Dead Certain

Bill Delius’s heart attack.
    Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center is an amalgam of merged hospitals that were cobbled together during the last crisis in medical care. It lay directly west of downtown and encompassed the west-side VA and Cook County Hospital, home of the world’s largest and busiest emergency department. Like Prescott Memorial to the south, it was a refuge and a lifeline for the city’s poorest of the poor.
    Rush-St. Luke’s sprawling medical campus was confusing to all but the initiated, and enormously difficult to find your way around. Cheryl had drawn me a map and typed out instructions to Laffer’s office. They were so detailed they read like directions for finding the Holy Grail. Once I’d parked the car, I did my best to follow them as I tried not to think about what would become of me once Cheryl graduated.
    I navigated the endless string of white-coated corridors, eventually ending up at Carl Laffer’s office almost as much by accident as design. Like McDermott, Dr. Laffer was talking on the phone when his secretary showed me in. But he not only hung up as soon as I was through the door, he also apologized, rising to his feet to bid me welcome and to take my hand in his mighty grip.
    Laffer was a tall man, tall enough to make me feel short. If his altitude weren’t enough of a tip-off—he was at least six inches over six feet—his office made no secret of his passion for basketball. The way that Laffer liked to tell it, if he had been a half a step faster, medicine would have lost a compassionate physician and the NBA would have gained a mediocre center. He was, according to Claudia, passionate about three things: opera, Hoosier basketball, and surgery—not necessarily in that order. I smiled and took my seat, wishing I’d had the time to bone up on Bobby Knight’s biography. Claudia reported that Laffer believed that the Indiana University basketball coach was the greatest strategic thinker of the twentieth century. On second thought, maybe he wasn’t as reasonable as I’d hoped.
    “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make time to see you sooner,” Laffer began, pushing aside a pile of patient charts eerily similar to the ones in the trunk of my car. “But between teaching, seeing patients, and my administrative duties at Prescott Memorial, my days get pretty full.”
    “I appreciate your making the time to see me at all,” I replied. “It gives me the opportunity to thank you in person.”
    “For what?” he asked. From the look on his face I knew that at least I wasn’t going to have to juggle to get his attention.
    “You saved my client’s life Friday night.”
    “Your client?”
    “A man by the name of Bill Delius who came into the emergency room with a heart attack.” While I knew it violated my agreement with Claudia about keeping our friendship in the background, I told myself that circumstances had changed. Not only might Laffer listen more closely to what I had to say if he knew that Claudia and I were friends, but at this point it couldn’t hurt Claudia for the hospital to know that she had friends in high places.
    “So you’re the lady lawyer Dr. Stein was talking about,” he observed with a strange look of enlightenment. “As I recall, Claudia lectured me that I’d better save Mr. Delius or her roommate was going to sue us. I knew she lived with a lawyer, I just didn’t know that the lawyer was you. So how do you two know each other?“
    “We were roommates at Bryn Mawr,” I explained. “We’ve been friends ever since.”
    “She’s a gifted physician. Your client was lucky she was on trauma call the night his heart decided to act up. At any other hospital they probably would have pronounced him DOA.”
    “I know,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons I came to see you today.”
    “Oh?” he inquired warily, no doubt wondering if I’d come to pressure him to intercede on Claudia’s behalf in the matter of Mrs. Estrada’s death.
    “I must confess that when my mother first asked me to help her stop the sale of Prescott Memorial, I had never given much thought to the hospital. Even when Claudia began her rotation and started telling me about her cases, I didn’t really realize how unique it is as an institution and how important a job it does, not just in caring for patients but in training doctors.”
    Laffer looked surprised. “I thought all lawyers were pragmatists,” he said.
    “And I thought all doctors were