My father was at her side, looking handsome in his genial, silver-haired way, and no doubt already half in the bag. That my father was an alcoholic was something that I hadn’t consciously considered until college. That was when I realized that other people’s fathers didn’t start their day with an eye-opener at breakfast and switch to gin and tonics at noon. Of course, it was hard for me to be too critical. After all, my father was sweet even if he was ineffectual, and I was pretty sure that if I were married to my mother, I’d want to be drunk most of the time, too.
Whether it was a form of familial telepathy or just from having been so often at the receiving end of her temper, I could tell even from a distance that my mother was furious. All I could do was pray that it wasn’t at me.
As promised, when introduced, Elliott shook my father’s hand and called him sir. Father, as Elliott had predicted, seemed pleased. Mother, whose scrutiny of Elliott I’d been actively dreading for months, seemed to take barely any notice of him. Instead her attention was focused, laserlike, on a handsome figure across the room.
“Can you believe he’d even have the gall?” she demanded. “The nerve of that man showing up here!”
I followed her gaze, fully expecting to see Stephen Azorini and Miss Norway. Instead, I was surprised to see Gerald Packman, the CEO of HCC, warmly shaking hands with the mayor and his wife.
“I should call security and have them escort him out,” she fumed.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I countered, secretly worried that she might actually do it. The trouble with Mother was that she was like the little girl in the Mother Goose rhyme, the one with the little curl. When she was good, she was very, very good; but when she was bad, she was horrid. The plain fact was that Mother was capable of almost anything when she was angry.
“Then I want you to go over there and find out what he’s doing here.”
“Mother,” I protested, “anyone who buys a ticket can come. His money is as good as anyone else’s. Ten to one he’s here as someone’s guest.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean I have to be in the same room with him,” she huffed, and taking my father by the arm, promptly marched out, leaving Elliott and me speechless.
“And to think that I was afraid tonight was going to be boring,” declared Elliott finally. “Is this what all these things are like—cocktails and intrigue?”
“Oh, no,” I deadpanned. “Later there’ll be dancing.”
CHAPTER 11
I couldn’t help admiring the way that Gerald Packman worked the room. Patting the chairman of Chicago’s largest bank on the back and trading quips with Paul Riskoff, the real estate magnate, he moved with ease among the city’s rich and powerful, like a candidate for public office who knows he already has the election in the bag. While I didn’t share my mother’s sense of outrage, there was something disturbing about his presence here tonight, something that said as much about the man and his nerve as his gimmick with the chess clock.
Knowing private detectives to be an inquisitive bunch, I pulled Elliott aside and treated him to a whispered, rapid-fire account of what was going on between Prescott Memorial and HCC. When I’d finished, Elliott placed his hands gently on my shoulders, looked deeply into my eyes, and told me that I was completely out of my mind to get involved. I was about to agree with him when I felt a strange arm around my waist. Turning toward its owner, I found myself face-to-face with Gavin McDermott and his wife, Patsy.
I’d known—and envied—Patsy ever since I was in the second grade. Athletic and adventurous, she’d gotten into trouble with impunity and even as she’d gotten older seemed to personify the adjective saucy.
In Patsy I suspected McDermott had finally met his match. A world-class distance runner in college, upon graduation she’d traded the challenges of elite athletic competition for the more visceral thrills of mountaineering. She’d set her sights on ascending all seven of the world’s most arduous peaks, and she’d been steadily making progress achieving her goal. While I couldn’t remember how many she had left to climb, I was fairly certain that I was in the presence of the only woman in the room who’d been to the top of Everest and back.
Patsy had had as many husbands as McDermott had had wives, and enough money of her own to not be impressed by a surgeon’s salary—not a bad thing considering the things I’d heard about McDermott’s weakness for nurses. It was Patsy who’d dragged him over, propelled as much by curiosity about Elliott as her eagerness to boast about her recent ascent of Kilimanjaro. If Gavin remembered he’d run out on our meeting the day before, he certainly didn’t acknowledge it. I wasn’t bothered by the lack of apology. After the way he’d treated Claudia, no show of manners would ever redeem him in my eyes.
I made introductions all around, my irritation compounded by the fact that McDermott still had his arm draped around my middle. Surgeons, I knew from Claudia, are literally a “touchy” bunch, inured to the physical boundaries by which most people conduct themselves and used to experiencing the world by touch. On the other hand, female lawyers almost universally object to being embraced by middle-aged men with whom they are vaguely acquainted and coincidentally mad at.
“So how do you and Kate know each other?” asked Patsy after she’d given us a brief account of her experiences in Tanzania.
“I’m a private investigator,” replied Elliott. “I met Kate a couple of years ago when she hired me to do some work for her.”
“I should probably get your number in case Gavin starts getting any ideas.”
“He looks absolutely trustworthy to me,” replied Elliott, with a pointed look at Gavin McDermott’s hand, which was still around my waist.
“Who says Gavin is trustworthy?” demanded a striking woman with a mane of honey-colored hair that cascaded down her bare back.
