Expecting to have the place to myself, I was surprised to see Michelle Goodwin sitting at a table in the corner of the lunchroom, headphones clamped over her ears, eating a container of yogurt and reading a scientific journal. Of all the ZK-501 scientists she was the one who most preferred to work at night when there was a scarcity of human interference and an abundance of cpu time. Several times I had seen her leaving the building to begin her daily workout as I was just arriving.
Tonight Michelle seemed totally wrapped up in her own thoughts, cut off from the rest of the world by whatever music was coming out of her headphones and the submicroscopic universe that occupied her. There was an intensity about her, even in eating, a singularity of focus. It was a trait I had recognized in all sorts of people who were driven to excel.
Watching her I felt a strange kinship. I suspected that at this point in time Michelle felt she carried the entire burden of the ZK-501 project on her shoulders. Childress she viewed as window dressing, always heading to some conference or other while she concentrated on getting the work done. Like a runner in a relay race, until the structure of ZKBP was solved, she carried the baton alone. Seeing her there, in the middle of the night, I felt fiercely protective. I wanted to make the deal that would let her see the race through to its completion.
I hated to disturb her, but it seemed strange for us to be together in the middle of the night without acknowledging each other. Besides, I was afraid if she caught sight of me unexpectedly I might startle her. Slowly, I moved into her field of vision and stayed there, until she finally looked up.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Despite my best intentions I had clearly startled her.
“Stephen needs something on his desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” I replied. The emptiness of the building seemed to weigh on our conversation, making small talk seem stilted and our voices seem unnaturally loud.
“It never occurred to me that lawyers had to work through the night.” It was obvious that Michelle knew as little about the practice of corporate law as I did about crystallography. All-nighters were so common in the deal-driven areas of law that some firms employed three shifts of support staff to provide coverage around the clock.
A friend of mine from law school liked to tell a story about clerking for a firm in New York that specialized in mergers and acquisitions. One night her husband had woken up at four o’clock in the morning alarmed to find her not there. Worried, he called her office only to have the receptionist inform him politely that his wife would have to call him back because she was in a meeting.
“The Japanese faxed us a proposal today and Stephen wants us to have our reply ready by tomorrow morning,” I explained.
“You be careful with the Japanese,” warned Michelle.
“Why’s that?”
“They have a way of kidnapping people.”
“Kidnapping?” I demanded. “I’ve heard them accused of a lot of things, but never kidnapping.”
“Not literally,” Michelle replied seriously, “but what they do is every bit as dangerous.”
“And what is it that they do, exactly?”
“They dangle their money in front of you and ask you to do backflips for it. But what happens is that in the end you spend so much time working on your backflip that you lose sight of the fact that you’re a scientist and not an acrobat.”
“I guess it was hard when Okuda walked away from the deal for the integrase project.”
Michelle shrugged, noncommittally. “Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me,” she said.
I had the first draft of the proposal on Stephen’s desk at precisely four minutes to nine. While he read it I paced the floor nervously. I’d gotten my second wind somewhere around sunrise and I wasn’t tired. From experience I knew this second wave of energy would carry me for most of the day, right up until the time when accumulated fatigue hit me like a ten-pound sledgehammer in the late afternoon.
Stephen immediately lit upon two potential problems in the royalty structure—hidden grenades, he called them. We spent half an hour brainstorming a way to defuse them. By the time we had worked out the details it was time for Stephen to head to that morning’s project council meeting for the Hemasyn group. Even more important, it was time for Neiman Marcus to open.
At ten o’clock on the dot, I consulted my address book and phoned the manager of Neiman Marcus’s downtown store. His name was Mr. Riccardi and he was only one of the legion of Chicago retailers willing to fall on their swords at the merest mention of my mother’s name. Like everyone whose job it is to cater to the well-to-do, when I told him what I needed he asked no questions and assured me it would be done.
That accomplished, I spent the next couple hours drafting Azor’s final counterproposal. I knew any one of the secretaries would have been happy to do it for me, but I feared a fresh typist would only make fresh mistakes and besides, having gotten it to this point alone, I almost preferred to do it myself.
Once I was finished I took the elevator to the ninth floor and hand-carried the document to Stephen personally for his signature. Having never had occasion to go beyond the first floor, I was mildly surprised to find myself in a parallel universe—labs, lunchrooms, all laid out the same way as for the ZK-501 project, except devoted to different problems.
Once Stephen signed the proposal and the cover letter, I took them back downstairs to my office and, with a sense of occasion, loaded the pages into the fax. My packages were delivered just as I finished. I accepted the two maroon-and-gold shopping bags, thanked the messenger, and shut the door behind him. Then I carefully closed the blinds and emptied the contents of the two bags onto the desk. Enshrouded in tissue was a slate blue Dana Buchman jacket with a black wool skirt. There were also a cream-colored silk blouse, two pairs of DKNY pantyhose—size tall—and an assortment of Hanro cotton underwear.
