A Night at the Operation (32 page)

“We’ve got to talk,” I said when there was air between us.

“You sound like you’re breaking up with me,” Sharon said, “and we’re not even together.”

“You could have fooled me a second ago.”

We closed the door to the office and sat down, and I updated Sharon on the situation at the Chapman house. I had called her from the cruiser using Kowalski’s cell phone, so she knew I was no longer being imprisoned in a posh office.

“They’re really crazy,” she said when I was finished.

“I thought you medical professionals were supposed to say things like
mentally ill
or
disturbed
,” I reminded her.

“They’re nuts,” Sharon said.

“Fair enough. Now, tell me about Lennon.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on him, like we agreed,” she began. “And he’s been nervous. Not so much mean to Betty or Grace, but dismissive. Closed off. And that’s not Lennon. He’s never exactly chummy, but he’s not cold, usually.”

I nodded. “You said you thought there were money problems.”

“Yes, go figure! I owe you one on that. I heard him on the phone to his brother, through the closed door of his office, yelling that he needed that loan, and why couldn’t Hendrix understand that.”

I passed on commenting on the first names in the Dickinson family. It was starting to add up, but the total was a little strange. “Has he ever said anything to you or Toni about needing money?” I asked.

“Never. And we’re his partners. You’d figure he’d say something to us first.”

“Is he in his office?”

“I think so,” Sharon said.

“All righty, then.”

She looked at me with the same level of concern I’d seen when I was ranting about the shopping cart. “What did you say?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’ll go talk to Lennon.”

Sharon stood up. “Okay,” she said.

“No. Just me.”

She stopped and her eyes narrowed. “Why?” she asked.

“You’re his partner. He’s not going to speak as freely about his financial troubles with you in the room.” I got up and headed for the door.

“I’m his partner. That’s exactly why he should speak freely about his financial troubles,” Sharon said.

“That’s your problem,” I told her. “You think everybody is as logical as you are.”

I left her behind her desk. The truth was, if Lennon didn’t react well to my questioning—what with his being testy and everything—I didn’t want Sharon in the room. I’d been worrying about her enough lately.

Lennon Dickinson’s office was two doors down from Sharon’s, and when I stopped to knock, I did not hear shouting through the heavy door, as Sharon had. I knocked, and Lennon’s voice said, “Come.” So I went inside.

A doctor’s office, I’m sure, could yield Sherlock Holmes (or even Buster Keaton in
Sherlock Jr.
) a wealth of information about the man who inhabits it. Alas, I am neither Sherlock nor Junior, so all I got from looking around was that Lennon was, in fact, a doctor. The bookshelves had medical volumes on them, and the walls had the requisite diplomas. There were no photographs framed on his desk, and no art hung on the walls. It was a generic doctor’s office.

Except that Lennon Dickinson, possibly the world’s handsomest physician, was seated behind the desk. And he smiled when he looked up, a perfectly rehearsed, friendly smile. I’ll bet that one worked on the ladies.

“Elliot,” he said. “Nice to see you. Sit down.”

I did so, and smiled at Lennon. He probably gets that a lot.

“Sharon told me you’re in on our little secret,” Lennon said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you that she’d driven me to the city that night, but she swore me to secrecy, and I really didn’t know where she was going.”

“That’s okay” was all I said, even though it wasn’t.

“Are you here visiting Sharon?” he asked me.

“Yes, and to see you,” I replied.

Lennon might even have really been surprised. His face registered some amazement, but not an inordinate amount. He was good. “Me?” he asked. “I’m flattered, Elliot.” Damn good.

“I’m a little worried about everything that’s been going on around here, and I thought maybe you could help me figure some things out.” I had unzipped the parka, and was wearing it open. I put my hand in the right-side pocket.

Lennon didn’t so much as blink, but he upped the wattage on his smile a bit. “Of course you know I’ll do whatever I can,” he said with professional sincerity. “How can I help?”

