“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. “I
t’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.
My first instinct was to be furious with my mother. If she was really serious about quashing the deal with HCC, how could she even think about sending me into a meeting with its CEO completely unprepared? It struck me as yet one more indication that my mother had no idea of how things worked outside the constricted sliver of her country-club world.
In spite of myself I felt my heart quicken. Just the fact that Packman was in town spoke volumes about the relative importance of Prescott Memorial to HCC, and there was enough of Everett Prescott in me that I relished the opportunity to size up a potential adversary. That still didn’t mean I was convinced that fighting HCC was a good idea, but there was no doubt that seeing the trauma team in action firsthand had made the discussion much less abstract.
Disconcertingly my escort stopped dead in front of a blank wall at the end of the corridor. At the push of a button, the wall turned out to be a hidden panel. Even I had to concede that it was a nice touch, a way to knock adversaries off balance before they even made it through the door.
The panel opened silently to reveal a long, narrow conference room dominated by a massive table milled from a single, enormous piece of black marble polished until it shone like patent leather. At the far end sat Gerald Packman—alone. Behind him hung an enormous painting that looked like a bucket of crimson paint had been hurled at a white canvas. The top of the table was completely empty except for a single glass of water and a small clock of the kind used to time moves in chess competition.
I knew little more about Packman beyond what Joan Bornstein had told me. There were only snippets about him in the newspaper clippings about HCC my mother had sent over. Neither had prepared me for the sheer force of the personality of the man himself. He was a big man in his early forties with the bearing of an athlete and the manicured hands of an investment banker. Well groomed beyond the boardroom standard, he exuded confidence from every pore. It was no wonder he’d set his sights beyond fried chicken.
“You have ten minutes,” he said, reaching forward to press the switch on top of the clock that set the hands moving.
“Then perhaps you should spend it telling me why I shouldn’t do everything in my power to keep you from buying Prescott Memorial Hospital,” I said matter-of-factly. I’d seen all kinds of outrageous behavior in my time. Packman’s gimmick with the chess clock may have been original, but I wasn’t that impressed.
“It would only be a waste of both of our time,” he replied. “Our purchase of Prescott Memorial Hospital is a done deal. The board of trustees has voted and the letter of intent has been signed. My lawyers tell me that it’s a lock.”
“I’m sure they also tell you what a great guy you are,” I pointed out, surprised by his unwillingness to even pay lip service to diplomacy, “but that doesn’t necessarily make it true.”
“You’re a very rude young lady,” he said. It was a statement of fact.
I looked pointedly at the clock. “And you think you’re more important than you are.”
Packman leaned back in his chair, unmoved, and pressed his steepled fingers to his lips, focusing his gaze on me like a high-priced shrink.
“I didn’t get to where I am today without being a pretty fair judge of people. I’m going to venture a wild guess and Say your mother put you up to this,” he observed.
“I’m here representing the interests of the people whose donations built the hospital you seem to think you’re buying.”
“In that case, let me offer you some advice.”
‘What’s that?”
“Just let it go.”
“What?”
“Walk away.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because it’s in your family’s best interests.”
“I hardly think you’re in the best position to judge what is or is not in the best interests of my family.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you.“
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Your family enjoys quite a reputation in this town— like the Kennedys but without all the scandals. I can only assume you’d want to keep it that way.”
“Is that some sort of threat?”
“No, just a statement of fact. It would be extremely unpleasant for your family to have the details of the hospital’s operations dragged out into the light of public scrutiny.”
“More painful than seeing the institution that we have spent millions of dollars supporting being used to squeeze profits out of sick people?” I demanded, wondering what on earth Uncle Edwin had been up to that had given Gerald Packman not only the ammunition, but the sense of impunity to use
it.
“Let’s just say that Prescott Memorial’s operations have gone unscrutinized for far too long. As you can imagine, I’ve had quite a bit of experience with so-called charitable institutions. More often than not they are ruled by ego and riddled with financial irregularities. When we come in, we invariably uncover a shocking lack of professional oversight and controls, problems that have been left to fester for years.”
“So naturally you expect to find those same kind of problems at Prescott Memorial.”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t want anybody to be printing the hospital’s postoperative mortality statistics in the newspaper right now.”
“Is that so?” I observed blandly. Inside, my heart practically leapt from my chest. From everything Claudia had told me, I assumed that knowledge of the problem with postsurgical deaths was confined to the hospital. If so, how had Packman found out about it?
“In the real world the drive to make a profit forces companies to solve problems. In hospitals like Prescott Memorial, they just get swept under the rug. In my experience that’s never a good thing.”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about,” I said, eager for the opportunity to shift the conversation over to my agenda.
“What’s that?”
“Your experience. I understand that prior to starting HCC you worked primarily in the fast-food and convenience-market industries. I was wondering exactly what it is about those endeavors that prepared you to run a health care company?”
“I know you intend the question as an insult, but I actually look forward to answering it. For your information the similarities between the two industries are actually quite striking.”
“Really? In what ways?”
“Right before HCC bought its first hospital, I spent an entire day just hanging around in the emergency room, observing what kinds of things went on, and you know what struck me immediately? How similar it was to a fast-food franchise. People showed up in a hurry and went up to the counter to tell the person on the other side what they wanted. Not only that, but the measures of customer satisfaction were exactly the same: speed, courtesy, cleanliness, and convenience.”
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