Dead Certain (3 page)

“Nobody knows,” reported Jeff Tannenbaum, the as- , sociate on whose broad shoulders I’d been heaping the grunt work of the transaction. “Hurt phoned from the plane and said he wasn’t coming. We asked, but I don’t think he gave his lawyers a reason. They just packed up and left.”

“So We don’t know whether the deal is off or on,” I complained. I resented the lawyers’ blind obedience to Gabriel Hurt less than the fact that they were probably back at their hotel by now, dialing room service and turning the hot water taps to full. I also reminded myself that it was too early to tell what it meant. Gabriel Hurt had a reputation for driving a hard bargain, and he was powerful enough to not have to play by the rules.

“I don’t give a shit why they left,” snapped Millman, furiously staring me in the face. “What I want to know is what you plan on doing to get them to come back.”

When I got back to my office, I asked Cheryl to bring me a cup of coffee and a bag of M&M’s. Then I started working the phones. The first thing I did was call and leave messages for the Icon people at the Four Seasons, where I knew they were all staying. According to the newspaper, Hurt and his retinue had taken the top three floors of the hotel, including the penthouse. Then I called everyone I could think of who’d had dealings with Gabriel Hurt. Of course, this wasn’t the first round of calls I’d made to get the skinny on the famous software mogul, but now I had a better idea of what I needed to know. It wasn’t until I dialed the third number on my list that I hit pay dirt.

Computer geeks, in general, make terrible liars. To them, the truth is too absolute to bend, and the one on the other end of the line was no exception. He was the computer guru for Stephen’s company, Azor Pharmaceuticals, but he also did some independent consulting for me on the side.

“I told you that Hurt can be unpredictable,” he observed as soon as I finished telling him what had just happened. “Who knows why he pulls this kind of shit? When you’re Gabriel Hurt, you don’t need a reason. However, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I just heard a rumor that there’s a group out of Seattle that’s developed this new input device that’s twice as fast as Delirium’s and is easier to configure with network applications.”

“And that would mean in English?” I inquired.

“You’re fucked. Somebody’s built a better mousetrap than Delirium, and they’re probably selling it to Icon even as we speak.”

Cheryl stuck her head in the door to say good-bye. I’d forgotten that she told me that she had to leave early for an interview. I wished her luck and told her to switch roe over to voice mail and shut the door behind her. I couldn’t believe that in two more months she would be gone. Mrs. Goodlow, the firm’s iron-backed office manager, had already begun sending me potential replacements to interview, but so far I found that I had little stomach for the task. Even though I’d always known that one day Cheryl would be leaving, somehow it didn’t make it any easier. Cheryl had started in the night law school program at Loyola the same year that I’d joined the firm. Don’t worry, I was told, with her working fulltime, it’ll take her forever to finish. Now suddenly forever was here.

The strange part was that her experience with me, doing the kind of deal-driven corporate work that characterized my practice, had made her one of the most sought-after candidates in her graduating class—a development I viewed with a kind of bittersweet pride. It was only a matter of time before the two of us found ourselves squared off against each other on opposite sides of some transaction.

For the rest of the afternoon I fretted like a lovesick teenager, waiting for the phone to ring, the roller coaster of my anxiety fueled by lack of sleep and a steady stream of irate phone calls from the two principals of Delirium. It was hardly remarkable that my clients were furious and looking for someone to blame. However, the fact that that someone should be me was the first thing they’d agreed on in a very long time.

But when I still hadn’t heard from Icon by seven o’clock, I abandoned hope and decided to go home. I was so wrapped up in self-pity about Delirium tanking that I completely forgot about Prescott Memorial and my mother’s visit. It wasn’t until I had my coat on to leave for the night that I tripped over a box of files that my mother had apparently sent over. Cheryl had put it smack in the middle of the doorway so that I would be sure to not forget it. I rubbed my shins and cursed her efficiency.