I closed my grasp on the object I’d found in Chapman’s desk, which I had concealed in the pocket of my parka, and I pulled it out and tossed it onto Lennon’s desk. He recoiled as if I’d thrown a live grenade.

And maybe I had.

“You can tell me what that is,” I suggested.

Lennon didn’t want to touch the object, although I was willing to guess his fingerprints were already on it. But he made a show of leaning over to examine it more closely. “I really haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. But his smile wasn’t anywhere near as broad now. The ladies would have been less charmed.

“Really?” I could play-act, too, if the situation called for it. “I’d think you’d be intimately acquainted with that little doohickey. I’ll bet you know every millimeter of it by heart.”

It was a pity: Lennon’s Academy Award-winning performance was already starting to show signs of collapse. (Of course, since the Academy never recognizes comedy, I don’t place much stock in it—or is this not the time to bring that up?) His wide-eyed expression of confusion was too wide, and his hands were starting to tremble just a bit. The mannerisms were self-contradictory, nervous, and defiant. He looked like Carol Channing about to sing an aria at the Metropolitan Opera.

“Why would I know it?” he asked. “I’ve never seen it before.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Then I guess if I look through all your desk drawers, I won’t find another one just like it, will I?” I asked. I raised myself off the chair then, as if to stand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?” I suggested.

Lennon answered too quickly. “That’s all right,” he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of contrition. “You’re right. I’ve seen that before. I designed it.” Even in this context, there was some pride in his voice. “I
invented
it,” he corrected himself.

“What is it?” I asked. “It looks like Mae West’s eyebrow tweezers on stilts.”

“It’s a new kind of surgical clamp,” Lennon answered with a condescending smirk. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand the technical aspects, but this kind would be used in vascular transplants, cardio bypass procedures, and some kinds of cosmetic surgery.”

“And you wanted Russell Chapman to invest in it, didn’t you?”

Lennon Dickinson seemed to deflate in front of my eyes. His chiseled face sagged and his smile became a grimace. He sat back in his chair with the exhausted groan of a man twice his age.

“I thought that a man as successful as Mr. Chapman, who had made his fortune by reinventing a common product, would be able to appreciate the innovation I had achieved,” Lennon said, his breath coming in labored exhalations. “I thought he’d have the vision to imagine a possible stream of income for both of us.”

“What happened?” I tried to sound gentle. “Why were you so desperate for money? The practice is doing well.”

He looked at me sideways, his sad smile not fading. “Yes. The practice is doing well.”

“Why did you need the money?” I asked again.

“I was working with an investment counselor who was unscrupulous, and I didn’t know it,” he said, closing his eyes. “I lost seven hundred thousand dollars in the time it would take you to brush your teeth.” He seemed to be trying to appeal to my sympathy, to make me feel that whatever he’d done had been justified by the unfair circumstances life had dealt him. “So I borrowed some money from a bank, and then some more from . . . I guess there’s no term other than a loan shark.”

“And those guys don’t take kindly to your missing a payment, so there was a time element involved now.”

“That’s right. You have no idea the interest those people charge.” The doctor was amazed that gangsters sometimes act unscrupulously.

“So when Sharon told you about Chapman’s test results, you figured he’d be in a generous mood to anyone from the practice, is that it?” I asked. He’d asked Sharon about the old man’s possible interest in “a product.” You didn’t have to be Rembrandt to connect the dots on this one.

“But then they said he’d committed suicide, and that didn’t make any sense,” Lennon said. “He’d been given a clean bill of health. Or at least, that was what Sharon had said she’d done. No one else was allowed in the conference room, so she could have told Chapman anything.”

I tried to speak clearly and distinctly, so as not to be misunderstood. “But then you found out Chapman hadn’t killed himself. He’d used the fact that his daughters thought he was dying to stage a fake suicide, and now he was alive. How did you discover that?”

“The police called with the news that Mr. Chapman was alive,” Lennon said. “He was back in his house, having alerted his attorney after living in a hotel for three days.”

“And you immediately hightailed it there before he could die again?” I said. That was probably a miscalculation, not being sympathetic to his cause. I’d pay for it with a tightening of his lip, no doubt.

