Dead Certain

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “So who’s your new client?” I asked.

  “Your mother.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “Please tell me that you’re kidding,” I begged.

  “What’s the big deal? I get assignments from Denise all the time. She wants us to do a quick backgrounder on HCC.”

  “I understand, but it seems weird to think of you working for my mother,” I sighed.

  “In my experience it never hurts to have Mom on your side,” Elliott pointed out with a sly grin that immediately brought to mind thoughts that would have made my mother blush.

  “So what have you dug up?”

  “I’ve had people working the phones since yesterday, talking to anybody who’s had dealings with HCC. We started out targeting transactions that are similar to the one they’re attempting with Prescott Memorial.”

  “So what have you found out? Anything?”

  “Well, for one thing, there’s no shortage of people eager to talk to us. Usually people are reluctant to spill their guts when they get a phone call from an investigator out of the blue, but apparently the people who’ve been burned by HCC are just panting to tell their stories. One of my people suggested that we bill the people she’s talked to, charging them for a therapy hour.”

  “So who have you talked to?”

  “Mostly doctors and hospital administrators. Like I said, the problem isn’t getting these people to talk, it’s getting them to shut up.”

  “So what are they saying?”

  “Basically that HCC is a take-no-prisoners operation.“

  “There’s no law against being ruthless,” I reminded him. “True. But there’s ruthless and then there’s breaking the rules.”

  “Any proof that HCC has done the latter?”

  “Do you know what it says below Gerald Packman’s picture in his high school yearbook?”

  “Please tell me that you didn’t actually check to find this out.... No, I take that back, tell me that you’re not billing me for the time it took to find this out.”

  “Are we thorough or what?” he countered, smiling. “Under his picture it says, ‘If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.’ ”

  “I don’t think I want to live in a world where people are held accountable for what it says in their yearbooks. As I recall, I think I quoted some Warren Zevon lyrics. You know the one: Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad get me out of this.”

  “It’s just interesting in light of a common thread that seems to be popping up in a lot of these interviews.“

  “Which is?”

  “People keep hinting that one of the reasons that HCC is always able to close their deals so quickly is that they have someone inside the target hospital feeding them information.”

  “What kind of information?” I demanded.

  “What kind of information would you want if you were trying to take over a hospital?”

  “Financial information, inside dope on the medical staff, like which docs are calling the shots and which ones are bringing in the bucks. I’d want to know about the physical assets, the property, buildings, and equipment, union contracts, relationships with suppliers, any formal referral contracts they have in place—”

  “So who would have access to that kind of information?”

  “Depends on the hospital, but it would be someone at the top, either a doctor or an administrator. Do you think there’s any chance that they’re pulling the same stunt in Chicago?”

  “I have no way of knowing, but in my experience companies aren’t that different from the people who run them. They tend to stick with what they know and what has worked for them in the past.”

  “Is there some way to find out for sure?”

  “You know our motto. There’s always a way to find out; all it takes is time and money.”

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “Then it would help if we could narrow down the field. Who at Prescott Memorial is in a position to provide the kind of information we’re talking about to HCC?”

  “Not too many people. Most of the docs at Prescott Memorial are only there a couple of days a week. They’re not involved in the running of the hospital per se. That puts Kyle Massius on the top of the list. He’s the president of the hospital, and he’d not only have access to the information, he’d know most of it off the top of his head. The only trouble is that he’s also made no secret of the fact that he’s in favor of the sale.”

  “Why would that be a problem?”

  “Because it makes him either incredibly altruistic or incredibly naive.”

  “Why is that?” Elliott prodded.

  “One of the first things HCC will probably do if they take over the hospital is fire him and bring in their own people.”

  “Not if he’s already cut a deal with them. One of the things we keep hearing from people is that after HCC takes over, unexpected people wind up on top.”

  “Which is why everyone thinks the winners in the takeover were secretly working for HCC before the fact. I don’t know. The whole thing sounds like a mixture of sour grapes and paranoia to me. Besides, what kind of incentives could HCC offer? Villas in Tuscany?”

  “How about a cut of the profits? According to the company’s annual report, and I quote, ‘Aligning physicians through financial incentives is one of HCC’s primary tools for medical efficacy.’ ”

  “Meaning that the best way to get doctors to do what you want is to cut them in on a piece of the action. How big a piece do you think we’re talking about?”

  “I don’t know, but apparently the dollar amounts are huge,” Elliott replied. “According to one source there was a radiologist in Kansas City who actually did buy a villa in Tuscany after HCC took over.”

  “Yeah, but you couldn’t even buy a cheeseburger with what Prescott Memorial makes a year. They lose money.”

  “I see your point.”

  “Unless whoever it is has made a deal for a piece of the bigger picture,” I mused out loud. “It’s pretty obvious that HCC is trying to make their move into a major metropolitan market and Chicago is it. I just found out they’ve approached the archdiocese about taking over the management of the city’s Catholic hospitals. The good news is that my mother seems to have succeeded in derailing that. The bad news is that they’ve sued my mother, alleging millions of dollars in damages.”

