Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “It would be better if it was today.”

  “Fine. I’ll try to catch him at home. What’s the big rush?”

  “According to Guttman, if you don’t make this deal with Takisawa, Cassidy already has the votes lined up on the board to demand your resignation.”

  “Really? Then he should be happy to hear that I got a fax from Tokyo this morning. Takisawa is sending a delegation of their top scientists and business people here on the nineteenth. They want to hear about our results, see our labs, and talk dollars and cents.”

  “Is there any chance of finalizing the deal while they’re here?” I asked eagerly. The board was scheduled to meet the Monday after Thanksgiving. If we could present them with a signed agreement with Takisawa, it would stop Cassidy and his buddies cold.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on this, Kate. I know what Cassidy wants. He wants to jack up the share price, sell his stock, and cash out of the company. He doesn’t give a shit what happens to us after he’s gone. I’m not going to let Cassidy or anyone else try to scare me into giving away the store just to come to terms with Takisawa. The way I see it, a bad deal can kill us just as fast as no deal at all. This negotiation with Takisawa is going to be very, very tricky.”

  “Do you think twelve days is enough time to get ready?” I asked. The Japanese are notorious for detailing Westerners to death. Before they wrote a check with that many zeros on it, Takisawa was going to want to know absolutely everything there was to know about Azor right down to the number of fillings in Stephen Azorini’s teeth. “It won’t be easy,” Stephen assured me, “but we’ll do it.”

  “Tell Danny to call me if he wants a hand,” I said, disgusted that I was letting Guttman get to me even this much. “I don’t want him to think I’m trying to muscle in on him, but you know I’m available if he needs me.”

  “I’m sure Danny will be thrilled to have your help,” replied Stephen, suddenly turning grim. “There’s going to be more than enough agony to go around on this one.”

  * * *

  When Stephen Azorini finished school, he had a medical degree and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He also had his pick of academic appointments, not to mention offers from all the big drug companies. None tempted him. He’d long before made up his mind to challenge the giant drug companies at their own game. His plan was to start a pharmaceutical company daring enough to ride the cutting edge of scientific discovery and nimble enough to capitalize on opportunities that the pharmaceutical behemoths with their massive bureaucracies were too slow and cumbersome to exploit.

  Danny Wohl was Azor Pharmaceuticals’ first employee. Danny and Stephen had known each other since college. Danny had gone to Harvard on scholarship, while Stephen had gone to prove he had the backbone to defy his father. While there is little doubt it was Stephen’s good looks that prompted Danny to strike up a conversation that first day, it was quickly apparent to both of them that they had something very important in common. What both men shared, what they immediately recognized in each other, was the same fierce desire to prove they were better than where they’d come from.

  Danny grew up in a grim, blue-collar pocket of Detroit, the only son of an intermittently employed welder and his embittered, alcoholic wife. Stephen’s father, on the other hand, was a Chicago business tycoon with ties to organized crime. What had become of his mother was a question you learned not to ask twice.

  Over the years I have tried to imagine how Stephen must have seemed to Danny back then. It is hard to believe he wasn’t mesmerized. At eighteen Stephen had been an Adonis—accomplished, athletic, and rich. That Danny reinvented himself using Stephen as a model I am certain. Years later there were still things about him, from his taste for Bushmills to his deep-seated love of jazz, that he’d picked up from Stephen the way a poor relation might acquire a suit of hand-me-down clothes.

  But Danny was no weak shadow. After ten years he bore little resemblance to the child of poverty and longing who’d gotten off the bus in Cambridge. Although Stephen routinely received the credit for Azor’s meteoric rise, those closest to the company quietly agreed that while it was the fire of Stephen’s entrepreneurial genius that had fueled the rocket, it was Danny’s firm hand on the throttle that had kept it on course.

  And yet, despite all the exigencies of business, Danny was able to remain a man of wide-ranging interests. A passionate collector of modem art, he also served on the board of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and raised money for the Lyric Opera. That he was gay always seemed one of the least significant things about him.

