A Night at the Operation (16 page)

I’m willing to bet the older cop would have cut the cuffs off at that moment, but the younger one said, “You’re breakin’ my heart, pal. But you divorced her for a reason, right?”

“She divorced me.”

“Imagine that.”

They moved me toward the door, and my secret weapon finally became useful. Mom stood up.

“You’re not
really
going to arrest my son, are you?” she asked.

The cuffs were off in seconds.

The cops made sure I cleaned up the broken glass and plugged the hole in the window with some paneling I found in the crawl-space under the kitchen. Then they led Mom and me outside, and watched us get into my car. They followed us to the town limits, which was just about the time Mom’s cell phone rang.

The cops were watching, and I didn’t want to get fined for using a cell phone while driving, so I pulled over when Mom told me it was Meg.

“She wasn’t here, but I think she might have been recently,” I told her.

“Well, she hasn’t shown up here, either,” Meg said. “But there has been a development.” And my adrenaline started its roller-coaster trip around my body again.

“What kind of development?” I asked as casually as I could.

“Mr. Chapman’s lawyer called,” Meg said. “She got a call from him last night. He’s alive.”

 

 

 

 

THE
drive back to Midland Heights was pretty much like the drive up to Lake Carey. I wasn’t thinking much about the road, and my speed was probably ten to twenty miles an hour faster than I normally would do in any borrowed car, let alone Mom’s ancient Olds. But she didn’t make me stop for food this time, and we were back at Comedy Tonight in about two and a half hours, just in time to watch Sophie scowling at having to set up for the matinee.

“There aren’t enough hours in the day,” she said when Mom and I walked in. “Do you think I have time to do my job and yours and still get through two separate practice tests in the next twenty-four hours?”

“No, I don’t,” I answered, and kept walking, despite her annoyed cries of “Elliot!” as I found Meg and Dad at the entrance doors to the auditorium. Mom gave me a look that indicated her disapproval of the way I treated Sophie, but I ignored it. I took a mental inventory: Anthony would be in the projection booth, and Jonathan was probably cleaning up the auditorium.

Dad hugged me, something he’d been doing more often lately, and said, “Nothing?” I shook my head and turned toward Meg. I told her our story. Even the part about almost being arrested, which led to a cry of “I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” something I’m used to hearing from my mother, but not a homicide detective. My mother, to my right, just rolled her eyes and let her face speak volumes on the embarrassment and suffering she endured on my account.

“She was there,” I said. “Sharon was at the lake house. Recently. Maybe yesterday.”

“Sharon?” Dad said, his eyes widening. “How do you know?”

“One of the rooms wasn’t covered in dust,” I said. “The rest of the place looked like Vincent Price’s dungeon.”

Mom made a face. “That’s disgusting.”

I decided to ignore that, too, and talked to Meg again. “She was there. I don’t know how recently, or if she was alone or not, but she was there.”

“You should have told that to the cops,” Meg said. “They could be on the lookout for her now.”

“I couldn’t risk it. Next thing you know, they’d be accusing me of chopping her up and dumping the body in the lake. I couldn’t give them an excuse to hold me there.”

“Elliot!” my mother said. I put an arm around her shoulder, and she looked at me like I must be in need of some strong mood-altering drugs.

“I’ll call them in an hour or so,” Meg said. “If there’s a chance they can find Sharon up there, we should take it.”

“Tell me about Chapman,” I said.

Sophie had turned the “closed” sign in the front window to “open,” so a few people were starting to drift in for the early show of
Sullivan’s Travels
. I half expected to see Martin Tovarich come back for a second viewing, just to get his mojo back, but he didn’t arrive. When customers started reaching the auditorium doors, I motioned my posse (as I was now thinking of them) back toward the office door. We couldn’t all sit, or, for that matter, enter, but we could be out of the way near there.

“All I know is, the word came in to Barry Dutton either late last night or early this morning,” Meg said. “Chapman’s lawyer, a woman named Angie Hogencamp, called the county prosecutor to let him know Chapman had gotten in touch with her over a legal matter, so that meant he was alive. She’d spoken to Chapman himself, and there was no mistake.”

