so I owe it to them to do the best I can and get scholarship money,” Sophie answered. Her parents were using the old guilt ploy. It was a tactic with which I had some familiarity.

  “Do you want me to call them?” I asked.

  “No!” I was getting that a lot lately. “They’d just get mad.”

  “Sophie, listen to me.” I stood up; as I said, I think best on my feet. But the phone cord isn’t very long, so I had
to lean over. I wasn’t sure what effect that had on my thinking. “Tell them I didn’t accept your resignation. Tell them I said you had to come to work because I don’t have anyone else.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t sure if she was grateful for the idea, or questioning my sanity.

  “Yes, really. Tell them that you have to at least give two weeks’ notice, and that’ll give us time to think of something. Okay? Now, I expect to see you at work this very evening.”

  “It’s my night off,” she said.

  “They don’t know that.”

  I could hear her blow her nose. “Thanks, Elliot.”

  “No charge, sweetie.”

  Sophie is the backbone of my staff. Yes, Anthony is incredibly valuable because he can run the projector, and Jonathan can . . . Jonathan is very good at . . . I like Jonathan, and he knows his comedy, an asset in a theatre that might, on occasion, book Sons of the Desert (Laurel and Hardy, 1933). But Sophie is the bridge between the technical staff (Anthony) and the support staff (Jonathan), not to mention management (that’s me). I could lose Sophie to Harvard, but I wasn’t going to lose her to Ilsa Beringer.

  This would require some thought, and I didn’t have the time for that now. I had to figure out what happened to Russell Chapman. There was only one thing to do: go out and get a sandwich.

  But I had barely made it to the office door when it became obvious I had something else to do first. There was a thin wisp of smoke coming from the basement door, but that didn’t bother me. There was a slight smell of burning rubber in the lobby, but that didn’t bother me.

  It was the flames coming down one of the walls in a straight line that bothered me.

  I dashed for the snack bar, where we have a fire extinguisher, and grabbed at it. I’d never actually used a fire extinguisher before, but this seemed like an excellent time to learn. So I ran with it, shaking it as if it were an enormous can of whipped cream, toward the lobby wall with the line of flames. As I ran, I yelled “Dad!” down the basement stairway.

  It turns out that it’s not that difficult to use a fire extinguisher. It’s pretty much point and shoot, and what do you know—it extinguishes the fire. If only all things were as reliable in their ability to perform the task assigned to their names. Then we would have cough suppressors that really suppressed coughs, and public servants who actually served the public.

  But perhaps that’s beside the point.

  Feeling pleased with myself, I immediately turned toward the basement door, from which Dad was emerging, looking a little panicked at my tone. Sandy Arnstein was behind him, holding what appeared to be the world’s largest wrench.

  “What’s the matter?” Dad asked. Then he looked at the lobby wall—now streaked with black soot and extinguisher foam—and said, “Oh.”

  “This isn’t anything I did,” Arnstein said. Some guys know exactly how to handle human interaction, and then there are those who are more comfortable with things like wires and current.

  “No,” I agreed. “I’m sure the wall just burst into flames on its own, and the smoke coming from the basement where you were working is strictly a coincidence.”

  Dad looked shocked, probably more at my sarcastic tone with his friend than with his friend’s setting my theatre on fire while Dad looked on. “Elliot,” he chided.

  “Why didn’t my fire alarm go off?” I asked.

  “I had that fuse turned off,” Arnstein explained.

  “I hope you have a good lawyer,” I said. There went the family discount.

  Arnstein said not another word. He turned and walked toward the basement door, no doubt to pack up his tools and move on. I had to consider reining in my mouth on occasion until such time as my theatre isn’t in danger of being shut down by the local fire department.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Dad said, and went to follow Arnstein.

  “Tell him I won’t sue him if he fixes the fire damage,” I said, and Dad gave me a stern look. I thought I was being reasonable.

  My day didn’t get any easier when I turned to walk back toward the office. Standing just inside the lobby doors were Gwen Chapman and her sister, Lillian.

  Standing next to them was the redheaded man I’d seen at C’est Moi! right before the shopping cart had tried to flatten Sharon.

  I walked over to them, and extended my hand to the red-haired man.

  “I’m Elliot Freed,” I told him. “And you just have to be Wally. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  He didn’t look pleased.

  30

  WALLY Mayer did not take my hand. Instead, he looked at me much as that big animated can of Raid used to look at the animated bugs it annihilated. “I’m not here to be friendly,” he growled.

  “Well, you’re off to a flying start,” I told him.