  I will never forget the day that Danny came to my office to tell me he’d tested positive for HIV. I’d assumed he was coming to discuss a possible stock offering for Azor. Instead, he asked if I would draw up the necessary documents granting Stephen power of attorney in the event he became incapacitated. Up until that moment AIDS for me had always been a word on paper, nothing more. Now I sat and looked across the desk at Danny, blond and sunburned from spending the weekend on a friend’s boat, and all I could see was a dead man.

  Eventually the horror receded, papered over by other problems, different crises. Ironically it was new drugs developed by the very pharmaceutical companies he and Stephen had long decried as dinosaurs that finally offered hope. For the past year Danny had been taking a “cocktail” of anti-AIDS drugs. While they reduced the amount of virus in his blood to below measurable levels, the regimen left him struggling with a plethora of side effects. Tormented by deep muscle pain, blinding headaches, and a general sense of malaise, Danny had been forced to cut back on his schedule. Even so, one day in ten found him too weak to make it in to the office at all. While Guttman had been railing about Danny’s unavailability, Danny had probably been in bed, shuddering through waves of nausea and despair, no doubt feeling less concerned about the company’s prospects of survival than his own.

  At five o’clock I waited on the corner of Adams and LaSalle with the darkness gathering around me. In winter, night comes early to Chicago; by the time December rolled around, it would practically fall in the middle of the afternoon. I pulled the heavy cashmere of my coat around me and stamped my feet against the cold.

  Stephen pulled to the curb and I slid gratefully into the warm, dark car. He was talking on the phone, immersed in a conversation I could not understand—something about chemical sequences and protein folding. As we glided through traffic I listened with half an ear, vaguely comforted by the thought of atoms and molecules binding and releasing like dancers in a quadrille.

  We drove east on Adams then turned north onto Michigan Avenue through the thickening rush-hour traffic. It was a clear night and everything seemed crisp from the cold. Thanksgiving was still weeks away, but the trees were already hung with tiny white Christmas lights that glittered like diamonds strung against the dark velvet of the night.

  As we turned onto East Lake Shore Drive it seemed as if someone had lowered the volume of the city. The cacophony of Michigan Avenue evaporated, buffered by an open expanse of park and the much larger silence of Lake Michigan. Our new apartment was in an elegant building nestled in the elbow of Lake Shore Drive just where it reaches out to embrace the shore. Built at the turn of the century, the apartment itself had been designed by David Adler, an architect whose sense of scale was so legendary that he supposedly could look at an eighteen-foot ceiling and tell instantly if the cornice was even a fraction off.

  By any measure it was a grand apartment. My mother always said it was the best in the city. She should know— it had once been hers, a wedding present from my grandparents who’d made their home in the one directly above it. Later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Palm Springs, Mother combined the two apartments, adding a graceful curved staircase and creating arguably the most stunning duplex in the city.

  They sold it when I was six and we went to live in the big house in Lake Forest where I grew up. In the intervening years the apartment changed hands a number of times. It had most r
ecently been purchased by Victor Sanderson, who’d died six weeks later after choking on a piece of roast beef at the Saddle & Cycle Club. His widow, Phyllis, continued to live there but grew more eccentric with each passing year. Over time she closed off progressively more of the apartment until she was living in the smallest of its twenty-one rooms, eating cold soup by candlelight in order to save on the electricity. According to the attorney who handled the estate, she left behind a fortune totaling over $120 million.

  Stephen pulled the car under the arched portico of the building and the liveried doorman touched the bill of his cap. We waited for a moment while he released the wrought-iron security gate. As the gate parted noiselessly, Stephen eased the car down the steep ramp into the underground garage. Beneath the luxury apartments of Chicago’s Gold Coast lies a subterranean world. Cars are washed and filled with gas, dry cleaning makes its way in and out of closets, meals are cooked, and groceries are delivered. I wondered what my new neighbors would think of my battered Volvo. No doubt they’d assume it belonged to the maid.

