A Night at the Operation (19 page)

But from the snack bar, I heard a scream. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Sophie shouted. “You’re not leaving me to supervise another double feature when I have
real
work to do!” She stormed out from behind her station—which was just as well, since there would be no customers to serve for another two hours—and advanced on me like a rhino on a first-time safari hunter armed with nothing but a camera. The hunter, not the rhino.

“Sophie,” I said. “I haven’t slept since . . .”

“I don’t care! You’ve been blowing me off for days now! It doesn’t matter to you if I get into a good school—you just care about your theatre! Well, if that’s the way you’re going to be about it, I
quit
!”

Don’t ask me to explain it, but that was the death blow. I sat down on the floor of the lobby right where I’d been standing, as if she’d knocked me out with a vicious left hook. I looked up at the crowd gathered around me—Mom, Gregory, Dutton, Meg, Sophie—all staring at me like they would a harmless but pathetic mental patient. Except Sophie probably wouldn’t have used the word “harmless.”

“You can’t,” I croaked.

Jonathan came running over from . . . somewhere . . . and stared pleadingly at Sophie. “You’re not serious,” he said. “You’re not leaving.”

“Sure I am! If you can’t even take my suffering seriously . . .” That was directed at me.

“Your suffering?” Anger took on despair inside my head, and it wasn’t a fair fight. I got shakily to my feet. “
Your
suffering? You’re a teenage girl with every advantage, a first-class brain and good sense, who’s going to get into every single college she applies to without all the courses and strategy, because she’s brilliant! Do you have any idea what
we’ve
been going through for the past few days?” I asked Sophie, gesturing at the gathered group, which now somehow included my father.

Sophie blinked. “You think I’m brilliant?”

“I always have. But you’re not the one who’s suffering. We are!”

Sophie blinked twice. “Why?” she asked.

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be that she hadn’t known, that she’d missed every conversation. Could Sophie have buried her nose so deep into her books that she didn’t know what was going on?

My voice calmed, and descended in volume. “Sophie, please pay attention. For the past few days, I haven’t been acting like myself; I know you’ve noticed that.”

“Sure,” she said. “You were mad because I was studying during the movie.”

“No,” I said. “I’m very emotional right now—and so is everyone else here—because Sharon has been missing since Thursday night.”

Sophie’s eyes doubled in size. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “And there’s a really good chance that none of us might ever see her again.”

“Don’t you think you’d better check with me on that?” asked a voice to my left, and my head turned ninety degrees in one frame of film (that’s one twenty-fourth of a second).

Sharon, hand on her hip, was standing at the front door to the theatre, with a look on her face that can only be described as bemused.

“Did I miss something?” she asked.

 

 

 

 

THE
avalanche of humanity that launched itself toward the front doors of Comedy Tonight would probably have frightened most people. Sharon, not being most people, seemed to find it amusing and, in a way I couldn’t figure, gratifying.

All eight of us (minus the plumber, and Anthony, who remained blissfully asleep on the balcony stairs) began launching questions at the same time. Okay: Jonathan didn’t say anything, only because he deferred to Sophie. I arrived first (not that I’m at all competitive) and kissed my ex-wife with a passion I would leave to a more private audience on virtually any other occasion.

“Well, it’s good to see you, too,” she said when we finally came up for air. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gregory looking peevish. I felt better than I had in days.

“Where have you been?” Mom shouted at Sharon. “We’ve been frantic.”

“Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?” Gregory asked. “I tried you every hour until the voice mail was filled.” The needy wimp. I’d only called every two hours. I kept my arm around Sharon’s shoulders. That would show him.

Gwen Chapman walked back into the theatre, but stood to the side, just watching the group. I was thinking only about Sharon.

“The practice has been looking for you,” I told her. “Nobody’s known where you were since Thursday night.”

“Why didn’t you . . . ?”

“When did you . . . ?”

“Who was with you . . . ?”

“Have you eaten anything?” My father. A man of basic concerns.

