Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  Mother’s instructions had been carried out to the letter. A long table had been set up along the west side of the lower dining room commanding a prime view of the city lights spread out like a jeweled blanket beneath us. The table had been decorated with the orchids that had caused Cheryl so much grief, arranged in very tall bud vases so that they would seem to bloom above the heads of seated diners.

  From my folder I pulled the stack of place cards the calligrapher had prepared and consulted the seating chart Mother had prepared for me. At first I thought she was playing some kind of elaborate joke—either that or she’d been drinking. According to her diagram, she had old man Takisawa sitting between Lou Remminger and Dave Borland. Hiroshi was at the far end of the table between Stephen and Childress. I quickly pulled the crystallographer’s place card and tore it up. Hiroshi would have to make do with Michelle instead.

  I looked at my watch. The busboys were busy filling the Water glasses from silver pitchers. If everything was going according to schedule, Stephen and the contingent from Azor were already waiting in the lobby for the arrival of the limousines bringing the Takisawa people from the Nikko. There was no time to fiddle with the seating, so I I decided to trust my mother’s judgment. I had just laid down the last place card when the maitre d’ appeared at my elbow and discreetly whispered my mother’s favorite words: “Your guests have arrived, Madame.”

  If Stephen thought the seating arrangements were peculiar, he said nothing to me; indeed, he said nothing at all to me that night. But by the time the salad course was served, all my reservations about Mother’s plan had been completely erased. Every time I glanced in his direction, the chairman of the Takisawa corporation was smiling. From time to time he even laughed out loud.

  Things were rockier at my end of the table where Mother had relegated the bulk of the non-English speakers. All they could manage was a few polite inquiries about Dr. Childress’s health. After some discreet probing, it became obvious that Stephen had told them the crystallographer had suffered from acute appendicitis while attending a conference in Boston. In reply to their inquiries I said that the last I heard, the world-famous crystallographer was resting comfortably.

  The waiter had just served the cheese course— accompanied by a truly wonderful twenty-year-old port— when the maitre d’ discreetly slipped me a note. It was a message from Elliott saying he would be waiting to pick me up downstairs at ten-fifteen.

  I checked my watch, made my excuses to my dinner companions, and left my port with great regret. I thought about letting Stephen know I was leaving but thought better of it. After all, he wasn’t the only one who’d gone to junior high.

  * * *

  Elliott was already waiting for me when I got downstairs, sitting in his Jeep with the motor running. The exhaust from his engine made great billowing clouds of white smoke in the cold night air. The streets of the Loop were deserted. Stepping into the private detective’s car in my low-cut dress and high heels, I felt, for just a moment, like a character in a movie.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The morgue,” he replied with a sly smile.

  “Why the morgue?”

  “Joe called me about an hour ago. Julia Gordon is giving your friend Dr. Childress his last physical. Blades thought you might like to see what develops firsthand.”

  “Are you sure this is okay with Dr. Gordon?” I demanded, praying fervently that it was not. I’d already had enough dead bodies for one day. Besides, I’d never seen an autopsy and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, especially not so soon after dinner.

  “Dr. Gordon says come on down. The more the merrier. I think she figures this is a good way to keep your boyfriend and his well-connected friends off her back.”

  “Great,” I replied miserably, huddling down into the folds of my cashmere wrap.

  Unfortunately we didn’t have far to go, and soon we were pulling into the parking lot behind the Robert J. Stein Institute for Forensic Medicine. A ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire had been erected around Sarrek’s trailer, and the entire area was lit up like a prison yard. Elliott explained that double-deck tourist buses had taken to stopping there, and they’d erected the fence to keep out souvenir hunters.

  We parked the car and I followed him into the building, feeling ridiculous in my evening clothes. The attendant at the desk told us that Dr. Gordon was in autopsy suite three and that she was expecting us. With a growing sense of dread I followed Elliott down the hall.

  “Are you okay with this?” he asked with an inquiring look as we approached the door.

  “I can hardly wait,” I replied, determined not to disgrace myself. Elliott smiled and took my hand. I was so nervous about where I was going that I did not protest.

  “It’s about time you two showed up,” said Joe Blades by way of greeting from the far side of the room. He looked like he’d put on weight since I’d seen him last and his skin, always pale, had taken on a pasty fluorescent-induced pallor that I suspected was from too much time at his desk doing paperwork on the Sarrek victims and not enough time on the basketball court.

  “Dr. Gordon,” said Elliott. “Thanks for the invite.”

  “Are you kidding? The mayor himself called me this morning and told me to give you every cooperation.” While Stephen may not have been talking to me, I reflected that he’d certainly wasted no time in getting on the phone to everybody else. “Besides, you know I always do my best work with an audience,” she continued, turning back to her work. On the metal table in front of her lay the now thawed body of Michael Childress. His major organs had been removed and his empty center yawned at us grotesquely.

