A Night at the Operation (24 page)

I nodded. “She wouldn’t. But someone here was involved with Chapman, at least as more than a patient. A private detective saw them go to a hotel together, and saw Chapman drop the woman off at Sharon’s house.”

Grace’s eyes widened a little. “A private detective?” she asked.

“Yeah. What do you know?”

She took a moment to think, seemingly about how much she could tell without betraying a serious confidence. “There was someone here who saw Mr. Chapman about once a week or so,” she said. “I can’t say how intense it got, but I know it was a regular thing. Now, what they’d be doing at Sharon’s house, I have no idea.”

I leaned forward. “You know I wouldn’t push it if this weren’t unbelievably important, but I have to ask, Grace: Who was it?”

“Don’t ask me that, Elliot.”

“I’m asking.”

Grace’s expression spoke of serious pain; she loves to talk, but hates not being trustworthy. She considered her words very carefully. “If I were forced to name names,” she said, “I’d have to say it was Toni Westphal.”

The difference between life and the movies is that a script
has to make sense, and life doesn’t.

—JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ (SCREENWRITER,
All About Eve)

 

“IT’S
all tied together,” said Sandy Arnstein.

Sandy, the electrician Dad had called to deal with the electrical problem at Comedy Tonight—which had resulted in three flickers and two outright blown fuses the night before—was a guy who had been an electrician since roughly ten minutes after Ben Franklin came in with the kite. He was standing in the doorway to the theatre’s basement, holding a pair of wire cutters and trying (in vain) to explain himself to me in a way that my techno-challenged brain could somehow understand.

“What’s all tied together?” I asked for the fifth time.

“The problems with the plumbing and the electricity,” Sandy answered. “One causes the other, which causes the first one again. It’ll keep up this way until someone breaks the cycle.”

“So break it,” I suggested.

“You can’t,” Sandy said, with a tone that indicated a third grader would have grasped this by now. “If I break it now, it’ll just come back in the plumbing.” I would have sworn I saw Jerry Lewis play this guy in a movie once.

I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, and contemplated putting a sign on the front door that read BEST offer. “So what needs to be done, and how many banks do I have to rob to pay for it?” I asked.

Sandy didn’t so much as smile. It was possible I really would have to go into a life of crime, after all. “I think you need a whole new electrical service, and it’s possible I’ll have to rewire a good portion of your theatre.”

“You can’t kill me with words, Sandy,” I told him. “Just tell me how much time and how much money.”

“Time? Impossible to say—I have to see how much wiring is burned out already. Money?” Sandy reached into a pocket in his overalls and pulled out a calculator, on which he started punching buttons. It took considerably longer to reach a sum than I would have preferred. “About six thousand dollars.”

“I was wrong. You
can
kill me with words.”

Dad, who had been leaning on the wall next to the men’s room door, walked over. “Come on, Sandy,” he said. “Give him the family discount.”

“That
is
the family discount, Art,” he said.

“Pretend it’s
your
family.”

Sandy pursed his lips, stared at my father for a moment, and said, “Lemme check.” Then he walked back down the basement stairs.

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.