Black Cat Weekly #2

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD GIRL! by Jeff Cohen-4

Great. So I was in the room with a murderer and my business was going to dry up and blow away. Where were those security guys, anyway?

The curtain opened, not with a quick rush like the shower curtain in Psycho but more like the way Toto opened the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, but there wasn’t a bogus magician inside. Whether or not there was a serial killer back there was yet to be discovered.

Either way, Dr. Wiseguy and his evil minion walked out and Sharon, appearing just a little bit more rumpled than before, looked over at the gathered group. “My goodness,” she said. “You should have sold tickets, Elliot.”

I couldn’t let Anderson leave the room before the security men got here. I was sure the hospital would have some idea where Dr. Wiseguy was going, but who knew if the Sweeney Todd wannabe now at his side was going to follow his mentor around all night? I took a few steps toward the bed as the two doctors moved out, glancing again at the door. No stirrings at all.

“You okay?” I asked my ex-wife as soon as I got to her bedside.

She looked at Dr. Wiseguy. “Am I?” she asked. She knew perfectly well but was pretending to defer to his wisdom.

“You’re fine,” he answered, puffing himself up like a graying penguin. “All your signs are textbook. But you have a few hours to go yet. I’ll check in on you in a little while. Dr. Anderson?”

The resident, stung by his wrong answer before, fell back on his strength. “I don’t think we’ll need to prepare you for surgery,” he said to Sharon.

Bedside manner? In Anderson’s mind, that was the name of an assisted-living facility.

Dr. Wiseguy laughed. “Surgeons,” he said. “For them cutting is as much fun as sex.” He thought he was hilarious. No one corrected him. “I saw a surgeon cut an orange with a scalpel once.” In doctor comedy clubs, this guy would kill. I wondered if the other guy would kill in a supply closet.

He and Norman Bates started heading toward the door. That was a mixed blessing: the slasher would be farther from Sharon (and, when I thought about it, me), but he’d also be harder to locate and contain.

Hospital security. They’re never around when you need them, right?

I stepped into the two doctors’ path and they stopped. I noticed Anderson’s eyes narrow when I did that.

“Are you guys sure the baby isn’t coming now?” I asked, trying my best to sound like an anxious father. It wasn’t much of a stretch. “It’s already been a long time.”

“Elliot,” Sharon admonished from her bed. “They’re doctors.”

“Yeah, and Alfred Hitchcock was a director. Didn’t stop him from making Stage Fright.”

“Which one is that?” Jonathan asked.

“Exactly.”

“It’s okay, Dr. Simon-Freed,” Dr. Wiseguy said. “We understand there is always a little concern, especially with a first baby.”

“You think there’ll be more?” my mother asked. Mom believes doctors walk on water, can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and predict the future accurately. If doctors were one-third as powerful as my mother thinks they are, I’d have asked Sharon for World Series odds in April every year.

Dr. Wiseguy chuckled. “Not today,” he said and tried to maneuver his way around me again. I didn’t budge.

Again there was the attempt to leave and again I blocked their path(s). “Are you sure?” I was running out of material. “We’ve never seen you before today. Why should we trust your judgment?”

“Elliot!” My father. He respects everybody. It amazes him when I don’t.

“Well, I mean Sharon’s never had a baby before. Maybe she’s faster than most.” I was one stammer short of being Martin Short in Three Amigos.

Sharon sat up in the bed, which was no small feat given the amount of baby she was still attached to. “Elliot, let those two poor men leave.” There was a real echo of the day she told me she wanted to get a divorce in that sentence. Child visitation issues hung in the air.

I stood to one side, and Dr. Wiseguy, pretending he wasn’t at all insulted, nodded and brushed by me. I kept up with Anderson as they walked toward the door.

I sidled up to Anderson so he could hear me speak very softly. “What did you do with her?”

He looked at me with something resembling bewilderment just as his superior walked out the door and then he whispered back at me. “Don’t say anything,” he hissed. “Not a word.” He nodded in Sharon’s direction, which I took as a threat, and left.

I stood rooted to the spot for a moment, but my ex-wife was not sensitive to my feelings in this of all circumstances. I thought women were supposed to get all nurturing when they were about to become mothers.

“What was that all about?” she demanded.

“Just a second,” I said and turned to rush out the door toward the nurses’ station. Already I couldn’t get my eyes on Dr. Wiseguy and Anderson (which would be a great band name, by the way). I found Randy at the far end. “Where are the security guys? He’s getting away!”

Randy stared at me blankly. “You were serious about that?” he asked.

Defeated, I returned to the room without saying a word.

I had options. I could easily go downstairs and find the security station, tell the people in charge there—who hopefully wouldn’t be the two I’d met before—about what I’d seen and let them handle it. Or I could call the New Brunswick police directly. I could run through the hallways of the hospital yelling, “Murder!” at the top of my lungs, but that might be dicey around the cardiac wards.

