Fatal Reaction (11 page)

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest.

“Clues,” he said with a big grin.

“So what have you found?”

“Packets of soy sauce, take-out menus, breath mints, rubber bands, and four bottles of Maalox. Looks like Stephen must be a rough boss to work for.”

“That’s not it. Lots of the drugs Danny was taking were hard on his stomach.”

“What was he taking?”

“You’d have to ask his doctor,” I said, sliding into the visitor’s chair, “but as far as I know he was on the ‘Crixivan cocktail.’ That’s a combination of Crixivan, AZT, and 3TC taken on a very rigid schedule—three times a day with no food for an hour before and two hours after, ft works out to something like twenty-two pills a day.”

“And this was to get rid of his AIDS?”

“The drugs can’t get rid of the AIDS. They just keep it from making more virus.”

Elliott reached beneath the desk and pulled out Danny’s briefcase. “Your friend Stephen asked me to bring this down to you. He said Danny took it with him on the trip toJapan.”

“Oh, good. It has all of Danny’s notes in it. I’ve got to go through them.”

“Notes about what?”

“The negotiations he and Stephen were having with the Takisawa Corporation.”

“Was that part of Danny’s job as in-house counsel?”

“They had to call him something so that was his title but he really did just about everything. In addition to overseeing the company’s legal affairs, he negotiated transactions, managed the financial side of the company, handled shareholder relations...

“So what’s the impact of his death going to be on the company?”

“It’s never good to lose key personnel for any reason.”

“What about the deal he was working on? Could someone have been trying to sabotage the negotiations?” I made a face. “You need to stop seeing so many movies,” I replied. “Besides, if a competitor wanted to torpedo the ZK-501 project they’d go after one of the key scientists, Lou Remminger or Michael Childress. They wouldn’t kill Danny.”

“What about his personal life?”

“What about it?”

“Could he have been involved with anyone from the office?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, thinking about the homely assemblage at the ZK-501 meeting. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you know if he was seeing anyone regularly, somebody from outside the office?”

“Danny was always pretty vague when he talked about how he’d spent the weekend. I mean, he did a lot of great stuff—went to the theater, parties-—but it was always with ‘friends.’ ”

“And you never got the sense that he was part of a couple, that there was someone special.”

I shook my head slowly.

“You’re sure he never mentioned anyone?”

I thought for a moment.

“Oh god!” I exclaimed suddenly. “There was someone once, but it was hardly the love of his life. This was a few years ago when we were doing the IPO, taking the company public.”

“I know what an IPO is.”

“Well, then you know what an intensely miserable chunk of work it is, all the regulations, all the filings. We were on an all-night jag at the legal printers, punch-drunk from lack of sleep and waiting to go over the proofs. I said something about wanting to get home to my own bed and Danny said something about being perfectly happy right where he was because nobody could find him. When I asked him about it, he told me he’d just started dating someone, but it turned out he was a psycho killer.”

“Literally?”

“No, I don’t think he meant it literally,” I replied, thinking that we all had a bit too much of Stanley Sarrek and his freezer on the brain. “But he told me some of the things the guy did.”

“Like what?”

“Like leaving creepy messages on his answering machine. Following him. I guess right before Danny and I had had this conversation this guy talked the janitor of fanny’s building into letting him into Danny’s apartment. Danny came home late from work one night and found him sitting there in the living room with all these Candles burning. When I asked Danny how he managed to get rid of him, he said he grabbed the guy’s wallet, dropped it out the window, and then after the guy ran downstairs to get it, Danny says he locked the doors and called the police.”

“And when did all this happen?”

“We finished the IPO three years ago last October, so it must have been somewhere around then. You know, come to think of it, Danny moved not too long after that. I wonder if there was some connection.”

“Did Stephen and Danny travel together often?” asked Elliott, seemingly from out of the blue.

“Of course they did.”

“So this trip to Japan was not the first time?”

“Not by a long shot and I know where you’re going with this, Abelman, and that dog won’t hunt.” Law enforcement types were all the same; they always assumed the worst. “Danny was gay; Stephen was straight. They worked together, but they didn’t sleep together.”

