Dead Certain (9 page)

“I’m fine,” I said. “How’s your wife? Has she had the baby yet?”

“She sure did,” he grinned. “A beautiful baby girl. We named her Gloria, after my mom.”

“Congratulations,” I replied with a brittle smile. “I’ll be sure to tell Claudia. I’m sure you’ll understand if she doesn’t offer you her congratulations herself.”

“Why’s she still so sore at me?” he asked, with a hurt expression with which I’m sure his wife was highly familiar. Hell, for a split second
I
found myself wondering whether to spank him or give him a lollipop. “I didn’t mean for her to get her feelings hurt—”

“I don’t think you get it,” I replied. “Claudia’s not the kind of girl you snack with. If she wants to sleep with married men, she has her pick of doctors.”

“So what you’re saying is that she was slumming when she went out with me,” he replied, getting angrily to his feet in order to get in my face.

“What I’m saying is that she thought you were telling her the truth when you told her that you were single,” I said in a voice loud enough to compete with the TV playing in the corner. “What I’m also saying is that if you don’t want to find yourself in court slapped with a restraining order, you’d better stop calling our house and Pestering Claudia. And if you take one step closer to me, I m going to scream like hell for Security. When Claudia told you it was over between you, she meant that if she never sees your lying face again, it’s too soon. Have I made myself clear?”

Two old ladies and a hooker who looked like she’d been hit by a car burst into applause, and Carlos’s face turned deep red. I couldn’t tell whether it was from embarrassment or anger, and I was in no mood to find out. But as I turned to walk away he grabbed hold of my upper arm, squeezing it so hard I knew there’d be a bruise.

“You tell your roommate from me,” he whispered, his voice little more than an angry hiss, “that we had a good thing going, the two of us. You tell her that I know what she needs and I’m the one to give it to her.” He dropped his voice even lower still. “You tell her that it’s
never
over until
I
say it’s over.”

I used my cell phone to call Mark Millman from a relatively quiet corner of the waiting room. Luckily I caught him at home just as he was getting ready for bed. I couldn’t think of how to soften the blow, so I just told him what had happened. From the silence on the other end of the line I could tell that I had just handed him the worst news of his life.

If you didn’t count his ex-wife, Bill Delius had no family, certainly not in town, so Millman said he’d come. While I waited for him to make it down to the hospital I killed time by pacing the floor. Was Carlos just an angry guy? And now that he was mad, was he more or less* likely to take it out on Claudia after the dressing down I’d given him that night?

Mark Millman pushed through the emergency room doors, looking for all the world like a heart attack waiting to happen. Pasty faced and out of breath, he pulled at his tie as if it might help him get more air. Without even looking for me, he made a beeline for the triage nurse and loudly demanded that he be allowed to see Bill Delius. I caught him by the elbow and steered him away, long enough to explain that Bill was still in surgery and I to fill him in on the little I knew about his treatment. Then I said good night. Mark was Delius’s partner. I was just the hired help, a stranger who just happened to
be
there when the big one hit. The image of Claudia’s hand thrust deep inside Bill Delius’s chest suddenly pulsed across my brain. I’d already been witness to more than I had a right to.

As I made my way through the parking lot it occurred to me that although I’d long considered the hospital a fixture in my life, this was the first chance I’d had to
really
see it. Suddenly my lunchtime conversation with Joan Bornstein seemed much less abstract. What, I wondered, would be different when it became HCC-Prescott Memorial? Would someone like Claudia still be waiting at the door?

As I got into the car I slid a CD into the slot and watched it disappear. The sound of Elvis Costello’s smoky voice filled the car and soothed me like a drug. I wondered what Claudia was listening to right now as she helped Carl Laffer cut through Bill Delius’s chest. Puccini, perhaps. Laffer was an opera buff who liked to sing along with the tenor on the tape and encouraged the rest of his team to do the same. There were some nurses he reportedly wouldn’t work with solely because they couldn’t carry a tune. Luckily, Claudia was a gifted soprano, who reported that singing made the backbreaking labor of cardiac surgery pass more quickly. For my part I was just grateful that it wasn’t Gavin McDermott now holding Bill Delius’s heart in his hands.

