Dead Certain

Memorial files into the dining room. The only thing standing between me and a good night’s sleep was my mother and her harebrained plan to block the sale of the hospital, and I was determined to spend as little time as possible on it. Indeed, I’d already come up with a short mental list of other lawyers to recommend in my place—lawyers who’d crossed me on deals past and whose suffering at my mother’s hands wouldn’t cost me any sleep.
    I set the box on the dining room table, a scarred monstrosity inherited from a previous tenant who’d been forced to leave it behind when there turned out to be no room for it on the moving van. In the years that we’d lived in the apartment I don’t think that Claudia and I had ever eaten a meal there. Instead it was our worktable, though what I was doing on it tonight hardly qualified as work.
    What I was doing was just going through the motions. With the letter of intent already signed and the deal set to close in ten days, any attempt to stop HCC was sure to be a quixotic effort. Besides, engaging in a doomed campaign against an experienced and highly motivated corporate adversary was hardly my idea of a mother-daughter bonding experience. When it came to my mother, I figured I should probably stick with what I knew best, fighting about my choice of boyfriends and what I was doing with my hair.
    I was also afraid that when it came to the sale of Prescott Memorial, her motives were suspect. Unaccustomed to being crossed, Mother was simply furious at the board members who’d betrayed her by casting their votes to sell to HCC; it had less to do with her concern for patient care than her own ego. I had no interest in using up my professional capital avenging my mother’s injured pride.
    However, there was no way I could avoid at least looking at what she’d sent over. Not if I knew what was good for me. Fetching a knife from the block on the kitchen counter, I slit the tape that sealed the box and opened up the flaps. What I saw inside was a nightmare, not an orderly compilation of documents pertaining to the proposed sale of the hospital, but rather every piece of paper in my mother’s possession that was remotely related to the hospital dumped together into a box. I gave it a shake in disgust. It was obvious what importance my mother, whose social calendar was as meticulously laid out as the timetable for a NASA launch, attached to the affairs of Prescott Memorial Hospital.
    Eager to be done with the entire charade, I picked up the box and dumped the contents out onto the table. Mixed in with the business documents were envelopes that had never been opened, scribbled notes for seating charts, and an assortment of to-do lists filled with such gripping entries as lunch with Bitsy and fitting at Chanel. The writing was all in my mother’s characteristic backward slanting script. On several pages the margins were thick with the elaborate curlicues and fleurs-de-lis that she liked to doodle when she was bored.
    The phone rang just as I was finishing up separating out the junk. I looked at the clock, deciding whether to answer. I was too tired to get up for one of Carlos’s hangup calls, but there was always a chance that it might be Elliott. Feeling optimistic, I got to my feet and caught it by the fourth ring and was rewarded by the sound of Elliott Abelman’s voice, husky with fatigue, on the other end of the line.
    “Are you okay?” he asked. It was his standard greeting, a holdover from the days when I called him only when I was in some kind of trouble.
    I’d first met Elliott three years ago when I’d hired him as a private investigator. A former prosecutor and an exmarine, Elliott had just struck out on his own and was as eager to please as he was happy for a piece of Callahan Ross’s business. Since then, Abelman & Associates had become one of the premiere operations of its kind in the country. Employing nearly a hundred full-time investigators in three cities, Elliott’s firm specialized in financial crimes—bid rigging, bribery, computer theft, and embezzlement—the kinds of bloodless offenses that police and prosecutors were ill equipped to handle.
    “How’s it going with the trial?” I asked, sliding my back down along the wall until I was sitting comfortably on the floor.
    Now that Elliott and I were finally free to see what it would be like to spend time together, circumstances had conspired to keep us apart. A complicated fraud case he’d