Fatal Reaction (22 page)

By the time we finally gave up I had a headache from squinting at the grainy images on the video screen. I was also starving. The dinner the firm brought in every night for people working late had long ago been served. From long experience I knew that by now only the picked-over dregs remained. There aren’t many restaurants that stay open for dinner in the loop, so I suggested we grab something at the Union League Club.

Outside the temperature had dropped and the wind roared through the canyon of office buildings, gathering speed, and seemed to drive right through us. It was literally too cold to speak. I clutched my coat around me and leaned into the wind. LaSalle Street was completely deserted except for the man huddled over the newspaper machine across from the Board of Trade, filling it with the next day’s edition. It was hard to miss the headline that announced in ten-point type that the body of Sarrek’s first victim had been identified. They were running what looked like a high school graduation picture beside the now familiar head shot of Stanley Sarrek. I thought of Joe Blades. One down, sixty-two left to go.

We arrived at the Union League with the relief of refugees. Shedding our coats in the cloakroom we made our way up the club’s graceful central staircase to the main dining room. At that hour there were only a half-dozen diners lingering over their brandy. Louis, the maître d’ wished us a good evening and ushered us to a quiet table by the window.

The Union League Club is a bastion of emphatic political incorrectness. After all, it had once boasted General Philip Sheridan—he of “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” fame—as a member. Women were a very recent concession and our presence had in no way altered the deliberately staid gentleman’s club atmosphere.

Tonight I didn’t care. I just wanted food. A few seconds later a waiter appeared in response to my telepathic summons and deposited a basket of fresh rolls. I helped myself as Elliott watched me, grinning.

“What?” I demanded, greedily tearing one in half. “Nothing.”

“Oh, come on. What?”

“I just get a kick out of watching you eat.”

“You can’t possibly mean that.”

“You don’t understand. Most women are afraid to let anyone see that they’re hungry. They tell the waiter to take the butter away and order their salad dressing on the side.”

I was curious about these breadless women of his acquaintance but realized that by asking I would be opening myself up to questions I did not intend to answer.

“Well, tonight I’m so hungry that I’m thinking of ordering a glass of salad dressing as an aperitif,” I announced.

“I’ve missed you, you know.”

I shook my head in warning. “Don’t,” I said, meaning it. I looked at him across the table and wished I didn’t want to sleep with him so badly. I was just being a spoiled little rich girl, I scolded myself, wanting what she knew she shouldn’t have.

The waiter came and we ordered steaks for both of us and a very nice cabernet to wash it down with. Like many clubs, the wine cellar at the Union League was generally much more reliable than the kitchen.

“So,” ventured Elliott. “Tell me about this guy Galloway. Do you think he’s our bad guy?”

“How can he be?” I countered. “We both saw the tape. He left the apartment just like he said.”

“He could have come back in another way, maybe from the garage.”

“For that matter so could the guy we’re looking for.”

“Tell me about Galloway anyway.”

“Well, up until this morning I’d have told you he was a star. You know the type—top of the class without breaking a sweat, good-looking, socially poised. The kind of charmed young lawyer who comes along every couple of years and makes it all look easy. He’s popular with his peers, the partners are falling all over themselves to help his career, and the secretaries are all in love with him.”

“Good lawyer?”

“Whatever else he may be Tom Galloway is a crack litigator. He’s equally good in a courtroom or a settlement conference. He made a splash with a couple of big wins with very complicated cases in front of a jury. That’s why I recommended him to Azor for the lawsuit involving Azor’s new antischizophrenia drug.”

“Is that how he and Danny met?”

“Apparently.”

“Now that you know about the two of them what’s your opinion of Galloway?”

“Beneath contempt pretty much sums it up.”

“Because he’s secretly gay?” Elliott inquired.

“No, because he’s a liar,” I replied. “I don’t think I’d feel any differently if he’d been sleeping with his secretary. Come to think of it, as far as I know he could be sleeping with her, too. When a man is not who he says he is then he could be anybody. It opens up whole vistas of deception.”

Elliott laughed.

