Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “Literally?”

  “No, I don’t think he meant it literally,” I replied, thinking that we all had a bit too much of Stanley Sarrek and his freezer on the brain. “But he told me some of the things the guy did.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like leaving creepy messages on his answering machine. Following him. I guess right before Danny and I had had this conversation this guy talked the janitor of fanny’s building into letting him into Danny’s apartment. Danny came home late from work one night and found him sitting there in the living room with all these Candles burning. When I asked Danny how he managed to get rid of him, he said he grabbed the guy’s wallet, dropped it out the window, and then after the guy ran downstairs to get it, Danny says he locked the doors and called the police.”

  “And when did all this happen?”

  “We finished the IPO three years ago last October, so it must have been somewhere around then. You know, come to think of it, Danny moved not too long after that. I wonder if there was some connection.”

  “Did Stephen and Danny travel together often?” asked Elliott, seemingly from out of the blue.

  “Of course they did.”

  “So this trip to Japan was not the first time?”

  “Not by a long shot and I know where you’re going with this, Abelman, and that dog won’t hunt.” Law enforcement types were all the same; they always assumed the worst. “Danny was gay; Stephen was straight. They worked together, but they didn’t sleep together.”

  “For now I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” shrugged Elliott, his tone of voice suggesting that nothing would make him happier than discovering that Stephen was secretly gay. “I’ve got a gay operative assigned to work on Danny’s other life.”

  “What do you mean, his ‘other’ life?” I demanded, resenting the sleaziness his tone implied.

  “Don’t be so naive, Kate. I guarantee you, there are things you don’t know about Danny, things that may lead us to finding out who killed him.”

  “That’s true of everyone,” I protested.

  “Yes, but it’s more true because he was gay. But for now, why don’t you just tell me what he was like to work with?”

  “He was a good guy.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was very smart, good at his job, easy to deal with the way that competent people always are. You knew that if he said he’d do it, it would get done.”

  “How long had he worked for Azor?”

  “From the very beginning. He and Stephen used to joke that in the old days he actually worked for food.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Like all start-up companies Azor didn’t have much money and what they had they certainly couldn’t waste on legal advice. I think the first six months Danny worked for Azor he actually slept on Stephen’s couch.”

  “Why would he do that?” asked Elliott with a look that said he didn’t believe for a minute that Danny had confined his slumbers to the couch. “He was a Georgetown-educated lawyer. Stephen told me that before Danny came to work for Azor he was an associate at McKenzie Valentine in New York. Why would he give up such a prestigious job in order to work for Stephen Azorini for free?”

  “For the same reason they still come to work for Stephen,” I replied, thinking about the scientists on the ZK-501 project. “Because he gives them a chance to do work they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to do. Besides, Danny was no fool. He knew Stephen well enough to realize the odds were pretty good that Stephen would hit 0lle out of the park with his new company. He had a chance to be in on the ground floor.”

  “Did he own stock in Azor?”

  “Quite a bit. I can look up the exact number of shares for you.”

  “What would you guess the dollar value to be?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere in the million-dollar range at the price the shares are trading today.”

  “Do you have any idea how he left his money?”

  “As far as I know he left it all to AIDS-related charities. From what he told me, I gathered his family were all dead.”

  “I still don’t quite buy his leaving McKenzie just because he thought Stephen might strike pay dirt. There had to be something more, something personal, that would make him take that risk.”

  “Sure, but it’s not what you’re thinking. You’re the one who was talking about the straight world and the gay world a minute ago. Well, if he’d stayed at McKenzie it would have meant staying in the closet for the rest of his life.”

  “From what I’ve heard about him, Danny was not exactly open about his homosexuality. Just from the few people I’ve talked to out here I didn’t get the sense that people realized he was gay.”

  “He was a lawyer. At Azor that means he didn’t even really exist. Besides, not telling the world about what’s going on in your bedroom is a lot different from being terrified that if someone finds out, it will destroy your career.”

  “So do you have any idea what his life was like out of the office?”

  “He collected modern art,” I replied dryly.

  “You know that’s not what I mean. Did he have a steady boyfriend, do you know? Did he do a lot of one-night stands? Did he cruise leather bars? Was he a drag queen?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “That’s okay, we’ll find out all his secrets soon enough,” declared Elliott matter-of-factly.

  “Not everybody has secrets,” I shot back.

  “No, they don’t,” agreed Elliott. “Especially once they’re dead.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Elliott wanted to have a look at Danny’s personnel file, so I walked him down to human resources. While I was there I had my picture taken and my employee ID made. It took only a few minutes, but to me it seemed like a momentous step, a laminated piece of plastic that identified me as an employee—a person under Stephen Azorini’s control. Well, identify might have been too strong a word. The company used one of those cameras that spit out a computer-generated image and the quality of the likeness that appeared on the ID was so poor that it looked like a Xerox of a morgue shot taken in bad light.

