Free A Night at the Operation by JEFFREY COHEN Page B

could do not to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. I gritted my teeth. “Where exactly is your husband now?” I considered asking if she could verify his whereabouts, as well, but I didn’t want to tip my hand.
    “Trying to get a flight home,” she answered. “He was in Japan when we had to call him last night.”
    “Japan?” I asked. It’s not that I’m not familiar with the name, but it seemed incongruous in this conversation.
    “He had business there. Wally’s in importing. I’m going to be picking him up at the airport. And he loved my father as if he were his own. This is hitting him even harder than me, I think.”
    I didn’t care who it was hitting, or how hard. “He’s flying in from Japan tonight? How long has he been there?”
    “Only since Wednesday,” Lillian said, surprised that I was asking. “He was supposed to stay for a week, but now, of course, he’s coming home. Why do you ask?”
    Luckily, at that moment the office door opened and Betty approached, smiling sympathetically, effectively saving Lillian’s life. “Ms. Mayer?” she said. I understood that even though I had gotten there first, she was the family of a deceased patient, and therefore outranked me. “Dr. Dickinson will see you now.” Good move. Get the handsome serious guy to talk to the dead man’s daughter.
    Lillian got up and walked toward the conference room. Tovarich turned away to let her by, and Betty used the excuse to walk back out toward the reception area. She appeared at the door, and crooked a finger at me, a gesture very few men would be able to resist. I walked over.
    “Dr. Westphal may be a while, talking to this insurance man,” she said. “Do you want to talk to Grace?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “I’ll get her. You come right through, Elliot.” She held the door open. I nodded at Tovarich and walked inside.
    Betty walked back to her desk as Grace, the nurse who had been working the night Chapman got his test results, walked out from one of the examination rooms and met me in the hallway. “Elliot,” she said. “What have you heard?”
    “Nothing. And it’s driving me crazy.”
    “I’m so sorry,” she said. Grace was not avoiding eye contact. She’d dealt with people before who were in difficult—sometimes impossible—situations. She was there to help.
    “When’s the last . . . most recent time you saw Sharon?” I asked.
    “Well, I dropped off some patient records at her house Thursday morning because she was coming in late, and then I saw her at the office until closing. Nothing since then.” Grace bit her lip; she wanted to be more help than this.
    “What can you tell me about that evening? Were you in the room when Sharon gave Chapman his test results?”
    “No. She called him into the conference room alone.”
    The conference room is a separate space outside the examination rooms where doctors and patients confer. But it’s rarely used for good news—you get that on the phone. Believe me, you don’t want to be in the conference room with your doctor.
    “Isn’t that unusual?” I asked. “Doesn’t Sharon usually want someone in the room with her when she calls a patient in?”
    “Yeah. I thought it was a little odd, but she said she’d do it herself, and I do what the doctors tell me to do,” Grace said.
    “How did you find out the test results were incorrect?”
    “As far as I know, we never had incorrect test results for Mr. Chapman,” Grace said. “We only got one set of films for him from the radiology lab. Those films were the ones Sharon brought in to the conference room with her.”
    “But Betty said Sharon had gotten some new results back right before she left that night, and that whatever she saw there had really shaken her up,” I reminded her. “Weren’t those new results or updates of Chapman’s films?”
    Grace shook her head. “No,” she said. “Those records weren’t for Chapman.”
    “Another patient?” Was there another case involved in