Dead Certain

by Hartzmark, Gini

  Despite my mother’s calls for sainthood, I suspected he endowed Prescott Memorial Hospital not out of altruism, but in an effort to buy his way into Chicago society. I had no way of knowing how he’d have seen the sale of the hospital that bore his name—whether he’d perceive it as an outrage or see it as he’d viewed the opium trade, a function of the times. However, I didn’t have the time to speculate about it right now. Cheryl had appeared at the door again, and this time she was taking the direct approach.

  “I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” she said smoothly, “but Kate’s client needs her urgently in the conference room.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back and tell them that she’s already busy with a client,” my mother informed her.

  “Pardon me?” I bleated. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a look of horror spreading across my secretary’s face.

  “Why else do you think I came here?” Mother demanded incredulously. “I’m hiring you to stop the sale of Prescott Memorial Hospital.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I ended up saying yes just to get rid of her. There would be plenty of time to find a way to get out of it later. Besides, I told myself I hadn’t agreed to anything I wouldn’t have done for any prospective client—taking a look at the situation and offering an opinion. But in my heart of hearts I knew the truth: after thirty-four years I still hadn’t figured out how to say no to my mother.

  In the meantime I had to get back to the conference room and Delirium. By this I meant Delirium the client, not the state of mind, though after three days of caffeine and no sleep it was hard to be sure. Delirium was a computer company, a shoestring start-up on the cusp of either success or ruin, depending on whether I could keep its feuding partners from each other’s throats long enough to make the deal that would make them rich. The company was the product of an unnatural alliance between a visionary professor of computer engineering and a venture capitalist whose time horizon extended only as far as the bottom line.

  Normally, in my line of work, I expect to find my adversaries on the opposite side of the table, but there was nothing normal about Delirium. Even by the eccentric standards of the computer world, Bill Delius, the brains of the company, was considered deeply odd. To Bill, technology was his religion and the compromises of business were a painful anathema. On the other hand, his partner was purely a money guy. Mark Millman was a pragmatic opportunist who, if pressed, might confess to a certain faith in the free market, but whose more immediate concern was turning a profit.

  For both men, Icon’s interest in Delirium’s technology was a dream come true. The only problem was that for each of them it was a different dream.

  Founded by Silicon Valley legend Gabriel Hurt, Icon was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the computer industry. Its founder was Bill Delius’s idol. To Delius, Hurt was an imagined soul mate, someone capable of understanding and sharing his vision of the world—a world in which information would soon replace money as the currency of power. However, Delius’s partner was less interested in Gabriel Hurt’s genius than in his bank account. Millman was a gambler, a man who saw his long shot approaching the finish line in the lead. The day Delirium and Icon signed a letter of understanding, the document that signaled the beginning of negotiations in earnest, Millman went out and made a down payment on a Ferrari.

  As their attorney, my job was to lead them onto common ground, a task for which I’d begun to suspect a therapist might be better suited. As we neared the deadline for making a deal with Icon, I was beginning to feel like a realtor charged with selling the dream house of a couple now in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. My goal was to get the deal done and, if possible, avoid getting hit by the cross fire.

  Contributing to an even greater than usual sense of urgency was the knowledge that I was dealing with quirky people in an idiosyncratic industry. Bill Delius might be weird, but Gabriel Hurt was arguably the world’s most famous eccentric—probably because he could afford to be. Even though I’d spent the last three days in round-the-clock negotiations with Icon’s handpicked transaction team, I had no idea of whether we were any closer to a deal than when we’d started. Gabriel Hurt might run an $800 billion company, but he still made decisions the same way he had when he was writing code in his parents’ basement—alone.

  I glanced at my watch and mentally cursed my mother’s timing. Hurt was on his way to Chicago for COMDEX, the week-long computer industry expo held every year at McCormack Place. The Icon jet was due to touch down at Meigs Field any minute, where a limousine was waiting to bring him to Callahan Ross for lunch (a tuna fish sandwich and red Jell-O served on a plain white china plate per instruction) and hopefully the final round of negotiations. As I turned the corner to the conference room I rolled my head to relieve the tension in my neck and reminded myself that this is what I lived for.

  I knew there was trouble the minute I pushed open the door. When I’d left the room in response to Cheryl’s summons, there had been nineteen people at the table: myself, three other Callahan Ross lawyers, Delirium’s two principals, and the thirteen attorneys, investment bankers, and officers that made up the Icon transaction team. Now there were only enough people to fill five seats. There was not one face from Icon to be seen.

  Making matters worse, Mark Millman was pacing along the far end of the room as quickly as his ample bulk allowed. A fleshy man with thinning hair and flapping jowls, he’d obviously been at it awhile, because there were dark rings of sweat under the arms of his suit jacket and his face was a damp and unhealthy shade of red. By contrast, Bill Delius, wraith thin and dressed entirely in black, stood motionless at the opposite end of the room, staring out the window. I stole a quick glance at the trio of Callahan Ross associates who’d been working with me on the deal, but they were all too busy studying the surface of the table in front of them to catch ; my eye. Not a good sign.