  “But I still don’t get why HCC is interested in Prescott Memorial.”

  “Because none of the physicians at Prescott Memorial are on staff full-time. They’re all affiliated with other hospitals, and most hold medical school appointments, as well. Win the hearts and minds of the Prescott Memorial medical staff and you’ve got a foot in the door of every major hospital in the city.”

  “So who at Prescott Memorial besides Massius would be in the best position to help them do that?”

  “When you think about it, it’s still a pretty short list. There were only three trustees who voted for the sale: Carl Laffer, the hospital’s chief of staff; Gavin McDermott, who’s chief of surgery; and Kyle Massius.”

  Elliott jotted their names down on the legal pad in front of him. “Anybody else you can think of?”

  I considered for a moment. “Farah Davies.”

  “You mean the woman we met the other night? The one with the hair and the eyes?”

  “Yes. She’s the head of obstetrics and gynecology at Prescott Memorial, as well as a professor at the University of Chicago medical school. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some kind of history between her and McDermott. Not only that, but if I remember correctly, she was pretty steamed when she got passed over and Carl Laffer was named chief of staff at Prescott Memorial. There was even some talk about her filing suit for sex discrimination, but in the end she decided against it.”

  “I just wish I could remember where it is I know her from,” sighed Elliott, shaking his head.

  “Maybe she was one of your old girlfriends’ gynecologist?” I offered helpfully.

  “Very
funny. What made her decide not to sue? She didn’t exactly strike me as the type who’d run from a fight.”

  “They bought her off by making her head of OBGYN.”

  “Interesting...” mused Elliott.

  “Why is that so interesting?”

  “Because if someone bought her off once, then somebody else could buy her off again.”

  That night I stopped on my way home and picked up Thai food from the storefront across the street from the apartment. After I’d put her in a cab outside of Joan Bornstein’s office, Claudia had gone home and tried to nap on the couch, only to be woken by yet another hangup call. By the time I got there, her nerves were such a mess that I dragged out the bottle of Absolut we kept in the freezer for just such emergencies and poured her a healthy shot. After we’d knocked back a couple and helped ourselves to pad thai, the conversation turned to Carlos.

  When I mentioned that I’d run into him at the hospital on the night of Bill Delius’s heart attack, she confessed that he’d taken to hanging out in the ER even on the nights he wasn’t working if she was on trauma call. Not only that but she’d found roses in her locker and love notes on the windshield of her car.

  “Your locker in the on-call room?” I demanded. “Isn’t that off limits to everyone but house staff?”

  “Yes,” agreed Claudia. “After it happened, I went to the head of security about it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He practically laughed me out of his office. There was no note left with the flowers, no way of proving that Carlos was the one who’d left them. I’m sure he was thinking that women should be thrilled to have someone leaving them notes and flowers. He told me to come back if Carlos threatened me.”

  “I’m sure you found that reassuring,” I remarked as I refilled her glass. Claudia might be a ninety-eight-pound weakling, but she could drink like a stevedore.

  “Absolutely,” replied Claudia. “I can sleep so much better at night knowing that if Carlos decides to beat me up in the parking lot, I’ll be able to go back to that jerk in security and tell him ‘I told you so.’ ” She drained her glass. “You know, before this happened with Carlos, I used to be so smug. I’d see these women in the ER who’d been abused by their boyfriends, and I’d ask myself why they didn’t just get out, or worse, why they got mixed up with these losers in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I figured they showed up on the first date wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘I beat women.’ ”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I was thinking of calling his wife, except that I’m afraid that if she says anything to him, he may end up taking it out on her....” She groaned. “This whole thing is making me crazy. Half the time I think I’m being stalked, and the other half I think I’m just being paranoid.”

  “You’re not being paranoid,” I said. “There has to be somebody else you can go to. What about Dr. Laffer? Isn’t he in charge of the fellowship program?”

  “Yeah, but I hate to go to him after this whole thing with Mrs. Estrada. He’s going to end up thinking that I’m some kind of wacko—killing patients, being stalked by married ex-boyfriends....”

  “I thought you said he stood up for you in the M&M conference. Besides, you’re always telling me what a good guy he is.”

  “You’re right,” said Claudia. “That’s the trouble with being stalked by a psycho. It actually does make you paranoid.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t speak for Claudia, but the next morning I was forced to confront the cruel reality that I wasn’t getting any younger—or at least my head and stomach weren’t. Of course, it didn’t help that I had to be in court bright and early. We were scheduled to present our request for an injunction against the sale of the hospital to HCC at eight. While Tom Galloway, one of the firm’s marquee litigators, was set to make the argument for our side, I still had to show up.

