Fatal Reaction Page 11

  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.

  “How’s that?” I asked, having never really considered Stephen on the hook in the first place.

  “I think we can rule him out just on the basis of size. How tall was Danny?”

  “Average. I’d guess five foot ten or eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds.”

  “So that would put his shoes somewhere between a size eight and ten. We’ll check his closet to be sure. But see here, the waffled print that looks like it was made by an athletic shoe? This one’s definitely smaller and narrower than the others. Now, I don’t know what size shoe your boyfriend Stephen wears, but how tall is he? Six two, six three?”

  “He’s six foot five,” I replied, much amused. Elliott, who made his living on his faculty for observation, knew very well how tall Stephen was.

  “Well, it’s a good bet that his gunboats make a much bigger print than that,” replied Stephen, indicating the clear tread of a pair of athletic shoes.

  “How can you be sure that whoever made the second set of footprints was in the apartment at the same time as Danny? Isn’t there a chance he came in after it was all over?” I demanded.

  “Joe says he and Wypiszinski had the crime lab check and they found several places where Danny’s footprints were superimposed on the running shoes’. I’ll have an independent forensics lab send a team through here and I’ll make sure they send a footprint expert.”

  “So what we have to do, a la Sherlock Holmes or Cinderella, is find the person who matches the footprint. Even if he didn’t kill Danny, it’s a sure bet he knows how he died.”

  “Yeah. He was there,” replied Elliott. “When I talked to Joe yesterday he said that every bought politician in the state has been on the phone to the ME’s office about getting the autopsy done. He expects to hear from the ME any day now.”

  “The autopsy’s been done already,” I replied. “I didn’t call you because I assumed you’d have heard it from Blades.”

  “What do you mean it’s already been done?” Elliott demanded. “When?”

  “Sometime late yesterday afternoon.”

  “I talked to Joe this morning before I went to your Place. He didn’t say a word about it.”

  “Oh, there’s more,” I continued and proceeded to tell him about Stephen’s and my unscheduled visitation of fanny’s body.

  “Now I know why you stick with the guy. It’s not that he’s good-looking, or rich, or successful. No, it’s because he really knows how to show a girl a good time,” quipped Elliott humorlessly. “I can also assure you that Joe’s going to be real pissed about the autopsy.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The detectives assigned to the case are supposed to get three hours’ notice from the medical examiner so that they can be present for the autopsy. This thing with Sarrek has got the whole system tied into knots. So what does the ME say killed him?”

  “I don’t think they know,” I replied, shuddering inwardly at the thought of Danny. “Everything Joe said was true, though. There was no blood left in his body and there wasn’t a mark on him.”

  “What does your friend Stephen think? After all, he’s a doctor.”

  “Even when he was still seeing patients I think he knew a lot more about the living,” I pointed out. “I don’t think he knows what to think.”

  Elliott sighed and began walking slowly around the apartment as if trying to look at it again in light of this new information. He picked up a photograph in a brushed chrome frame from a side table.

  “Is this him?” he asked. I came over and took a look. It was an arty black-and-white shot of Danny looking soulful. Droplets of blood had dried dark brown on the surface of the glass.

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  “Is it a good likeness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Elliott. He carefully removed the picture from its frame and slipped it into his pocket. Then he t
urned to me and gestured at the paintings and photographs that hung on the walls. “These are what he collected?”

  “Yes. I don’t understand it, but supposedly Danny not only had a passion for contemporary art, but a good eye.”

  “Which don’t you understand?” inquired Elliott, squinting at a canvas covered thickly with murky acrylics into which the artist had stuck pieces of broken glass and hair, apparently at random. “The paintings or the passion?”

  “Neither,” I replied.

  “What would you say all of this was worth?”

  “I have no idea,” I replied.

  “Joe says it’s insured for a million bucks.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied slowly. “As far as I can tell there’s no big empty space on the wall that catches my eye, but it’s so hard to tell. Danny liked to move things around, and besides, the stuff all looks the same to me.” Elliott put his hands in his pockets and rocked backward on his white sneakers, surveying the room. “That’s at least twenty grand’s worth of stereo equipment,” he said with a note of jealousy in his voice. “Bang & Olufsen CD player with tape-to-tape dubbing. It doesn’t look like whoever was here with him was interested in boosting anything. I guess we should have a look in the bedroom.”

  I led the way, relieved at the idea of a change of venue. “These are some interesting pictures,” observed Elliott after we arrived in the bedroom and he’d had a chance to look at the photographs.

  “Mapplethorpe is considered by a lot of people to be a great artist,” I replied, embarrassed nonetheless.

  Elliott sniffed and pulled open the bifold doors of Danny’s closet.

  “Wow!” I exclaimed. It was the male version of my mother’s closet. Danny had more shoes than Imelda Marcos, more ties than Countess Mara, not to mention sweaters in every shade, and shirts and jackets all arranged with Danny’s fanatical tidiness by color and style in a system of racks and drawers from one of those closet-organizing companies. On one side, suits hung from wooden hangers with military precision, ranging from dark to light. On the other side, the hangers had been pushed to one end and several garments had fallen to the floor.

  “It’s weird that everything’s shoved over to one side like this,” said Elliott, carefully examining the inside of the closet door.

  “Maybe that’s why whoever was with him cleaned himself up afterward. Even if he didn’t come to steal the stereo, he might have come looking for something else.”

