Dead Certain

morning I was forced to confront the cruel reality that I wasn’t getting any younger—or at least my head and stomach weren’t. Of course, it didn’t help that I had to be in court bright and early. We were scheduled to present our request for an injunction against the sale of the hospital to HCC at eight. While Tom Galloway, one of the firm’s marquee litigators, was set to make the argument for our side, I still had to show up.
    Even without a hangover I find the courthouse depressing: the hallways crammed with milling people, the tired cops and harried lawyers who seem less concerned with justice than with just keeping a large and imperfect system grinding forward. I chafed at the feeling of supplication that hung in the air, the asking and the arguing, the sense of being at the mercy of some black-robed functionary who’d more likely than not risen to the bench less for his legal acumen than his ability to suck up. Fortunately I didn’t have anything of substance to do. All I had to do was sit at the counsel table, pretend to take notes, and if possible, avoid throwing up.
    There were only the two of us at the plaintiff’s table, with my mother sitting demurely in her St. John’s knits behind us. In contrast, HCC had a phalanx of lawyers, who overflowed the seats and spilled a full three rows back. There were attorneys for Prescott Memorial as well as HCC, giving my mother and me the bitter satisfaction of knowing that we were paying, however indirectly, for the services of the people working against us. I spotted Kyle Massius among them, looking as though he fit right in there with the suits and the stiffs. My mother, sitting ramrod straight, fixed him with a look of diamond hardness.
    Tom, I thought, did a magnificent job of presenting our request for an injunction delaying any sale of the hospital for an additional thirty days. But it made little impression on the judge, a phlegmy old man who I suspected of being a borderline narcoleptic. He ruled against us, seemingly without reflection. At least the lawyers for HCC had the decency to save their high fives for the hallway.
    Even though I knew that being granted the injunction was a long shot, I was surprised by the extent of my disappointment. Ruefully I had to admit that while failure was one thing, failure in front of one’s mother was quite another. The dry thanks she offered up for my doing my best did little to assuage my feelings of inadequacy and, even less explicably, guilt.
    My disappointment was mitigated somewhat by the fact that Mother was clearly winning the public relations war. Unfortunately, whatever ink she garnered not only aided our fight against HCC, but also provided ammunition for their breach-of-confidentiality suit against her. While she might not be aware of it, with every interview she granted—and they were already waiting for her on the courthouse steps—Mother raised the stakes. We had to figure out some way to keep Prescott Memorial out of the clutches of HCC.
    As soon as I got back to Callahan Ross I summoned Sherman Whitehead to my office and instructed him to draft a new complaint against HCC. The argument I outlined for him was based on the premise that their offer to buy Prescott Memorial was tainted by illegally obtained insider information. I was gambling that within the next four days Elliott would succeed in unearthing the name of the HCC mole in time for us to insert it into the complaint. However, I could tell from the look on Sherman’s face that if anything, he thought that this one was an even longer shot than the first.
     
    * * *
     
    That night I was pleased to see the lights burning in the apartment window when I finally arrived home. I found Claudia sitting in the dining room with patient charts fanned out around her, making notes on her legal pad with the concentration of a monk copying a holy text.
    “Are these charts from the patients who died?” I asked, appalled to think that each of the buff folders lying on the table represented a life lost.
    “So far. The advantage of being a female doctor is you get a chance to get to know the nurses from the changing room. Once I asked, it was easy to come up with the names. Everyone remembers the ones who die, especially the nurses.”
    “Why’s that, do you think?”
    “To the surgeons, they’re just another case. You know, the gallbladder in room four. We don’t really have too much to do with them when they’re awake, but for the nurses