I hoisted the box of files and made my way through the darkened reception room and out into the world. Wearily, I leaned against the back wall of the elevator as it carried me down to the basement. In the polished brass of the doors I contemplated my reflection, a pale face offset by dark hair, disheveled by the day and slowly working its way down from its usual French twist. It occurred to me that while I might be nearly two decades younger than my mother, it was I who looked older. I wondered what the female equivalent of the firm’s balding and shriveled senior partners would look like and whether in thirty years’ time that was going to be me.

The doors opened as the elevator deposited me on the lowest level of the parking garage—deserted this time of night. As my heels clicked across the smooth concrete I pushed the key-chain remote and heard the reassuring chirp of my car alarm being deactivated. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to seeing the sleek bottle-green Jaguar in the place that had been for so long occupied by my recently totaled Volvo, but I was working on it. It helped that over the past few months the new-car smell had gradually given way to the more familiar scent of old running shoes and empty Starbucks containers. I’d also managed to accumulate enough Diet Coke cans on the floor of the backseat to replicate the Volvo’s trademark rattle whenever I hit a pothole.

Of course, having an expensive new car wasn’t easy in Hyde Park. The neighborhood that has been my home for the last half-dozen years isn’t exactly a yuppie paradise, but rather the kind of neighborhood you get when you drop a world-class university in the middle of the ghetto, then allow it to be reshaped by every social tide of the last fifty years. White flight, the Jewish exodus to the suburbs, race riots, urban renewal, and the vicissitudes of the drug trade had all come and gone, leaving their scars behind. Through it all the essential nature of the place had remained remarkably unchanged. Hyde Park was a real-life social laboratory, a place where the affluent and the educated lived side by side with immigrants, criminals, and families where three generations had lived from welfare check to welfare check. Needless to say, it was a less than ideal environment for a luxury car. That’s where Leo came in.

Leo was an urban entrepreneur, one of those fringe artists of economic survival that most people in their leafy suburban neighborhoods haven’t a clue even exist. Nineteen years old, by day he was almost certainly employed as a numbers runner for Carmine Mustafa. Parking cars was a sideline, a way to pick up extra money to help support his girlfriend, Angel, and their three children.

It was a straightforward and strictly cash business. For a flat monthly fee Leo met me at my door when I came home at night, and parked my car behind the electric gates of Carmine Mustafa’s compound in Kenwood— right next door to Louis Farrakhan’s house. There, under the double protection of a drug lord and a black supremacist, my British luxury sedan safely passed the night until Leo delivered it to me the following morning in time for me to drive downtown to work.

As I pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Fifty-third Street I called Leo’s beeper number. By the time I pulled up to the curb in front of my building, he was already waiting, his baseball cap pulled down low over his face and his spotless Nikes iridescent under the soft streetlights.

“How do you ever expect to find yourself a new boyfriend, working as late as you do?” demanded Leo with a smile as he held open the door for me.

“I think I’ve had enough of boyfriends for a while,” I replied, shivering from a combination of the cold and my own fatigue. Even though it was April, in my world it still felt like winter. There was frost on the ground when I left for work in the morning, and by the time I came home at night, it was dark and I could see my breath. “I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided it’d be easier to just get a dog.”

“I tell you what, until they catch the guy that’s been breakin’ into apartments around here, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Angel thinks maybe I should let you take Mona for a while.” Mona was Leo and Angel’s dog, an embarrassingly affectionate Doberman that sometimes came along with Leo when he met me late at night.

“That’s sweet of you,” I said, “but you need Mona to keep an eye on Angel and the kids while you’re out watching over me. Besides, from what I heard, this guy follows little old ladies home from the grocery store during the day. I’m like Dracula, I only come out when it’s dark.”

“I just worry about you is all, two women living alone in this kind of neighborhood...,” Leo said as he slid into the driver’s seat.

“You’d better watch yourself, Leo,” I chided him sternly. “You’re starting to sound like my father.”

