Dead Certain

by Hartzmark, Gini

  The scary part was that in some ways his office was almost the duplicate of mine. Patient charts replaced case files, but there were Post-it notes everywhere, and a small tape recorder for dictation lay close at hand. Outside the window there was no view to speak of, just the red brick facade of another medical center building. The only objects approaching decoration were a series of plastic anatomical models lined up along the front edge of his desk to be used as visual aids for explaining procedures to patients.

  As McDermott droned on I became increasingly restless. Almost without thinking, I picked one of the models up and turned it over in my hand. Automatically, I gave it a little toss, subconsciously registering its weight. Propelled as much by McDermott’s arrogance as by my own boredom, I reached for a second model.

  When I was in college, some guy at a party bet one of his buddies that he could teach anybody, no matter how inebriated, how to juggle. While I’m a little fuzzy on the details, I am a living testament to the efficacy of his teaching methods. Of course, when my mother said that every woman should be able to do some kind of handiwork, she was talking about needlepoint, not juggling. On the other hand, I doubted it would have had the same impact if I’d whipped my embroidery thread out of my bag as it did when I got a plastic set of tonsils, a sinus, and the cochlea circling each other neatly in the air.

  McDermott hung up the receiver and looked at me with something very close to astonishment.

  “I didn’t know you could juggle,” he observed.

  “And I didn’t know you could make someone’s bladder bigger,” I replied, catching the body parts one by one and carefully setting them back down on his desk.

  “So, what are you still doing in the city this late on a Friday afternoon?” he demanded, no doubt forgetting that unlike my parents, I didn’t live in the suburbs. “I thought that by now all the lawyers were out on the golf course.”

  “Oh, there are one or two of us still at work at this late hour,” I replied with a smile. “We take turns staying at the office as a public service. We want to make sure there are enough tee times available for all the doctors who want them.”

  “Touché. I take it you’ve been sent to twist my arm about Prescott Memorial.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I’d certainly be willing to give it a try if you thought that giving it a twist would work. Are you a righty or a lefty?”

  “A lefty. But I’m afraid it’s going to take more than brute force, no matter how prettily applied, to get me to change my mind.”

  “I was hoping that moral suasion and an appeal to your higher nature would do the trick.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m serious, Gavin. I want to know why you think it’s a good idea to sell Prescott Memorial to a for-profit chain like HCC.”

  “Maybe I think it’s best to just take the money when it’s offered,” he answered simply. “Who knows if we’ll ever get offered this kind of money again? In my opinion it’s a simple and straightforward business decision.”

  “In my experience very few business decisions are either simple or straightforward,” I countered.

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, this one is. The handwriting’s on the wall, Kate. It’s either HCC or somebody else. Places like Prescott Memorial are dinosaurs, an aging facility at the mercy of a bunch of ignorant millionaires— no offense.”

  “None taken,” I replied dryly. “But I confess I am curious how you arrived at this sudden revelation.”

  “Marrying Patsy was a big part of it. Seeing that whole crowd up close made me think about how truly vulnerable the hospital is.”

  “To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought of it as vulnerable at all,” I replied, “not until you voted to sell it to HCC.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Have you ever thought of what would happen if your parents got divorced, or your Uncle Edwin decided to use his money to set up retirement homes for aging hookers?”

  “And what if there’s a cure for cancer, or an asteroid hits Chicago?” I countered. “You can play the game of what-if forever and make it come out however you want. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. What do you know about the day-to-day workings of the hospital beyond writing checks and going to parties?”

  I was tempted to tell him that I knew he liked to work only with pretty nurses and his operating room profanity had earned him the nickname Dr. McDamnit, but I knew it would do little to advance my case.

  “Medicine has changed in the last couple of years. It’s hardly the same profession as when I first started out. Back then, I spent my time in the operating room. Now I spend it in here, arguing on the phone with insurance companies. Pretty soon we’ll be doing operations in the parking lot and telling patients to bring their own bandages.”

  “What does any of this have to do with selling Prescott Memorial?” I demanded.

  “It has to do with making choices while we still can,” explained McDermott. “With every succeeding generation, the money that has traditionally been used to support the hospital gets split more ways. Talk to Kyle Massius about the kind of begging we have to do. Remember Megan Fredericks? Her parents have been supporting pediatric services in this hospital ever since she had encephalitis when she was ten. But now they’re dead, and she wants to put that money into her art gallery.”

  “That’s only one example.”

  “You want some more?” he countered savagely. “I’ll give you some more. What about your cousin Cameron? He’s been in and out of Betty Ford so many times that when he checks out, they don’t even bother to change his sheets. Do you think we should count on his continued support? Or what about your sister Beth?”

  “Beth is still in college.”

  “From what your mother tells me, she’s majoring in becoming a crazy lesbian.”

  “Being crazy and a lesbian have nothing to do with one another,” I pointed out.

  “No, but being a lesbian and tormenting your mother do. What do you think Beth will do when she realizes that all she has to do on her twenty-first birthday to really make your parents angry is to give her money to Gays for Peace instead of Prescott Memorial?”