  Even without a hangover I find the courthouse depressing: the hallways crammed with milling people, the tired cops and harried lawyers who seem less concerned with justice than with just keeping a large and imperfect system grinding forward. I chafed at the feeling of supplication that hung in the air, the asking and the arguing, the sense of being at the mercy of some black-robed functionary who’d more likely than not risen to the bench less for his legal acumen than his ability to suck up. Fortunately I didn’t have anything of substance to do. All I had to do was sit at the counsel table, pretend to take notes, and if possible, avoid throwing up.

  There were only the two of us at the plaintiff’s table, with my mother sitting demurely in her St. John’s knits behind us. In contrast, HCC had a phalanx of lawyers, who overflowed the seats and spilled a full three rows back. There were attorneys for Prescott Memorial as well as HCC, giving my mother and me the bitter satisfaction of knowing that we were paying, however indirectly, for the services of the people working against us. I spotted Kyle Massius among them, looking as though he fit right in there with the suits and the stiffs. My mother, sitting ramrod straight, fixed him with a look of diamond hardness.

  Tom, I thought, did a magnificent job of presenting our request for an injunction delaying any sale of the hospital for an additional thirty days. But it made little impression on the judge, a phlegmy old man who I suspected of being a borderline narcoleptic. He ruled against us, seemingly without reflection. At least the lawyers for HCC had the decency to save their high fives for the hallway.

  Even though I knew that being granted the injunction was a long shot, I was surprised by the extent of my disappointment. Ruefully I had to admit that while failure was one thing, failure in front of one’s mother was quite another. The dry thanks she offered up for my doing my best did little to assuage my feelings of inadequacy and, even less explicably, guilt.

  My disappointment was mitigated somewhat by the fact that Mother was clearly winning the public relations war. Unfortunately, whatever ink she garnered not only aided our fight against HCC, but also provided ammunition for their breach-of-confidentiality suit against her. While she might not be aware of it, with every interview she granted—and they were already waiting for her on the courthouse steps—Mother raised the stakes. We had to figure out some way to keep Prescott Memorial out of the clutches of HCC.

  As soon as I got back to Callahan Ross I summoned Sherman Whitehead to my office and instructed him to draft a new complaint against HCC. The argument I outlined for him was based on the premise that their offer to buy Prescott Memorial was tainted by illegally obtained insider information. I was gambling that within the next four days Elliott would succeed in unearthing the name of the HCC mole in time for us to insert it into the complaint. However, I could tell from the look on Sherman’s face that if anything, he thought that this one was an even longer shot than the first.

  * * *

  That night I was pleased to see the lights burning in the apartment window when I finally arrived home. I found Claudia sitting in the dining room with patient charts fanned out around her, making notes on her legal pad with the concentration of a monk copying a holy text.

  “Are these charts from the patients who died?” I asked, appalled to think that each of the buff folders lying on the table represented a life lost.

  “So far. The advantage of being a female doctor is you get a chance to get to know the nurses from the changing room. Once I asked, it was easy to come up with the names. Everyone remembers the ones who die, especially the nurses.”

  “Why’s that, do you think?”

  “To the surgeons, they’re just another case. You know, the gallbladder in room four. We don’t really have too much to do with them when they’re awake, but for the nurses it’s different. To them, the patients are actually people.”

  “So how’s it going?”

  “A lot slower than you’d think. It’s hard to look for a pattern when you have no idea what you’re looking for.“

  “Just take your time. It’ll come to you.”

  “That�
��s the problem. It’s against the rules to remove patient charts from the hospital. If they found out I took them home, it’s a firing offense.”

  “How would they find out?”

  “They’re signed out to me. All it would take is someone else coming around looking for them. That’s why I have to get them back to the hospital as soon as I can.”

  “Why don’t you photocopy them?”

  “I thought of that. But there are literally thousands of pages. It would take me days.”

  “Then let me take them into the office. I’ll have our duplicators do it. You’ll have them tomorrow night. That way you can get the charts back to the hospital before anybody has a chance to miss them.”

  Claudia took off her glasses and laid them in front of her on the table, making her face look simultaneously unfinished and exposed. With her thumb and forefinger she massaged the bridge of her nose as wearily as an old man.

  “Goddammit, I wish I worked someplace where if you screw up, a brick’ll be out of place or there’ll be a little ripple in the cement, but folks aren’t going to die.”

  “I know it’s something of an understatement, but you’ve had a bad couple of days,” I reminded her.

  “No, the more I think about it, I’ve had a bad couple of decades.”

  “Oh, come on—” I protested.

  “No, no, listen to me. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. How long have you known me?”

  “Since freshman year.”

  “And when did you find out that I wanted to go into medicine?”

  “Probably the first day I met you.”

  “You know why? Because I’ve known that I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was thirteen years old. Not only that, but from that time on I set out to do it in the most focused and rational way I could. In high school, college, medical school, choosing an internship—I never let anything or anybody stand in the way of what I wanted to do. My whole life was plotted and planned and aimed at getting this degree, getting this profession.“