Read Online Final Option by Gini Hartzmark - Free Book Online Page B

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 supposed to meet you the morning he was killed. I’m sure that you’re on the top of the cops’ list right now.”
    “Stop it,” I said. “You’re depressing the hell out of me. I’m juggling too many cases as it is. I don’t have time to be a murder suspect. Besides, what would your parents say if they found out you had such an elevated opinion of the cops?” Claudia’s parents were both professors at NYU, radical Jewish intellectuals and grayhaired rebels against authority.
    “All I said was that the homicide cops, as a rule, have their shit together. Policemen are like plumbers, some of them are good and most of them aren’t. I spend a fair chunk of time trying to sew up the holes in people that wouldn’t be there in the first place if the cops had been doing their job. You know what they say about cops in the emergency room?”
    “What’s that?”
    “ ‘Call for a cop and call for a pizza and see which one comes first.’ ”
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    The Chicago Board of