  “Where did everybody go?” I asked as I set down my legal pad and took my seat at the head of the table.

  Mark Millman stopped pacing and slammed his meaty palms down on the polished mahogany of the table. The three associates actually flinched.

  “They left,” he growled. “Hurt called and said he wasn’t coming.”

  “Why not?” I asked, saying a silent prayer for a benign explanation, like a plane crash.

  “Nobody knows,” reported Jeff Tannenbaum, the as- , sociate on whose broad shoulders I’d been heaping the grunt work of the transaction. “Hurt phoned from the plane and said he wasn’t coming. We asked, but I don’t think he gave his lawyers a reason. They just packed up and left.”

  “So We don’t know whether the deal is off or on,” I complained. I resented the lawyers’ blind obedience to Gabriel Hurt less than the fact that they were probably back at their hotel by now, dialing room service and turning the hot water taps to full. I also reminded myself that it was too early to tell what it meant. Gabriel Hurt had a reputation for driving a hard bargain, and he was powerful enough to not have to play by the rules.

  “I don’t give a shit why they left,” snapped Millman, furiously staring me in the face. “What I want to know is what you plan on doing to get them to come back.”

  When I got back to my office, I asked Cheryl to bring me a cup of coffee and a bag of M&M’s. Then I started working the phones. The first thing I did was call and leave messages for the Icon people at the Four Seasons, where I knew they were all staying. According to the newspaper, Hurt and his retinue had taken the top three floors of the hotel, including the penthouse. Then I called everyone I could think of who’d had dealings with Gabriel Hurt. Of course, this wasn’t the first round of calls I’d made to get the skinny on the famous software mogul, but now I had a better idea of what I needed to know. It wasn’t until I dialed the third number on my list that I hit pay dirt.

  Computer geeks, in general, make terrible liars. To them, the truth is too absolute to bend, and the one on the other end of the line was no exception. He was the computer guru f
or Stephen’s company, Azor Pharmaceuticals, but he also did some independent consulting for me on the side.

  “I told you that Hurt can be unpredictable,” he observed as soon as I finished telling him what had just happened. “Who knows why he pulls this kind of shit? When you’re Gabriel Hurt, you don’t need a reason. However, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I just heard a rumor that there’s a group out of Seattle that’s developed this new input device that’s twice as fast as Delirium’s and is easier to configure with network applications.”

  “And that would mean in English?” I inquired.

  “You’re fucked. Somebody’s built a better mousetrap than Delirium, and they’re probably selling it to Icon even as we speak.”

  Cheryl stuck her head in the door to say good-bye. I’d forgotten that she told me that she had to leave early for an interview. I wished her luck and told her to switch roe over to voice mail and shut the door behind her. I couldn’t believe that in two more months she would be gone. Mrs. Goodlow, the firm’s iron-backed office manager, had already begun sending me potential replacements to interview, but so far I found that I had little stomach for the task. Even though I’d always known that one day Cheryl would be leaving, somehow it didn’t make it any easier. Cheryl had started in the night law school program at Loyola the same year that I’d joined the firm. Don’t worry, I was told, with her working fulltime, it’ll take her forever to finish. Now suddenly forever was here.

  The strange part was that her experience with me, doing the kind of deal-driven corporate work that characterized my practice, had made her one of the most sought-after candidates in her graduating class—a development I viewed with a kind of bittersweet pride. It was only a matter of time before the two of us found ourselves squared off against each other on opposite sides of some transaction.

  For the rest of the afternoon I fretted like a lovesick teenager, waiting for the phone to ring, the roller coaster of my anxiety fueled by lack of sleep and a steady stream of irate phone calls from the two principals of Delirium. It was hardly remarkable that my clients were furious and looking for someone to blame. However, the fact that that someone should be me was the first thing they’d agreed on in a very long time.

  But when I still hadn’t heard from Icon by seven o’clock, I abandoned hope and decided to go home. I was so wrapped up in self-pity about Delirium tanking that I completely forgot about Prescott Memorial and my mother’s visit. It wasn’t until I had my coat on to leave for the night that I tripped over a box of files that my mother had apparently sent over. Cheryl had put it smack in the middle of the doorway so that I would be sure to not forget it. I rubbed my shins and cursed her efficiency.

  I hoisted the box of files and made my way through the darkened reception room and out into the world. Wearily, I leaned against the back wall of the elevator as it carried me down to the basement. In the polished brass of the doors I contemplated my reflection, a pale face offset by dark hair, disheveled by the day and slowly working its way down from its usual French twist. It occurred to me that while I might be nearly two decades younger than my mother, it was I who looked older. I wondered what the female equivalent of the firm’s balding and shriveled senior partners would look like and whether in thirty years’ time that was going to be me.

