Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “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 bo
dy 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.”

  “They wouldn’t release the body without doing an autopsy,” I protested.

  “Not necessarily. You’re forgetting that I asked my father to see if he could make a couple of calls to see if he could expedite things. The trouble with organized crime, though, is that they’re not that organized. At that point I had no idea whether my father had succeeded in getting the medical examiner’s office to perform the autopsy and release the body, or whether some over-ambitious gangster had just paid off somebody at the morgue to look the other way while he made off with the body. I had to be sure. That’s why I took matters into my own hands.”

  “Is that what you’d call it?”

  “Come on, Kate. I had to see him before the embalmer got his hands on him. I had to see him for myself.”

  “And now that you’ve seen him...” I said, staring into the amber depths of my scotch. I still couldn’t get over how lucky we’d been. It was a miracle the two of us weren’t sitting in the municipal lockup right now waiting to make our one phone call.

  I contemplated which one of my partners I’d burden with arranging my release and shuddered at the thought of exposing that kind of vulnerability to any of them. “So, now that you’ve seen him what do you think killed him?” I asked, shaking off the thought.

  “I don’t know. But he definitely wasn’t stabbed to death. You saw him. There was no sign of any kind of injury.”

  “Could he have bled to death internally?” I asked.

  “Of course, he could have,” replied Stephen. “But that still wouldn’t explain why there was blood splashed all over his apartment or why the couch was turned upside down.”

  Customers in the bar swung into “My Sweet Adeline,” the bartender set us up with another round, and I steered the conversation to other matters, different levels of distress.

  “What’s Takisawa’s son-in-law like?” I asked. I’d seen his name on the list of people Takisawa was sending over. I wondered how he was going to take the news about Danny.

  “You’ll like him, Kate. Not only is he very bright, hut he’s also outgoing and personable, especially for a Japanese.”

  “How well did he and Danny know each other?”

  “They were very close, at least during the time they were both at Harvard. After that...”

  “So you’re saying he and Danny were more than just friends'?”

  “My guess would be yes.”

  “But now he’s married.”

  “Like I said, he’s a very bright guy. After he got his law degree, he picked up an M.B.A. at Wharton, then he went back to Japan and made what was probably his smartest career move—he married old man Takisawa’s only daughter.”

  “Do they have kids?”

  “They have one child, a boy.”

  “So I gather it’s safe to assume he’s never told his family about his relationship with Danny.”

  “Let’s put it this way, Kate. Who knows what confidences are exchanged between a husband and his wife, but I think it’s a safe bet a homosexual relationship in one’s past is not exactly the kind of thing Hiroshi would be likely to advertise to his father-in-law.”

  I had Stephen drop me off at my office. It may have been Friday night, but we both still had work to do. Besides, with each day that passed it seemed that the stakes for the ZK-501 project grew higher. With the rumblings of unrest among the company’s board of directors it was becoming increasingly urgent to strike a deal with Takisawa. With that in mind I settled down to read the thousand-plus pages that to date chronicled the history of Azor’s negotiations with Takisawa.

  I didn’t finish until well after midnight. Then, instead of taking myself home, I made my way to the firm’s library, not surprised to find the lights still on and a beleaguered first-year associate grimly wading through casebooks. He looked up, astonished through his fatigue to find that he was not alone. While my appearance no doubt reinforced the work-animal reputation I still possessed I felt a pang of gratitude that at least those days were behind me.

  I offered up a small nod of compassion and went off in search of what I was looking for. As it turned out the firm possessed an ample collection of books concerned with doing business with the Japanese. That night I read them all.

  It didn’t take me long to conclude that in choosing me to take Danny’s place, Stephen had made a terrible mistake. Not only was I as ignorant about Japanese business as I was about molecular chemistry, but that ignorance put Azor at a tremendous disadvantage. I’d always known that the Japanese conduct business very differently from Americans, but until that night I had not realized how deep the cultural roots of those differences went.

  There was a lot more to it than bowing and eating sushi. Japanese culture placed a much higher value on physical etiquette and group harmony than on the personal expression and individual freedom celebrated by Americans. Over time the Japanese with their single language, homogeneous culture, and common life expenses had developed highly evolved systems of informal consensus building and formal decision making that were strikingly different from our own.