  That done, I left Elliott to make his own way through Danny’s personnel file and find his own way out of the building. Now that I was officially employed by Azor it seemed like a good idea to do something about earning my keep. I had a long way to go before I felt comfortable taking the helm of the negotiations with Takisawa and it was time I did something about it.

  Walking down the corridor that housed all the company administrative offices, I noticed that Stephen’s door was open and saw him sitting behind his desk doing something on the computer. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and called out for me to come in.

  “When are you and I going to have some time to sit down and talk about Takisawa?” I asked him, folding my arms across my chest.

  “I was hoping to block out most of the afternoon on Saturday. That way we’ll hopefully have fewer interruptions.”

  “Don’t forget we have to go to the Benefactors’ Dinner that night,” I said, congratulating myself that I’d remembered. It was a dinner at the Museum of Contemporary Art honoring its biggest donors. Skip Tillman, the firm’s managing partner, had recently been named president of the MCA’s board of trustees. As a result, Callahan Ross partners were now expected to take an active role in the museum. Worse yet, Skip’s wife Bitsy and my mother were friends, so I had gotten both arms twisted about going.

  Stephen pulled a large, thick envelope from the top of a pile and tossed it toward me. “This just came this morning,” he said, moving on to other things.

  I opened it. Inside was a set of interrogatories at least an inch thick. These were the written questions posed to Azor by the plaintiff’s attorneys in the most recently filed Serezine case. They represented round one in what would no doubt turn out to be a lengthy—and for Stephen, expensive—discovery process.

  “I’m going back downtown to my office this afternoon. I’ll deliv
er them to Tom Galloway myself. He’ll want to set up a time to meet with you early next week to go over your answers.”

  “Can’t this wait until after the Takisawa visit?”

  “Unfortunately, interrogatories have to be answered within ten days. Don’t worry, Tom will make it as painless as possible.”

  “Sure. The only place it’ll hurt will be my wallet.” He looked down at my Azor ID, which I’d clipped to the lapel of my jacket, and smiled. “At least I get a break from paying you by the hour for a while.” He picked up another piece of paper from his desk and handed it to me. “This fax came in from Takisawa overnight.”

  I read it through quickly. It was a letter, brief by Japanese standards, informing Stephen that the company’s chairman, old man Takisawa himself, would be making the trip to Chicago.

  “I take it this is good news?” I asked.

  “Very good. But it certainly ups the ante on their visit, especially when it comes to planning the logistics.”

  “In what way?”

  “The Japanese traditionally read a great deal of meaning into how they are treated, and believe me, senior executives like Takisawa are used to being treated like royalty.”

  “So you book them into a suite at the Four Seasons and hire a limousine to take them back and forth,” I said, figuring that’s what Stephen was already planning.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that. You’re thinking about this like a business meeting when it’s really much more like a state visit for a foreign dignitary. For example, it is expected that we’ll come up with someplace special for dinner on the first night they’re in town.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Someplace unique and not generally available. Preferably someplace with a sense of ceremony.”

  “What about church?” I offered, only half joking.

  “I was actually thinking about your parents’ house. You have to admit it would be perfect. Old man Takisawa would love the idea that he could go home and tell all his rich old friends he’d been entertained in Astrid Millholland’s house.”

  “You know my mother,” I replied dubiously. “She’s perfectly capable of snubbing people she’s known for years. I can’t even begin to imagine how she’d feel about a bunch of strange Japanese businessmen in her house.”

  “She wouldn’t even have to be there. We could have the whole thing catered.”

  “I don’t know....” I ventured uncertainly.

  “It can’t hurt to ask.”

  I thought to myself that it very well might.

  “Well, what do you think?” pressed Stephen. “Do you think there’s a chance she’ll say yes?”

  “Oh, I’m sure I can get her to say yes,” I replied weakly. “It’s the concessions she’s going to wring out of me in exchange that have me worried.”

  I went back to Danny’s office and started pulling out his file on Takisawa. While I was at it I grabbed the ones on Okuda, too. The previous year Azor had been involved in an aborted courtship with the Okuda Corporation. For months Danny had pursued the possibility of a joint venture with that Japanese drugmaker in the hopes of financing the development of an HIV integrase inhibitor that would block the ability of the HTV virus to take over healthy cells. Unfortunately, right before the deal was signed, Merck published findings putting them ahead in the race to develop the drug and Okuda hastily bowed out. But not before they’d come to pay a four-day visit to Chicago to tour Azor’s labs.

  I was hoping to free ride on Danny’s experience with Okuda and I was not disappointed. Orderly to a fault, Danny had saved everything, from his correspondence with the general manager of the Hotel Nikko, the city’s premier Japanese-owned hotel, to a detailed itinerary setting out every aspect of Okuda’s visit. Stephen was wrong about it being like planning a state visit; after I read through the file I realized it was more like organizing the invasion of a foreign country. Meals, gifts, the logistics for dozens of people, all planned to the minute... I had no time for this.