When I got home Leo once again waited out front until I had gotten past the dead bolts and was safely inside. Apparently there’d been another break-in the night before, prompting a repeat of his offer to lend me his dog, as well as other, vaguely paternal warnings. I told that I was grateful for his concern, but I was so tired at I honestly didn’t care if someone broke in, just as long as the burglar was careful not to wake me up.

I let myself into the dark apartment, practically swaying on my feet from exhaustion. Even before I switched on the light, I saw that there were five messages on the answering machine. For a woman with almost no personal life, this was not a good sign. I flipped through the mail as the tape rewound, dropping credit-card come-ons and promises of long-distance savings unopened into the garbage can.

The first four calls were from my mother. Made at various intervals throughout the evening, they ranged in tone from irritated condescension to outright pique. These were followed by a short message from Elliott Abelman explaining that the defense had rested and the judge had called for closing arguments the next day. His exile to Springfield was drawing to a close.

Normally the messages from my mother would have sent me into an orbit of distress, but tonight I was immune from her displeasure. Instead, I reveled in the sound of Elliott’s voice and felt my heart quicken at the prospect of seeing him again. I’d spent the last three years trying to figure out my feelings for the man, and for the first time, my heart spoke clearly. Tonight I’d seen blood and pain and glimpsed the capricious fates that hold us in their hands. Perhaps, I thought to myself, perhaps we’re meant to accept love when it’s given.

The next morning I slept through my alarm and woke up with the sun pouring in through the blinds turning the dust in the room into dancing glitters of light. I rolled over, wrapped in the familiar softness of one of Russell’s old T-shirts, my body still heavy with sleep, and looked at the clock. It took a while for the numbers to penetrate the thickness in my brain. I couldn’t believe that it was after nine o’clock.

I groaned and wondered whether seppuku was an option. Then I remembered Bill Delius and dragged myself to my feet, padding barefoot to the telephone in the front hall to page Claudia. Since we’d started getting hang-up calls, we’d unplugged all the phones in the back part of the apartment to avoid being woken up. By the time I’d made my way to the phone in the front hall, the soles of my feet were covered with dust. Now that both of us knew we would be moving, we’d stopped even talking about cleaning.

The message light was blinking again. Apparently I’d slept through another call. I hit the rewind button and waited, steeling myself for the worst. When I heard Claudia’s voice on the tape, I actually held my breath.

“Hi, Kate, it’s me,” began my roommate, her voice thick with fatigue. “It’s... let me see... it’s four-thirty in the morning, and I thought you’d want to know that your client ended up with a double bypass, but it looks like we’re going to be putting his name down in the ‘save’ column. You might want to stop in and see him in the next day or so and judge our handiwork for yourself. You might also want to tell him about the crack trauma team that saved his ass. At any other hospital they would have called him DOA the minute they wheeled him in the door.” Even on the tape I could hear the piercing tones of her beeper going off again. “Uh-oh, they’re playing my song. Got to go,” she said, followed by another beep, this one from the answering machine signaling the end of her call.

I pushed the rewind button and listened to the message again, feeling a sudden lightness that was much more than relief. It had been so long since I’d last felt it that it took me a minute to put a name to the emotion. It was joy.

Joy, pure and simple. A delight in life. As I stood there in my underwear and old T-shirt, it struck me like a revelation. This was how it was supposed to turn out. Not Russell, wracked with pain and wasting away before my eyes, but Claudia reaching into Bill Delius’s chest and dragging him back from the brink. If that was possible, there could be little else beyond our reach. Bill Delius had cheated death. By comparison, how hard could landing a deal with Icon be?