  On the ceiling above the body was an overhead camera mounted on tracks so that it could be moved and focused over different regions of the corpse. A microphone dangled somewhere above Childress’s chest with a foot pedal to turn it on and off as the pathologist dictated her findings. On a clipboard beside Childress’s head I could see a predrawn diagram of a generic body on which Dr. Gordon had already begun scribbling notes.

  To the pathologist every body tells a story and as queasy as I felt in my high heels and evening dress, I intended to stick around to hear how this particular one turned out.

  “Where are Rankin and Masterson?” asked Elliott, casually taking a seat beside his friend. “I can’t believe they’re so busy they can’t show up for their own case.”

  “They just ran across the street to grab dinner. They’ll be back in a couple minutes. Why don’t you tell them what you’ve told me so far, Doc?” suggested Blades.

  “As long as you understand that all of this is preliminary and so far off the record that it doesn’t even exist,” she warned us.

  Elliott and I chorused our agreement.

  “Do you know how he died yet?” I asked.

  “So far all the evidence points to hypothermia, most likely some time during the day on Sunday. I can’t pin the time down any better until I get the rest of the lab results back.”

  “Can you tell whether he was alive when he went into the freezer?” inquired Elliott.

  “Most definitely,” replied Gordon, setting the lungs on an electronic scale and making a note of their weight. “I’ve noted swelling in the extremities—ears, nose, etc.—also, focal ulcers of the gastric mucosa and evidence of pancreatic hemorrhage, all of which are consistent with death caused by hypothermia.”

  “But if he was freezing to death, why was he naked?” I asked. “His clothes were right there beside him....”

  “I’d say it was a textbook case of paradoxical undressing,” replied the medical examiner matter-of-factly as she made an incision at the back of Childress’s head and began to pull his scalp down over his face.

  “What is paradoxical undressing?” I asked, studying my shoes.

  “It is a relatively common phenomenon seen to some degree in close to seventy percent of deaths due to exposure to the cold. It can vary from the stage when the person is just beginning to
undress to total nudity. The act of disrobing is thought to occur just before unconsciousness sets in. The reason, in theory, being that with sufficient lowering of the body temperature the blood vessels in the extremities dilate, giving a false feeling of warmth and causing the victim to undress. The fact that Dr. Childress took his clothes off and then apparently lay down and tried to make snow angels in the layer of frost on the cold-room floor is completely consistent with the kind of disorientation that he would experience prior to death from hypothermia. The injuries to his hands and feet and the bruising on his knees most likely occurred earlier.”

  “You mean before he went into the freezer?” asked Elliott.

  “No. When he was trying to claw his way out. The bruising on the heels of his hands and the underside of his wrists were probably made when he tried to summon help by pounding against the inside of the cold-room door, while the trauma to his fingers makes it look like he made repeated attempts to pry the door open.”

  I looked at Dr. Gordon and said nothing. I could not help but think these were things no one should ever have to know.

  “So then how did he get into the cold room in the first place?” asked Elliott finally. “Did he walk in on his own?”

  “Interesting you should ask. There are no signs of any other kind of trauma besides the ones we’ve just discussed, that is, there were no marks that would indicate he’d been knocked unconscious or in any way bound. However, if you look at the side of his upper thigh, you’ll notice something a little unusual.”

  Elliott walked over to the body and took a good look. I stayed where I was, willing to get the news secondhand.

  “It looks like a needle mark,” he observed.

  “Yes. It does.”

  “Funny place for one, though.”

  “I agree. What makes it even more interesting is that we’ve got the preliminary results back on the first round of our toxicology screen.”

  “Already?” demanded Elliott.

  “Believe me, strings have not only been pulled,” replied Dr. Gordon, “but they’ve been pulled hard. What’s interesting is that we’ve gotten a positive reading for opiates.”

  “So he was drugged before he was put in the freezer,” observed Elliott.

  “Tell them the best part, Doc,” urged Blades with something akin to glee.

  “Our toxicologist has identified the opiate as phenokynamine.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” said Elliott.

  “That’s because it’s a veterinary tranquilizer,” replied Dr. Gordon. “It’s used only for animals.”

  CHAPTER 27

  By the time I got up the next morning I was ready to do something I was actually good at. I was tired of all my fruitless speculation about who had killed Michael Childress and Danny Wohl. I was sick of wondering about what had become of Childress’s car and worrying about the impact on Tom Galloway’s career once the press got wind of his relationship with Danny Wohl. “Oh, it won’t be so bad,” Elliott had quipped. “It’ll be just like coming out on Oprah.”

  I never thought it would come to this, but after trying to find some kind of solution in the ever shifting investigation into what Joe Blades had come to refer to as the Azor murders, I was actually looking forward to sitting down and negotiating with Takisawa. When I arrived at Azor, the first thing I did was go to Stephen’s office. His greeting was so chilly that I decided not to mention my trip to the medical examiner’s office the night before. I figured he could wait and get the news from the Oak Brook police.

  In contrast, the Japanese appeared in exceptionally good spirits. I learned from Lou Remminger that after dinner Dave Borland had led a group of Takisawa scientists on an impromptu tour of Rush Street, during which he’d learned a thing or two about the Oriental appetite for debauchery. More important, he reported that the Japanese scientists were practically salivating at the prospect of the proposed joint venture.

