Dead Certain (35 page)

“What the
fuck
do you think you’re doing calling me at home in the middle of the night? I don’t care who the hell you think you are. You have a lot of nerve! How the hell did you even get my number?”

“From my mother” I said sweetly.

“Then I suppose you’re going to tell me what the fuck you want.”

“You and I need to talk.”

“About what?” he demanded. His voice suddenly seemed not just loud, but belligerent. He was either drunk or close to it.

“You and HCC.”

“No fucking way. This constitutes harassment! I categorically refuse to discuss this with you or anybody else. Of all the nerve—”

“No problem,” I said smoothly. “But I just want you to know that I’m going to the courthouse first thing on Monday morning, and I’m filing a lawsuit against HCC, alleging that they made use of misappropriated confidential information in their offer to buy Prescott Memorial and identifying you specifically by name as the person who gave it to them. It doesn’t matter to me one way or another if you want to talk or not. I’m just calling you as a courtesy.” Then I hung up the phone.

I’d only managed to count to seven before my phone rang. His phone must have had an automatic dial feature.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock at Rinalli’s—222 South Wabash,” he said.

Then the line went dead.

CHAPTER 28

I hadn’t really expected to sleep, but McDermott’s reaction to my call erased whatever small possibility there might have been. I had hoped to strike a nerve, and I’d succeeded. If I played my cards right, by tomorrow afternoon I would have the proof I needed that Gavin McDermott was the HCC mole. I tried calling Laffer, but whichever number I called led inevitably to his answering service, so I had to be satisfied with leaving messages asking him to call me in the morning.

It wasn’t hard for me to imagine McDermott selling out for the money. Even though he made what most people would consider a king’s ransom, he had three ex-wives to support and more than a half a dozen children. His eldest, I knew, had just been accepted to Princeton to the tune of $40,000 a year after taxes. And while Patsy had money—she’d played matrimonial roulette enough times—I had no doubt her income and assets had been placed safely beyond McDermott’s reach before she said “I do.”

The more I thought about it, the more I could also imagine McDermott slipping Pavulon into his patients’ IVs. Even though it didn’t make perfect sense that he would choose his own patients, perhaps he’d been reluctant to bring that kind of suspicion on his colleagues, who might have insisted more actively on some kind of investigation. It would be just like Gavin to be so certain of the unassailability of his own reputation that he’d naturally assume that suspicion would fall on someone else, perhaps on the nursing staff, instead of himself.

Of course, none of this explained what had happened to Claudia. Had Claudia seen something she shouldn’t have? Perhaps McDermott fiddling with a patient’s IV? Or had she merely spotted something in the patient data that tied all the deaths irrevocably to him?

I went into the kitchen to retrieve the box of Frango Mints. On the table beside the packages was a pile of mail that I flipped through quickly. Most of it was junk, but there was also a manila envelope that had apparently been hand delivered earlier in the day from Joan Born-stein. I tucked it under my arm and took it back with me to my home office.

As the night wore on I carefully worked my way through both the file and the chocolate mints. On top was a memo from Dr. Cho summarizing the team’s findings about the patients who had died. Even after I’d read it through twice, it still seemed like gobbledygook. The only thing that struck me about the data was that the patients had been as a rule elderly. With the exception of Mrs. Estrada, all were without close family. Besides the fact that they were all McDermott’s patients, the only other common denominator seemed to be that they were all people who wouldn’t be missed.

Mrs. Lapinsky, the lone survivor, was by far the most interesting. Elliott had found her in a rehabilitation hospital in Blue Island, where he was planning to visit her the next day. Reading through the summary of her treatment prepared by Dr. Cho, I wondered whether it would turn out to be a wasted trip. Even before suffering a mild stroke as a result of her cardiopulmonary arrest, Mrs. Lapinsky would have made a less-than-reliable witness. She was an alcoholic with a fourth-grade education who’d spent much of her adult life on welfare. A chronological listing of emergency-room visits offered an encyclopedia of complaints: high blood pressure, diabetes, headaches, ulcers, shingles, gallstones, blurred vision, and boils.

Once, close to the beginning of her rotation, Claudia had told me that the biggest threat to the work of Prescott Memorial Hospital was selfishness. The cruel reality, she explained, is that in any place and at any time roughly 20 percent of the people in society either cannot or will not take care of themselves. It was up to us, said Claudia, to decide if we were going to pick up the tab for the 20 percent, and what we chose to do said more about us than it did about the poor.

When I protested that the uninsured were not turned away from receiving necessary care, I thought she was going to slug me. True the uninsured can take their diabetes, their tuberculosis, their hypertension, and their obesity to emergency rooms where they must be treated free. But Claudia was quick to point out that treating the uninsured by treating them only in emergencies is often the most expensive course of action, the high price we pay for choosing to look away.

An uninsured diabetic is cheap to treat when he is delivered comatose to the emergency room and dies. But a more typical emergency-room visit brings charges of between two hundred and five hundred dollars, while the regular checkups and preventive care that would have avoided the coma in the first place would have cost less than a quarter of the amount.

The question, according to Claudia, was always what kind of society we wanted to live in. Did we want to live in the Chicago of Everett Prescott’s time, when there were people dying in the streets, or did we want to do our great-grandfathers one better?

In addition to his summary, Dr. Cho had stapled a copy of the note the neurologist who’d treated Mrs. Lapinsky after her episode of cardiopulmonary arrest had written on her chart. It was clear from his tone that he thought she was crazy. Delusional. A dried-out ex-alcoholic gabbling out a garbled account of what her shriveled brain had concocted during a grand mal seizure. According to his notes his follow-up took the form of a request for a psychiatric referral, but there was no indication in any of the documents that I had that one was ever done.