“For now I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” shrugged Elliott, his tone of voice suggesting that nothing would make him happier than discovering that Stephen was secretly gay. “I’ve got a gay operative assigned to work on Danny’s other life.”

“What do you mean, his ‘other’ life?” I demanded, resenting the sleaziness his tone implied.

“Don’t be so naive, Kate. I guarantee you, there are things you don’t know about Danny, things that may lead us to finding out who killed him.”

“That’s true of everyone,” I protested.

“Yes, but it’s more true because he was gay. But for now, why don’t you just tell me what he was like to work with?”

“He was a good guy.”

“In what way?”

“He was very smart, good at his job, easy to deal with the way that competent people always are. You knew that if he said he’d do it, it would get done.”

“How long had he worked for Azor?”

“From the very beginning. He and Stephen used to joke that in the old days he actually worked for food.”

“How’s that?”

“Like all start-up companies Azor didn’t have much money and what they had they certainly couldn’t waste on legal advice. I think the first six months Danny worked for Azor he actually slept on Stephen’s couch.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Elliott with a look that said he didn’t believe for a minute that Danny had confined his slumbers to the couch. “He was a Georgetown-educated lawyer. Stephen told me that before Danny came to work for Azor he was an associate at McKenzie Valentine in New York. Why would he give up such a prestigious job in order to work for Stephen Azorini for free?”

“For the same reason they still come to work for Stephen,” I replied, thinking about the scientists on the ZK-501 project. “Because he gives them a chance to do work they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to do. Besides, Danny was no fool. He knew Stephen well enough to realize the odds were pretty good that Stephen would hit 0lle out of the park with his new company. He had a chance to be in on the ground floor.”

“Did he own stock in Azor?”

“Quite a bit. I can look up the exact number of shares for you.”

“What would you guess the dollar value to be?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in the million-dollar range at the price the shares are trading today.”

“Do you have any idea how he left his money?”

“As far as I know he left it all to AIDS-related charities. From what he told me, I gathered his family were all dead.”

“I still don’t quite buy his leaving McKenzie just because he thought Stephen might strike pay dirt. There had to be something more, something personal, that would make him take that risk.”

“Sure, but it’s not what you’re thinking. You’re the one who was talking about the straight world and the gay world a minute ago. Well, if he’d stayed at McKenzie it would have meant staying in the closet for the rest of his life.”

“From what I’ve heard about him, Danny was not exactly open about his homosexuality. Just from the few people I’ve talked to out here I didn’t get the sense that people realized he was gay.”

“He was a lawyer. At Azor that means he didn’t even really exist. Besides, not telling the world about what’s going on in your bedroom is a lot different from being terrified that if someone finds out, it will destroy your career.”

“So do you have any idea what his life was like out of the office?”

“He collected modern art,” I replied dryly.

“You know that’s not what I mean. Did he have a steady boyfriend, do you know? Did he do a lot of one-night stands? Did he cruise leather bars? Was he a drag queen?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“That’s okay, we’ll find out all his secrets soon enough,” declared Elliott matter-of-factly.

“Not everybody has secrets,” I shot back.

“No, they don’t,” agreed Elliott. “Especially once they’re dead.”

CHAPTER 9

Elliott wanted to have a look at Danny’s personnel file, so I walked him down to human resources. While I was there I had my picture taken and my employee ID made. It took only a few minutes, but to me it seemed like a momentous step, a laminated piece of plastic that identified me as an employee—a person under Stephen Azorini’s control. Well,
identify
might have been too strong a word. The company used one of those cameras that spit out a computer-generated image and the quality of the likeness that appeared on the ID was so poor that it looked like a Xerox of a morgue shot taken in bad light.

That done, I left Elliott to make his own way through Danny’s personnel file and find his own way out of the building. Now that I was officially employed by Azor it seemed like a good idea to do something about earning my keep. I had a long way to go before I felt comfortable taking the helm of the negotiations with Takisawa and it was time I did something about it.