“Have you met Dr. Farah Davies, Prescott Memorial’s inestimable chief of obstetrics and gynecology?” inquired Gavin, stepping aside to make room for her to join our circle.
Dr. Davies was definitely a presence. Tall and athletically thin, she carried herself with the same brand of physical confidence I recognized in Patsy. She was dressed in a strapless gown that might have been a Vera Wang and carried a simple Kate Spade satin evening bag to which she’d clipped her pager. Her hair was an amazing amber mane of twisted ringlets that was no hairdresser’s creation. Her makeup, dramatic but expertly applied, somehow served to draw her intelligence into sharper focus rather than diminish the forcefulness of her personality. The fact that her eyes were different colors—one brown, the other blue—merely reinforced the contradiction. It also made it hard to look at anything else. I wondered how long you had to know her before you got over the incongruity of it.
“You know, I think we may have met before,” remarked Elliott as he took her hand in his, “but for the life of me I can’t think where.”
“Pm sorry I can’t help you—” Dr. Davies smiled warmly. “—but I see so many people that when I run into someone in a different context, I have the hardest time placing them.”
“Ten to one he isn’t a patient,” McDermott chortled as he traded his empty champagne glass for another from a passing waiter’s proffered tray.
“Thanks for the tip, professor,” replied Farah dryly. “I don’t know how any of us would ever manage to get along without you.”
At this, McDermott’s face darkened dangerously, and his wife laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“You might want to ask yourself that same question the next time one of your patients starts bleeding out on you,” he snapped.
Farah Davies cast her mismatched eyes heavenward as if entreating the lord for patience. “Don’t even think of trying to lay what happened to your patient at my door,” she warned. “All I needed was an extra pair of hands. I could just as easily have asked one of the fellows to scrub in. The trouble with you prima donnas is that you always think you’re rushing in to save the day, but when things go wrong, you look for someone else to blame.“
“And the trouble with you gynecologists is that you think that just because they let you have a scalpel, you know how to use it.”
I work in an arena filled with blunt talk and big egos, but not like this. The tension between the two physicians sang like a high-voltage wire. Good manners dictated that someone change the subject, but good breeding aside, I had absolutely no interest in making things easier for McDermott. Besides, I was enjoying seeing him pick a fight with someone who was in a position to fight back.
“Children, children,” admonished Carl Laffer, stepping in to spoil the fun, “let’s save these petty disagreements for the operating room where there are plenty of sharp instruments at hand.”
Carl Laffer was a very tall man who had played basketball in college. In spite of his gray hair and bifocals, he still maintained the look of a center about him, one that had retired and become a particularly good-natured coach. He was the hospital’s white-haired elder spokesman, a pragmatist inside the operating room and out. He was genial and endlessly diplomatic, and his appointment as chief of staff had required him to tap into deep personal reserves of goodwill. While long on responsibility and short on remuneration, the chief of staff post at Prescott Memorial was considered one of the most prestigious in the country. Both Farah Davies and Gavin McDermott had lobbied furiously for the appointment, fomenting divisiveness among the medical staff that had taken Laffer the better part of the last year to repair.
Through Claudia over the years, I had come to see the unromantic side of medicine. While few patients pause to consider it, there are more good physicians in every subspecialty of medicine than good positions. Competition is intense and promotions are often based on considerations other than ability. In medicine, like any other high-stakes profession, personal animosities can infest professional relationships and ruin careers—something that Claudia’s recent run-in with McDermott had brought sharply into focus.
I had long suspected that the same traits that drove people to excel in highly competitive professions like law or medicine—relentless perfectionism, intolerance of failure, and almost manic compulsion—were the ones that also made them assholes. I remembered asking Claudia about the surgeons she’d worked with at Prescott Memorial. She told me that if she’d had to pick, Carl Laffer was her favorite to scrub with, but if she were the one on the operating table, she’d choose Gavin McDermott every time. Of course, that was before his patients had started inexplicably going into respiratory arrest.
A white-gloved waiter sounded the gong for dinner, and like two fighters sparring in the ring, Gavin McDermott and Farah Davies separated as if on cue. Elliott and I let the tide of partygoers slowly carry us in to dinner. I was in no hurry. As soon as we sat down, we would be trapped at the family table through dessert. I was also reluctant to bump into Stephen on the way into the dining room.
“I don’t think those two like each other much,” I whispered to Elliott, meaning Drs. Davies and McDermott. “I wonder if perhaps there isn’t some sort of history there. After all, McDermott has a reputation as a womanizer, and Farah Davies looks like someone who’s turned a few heads in her time.”
“I know, that’s why it bugs me that I can’t remember where I’ve met her before.”
“I’m going to have to ask Claudia if Farah Davies and McDermott were ever an item.”
“How does Claudia know them?”
“She’s doing her six-month rotation through Prescott Memorial’s trauma unit. McDermott works trauma there one day a week.”
“That’s funny. He doesn’t seem like the type to spend his time digging bullets out of junkies.”
“Shhhh,” I whispered in his ear. “In this group we prefer to refer to them as the deserving poor.”