Dutton raised an arm and whistled loudly. “If everyone would please give the doctor some breathing room, I have some concerns that I want to address privately with her before anyone else has a chance to influence her answers,” he said. “Elliot, can we use your office?”

“Sure,” I answered, and the crowd did its best Red Sea imitation to let me lead Sharon through toward the door. I reached into my pocket with my right hand for the office key, but kept the left on Sharon’s arm. I was formulating a plan that included never actually losing physical contact with her again.

The door opened, and I ushered Dutton inside. Sharon followed him, a quizzical look on her face. I started into the office behind Sharon, and Dutton raised a hand, telling me to stop.

“Just the doctor and me,” he said.

“But, I . . .” The plan about physical contact, like most of my plans, had not lasted long.

“It’s okay, Elliot,” Sharon said. My face fell. I picked it up and left the office, closing the door behind me.

The gathered assemblage was facing me when I turned around. “All right, people,” I said, motioning like a traffic cop. “Show’s over. Nothing to see here.”

We moved, in a pack, toward the snack bar. Sophie took up her usual post, on the barstool I’ve installed there for her, and Jonathan took up his, perched on an inflatable chair he installed there himself so he could look at Sophie as much as possible. Jonathan’s approach to women was taking on an eerily familiar look; I shuddered, thinking of high school.

Dad shrugged and went back to instructing the plumber, who surely must have finished reeling in his hose by now. I got Mom a folding chair from behind the snack bar and set it out to one side, so she could sit and memorize how everyone there was in some way failing her at that moment. She liked to savor such memories at a later date.

That left Meg, Gregory, Gwen, and me. We all stood around, watching the office door, trying to look inconspicuous. And failing miserably.

I walked over to Gwen. “Something I can help you with?” I asked. It was the first chance I had to find out why she’d returned.

“No, no,” she answered. “I saw the doctor walking into the theatre when I was getting into my car, and I just wanted to see the relief on your face. Right now, that’s a real treat for me, to see other people feeling better.”

“You must be having a very rough time,” I said. “I’m sorry if I didn’t seem sympathetic enough, but . . .”

“Believe me, I understand,” Gwen said. “But I would like to ask the doctor something when she comes out.”

“Of course,” I said.

And that pretty much exhausted our supply of conversation. We all watched the office door for a while longer.

“Barry just doesn’t want her answers to be practiced, or corrupted by anything one of us could tell her,” Meg said after a few minutes. “It’s standard procedure. It’s what I’d do. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“That’s what I thought,” I answered. “Dutton already told me he didn’t suspect Sharon in Chapman’s death. He’s just going through the motions, taking care of formalities.”

“I don’t think Sharon killed anyone,” Gregory said, presumably because he thought it was his turn. Nobody even glanced at him; we were doing our best to pretend he wasn’t there.

The number of “casual” glances toward the office door increased. I even caught Sophie stealing a look in that direction as she restocked the nonpareils, which only led me to wonder why no one ever ate pareils. My mind tends to travel in strange directions when my ex-wife is being questioned by the police. I wasn’t sure if that was useful information, but I noted it and saved the analysis for later.

“So where do you think she’s been for the past three days?” Sophie, the eternal fount of tact, asked.

“She’ll tell us when she’s done in there,” Meg assured her. “I’m sure there’s a very simple explanation.”

“The important thing is that she’s safe,” said my mother, for once echoing what I would have been thinking if I weren’t such a petty, self-centered . . . Damn! She could do it even without trying!

Dad wandered out of the ladies’ room and approached me with a look that spelled no good for my theatre and its vital systems. He motioned me aside, and spoke quietly, to preserve confidentiality. “The guy thinks there’s a good chance your sewer is backing up,” he said. “It could possibly affect other systems, like air-conditioning.”

“That’s not a very big deal in this weather,” I said.

“Eventually, the backup could reach the heating system,” Dad warned.

“Eventually? I’ll worry about that eventually, then.”