We both laughed, and I turned to make my way up the wide stone steps that led to the front door of my building. I waved at Leo to signal that I was all right and then climbed another six steps to the internal door to the first floor. As I turned the key in the next lock it occurred to me that if she lived for a thousand years, my mother was never going to meet someone like Leo, much less get to know him well enough to learn the name of his dog. And yet it was people like Leo—petty criminal, family man, and worrier about my safety—who were precisely the type who passed through the doors of Prescott Memorial Hospital every day.

As I made my way across the dimly lit first-floor landing I was greeted by the strains of Vivaldi coming from the living room. My roommate, Claudia, was not just home, but awake—a remarkable occurrence, especially given the relatively early hour. In the middle of a fellowship in trauma surgery, my roommate lived a life stripped down to work and sleep. One of only three doctors assigned full-time to what was arguably one of the busiest trauma units in the city, she not only spent every third night on twenty-four-hour call at the hospital, but was charged with supervising the follow-up care for every trauma patient admitted to the hospital during her shift. The irony of the fact that the hospital in question was Prescott Memorial was hardly lost on me.

I would have loved to tell her about the proposed sale of the hospital, if only to hear what she had to say about it, but I felt reluctant to raise the subject. Claudia had enough to worry about without having to keep my secrets. Surgery is a prickly meritocracy, a separate world filled with competitive people whose egos are as vast as their sense of entitlement. Like every other trauma fellow in her program, Claudia had hoped to be assigned to Prescott Memorial. It was considered far and away the best rotation, not just for the famous surgeons who left their prestigious practices to take their turn on trauma call, but for the high volume of patients—especially victims of person-to-person violence.

But Claudia had been equally determined to earn a spot on her own, without our friendship coming into play, and once she’d been chosen for the Prescott Memorial team, she was, if anything, even more anxious that her association with my family remain a secret. Having battled whispers about pulled strings and family connections my whole life, I understood her fears and respected her wishes.

And yet, as much as she had sought it, Claudia’s rotation through Prescott Memorial had so far not been a happy one. They say that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but the stress was clearly taking its toll. Because the senior attending surgeons were all on staff at other hospitals, the burden of providing the bulk of care fell to Claudia and the two other trauma fellows. In addition, they were charged with supervising the work of a half a dozen interns and residents who were assigned to the service.

I set the box of Prescott Memorial files on the floor of the vestibule before following the sound of violins and the smell of pizza into the living room. I found Claudia in her favorite spot, an elaborately tufted cabbage-rose chintz armchair that was a hand-me-down from my mother. It was the most comfortable seat in the whole place. The rest of the apartment was furnished with a weird hodgepodge of pieces, castoffs from both our families and furniture we’d picked up over the years at the odd garage sale. The overall effect was less of a home than a resting place—somewhere where two women who conducted their lives elsewhere dropped in to sleep and change clothes.

“Did you leave any for me?” I inquired hopefully as I kicked off my shoes beside Claudia’s bloodstained sneakers. By way of an answer my roommate lifted the lid of the Edwardo’s box, revealing a large deep-dish spinach pizza with only one piece missing.

“You are going straight to heaven,” I proclaimed over my shoulder as I made a quick U-turn into the kitchen. Returning, plate in hand, I shed my jacket and peeled off my pantyhose while Claudia served me up a slice and poured me a glass of wine.

Curled up in the big armchair, my roommate looked less like a surgeon and more like a little girl dressed for bed in a pair of green pajamas. With her curly black hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a single long braid, all she needed was a teddy bear to hold. Unlike lawyers, surgeons dressed for function, not success. Claudia’s hairstyle was dictated by the fact that she could slip the braid down inside the back of her scrubs in the OR, and the scrubs, like prison togs, were institutional issue.

It wasn’t until you looked closer, saw the fine lines of stress etched around her eyes, the splatter of dark stains that could only be blood, that you realized there was nothing at all childlike about her. Watching her dissect the pizza, I could not help but notice the exhausted slump of her shoulders. It was the cumulative effect of the years of sleep deprivation that are part of the surgeon’s rite of passage, deprivation that no single night’s sleep could ever erase.