A Night at the Operation (11 page)

There were four stores and the hotel bar on the list Dutton had provided, showing purchases on the credit card with my name on it. The first was a jewelry store on Forty-fourth Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. We walked there, and I noted as ever that Manhattan creates a wind tunnel effect unparalleled in my experience. I felt like I was at the top of Mount Everest, but for the Sherpa guides and oxygen tanks.

The “jewelry store,” when we got there, turned out to be one of those cheap souvenir places in Midtown that specialize in Broadway-themed items made in Bangladesh, pictures of Marilyn Monroe standing on a sewer grate (did you know her first movie was
Love Happy
, with the Marx Brothers?) and “gift items” from New York’s most bizarre tourist attraction, Ground Zero. If I’d stopped to think about it, that would probably have led me to wonder if there was now a gift shop outside the Auschwitz concentration camp area, selling T-shirts showing the crematorium with the phrase “We Must Never Forget” written in German over it (tastefully, of course).

Luckily, I didn’t stop to think about it.

“Sharon would never shop here,” Gregory said as we approached.

“No,” I agreed, rubbing my hands together, “but I’ll bet it’s heated.”

He nodded. “That isn’t a bad thing.”

We went inside. The man behind the counter was working diligently to sell a woman in her forties a souvenir T-shirt. Judging by his accent, he must have been born somewhere outside the tristate area.
Far
outside the tristate area.

“Sure it’ll fit you,” he said (I’m pretty sure) to the woman. “It’s one size fits all. It fits everybody.”

“You sure? Can I bring it back if it doesn’t fit?” Her husband, who looked profoundly embarrassed, was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a down-filled parka, and one of those headbands that covers your ears but doesn’t cover your head. Sort of an almost-a-hat.

“Back? No, you can’t bring it back. But it’ll fit.” The salesman looked disgusted at the very prospect.

“I dunno. I’ll think about it.” The woman walked to her husband, who now looked profoundly relieved, but never took his hand off his inside jacket pocket, and they left.

“She’s gonna think about it. Six ninety-nine, and she’s gonna think about it.” The guy rolled his eyes a little, and then looked at us. “So what can I do for you?”

I had found a photograph of Sharon on my computer and printed it out seven times, for reasons I could not possibly explain. I took it out of my jacket pocket and showed it to the guy.

“Have you seen this woman?”

His lips pursed and one eye squinted. “You guys cops? This is a legit business here.”

“We’re not cops,” I said. “We’re her husbands.”

“Mormons?”

I shook my head. “You haven’t even heard of our religion yet. Have you seen her?”

“How do I know you’re not cops?”

“Because I would have shot you by now. Look at the picture.
Have. You. Seen. This. Woman.
”

He took what could charitably be called a glance. “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I shouted. “You barely even looked at the picture!”

“Elliot,” Gregory said.

“No! We’re trying to save a woman’s life, and this guy thinks he’s a day player on
Law & Order SVU
!” A couple of heads turned at the back of the store.

I heard one guy near a rack of 9/11 ties say, “Are they filming here?”

“What do you want me to tell you?” the salesman asked. “I don’t memorize every face that comes in here.”

“We have some credit card records,” Gregory said before I could jump down the salesman’s throat a few inches deeper. “Would they help you trace the purchase? At least tell us what was bought?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve got customers; I can’t stop everything to look up some receipts.” He motioned over to a frightened-looking man wearing an FDNY baseball cap that had probably been purchased the same day.

“Sir.” Gregory’s eyes took on a liquid, pleading quality. Either he was truly distraught, or Dr. Sandoval could have taught at the Actors Studio. “Please. This is a very important matter, and you could help enormously. Isn’t there some way?”

“Sure, there’s a way,” I muttered. “We could beat him to a pulp until he agrees to do it.”

But I don’t think the salesman heard me, because he took a long moment to search Gregory’s eyes. Without turning his head, he screamed, “Mahmoud!” A young man seemed to appear in an instant. “Sell things. I’ll be right back.”