Walking down the corridor that housed all the company administrative offices, I noticed that Stephen’s door was open and saw him sitting behind his desk doing something on the computer. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and called out for me to come in.

“When are you and I going to have some time to sit down and talk about Takisawa?” I asked him, folding my arms across my chest.

“I was hoping to block out most of the afternoon on Saturday. That way we’ll hopefully have fewer interruptions.”

“Don’t forget we have to go to the Benefactors’ Dinner that night,” I said, congratulating myself that I’d remembered. It was a dinner at the Museum of Contemporary Art honoring its biggest donors. Skip Tillman, the firm’s managing partner, had recently been named president of the MCA’s board of trustees. As a result, Callahan Ross partners were now expected to take an active role in the museum. Worse yet, Skip’s wife Bitsy and my mother were friends, so I had gotten both arms twisted about going.

Stephen pulled a large, thick envelope from the top of a pile and tossed it toward me. “This just came this morning,” he said, moving on to other things.

I opened it. Inside was a set of interrogatories at least an inch thick. These were the written questions posed to Azor by the plaintiff’s attorneys in the most recently filed Serezine case. They represented round one in what would no doubt turn out to be a lengthy—and for Stephen, expensive—discovery process.

“I’m going back downtown to my office this afternoon. I’ll deliver them to Tom Galloway myself. He’ll want to set up a time to meet with you early next week to go over your answers.”

“Can’t this wait until after the Takisawa visit?”

“Unfortunately, interrogatories have to be answered within ten days. Don’t worry, Tom will make it as painless as possible.”

“Sure. The only place it’ll hurt will be my wallet.” He looked down at my Azor ID, which I’d clipped to the lapel of my jacket, and smiled. “At least I get a break from paying you by the hour for a while.” He picked up another piece of paper from his desk and handed it to me. “This fax came in from Takisawa overnight.”

I read it through quickly. It was a letter, brief by Japanese standards, informing Stephen that the company’s chairman, old man Takisawa himself, would be making the trip to Chicago.

“I take it this is good news?” I asked.

“Very good. But it certainly ups the ante on their visit, especially when it comes to planning the logistics.”

“In what way?”

“The Japanese traditionally read a great deal of meaning into how they are treated, and believe me, senior executives like Takisawa are used to being treated like royalty.”

“So you book them into a suite at the Four Seasons and hire a limousine to take them back and forth,” I said, figuring that’s what Stephen was already planning.

“It’s a little more complicated than that. You’re thinking about this like a business meeting when it’s really much more like a state visit for a foreign dignitary. For example, it is expected that we’ll come up with someplace special for dinner on the first night they’re in town.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Someplace unique and not generally available. Preferably someplace with a sense of ceremony.”

“What about church?” I offered, only half joking.

“I was actually thinking about your parents’ house. You have to admit it would be perfect. Old man Takisawa would love the idea that he could go home and tell all his rich old friends he’d been entertained in Astrid Millholland’s house.”

“You know my mother,” I replied dubiously. “She’s perfectly capable of snubbing people she’s known for years. I can’t even begin to imagine how she’d feel about a bunch of strange Japanese businessmen in her house.”

“She wouldn’t even have to be there. We could have the whole thing catered.”

“I don’t know....” I ventured uncertainly.

“It can’t hurt to ask.”

I thought to myself that it very well might.

“Well, what do you think?” pressed Stephen. “Do you think there’s a chance she’ll say yes?”

“Oh, I’m sure I can get her to say yes,” I replied weakly. “It’s the concessions she’s going to wring out of me in exchange that have me worried.”

I went back to Danny’s office and started pulling out his file on Takisawa. While I was at it I grabbed the ones on Okuda, too. The previous year Azor had been involved in an aborted courtship with the Okuda Corporation. For months Danny had pursued the possibility of a joint venture with that Japanese drugmaker in the hopes of financing the development of an HIV integrase inhibitor that would block the ability of the HTV virus to take over healthy cells. Unfortunately, right before the deal was signed, Merck published findings putting them ahead in the race to develop the drug and Okuda hastily bowed out. But not before they’d come to pay a four-day visit to Chicago to tour Azor’s labs.