Dead Certain

dazzled by the view.
    In the hundred years since the building had been erected, the apartment had come on the market only twice. A Gold Coast duplex with lake views in three directions, its first owners had been my grandparents, who’d commissioned David Adler, the legendary architect, to design the interior. I’d lived there until I was six years old and my parents decided to forsake the excitement of the city for the sylvan pleasures of suburban Lake Forest. Convinced we’d never have the chance again, we wrote the check and embarked on a yearlong renovation. The only trouble was that by the time the plaster was dry, I knew that I would never live there with Stephen.
    But as any lawyer will tell you, things only get more complicated when you start picking them apart. It had taken two months of negotiations to buy back Stephen’s half of the apartment, longer still to straighten out the mess of contractors’ bills and decorator’s invoices. It was like going through a divorce without the benefit of ever having been married, and in the end the whole thing had left me emotionally exhausted.
    So for now the big apartment on the lake sat empty and perfect, like a layout for Architectural Digest. For now, I was in no hurry to move in. The idea of taking up residence in a two-story apartment the size of a large house was going to take some getting used to. Besides, I’d agreed to stay on in the Hyde Park apartment with Claudia until her fellowship was over at the end of June. Her dream job was already waiting for her, a faculty appointment at Columbia’s medical school.
    I hoisted myself wearily to my feet and dragged myself back into the dining room. If the fact that I already have my dream job isn’t proof that God had a sense of humor, I told myself, nothing else is.
    I poured myself the last of the wine and gave myself over to the documents my mother had sent me. When I first started out at the firm, my old mentor, John Gutt-man, used to lecture me about finding the story of a file, the dramatic thread that ran through a particular matter. He believed that when you stripped away the dry terminology and the rigid structure of the legal forms, even the most unexceptional transactions contained the elements of drama.
    Back then I thought he was crazy, that he’d spent so much time drafting prospectuses and parsing proxy statements that it had affected his brain. But lately I’d come to realize that he was right. Tonight I was even doing it myself, piecing together the fragments of the story and looking for the nuances in what had been left unsaid.
    I began by reading through a sheaf of newspaper clippings I’d found at the bottom of the box. I don’t know who was responsible for compiling them, but there was no doubt they presented an interesting picture of the Health Care Corporation of America. HCC was a company that likened medical specialties to product lines and had pioneered the practice of providing financial incentives to physicians and administrators for meeting financial performance targets. Not unexpectedly, shareholders were ecstatic with the company’s performance, while the medical community was substantially less impressed. A Wall Street Journal profile of the company’s acquisition of a string of community hospitals in Duluth seemed to exemplify HCC’s style of operation.
    Within an eight-month period Health Care Corporation, under the guidance of CEO Gerald Packman, bought eight of the twelve hospitals serving the greater Duluth area. Once they effectively controlled the number of beds, they began slashing costs across the board, negotiating discounts with suppliers, centralizing administrative operations, and dramatically cutting the number of beds. They closed three hospitals completely. They also eliminated overtime, cut the staff of registered nurses by a third, and began limiting patient access to unprofitable tests and treatments. The unspoken conclusion of the article was that under the HCC system, profitability went up as the quality of patient care came down.
    But Prescott Memorial was not the same as a community hospital in Duluth. It was a charitable teaching hospital as committed to providing care to an indigent inner-city population as it was to educating new doctors. It was also a trauma center, one of the seven hospitals within the city limits that was tied to the 911 system. What that meant was that at Prescott Memorial they had not just a ready operating room, but