I could go down to the morgue and see if a curly-haired blonde had been brought in with a stab wound to the abdomen, but I doubted Anderson would be stupid enough to do that, and besides, nobody was going to let me into the morgue. I’d been there once before and did not want to return until such time as I was an honored guest.

The other possibility was walking back into the room where my ex-wife was having my baby and worrying about what I’d seen after we were all home and safe a few days from now. As much as I like to think of myself as a concerned citizen of the world, that was the choice that seemed most intelligent at the moment.

I did one lap around the maternity floor just to clear my head before neglecting my duty to the woman whose blood I’d seen today. Didn’t she deserve justice? Well sure, but did she have to have it now? One thing about being dead was that time doesn’t have quite the same element of urgency it did before. I imagined.

One of the reasons I felt so bad about not acting now was that it was out of character for me. I realized somewhere around the time I was passing the actual ice machine that I’d been behaving like Jerry Lewis when I should have been Groucho Marx.

I’ve never much cared for Lewis’s work. I’m not French enough, or something. But his character is always the victim; he’s always the fool trying to do things right and failing miserably to the exasperation of all who come in his path. I’d been acting like Jerry Lewis ever since I’d seen Anderson and the curly-haired woman in the utility closet. I’d been bumbling and stumbling and ranting about murder to people who thought I was an annoyance.

In my usual life, I’m much more Groucho. While I aspire to be like his brother Harpo, who was a force of light and let nothing bother him, I tend to behave more like Groucho, taking on those I don’t like head-on and trying to win the day with jokes rather than action. I had shown no signs of Groucho since the utility closet.

That was the thing: It wasn’t what Groucho would do in such a situation. Things like murder very rarely even existed in his world. My problem was much more one of attitude, in that the one I’d been displaying all day had been passive and scared. Groucho might sometimes have been scared, but he wasn’t ever passive.

I needed less Jerry Lewis and more Groucho Marx.

The first order of business was to lock down security in Sharon’s room. Then I could act.

I hustled back there with an increased pace and a head held higher. Now I remembered who I was again.

Of course, once I got to the room I found more people there. Anthony and Carla had shown up, no doubt after the second film had let out, and it was lucky Sharon had gotten the luxury suite or we’d be reenacting the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera. Again.

“Where have you been?” my ex demanded. She was looking considerably more uncomfortable, a little damp with sweat, and kept rolling around in the bed as if the next adjustment was finally going to make her feel better.

“Ever?” I asked. “I was born in Irvington, New Jersey.”

“You were born in Newark,” my father noted. “Irvington General Hospital wasn’t as good as the one on Lyons Avenue.”

“Don’t be a wiseass,” Sharon said, taking in a deeper breath.

“It’s way too late for that,” I told her. My inner Groucho was back. It felt good. But she was entitled to an answer. “I had to take care of a few things out there, but it’s all going to be okay now.”

“What’s going to be okay?” my mother asked. “Sharon is in here, not in the hallway.” Mom has a talent for the unbelievably obvious.

I walked to the bed and took Sharon’s hand, keeping an eye on the monitor. The contractions, according to what I read, were coming faster and harder now. “I’m going to stay here until the baby comes and then I’m going to the nearest police station to swear out a complaint against your doctor.”

“She’s not even here yet,” Sharon said, eyes wide.

“Not that doctor. The other doctor.”

On cue, Dr. Wiseguy pushed open the door and walked in, a little more spring in his pace than there had been the last time I saw him. “I hear the contractions have accelerated,” he said to Sharon.

“Yeah, they’re up to sixty-five miles an hour,” I ventured. “Where’s your lapdog?”

“Elliot!” my mother said. I have spent a lifetime ignoring her horror at my poor manners and saw no reason to break up the no-hitter now.

Sharon had spent a decent number of years ignoring me, so she plowed right on through. “Yes,” she said. “They’re coming about every five minutes now, and I think I might be fully dilated.”

“Well!” Dr. Wiseguy sounded as if he disapproved of Sharon’s labor developing faster than he had predicted it would. “Let’s take a look.”

I herded the gathering hordes aside as he walked to the bed and pulled the curtain around it again. And having done that and moved to the other side of the room myself, I wasn’t prepared for the sight of Dr. Anderson walking into the room and heading, with a brief glance at me, toward Sharon.

And that’s when I snapped. “Stop!” I shouted. “That man is a murderer!”

This is a word of warning: What is about to come is not intentional. Under the circumstances I would rather have any other way of making this statement. But I was there and you weren’t, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it that there’s no better idiom to describe the moment.

There was a pregnant pause.

Okay, I said it. Let’s move on.

Everyone else in the room—enough to start an “I Survived Sharon’s Labor” softball team—stopped and stared at me. Anderson himself had the nerve to look surprised and broke the silence first.