Fatal Reaction (12 page)

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.”

“He’s a...” I fished helplessly for the right word. What was he? A customer? A client? “He’s deceased,” I blurted stupidly.

“I’m afraid that unscheduled viewings are not permitted,” the man in the cardigan sweater informed us in a shocked voice. “Are you family?”

In response to that question Stephen shouldered his way past the man into the building.

“Wait a minute! You can’t come in here!” shrieked the man in alarm, taking off after him. Not knowing what else to do, I followed both of them. Before I knew it Stephen had pelted through a set of double swing doors, down a long, dimly lit corridor, and up a half-flight of stairs, guided, no doubt, by the increasingly powerful smell of formaldehyde.

Passing through a door marked
private,
Stephen came up short and we found ourselves in a large room with green tiles on the walls and a drain in the middle of the floor. On a steel table in the middle of the room, illuminated by a hanging fluorescent fixture, was the naked body of an elderly woman. Her sagging breasts had slipped to either side of her wrinkled chest and her feet were twisted obscenely inward by arthritis. All around the room other bodies lay on gurneys covered with sheets.

“If you don’t leave immediately I will have no choice but to call the police,” the man in the cardigan announced, his voice quivering with fear.

“Wait! Please!” I implored him. But Stephen was already moving across the room ripping sheets from gurneys. The man from the funeral home was off like a shot for the phone.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shouted at Stephen. “Are you out of your mind?”

Stephen ignored me, crossed the room, and yanked the sheet from the farthest gurney. Suddenly there before us lay the bloodless body of Danny Wohl. I shrank back for a moment, limbs paralyzed, words frozen in my mouth. Then, in spite of myself, I drew nearer to Stephen in order to take a closer look.

CHAPTER 10

Danny’s face stared up at us with the vacant eyes of the dead. His lips were the same color as the rest of his skin, so white it made me shiver, completely drained of blood. Carved into his pale flesh was the pathologist’s trademark, a ghastly Y-shaped incision that spanned his chest from shoulder to sternum and then to the other shoulder and ran the full length of his body from neck to groin. They had hastily stitched him back up when they were finished and the long, uneven black stitches seemed horrible against his dead skin.

“I need some gloves,” said Stephen, his eyes darting around the room. I barely heard him. I was transfixed, unable to look at anything but Danny. What lay on the gurney was someone I had known. Someone I had liked. But now the familiar tumble of his blond hair was matted with dried blood, his lips set in the grim rigor of death.

Tearing through the contents of a set of metal drawers Stephen came upon a box of latex gloves. He pulled them on with a practiced snap and grabbed Danny’s body by the shoulders. He quickly ran his hands over Danny s arms and legs looking for cuts or abrasions. Joe Blades had been right. There were no marks on Danny’s body larger than a pinprick.

“Help me turn him over,” urged Stephen handing me a pair of gloves. I stood aghast. “Oh come on!”

I did as I was told though my hands were shaking so badly it was hard to work on the gloves. Once they were on I stepped up to the gurney.

“We’ll lift him on three,” instructed Stephen.

As my hand touched Danny’s cold flesh I felt all the oxygen leave the room.

“One, two, three.”

We lifted. I staggered awkwardly as we flipped him, suddenly understanding why they call it deadweight.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” shouted the man from the funeral home. “You can’t do that!”

“I’m a doctor,” announced Stephen, as if that somehow explained everything. Personally, I didn’t see what that had to do with anything seeing as Danny was already dead and we were obviously in a shitload of trouble. On the other hand, at least he hadn’t run to get his shotgun.

“What’s this cut on the top of his head?” I asked, bending over for a closer look in spite of myself.

“The pathologist makes that incision so he can pull the scalp down over the face, lift off the top of the skull, and remove the brain.”

This was a piece of information I could easily have done without.

Once more Stephen bent over the body of his dead friend looking for signs of injury. He found nothing: only a small Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on the inside of his thigh-—one of the classic signposts of the AIDS virus—a tiny shaving cut just beneath his left ear, and the mark left over from a recent inoculation—absolutely nothing that would account for the bloodbath in the dead man’s apartment.

“What is it that you are looking for?” the man from the funeral home asked warily from the shadows.

“I’m not sure,” replied Stephen, replacing the arm of his dead friend on the cold metal of the gurney. The fury that had driven him to force his way in here had left him, that storm spent. “I just wanted to see if I could figure out how he died.”

Picking up the sheet from the ground, he carefully covered up the body. There were tears in his eyes.

“Who
are
you?” demanded the man from the funeral home, finally stepping up to face him now that the threat of violence seemed to be past.

Stephen looked up from the gurney as if waking from a dream.

“I’m Dr. Stephen Azorini,” he said, stripping off the gloves. “You must be Mr. McNamara. We spoke on the phone.” Mr. McNamara, still looking somewhat uncertain, allowed his hand to be shaken. “This is my attorney, Kate Millholland. I’m sorry we just barged in on you like this. I was so frustrated by the runaround I’ve been getting from the medical examiner’s office I had to see things for myself.”

“We are so sorry for this intrusion,” I chimed in. While they may not formally teach it in law school, groveling cannot be overrated in the attorney’s arsenal of indispensable skills. “I can’t imagine what you must have thought when we arrived. I assure you we meant no harm to you, your place of business, or the dignity of your clients. I’m just afraid that in his grief Dr. Azorini was swept away by his desire to be sure the medical examiner’s office was handling matters correctly....” In the distance I could hear the whine of approaching sirens. “Now that those concerns have been addressed, I’m sure he’s ready to turn his attention to the matter of funeral arrangements for Mr. Wohl. Stephen was just telling me that he was hoping he would be able to plan a really memorable final tribute for his friend.”

“Well, I suppose there’s been no real harm done,” ventured Mr. McNamara, no doubt calculating exactly how many dollars constituted a fitting final tribute. We heard the buzzer from the front of the mortuary.

“That will probably be the police,” observed the funeral director as Stephen and I did our best to look harmless. “I’ll just go out front and tell them it was all a false alarm.”

As he disappeared through the swinging doors I felt myself go limp with relief.

“A memorable final tribute,” muttered Stephen, under his breath. “Do you have any idea what that’s going to end up costing?”

“No,” I replied. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Whatever it is, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring a lawyer to defend yourself against criminal-trespass charges.”

It seems only fitting that, after that macabre burlesque, we ended up in a corner tavern a few blocks from the funeral home that was filled with people who’d apparently just come from some kind of barbershop quartet convention. Over the strains of “Down by the Old Mill Stream” in four-part harmony, I tried to get some kind of explanation out of Stephen.

“Do you mind telling me what the hell got into you tonight?” I demanded once I’d gotten my hand around a double scotch.

“The medical examiner’s office called this afternoon while I was in a meeting downtown. Rachel must have been away from her desk so they just left a message on her voice mail. All it said was that they were releasing Danny’s body to the funeral home. Unfortunately by the time she got the message and gave it to me, and I called them back, whoever had left the original message had already left for the day. I finally managed to speak to the morgue attendant, but he couldn’t tell me anything except that the body had just been picked up by the funeral home. I asked him if he knew if an autopsy had been performed before the body was released, but he had no idea. I asked him to check his paperwork, but he couldn’t find any for that particular case.”