I dropped off into a restless sleep, wondering whether Mrs. Lapinsky’s devil with the “big eye” meant that she was crazy, or that I was.

The next morning I took a shower and banged around the kitchen in my underwear in a futile attempt to make coffee. My new kitchen was a cook’s Valhalla, filled with cupboards of every size and description, including several with built-in hooks or shelves the purpose of which completely eluded me. I had no idea what had possessed Stephen to order them all, whether he’d hoped someday to venture into the kitchen himself or whether, like my mother, he was eternally optimistic that I might eventually reform.

The coffeepot was one of those Italian ones that does everything but curl your hair. After pushing all the buttons in every combination I could think of, I couldn’t get it to produce anything other than a kind of hissing sound. I padded back upstairs to the bedroom in frustration, slipped on a pair of jeans and an old Harvard sweatshirt that had once belonged to Russell, and set out in search of the nearest Starbucks.

I didn’t have far to look. The doorman on duty directed me four blocks west to the one on Rush and Oak. Standing in line with all the slightly hungover beautiful people who lived and worked in the neighborhood, it occurred to me that instead of Hyde Park, I was now living in the Chicago equivalent of Beverly Hills. As I clutched my enormous latte in both hands and walked back toward the lake, I wasn’t sure how I was going to like it.

As I got close to my apartment I was surprised to see a familiar figure being disgorged from a taxicab. It was Carl Laffer, swathed in the Gore-Tex of a serious runner, pulling himself and a couple of big shopping bags out of the back of the taxi.

“I was hoping I would catch you,” he said, unfurling his rangy frame and slipping a couple of bills to the driver. “I got your message this morning about wanting to meet, and I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. Your mother told me I might find you here.”

“What’s all this?” I asked, eyeing the shopping bags.

“Claudia’s things from the hospital. Your mother said she thought you’d be going to New York for the funeral, so I wanted to be sure you had a chance to go through them and take her parents whatever you thought they might want.”

“What kind of stuff is it?” I asked, feeling strangely reluctant to pick it up.

“I don’t know. I didn’t really look.” My heart leapt in my chest, thinking that Claudia’s notes on the patient charts might be among them. “I was just going for a run along the lake before I stopped in to see my patients at Northwestern. I thought I’d drop the bags by as long as I was in the neighborhood.”

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I had wanted to talk to Laffer after I’d had a chance to confront McDermott, not before.

“Would you like me to help you get the bags upstairs?” he asked eyeing the cup of coffee in my hand.

“I’d appreciate it,” I said.

We each grabbed a bag as the doorman swung the door open for us, touched his cap, and wished us both a very good morning.

“How long have you lived in this apartment?” he asked, making small talk as we stepped into the elevator.

“Since yesterday,” I said. “I bought the apartment almost a year ago and gutted it,” I said, deciding to leave Stephen Azorini out of it. I figured if he hadn’t already learned the details of our breakup by reading the papers, it wasn’t my job to bring him current. “The work was finished a couple of weeks ago, but I’d agreed to stay in the apartment in Hyde Park with Claudia until she was finished with her fellowship.”

“I’m sure you didn’t want to leave her alone in that neighborhood,” he observed.

“I didn’t want to leave her, period,” I said, my voice tightening up with the unwanted approach of tears. “But she was moving back to New York. It seemed like a natural time.”

“I don’t need to tell you,” said Laffer, with a sad shake of his head, “but your roommate was one of the most talented surgeons I ever had the privilege of working with. She was one of those rare few who, when they looked at something, saw a solution instead of a problem.”

I nodded, fighting back the tears, as the elevator came to rest on seven. I squeezed awkwardly past Laffer through the narrow elevator door as he chivalrously hung back and waited for me to pass.

“Only one apartment per floor?” inquired Laffer.

“That’s the way the building was originally designed,”

I told him dutifully. “This particular apartment is actually a duplex. The apartments on seven and eight have been joined together to form a single residence.” I wanted to kick myself for sounding like a realtor, but there was something about the shock of losing Claudia that had knocked me off kilter. I no longer had any idea of what was going to come out of my mouth. I just hoped Laffer wasn’t the kind to easily take offense. I thought that he and I had gotten off on the right foot the other day, and I didn’t want to do anything to change that.

“You must have room enough for a staff in here,” he said, as he stepped inside the massive foyer. At the sight of the apartment, I could tell, he suddenly felt less urgent about fitting in his run. “This place looks like it goes on forever.”

“Actually, the building was designed with servants’ quarters in the basement,” I said somewhat apologetically. “When you buy your unit, the co-op board assigns you a corresponding staff apartment. I’ve just moved in, so I don’t have anybody working for me yet, but the apartment is quite nice. You can’t beat the location,” I added stupidly.

“I’ll say,” remarked Laffer, drawn in spite of himself to the windows on the far side of the living room and their commanding view of the northward skyline and the lake.

I set my purse down beside the bags in the entryway.

“Would you like a tour?” I inquired.

“If you’re sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” he replied, unable to completely conceal the envy in his voice.

“This building was designed by David Adler,” I began, leading him through the living room into the library, a fantasy of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves complete with a two-story ladder that moved on a wheeled track that ran around the entire perimeter of the room. I turned to face him and saw the wonder on his face. It was Adler’s sense of proportion. It struck everyone the same way. Even if you didn’t realize it, there was something about the perfection of the space that made everyone look dreamy. “I guess that’s why they call it genius,” I said to myself, watching Laffer as he marveled at the room, slowly unzipping his warm-up jacket.

I opened my mouth to say something about the paneling, but the words would not come. They stayed there, stuck in my throat, as I stared, dumbfounded and transfixed. There, on the front of Carl Laffer’s T-shirt, as big and as plain as the words on a stop sign, was the single letter
I.