Dead Certain

I’d agreed to stay in the apartment in Hyde Park with Claudia until she was finished with her fellowship.”
    “I’m sure you didn’t want to leave her alone in that neighborhood,” he observed.
    “I didn’t want to leave her, period,” I said, my voice tightening up with the unwanted approach of tears. “But she was moving back to New York. It seemed like a natural time.”
    “I don’t need to tell you,” said Laffer, with a sad shake of his head, “but your roommate was one of the most talented surgeons I ever had the privilege of working with. She was one of those rare few who, when they looked at something, saw a solution instead of a problem.”
    I nodded, fighting back the tears, as the elevator came to rest on seven. I squeezed awkwardly past Laffer through the narrow elevator door as he chivalrously hung back and waited for me to pass.
    “Only one apartment per floor?” inquired Laffer.
    “That’s the way the building was originally designed,”
    I told him dutifully. “This particular apartment is actually a duplex. The apartments on seven and eight have been joined together to form a single residence.” I wanted to kick myself for sounding like a realtor, but there was something about the shock of losing Claudia that had knocked me off kilter. I no longer had any idea of what was going to come out of my mouth. I just hoped Laffer wasn’t the kind to easily take offense. I thought that he and I had gotten off on the right foot the other day, and I didn’t want to do anything to change that.
    “You must have room enough for a staff in here,” he said, as he stepped inside the massive foyer. At the sight of the apartment, I could tell, he suddenly felt less urgent about fitting in his run. “This place looks like it goes on forever.”
    “Actually, the building was designed with servants’ quarters in the basement,” I said somewhat apologetically. “When you buy your unit, the co-op board assigns you a corresponding staff apartment. I’ve just moved in, so I don’t have anybody working for me yet, but the apartment is quite nice. You can’t beat the location,” I added stupidly.
    “I’ll say,” remarked Laffer, drawn in spite of himself to the windows on the far side of the living room and their commanding view of the northward skyline and the lake.
    I set my purse down beside the bags in the entryway.
    “Would you like a tour?” I inquired.
    “If you’re sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” he replied, unable to completely conceal the envy in his voice.
    “This building was designed by David Adler,” I began, leading him through the living room into the library, a fantasy of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves complete with a two-story ladder that moved on a wheeled track that ran around the entire perimeter of the room. I turned to face him and saw the wonder on his face. It was Adler’s sense of proportion. It struck everyone the same way. Even if you didn’t realize it, there was something about the perfection of the space that made everyone look dreamy. “I guess that’s why they call it genius,” I said to myself, watching Laffer as he marveled at the room, slowly unzipping his warm-up jacket.
    I opened my mouth to say something about the paneling, but the words would not come. They stayed there, stuck in my throat, as I stared, dumbfounded and transfixed. There, on the front of Carl Laffer’s T-shirt, as big and as plain as the words on a stop sign, was the single letter I.
     

CHAPTER 29
     
    Just like Claudia, I found myself alone with the devil. The same devil who had come into Mrs. Lapinsky’s room with not an enormous “eye,” but an enormous I for Indiana basketball. McDermott hadn’t been the only Prescott Memorial surgeon who’d been in Indiana at the time of the VA Hospital deaths. Carl Laffer, the man who loved nothing more than opera and Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers, had played basketball there as an undergraduate. Not McDermott, Laffer.
    What a mistake it had been to think that just because Laffer seemed nice that he was actually kind. Surgeons were, by necessity, capable of ruthlessness, in the operating room and when it came to their own careers.
    I must really be my mother’s daughter after all, I thought bitterly to myself. I’d been blinded by good manners, tricked into applauding Laffer’s ambition as diplomacy and his ruthlessness as pragmatism because he wore a mask of perpetual geniality. What a fool I’d been to think that a