He walked behind the counter and through a door with a bead curtain, and without being invited, Gregory and I followed him into the back room.

If the front of the store was dingy, this area was downright disturbing. An unidentifiable odor permeated, and pretty much everything was covered with a substance that lived in the netherworld between dust and grime.

The salesman settled on a metal stool behind the screen of a computer that hearkened back to a simpler, less technological time. He typed in a few lines and green text appeared on the screen. I felt like I was visiting the Hewlett-Packard Museum.

“Give me the numbers,” he said.

Gregory took Dutton’s list out of his jacket pocket and read off the transaction numbers for this store. The salesman typed them in slowly, and then pushed a button. Things whirred. Things clicked. I half expected to see a hamster running on a wheel powering the computer. If Fred Flintstone had built himself a computer, it would be newer than this one.

“It was Thursday night,” the guy said after his screen spit out more incomprehensible data. “She bought a history of Broadway musicals and a pewter ring in the shape of the World Trade Center.”

“A ring in the shape of . . .” I marveled.

“You’d be amazed,” the guy said.

I looked at Gregory. “That’s not Sharon,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. It’s not.” He turned to the salesman. “Sorry for wasting your time.”

The guy looked up. “Well, if you want to make it up to me . . .”

“I don’t want a 9/11 tea cozy,” I said. But I gave him a Comedy Tonight business card and told him to call if he thought of anything. The guy probably used it to pick his teeth and threw it away the minute I walked out the door. Some people just don’t pick up on my innate charm.

Gregory handed the guy a twenty-dollar bill. “Thanks for the help,” he said.

We left the store, and stood out on Forty-sixth Street. People went by on their way to see
Wicked
and
Mamma Mia!
, and we just stood there.

“Now what?” Gregory asked.

I had no idea.

 

 

 

 

WE
couldn’t think of anything else to do, so we went to visit the other retailers on Dutton’s list. The first three were variations on the theme established at the “jewelry” store: an electronics outlet, a clothing store that specialized in “adult lingerie” where some rubber garments had been bought (Gregory came close to passing out a couple of times), and a high-end cookware outlet that didn’t seem to fit the list. None of the salespeople or managers at the stores remembered seeing Sharon, and none of the purchases were anything Gregory or I could imagine her buying, although I confess I did try to imagine the lingerie.

At the bar in the Affinia Manhattan hotel, across the street from Madison Square Garden, we struck pay dirt. Sort of.

“Yeah, I remember her,” the bartender said. My head broke the land speed record for swiveling in his direction. “Just a couple of days ago. Came in for about an hour. It was the busy time of the night, so I didn’t talk to her much.” The guy was maybe thirty, with the chiseled face of an actor who makes his living serving drinks to the well-off.

Gregory and I, stunned at our sudden success, must have had eyes the size of silver-dollar pancakes. I regained the power of speech first. “How do you remember her?” I asked.

“Well, she was pretty, but we get a lot of nice-looking women in here,” he answered. “I remember her because of what she was drinking.”

We waited, and he eventually came to the conclusion that we would like to know what that was. The bartender smiled. “Milk and seltzer,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

Gregory and I stared at each other. “Milk and seltzer?” Gregory asked, after a moment. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t get much call for it,” the bartender answered. “Believe me, I remember.”

“But you’re sure it was the woman in the picture,” I emphasized. “It couldn’t have been someone else.”

The bartender shook his head. “No, that’s her, all right. First thing when I saw her picture, I said, ‘Milk and seltzer.’ Does she drink that all the time?”

“No,” Gregory answered. “I’ve never seen her with that one.” He turned to me. “You?”

I shook my head. “Never,” I said. “You should have added some chocolate syrup and made her an egg cream.”

“I offered,” the bartender said.

Gregory remembered something then. “We have her credit card receipt from that night,” he told the bartender. “The total was over thirty-two dollars. That’s a lot of milk and seltzer to drink in an hour.”

“Well, the guy she was with was drinking Dewar’s,” the guy answered. “That’s most of the bill. I don’t even think I charged her for the milk.”

