Dead Certain (21 page)

“But if they’re so desperate to keep us from showing that Mrs. Estrada’s death was part of a pattern, won’t that just make them all the more determined to blame it on me?”

“Yes. But it also gives you something terribly important.”

“What’s that?”

“The ability to help yourself,” Joan Bornstein replied. “How?” demanded Claudia, her face lighting up with something very much like hope.

“Your job is to find out as much as you possibly can about the other patients who died. Review their charts, talk to the nurses who took care of them.”

“What for? What am I trying to find out?”

“You’re looking for patterns. Any kind of similarities. Did they all die at the same time of day? During the same shift? What kinds of medications had they been receiving? What kinds of procedures had been performed? Anything that links them together.”

“Patient records are confidential,” Claudia reminded her.

“I know that and I’m not asking you to divulge any information to me or anyone else,” Joan was quick to assure her. “But there are no moral, ethical, or legal reasons why
you
can’t go back and review patient records. We’ll cross those other bridges when and if you find some sort of pattern in the charts.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” inquired Claudia. “How am I supposed to go into the hospital every day? Half the people I work with think I did something wrong that killed my patient, and the other half assume I’m being set up to take the fall for McDermott. Either way I’m going to be under the microscope.“

“I know it’s going to be hard,” Joan assured her earnestly, “but now more than ever it’s absolutely imperative that you go into the hospital every day you’re scheduled and continue to do your work according to your usual high standards. You can’t let yourself be coerced or co-opted into making it any easier for them to sabotage your career. It’s all about showing them that you aren’t about to roll over for them. To make them realize that if they want to take you down, they’re going to have to fight you every inch of the way.”

Claudia absorbed all of this with a kind of grim stoicism. From her face, I couldn’t even begin to guess what she was thinking.

I prayed that my faith in Joan Bornstein, in whose hands Claudia’s future now rested, was not misplaced. Of course, I was also furious at Gavin McDermott for having put her in a situation that put everything she’d worked so hard for, for so many years, at risk. I was disgusted by his calculation and his cowardice, not to mention his eagerness to offer her up as sacrificial victim.

But overriding all of this was a terrible sense of fear, fear not just for Claudia, but for myself. Sitting in Joan Bornstein’s office with my old college roommate brought home the fact that it is a small world filled with overlapping relationships and conflicting loyalties. The truth is I didn’t know what I would do if it came down to choosing between saving my roommate’s reputation or that of Prescott Memorial Hospital.

CHAPTER 15

In a perfect world I would have not only driven Claudia home but also made her a cup of tea, chatting with her until she’d drunk it and drifted off to sleep. Having spent thirty-six hours at the hospital before being dragged in front of the M8cM panel, my roommate was starting to resemble an ambulatory corpse. But today of all days I was acutely aware of the world’s imperfections, and I had to settle for putting Claudia in a cab and sending her back to Hyde Park by herself.

As we were walking out of Joan’s office her receptionist handed me a message from Cheryl. It said that Gabriel Hurt was returning to the West Coast earlier than expected. The only time he was now available to meet with Delirium was two o’clock at the Four Seasons. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to two. I hoped that the words
your secretary will coordinate
written on the message pad meant that Cheryl had managed to get in touch with Millman and that he and Bill Delius’s graduate student were on their way.

As I watched Cheryl’s taxi disappear from view I realized that I had ten minutes and the Four Seasons was nine blocks away. I suddenly felt exhausted, as if I’d lived half a dozen lifetimes since I’d stood beside my mother on the courthouse steps that morning. As I stepped out into the street to flag down another cab I tried to remind myself that this was what I lived for.

I had the driver drop me at the corner of Walton and Michigan. The entrance to the hotel is on Walton, but the street is one-way the wrong direction. At this time of day it could easily take ten minutes to just make it around the block. On foot, I made it to the Four Seasons breathless, but with two minutes to spare.