I hadn’t slept nor eaten in a long time (my exercise in teaching my mother a lesson had been a miscalculation, I was realizing), and my brain didn’t seem to be functioning at its normal level. “Is it me, or does that not add up? Why didn’t Dutton send someone out to see Chapman when he got the call?”

“It’s not his jurisdiction,” Meg said. “No crime was committed in Midland Heights. The East Brunswick cops have been investigating, so they might have gone, or the prosecutor may have sent an investigator, but I don’t know that for sure.”

“What about Sharon?” my mother insisted. “What does this do for her?”

“Not very much, Mom,” I told her. “We still don’t know where she is, or why.”

“At least she’s not a murder suspect anymore,” my father offered. Dad is a walking ray of sunshine.

But there was a walking veil of darkness approaching from the left, and it had a voice. “Yes, she is,” said the voice.

Lillian Chapman Mayer, resplendent in a black business suit, had slithered into the theatre when nobody was looking, and stood, hands-on-hips, surveying us with the same expression I imagined she’d give Charles Manson if he’d decided to drop by for an evening’s entertainment.

“So this is where you work,” she said to me, with what I perceived to be a sneer in her voice. (I don’t often get to hear genuine sneers, so I might be out of practice.) “It’s cozy.”

“I don’t care for that word,” I answered. “I like
inviting
.”

Meg gave me a questioning look. “This is Lillian
Chapman
Mayer,” I said to the group. “We met at Sharon’s practice yesterday morning.”

“And you were rude, and didn’t tell me who you were until it was too late,” Lillian added.

“Nonsense. I merely pointed out that you don’t stop talking very often. You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” Groucho. If you steal, steal from the best.

“Elliot!” My mother, more offended than Lillian Chapman, would have swooned or taken the vapors if she’d been a Southern woman. Instead, she was from Eastern European stock (by way of the Bronx), and with her delicate constitution, could no doubt have pulled a plow through the lobby if that had become necessary. Luckily, it did not.

Dad, ever the diplomat (salesmen are peacemakers by nature, and Dad was an excellent salesman: never pushy, always ingratiating), shifted the conversation back into drive. “What brings you here, Mrs. Mayer?” he asked.

Meg tried to bring order where there was no order; that’s
her
nature. “There’s no point in looking for Dr. Simon-Freed here,” she said. “We have no idea where she is.”

“Yeah, she’s flown the coop; my sister told me that,” Lillian responded. “Just a little suspicious, don’t you think? Right after the doctor gave my father a death sentence that she knew was wrong, she disappeared.”

I considered pointing out that Lillian herself could disappear without making much of a dent in America, but Meg was quicker—and saner—than me. “I don’t think it’s relevant,” she said. “We were told your father is still alive, so the doctor’s whereabouts don’t have anything to do with him.”

Lillian actually smiled. She looked like Mr. Burns on
The Simpsons
. I think I preferred her
not
smiling.

Finally, I drew in my breath, swallowed, and said, “Miss Chapman, shouldn’t you be plotting the end of civilization at your evil lair? Why aren’t you visiting the father you thought you’d lost? Now that your inheritance isn’t imminent, aren’t you his loving daughter anymore?”

Meg and my mother shot me exactly the same look; it was eerie.

“It was important I see your face when I tell you this, Mr. Freed,” Lillian said. “My father’s body was discovered in his study this afternoon at one. The medical examiner is still investigating, but it appears that his throat was cut. With a scalpel.”

 

 

 

 

“OH,
yeah,” Chief Barry Dutton said. “I knew there was something I’d forgotten to tell you.”

I sat in his visitor’s chair, a municipal mail-order beauty of chrome and vinyl, squeezing my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Maybe if I pressed hard enough, I could push each eye into the opposite socket and see life differently. “Something you’d forgotten to tell me?” I asked. “Is that the police version of wit?”

“Let’s recap a little,” Dutton said, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head, lacing the fingers. “You chose not to mention that you drove up to some postage-stamp town in Pennsylvania looking for a woman whose disappearance we’re investigating, that you broke into a house and damn near got yourself arrested, that you discovered something you chose
not
to tell the officers at that postage-stamp town in Pennsylvania, and now you’re chiding
me
about not promptly disclosing everything I have no obligation to tell you?”

