Chapter 8

Ruben turned around.

Warren Osei stood at the lectern with a leather folder open in front of him and a single sheet of paper in his hand. He was sixty-one, broad-faced, gray-bearded, wearing a plain black tuxedo with no pocket square, and he looked like a man who had walked into his own building and found it on fire.

"Where is Mr. Coyle?" he said again.

"He's leaving," Halloway said quickly, from the middle of the floor. "I handled the situation. He came in without a ticket-"

"Grant. Sit down."

Halloway did not sit down. But he stopped talking, which in that room amounted to the same thing.

Osei lifted the paper.

"This is the original gift agreement," he said. "Executed three years ago in August, in my office, with two witnesses. Four million, two hundred thousand dollars from Mr. Ruben J. Coyle of Cincinnati, Ohio. Given in memory of his wife, Margaret Coyle, who died in this hospital in March of that year. The agreement contains one condition, written in the donor's own words and initialed by me: that his name never be printed."

He set the paper down and looked out at the tables.

"We printed it anyway. Tonight. On a seating card. That is my fault and I will answer for it."

Someone at the second table said, "The Chicago family-"

"There is no Chicago family," Osei said. "I have never met them. I have never spoken to them. In three years, no one has ever been able to tell me the name of a single member of that family, including the man who has been raising money on it."

Ruben stood at the doors with his hand still on the brass push bar.

"Dr. Vasquez," Osei said. "You've been in this wing's planning meetings since the beginning. Tell the room what four million dollars buys."

Vasquez walked to the microphone. She didn't use notes.

"It buys twenty-two beds," she said. "It buys a clean-air isolation unit. It buys the infusion suite where a nine-year-old named Devon spent last winter. It buys a playroom on the third floor where a volunteer named Margaret Coyle used to read to children on Thursday nights before she got sick in that same building." She looked at the door. "It buys the reason every child in that wing is alive. Not one of them knows his name."

Halloway stepped forward. His voice had gone high and thin.

"This proves nothing about the man standing at my door. Anybody can walk in off the street."

Osei looked at him for a long moment.

"Then answer one question," he said. "Who countersigned the receipt, Grant?"