Dead Certain (18 page)

Making my way north, I stopped and had breakfast at the University Club with a sober and repentant Mark Millman. Of the two of them it was Jeff Tannenbaum who looked the worse for the wear and gratefully seized the opportunity of my presence to go home. From the look on his face, I could tell he’d found baby-sitting Millman a less-than-congenial assignment. I didn’t blame him. Making sure the client stayed away from the bottle wasn’t what people went to law school for.

Upstairs in the dining room only a handful of tables were taken. The University Club was so far from exclusive that it was sometimes referred to snidely as the Ubiquitous Club, which was probably why I liked it. But except for the athletic facilities, on weekends it was pretty much deserted. Only a smattering of the guest rooms were occupied, mostly by members temporarily on the outs with their wives.

We were ushered to a table by the window that overlooked Buckingham Fountain, which had just recently been turned on for the season. Millman still looked a little green around the gills, a condition I knew was unlikely to be improved by the University Club’s indifferent kitchen. Serves him right, I thought to myself savagely. Cheryl had sent him over some fresh duds—a navy blazer and khaki pants from Brooks Brothers—clothes that if we didn’t manage to make a deal with Icon, I’d end up paying for out of my own pocket. After we ordered, I asked Millman about Delius. I was glad to hear that he and Jeff had gone to Prescott Memorial to look in on him the night before. I’m sure it was just how Jeff had planned on spending his Saturday night.

“I still can’t believe that of the two of us, it was Bill who had the heart attack,” declared his partner, shaking his head over his coffee cup. “Look at me. I’m forty pounds overweight—at least—eat red meat, drink like a fish, and haven’t seen the inside of a gym in the last ten years except to watch my six-year-old play basketball. So who gets it in the chest? Professor wheat germ of the Nordic Track. Go figure.”

“So how’s he doing?”

“They’ve got him hooked up to so much electronic equipment I bet he can pick up the Cubs game without an antenna.”

“Is he awake? Is he talking at all?”

“When we were there, all he did was moan,” said Millman. “I don’t think he even knew we were there. But I did talk to one of the doctors, and he told me that his recovery was progressing normally and he’s going to end up being fine.”

“Did he say when?” I asked, knowing that I must sound callous. The arrival of our eggs, served on chargers of antique silver and predictably cold, delayed his answer.

“Why? Does it matter?” asked Millman miserably.

“Gabriel Hurt came to see me Friday night.” I raised my hand up, signaling that he should let me finish. “He’s still interested in making a deal for the input driver, but he wants to sit down face-to-face with Delius.”

“Shit!” exclaimed Millman under his breath as he slammed his hand on the edge of the table, making the silverware jump. “I can’t believe it!”

“I’m afraid you can’t swear in this club,” I informed him calmly, helping myself to a sip of my coffee. “Better keep that in mind when I tell you the rest of it. Apparently, Hurt’s also been talking to another group that’s developed a similar product.”

“Whatever the other guys are willing to give him, we’ll give him double,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. With his partner in the hospital, unable to make the case for maintaining control, all Millman could see were dollar signs.

“I’m afraid that’s not the issue,” I replied. “Icon’s going to drive a hard bargain no matter what. I’m sure they’ll wring the same concessions out of whomever they decide to go with.”

“Then what are they interested in?”

“People.”

“We’re talking about a computer system,” Millman shot back.

“Not entirely,” I ventured. “I don’t know the first thing about this other group—”

“There’s only one other company it could be, and they’re a bunch of snot-nosed kids from Seattle who don’t know their asses from—”

“Don’t tell me,” I said as I wrote down Elliott’s office phone number for him. “Tell him.”

“Who’s he?”

“A private investigator. He has people who will find out everything there is to know about these guys in Seattle. In the meantime I need to know who Delius has working with him on the input driver.”

“Nobody really, just a bunch of kids. He picks his top students and lets them work on the project in exchange for credit as an independent study.”

“Is there any student in particular who stands out? Anybody who’s been with him a long time?”

“There’s this kid Felix, or maybe it’s Fernando, who’s been his research assistant for a couple of years...,” Millman offered uncertainly.

“Then I need you to find this young man whose name begins with
F
and tell him that I need to see him right away.”

I spent the rest of the day holed up at my parents’ house with Denise and her public relations minions planning Mother’s assault against HCC, while security guards patrolled the perimeter and kept the minicams at bay. I had to admit that I found the whole thing interesting. Besides her usual staff, Denise had brought along the public relations equivalent of a SWAT team: a video coach, a “content” specialist, and a wraithlike young man dressed from head to toe in black who was in charge of hair and wardrobe.

Like the theater inherent in the courtroom or at the negotiating table, the battle for public opinion was an effort to influence the point of view of others. However, in this case, the stage was not only much bigger, but the rules were much less clearly defined. Instead of constructing arguments and interpreting precedent, Denise was trying to influence events by creating the appearance of being right. It didn’t take long to figure out that
appearance
was the operative word.

While my father retreated to the library with his bottle of gin and whatever sporting event was on television, Denise and the video coach set up operations in the music room. Having never seen my mother so much as take a suggestion from anybody, much less an order, I stood at the ready to smooth ruffled feathers, but to my surprise there weren’t any. Mother was an apt pupil, intelligent and intent on getting it right on the first try. She was also indefatigable, keeping at it until she was polished and perfect on every conceivable issue relating to Prescott Memorial, nonprofit medical care, and the future of charitable institutions in Chicago.

Of all the people in the room, I was the most impressed.

