Fatal Reaction (3 page)

Stephen pulled the car under the arched portico of the building and the liveried doorman touched the bill of his cap. We waited for a moment while he released the wrought-iron security gate. As the gate parted noiselessly, Stephen eased the car down the steep ramp into the underground garage. Beneath the luxury apartments of Chicago’s Gold Coast lies a subterranean world. Cars are washed and filled with gas, dry cleaning makes its way in and out of closets, meals are cooked, and groceries are delivered. I wondered what my new neighbors would think of my battered Volvo. No doubt they’d assume it belonged to the maid.

Mother and her decorator, Mimi Sheraton, were already upstairs waiting for us. We found them in the living room which, without furniture, seemed roughly the size of the cargo hold of an ocean freighter. Despite the fact that the walls had been painted the color of Pepto-Bismol, the intricately carved egg-and-dart moldings made my heart turn over in their symmetry.

Dutifully kissing the air beside my mother’s perfumed cheek, I immediately wished I had thought to put something else on that morning. Mother, in a scarlet Valentino cocktail dress, reduced the severe uniform of my navy suit and pearls to rags with one withering glance. If Mussolini had put one-tenth the effort into his quest for world domination that my mother spends on looking beautiful, we would all be speaking Italian right now.

Mother, who was due at an important party (one of her more irritating oxymorons), had come to advise us on the architect’s latest sketches for the kitchen and the master suite. Mimi, drawings in hand, led the way while two assistants of dubious sexuality hovered in the background with clipboards and tape measures. Mimi Sheraton was the quintessential society decorator. At least two face-lifts older than my mother, she favored St. John’s knits and was unabashedly condescending to everyone who crossed her path, carpenters and contessas alike. Much of her career had been spent endlessly redecorating my mother’s houses, and as such she counted as more of a fixture of my childhood than many of my actual relatives.

I had grown up in a house that was in a constant state of redecoration. By the time I was ten I’d already had my fill of window treatments and floor coverings. Deciding where to move the file cabinet in my office was more than enough to satisfy whatever occasional urges I might feel to alter my surroundings. I was more than happy to entrust matters both large and small to my mother and Mimi. As far as I was concerned, the extent of my role in the proceedings was to write checks and feign interest.

Stephen, on the other hand, could usually be counted on to summon enthusiasm for the process. Once we bought the apartment I was surprised to discover in him an orphan’s delight in all things domestic. While there is no doubt he enjoyed the idea of calling such an elegant residence his own, what he really seemed to relish was the prospect of—after a decade of sterile bachelor apartments—finally settling into a real home.

But tonight was different. From the very first he seemed preoccupied, too distracted to participate in the discussions about plastering and the problem of what to do about the hideous wood-grain Formica paneling that had been installed by some previous criminal against architecture. As we talked he slipped away entirely. When I was sent to fetch him, I found him pacing the entrance hall, cell phone in hand, punching in Danny’s number for the fourteenth time that day only to be rewarded yet again by an endless ringing at the other end.

“Maybe we should stop over at his apartment when we’re done here and make sure he’s all right,” I suggested.

“He’s probably asleep,” replied Stephen. “I did tell him he could take the day off. I’d feel like an ass showing up on his doorstep just because Jim Cassidy has decided he wants to swing his dick around.”

Stephen was right, of course. That was the worst part about people like Cassidy and Guttman. They generated artificial crises and it didn’t matter that their crises had no substance—they still managed to suck you in.

Eventually Mimi turned to Stephen’s pet project—the exercise room that was planned as part of the master suite—and he was able to set his other concerns aside. After having spent the last half hour listening to Mother and Mimi debate where to hang the copper pots we did not own and would surely never use to prepare meals neither Stephen nor I would ever be home to eat, it was my turn to escape. I wandered down the hall to look at the small bedroom I planned on turning into my study. To my dismay, Mother came and found me almost immediately.