I jumped in before Gregory could inhale. “The
guy she was with
?” I asked. “She was with a guy?”

“Yeah, for a while. He left after a couple of drinks, and she stuck around maybe twenty minutes.”

“What did he look like?” Gregory asked breathlessly.

The bartender shrugged. “Nothing special; nothing I can remember,” he said. “I’d say thirties, dark hair, ladies would probably find him handsome. I don’t remember the guys as well as the women.” He smiled his devilish smile. It didn’t have much effect.

“And he left before her?” I said. “They didn’t leave together?”

“No. I mean, I was busy at the bar, but I don’t remember seeing him again.”

I had to ask. “When he left, how did she say good-bye?”

The bartender’s brow wrinkled. “I didn’t hear her say good-bye,” he said. “I don’t listen in on customers’ conversations.”

Gregory’s lips had flattened out to a straight horizontal line. “He means, did she kiss him good-bye,” he said.

“I think so, but just on the cheek, like a friend,” the guy said.

“Did she have any luggage with her?” I asked. If Sharon knew she was going away for a while, she’d bring changes of clothes, cosmetics, and enough other stuff to fill a U-Haul van.

“I didn’t see any,” the bartender answered. “Hang on, I have somebody at the other end of the bar.” And he went down to take an order from a guy who was trying to impress a woman of maybe twenty-five in a silver dress you could clean with Windex.

“I thought
you
were the guy,” Gregory said. “I guess I was wrong.”

“I guess so.”

“What do you think it means?” Gregory asked.

“I think it means she was here,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like she was being held against her will. It doesn’t sound like she was especially distraught. I can’t imagine what she was doing here in the city after the whole business with Chapman, but she hadn’t heard about his suicide yet—if he committed suicide. And it doesn’t help us at all to figure out where she is.”

The bartender wandered back from his post, shaking his head. “Guy’s trying to get laid,” he said, “and he orders a chocolate martini. For
himself
. Maybe it’s me.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us about the night our . . . friend was here?” I asked him. “Anything about the other guy, anything about where she might have been going when she left?”

He made a show of thinking, so the tip Gregory would give him could be larger. “I wasn’t looking, so I don’t know if she got into a cab or took the subway.”

“Cab,” Gregory and I answered in unison.

“I do remember, though, that her hands were shaking,” the bartender added. “When the guy was there, you couldn’t tell. He said he could stay if she wanted him to, and she said no, she’d be fine if she could just get away fast enough. After he left, I think there were a couple of times she started to cry, but then she pulled herself together.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t eavesdrop on customers,” I said.

I gave him a Comedy Tonight card. Gregory gave him a fifty.

 

 

ON
the way back in the car, I called Dutton on Gregory’s cell phone and filled him in on what we’d discovered, which really hadn’t been much beyond a mystery man in the bar whom we couldn’t identify. I’d handed a Comedy Tonight business card to virtually every cheap retailer in Manhattan and the bartender at the hotel, and Gregory was down about a hundred and fifty bucks, which didn’t bother me in the least. Dutton refused to elaborate on the strange report from the medical examiner, which I found rude, but grudgingly understandable. Then I called the theatre and got Sophie on the phone.

“We’re just about up and running,” she said. “Jonathan is taking tickets so I can run the snack bar, and I called Anthony to get here early because you aren’t threading up the projector. He’s upstairs getting the movie on now.”

“You’re my hero, Sophie,” I told her.

“I have to go,” she said. “Brown University recommends the SAT
and
the ACT. I have studying to do.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“Yeah. Some guy came in from an insurance company. Said he met you at the doctor’s today. Are you sick?”

“Just heartsick,” I said. “Was this guy’s name Tovarich?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s here now. The movie starts in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll be back before intermission,” I said. “Hold down the fort.”

“What fort?” Sophie asked.

I should have hung up. In retrospect, it would have been so much better. “There’s a woman here, too, looking for your ex-wife,” Sophie continued.