A Night at the Operation (7 page)

I took a shower, because if . . .
when
Sharon got back, it would be best for me not to smell like unwashed socks. And as I was walking back into the bedroom, drying off (carpet be damned!), the phone rang.

After the ensuing heart attack, it took me roughly .04 seconds to pick up the receiver, but I’d had enough time to think, so I didn’t yell “Sharon?” at the top of my lungs.

“Is this Mr. Freed?” For a kidnapper, the guy had a very young voice. Cagey little ploy, but I wasn’t falling for it.

“Who wants to know?” I asked. I was leaning heavily on Bowery Boys movies now, trying to sound like Leo Gorcey, or at the very least, Huntz Hall. You had to respect a guy whose first name was Huntz.

“This is A-OK Plumbing,” he said. “You called about a problem?”

 

 

WE
agreed that I’d meet the plumber at Comedy Tonight within the hour, which would give me enough time to bike to the theatre and still be able to start harassing anyone I could think of about Sharon—mostly her colleagues at the practice—as soon as businesses opened for the day. I got dressed, layered myself with sweatshirts and long underwear (not in that order) to make the ride to Midland Heights tolerable, skipped breakfast (my stomach was in no mood to eat), and grabbed my beautifully reconstructed bicycle to head out.

I didn’t even look at the DVDs in the living room. I didn’t want to be reminded.

Now that I thought about it, I’d probably be at or near the theatre by the time Meg arrived. So I called the cell phone number she’d given me, and gave her directions to Comedy Tonight. She said she’d “dealt with the department,” and would be on her way within minutes. I had no doubt she would.

It had been a while since I’d been out this early—movie theatres don’t often require their owners to be early birds—so it was something of a surprise how cold it was, and how low the sun was in the sky. I’m told some people like the morning, and someday, I must ask one of them why.

I found myself pedaling much too fast, especially up the hill into Highland Park, and had to scale back. I wouldn’t be very helpful in searching for Sharon if I had to do it from a hospital bed.

Perhaps a mile from the theatre, I became aware of a car on my left, so I hugged the curb a little more than usual. I’d had enough experience with cars getting too close to bicycles on the road. But this one honked its horn, and when I turned to look, I saw Chief Barry Dutton driving his own personal car up Route 27 and pointing toward the sidewalk, indicating I should pull over.

Heart in my mouth, I did so. Dutton pulled the car up and opened the passenger side window. “What have you heard?” I sort of screamed.

“Nothing yet,” Dutton said. “But I need you to verify something for me.”

For a hideous moment, I had a mental flash of me trying to identify a body at the morgue in Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and I closed my eyes tight to banish the image.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Credit card receipts with your name on them,” Dutton said. “It looks like someone’s been busy charging things. Do you still have a joint credit account with Sharon?”

“No,” I said. “I have a credit card, but I haven’t used it in years.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Dutton challenged. “Aren’t you an American?”

“Yeah, but not a good one.”

“Get in.” He popped the trunk, and I took the front wheel off the bike and deposited it, then got in on the passenger side. When I sat down, he asked, “How did your ex-wife get your credit card?”

“We were still married when I got the card. We probably got two, and Sharon has one. Can we tell where Sharon is from the receipts?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Dutton said as he pulled away from the curb. “We don’t even know it’s Sharon yet. Someone could have stolen your credit card when they were in your house last night.”

“I carry it in my wallet,” I told him.

“You keep records of the numbers? There’s such a thing as identity theft.” Dutton was intent on the road, so he didn’t see me cringe.

“None of the receipts is from before the break-in?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Dutton told me. “We know that someone was in your town house between the time you left for the theatre yesterday and the time you got home. That gives them . . .”

I groaned. “Roughly twelve hours,” I said.

“Exactly. So yes, the credit card receipts are all from yesterday, and you can tell me when you left in the morning and when you got home, so the time stamps on the receipts will tell us if they were all while you were out. But we don’t know exactly when the break-in took place. Would any of your neighbors have seen anything, someone suspicious around the front door?”

