Dead Certain

a pretty interesting character.”
    “You mean because he’s an ex-basketball player who also happens to be an opera fanatic?”
    “For starters. You know, in some ways he reminds me a lot of the doctor whose wife was sleeping with Farah Davies, the classic good guy to whom bad things always happen.”
    “What bad things have happened to Laffer?” I inquired. “He was named in a big malpractice suit five or six years ago. Your friend Joan Bornstein handled his defense. It was one of her first big, high-profile trials.“
    “What happened?”
    “You know that Laffer and McDermott are partners, don’t you?”
    “No, I didn’t realize that.”
    “It’s not exactly like they’re joined at the hip. They’re both in a practice group with six or seven other surgeons who share office space, cover for each other on vacation, and take turns being on call. All of them take trauma call at Prescott Memorial, as well. Anyway, around that time, McDermott was going through an ugly divorce, and in consequence he was leaning on his partners pretty hard.“
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning he was doing a fair amount of drinking and even more feeling sorry for himself. It turns out that wife number two just so happens to be Dale Adelhelm’s sister.“
    “Dale Adelhelm the divorce lawyer? They call him the Jackal.”
    “Yeah, because he has a knack for picking the carcass clean. Between the two of them they hung McDermott out to dry. The way my investigator explained it to me, Dr. McDermott is going to be the only man in the history of the free world to end up paying alimony after he’s dead.”
    “So she took him to the cleaners. What does that have to do with Laffer?”
    “One night while all of this was going on, McDermott showed up on Laffer’s doorstep sloppy drunk and crying about all the bad things that his ex-wife was doing to him.“
    “And?”
    “It was a night that McDermott was on call.”
    “And he was drunk?” Claudia wouldn’t have so much as a teaspoon of cough syrup the nights she was on call.
    “Shit-faced. So Laffer does his best to be a sympathetic friend, and before you know it, McDermott’s fast asleep on the couch. Laffer covers him up with a blanket and is about to go to bed himself when he hears McDermott’s beeper going off. Now what he should have done is just ignore it and gone upstairs to bed. But I told you he’s a good guy, so instead he calls the page operator and tells her that he’s covering for McDermott.”
    “So what happened?”
    “The operator tells him there’s a patient being air-evacked to the hospital, a thirteen-year-old boy who’d been hit by a semi. Laffer grabs his car keys and arrives at the hospital at the same time as the boy. The kid’s a mess. He’s covered with blood from head to toe and has several abdominal lacerations, any one of which are deep enough to cause massive internal bleeding. He also has compound fractures of both of his legs—and that’s just what the paramedic tells him in the first two minutes.“
    “Did the boy die?”
    “Laffer had to operate to remove the spleen and repair internal damage, but he was able to save the other organs. An orthopedic surgeon was called in to set the patient’s legs, and after six hours of surgery, an exhausted Dr. Laffer walked out into the waiting room to tell the boy’s terrified parents that while his injuries had been severe, it looked like there was a good chance that their son would survive.”
    “But something bad happened,” I said, not sure I wanted to know what it was.
    “The boy died the next day from a massive brain hemorrhage. Apparently when he was hit, his skull had been literally torn lose from the neck, causing him to slowly bleed into his brain.”
    “How awful.”
    “From the trial transcripts it looks like the experts disagreed about whether Laffer should have known. There was one expert who testified for the defense that even if Laffer had diagnosed the head trauma there would have been no way to correct the problem and save the boy.”
    “I imagine the plaintiff’s lawyer had a field day.“
    “Absolutely,” replied Elliott, switching quickly to the badgering tone of voice favored by lawyers during cross-examination. “‘You mean, doctor, that you didn’t notice that the poor child’s skull had been separated from his spine?’ ”
    “No jury in the world could sit there and listen to a detailed account of what had happened and not want to see someone