“I know you like to pretend that it’s not, but how you live is very important,” she said in her gospel-according-to-Astrid-Millholland voice. “You may not be interested in entertaining any of your old friends, but I am sure Stephen would like to have a nice home in which to receive guests.”

“I would like to have a nice home, too, Mother,” I assured her peevishly.

“Well, you would never know it from how you live now,” she sniffed. “Honestly, I don’t see how you’re going to manage this renovation if you aren’t willing to take an interest in the details.”

“We’ve hired Mimi to handle the details.”

“Mimi is not the one who is going to be living here. Don’t you think you’ve taken this lawyer business far enough? Why don’t you just give it a rest for a while and concentrate on what’s really important in your life?”

“Important to whom?” I inquired.

From the end of the hall we could hear Stephen’s approaching baritone. “So you really think we’d have room for a steam room next to the gym if we moved that one wall?”

“I wish you could see yourself,” Mother hissed, unable to resist getting in one last shot. “That stubborn look you get is so very unattractive. It’s a wonder Stephen puts up with it.”

“I like being stubborn, Mother,” I replied coolly. “That’s why I became a lawyer.”

CHAPTER 3

Stephen and I were already in bed when the police arrived. The doorman’s buzzer caught us in midembrace, and his announcement that there were two uniformed officers in the lobby asking to see Stephen left us searching frantically for our clothes and filled with silent alarm.

We managed to be presentable by the time the elevator delivered the officers upstairs. His face ashen in alarm, Stephen opened the door to two middle-aged beat cops. One was white, the other black, but they both had guts that hung on them like saddlebags and strained against the black leather of their jackets.

All business, Stephen quickly identified himself and ushered them inside. They seemed oblivious to the size of Stephen’s apartment and the view it commanded. I knew this was a bad sign. These men were professionals, they had a lot of years between them, and they still didn’t want to be here—they didn’t want to do what they had come to do.

The words of the formal notification may have been memorized, but their sympathy seemed real. They regretted to inform us that Danny Wohl had been found dead in his apartment earlier in the day. The detectives who’d been summoned searched his apartment and found a copy of the power of attorney I’d drawn up more than a year ago. However, it had taken some time to process the information and locate Stephen’s home address.

We pressed for details, but there were only a few forthcoming. Apparently a building engineer had let himself in to the apartment to check a faulty thermostat and discovered the body. Immediately recognizing that Danny was dead he’d called 911. When we asked the officers how Danny had died they could give us only the official answer. In cases of an unattended death it was up to the medical examiner to determine the cause of death. An autopsy would have to be performed.

While they were obviously reluctant to offer us anything more, they did manage to leave us with the distinct impression that Danny had died peacefully—his life claimed by something from the doctor’s lexicon of sudden death—an aneurysm or an embolism, perhaps. Later, after they had gone and the initial shock had worn off, we consoled ourselves with that.

As an intern, Stephen had had a chance to see firsthand the prolonged agony of a death from AIDS. Patients in excruciating pain, robbed of their sight, their strength, their dignity... At least, we told each other, at least, whatever malady had claimed him, he’d been spared that.

The next morning we were woken by the telephone. It was the woman from the management company shrilly demanding that Stephen come and see Danny’s apartment for himself. He was perplexed by her insistence, her refusal to discuss over the telephone something as simple as having an apartment cleaned. Compared to the enormity of Danny’s death, her concerns about getting the carpets cleaned seemed petty and ridiculous.

Of course, now that we were actually in the apartment, it all made sense. Her anger as we first spoke in her office. The way she’d bitten off her syllables as she told us how they’d found his body. The almost savage way she’d twisted her passkey in the lock and pushed open the door to let us in, careful not to cross over the threshold herself.

The last time I had been in Danny Wohl’s apartment it was an elegant place, festive with fresh flowers and lit with candles for a dinner party. Today it looked like a slaughterhouse. The living room was in shambles. The glass top of the coffee table had been tumbled off its props. Cushions, covered with ominous dark stains, had been torn from the couch and lay scattered across the floor. Blood was everywhere. The walls were covered with it, splashed in arcing, elliptical stains, or worse, smeared with frantic, sliding hand marks.