I closed my eyes. “I’ve never met any of my neighbors, Chief.”

“You really are a bad American.”

He drove me all the way to police headquarters before I remembered about the plumber. Once we got to Dutton’s office, I asked to use his phone, and he groused anew at my resistance to cell phone mania, but gestured that I should go ahead and dial.

I called Sophie, and thanked my guardian angel that I had
her
cell phone number, so there would be no danger of Ilsa or Ron Beringer answering the call.

“Hello?” she asked, tentatively, after a number of rings. It was a Saturday, and she was a teenager. The idea that she’d be awake at eight in the morning was just a little more ludicrous than the idea that I would be.

“Sophie,” I said. “It’s Elliot. Do me a favor, and go to the theatre. Let the plumber in to look at the pipes in the men’s room. Use your key. You’re in charge.”

“Of what?” she asked, and I hung up.

Dutton pulled a file from a rack on the wall next to his desk, and sat down. He opened it to show me faxed copies of several credit card receipts. The chief put on a pair of half glasses to read them, creating an image of Godzilla in middle age, looking over his financial records.

“These are the receipts from a number of retailers and a hotel bar in Manhattan, all from yesterday,” he said. He turned the records toward me so I could peruse them.

“These stores don’t strike me as the kind where Sharon would shop,” I told him.

“You really never use a credit card?” he asked.

“Really.”

“How about an ATM card?”

I’ve never understood the word
sheepish
, because sheep are rarely embarrassed at their actions, but I believe that was the expression I gave Dutton at that moment.

“You don’t have an ATM card, either?” he marveled. At least, I like to think of it as
marveled
.

“Do you have any idea how much the government can find out about you from your ATM records?” I asked him.

“I’m the chief of police, Elliot. I
am
the government. And I don’t really think that the fact you withdrew twenty dollars from your checking account on a Friday night is really a dangerous piece of information.”

I decided to change the subject, since Dutton was showing troublesome signs of having a point. “Anyway, why can’t we take the addresses from these card purchases and trace Sharon, maybe back to the hotel?”

“I called the hotel already. Sharon is not listed as a guest there, and never has been. The card didn’t pay for a room, only a bar bill. Still, you wouldn’t want useful records like that to show up in
your
file if
you
ever disappeared, would you?” Dutton grinned and suddenly seemed very Bill Cosby- esque. I half expected him to put on a colorful sweater and eat some pudding.

Summoning my best judgment, I ignored him. “If someone’s holding her against her will, the room could be in that person’s name, couldn’t it?”

“Yes, but since you’re so interested in preserving our citizens’ privacy, I assume you think it would be a bad idea for me to get the name of every single guest in the hotel, and then show it to a civilian like yourself to see if any of the names ring a bell?”

“You’re not going to let it go, are you?” I asked.

“I don’t see why I should.”

“Well, if you want to show me the list, you can say whatever you want about my commitment to privacy or my hypocrisy.”

“I didn’t get the list. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. I sincerely doubt a kidnapper would register at a hotel under his own name.”

“Chief,” I said, trying to banish any number of unpleasant thoughts from my mind, “what if the person who broke into my place didn’t have anything to do with Sharon’s disappearance?”

“Wasn’t that the theory
you
were espousing?” A police chief who says “espousing.” That’s Midland Heights for you. The town probably requires an IQ test of potential residents.

“I’m still
espousing
it, but just in case. I’m thinking out loud. Aside from the coincidence, it doesn’t really add up to much. Breaking into my house doesn’t get a kidnapper, a blackmailer, or anybody else anything they could use against Sharon.”

Dutton’s eyes narrowed. “So?”

“So, let’s guess for a moment that the person who has a grudge against Sharon is a member of Russell Chapman’s family, or someone who doesn’t appreciate the idea that he’d leave her some money.”