  Mother and her decorator, Mimi Sheraton, were already upstairs waiting for us. We found them in the living room which, without furniture, seemed roughly the size of the cargo hold of an ocean freighter. Despite the fact that the walls had been painted the color of Pepto-Bismol, the intricately carved egg-and-dart moldings made my heart turn over in their symmetry.

  Dutifully kissing the air beside my mother’s perfumed cheek, I immediately wished I had thought to put something else on that morning. Mother, in a scarlet Valentino cocktail dress, reduced the severe uniform of my navy suit and pearls to rags with one withering glance. If Mussolini had put one-tenth the effort into his quest for world domination that my mother spends on looking beautiful, we would all be speaking Italian right now.

  Mother, who was due at an important party (one of her more irritating oxymorons), had come to advise us on the architect’s latest sketches for the kitchen and the master suite. Mimi, drawings in hand, led the way while two assistants of dubious sexuality hovered in the background with clipboards and tape measures. Mimi Sheraton was the quintessential society decorator. At least two face-lifts older than my mother, she favored St. John’s knits and was unabashedly condescending to everyone who crossed her path, carpenters and contessas alike. Much of her career had been spent endlessly redecorating my mother’s houses, and as such she counted as more of a fixture of my childhood than many of my actual relatives.

  I had grown up in a house that was in a constant state of redecoration. By the time I was ten I’d already had my fill of window treatments and floor coverings. Deciding where to move the file cabinet in my office was more than enough to satisfy whatever occasional urges I might feel to alter my surroundings. I was more than happy to entrust matters both large and small to my mother and Mimi. As far as I was concerned, the extent of my role in the proceedings was to write checks and feign interest.

  Stephen, on the other hand, could usually be counted on to summon enthusiasm for the process. Once we bought the apartment I was surprised to discover in him an orphan’s delight in all things domestic. While there is no doubt he enjoyed the idea of calling such an elegant residence his own, what he really seemed to relish was the prospect of—after a decade of sterile bachelor apartments—finally settling into a real home.

  But tonight was different. From the very first he seemed preoccupied, too distracted to participate in the discussions about plastering and the problem of what to do about the hideous wood-grain Formica paneling that had been installed by some previous criminal against architecture. As we talked he slipped away entirely. When I was sent to fetch him, I found him pacing the entrance hall, cell phone in hand, punching in Danny’s number for the fourteenth time that day only to be rewarded yet again by an endless ringing at the other end.

  “Maybe we should stop over at his apartment when we’re done here and make sure he’s all right,” I suggested.

  “He’s probably asleep,” replied Stephen. “I did tell him he could take the day off. I’d feel like an ass showing up on his doorstep just because Jim Cassidy has decided he wants to swing his dick around.”

  Stephen was right, of course. That was the worst part about people like Cassidy and Guttman. They generated artificial crises and it didn’t matter that their crises had no substance—they still managed to suck you in.

  Eventually Mimi turned to Stephen’s pet project—the exercise room that was planned as part of the master suite—and he was able to set his other concerns aside. After having spent the last half hour listening to Mother and Mimi debate where to hang the copper pots we did not own and would surely never use to prepare meals neither Stephen nor I would ever be home to eat, it was my turn to escape. I wandered down the hall to look at the small bedroom I planned on turning into my study. To my dismay, Mother came and found me almost immediately.

  “I know you like to pretend that it’s not, but how you live is very important,” she said in her gospel-according-to-Astrid-Millholland voice. “You may not be interested in entertaining any of your old friends, but I am sure Stephen would like to have a nice home in which to receive guests.”

  “I would like to have a nice home, too, Mother,” I assured her peevishly.

  “Well, you would never know it from how you live now,” she sniffed. “Honestly, I don’t see how you’re going to manage this renovation if you aren’t willing to take an interest in the details.”

  “We’ve hired Mimi to handle the details.”

  “Mimi is not the one who is going to be living here. Don’t you think you’ve taken this lawyer business far enough? Why don’t you just give it a rest for a while and concentrate on what’s really important in your life?”