But no, Lennon just said, “I thought I’d drop by and see our patient, and if he said he had some interest in a business proposition, I’d be ready.”

“So you had how many of those prototype clamps with you when you went to Chapman’s?”

“Three,” he said. “This one, which Chapman initially said he’d keep to show investors, the original, which I kept, and the third, because I wasn’t sure if other people would be involved.” Lennon’s face was sour, remembering that Chapman had slighted him.

“That was the problem, wasn’t it?” I asked. “That he took a look at your design and decided it wouldn’t work?”

“That was what
he
thought,” Lennon spat out. “A man who invented a different type of taco shell, and he thought he knew whether an innovative medical instrument would operate.”

“Tortilla,” I corrected him, but Lennon was on a tear.

“Of
course
it would work!” he went on. “The whole idea is different, it’s so simple that it could become a standard instrument in every operating room in America. Probably in the world. There was never any doubt in my mind.”

“But some in Chapman’s. So you got angry, and you cut him with something, didn’t you? That was the blood on the carpet and the desk.”

Lennon wasn’t so far gone that he missed the meaning of that question. His gaze shot up from the instrument on his desk to my eyes. “It was an accident,” he said. “The arms on the clamp were sharp—they had to be; the idea was for them to be used carefully, but to double as a very fine scalpel when necessary. And when I became a little . . . involved in my argument, I swung it too hard, and cut Chapman on the ear.”

“The ear?” No one had said anything about a cut on Chapman’s ear, but given the way he died, his ear probably hadn’t seemed important.

“Yes, his right ear,” Lennon said. “I saw it was superficial, and offered to put a dressing on it right there, but Chapman was furious with me. He told me he no longer had any interest in my work, and asked me to leave.”

“And that’s when you used it to cut his throat.”

Lennon sat up straight, offended that I’d even suggest such a thing. “Oh no,” he said. “I didn’t kill him. When I left his office, he was alive, with a superficial wound to his ear.”

“Then, I don’t understand,” I told him. “How did Russell Chapman’s throat get cut?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Lennon Dickinson said.

“Well, who else was in the house when you were there?” I asked him.

“It was a few hours after the police had called to say he was alive,” Lennon said. “Chapman said they’d been there and left. No one else was there when I arrived.”

“How about when you left?”

“What do you mean?” Lennon asked, as if I’d said something confusing.

“Was anyone there when you left the room? Now that the cops had called around, hadn’t either of Chapman’s daughters come to see if he was all right?”

“I, um . . . er . . . ah . . .” Lennon was becoming Larry Storch before my eyes. “I don’t know who was there.”

“Yes, you do. You had investors. You had people who were talking you up with Chapman. One of his daughters, or both of them?”

“All right. Lillian and her husband had arrived when I left the office. They said Gwen was on her way.”

“So one of the daughters or Wally killed Chapman?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Lennon said, but his eyes were lying desperately.

“Why didn’t you say anything before now?” I asked.

“Once I’d heard Mr. Chapman had been murdered—and with a
scalpel
—there was no doubt I’d be the prime suspect if anyone knew I’d been there. And I couldn’t risk the exposure of my invention, because I knew I’d find another investor for my device.”

“How’s that coming so far?” I asked.

“I expect something to happen very soon,” he said. “But I don’t understand how you found out I went to see Chapman. How could you tell that the prototype was mine?”

“You stole my credit card, Lennon. That thing is made of everything you bought in your little shopping spree in the city on my dime, which you had to have because your own have been maxed out. Blades from the gourmet cooking supply house. Electronics? The LED readout to show the angle to which the clamp had been opened. Pewter from the oversized ring you bought at the cheapo souvenir store, which you’d melted down to solder the thing together. I’ll bet the rubber ring that restrains the blades was taken from some part of the kinky lingerie you bought.”

“Very clever. I’m more impressed with you than I thought I’d be, Elliot.”

“But you didn’t just get inspired that day, did you?”