The next morning Mother and I were at the courthouse early. The time had come to file our suit against HCC. We were not alone. Callahan Ross employed four full-time docket clerks whose job it was to file documents and keep track of court appearances. The most senior of them, Libbert Pinto, a barrel-chested man with elaborately brilliantined hair, walked ahead of us at a decorous distance. The truth is I was a stranger to the courthouse and didn’t have the first idea of where to go to file a complaint. Indeed, my presence and more importantly that of my mother had less to do with administrative necessity than with the TV cameras waiting for us on the other side of Daley Plaza.

The paperwork took only a minute, and by the time we were done, the news crews had finished setting up. One look at them clustered together expectantly and I had to fight the urge to bolt, but Mother fixed her most winning smile on her face and prepared to face her inquisitors. Even I had to admit that she was nothing short of amazing.

Coached by Denise, Mother distilled our reasons for wanting to block the sale of Prescott Memorial Hospital into snappy sound bites, which she dispensed with the poise of a professional. Without any sense of irony, Denise had convinced Mother to sell our legal challenge as a David versus Goliath story with the small and determined Prescotts and Millhollands pitting themselves against an unfeeling and monolithic corporation. This struck me as so preposterous that I was worried about keeping a straight face, but just as Denise had predicted, the reporters ate it up.

When her PR handlers signaled that it was time for Mother to move on to her schedule of print interviews, I was grateful. Even the horror show of a day that I was facing seemed preferable to a daylong grin fest with the press—and that was even taking into account the fact that my first call of the day was at the hospital.

It always amazes me how quickly the prosperity of the business district gives way to something else. Five blocks from where the young Turks of the financial markets juggle buy and sell orders from Japan and worry about making the payments on their Ferraris, families live from welfare check to welfare check from one generation to the next. There were no Starbucks on these street corners, no Armani-clad strivers, just empty bottles and swirling trash and the hard, cold reality of the street.

Traffic thinned out as soon as I shook clear of the Loop. Everybody who had someplace to go was heading in the other direction, trying to get to work on time. I turned west on Sixteenth Street, heading over the railroad yards toward Canal. In the daytime the neighborhood surrounding Prescott Memorial looked even shabbier than at night. Fast-food wrappers blew through the streets carried by the breeze while the asphalt glittered with shards of broken glass.

I parked in the lot closest to the main building and said a silent prayer for my car. My grandfather had always envisioned his hospital as an oasis, a place of beauty as well as healing. Now the eaves sagged on the stately red brick buildings, the lawn was trampled, and the sidewalks were cracked. Still, compared to what lay around it, the hospital campus looked like Lourdes.

I decided to see Bill Delius first. I was also hoping that I might bump into Claudia. Something about the hang-up calls was still nagging at me, and I wanted to ask her about her weekend schedule. I also wanted to wish her luck in today’s morbidity and mortality conference.

But when I arrived on the postsurgical floor, there was another doctor sitting at the nurses’ station. When I asked, he told me that a construction worker had just been helicoptered in from the work site where he’d fallen, impaling himself on a ten-foot length of steel pipe. My roommate would be in the operating room for the foreseeable future.

I found Bill Delius easily enough. He may have been only a semi-impoverished college professor, but by the standards of Prescott Memorial, the fact that he had health insurance made him a wealthy man. He had one of the private rooms reserved for paying patients down at the end of the hall. I knocked softly, not wanting to disturb him if he was resting. Receiving no reply, I stuck my head in cautiously for a peek.

He looked terrible, though I don’t know what else I expected. After all, they’d opened him up from stem to stern and even harvested veins from his legs to graft onto the vessels leading to his heart. According to Claudia, even though the procedure is common, it’s one of the most invasive—and for the surgeon, exhausting—in the medical repertoire. When they’re done, they still have to connect the two sides of the breastbone with steel wires, and just sewing everything back up can take two surgeons working together for hours.

Looking closely, I thought Delius seemed more out of it than asleep. The drugs that poured in through the IV line to control his blood pressure, his heart rate, and his pain also caused a backlash of interactions and side effects. As I eased myself into the visitor’s chair it occurred to me just how vulnerable he was lying there unconscious and alone. I thought of Mrs. Estrada and the other patients who had died, and wondered if they had been on this floor.

Bill Delius wasn’t dying—at least not while I was in the room—but unfortunately he wasn’t doing anything else either. Seeing him hooked to monitors and with tubes running in and out of his body, I felt all my Monday-morning bravado drain away. I’d known what Bill Delius had wanted before his heart attack, but everything had changed in those terrible seconds on the sidewalk outside of McCormack Place. Did I have any idea of what he would want now? And who the hell did I think I was, going to bat in his place with Mark Millman and whatever graduate student he managed to get ahold of?

I looked down at Bill Delius’s sallow face, the oxygen cannula taped to his nose, but as hard as I looked, I saw no answers there.

I found Kyle Massius in his corner office in the hospital’s administrative wing. He did not look at all happy to see me.

“I really should call security and have you thrown out,” said the man I’d dunked in the pool every summer when we were still kids.

“I’d love to see you try,” I countered easily, settling into a chair. After all, it’s hard to be intimidated by somebody once you’ve seen them with French fries stuck up their nose. In an earlier generation Kyle would have been considered the classic second son. Clever and ambitious, he’d been raised to privilege and then pushed out to make a living when his father left his mother and squandered all his money on a twenty-two-year-old soap opera star. With an interest in science but a talent for business, he’d gotten his degree in hospital administration and used his family connections to land his job at Prescott Memorial.

“Do you have any idea how much trouble your mother is going to end up causing for herself with this crusade of hers?” he demanded, running his hand through what was left of his hair and giving me what I’m sure he thought of as a very pointed look over the top of his glasses.