Some kind soul had tucked in a cosmetics bag crammed with sample sizes of all kinds of makeup and perfume, which, according to the embossed notecard I found inside, the manager of the Oak Brook store urged me to accept with his greatest compliments. I picked up the pocket tape recorder from my desk and dictated a quick thank-you note for Cheryl to type before throwing the manager’s notecard into the trash.
I stripped out of yesterday’s clothes gratefully and told myself that at this point clean underwear was actually better than sleep. Thinking about the day ahead I was glad I had a meeting with Tom Galloway later that morning. We were set to go over the interrogatories on the new Serezine suit—a task I hoped would be consuming enough that I wouldn’t be able to worry too much about how our counterproposal was being received.
With the fifteen-hour time difference between Tokyo and Chicago, it was unlikely we would hear back from Takisawa that day. I was convinced a quick response was more likely to be negative and so I found myself actually hoping for a delay. Still, with so much on the line, I was grateful to have something else to occupy my mind— even if it was a wrongful-death suit.
When Tom arrived, I ushered him into the small conference room adjacent to Stephen’s office. Somehow it seemed unfair to ask him to work in Danny’s old office with all its painful associations. I expected, with the funeral behind us, that Tom would have seemed easier in my company. But as we settled into our chairs he seemed if anything even more ill at ease. I hoped he wasn’t about to unload some new bombshell about the Serezine suits. With our counterproposal in Takisawa’s court and without sleep, my nerves were already singing like high-voltage wire.
“I think I owe you an apology,” he said, like a little boy coming clean in the principal’s office. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was speaking out of genuine contrition or trying to salvage his chances with the partnership committee. “When I stormed into your office the other morning I acted like a real jerk. I realized that at the funeral yesterday. You were only doing what any friend would do and I was so paranoid that I was making it into something else.”
“Apology accepted,” I said, though nothing had changed in terms of my opinion of him.
“Can I ask you a favor?” he ventured uncertainly, y “That depends on what it is.”
“Will you tell me if you find out anything more about how Danny died?”
“Why?” I countered, sensing that Tom Galloway had something he clearly wanted to get off his chest.
“I’ve heard some things.”
“What things?”
“I ran into a guy at the funeral who I recognized from Danny’s building. We started talking and he said the building manager told him Danny’d been stabbed. She said there was blood all over his apartment....”
“There was a lot of blood,” I replied, “but Danny wasn’t stabbed. Though it was the appearance of the apartment that got everyone started asking questions in the first place. I told you in my office how he died. He had a perforated ulcer.”
“Does that mean foul play isn’t suspected anymore?” asked Tom, sounding relieved.
“No. Just the opposite. The medical examiner has just uncovered evidence that very definitely points to murder.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m sorry, for the time being I can’t tell you any more. All I can say is we’re looking very hard for the person who was with him in his apartment at the time he died.”
“Why?” asked Galloway, his composure falling from him like a mask. “What does it matter who was with him in the apartment?”
“Was it you?” I demanded. “Were you the one with him?”
“No,” said Tom, “but I kind of know who was.” His shoulders sagged miserably and he looked up at me with puppy eyes of remorse. It was no wonder he got away with what he did. I didn’t know whether to reach over and pat his head or strangle him.
“What exactly is it that you kind of know?” I demanded.
“I should have told you sooner.”
“Told me what?”
“What I told you the other day was true. When I left Danny on Sunday morning he really was fine. But he was also waiting for someone.”
“Who was he waiting for?”
“I don’t know who.”
“That’s awfully convenient.”
“What I mean is I don’t know the person’s name. Danny was always careful not to tell me. He didn’t want to get them into trouble. But I do know it was someone who worked here.”
“Here? At Azor? Do you know what the person’s job was, at least?”
“A chemist I think.”
I groaned inwardly. “Do you know what kind of chemist?” I prodded.
“I don’t know exactly, but it was someone doing research.”
Great, I thought to myself, now we’re really narrowing it down. Out loud I said, “Was this a friend of Danny’s? Someone he was involved with in some way? Why were they coming to his apartment, do you know?”
“We never really talked about the person,” explained Galloway apologetically, “only what they promised they could do for him.”
“And what was that?” I demanded.
“Give him an experimental new drug for AIDS.”
“What?”
“This researcher knew someone who was working on a very hush-hush new AIDS drug, something like a vaccine, only you took it after you’d been infected and it actually blocked the action of the virus.”
“Danny was doing so well on the medication he was taking. He was symptom free. Why would he take a risk on an experimental drug?”
