A Night at the Operation (25 page)

“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.

 

 

 

 

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 supermarket 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.

I was planning to solve these problems by playing MacBrickout for a while (you’d be amazed how much you can think about when you’re not thinking), but then I remembered there was a stack of mail on my desk that I had not looked at since Sharon had taken her little trip to the Poconos. I sat down at the desk and started sorting the mail.

After throwing away catalogs (I didn’t really
need
new popcorn buckets) and stacking bills, I had a depressingly small pile of mail that actually was addressed to someone other than “occupant.” I disposed of most of it quickly, and then I came across an envelope that was unusual.

It was plain, with no return address and no distinctive stationery pattern. The address was handwritten (and not by one of those computer programs that’s supposed to
look
handwritten), in blue ink, to “Mr. Elliot Freed, c/o Comedy Tonight,” with the address of the theatre beneath. It was post-marked in East Brunswick two days before, indicating that it had been stamped by the post office on Monday, and could have been mailed anytime between the post office closing on Saturday and sometime after it opened Monday.

The letter was strange in that there was absolutely nothing strange about it. It’s rare that a business, especially, gets a piece of mail that isn’t in some way generated by another business. Movie theatres don’t get personal letters, and yet this appeared to be just that.

I actually used a letter opener I have on my desk, something I rarely do. Sharon had given me the opener when I started the theatre, as part of a stationery set that I almost never use. She thought it seemed “professional” to have such an item. I’m not sure I’ve made this clear, but I don’t have use for the thing.

Unfolding the letter, I had a sense of importance; this didn’t feel like a casual piece of mail. It was also handwritten, in very clear script, on heavyweight, expensive stationery. It was dated three days ago—Sunday—and it read: