Fatal Reaction (28 page)

“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?”

“Maybe I have some eggs or something...” I replied, but it was the lack of sleep talking. Not only did I have no recollection of ever seeing any eggs in my refrigerator, but when it came to food preparation my experience was severely limited and did not actually extend to poultry products.

“I’ll tell you what,” Elliott said. “I’m starved. Let me run out and pick something up. I’ll be back in a minute.” I went inside and checked the answering machine. No messages. I took a deep breath and told myself that the longer we didn’t hear from the Japanese the better. While Elliott was off rustling up dinner I took a shower. It didn’t wake me up, but at least I felt clean. I put on a pair of old jeans and an old U of C sweatshirt. I was just hunting through drawers for a rubber band for my hair when the buzzer rang.

Elliott had gone to Picolo Mondo and picked up Italian food which he insisted on serving on real dishes—dishes he quickly washed and dried before setting out onto the table. After what he’d seen of my housekeeping, he explained, a person couldn’t be too careful.

Over creamy risotto with grilled chicken and crisp pinot grigio I told him Tom Galloway’s story about Danny and the experimental AIDS drug.

“Is there any chance there really is a new drug like that out there?”

“Of course it’s possible,” I replied. “That’s why Danny bought it. But I don’t think it was an AIDS drug in that syringe. Stephen seemed pretty sure from the photos of the liver tissue that it was PAF.”

“I’m surprised Danny talked through his decision to try the new drug with Tom Galloway. You’d think Stephen would be the logical choice.”

“He didn’t talk to Stephen because he knew Stephen would be against it. It would be acting ahead of the facts, something Stephen would never approve of.”

“So who at Azor could plausibly come to Danny with the offer of the drug?”

“Plausibly? It could be anyone. These guys move around so much—from drug company to drug company, from university to university. Anyone could make up a story about an old colleague in another lab who’d struck pharmaceutical gold. But the first question ought not to be who could have plausibly approached Danny with the possibility of the drug, but who knew he had AIDS?”

“Who knew?”

“Stephen. Me. Other than that, it wasn’t common knowledge, though anyone who watched his habits or perhaps saw him take his medication would have been able to guess. I’ll try to ask around at Azor.”

“Speaking of asking around, you’ve got to convince Stephen to let me come out and question the employees.”

“There are over two hundred of them. Where would you start? Besides, they’re shutting the company down over the weekend. The whole building will be closed so they can put in new electrical transformers. After that, the Japanese will be here....”

“That may be,” replied Elliott, getting up to clear the table, “but you said it yourself, these guys move around all the time from project to project and company to company.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that the longer you wait the bigger the chance that whoever we’re looking for isn’t going to be there anymore.”

I woke up at four o’clock in the morning surprised to find myself on the living room couch. The last thing I remembered was lying down to shut my eyes for a minute while Elliott finished doing the dishes. I told him to leave them until the morning, but he’d seemed almost offended by the idea. Somewhere between dinner and dessert I must have fallen asleep. I sat up and looked around.

The apartment was dark and empty. The comforter from my bed lay on top of me. Elliott must have covered me up before he left. I shuddered at the thought of him seeing my bedroom. It had been so long since I’d picked up in there I didn’t think I could remember the color of the carpet.

I got up feeling stiff. I knew that if I went back to sleep I’d either wake up feeling even worse than I did now or sleep until noon. Neither was a particularly attractive possibility. Instead, I picked up the comforter from the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders, telling myself a shower would do me good. As I passed the telephone I noticed that the answering machine light was blinking. I must have been sleeping so soundly that I didn’t hear the phone.

Yawning, I pushed the button that rewound the tape. As the tape rewound, my heart began beating wildly, even though more likely than not it was someone selling long distance service, spared from a tongue-lashing by the fact that I was an especially sound sleeper.