“It’s a stretch, but okay, let’s guess that.” Dutton, as he often does when thinking, put his hands together in a pyramid, index fingers and thumbs touching. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

“What does that person get from breaking into my house?”

“Nothing, apparently,” Dutton said. “So, what does that tell us?”

I stood up and started to pace. “That maybe the person who broke into my house was looking for Sharon.”

Dutton opened his eyes. The phone rang, and he picked it up, listened for a moment, and offered me the receiver. “It’s for you,” he said.

I pondered that, since no one but Dutton and I knew I was there. But I took the phone.

“Elliot?” Sophie’s voice asked.

“How did you know I was here, Sophie?”

“Caller ID from when you called me,
duh
.” Nobody can make you feel as terminally stupid as a teenage girl.

“What’s up?”

“The guy says he needs to break the floor.”

I considered the possibility that Sophie was speaking in code, and remembered she was dealing with the plumber. “What do you mean, ‘break the floor’?”

“He says the pipes are set in concrete, and he needs to break the floor to get at the broken part.”

“Tell him no,” I said. “He can’t break the floor.”

“
Elliot
, I don’t have time to fool around with this. I’ve got to start setting up college tours, and work on a comparison of myself to other candidates for the same academic slots.”

“Put the guy on the phone,” I said.

Now in the field, the A-OK Plumbing representative sounded even younger. His voice almost squeaked. “Mr. Freed, the pipes in your bathroom are set in concrete. If you want me to stop the leak . . .”

“I want you to exhaust every possibility before you start with something like that, you understand?” I said. “I’m in no mood to spend weeks with a closed theatre and pay thousands of dollars in repairs because it’s your first week on the job.”

The guy took a moment. “I’m the owner of the business, Mr. Freed,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years. And the damage to your floor will be so minimal, you might not have to replace as many as two of the tiles.”

“Break the floor,” I said. Then I told him to put Sophie back on the phone. “From now on, just decide,” I told her. “If I say you’re in charge, be in charge.”

“That’s what your dad said,” she answered.

“He’s there?”

“Yeah. He got here before I did.”

I hung up on her again, and looked at Dutton.

“I need to do something,” I told him. “What can I do?”

“See what I’m doing?” he asked.

“You’re sitting behind your desk,” I observed.

“Exactly.”

I wasn’t going to do that.

 

 

 

 

I
was at the front door of Sharon’s practice, with my bike out of Dutton’s trunk and locked securely on a rack to one side, when Betty the receptionist (and her
Playboy
magazine figure) opened up at eight forty-five. Patients, I knew, wouldn’t start showing up until nine, unless there was an emergency, and the practice would close as near to noon as possible. It was, after all, the weekend.

“I’m not surprised to see you,” she said when I came in (literally) out of the cold.

“You still haven’t heard from her?” I asked. No sense in bothering with formalities. Betty has known me for years, since before Sharon and I divorced.

I reflexively curb my lust at the door whenever I enter the practice, and today, I wouldn’t have been interested even if Betty had welcomed me wearing a black lace teddy and locked the door behind me. But she did bear a passing resemblance, I noted, to a Latina version of Thelma Todd, who played the “college widow” (don’t ask me; maybe she was married to a college that died) opposite the Marx Brothers in
Horse Feathers
.

“No,” she said. “Still not a word, and she’s not answering the cell. I’m kind of worried.”

“Tell me about Russell Chapman,” I said.

“I’m not allowed to talk about a patient’s medical records,” she answered. “You know that, Elliot.”

“I don’t care about his medical condition,” I told Betty. “I’m concerned about the sequence of events. What happened when?”

She walked behind the glassed-in counter and I could see her through the window, looking up records. “Mr. Chapman came in two weeks ago, and underwent some tests,” she said, careful to leave out any details. “He came back Thursday afternoon to get the test results, and that was all we knew until the police called about his suicide.”