  Wally huffed and puffed, but even given the dilapidated condition of the house was unable to blow it down. Seeing as how the house had tried to burn itself down only a few minutes before, it was showing surprising resilience.

  “We’re here to deliver a message,” Wally continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, which was the first sign of intelligence he had shown.

  “Three people for one message?” I marveled. “That must be a huge Candy-Gram. Where’d you hide it?” I looked around the three of them, as if expecting at the very least a Whitman’s sampler. Nothing.

  “You can’t protect your wife,” Wally said.

  “Ex-wife,” I corrected him.

  “Ex-wife,” he agreed.

  “I can’t believe you ever married that woman,” Lillian Chapman offered.

  “Well, I can’t believe you married that man,” I countered, gesturing toward Wally. “It’s all a question of taste, isn’t it?”

  Gwen, who had been looking like she’d rather be in Philadelphia (it’s a W. C. Fields reference; Google it if you don’t believe me), finally piped up, “Can’t we find some common ground here? There’s no reason to be so unpleasant.”

  “Your ex killed a very important man,” Wally intoned, completely ignoring his sister-in-law. He’d learned his lines, and he was delivering them. “A very important man.”

  “She didn’t kill anyone. And you mean a very rich man,” I corrected.

  He shrugged. “It’s the same thing.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “The three of you—okay, the two of you—have come here to verbally threaten the life and health of my ex-wife? Because you still harbor some twisted belief that she drove him to attempt suicide? You haven’t heard that she told him he didn’t have cancer? And you haven’t been told that he was murdered—excuse me, Gwen—not driven to suicide? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “I’m here to suggest a reasonable attitude,” Gwen said. “Mr. Freed had nothing to do with Dad’s death, certainly. Why are you threatening him?” But again, her sister and brother-in-law pretended she hadn’t spoken at all.

  “You hang in there, Gwen,” I said. “In the end, you’ll be proven right.” I winked at her, which probably wasn’t the right move.

  “She told him he had cancer because she wanted his money,” Lillian Chapman continued, not persuaded. “She seduced him and then took away all his hope. And she duped my poor father into willing her millions.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Gwen told her sister. “Dad never would have invested without a prototype.” Beats me; I was an English literature major.

  “Man, you guys would have made great comedy writers,” I said. “And here I am without a tape recorder to get all this down.”

  “You don’t have any witnesses, either,” Wally reminded me. “So you can’t go and report us to the police. They’ll never believe you, anyway.”

  “Oh now, stop it, Wally,” Gwen pleaded. “There isn’t going to be any trouble.”

  “That’s what you think,” Wally told her, betraying his third-grade level of wit.

  “So, just to be clear, what kind of violence should I warn Sharon about?” I asked. “Are you going to attack her with more sup
ermarket paraphernalia, or will one of you cut her throat with a scalpel like you did with your old man?”

  And imagine this—the Chapman girls had the nerve to act offended! “How dare you accuse us of such a thing?” Lillian huffed. “I should have known you would stoop to this level—your kind are all alike!”

  I drew myself up to my full height. “My kind?”

  Lillian looked down the full length of her nose at me. “You know exactly what I mean,” she growled.

  “Lil!” Gwen admonished.

  “If you guys came by looking for free movie passes, you really need to work on your technique,” I told them. Then I turned to Wally. “Look, your wife was born into this family, but you chose to marry her. That wasn’t a really high intelligence day on your biorhythm the day you said I do, was it?”

  “Whaddaya mean by that?” he asked.

  “My mistake,” I said. “I guess you don’t have any really high intelligence days on your biorhythm. Now, take your lovely sister-in-law and your fairly unappetizing wife, and get out of my theatre. The management reserves the right to refuse admission to anyone who has an IQ in the negative numbers.”

  Strikingly, they left, even as Gwen apologized to me a number of times.

  I could hear clanking and the occasional power tool sound from the basement, so I guessed Dad had worked his magic on Arnstein. What I couldn’t decide was whether I was happy about that or not. But I did decide not to report the fire to the department of the same name, as I was tired of being shut down, and figured the fire was already out, and they’d just put on all their winter gear for no purpose. You see, it was really an effort on my part to lighten the load of the local fire department.

  Fine. Believe what you will.

  I could remember something about wanting to go out for a sandwich, but that seemed like a very long time ago. Since I was here, and there was little I could do while my theatre’s electrical system was being dismantled—and, hopefully, re-mantled—I decided to head back to the office to get some paperwork done and try to solve a few problems. Like figuring out who killed Russell Chapman, how to keep Sophie on my staff, and whether we should name the baby after Groucho or Harpo if it was a boy.