Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  Through the window I saw Lou say something to Michelle, but when the crystallographer turned around, her face was pale and rigid as a mask. Wordlessly she stalked out of the X-ray lab, past the rapidly dispersing scientists, and made her way quickly down the hall and out through the animal labs.

  “Poor Michelle,” someone whispered.

  “Poor Michelle is right,” echoed Borland. “Somebody better go after her and take away her damn car keys.”

  CHAPTER 16

  By Monday morning I felt I had slipped back into the grip of routine that had ruled my life as an associate. I had gotten up before it was light, exercised, showered, and begun my workday as soon as I got into the car, dictating letters into my little tape recorder as I avoided potholes on Lake Shore Drive. The fact that I would spend only a couple of hours at my desk at Callahan Ross before driving out to Oak Brook to begin my day all over again at Azor did little to improve my outlook.

  When I arrived at Callahan Ross, I was surprised to experience a pang of something very much like homesickness. Clearly, it was all starting to get to me— Danny’s death, the sterility of the suburbs, the foreignness of the labs—room after room filled with unfamiliar equipment and people who for all intents and purposes spoke a language I didn’t understand. Fluent in the jargon of due diligence, stock splits, and black-lined drafts, I had been trapped in a place where the air was filled with talk of receptor assays, X-ray diffraction, binding sites, and autoreactivity. It was nice, for an hour or two at least, to be back on home ground.

  As I made my way through the still-empty corridors I was surprised to see Tom Galloway pacing the floor in front of my door. My heart sank. No one, not even Stephen, knew I would be coming to the firm that morning. Only something truly disastrous would be enough to propel Galloway to wait for me on the off chance I’d show up. Even from the other end of the hall I could see that he was agitated. There must have been another Serezine death over the weekend. There was no other explanation.

  Six-thirty in the morning is no time for small talk so I unlocked the door, switched on the light, and ushered Tom Galloway into my office.

  “Have a seat, Tom,” I said as I unwound the cashmere scarf from around my neck and slipped out of my coat.

  “I heard you were looking for me,” he said in a voice so charged with emotion that it was practically a snarl. Not knowing what else to do I retreated to the relative safety of my desk.

  “I don’t think so,” I answered, genuinely bewildered. “Don’t insult my intelligence by denying it,” snapped Galloway. His fair skin was flushed to the roots of his jet-black hair, and his blue eyes flashed. His emotions, displayed so close to the surface, made him seem very attractive. No wonder juries loved him.

  “Tom,” I insisted calmly, “please sit down and tell me what it is you’re talking about.” He sat, but only reluctantly. After all, there was no pretending that this was a conversation between equals. I was a partner and Tom was an associate. When I said sit, he sat. “Now, what’s this all about?”

  “It’s about you sending private detectives to every restaurant in town trying to catch me.”

  I sat back in my chair and wondered whether Tom had just told me what I thought he had. I took a deep breath and slowly clasped my hands together, making a steeple with my index fingers and pressing them to my lips. It was one of the lawyerly gestures I had learned from John Guttman. He used it to buy time when he was caught off guard and I put it to the same use now.

  After all the talk of the “famous fuck” theory, as Blades had dubbed it, the mystery man in Danny’s life was a fourth-year associate at my own firm with a politically prominent wife and dreams of partnership.

  “So you and Danny were involved,” I said, careful to make it a bald statement of fact—nothing more.

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “None,” I replied, clasping my hands together in front of me on my desk and looking him in the eye. My brain exploded with questions competing to be asked, but all litigators are actors and anyone, like Tom, who made his living by thinking on his feet would soon have the upper hand in any exchange. Instead, I decided to turn my silence against him. Surely he would be smart enough to realize that if I didn’t ask the questions then someone else would come along who would.

  “Do you want to tell me why you hired a private detective to find me?” he asked, after several seconds of painful silence.

  “There are questions about Danny’s death,” I replied, but offered no details.

  “What kind of questions? I thought he died of a heart attack.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The girl who answered the phone at Azor when I called on Monday.”

  “Why did you call?”

  “I’d just received a letter from the carrier of Azor’s liability insurance and I needed to talk to Danny about it,” he replied defensively. “When he didn’t answer his line, it flipped over to the receptionist. She was the one who told me about the heart attack.”

  “That’s not how he died,” I replied. There must have been all kinds of stories floating around that day, I thought to myself. The girl at the desk must have just repeated something she’d heard.

  “So then how did he die?”

  “A complication from his ulcer.”

  “I didn’t know he had an ulcer.”

  “As far as I know, no one did. Maybe not even Danny.”

  “So if he died from an ulcer, why the private eye?”

  “When did you first learn he was dead? What time did you call?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some time in the afternoon.”

  “Had you seen him since he came back from Japan?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Sunday morning.”

  “What time?”

  “I left Danny’s between ten and ten-thirty.”

  “You went to see him at his apartment?”

  “I spent the night,” he replied. I could tell the words cost him. With every grudging admission I’m sure he felt like he was committing career suicide. He may very well have been. Frankly, Galloway’s career was the least of my concerns.