  The electronic squeal of a beeper cut me off before I had a chance to reply. I watched McDermott’s eyes drop automatically to one of the three clipped to the pocket of his white coat, and waited for him to continue. Instead, he was on his feet in an instant, patting his pockets for his keys.

  “We’ll have to continue this another time,” he said in an urgent voice. From the look on his face, I could tell that mentally he was already out the door.

  The people who worked late on Friday nights at Callahan Ross were a hardcore group. I may have joked with McDermott about doctors and lawyers on the golf course, but even the most workaholic attorneys at Callahan Ross usually went home to their families on Friday nights. Not having a family to go home to, I ordered a roasted red pepper and chèvre sandwich on focaccia bread from a restaurant whose evening business consisted of delivering overpriced meals to lawyers. For the price of the sandwich I could have rented an apartment in Iowa.

  While I waited for dinner to arrive I wandered into the library to check on Sherman. I found him in his favorite cubicle, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. It looked like he was settling in for a long weekend. His usual dinner sat beside the computer screen. As far as I could tell, he had the same thing every night: a container of boysenberry yogurt, a Slim Jim, and a Snickers bar, all from the firm vending machines. At Callahan Ross a minor obsessive-compulsive disorder was practically a job requirement.

  Walking back to my office, I lingered for a couple of minutes among the stacks of calf-bound volumes, slipping one or two from the shelves at random and breathing in their musty fragrance. For some reason it made me feel sad to think that nowadays these books were only there for show. Thanks to men like Gabriel Hurt, legal decisions were now entered into computer databases almost as soon as they were handed down, while se
arch engines like Lexis steered the way through the virtual stacks. Progress might be inevitable, but I didn’t think I’d ever get over my love of books.

  When my sandwich came, I inhaled it greedily. I was so hungry I even ate the pickle. But I still didn’t feel like settling down to work. Instead I dragged the boom box out of the bottom drawer of my credenza and plugged it in. Then I kicked off my shoes and pulled all the hairpins out of my French twist and literally let my hair down. Then I chose Best o’ Boingo from the stash I kept in my bottom drawer, slipped the CD into the machine, and cranked up the volume.

  I am without a doubt the absolute worst dancer in the known universe. Not only am I completely uncoordinated, but I lack any semblance of rhythm or grace. With a partner, things can really get ugly. I cannot tell my right from my left, and for some reason I insist on leading. Russell was the only person able to endure it more than once which is one of the reasons I married him.

  Even so, I love to dance. As long as I am alone, I am utterly unselfconscious. I lose myself in the music, and by the time I get back to my desk, I feel not just happy, but reenergized. “Dead Man’s Party” in and of itself is usually good for at least two more hours’ worth of work.

  I was prancing around my office probably looking like a chicken in mid-seizure when I suddenly realized that I was not alone. Stopping in midstrut, I turned and found myself face-to-face with a nondescript little man whose salt-and-pepper beard and perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses made him more recognizable than any movie star.

  “How did you get in here?” I blurted to Gabriel Hurt ungraciously, my heart pounding furiously from the combination of dancing and fright.

  “The security guard downstairs told me where to find you,” he explained mildly.

  “He’s supposed to call before letting visitors up after hours,” I pointed out, still struggling to regain my composure. I did my best to pull my hair away from my face and tuck my silk blouse back into the waistband of my skirt. When I looked down, I realized that my big toe was protruding comically from a hole in my black stockings, which had a massive run directly up the front.

  “I guess he was willing to make an exception in my case,” Hurt apologized. Even under the circumstances I found his tone of modest understatement endearing. “I told him you had sent me a gift and I wanted to surprise you by coming up and thanking you personally.”

  “You’re welcome,” I replied somewhat incoherently. “I see you’re a fan of Danny Elfman’s music,” he observed, cocking his head to one side quizzically as I lunged for the CD player and hit the PAUSE button. “Too bad he mostly writes soundtracks nowadays.”

  There was a stillness in Hurt’s demeanor that worked as an effective counterpoint to the power he wielded in the world. Dressed in wrinkled chinos and a nondescript polo shirt, he stood perfectly still, his sneakered feet together and his hands clasped in front of his thighs. When he spoke, he was in the habit of keeping his voice soft and his speech slow, like a patient naturalist trying to approach a skittish animal.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked, scrabbling for my shoes with one hand while gesturing toward the visitors’ chairs with the other.

  “Thank you,” said Hurt proceeding to sit as deliberately as he’d stood. “I really did come to thank you for the game. I know it’s hopelessly low tech, but it really is fun to play and it brings back such wonderful memories of my youth.” For a minute I wondered if he was joking. Hurt’s oft-cited age was thirty-one. But then again, he was the old man of an industry that used to joke that time progressed in dog years, but had now changed to hamster years.

  “I’m glad you liked the gift. I was afraid you’d think it was presumptuous of me to send it.”

  “It was,” he remarked. “But I like it anyway.” He glanced around my office pointedly, adding, “In my world everything is so new, how we do things hasn’t had time yet to develop into protocol. Besides, it showed initiative. Sometimes the person who wins the prize is the one who wants it more.”