The actual lobby of the Four Seasons is on the fifth floor of the Magnificent Mile building. All that greeted guests on the street level was a smallish marble foyer with a security desk and a bellman’s station. It was here that I found Millman pacing like an irritated jungle cat. Doing his best to stay out of his way was a scraggly youth with dirty blond hair pulled into a scrawny ponytail and what I’m sure he hoped passed for a goatee on his chin. Fie was dressed in a pair of enormous blue jeans, so wide they might have been wings, a rumpled plaid shirt, and a pair of much-worn black Converse high-tops.

I’m not normally the sort of person who likes to touch people in the course of conversation. I was raised believing that unless you’re engaged to be married, a handshake is more than enough. But as soon as I spotted Millman, I cast repressed Waspdom to the winds and put my arm around his shoulder. The gesture was meant to reassure, but I was the one who was relieved when all I smelled were Altoids on his breath. Delius’s computer prodigy might look like a dopey skateboard delinquent, but at least he hadn’t driven Millman to drink. It was much too early to tell what effect he would end up having on me.

Millman introduced us. The young man’s name was Floyd Wiznewski, and he looked so nervous that you’d think he was about to meet God, or the Lord High Executioner, or both. I put my arm around him, too.

“Listen,” I said, as Millman pushed the button to summon the elevator. “Gabriel Hurt is a man just like anybody else. He chews his food. He gets wet when it rains. Don’t let him scare you.”

I looked at Floyd to see how he was taking this. He looked like he’d just swallowed a mouse.

The elevator stopped, and we stepped out into the lobby, opulent by any standards but all the more incongruous for being on the fifth floor. I didn’t know anything about Floyd Wiznewski, but judging from his expression, I guessed he’d never been inside a four-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel before. I sent Millman to the desk to have them call up to Hurt’s suite and did my best to keep Floyd from gaping.

“I went to see Bill Delius this morning,” I said, walking Floyd slowly past the fountain and the indoor plantings of orchids toward the bank of elevators that whisked people silently between the fifth floor and the penthouse.

“How’s he doing?” Floyd asked. Either he had some kind of weird speech impediment or all the moisture in his mouth had disappeared from nervousness.

“He seemed much better than the last time I saw him,” I said truthfully, neglecting to add that the last time I’d seen him, he’d been clinically dead. “He was so relieved when I told him that you were going to be meeting with the Icon people,” I continued, passing with a tiny blip of guilt into the realm of pure invention. “He told me that you’d been with him right from VI,” I said, hoping I was getting the jargon right, “and that nobody understood how he coded things better than you did.”

Floyd seemed to relax a little, or at the very least he seemed to be breathing.

“I assume you’ve seen
Star Wars,”
I ventured, knowing it was like asking a priest whether he’d ever heard of a book called the Bible. “Then maybe you’ll remember that throughout the whole movie Luke Sky-walker never seemed nervous. Now I’m sure that there are some George Lucas fans out there who’ll tell you that it was because of the Force, that he knew what his destiny was and so he wasn’t afraid. But I actually think the explanation was simpler than that.”

“Of course it was the Force,” protested Floyd, indignation overriding his nervousness. “That was the whole
point.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “Or maybe it was that Luke knew from the first time that he saw the message from Princess Leia that the Rebel Alliance was no match for the Death Star. It was hopeless. It was the classic David-versus-Goliath situation. He wasn’t afraid, because he had absolutely nothing to lose.

“Now I’m just a lawyer, not a Jedi master. I can’t tell whether it’s our destiny to make a deal with Icon and go on to greatness. But what I
can
tell with complete certainty, is that, at this point in time, we have absolutely nothing to lose by trying.”

A butler was summoned to the hotel lobby; he had a special key to the elevator that would allow it to take us up to the penthouse. Millman muttered something about feeling like he was in a James Bond movie, but when the doors opened, we stepped over the threshold of what looked like a very well appointed college dormitory on the night before exams. Icon had apparently taken the entire floor. Kids no older than Floyd, and some who looked younger, padded around in their stocking feet, talking on cell phones and babbling about bugs and beta versions.