  “And how did he seem when you left him?”

  “Seem?” demanded Galloway, his temper flaring. “He seemed fine. What the hell are you trying to get at? You just told me Danny died of an ulcer. If you want to accuse me of something, why don’t you just come out with it? You expect me to sit here and set fire to my career, but you won’t even do me the courtesy of telling me why?”

  “Assuming you cared about Danny, I’d think you’d want to help.”

  “Help whom?” countered Galloway bitterly. “No one can help Danny, not anymore.”

  “Listen Tom,” I said, with more kindness in my voice than I actually felt. “If you want, anything you tell me will be protected by attorney-client privilege. I just need you to answer a couple of questions.”

  Tom fished his wallet out of his back pocket, extracted a single dollar bill, and handed it to me. “I want a receipt,” he said.

  I grabbed a scratch pad from beside the phone and scribbled one. As every first-year law student knows, there are two parts necessary for a binding contract—the oral or written agreement and some form of material consideration that changes hands from one party to the other. I had never been a dollar lawyer before.

  “When did you two start seeing each other?” I asked. “Was it when I gave you the Serezine litigation?”

  “Yes. I knew the minute I met him in your office. We both knew.”

  “What about your wife?” I asked.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “I’m your lawyer. Try me.”

  “Most people think that being gay means hopping into bed with someone of the same sex. But you know what it also means? It means you’re a member of the last minority that it’s okay to hate. It means the things that most people work so hard for—the kids, the station wagon, some kind of social st
anding in the community— all those things are closed off to you.”

  “Does your wife know you’re gay?”

  “No.”

  “So tell me this. I was there that day in my office and frankly, the only thing I remember going on was a discussion of Azor’s exposure on Serezine. How did Danny know you weren’t the happily married young lawyer the world thinks you are?”

  “Gaydar. It’s the sixth sense gay people have. When you’re gay, you can always tell when someone else is.”

  I tried to listen with an open mind, but images of Tom Galloway’s wife and children kept intruding themselves. The idea that he’d been cheating on his wife—with someone who was infected with AIDS no less—did more than offend me. It also made me wonder what Danny must have seen in him. Surely someone who was capable of such betrayal would be capable of anything—including keeping his hemorrhaging lover from using the telephone if he thought it would hurt his chances of partnership.

  “So you’ve been seeing each other pretty regularly since then?” I asked.

  “Whenever I could get away.”

  “And you had no idea he was dead until you called his office on Monday?”

  “No idea. How do you think this makes me feel?” he cried. “When I left him he was fine and the next day I find out he’s dead. You of all people should understand.”

  “What did you do when you heard he’d died?”/

  “I had to leave the office.”

  “Did you go to Danny’s apartment?”

  “No. Why would I go there?”

  “Did you have a key?”

  “No. Danny had once dated a' real psycho. Since then he’s never given anyone the key to his place.”

  “After you found out, did you call anybody to tell them the news? Any of his friends?”

  “I didn’t know any of Danny’s friends.”

  “So where did you go? Home?”

  “I went to the Ritz-Carlton and got myself a room. I needed to be alone.”

  “So is that where you were when your secretary told me there’d been a death in the family?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell your family?”

  “I said I had to go to Philadelphia for a deposition,” he said, his face darkening.

  More so than when we talked about the details of his affair with Danny, whenever we talked about Galloway’s family I knew I was treading on dangerous ground.

  “After you said good-bye to Danny on Sunday where did you go?” From the corner of my eye I noticed that Cheryl must have arrived for the day because the light to her extension was illuminated.

  “Home. It was my son’s birthday.”

  “Which one?”

  “Jeff’s.”

  “I didn’t mean which son, which birthday?”

  “Four.”

  Cheryl knocked softly at the door and stuck her head in apologetically. Normally she didn’t disturb me when the door was closed, but at this time of the day she knew that coffee was a priority.

  “Would you like some coffee, Tom?” I inquired. He nodded and I stuck two fingers up as Cheryl retreated. “What did you get him?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “For his birthday, what kind of present did you get him?”

  Tom looked at me like I was mad.

  “One of those toy electric cars that he can sit in and drive up and down the driveway. Nancy picked it out. She’s usually in charge of all the stuff like that.”

  Nancy was his wife. The senator’s daughter.

  Cheryl knocked softly and came in with two cups of coffee and cream and sugar on a tray. Tom took his, had a sip, and set his cup on the coaster I had placed on the edge of my desk.

  “So now that I’ve told you, what’s going to happen?” asked Galloway, once Cheryl had retreated and we were alone again. “Will you call off the private detectives?”

  “From trying to find you, yes,” I replied quietly. “From investigating the circumstances of Danny’s death, no.”