  As soon as I got back to my office I asked Cheryl to get my mother on the phone so that I could set up a lunch date. Cheryl looked at me, stood up, calmly walked over to my side of the desk, and put her hand on my forehead.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  “I’m just checking to see if you have a fever. It’s the only logical explanation.”

  “Oh, come on, I can invite my own mother to lunch, can’t I?”

  “You can do anything you want,” replied Cheryl with great deliberation, “but do you realize how many times in the years I have worked for you that you have made me lie to your mother so that you didn’t have to even talk to her on the phone? Do you know how often I have had to beg you to return her calls? Let me remind you that last year you deliberately scheduled the Cranfield Tire deposition in L.A. for the week of her birthday so that you could get out of going to her party. So it seems only natural to assume that there’s some physiological reason for this aberrant behavior.”

  “I need to ask her a favor,” I said sheepishly.

  “That’s kind of what I figured,” replied Cheryl, grinning as she returned to her desk.

  If anything, Mother greeted my invitation with even more suspicion than Cheryl, but curiosity won out and she agreed to meet me for lunch at the Four Seasons the following day. I had just hung up the phone when Tom Galloway appeared at my door. His look of roughened grief made me feel ashamed of myself. Cheryl said that according to the secretarial grapevine it was his brother who had died. One look at his face and I found myself wondering whether it might have been his twin.

  Tom was one of the firm’s up-and-coming stars, a talented litigator who’d had the good sense to marry into a well-connected political family—his wife’s father was a U.S. senator, her uncle an appeals court judge. It was widely rumored that Tom would seek his father-in-law’s senate seat when he decided to step down.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, shaking his hand. He was tall—enough so I looked him in the eye—and had jet black hair and the fair skin of an Irishman. The same good looks that made him a favorite with the secretaries would no doubt some day serve him well in public office, but today he just looked exhausted.

  “Thank you,” he murmured wearily. I found myself remembering how quickly those well-meaning offers of condolence began to grate.

  ‘I assume you’ve heard about Danny...” I ventured, hoping that he had.

  “What a terrible thing...”

  f don’t know if you’ve also heard that I’m tem-Porarily taking over for him as in-house counsel at Azor.”

  Guttman told me you’ve taken a leave of absence.”

  “Just until they’ve concluded negotiations with Takisawa.”

  “The Japanese thing?”

  “Yes. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. While you were out of the office Azor was served with another wrongful-death suit involving Serezine,” I said, handing him the copies of the complaint and the interrogatories that I’d had Cheryl make for him.

  “Ouch,” he said, reaching for the file. “I bet Stephen was pissed.”

  “You can say that again. Once you’ve had a chance to read through the complaint you two should sit down and discuss it, but he seemed to indicate there’s a good chance that—”

  Cheryl appeared in the doorway looking so flustered that I stopped in midsentence. Her judgment was as formidable as her composure. She would never interrupt if it weren’t important, and she wouldn’t look this shaken unless it was something beyond the pale of normal crisis. “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she began.

  “What is it, Cheryl?” I demanded, trying to suppress my alarm.

  “Stephen just called,” she reported uncertainly. “He wants you to meet him right away at this address on Division.” She held out her hand. In it was the piece of notepaper on which she’d scribbled the address.

  “When?”

  “Right now. He said it was urgent.”


  “Right now?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he say where it was or what it was about?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” she replied. This in itself seemed to be cause for alarm.

  “Why didn’t you let me speak to him?”

  “He was on the car phone. He was really upset, yelling. Whenever I asked him a question, it was like he couldn’t hear what I was saying. He just kept on shouting that you had to get there right away.”

  “And he didn’t say anything about what it was about?”

  “I don’t know. It was so hard to understand him. But he might have said something about needing a witness.”

  The address turned out to belong to McNamara’s Funeral Home and as the cabby pulled up in front of the building I saw that Stephen was already at the front door, banging on it with his fists. I gave the driver a twenty and, without waiting for the change, sprang from the cab and grabbed Stephen by the arm.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “They’ve released the body,” shouted Stephen over the pounding of his own fists. Pedestrians crossed the street in order to keep their distance. It was only a matter of time before someone called the police.

  Suddenly the door was opened by a gray-haired gentleman wearing a cardigan sweater and a pair of reading glasses on a chain.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” he inquired tentatively. I’m sure that in his line of work he did not have much of a drop-in clientele.

  “I need to see Danny Wohl,” announced Stephen.

  “Excuse me? Who?” asked the man, obviously bewildered.

  “Danny Wohl,” repeated Stephen in frustration. “Danny Wohl. Danny Wohl.”