“What is so funny?” I demanded.

“You know what you sound like?”

“No. What?”

“A partner in a large and prestigious corporate law firm.”

“Your point?”

“You realize that your reaction is exactly what he’s afraid of, especially since you say he’s up for partnership soon. That kind of fear is a powerful motive.”

“Motive for what?” I countered. “Danny died of natural causes. Joe’s right, no matter what we find out about what happened in that apartment it’s not going to turn out to be legally actionable.”

“Then you tell me,” replied Elliott, “why are we doing this?”

I thought for a minute. The answer I came up with surprised me.

“Because Stephen is a scientist,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“Before I started working at Azor I don’t think I could have told you what that meant. I had always assumed that being a scientist was just another kind of job, like being a teacher or an airline pilot. But on some level being a scientist means operating in the world in an entirely different way. A scientist is someone who embraces a much more rigorous and demanding view of the world. Scientists can’t just accept that something happens. They spend their lives relentlessly asking why things happen. They are driven to know, to explain, to understand what makes things work.” I thought about Michelle Goodwin’s tearful flight from her lab when her crystals failed to diffract. “I never realized it before, but their obsession with finding out can be a terrible thing. With Stephen it’s more than just wanting to know what happened to Danny. I don’t think he has any choice. He won’t be able to stop asking questions until he does know.”

“What about you?” asked Elliott. “Do you care about what happened to Danny?”

“Of course, I care,” I replied. “Of course, I’m curious. But I’m a lawyer. Intellectually I live in the gray spaces, somewhere where there are shades of meaning. I want to know what happened to Danny, but on some level I can accept that I might never know what happened in that apartment that day. Stephen can’t.”

The waiter appeared with salads and refilled our glasses.

“I found out who called Danny the day he died,” I continued once the waiter had retreated out of earshot. “Who?” '

“Michael Childress. He’s a crystallographer who works on the ZK-501 project at Azor.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re trying to find the next generation of anti-inflammatory drug, one that’s more effective than cortisone but with fewer side effects. Michael Childress is a senior investigator on the project.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“I should have pulled his curriculum vitae for you, but I didn’t think of it. All I can really tell you about him so far is that he’s famous and despised.”

“Despised?”

“I really don’t think that’s too strong a term. Stephen and I took him out to dinner once. I found him extremely unpleasant—arrogant, self-centered, abrasive. I gather he has something of a reputation for expropriating other people’s work.”

“So what was his connection with Danny?”

“That’s the big question. At the time he died, Danny was working almost full time on the ZK-501 project, trying to find a source of outside funding to keep the project afloat. I’m sure they must have had some dealings, but I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

“I’ll have to check him out.”

The waiter came and took away our salad plates, materializing a few seconds later with our entrees.

“You know,” I said, cutting into my steak, “while we’re on the subject, there’s somebody else I think you should check out.” As we ate I explained to him about Danny’s friendship with Takisawa’s son-in-law, Hiroshi Toyoda.

“The plot thickens,” remarked Elliott, taking careful notes as I spoke.

“Not necessarily,” I replied. “At this point I have no reason to assume Hiroshi was even in the country on the day Danny died.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult to find out. But if he was the one with Danny when he died, we don’t have to go looking too far for the reason he wouldn’t want anyone to know he was there.”

“Before you get too excited you’d better think about what’s on the videotape,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I think the guy in the raincoat looked too big to be Japanese.”

As the doorman flagged down a cab Elliott helped me with my coat. Both of us had drunk enough cabernet to constitute an excuse for just about anything. Standing in the darkened cloakroom, his hands lingering on my shoulders, I would not be honest if I said I didn’t consider the possibilities. But I was not drunk enough to guarantee that I wouldn’t bolt as I had the last time, nor stupid enough not to foresee the burden of any indiscretion, like a piece of awkward baggage, that would then have to be carted around.