  The doors opened as the elevator deposited me on the lowest level of the parking garage—deserted this time of night. As my heels clicked across the smooth concrete I pushed the key-chain remote and heard the reassuring chirp of my car alarm being deactivated. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to seeing the sleek bottle-green Jaguar in the place that had been for so long occupied by my recently totaled Volvo, but I was working on it. It helped that over the past few months the new-car smell had gradually given way to the more familiar scent of old running shoes and empty Starbucks containers. I’d also managed to accumulate enough Diet Coke cans on the floor of the backseat to replicate the Volvo’s trademark rattle whenever I hit a pothole.

  Of course, having an expensive new car wasn’t easy in Hyde Park. The neighborhood that has been my home for the last half-dozen years isn’t exactly a yuppie paradise, but rather the kind of neighborhood you get when you drop a world-class university in the middle of the ghetto, then allow it to be reshaped by every social tide of the last fifty years. White flight, the Jewish exodus to the suburbs, race riots, urban renewal, and the vicissitudes of the drug trade had all come and gone, leaving their scars behind. Through it all the essential nature of the place had remained remarkably unchanged. Hyde Park was a real-life social laboratory, a place where the affluent and the educated lived side by side with immigrants, criminals, and families where three generations had lived from welfare check to welfare check. Needless to say, it was a less than ideal environment for a luxury car. That’s where Leo came in.

  Leo was an urban entrepreneur, one of those fringe artists of economic survival that most people in their leafy suburban neighborhoods haven’t a clue even exist. Nineteen years old, by day he was almost certainly employed as a numbers runner for Carmine Mustafa. Parking cars was a sideline, a way to pick up extra money to help support his girlfriend, Angel, and their three children.

  It was a straightforward and strictly cash business. For a flat monthly fee Leo met me at my door when I came home at night, and parked my car behind the electric gates of Carmine Mustafa’s compound in Kenwood— right next door to Louis Farrakhan’s house. There, under the double protection of a drug lord and a black supremacist, my British luxury sedan safely passed the night until Leo delivered it to me the following morning in time for me to drive downtown to work.

  As I pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Fifty-third Street I called Leo’s beeper number. By the time I pulled up to the curb in front of my building, he was already waiting, his baseball cap pulled down low over his face and his spotless Nikes iridescent under the soft streetlights.

  “How do you ever expect to find yourself a new boyfriend, working as late as you do?” demanded Leo with a smile as he held open the door for me.

  “I think I’ve had enough of boyfriends for a while,” I replied, shivering from a combination of the cold and my own fatigue. Even though it was April, in my world it still felt like winter. There was frost on the ground when I left for work in the morning, and by the time I came home at night, it was dark and I could see my breath. “I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided it’d be easier to just get a dog.”

  “I tell you what, until they catch the guy that’s been breakin’ into apartments around here, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Angel thinks maybe I should let you take Mona for a while.” Mona was Leo and Angel’s dog, an embarrassingly affectionate Doberman that sometimes came along with Leo when he met me late at night.

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said, “but you need Mona to keep an eye on Angel and the kids while you’re out watching over me. Besides, from what I heard, this guy follows little old ladies home from the grocery store during the day. I’m like Dracula, I only come out when it’s dark.”

  “I just worry about you is all, two women living alone in this kind of neighborhood...,” Leo said as he slid into the driver’s seat.

  “You’d better watch yourself, Leo,” I chided him sternly. “You’re starting to sound like my father.”

  We both laughed, and I turned to make my way up the wide stone steps that led to the front door of my building. I waved at Leo to signal that I was all right and then climbed another six steps to the internal door to the first floor. As I turned the key in the next lock it occurred to me that if she lived for a thousand years, my mother was never going to meet someone like Leo, much less get to know him well enough to learn the name of his dog. And yet it was people like Leo—petty criminal, family man, and worrier about my safety—who were precisely the type who passed through the doors of Prescott Memorial Hospital every day.

  As I made my way across the dimly lit first-floor landing I was greeted by the strains of Vivaldi coming from the living roo
m. My roommate, Claudia, was not just home, but awake—a remarkable occurrence, especially given the relatively early hour. In the middle of a fellowship in trauma surgery, my roommate lived a life stripped down to work and sleep. One of only three doctors assigned full-time to what was arguably one of the busiest trauma units in the city, she not only spent every third night on twenty-four-hour call at the hospital, but was charged with supervising the follow-up care for every trauma patient admitted to the hospital during her shift. The irony of the fact that the hospital in question was Prescott Memorial was hardly lost on me.

  I would have loved to tell her about the proposed sale of the hospital, if only to hear what she had to say about it, but I felt reluctant to raise the subject. Claudia had enough to worry about without having to keep my secrets. Surgery is a prickly meritocracy, a separate world filled with competitive people whose egos are as vast as their sense of entitlement. Like every other trauma fellow in her program, Claudia had hoped to be assigned to Prescott Memorial. It was considered far and away the best rotation, not just for the famous surgeons who left their prestigious practices to take their turn on trauma call, but for the high volume of patients—especially victims of person-to-person violence.