Final Option

barely five feet, but with a core of toughness that transcended her size.
    “Did you have a rough day?” I asked again.
    “It was like Calcutta,” replied my roommate with feeling. “No, I don’t think Calcutta ever gets that bad. It was like Calcutta on drugs.”
    “What happened?”
    “Oh, the usual shit, only twice as much of it. We had two stabbings—teenage boys trying to settle an argument about a tape player they stole. They tried to eviscerate each other with kitchen knives. One of them had practically bled out by the time they got him in. After they were prepped for surgery, some genius parked them next to each other in pre-op. The next thing you know, one of the kids has hopped off the gurney, bleeding all over the place, and is trying to choke the other one.
    “Next, I get a sixty-three-year-old Portuguese woman? with a fractured tibia, only the orthopedic resident has mismarked the X ray and the first thing I do is open the wrong leg. I finish with her; then I do an emergency ruptured appendix and assist on a quick-and-dirty patch job on an eighty-two-year-old woman who was hit by a bus and was bleeding inside from every organ. Finally, it looks like there’s a break in the action, and who do they bring in but the same Portuguese woman with the broken leg. It seems that while they were shifting some patients around in post-op, the orderly parked her gurney for a minute in the hallway and she got run over by one of those huge nutrition carts, the ones they use to bring up the dinner trays. She fell off and lacerated her forehead and broke her nose and both of her arms. We drew lots for who was going to have to tell her family. I lost.”
    “Sounds like quite a day.”
    “And I didn’t even tell you about the yellow man.“
    “Who,” I inquired, “is the yellow man?”
    “The yellow man is a famous and semipermanent resident of the University of Chicago Hospitals. He’s a fifty-eight-year-old white male with cirrhosis of the liver so extreme that it has caused his skin to turn yellow and coincidentally has caused him to be completely insane. I bet you’ve seen him sleeping under the viaduct at Fifty-fifth Street. He wears a red hockey helmet all the time because he gets seizures and bangs his head. Anyway, they had him up in ICU because he was having some acute esophageal problems. To make a long story short, he managed to work himself free of his restraints and threw himself out a sixth-floor window. Problem is, he fell only a couple of floors onto the roof of the maternity wing.”
    “So what happened to him?” I demanded.
    “He broke every bone in his body, but the football helmet prevented head injuries. We just fixed him up and sent him back up to ICU.”
    “Calcutta on drugs,” I agreed.
    “So how was your day?”
    “I thought it was really exciting until you told me about yours,” I replied. “I went out to a client’s house this morning for a meeting, but when I got there he’d been murdered.”
    “You’re kidding!” exclaimed Claudia. “What happened?”
    I told Claudia about Bart Hexter being shot. Practice I was turning me into a polished raconteur of these events.
    “And there’s no chance it was an accident?” Claudia asked when I was done.
    “You mean, might he have gotten into his Rolls Royce wearing only his pajamas and driven to the end  of his driveway to clean his gun...?”
    “I get the picture. So what does the family say? Do I they think it was suicide?”
    “Right now everyone’s being too well-bred to discuss it. But when I spoke to his wife, she insisted that he’d never take his own life. She also said that they didn’t find a suicide note.”
    “Only half of suicides leave notes,” replied my roommate. “A medical education is full of all kinds of valuable information.”
    “I guess that leaves things in the hands of the police,” I sighed.
    Don’t underestimate the cops,” counseled my roommate. “We see a lot of homicide detectives in the emergency room. They don’t miss much.”
    “The homicide detective who questioned me this morning might not miss much, but he gave new meaning to the term abrasive .”
    “That’s because you’re a suspect, you dope. He’s not I going to waste his time being polite with you.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. There is no way he can suspect me of anything.”
    “Don’t they teach you anything in law school? You told me yourself that you were the first person on the scene. Hexter was