  “Important to whom?” I inquired.

  From the end of the hall we could hear Stephen’s approaching baritone. “So you really think we’d have room for a steam room next to the gym if we moved that one wall?”

  “I wish you could see yourself,” Mother hissed, unable to resist getting in one last shot. “That stubborn look you get is so very unattractive. It’s a wonder Stephen puts up with it.”

  “I like being stubborn, Mother,” I replied coolly. “That’s why I became a lawyer.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Stephen and I were already in bed when the police arrived. The doorman’s buzzer caught us in midembrace, and his announcement that there were two uniformed officers in the lobby asking to see Stephen left us searching frantically for our clothes and filled with silent alarm.

  We managed to be presentable by the time the elevator delivered the officers upstairs. His face ashen in alarm, Stephen opened the door to two middle-aged beat cops. One was white, the other black, but they both had guts that hung on them like saddlebags and strained against the black leather of their jackets.

  All business, Stephen quickly identified himself and ushered them inside. They seemed oblivious to the size of Stephen’s apartment and the view it commanded. I knew this was a bad sign. These men were professionals, they had a lot of years between them, and they still didn’t want to be here—they didn’t want to do what they had come to do.

  The words of the formal notification may have been memorized, but their sympathy seemed real. They regretted to inform us that Danny Wohl had been found dead in his apartment earlier in the day. The detectives who’d been summoned searched his apartment and found a copy of the power of attorney I’d drawn up more than a year ago. However, it had taken some time to process the information and locate Stephen’s home address.

  We pressed for details, but there were only a few forthcoming. Apparently a building engineer had let himself in to the apartment to check a faulty thermostat and discovered the body. Immediately recognizing that Danny was dead he’d called 911. When we asked the officers how Danny had died they could give us only the official answer. In cases of an unattended death it was up to the medical examiner to determine the cause of death. An autopsy would have to be performed.


  While they were obviously reluctant to offer us anything more, they did manage to leave us with the distinct impression that Danny had died peacefully—his life claimed by something from the doctor’s lexicon of sudden death—an aneurysm or an embolism, perhaps. Later, after they had gone and the initial shock had worn off, we consoled ourselves with that.

  As an intern, Stephen had had a chance to see firsthand the prolonged agony of a death from AIDS. Patients in excruciating pain, robbed of their sight, their strength, their dignity... At least, we told each other, at least, whatever malady had claimed him, he’d been spared that.

  The next morning we were woken by the telephone. It was the woman from the management company shrilly demanding that Stephen come and see Danny’s apartment for himself. He was perplexed by her insistence, her refusal to discuss over the telephone something as simple as having an apartment cleaned. Compared to the enormity of Danny’s death, her concerns about getting the carpets cleaned seemed petty and ridiculous.

  Of course, now that we were actually in the apartment, it all made sense. Her anger as we first spoke in her office. The way she’d bitten off her syllables as she told us how they’d found his body. The almost savage way she’d twisted her passkey in the lock and pushed open the door to let us in, careful not to cross over the threshold herself.

  The last time I had been in Danny Wohl’s apartment it was an elegant place, festive with fresh flowers and lit with candles for a dinner party. Today it looked like a slaughterhouse. The living room was in shambles. The glass top of the coffee table had been tumbled off its props. Cushions, covered with ominous dark stains, had been torn from the couch and lay scattered across the floor. Blood was everywhere. The walls were covered with it, splashed in arcing, elliptical stains, or worse, smeared with frantic, sliding hand marks.

  I glanced over at Stephen to see how he was taking it. His leonine head was bent, his smoky eyes hooded, his face registering no emotion other than objective interest. It was all an act, of course. A trick he’d picked up in medical school. But I am a lawyer, not a doctor, and I was completely unequipped to deal with what I was seeing in Danny’s apartment. I tried closing my eyes, but it did not help. Even the smell of blood was overwhelming—cloying and feral. What on earth had happened here?