I glanced over at Stephen to see how he was taking it. His leonine head was bent, his smoky eyes hooded, his face registering no emotion other than objective interest. It was all an act, of course. A trick he’d picked up in medical school. But I am a lawyer, not a doctor, and I was completely unequipped to deal with what I was seeing in Danny’s apartment. I tried closing my eyes, but it did not help. Even the smell of blood was overwhelming—cloying and feral. What on earth had happened here?

Danny would have hated to see his place like this. He had loved his new apartment with its high ceilings and glorious views. An avid art collector, he’d recently been forced to move when his taste had turned to works larger than the Mapplethorpe photographs with which he’d begun his collection.

Had the woman from the management company known that Danny had AIDS? I doubted it. So far Danny had done his best to keep his illness secret. All that blood and all of it HIV positive. I wondered who Stephen was going to find to clean it up.

I tried to look away, but there were no safe vistas. Even the carpet, sticky under my feet, bore testimony to the violent drama that had been played out here. Mottled footprints started near the sofa and turned to drag marks where Danny must have fallen and then crawled through his own blood, trying desperately to reach the phone. He had died just a few feet short of his goal. A lake of blood marked the spot, so big that it still hadn’t had time to dry.

A dark soot covered everything. At first I thought it was just the urban grit that drifts through every open window in the city, but the windows were shut tight. Then I realized it was the powder that the police had used to look for fingerprints. The dust scratched at my lungs while everything my eyes rested on tore at my heart.

“Haven’t you seen enough?” I asked Stephen.

“I just want to have a quick look at the bedroom,” he replied in a flat voice.

I followed, not wanting to be left alone. I had been ready to leave thirty seconds after we’d arrived. I could not imagine what could possibly make him want to stay.

Along the exposed brick of the hallway hung a series of monochromatic blue panels by a Dutch painter whose work Danny admired. I couldn’t remember his name, only that the piece was called
A Moment After Sinking
and that there was something special about the brushwork.

The bedroom had apparently escaped the bloodletting. The room’s decor was considerably less restrained than the rest of the apartment. In the center was a wrought-iron bed draped in enough mosquito netting to protect a small expedition down the Nile. There were Mapplethorpes on the walls here, too, but they were the photographer’s graphically sexual work—not the sort you’d want your business associates to see. I turned my back on them.

Danny’s desk, a large contemporary unit designed especially for a computer, with a pullout keyboard shelf, was near the window. Stephen came to a stop behind the ergonomically correct desk chair and stared forlornly at the black briefcase at his feet.

“You might as well take it,” I advised him gently. “The police have already been through everything and I guarantee you won’t feel like coming back.”

Reluctantly Stephen picked up the case and set it on top of the desk. With practiced hands he flipped open the latches and popped the lid. The inside was crammed with file folders and legal pads, all swarming with Danny’s tidy script. Satisfied, Stephen laid his large hands on top of the case and slammed it shut. In the silence of the apartment it sounded like a shot.

I trailed Stephen into the large bathroom, which was decorated in Danny’s typical eye-catching style. A pedestal sink of white porcelain was set against a wall of exposed brick. The floor was a deep blue hand-glazed tile. A single white towel lay across the lip of the tub, and the toilet seat was up. Stephen reached up and pulled open the mirrored doors of the medicine cabinet above the sink. It was crammed with prescription vials of every description and a veritable arsenal of grooming supplies— bronzers, mousses, gels, and spritzes—even an eyelash curler. No wonder Danny had always looked better than I did.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just looking.” He paused and shook his head. “There’s something very wrong with all of this.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded, feeling the dull ache of apprehension growing in the pit of my stomach.

Stephen did not answer but instead began to make his way back into the living room. As I followed, I almost tripped over the telephone cord which lay across the entrance to the hall. The table on which the phone usually rested had been overturned in the struggle, scattering squares of notepaper like leaves across the bloodstained carpet.