An acerbic-looking young man in a custom-made suit was waiting to receive us. I smothered my instinct to introduce myself and shake his hand. In Silicon Valley the rules of corporate behavior are the inverse of those in the rest of the universe. In the computer world, formality is the exception, and power rests with the least well dressed person in the room.

We were escorted into the penthouse living room, which looked like a room in my parents’ house but with an even more spectacular view. With the city spread out in one direction and the lake in the other, it was easy to be distracted from the chaos going on all around us. Several people I recognized from the transaction team lounged around the room, either pecking at their laptops or with their cell phones glued to their ears. The wreckage of lunch was strewn over the coffee table. I eyed the cold shrimp as I scanned the room for signs of Gabriel Hurt. I spotted him in a distant corner of the room playing pinball.

We waited, awkward and ignored, in the center of the room. I thought about Gerald Packman and his chess clock and realized that in his own way Hurt was every bit as controlling.

“Well, hi there!” he announced genially once he’d finished his game and crossed the room to join us. “I’m trying to get back up to my old college score, but I must be getting old or something.” We all laughed dutifully. “Where’s Bill?” demanded Hurt.

“He wishes he could be here, believe me,” I answered quickly. “Unfortunately he’s still in the hospital. He’s sent you Floyd Wiznewski in his place. Floyd’s been working with Delius on the project from the very beginning.”

“Pleased to meet you, Floyd,” said Hurt, keeping his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. He turned to the dark-suited man who’d met us at the elevator. “Darren, will you please take Mr. Millman to review the numbers with the guys from banking?”

The seeds of an objection formed themselves in my mind, but I deliberately ignored them. Icon held all the cards and called all the shots.

“Oh, good, there’s Mindy!” exclaimed Hurt. “Mindy, this is Kate Millholland. She’s the one who sent me the game.”

“Cool,” said Mindy, an athletic young woman whose white jeans and white T-shirt made her look like some sort of hip private nurse.

“Mindy, will you take Kate into the dining room and treat her to some of your famous Reiki?”

“No, thank you,” I answered, thinking that I was being offered something to eat.”

“No, no, I insist,” said Hurt. “Consider it a thank-you for the game. Besides, you look like you could use it.” Mindy gave me the same beatific smile you see on the Moonies who accost you at the airport and invited me to follow her into the dining room.

“Just take your shoes off and lie down on the table,” she said, pulling the curtains and dimming the lights. The table was covered with bed sheets and there was some kind of incense burning in little brass pots on top of the Sheraton sideboard.

“Excuse me?” I inquired with as much poise as I could muster, which frankly wasn’t much.

“Don’t worry,” replied Mindy. “I’m only going to do your hands, feet, and head. There’s no need to get undressed.”

“And what exactly are you going to do to my hands, feet, and head?”

“Didn’t Gabe tell you?” she asked, tipping her head back and laughing. “I’m his personal masseuse.”

I considered for a moment. Then I sighed and hoisted myself up onto the table. In less than a minute, I found myself listening to Indian sitar music while Mindy pressed the various spots on my feet that she assured me were connected to my internal organs. There was also something about trying to visualize different colors that I didn’t quite follow. Not that I was actually paying any attention. All I could do was keep thinking to myself that they didn’t do this kind of thing in any other business.

By the time I left the Four Seasons, I felt much better, though I couldn’t decide whether it was because Mindy had succeeded in releasing my toxins or because I had the draft copy of a deal term sheet in my hand. As the doorman held the door of the cab open for Millman and Wiznewski, who were heading to Morton’s to celebrate, I realized that I hadn’t even told Floyd that because Delius had given him shares in Delirium in lieu of a raise the past two years, he was about to become a millionaire. As they pulled away from the curb I decided it was okay to save it. He was already walking on air from having beaten Gabriel Hurt at pinball.