  “And?”

  “And sometimes it isn’t.”

  “Is that why you canceled at the last minute instead of coming to the Wednesday meeting? Have you decided you don’t want what Delirium is offering badly enough?”

  “You’re also direct,” he said. “I like that, too. Let’s just say that I was approached by another group that has developed an input driver very similar to Delirium’s. I wanted to have a chance to see it before I began negotiating with you in earnest.”

  If the three days’ worth of wrangling that had preceded the aborted meeting with Gabriel Hurt had only been a warm-up, I wasn’t sure I wanted to experience the real thing.

  “So which one do you think is better?” I asked, figuring if I was going to get bad news, I might as well get it over with.

  “Better is such an interesting word when it’s applied to new technology,” mused Hurt. With his white shirt and his hands neatly folded in his lap, he looked for all the world like a schoolboy reciting a lesson. “The natural response would be, ‘better’ than what? Or ‘better’ for what application? Of course, what complicates the whole question is the fact that a new technology is an evolving continuum. Comparing them is like comparing two rivers. At any given point one river may seem far superior to any given point on the other, but how can it be possible to compare the two rivers as a whole?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, feeling out of my depth in this Yoda-like discussion. “How do you decide anything? Economists talk about weighing different bundles of goods. Businessmen use cost-benefit analysis....”

  “Oh, my way is much simpler than that,” announced Hurt.

  “What way is that?”

  “I simply choose the best person to solve the problem.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The input driver Delirium has today is not the same one that Icon will put on the market in a year or eighteen months. Between the prototype and the marketplace lie a thousand different problems—some small, some large, some of them unforeseen and others unforeseeable. The question then becomes one of choosing who will do a better job of solving those problems.”

  “So how do you decide that?”

  “I need to sit down with Bill Delius.”

  “He’s in the hospital for observation,” I replied instinctively, withholding the truth as much from the negotiator’s habit of hoarding information as uncertainty over how best to proceed.

  “No rush,” said Hurt, getting neatly to his feet. “I’m in town until Monday. Get in touch with me anytime between now and then and we’ll set something up.”

  As I drove home I mentally kicked myself for having lied to Gabriel Hurt. Well, I hadn’t exactly lied, but failing to mention a client’s double bypass had to at least fall into the category of dishonesty by omission. I tried telling myself that, like Gabriel Hurt, my job was to keep my options open. But at the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that the road I was on inevitably led to disaster.

  I’d started out the day delighted that Bill Delius was still alive, but was ending it disgusted that he wasn’t well enough to sit down and take a meeting with Gabriel Hurt. By the time I pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment, I was so thoroughly disgusted with myself that even Leo’s cheerful banter couldn’t improve my state of mind. I just wanted to pour myself a big Scotch, take a long hot bath, and crawl into bed.

  But as soon as I walked in the front door, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Claudia’s shoes were lying inside the door exactly where she’d kicked them off, their laces soaked with blood. The lights were on, but there were no sounds of movement or music in the apartment. I stood for a long time in the front hall and listened before I heard anything at all, and even then I couldn’t be really sure.

  Claudia and I had known each other for a long time, and we had been through a lot together. She’d held my head as I lay weeping through the desolate months that followed Russell’s death. I’d listened as she whispered her secret fears a
bout succeeding in a profession filled with men who wanted nothing more than to see her fail. I had seen her stumble home, drunk with fatigue and emotionally battered. I’d seen her on mornings after she’d been up all night stitching up people who’d been hacked to pieces by hatred; nights when she’d had to strip to the skin because everything she wore—right down to her underwear—was soaked in a dead man’s blood; nights when she’d held dead children in her arms knowing that they’d been killed by their parent’s hand.

  But in all that time, I don’t think I’d ever heard her cry.

  CHAPTER 9

  I know it must seem strange that it took me so long to decide what to do. Claudia was my closest friend, but she was also someone whose character had been forged in the crucible of the operating room. The better part of me hesitated because I didn’t know if she would want me to see her cry, while the less admirable part of me held back from fear. Twenty-four hours ago I’d seen her slide her hand inside Bill Delius’s dead chest and with perfect calm squeeze life back into his heart. What was it that was devastating enough to have reduced her to tears?

  The only thing I could think of was that something terrible must have happened to one of her parents and I made my way down the hall toward her bedroom. Like all the others in the building, the apartment that I shared with Claudia was laid out railroad style. The living room and dining room, both palatially proportioned, sat at the front of the apartment, their grand windows facing the street. The other rooms all branched off a central hallway whose resemblance to the passageway of a railroad car had given the floor plan its name.

  Our bedrooms were directly across from each other at the back end of the apartment. Architecturally they were mirror images of each other. They were big rooms with dingy windows encased in burglar grilles that looked out onto the narrow alleys that ran between all the buildings on the block. Each had its own drafty fireplace and an adjoining private bath with a deep, claw-footed tub that, like all the rest of the fixtures, dated back to the twenties.