Dead Certain

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “I’m assuming you’re not supposed to actually wear these on your feet,” I declared. “I mean, they’re really just a form of weird fetishist sculpture—”

  “According to what I read in Vogue magazine, they are considered the sexiest shoes made,” my secretary informed me. “They’re remarkably comfortable, and they never go out of style.”

  I set them down on the carpet and stepped into them. “You’re absolutely right,” I said, doing my best to adjust to the altitude in the stiltlike stilettos. “I’m sure the hookers of ancient Rome wore something similar.” I didn’t like to say it, but they actually were comfortable. “What else is there?” I asked as Cheryl dug through the tissue at the bottom of the bag.

  She came up holding a lacy black push-up bra and matching panties.

  “And who, pray tell, are those supposed to be for?” I demanded.

  “Elliott,” replied my secretary as she flashed me a knowing smile.

  Elliott was waiting for me at the door, still dressed for court in a dark blue suit. Beneath the soft tousle of his brown hair his eyes looked tired and his shoulders seemed to sag. However, at the sight of me he broke into a grin as big and warm as summertime.

  “You look beautiful,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist and drawing me toward him for a quick kiss. Then he stepped back, looked me quizzically in the eye, and then glanced down at my shoes. “My, Little Red Riding Hood, how tall you’ve grown,” he remarked.

  “Cheryl’s to blame,” I explained somewhat incoherently. “Did you get a verdict? Are we celebrating tonight or drowning your sorrows?”

  “Celebrating,” replied Elliott. “The jury came back for the plaintiff and awarded us $6.7 million in damages.”

  I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Ooh,” I squealed in my best chorus-girl impersonation. “I’m going to have to start calling you the six-million-dollar man.”

  “Please, the six-point-seven-million-dollar man,” joked Elliott as the hostess came over and showed us to a table for two in a quiet corner of the restaurant. As we sat down he noticed the bag.

  “A present for me?” he inquired.

  “Actually, it’s a message for my mother. I was hoping you might send it out and have it dusted for prints.” I went on to describe the package that had been sent to my mother’s house and the message scrawled on the single sheet inside it as we took our seats.

  “I can’t believe she opened it without knowing who it was from,” remarked Elliott once I’d finished. “If it really was a bomb, she would have been killed.”

  “I’m sure that’s what whoever sent it wants her to think.”

  “I’ll send it out to our forensics guys and have them take a look at it. But I doubt they’ll turn up anything useful after the thing’s gone through the post office. So who do you think sent it?”

  “Who knows? My mother’s been on every TV and radio station in the city the past couple of days. Maybe it’s from some Bolshevik who hates rich people or some disgruntled former servant. God knows, you could populate a small town in Wisconsin with the people she’s fired.”

  “That wouldn’t explain why it came now, not unless you’re a big believer in coincidence. It seems to me like a pretty good bet that this was deliberately sent to scare her off her crusade against HCC.”

  “In that case it worked. Mother showed up at my office this afternoon to try and wriggle out of trying to block the sale.”

  “And I suppose you didn’t let her.”

  “You’re damned right I didn’t let her,” I announced, tearing into the warm baguette that had just materialized on our table.

  “My mother told me I’d meet girls like you,” reported Elliott gravely.

  “Girls like what?”

  “Girls who like trouble.”

  “It has nothing to do with liking trouble,” I protested. “My mother came to me with this half-baked idea that she wanted to keep HCC from buying Prescott Memorial. I suspected that her motives were truly selfish— she literally didn’t want some company out of Atlanta taking away the Founders Ball and all the other Lady Bountiful accoutrements she enjoys as a trustee of the hospital. I got involved because she’s my mother and I didn’t have the backbone to say no. The only trouble is that the deeper I dug, the more convinced I became that whatever her motives, my mother was right in fighting the sale. There’s no way I’m going to let her back down after we’ve come this far.”

  “Even if she’s being threatened?”

  “Especially if she’s being threatened,” I declared. “If you give in to threats, in the end you’re just rewarding bullies.”

  “I agree with you one hundred percent,” said Elliott. “But I just love it when you get all riled up like that.” I threw a piece of my bread at him. “I still want to know who you think might have sent it.”

  “Well, for starters, HCC.”

  “In which case they’ll follow it up with something worse if this doesn’t dissuade her.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “If you’re going to go around bullying people, you have to be willing to follow through on your threats or else no one will take you seriously. Everything I’ve found out about Gerald Packman says that he means business and he’s not above using force. When he worked for a fried-chicken franchise, he was having trouble with a couple of his food delivery people refusing to unload trucks. Supposedly he was waiting for them at one of the restaurants. As soon as they showed up, he frog-marched the pair of them into the freezer, tied them to chairs, and made them sit there while he unloaded the truck himself. I think one of them ended up with frostbite. Packman fought him tooth and nail in court alleging that the frostbite was his own damned fault, the result of his being too lazy to do his job. Do you think he sounds like a guy who’s above sending threats to socialites in the mail?”