  But what really frightened me was that Japanese businesses operate according to a completely different concept of time. While Jim Cassidy fixated on Azor’s single year of soft performance, the Takisawa Corporation was probably being operated according to a twenty-year plan. The Japanese, I reflected, had the time to grind you down.

  With their tradition of permanent employment, the Japanese were also highly averse to the transience of American employees. For that reason, author after author counseled against making any changes on the negotiating team once discussions had begun. Great.

  I was also depressed to learn that, if anything, Stephen had underestimated the importance of the physical arrangements for Takisawa’s visit. Not only were esthetic minutiae in business transactions seen as tremendously important by the Japanese, but the entire Japanese concept of hospitality differed wildly from our own. By Japanese standards a good host tries to anticipate and fulfill every need of his or her guest. To that end, it was best if everything were arranged ahead of time down to the smallest detail.

  The more I read the more my stomach hurt. Just the accommodations, transportation, meals, and scheduling would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to organize. Time that I, still unfamiliar with all but the most general terms of the proposed deal with Takisawa, did not have.

  It was the small hours of the morning when I finally walked through the darkened corridor back to my office and pulled the Takisawa file out of my briefcase. It was late, but I was too frightened to be tired. I had promised Stephen that I would take Danny’s role out of loyalty to him and to a company on whose board I served. Now I learned that my presence, even my gender, taken alone, might be enough to derail the negotiation. And I would be dealing with a culture so profoundly different from my own that I could only guess at what hidden pitfalls lay before me.

  In my reading about the Japanese I had come across the same adage over and over again: The nail that stands up gets pounded down. The Japanese use it to illustrate their emphasis on group harmony and consensus building. But sitting alone in my office with the rest of the world asleep, with Danny dead and Stephen’s hold on Azor on the line, I found myself interpreting it as a warning.

  CHAPTER 11

  I drove home in the dangerous single digits of the morning when the streets belong to somebody else. Shooting south toward Hyde Park on the empty ribbon of Lake Shore Drive, I saw parked cars clustered in the swath of green that buffers the lake
. Inside people were getting high, getting laid, and committing crimes in the soft glow of the dashboard light. Suddenly I felt old and impossibly cut off from the rest of the world.

  Danny Wohl was dead and I had spent the last seventy-two hours swept up by events that were beyond my control. I had seen the blood-splattered walls of Danny’s once elegant apartment, the stick figure of his body in a homicide cop’s notebook, and his blood-drained corpse on the metal gurney of the funeral home morgue. What made it worse was the fact that from the very first I was so consumed by the problems of taking Danny’s place that there was no time to feel much of anything about his death. Now, suddenly, it was all catching up to me.

  When I got home I was glad to see from the diminutive sneakers lying in the entrance hall that my roommate. Claudia, was home. I hadn’t worn shoes that small since grade school, but Claudia was so tiny that she sometimes had to stand on a stool when assisting a tall surgeon. I poured myself a drink and sat down on the couch to take my shoes off.

  I woke up four hours later to the sound of the front door buzzer. As I struggled to my feet I noticed that the room was just beginning to fill with light and that one of my arms was numb from being wedged between the cushions of the couch.

  Shaking my arm in the hopes of restoring circulation I pushed the intercom and demanded, “Who is it?” in the hostile tone employed, under the same circumstances, by every woman living in the city.

  “It’s Elliott Abelman.”

  As I pushed the button to let him in I realized that I must look like hell. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do anything about it.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you,” he apologized as I met him at the door. He had a steaming container of Starbucks coffee in each hand.

  “You are forgiven,” I replied, accepting one gratefully and ushering him into the apartment.

  “I was just about to head over to Wohl’s apartment,” he explained, “and I was kind of hoping you’d come with toe.” If Elliott was casting about for ways for us to be alone together he’d certainly stumbled onto an interesting choice. Even assuming a lack of ulterior motives, it seemed like something worth avoiding. As if reading toy thoughts, he continued. “It would really help to have someone who’s been there before. Otherwise I have no way of knowing if anything’s missing or out of place.”