  The exception appeared to be Chairman Takisawa. He remained silent and aloof during morning coffee and the level of nervous attentiveness on display from those around him seemed to bode no good. The day’s agenda called for another elaborately staged show-and-tell for the scientists, while the business people for both sides were set to huddle in Azor’s conference room and attempt to craft a deal.

  From the beginning things went badly.

  The deal on the table called for the Japanese company to provide support for thirty researchers at $200,000 per scientist per year for five years—a rule of thumb that included compensation, equipment, and supplies—totaling $30 million. If Azor succeeded in producing a drug, Stephen proposed splitting the revenues in half. In addition there were several provisions regarding patents and licensing, the distribution of worldwide rights, and the training and education issues that the Japanese had up until now held so dear.

  But obviously Chairman Takisawa had other ideas. He began by explaining with great deference that despite Azor’s recent success with isolating diffractable crystals of ZKBP, he doubted our scientists would be able to develop a drug. The most he could hope for was that they would be able to help Takisawa scientists find their own. Knowing what I did about the level of expertise of Takisawa’s scientists, much less their chairman, I recognized this statement as ridiculous on its face.

  Stephen could barely contain himself, but I knew it was important that we hear Takisawa out. I put my hand on his leg under the table and pinched him—hard—as a signal to say nothing. I felt sick but also struggled to remain impassive. Even though I tell myself I didn’t inherit my mother’s temper, as I sat there listening to all of Takisawa’s well-thought-out reasons for trying to screw us I wanted to climb over the table and throttle him with his skinny little tie.

  Thirty minutes later, it was clear that what Takisawa was proposing was much less than we’d hoped—namely $25 million for worldwide rights to any new anti-inflammatory drug that Azor produced. Before Stephen had a chance to speak, I thanked Chairman Takisawa profusely for sharing his thoughts with us and suggested we adjourn for our mid-morning break. Then I whispered to Stephen that I needed to talk to him.

  Trying to remain calm, I followed him into his office.

  “You never even gave me a chance to ask him how much they’re willing to give us up front,” complained Stephen angrily, once he’d shut the door.

  “You shouldn’t ask them,” I replied.

  “What do you mean I shouldn’t ask them?” he exploded, clearly at the end of his rope. What he had intended as a coup had now suddenly turned into, at best, a scraping negotiation with Takisawa setting performance milestones and royalty schedules. “That’s the absolute first thing you’d want to know when you start talking about this kind of deal.”

  “Listen to me, Stephen,” I said, looking him steadily in the eye. “You shouldn’t ask them, because this isn’t the kind of deal you ever want to get involved in. You say yes to this, I don’t care under what terms, and old man Takisawa will have you tied up with strings and have you dancing like a marionette.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t have any other choice,” replied Stephen, running his fingers through the thick waves of his hair. “If we don’t get the money soon, not only will we lose any chance at being first with the drug, but the board will have my resignation, and I’ll be working in some clinic somewhere looking into babies’ ears and telling fat people to give up smoking.”

  “Get a grip on yourself, Stephen,” I advised him. “You’re forgetting Millholland’s first law of negotiation.”

  “What is that?”

  “When the opposition starts fucking with you, you fuck them back. Borland told me this morning that their people are hot for our science. I’m telling you, they want this deal.”

  “They’re sure as hell not acting like it.”

  “Come on. Old man Takisawa is an arrogant son of a bitch, not to mention one shrewd negotiator. How else do you think he got where he is?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My poin
t is that arrogant men understand arrogance. You of all people should know this.”

  “So what do you propose we do?” Stephen answered, ignoring the dig.

  “Go back down the hall and tell old man Takisawa that you have sent for their cars and that Rachel will be happy to help with the arrangements for their return flight to Tokyo.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yes, I am. Tell them to get lost.”

  “After everything we’ve already sunk into this deal? You must think I’m out of my mind.”

  “Do you remember what you said to me that day in the car?”

  “What day?”

  “The day you got me into all this. The day you talked me into taking over the negotiations with Takisawa. You told me you trusted my judgment. Well now I’m telling you the time has come to put up or shut up. Trust me. Takisawa is just playing games. You’ve got to either fold or call their bluff. But if you don’t, it’s the first step down a very bad road. Say yes to them now and Takisawa will have a leash around your neck so fast that before you know it you’ll be barking like a dog.”

  Stephen stood behind his desk and considered what I had said. I could not read his expression, but the pounding of my heart filled my ears and sweat trickled down the inside of my silk blouse like a cold river of fear. I tried hard not to think about what a large piece of my life I was gambling on this one moment. I tried not to second-guess myself. When it came right down to it, my judgment was the only thing that separated me from a thousand other lawyers in this town. When I stopped trusting it, it would be time to quit and hit the cocktail-party circuit full time.

  “Okay,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “We’ll try testing your level of arrogance against theirs. You’d just better hope you’re right about this.”