Fatal Reaction (13 page)

“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.”

I tried to think of some excuse that wouldn’t make me seem like a complete wimp, but it was too early in the morning for that kind of invention. Instead I said no. “I’m surprised you haven’t been there already,” I said. “Someone must have tipped off the building management company that Danny had AIDS. They called the health department and they came out and put it under seal. It took Joe Blades most of the day yesterday to get them to agree to give me permission to go inside.”

He put his arm across my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Come on. Ten minutes of your life and it will be over.”

“Ah, the hooker’s mantra,” I replied, taking a sip of my coffee. “Is there time for me to take a shower?”

“Sure. Take your time,” he said. “Say,” inquired Elliott, casting a dubious eye over the dust balls under the radiators, “when are you guys going to get a cleaning lady?” The apartment Claudia and I shared was the poor, cousin of the one Stephen and I had just bought. Born in the same grand era, it was much smaller and the wood floors were scarred from years of neglect. Our furniture, which consisted of discards from my mother interspersed with sixties-era castoffs from Claudia’s parents, comprised a decorating style best described as an assault to the eye.

“If it really bothers you I think there might be a broom in the closet in the kitchen,” I informed him sweetly-“Make yourself at home.”

I showered quickly, but mindful of my lunch with my mother, I chose my clothes with care, selecting a black cashmere turtleneck, a pair of gray wool trousers, and a black snakeskin belt with a heavy gold buckle. After I was dressed I brushed my hair a full hundred strokes, a habit left over from an otherwise forgotten nanny. Knowing that Mother loathed my usual style, I elected to wear my hair down, which involved spending ten minutes on my hands and knees emptying out the cabinet under the bathroom sink until I finally found an old tortoiseshell headband. As an afterthought I pulled a pair of gold earrings that had once belonged to my great-grandmother and a heavy gold bracelet from my jewelry box.

“You look very nice,” said Elliott when I emerged from my bedroom. What I looked like was a brainless North Shore society princess with a lunch date, but being well brought up, I said thank you nonetheless. As I got my coat I took a quick peek under the radiators. I was relieved to see that the dust bunnies were still there.

If anything Danny’s apartment was worse the second time. At least the morning I’d gone with Stephen I had no idea of what awaited me. Even before we got there, just watching the numbers in the elevator increase as we rose to Danny’s floor had caused a hard knot of apprehension in my stomach. Now, as Elliott paused to remove the health department seal, I had to remind myself to breathe.

He turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The stale smell of old blood, like rotting meat, had gotten worse.

“Let’s just take a quick walk through it together,” said Elliott, putting his arm around my shoulder and steering into the living room. I felt an adolescent shiver that had nothing to do with the blood-splashed walls. It was all exactly as Stephen and I had left it except that the stains had grown darker and the pool of blood near the Phone was now dry.

Elliott whistled softly. “I don’t know what he died of hut whatever it was he sure didn’t die quietly,” he observed, so close to me I could feel the warmth of his breath.

Joe Blades once told me that every crime scene tells a story. Looking around Danny’s living room I knew instinctively that the story I was seeing was one of violence. The overturned furniture, the pillows hurled to the floor, the telephone toppled from its table, all these things spoke of some sort of physical struggle. Even to my untrained eye it seemed obvious from the splatter patterns on the walls that they could have been made only if Danny had been moving as he bled.

“Look here,” said Elliott, stooping near the edge of a long stain beside the slipper chair closest to the phone. “I’d swear this looks like two different sets of footprints.” He studied them in silence for a few minutes, considering. “At least this lets your friend Stephen off the hook,” he concluded, straightening to his full height.