“There’s also the possibility that any water in the basement could interfere with—”

The lights in the lobby chose that very moment to go out. They flickered, went completely dark, and stayed that way.

“—the electrical system,” Dad continued.

I wouldn’t have been able to see my hand in front of my face if it had been there for some obscure reason I wasn’t able to conjure at the moment. “Swell,” I said. “The flashlight is in the office.”

The plumber’s voice came from somewhere in the distance. “Just a minute,” he shouted.

The lights came back on.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Dad suggested.

“Yeah. Do you know an electrician?” I asked.

“Several.”

“Call one.”

“Which one?” Dad asked.

“The cheapest one.”

The office door, which we’d momentarily forgotten about, swung open, and Barry Dutton walked out into the lobby. “What’s the problem with the lights?” he asked.

“It’s being taken care of,” I told him.

Then I saw Sharon walk out of the office behind Dutton. She walked slowly, as if she were afraid she’d fall, hands behind her back. For a moment, she looked like an attractive, female version of Ed Sullivan.

In handcuffs.

Meg Vidal seemed to focus on the cuffs. Gregory’s mouth dropped open. My stomach, recently returned to its normal place in my abdomen, fell, rose, and fell again. It would take an MRI machine to accurately locate it, but that wasn’t my most pressing problem at the moment.

“Chief,” I started, and he held up a hand. Jonathan stood up to get a better look at Sharon. Then, as fit his attention span, he looked back at Sophie.

“For the time being,” Dutton said, “I’m asking for your patience. I’m taking the doctor back to headquarters to question her on suspicion of murder in the first degree.”

Anthony began to snore.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of
the road. They get run over.

—ANEURIN BEVAN

Anything that begins “I don’t know how to tell you this” is
never
good news.

—RUTH GORDON

 

THE
Midland Heights police station doesn’t really have a jail; there’s a holding cell they use occasionally, and most of the more serious criminals are sent to county lockup for any extended stay.

But today, Chief Barry Dutton wouldn’t even let me near the holding cell while Sharon’s release was being arranged. I’d tried to call Grace at Sharon’s practice for information, but she was out sick, and Betty said Dutton hadn’t called them, anyway. He had not informed me about her arraignment, and I hadn’t been notified as to the attorney she’d hired to defend her.

I was starting to think Dutton didn’t love me anymore.

“This isn’t like you,” I said to him, sitting in the same waiting room I’d inhabited the night Sharon had vanished. I had slept (a little), showered, and shaved for the first time in days, and was wearing clothes that didn’t make me look like I should be carrying a cardboard sign asking for donations for a Gulf War veteran down on his luck. “You’re a cop, but most of the time, you’re human.”

“This is murder,” he answered, reading something on a clipboard. His half-glasses didn’t seem as charming as they once had. “This is not something where rules can be bent. I have to play it by the book.”

“You told me yourself that you didn’t suspect Sharon in Chapman’s murder. And it took place in East Brunswick, not Midland Heights, but you’re holding her here. Something’s not kosher about this whole business, Dutton.”

He didn’t look up. “You usually call me Chief,” he said.

“You usually deserve respect,” I answered.

Dutton’s mouth twitched; it was the only sign that I’d struck a nerve. “Don’t cross the line, Elliot. Wait for things to play out.”

“Are we speaking in haiku today? Say what you mean.”

“That is what I mean. Show some patience. The truth will come out, and you’ll see that you don’t know everything you think you know.” Dutton stood up and left the room. It must have been his day to be vague.

I sat there for a few more eternities, not knowing exactly how long Sharon would be held. She’d been in custody since leaving Comedy Tonight the previous afternoon, and now, at nine thirty in the morning, more than fifteen hours since she’d been back, I had answers to exactly none of my lingering questions. That was not acceptable.

Finally, the dispatcher behind the desk pushed a button and a buzzer sounded. The inside door swung open into the waiting room, and Sharon walked through it.