  Before I left for Oak Brook, I wrapped my hand in Kleenex and carefully picked up the coffee cup that Tom Galloway had drunk from. I poured the remaining liquid into the potted plant on Cheryl’s desk and asked her to find me a brown paper bag. She produced one from her desk drawer, shook out the crumbs from yesterday’s lunch, and held it open for me while I dropped the cup inside. I told her to hand-carry it over to Elliott’s office with instructions to have the prints lifted and compared to the ones that had been found on the glass of water on Danny’s kitchen sink. From the look on Cheryl’s face it was obvious that she understood the implications of my wanting to check for Galloway’s prints in Danny’s apartment, but also knew me well enough to realize that this was not a good time to be discussing it. Cheryl was as patient as she was intelligent. She was willing to wait until I had more information—and time—before pressing me for the details.

  As soon as I got into my car, I punched in Elliott’s number, but it was still early and all I got was the answering service. I left him a message to call me if he had any questions about the coffee cup." I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell Elliott about Tom Galloway. With Stephen, however, there was no question. Not only was Stephen in a position to hurt Tom professionally, but more important, after the episode at the funeral home I was afraid of what he might do.

  Traffic was, as they say on the radio, “slow and go” on the Stephenson. As I slogged through it I also worked my way through the call list that Cheryl had prepared for me. I had to confess that, despite my general misgivings about technology, voice mail was a wonderful thing. By returning calls before people arrived at work for the day, I was able to create the illusion of eagerly trying to reach them without being in danger of actually speaking to anyone.

  I had just hung up on one call and was getting ready to dial up another when my phone rang. It was Rachel, Stephen’s assistant. She told me I was needed urgently at Azor, but when I pressed her for details she had none. I told her I was on my way and put the accelerator to the floor. This is how I’m going to die, I told myself, dodging construction barrels and bellowing into my car phone as I race from crisis to crisis.

  I arrived at Azor with all the worst-case scenarios screaming through my imagination: Azor had been named in a class action lawsuit involving Serezine, Takisawa had unilaterally killed the deal, Mikos had announced that they’d solved the structure… I swiped in and walked as quickly as I could through the lobby without actually running and went straight to Stephen’s office without even stopping to take off my coat.

  When I got there I found Stephen and Carl Woodruff waiting for me. Both men were on their feet, pacing around the room.

  “The power company has decided that we’re finally going to get the new transformers we’ve been begging for,” Stephen said as soon as I stepped into the room.

  “You’ve been pleading for them ever since you moved into the building,” I ventured uncertainly. Normally I would have expected that the power company’s coming through would be considered good news. Azor had been suffering through brownouts and starved for electricity for months, but everything about the two men’s demeanor spelled catastrophe. “When are they going to do it?” I asked, uneasily.

  “Commonwealth Edison has informed us they are shutting off our power this Friday at five P.M. and working on the installation over the weekend,” reported Carl. He sounded sick.

  “When will they turn it back on?”

  “They say six A.M. Monday,” said Stephen.

  “But that’s the day Takisawa is set to arrive here at Azor,” I protested. “I assume you’ve already asked them to push the work ahead by a day or two....”

  Carl nodded miserably indicating that he had and to no avail.

  “Then what about rescheduling Takisawa?” I asked, wondering how many things could go wrong before it could be safely concluded that the deal was jinxed.

  “We’re having cash-flow problems as it is,” snapped Stephen. “We can’t afford any m
ore delays.”

  “How will the power shutdown affect the work in the labs?”

  “Virology will be hardest hit, of course,” responded Carl. “The air handlers on the sixth floor completely exchange the atmosphere every six minutes. It will take several days to get that system back up and running after it’s been shut down. I’m also not sure how many of the experimental animals will have to be moved to other quarters.” I wondered where you’d find someone willing to take on a couple hundred rodents for the weekend but didn’t say anything.

  “Hematology, of course, will just be happy for the day off.”

  “What about the ZK-501 project?” I asked, thinking about all of Dave Borland’s work in the cold rooms and what Lou Remminger had said about crystals having to be grown under ideal conditions.

  “I figure we’ll shut down the computers and bring in a diesel-powered refrigeration unit. Our tissue and reagent inventories, which aren’t quite so sensitive, will be fine if we just turn the temperature down in the cold rooms as far as it will go and tape the rooms shut. Theoretically they’ll hold below freezing until the juice comes back up on Monday morning.”

  “And if they don’t get the power back up in time?” I asked.

  “In that case I suggest we all show up bright and early with mops and flashlights,” replied Stephen, without the slightest trace of humor.

  * * *

  By the time I finally sat down at Danny’s desk I felt as though I’d already lived through a year’s worth of catastrophe and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. With a heavy heart I turned around and checked the fax machine for the transmissions that had arrived from Takisawa overnight.

  Instead of slowing things down, the time difference between Chicago and Tokyo had a weirdly accelerating effect. Fifteen hours ahead of us, the Japanese business day ended as mine began. This meant I’d spend the day crafting our response to their most recent fax which I’d transmit to them at the end of the day. With the time difference they’d receive it just as they were arriving for work. Thus the faxes shot back and forth, communications hurtling forward much faster than if Takisawa were across the street.