  “Well, he’s threatened the wrong family,” I said as our waiter materialized with menus and asked if we cared to order something to drink before dinner. I preempted Elliott and ordered a bottle of champagne.

  “Congratulations,” I said once the bottle had been delivered and the tall flutes filled. “I know how much you’re going to miss the Springfield Ramada.”

  We clinked glasses and drank.

  Elliott took my hand across the white linen of the tablecloth and drew his finger gently up the inside of my arm. Over his shoulder I could see the antique bar of ornately pressed tin and a spectacular arrangement of spring flowers. A pretty woman with long dark hair and an elegant black dress leaned over to her male companion and whispered something in his ear. Whatever she said made him tip his head back with laughter.

  I felt the electricity of Elliott’s touch, and my skin thrummed like a living thing. I opened my mouth to speak, hesitating long enough to wonder why I was the only person in the restaurant who didn’t seem to be able to set aside the problems of the day and just enjoy myself. Then I told him the whole story about Mrs. Estrada, her appendix, and the suit against Claudia.

  “Do you think there’s any chance that all of these things are somehow related?” asked Elliott once I’d finished.

  “You mean the patient deaths and the sale of the hospital? I’ve certainly thought about it. The only trouble is that it just doesn’t add up. If it’s someone out to damage the reputation of the hospital, why is it that it’s only Gavin McDermott’s patients who end up dead? Besides, if HCC was trying to make the hospital look bad, you’d think that they’d have gone public by now.”

  Our food arrived and we paused while our waiter set our plates in front of us and asked if there was anything else we needed. Once I’d taken a few bites of cassoulet, I continued.

  “My biggest problem is believing that a large publicly traded corporation somehow arranged for Mrs. Estrada’s appendix to rupture so that they could murder her afterward in order to make either Claudia or the hospital look bad.”

  “What about the other deaths?” asked Elliott. “Could they be a part of the larger plan to a
cquire the hospital?”

  “I go back and forth,” I confessed. “I have moments when I think that Gerald Packman is capable of anything, even murder. Then I stop and wonder if there isn’t some kind of medication I should be taking for paranoia. I mean, this is a health care company we’re talking about, not the evil empire. I think it’s actually much more likely that there’s just some psychopath out there killing off patients because the voices in his head are telling him to.”

  “You know that Packman’s not above feeding the story to the press, if he finds out and decides it’s in his interest.”

  “That’s the trouble. He already knows. He brought it up that time I met him, which tends to confirm our theory about HCC having a mole inside Prescott Memorial, someone who’s feeding them information. But I still can’t figure out why he hasn’t used it.”

  “Maybe he already has,” ventured Elliott.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he doesn’t have to make the deaths public if just threatening to do so will accomplish his mission.“

  “You’re talking about blackmail,” I whispered thoughtfully. “You’re talking about hiring someone to kill McDermott’s patients and then blackmailing McDermott into voting in favor of the sale.”

  “You have to admit it would work.”

  “It seems awfully risky. I’d think it would be easier to just buy the votes.”

  “But blackmail is much more cost-effective. I imagine it would take some serious cash to buy a successful surgeon like McDermott.”

  “Whereas he’d be willing to do almost anything in order to stay successful,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “The only trouble is, I bumped into Julia Gordon. She rattled off the details of several cases where hospital patients were systematically killed off, and in every case it was some kind of nut.”

  “She actually used the word nut?”

  “Let’s just say in each case the perpetrator’s motivations were apparent only to themselves.”

  The waiter came and cleared our plates and took our orders for dessert. I took the opportunity to tell Elliott about my conversation with Laffer and the fact that he’d promised to change his vote provided I could bring him proof of HCC’s wrongdoing.

  “Then I guess you’ll want to hear what we turned up on the fab four.”

  “Who are the fab four?”

  “Our four front-runners for HCC mole: Gavin McDermott, Carl Laffer, Kyle Massius, and Farah Davies. You’ll be happy to hear that I finally remembered where I know Dr. Farah Davies from,” Elliott said. “It came to i me when I was driving back from Springfield tonight.“

  “Where?”

  “She was the third party in a divorce case I was involved in.”

  “I didn’t know you were ever married,” I remarked. “Involved as an investigator,” he corrected me.

  “I also didn’t think you did divorce work.”

  “I did in the beginning. When I was just starting out, I did anything that would help me make my rent. In this case the client was a doctor who was a friend of mine, so when he asked me, I didn’t say no.”

  “So was Farah Davies the wife or the girlfriend? „

  “Neither. She was the wife’s girlfriend.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Scout’s honor,” he replied, holding up his hand in a two-fingered salute while the other held his champagne glass. “Apparently the client’s wife had a very difficult pregnancy with their third child, lots of complications, and Dr. Davies was her OB.”

  “And?”

  “Over the course of the pregnancy the two women became close.”

  “I’m good friends with my dentist,” I protested, “but that doesn’t mean I’m sleeping with her.”