When the phone rang, it made me jump. I picked it up, hoping it was Cheryl or Claudia or maybe Mark Mill- man reporting on Bill’s progress. Naturally it was my mother.

“What on earth are you still doing at home?” she demanded without preamble. “Are you ill? Where have you been? I’ve been making myself frantic trying to reach you, and that secretary of yours is absolutely worthless. She claimed to have no idea at ail of what you’re up to.”

“And good morning to you, too, Mother,” I sighed wearily.

“I have no time for chitchat,” she replied, choosing for once to ignore my sarcasm. “I’m leaving for the club, and you have to get downtown for a meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“I’ve arranged for you to meet with the people from HCC at ten.”

I looked at my watch. “But that’s in twenty-seven minutes,” I protested. “I was at the hospital until late last night. One of my clients had a heart attack. I just got up. I’m not even dressed yet.”

“Then I suggest you’d better hurry,” she cut in, impervious to my excuses. “It’s all set up. You’re meeting at HCC’s law firm. It’s somewhere down there on LaSalle Street—McAdden, Kripps, and some Jewish name. I’ve written it down somewhere....”

“McAdden, Kripps, and Steinbach,” I replied as I rubbed the dirt on the bottom of my foot off onto the side of my leg. “I know where their offices are. What I want to know is what I’m supposed to be talking to them about.”

“You’re the big-time corporate lawyer. I thought I’d leave those details up to you.”

“So what did you tell them?”

“What do you mean?”

“What reason did you give them for my wanting to meet with them?”

“I just explained to them that you’re the attorney for the family,” replied my mother brightly. “That and the fact that we are planning to sue them.”

CHAPTER
7

The offices of McAdden, Kripps, and Steinbach were in one of the newer buildings in the financial district, a black marble edifice so sleek and forbidding that it had been inevitably dubbed the Darth Vader building by the denizens of LaSalle Street. I’m sure HCC’s lawyers didn’t mind—as a matter of fact, they probably liked it. McAdden Kripps attorneys were more upstart than Ivy League, and they had a well-earned reputation for playing both tough and dirty. What that meant in Callahan Ross terms was that while we were busy looking down our noses at them, they were thinking up new ways to kick our ass.

I got downtown in record time. I figured if I kept up this kind of driving, it was only going to be a matter of time before traffic cops went around with my picture taped to their dashboards and the auto-safety people put a bounty on my head. After handing the parking-lot attendant a twenty, I narrowly escaped being hit by two taxis and a bicycle messenger as I darted across Monroe and arrived breathless in the lobby. I crossed the expanse of marble at an uncivilized sprint and managed to find the appropriate bank of elevators to take me to the thirty-sixth floor on only the second try.

Riding up alone, I tried to catch my breath. I also silently cursed my mother as I felt the thin silk of my blouse, soaked with sweat, clinging unpleasantly to my back. No doubt she was just arriving cool and collected at the club.

The elevator doors opened directly into the firm’s reception area, a stark expanse of white marble punctuated by an outcropping of low-slung chairs of such modem design that I suspected it would take a gymnast to get in and out of them without injury. At the far end sat an elegant black woman wearing a telephone headset behind a massive wraparound desk that looked like it had been lifted from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. I gave her my name and politely ignored her suggestion that I have a seat.

I didn’t have long to wait. A female associate, so fresh faced she couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of law school, appeared almost immediately to take me back to the meeting. Shining with self-assurance, she wore a suit with a skirt so short it would have immediately sent half the partners at Callahan Ross into apoplexy. As we made our way back through the brightly lit corridors lined with secretarial cubicles, she explained that Mr. Packman was on a very tight schedule and would be able to give me only ten minutes. It took a conscious effort to keep surprise from breaking my stride. I don’t know what it was that I was expecting from this sit-down with HCC, but it certainly wasn’t a personal tête-à-tête with HCC’s chief executive officer.