We parted as we had so many times before, with things unsaid or deliberately ignored. I must confess that the whole ride home I thought nothing of Danny or Takisawa or Azor Pharmaceuticals’ predicament. Once inside the apartment I found Claudia’s suitcase sitting in the entrance hall and a message waiting for me on the answering machine. Whoever called must have done so after Claudia had gone to bed. My roommate’s sleep is much too precious to her to allow a phone in her bedroom. Instead she sleeps with her beeper on the pillow.

I pushed the button to rewind the tape and kicked off my shoes, willing the circulation to come back to my feet. The lights were off in the hallway that (led to the back of the apartment and everything was quiet except for the whir of the machine. Finally the tape clicked and a female voice filled the room.

“Ms. Millholland? This is Dr. Julia Gordon with the Cook County medical examiner’s office. I’ve been trying to reach Stephen Azorini, but I see your number is also in the file, so I thought I’d try you as well. I was hoping that one of you would be available to come and see me at my office tomorrow. Morning is best for me, but I’m sure I could accommodate you anytime that is convenient for you. I’ll be in at eight and I think you’ll have an easier time the earlier you arrive. I’m afraid the media has become a permanent fixture outside our building, but they’re not generally out in full force until after ten o’clock. I’ll leave your name at the front desk so that they’ll know I’m expecting you. If there’s a problem...”

I waited for the end of the message. Then I picked up the receiver and dialed Stephen’s number. It was after eleven o’clock and I was afraid I might wake him, but the phone just rang until the answering machine picked up. I tried his office and got no answer. I tried his car phone with the same result. Walking back to my bedroom I was filled with curiosity. I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Stephen. It wasn’t like him to be unreachable. I also could not imagine what was so urgent that Dr. Gordon was trying to track Stephen down after hours. In my experience, doctors seldom came chasing after you except with bad news.

The next morning I tried Stephen again, to no avail. Instead I arrived at the Robert J. Stein Institute for Forensic Medicine a few minutes after eight o’clock. While a number of white news vans were parked haphazardly on the curb like so many beached whales, my arrival did not seem to stir their interest. A tall fence topped with cyclone wire had been erected around a portion of the parking lot where it abutted the loading dock. Beyond it could be glimpsed Stanley Sarrek’s infamous refrigerated trailer.

I hadn’t been to the ME’s office since they’d moved into their new building. Once I was inside it struck me as a kind of Marriott for the dead. Even the dove-colored lab coats worn by the pathologists were of the same soothing shade of gray as the carpeting. In deference to the newly deceased, the temperature of the building was kept almost as low as that in Borland’s meat locker. But one thing all the new carpet and boring lithographs could not disguise was the stale stench of death that no amount of air freshener could mask.

I consulted with the woman at the reception desk, a stately black woman whose hair had been swept up and arranged into a single coil, who directed me to Dr. Gordon’s office on the third floor. On my way several people raced past me, their looks of focused determination speaking volumes about the current crisis.

Dr. Gordon’s door was open and I found her behind her desk, eyes closed, dictating into a small handheld recorder, the twin of the one I use. I knocked softly on the door frame. Her eyes shot open and her sagging shoulders snapped to attention as I announced myself.

“Ms. Millholland,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’m so glad you received my message. Please come in. I’ve been getting into the office so early on account of this Sarrek business, I’ve missed seeing you at Starbucks.”

Hyde Park, where both of us lived, is essentially a small place. Surrounded by the ghetto, it is ruled by a kind of siege mentality that fosters a small-town friendliness you wouldn’t normally expect in an inner-city neighborhood. For the last several months Julia Gordon and I had found ourselves on parallel schedules, running into each other as we stopped for coffee on the way to the office a couple of mornings a week. I was hoping this sense of neighborliness would help her to be forthcoming.

Julia Gordon was a small woman in her late thirties with a loose cap of blond curls and the wide blue eyes of a China doll. On the credenza behind her desk sat a framed photograph of her two daughters, smiling girls who looked to be about four and six years old. Behind the photo hung a poster showing the characteristics of wounds made by unusual bullets illustrated with color photos. I wondered whether she brought her daughters with her on Take Your Daughter to Work Day or whether they visited the hematology lab with her husband.