We eventually made it to our table, which was at the very front of the room at the foot of the dais. Under my mother’s watchful eye I dutifully took Elliott full circle around the table, introducing him to the various Prescotts and Millhollands in attendance. Except for their bank balances, they weren’t exactly an impressive lot. Besides my mother and father, there was my idiotic cousin Hermione and her husband, Lamont, who’d both been members of a cult in college and who to this day maintained an aura of otherworldliness that I suspected of having been pharmacologically induced. Next to them was Hermione’s mother, an acid-tongued harridan whose nickname was, of all things, Bubbles. Her husband, Art, whose claim to be hard of hearing I never believed but nonetheless understood, sat mutely at her side concentrating on his salad. Uncle Edwin and his latest bride, a beauty queen from Tennessee with a gravity-defying cumulus of blond hair and even more improbable breasts, rounded out the party.
Fortunately we were spared from the necessity of making small talk by the proximity of the band. Elliott gave my hand a reassuring squeeze under the table, and I found myself desperately wishing that the evening would just be over. After waiting for three years to get Elliott into my bed, the thought of waiting three more hours suddenly seemed interminable.
When the band stopped playing, Kyle Massius, the president of the hospital, climbed the stairs to the podium to introduce my mother. Like everyone else I grew up with, I had a hard time taking Kyle seriously as an adult. No matter what his accomplishments, in my eyes he would forever remain the skinny smart-ass kid who always got us all into trouble. The fact that he now stood up, straight faced, and sang my mother’s praises after stabbing her in the back by voting to sell the hospital did little to improve my assessment.
When he was through being insincere, my mother rose to her feet and ascended to the podium. Every year since I could remember, my mother had risen to make her customary welcoming speech. As a child it used to astonish me how hard she worked to prepare these few banal sentences of thanks and welcome. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood how few opportunities the women of her generation had to stand in the spotlight and how greatly they were cherished.
But tonight there was the glint of something dangerous in her eyes as she took her place behind the podium, her great-grandmother’s necklace glittering at her throat. She paused for a moment, looking out over the hundreds of faces, nearly every one belonging to someone she knew personally and who had shelled out a thousand dollars a couple to be there.
“An event of this magnitude is made possible by the work of many, many people,” she began. “Every year the members of the Prescott Memorial Hospital Auxiliary’s steering committee work for the entire year to plan the event you are enjoying this evening, an event that I might add raises more than a half a million dollars to provide health care for the most needy citizens of Chicago.
“While many of you may not be aware of this, there is another annual tradition associated with the Founders Ball. Every year on the Monday morning following the gala, next year’s steering committee hosts a luncheon at the Saddle and Cycle Club to thank the committee members who worked so hard to make this night possible.” The partygoers paused in the middle of their salads to offer up their hearty applause. Mother waited until they’d finished before she continued.
“Thank you,” she said. “It is in this way, with only one day in which to rest and put their feet up, that the tireless members of the Prescott Memorial Auxiliary go about their business of raising the funds necessary to support the charitable work of this unique and world-class hospital.
“When my grandfather, Everett Prescott, founded Prescott Memorial, it was with the idea of helping those less fortunate than ourselves. His friends took up his call to do the same, and his children and their children followed in his example. For four generations these families embraced the object of his generosity. Thus, supporting the hospital became more than an obligation, it became a tradition, one that has grown from those few founding families to include many, many members of the community, including all the wonderful people who are here tonight.
“But tonight I’m afraid Prescott Memorial Hospital takes your money under false pretenses,” my mother declared. The room fell silent,
and she paused to let what she had just said sink in.
“Oh, no,” I thought to myself, thinking of her signature at the bottom of the confidentiality agreement with HCC and yet powerless to do anything to prevent what I knew was coming next.
“Last Thursday the board of trustees of Prescott Memorial Hospital voted to sell it to a company called Health Care Corporation.” Small gasps of surprise went up around the room, and Mother again waited until they had subsided.
Her eye searched the crowd until she found Gerald Packman. Now she spoke to him directly. “If Health Care Corporation is successful in its bid to acquire the hospital, not only will these traditions end, but every penny that is raised here tonight, along with the millions of dollars in charitable contributions that have been raised in years past, will go to line the pockets of a for-profit corporation. That is why this year’s steering committee and I have just voted to refund to you all contributions made this evening.
“But, please, let’s not let such a sad turn of events put a damper on the lovely evening so many people have worked so hard for. My husband and I have just written a personal check to cover the cost of this evening’s meal, and I hope that you all will continue to enjoy the evening as our guests.”
Of all the possible scenarios that I’d imagined for how this evening would turn out, none came even close to the reality of that night. Like the moment of terrible quiet that follows an accident, as soon as she made her announcement, the entire ballroom seemed to stand still. For a full minute nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Mother folded up the small piece of paper she’d consulted when she spoke, and made her way down off the dais. But the usually bored society reporters who’d come for the open bar expecting to write fluff were still sober enough to recognize a story when it fell out of nowhere and hit them in the head. By the time Mother set her foot atop the bottom step, they were sprinting for the phones.
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