I stopped rubbing my eyes and fixed my sleep-deprived, bloodshot gaze on him. Both of him. “Chiding?” I asked.

“Don’t change the subject.”

I put my head down on his desk. I realized that I hadn’t really slept since . . . Thursday. That seemed a very long time, now. “You’re right,” I said. “I should have told you all that stuff. I had reasons I didn’t, and at the time, they seemed really good.”

“Apology accepted. When Meg gets back from the prosecutor’s office, I might even let you stay in the room.”

I didn’t answer. Since I wasn’t looking at Dutton (or anything except the insides of my eyelids), I can’t be sure, but I think he actually stood and leaned over the desk to see if I was asleep. “Elliot, I’ve never seen you like this,” he said.

His desk tasted like furniture polish. “Due respect, Chief, you haven’t known me very long.
I’ve
never seen me like this.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he said. “Sharon wouldn’t want you to . . .”

My head popped up off his desk like it was on a spring. “Don’t you do that!” I shouted. “Don’t talk about her like she’s dead!”

Dutton’s eyes widened, for about a third of a second. He nodded slowly, then leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. There’s absolutely no reason to think she’s in any danger at all.”

“That’s better.” I realized I was acting like a petulant eight-year-old, and I didn’t care. “Don’t let it happen again.”

“I won’t.” And I believed him. Dutton inspires confidence, and I’ve never seen him do anything he said he wouldn’t. I tried to remember if I had him on my holiday card list. His eyes were still moving around a little, as he tried to think of how to deal with this wreck of a man before him.

“What’s going on with Russell Chapman?” I asked him, mumbling. “Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he a zombie?”

“He’s dead, all right.” Meg Vidal must have entered through Dutton’s office door. I hadn’t opened my eyes, so I couldn’t tell you when. “The ME made a positive identification. He’s dead, and he’s got a big slit in his neck that’s not attractive.”

“You saw him?” Dutton asked.

“No, but I saw pictures.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The guy’s dead. Then we
think
he’s dead, but he’s missing. Then he’s alive, because he calls his lawyer. Then he’s dead again. I can’t keep up.”

“What do we know about the lawyer?” Meg asked Dutton. I didn’t see her, but I could be sure she wasn’t asking me.

“She’s a perfectly legitimate estate planner working in Spotswood,” Dutton said. “I’ve never heard a word about her that wasn’t professional and efficient, and I’ve dealt with her before. She called because she didn’t want to be involved in whatever deception there was regarding Chapman being dead when he wasn’t.”

“And now he is,” Meg said. “Again.”

“And Sharon’s back on the suspect list,” I said. “She probably wasn’t at the lake house when Chapman died, if it was today.” I raised my head. A little. “Do we know when Chapman died this time?”

“His daughter Gwen found him in the study at one this afternoon,” Meg said. “ME isn’t done yet, but thinks it was between six and eleven in the morning when he died.”

“I’d forgotten how nice it is to have a competent detective on staff,” Dutton said. “I might hire you full-time, Meg.”

“You don’t have enough homicides,” she said.

“Nonsense. We have one wherever Elliot goes.”

Dutton thought I’d laugh at that, but I wasn’t in the mood to be amused. “What about Sharon?” I moaned. “This gets worse every minute.”

“You sound like your mother,” Meg told me.

Suddenly, it occurred to me again that sleeping wasn’t the only thing I hadn’t done since Thursday. “I think I need food,” I told Dutton.

“Come on. I’m buying.”

 

 

BELINDA
McElvoy, the brilliant, beautiful waitress at Big Herbs, took one look at me as Dutton and I sat down and shook her head. “My god, Elliot, you look like you’ve been hit by a bus. I guess there’s no news about the doc yet?”

I shook my head. “Everybody in this town knows everything about everybody else, don’t they?” I asked her.

“Not everybody. Just me.” Belinda could see that I was in no condition to read a menu, so she said, “How about a nice veggie burger, Elliot? If they cook it long enough and put lots of toppings on it, you can’t tell it’s really seaweed.” Big Herbs is a vegetarian restaurant, but Belinda is a steak-and-potatoes (with a side order of steak) kind of girl.