  “Let’s just say they became closer than you and your dentist.”

  “So how did the husband find out?”

  “Well, he figured there was something going on. All of a sudden the wife starts acting weird, staying out late, going away on the weekends. He was afraid that she was seeing another man. That’s when he came to me.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I followed the client’s wife on a weekend trip she was taking to the Kohler spa in Wisconsin.”

  “And?”

  “And it turns out she wasn’t meeting another man, she was meeting Farah Davies.”

  “Maybe they were just going up there for the facials and the massages.”

  “I guess that’s one way to describe what they were doing,” declared Elliott with a look of amusement on his face. “If you want, you can look at the pictures yourself and decide what they were doing.”

  “No thanks, I think I’ll pass.”

  “As you might expect, my doctor friend was absolutely devastated. It’s hard enough when your wife is sleeping with another man, but this...”

  “So did he leave her?”

  “No. She left him. Told him that she’d decided that she wanted to live openly as a lesbian.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “That was the problem. Given the circumstances my client felt he should be granted custody of the children. His wife, needless to say, thought otherwise.”

  “So how did they resolve it? Did they end up fighting it out in court?” I asked, thinking that for all its perceived drama, I actually led a very boring life.

  “It never even got that far,” said Elliott. “As soon as my client filed his custody petition, two lawyers from one of the big national gay-rights organizations paid him a visit at his office.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They told him that if he persisted in seeking full custody of his sons through the courts, they were prepared to fight him with every means at their disposal. As far as they were concerned, his assertion that he was the more fit parent was a blatant example of discrimination based on sexual preference. They told him that they welcomed the opportunity to turn his custody claim into a test case for lesbian rights, make a public issue out of it, put it on the front page.”

  “So what did he end up doing?”

  “He hired an attorney and quietly negotiated a shared custody arrangement with his ex-wife. It wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t think that it was in his sons’ best interests, but he was afraid of what the publicity would do not just to his boys, but to his practice. I never met his wife, so I really don’t know her side of it, and Lord knows in my line of work you learn not to judge, but I can tell you that for the husband the whole thing was incredibly hard.”

  “What about Farah Davies? What was her role in all of this?”

  “You mean besides starring in some rather hot photographs taken with a telephoto lens? Nothing.”

  “Are she and your client’s wife still together?”

  “I don’t know, It’s not as though Dr. Davies is an openly practicing homosexual. In fact, it’s just the opposite. She’s publicly dated a number of men, most recently Kyle Massius, the president of the hospital.”

  “I wonder if she and McDermott were ever an item,” I mused. “That would certainly explain his behavior toward her at the party the other night.”

  “You mean he might have had a reason? I thought it was just because he was a jerk. But any way you look at it, Dr. Davies has some pretty good reasons to not want some parts of her personal life made public.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It probably wouldn’t help her practice any if word got out that she was into women.”

  “Women go to male doctors all the time,” I said. “Still, I see your point. Dr. Davies has every reason in the world to want to avoid having her sexual preferences made public, but I don’t see how that could possibly have any bearing on the situation with HCC.”

  “They could be blackmailing her,” offered Elliott thoughtfully, lifting a forkful of cheesecake to his lips. “But actually I like her better for the HCC mole.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, for one thing she’s ambitious. She
made no secret of the fact that she wanted the chief of staff job and was furious when she was passed over for Carl Laffer. Not only that, but obstetrics is by far the biggest moneymaker for HCC. Whenever HCC moves into a new market, the first thing they do is go around cutting deals with the local obstetricians, trying to get them to send their patients to one of the company’s hospitals. If I were Gerald Packman, Farah Davies would be my first choice.”

  “Except for one small thing,” I interjected. “She’s not a trustee, which means that she doesn’t have a vote. She’s only a department head. She’s not privy to the kind of financial information that I’d want if I were in Packman’s position.”

  “But if she’s close to Massius, he might be passing her information. And she might be able to influence his vote.”

  “She wouldn’t have to,” I pointed out. “It would be so much simpler to just make a deal with Massius. He’s sick and tired of running a prestigious but otherwise impoverished institution. He’d love the idea of himself at HCC—a corner office, a seat on the corporate jet.... If I had to pick the person most likely to sell out to HCC, it would have to be him. Not only is he in the best position to help HCC with insider information, but he stands the most to gain from striking a deal with them up front. He gives them his vote and whatever information they ask for now in exchange for a big job with an even bigger salary once they take over.

  “Right now he’s just an underpaid administrator who has to not only suck up to everyone who might have fifty dollars to give, but bow and scrape in front of everyone from the medical staff to my mother. A deal with HCC would turn him into one of the most powerful corporate players in town. People would be standing in line to bow and scrape in front of him.”

  “Okay,” said Elliott, “we’ll put him on top of our list.”

  “The only problem is that if he does turn out to be the mole, it puts me in the weakest position.”

  “How so?”

  “Massius is an administrator, not a physician. Therefore he has the simplest relationship with the hospital and the least responsibility.”