Dead Certain

first place would have cost less than a quarter of the amount.
    The question, according to Claudia, was always what kind of society we wanted to live in. Did we want to live in the Chicago of Everett Prescott’s time, when there were people dying in the streets, or did we want to do our great-grandfathers one better?
    In addition to his summary, Dr. Cho had stapled a copy of the note the neurologist who’d treated Mrs. Lapinsky after her episode of cardiopulmonary arrest had written on her chart. It was clear from his tone that he thought she was crazy. Delusional. A dried-out ex-alcoholic gabbling out a garbled account of what her shriveled brain had concocted during a grand mal seizure. According to his notes his follow-up took the form of a request for a psychiatric referral, but there was no indication in any of the documents that I had that one was ever done.
    I dropped off into a restless sleep, wondering whether Mrs. Lapinsky’s devil with the “big eye” meant that she was crazy, or that I was.
     
    The next morning I took a shower and banged around the kitchen in my underwear in a futile attempt to make coffee. My new kitchen was a cook’s Valhalla, filled with cupboards of every size and description, including several with built-in hooks or shelves the purpose of which completely eluded me. I had no idea what had possessed Stephen to order them all, whether he’d hoped someday to venture into the kitchen himself or whether, like my mother, he was eternally optimistic that I might eventually reform.
    The coffeepot was one of those Italian ones that does everything but curl your hair. After pushing all the buttons in every combination I could think of, I couldn’t get it to produce anything other than a kind of hissing sound. I padded back upstairs to the bedroom in frustration, slipped on a pair of jeans and an old Harvard sweatshirt that had once belonged to Russell, and set out in search of the nearest Starbucks.
    I didn’t have far to look. The doorman on duty directed me four blocks west to the one on Rush and Oak. Standing in line with all the slightly hungover beautiful people who lived and worked in the neighborhood, it occurred to me that instead of Hyde Park, I was now living in the Chicago equivalent of Beverly Hills. As I clutched my enormous latte in both hands and walked back toward the lake, I wasn’t sure how I was going to like it.
    As I got close to my apartment I was surprised to see a familiar figure being disgorged from a taxicab. It was Carl Laffer, swathed in the Gore-Tex of a serious runner, pulling himself and a couple of big shopping bags out of the back of the taxi.
    “I was hoping I would catch you,” he said, unfurling his rangy frame and slipping a couple of bills to the driver. “I got your message this morning about wanting to meet, and I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. Your mother told me I might find you here.”
    “What’s all this?” I asked, eyeing the shopping bags.
    “Claudia’s things from the hospital. Your mother said she thought you’d be going to New York for the funeral, so I wanted to be sure you had a chance to go through them and take her parents whatever you thought they might want.”
    “What kind of stuff is it?” I asked, feeling strangely reluctant to pick it up.
    “I don’t know. I didn’t really look.” My heart leapt in my chest, thinking that Claudia’s notes on the patient charts might be among them. “I was just going for a run along the lake before I stopped in to see my patients at Northwestern. I thought I’d drop the bags by as long as I was in the neighborhood.”
    “Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I had wanted to talk to Laffer after I’d had a chance to confront McDermott, not before.
    “Would you like me to help you get the bags upstairs?” he asked eyeing the cup of coffee in my hand.
    “I’d appreciate it,” I said.
    We each grabbed a bag as the doorman swung the door open for us, touched his cap, and wished us both a very good morning.
    “How long have you lived in this apartment?” he asked, making small talk as we stepped into the elevator.
    “Since yesterday,” I said. “I bought the apartment almost a year ago and gutted it,” I said, deciding to leave Stephen Azorini out of it. I figured if he hadn’t already learned the details of our breakup by reading the papers, it wasn’t my job to bring him current. “The work was finished a couple of weeks ago, but