“All Danny did was take medicine,” replied Galloway. “He didn’t want that to be what his life was about— watching the clock to make sure he didn’t eat for an hour before his medication, being careful not to eat for two hours after. The side effects were so terrible there were times he told me that AIDS couldn’t be worse. He had days that he felt so weak he couldn’t get out of bed, days when his muscles hurt so much he could hardly walk to the elevator, days when he couldn’t bear to be touched. When he came back from Japan, he decided he’d had enough. He wanted to give the new drug a try. Danny and I stayed up that whole night Saturday night, talking through his decision.”
“How was this new drug given?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be. “Was it a pill?”
“No,” answered Tom. “It was an injection. It was a series of injections.”
CHAPTER 22
Danny’s ulcer must have been quite a nasty surprise for the killer. Without it the murder would have been not just an easy but an elegant one. If everything had gone according to plan, the killer would have been long gone by the time Danny had died quietly of an internal hemorrhage. I’m sure he never planned on getting his hands dirty much less on the bloody struggle that had taken place in that apartment.
Of course, the story Galloway told about Danny and the experimental AIDS drug could have been just that—a story, a clever fabrication designed to deflect suspicion from himself. But if what he had to say was true, then someone at Azor was a cold and calculating killer.
Whoever had killed Danny had planned it carefully, laying the groundwork well before Danny’s trip to Japan. Assuming it was a researcher at Azor, then the killer was someone of obvious intelligence, someone likely to do a good job anticipating an investigator’s questions and able to make sure the answers didn’t lead back to himself. Even when things had gone spectacularly wrong and Danny had started bleeding he’d kept his head.
Not only had the killer managed to keep Danny away from both the phone and the door, but he’d had the presence of mind to clean up the apartment, remove the cassette tape from the answering machine, and get out of the building undetected. The needle cover had been an oversight. A mistake. The question, then, of course, was were there any others?
If there were I was too sleep deprived to grasp them. Besides, there were still the Serezine interrogatories to get through, page after page of formal inquiries that began, “To the best of your knowledge and belief...” Tom and I plodded through them, flagging specific questions for Stephen, for the lead investigator on the Serezine project who had long since returned to UCLA, and for those who just required a search of company records for an answer.
During bathroom breaks I stopped back at Danny’s office to stare balefully at the empty tray of the fax machine. I also tried to reach Elliott Abelman but succeeded only in leaving messages. Needless to say, I was eager to share Tom Galloway’s story with him.
We called it quits at five o’clock. My eyelids felt like lead and every movement was as exhausting as a walk through tall grass. I had reached the point where my lack of sleep posed a very real danger that something would be overlooked or omitted. It was time for me to call it a night.
Driving home I called my mother. Not only was conversation with her guaranteed to keep me awake, but I hadn’t spoken to her in a few days and wanted to make sure we were still on track with preparations for the Japanese visit. I managed to catch her just as she was dressing for a trustees dinner at Rush-Pres-St. Luke’s, but she was eager, almost excited, to share the details of what she was doing. As we chatted I saw no point in telling her that, depending on Takisawa’s response, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the deal was dead and all the orchids and the seating charts would have been for nothing.
“Before I forget, you have to call Mimi,” declared Mother. “She phoned this morning to say she received an oral report from the structural engineers who came out to look at the apartment.”
“What did they say?” I asked.
“They said it will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars to remove the soil from the top of the building and repair the damage to the roof.”
“Forty thousand dollars? How long will it take?” I demanded, no doubt suffering from the lawyer’s predisposition to measure everything in hours billed.
“I have no idea, but they say work can’t begin until after the ground thaws in the spring. They also say they can’t guarantee it won’t cost more if we have a lot of snow this
winter, because in that case it’s likely there will be even more damage to the roof and they’ll have trouble using their heavy equipment.”
“There is no way I am going to write a check for forty thousand dollars,” I announced.
“Naturally dear. It’s Paul Riskoff who’s going to have to pick up the tab.”
She was right, of course. But Mother didn’t know Riskoff like I did. He was one of the most litigious businessmen in the city. It would definitely take a lawsuit to pry that kind of money from him—a prospect that I, in my current state of mind, did not relish.
What next? I thought to myself, hanging up with my mother. Boils? Frogs? Running sores? Clearly I was being punished for something I had done in my past life. As I turned onto Hyde Park Boulevard I half expected to see flames leaping out of the windows of my apartment.
Instead I saw Elliott’s Jeep parked in front of the building. I parked in the alley out back and walked around to the front of the building and tapped on his window. I waited while he rolled it down.
“Are you staking me out?” I demanded, resting my elbows on the door.
“By the time I got your messages and called you back, they said you’d already left to go home. Cheryl gave me your car phone number, but your line was busy so I figured I’d take a chance and catch up with you here.”
“I was up all night working on something,” I said. “Do you want to come inside and talk?”
“Sure. Have you eaten anything today?”
“Today? I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”
“Do you have any food in your refrigerator?”
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