A Night at the Operation by JEFFREY COHEN

this business?
    This time, Grace did avoid eye contact. “I don’t know,” she said.
    My head snapped around in a blink. “What do you mean?” I asked.
    Grace took a deep breath. “That was the weird part,” she said. “Sharon wouldn’t tell me.”
    I didn’t get a chance to ask what that meant, because Toni Westphal appeared, shaking Tovarich’s hand at the exam room door. He actually bowed a little to her, but he didn’t leave. He just went back into the waiting room and, well, waited.
    “I’m sorry, Elliot,” Toni said, pulling me aside. “He has a lot of questions that I can only answer by pulling the medical records, and I couldn’t tell him to go away.”
    “It’s okay,” I assured her. “But why is he investigating a suicide? Does he really believe that Sharon did something wrong?”
    “From an insurance standpoint alone, it’s extremely irregular for her to have kept medical records back,” she said. “It’s not like Sharon, and it worries me.”
    “I don’t understand any of this,” I said.
    “Neither do I,” Toni said. “I’ve known Sharon since she was a resident, and I’ve never seen her act like this. To just leave and not tell us where she is? Not tell you ? It doesn’t make sense.”
    I took a deep breath. “You’re assuming she left of her own accord,” I said.
    Toni looked like I’d punched her in the gut. Her eyes got wide and she inhaled sharply. “Wow,” she said. “Is that what you think?”
    “I don’t know what I think.”
    “Elliot,” she said, sitting down on the spare desk chair. “I forget how much you still care about Sharon.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means that your feelings might be getting the best of you. You can’t abide Sharon leaving, so you decide she’s been taken against her will.”
    I blinked. More than once. “Toni, do you think Sharon really is covering up something about Russell Chapman’s death?” I asked.
    “Honestly,” she answered, “I can’t be sure.”

10
     
     
     
     
    I didn’t want to talk to anyone at the practice anymore, so I said a polite good-bye to Toni Westphal and headed for the door. Tovarich, still in the waiting room, shook my hand and took a Comedy Tonight business card, promising to attend a showing as soon as the theatre reopened. I smiled at him, hopefully convincingly, and left.
    It wasn’t even ten in the morning yet, and already I was having a lousy day. When I arrived at Comedy Tonight after the walk from Family Medical Practice, the A-OK Plumbing van was parked outside, my father’s truck was a few spaces down, and Sophie’s Toyota Prius, loaded with books on choosing the right college, was around the corner. I chained my bike to the steam pipe on the side of the building and brought the front wheel inside with me. The forecast was for cold temperatures, but no snow, so I figured I could leave the bike outside. It was a tight enough fit in my office, and a bicycle in the lobby didn’t look very movie-theatre-like.
    Once inside, I remembered that the plumbing problem meant that the heat was turned off, so I encountered an arctic Comedy Tonight. I found the expected chaos: my office door was closed and locked, a habit I’d picked up recently, but there was activity elsewhere. Off to the left, by the stairway to the balcony, the men’s room door was wide open, and there was a large red hose running out of the bathroom and across the lobby to the open doorway leading to the basement. The hose then went, I assumed, all the way downstairs. It was better not to think about what the plumber might have found down there.
    Dad, in a snappy overcoat and leather gloves, stood in the doorway to the men’s room, pointing at something inside. “I think that’s it there,” he said to the unseen plumber. “Try the third one.”
    I decided I didn’t want to know, and was unlocking the office door when I was frontally attacked by two irate females.
    Sophie was pointing an angry finger at me