Dead Certain

the room. Patting the chairman of Chicago’s largest bank on the back and trading quips with Paul Riskoff, the real estate magnate, he moved with ease among the city’s rich and powerful, like a candidate for public office who knows he already has the election in the bag. While I didn’t share my mother’s sense of outrage, there was something disturbing about his presence here tonight, something that said as much about the man and his nerve as his gimmick with the chess clock.
    Knowing private detectives to be an inquisitive bunch, I pulled Elliott aside and treated him to a whispered, rapid-fire account of what was going on between Prescott Memorial and HCC. When I’d finished, Elliott placed his hands gently on my shoulders, looked deeply into my eyes, and told me that I was completely out of my mind to get involved. I was about to agree with him when I felt a strange arm around my waist. Turning toward its owner, I found myself face-to-face with Gavin McDermott and his wife, Patsy.
    I’d known—and envied—Patsy ever since I was in the second grade. Athletic and adventurous, she’d gotten into trouble with impunity and even as she’d gotten older seemed to personify the adjective saucy.
    In Patsy I suspected McDermott had finally met his match. A world-class distance runner in college, upon graduation she’d traded the challenges of elite athletic competition for the more visceral thrills of mountaineering. She’d set her sights on ascending all seven of the world’s most arduous peaks, and she’d been steadily making progress achieving her goal. While I couldn’t remember how many she had left to climb, I was fairly certain that I was in the presence of the only woman in the room who’d been to the top of Everest and back.
    Patsy had had as many husbands as McDermott had had wives, and enough money of her own to not be impressed by a surgeon’s salary—not a bad thing considering the things I’d heard about McDermott’s weakness for nurses. It was Patsy who’d dragged him over, propelled as much by curiosity about Elliott as her eagerness to boast about her recent ascent of Kilimanjaro. If Gavin remembered he’d run out on our meeting the day before, he certainly didn’t acknowledge it. I wasn’t bothered by the lack of apology. After the way he’d treated Claudia, no show of manners would ever redeem him in my eyes.
    I made introductions all around, my irritation compounded by the fact that McDermott still had his arm draped around my middle. Surgeons, I knew from Claudia, are literally a “touchy” bunch, inured to the physical boundaries by which most people conduct themselves and used to experiencing the world by touch. On the other hand, female lawyers almost universally object to being embraced by middle-aged men with whom they are vaguely acquainted and coincidentally mad at.
    “So how do you and Kate know each other?” asked Patsy after she’d given us a brief account of her experiences in Tanzania.
    “I’m a private investigator,” replied Elliott. “I met Kate a couple of years ago when she hired me to do some work for her.”
    “I should probably get your number in case Gavin starts getting any ideas.”
    “He looks absolutely trustworthy to me,” replied Elliott, with a pointed look at Gavin McDermott’s hand, which was still around my waist.
    “Who says Gavin is trustworthy?” demanded a striking woman with a mane of honey-colored hair that cascaded down her bare back.
    “Have you met Dr. Farah Davies, Prescott Memorial’s inestimable chief of obstetrics and gynecology?” inquired Gavin, stepping aside to make room for her to join our circle.
    Dr. Davies was definitely a presence. Tall and athletically thin, she carried herself with the same brand of physical confidence I recognized in Patsy. She was dressed in a strapless gown that might have been a Vera Wang and carried a simple Kate Spade satin evening bag to which she’d clipped her pager. Her hair was an amazing amber mane of twisted ringlets that was no hairdresser’s creation. Her makeup, dramatic but expertly applied, somehow served to draw her intelligence into sharper focus rather than diminish the forcefulness of her personality. The fact that her eyes were different colors—one brown, the other blue—merely reinforced the contradiction. It also made it hard to look at anything else. I wondered how long you had to know her before you got over the incongruity of it.
    “You know, I think we