  Elliott stepped into the closet and felt all along the back wall and then got down on his hands and knees, picking up racks of shoes to examine the carpeting underneath.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A safe or some other kind of hiding place,” he said, his voice muffled from kneeling.

  While I waited for him to complete his search I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered what it would be like to go to bed looking at pictures of naked men in various S & M poses every night. Then again, I could never come home to some of the abstract paintings in the living room either.

  “I can’t find anything,” reported Elliott, getting back up onto his feet with a small grunt. “Just clothes.”

  “Maybe that’s what he was looking for,” I replied slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe he was just looking for something to wear. Think about it. Do you think the only thing that got bloody was the person’s shoes? I bet whoever was with him must have gotten blood all over himself. He couldn’t just walk out the door and onto the street that way. I bet you he just took off what he was wearing and put on something of Danny’s.”

  “So what happened to the clothes that he was wearing?”

  “Thrown away, burned, dropped from the Wacker Street Bridge....”

  “I’ll still have my people go through' the garbage dumpster in the off chance that whoever was with him was stupid—or lazy,” Elliott said. “Let’s take a look at the kitchen.”

  As we walked through the living room I realized that familiarity was beginning to inure me to its horrors. The puzzle of it, the unanswered questions of what had happened, was taking over. The lawyer’s instinctive response— head over heart.

  The kitchen, like everything else in the apartment, was exactly as it had been when I was there with Stephen. But now that the shock of seeing it had subsided, I found myself seeing it in much sharper focus—thinking about it instead of just letting it assault me.

  “I wonder why he used this sink to wash up,” I said.

  “You’d think it would have just been easier to step into the shower.”

  “Maybe he was cleaning off something besides himself.”

  “Maybe, or maybe in the heat of the moment he didn’t think of it.”

  From the front of the apartment I heard the chime of the doorbell. “That’ll be my guys,” explained Elliott.

  While he went to let them in I stayed in the kitchen. From the other room I could hear Elliott as he instructed his operatives on their door-to-door canvass. I walked up to the sink and stood there for a long time trying to imagine what it must have been like. What was it that Mr. Running Shoes was trying to clean up in the kitchen? What was it that he was trying to conceal? How had he felt on that fateful day, standing where I stood? Panicked surely, or at the very least, afraid. Covered with blood, terrified of discovery... And what else? Frantic. Desperate. I stared again at the sink before me.

  Off to the right on the counter by itself, about an arm’s length from the sink, stood a drinking glass. A drinking glass. Off to the right. Exactly where I’d set it if I were standing doing dishes and stopped for a drink of water. I stared at it for a long time. Yes, he’d been frantic, desperate, and afraid. But there was also a good chance he was thirsty.

  There was something very comforting about the dining room at the Four Seasons, very civilized. When I arrived, I found my mother comfortably settled at the very best table overlooking Michigan Avenue being fussed over like royalty by the head waiter and the maitre d’. Her hair, always perfect, had just been done and she was wearing a blouse of butter-colored silk and a string of Mikimoto pearls. I dutifully kissed the air beside her cheek before sliding into my seat. I wondered whether it was normal to be so nervous having lunch with your own mother.

  Of course, Mother wasn’t your normal mother. Dubbed the first lady of Chicago by the gossip columnists, she was instantly recognizable to anyone with even a passing interest in the society page. In the blue book of Chicago’s upper crust, Astrid Millholland was the one who decided whose name got included on the A list.

  To say that she had not been the warmest or most nurturing of parents would be something of an understatement. Even from the time I was very young, it must have been clear to her that I lacked not just the physical beauty that had been her birthright, but also the star quality of her personality. I was awkward where she was graceful, intelligent where she was charming, and her disappointment in me suffused even my earliest memories.

  And yet, as I grew older—or possibly just grew up—I had finally begun to see her from a different vantage point. I told myself that beneath the flawless exterior, the preternatural poise, my mother was just a woman. Driven to succeed in one of the few arenas available to her, indeed the only one she’d ever known, she was no better and not terribly much worse than many women of her generation and social stratum.

  Strangely enough, I had hoped the new apartment might turn out to be a kind of bridge between us. While I had no illusions about developing the kind of closeness I suspected that other mothers and daughters enjoyed, I at 'east hoped in time for some kind of rapprochement—a Pattern of civil relations and possibly even common ground. To a limited extent it seemed to be working. At least we now had something to talk about that didn’t inevitably lead to one of us stalking away from the table—usually me.

  And while I had been bloodied more than once in fierce business situat
ions, sitting across the table from my mother in the alien environs of a ladies’ lunch, I found myself paling at the prospect of what I intended to do. I let her rail about the “crime” Paul Riskoff had committed on the co-op roof and discuss her latest ideas for the new apartment, all of which seemed to involve moving walls at what I suspected would turn out to be shocking expense.

  Finally, with a plate of crab cakes in front of me, I managed to get up the nerve. Without going into the details I explained to her about Danny Wohl’s sudden death and how I had been drafted to take his place in the negotiations with Takisawa. But when I began explaining the difficulties I anticipated in dealing with the Japanese, she cut me off.

  “Of course, the Japanese can be terribly difficult,” interjected Mother. “It’s an entirely different culture. Do you remember Lissy Magnuson? Her daughter, Sarah, was two classes ahead of you at Chelsea Hall. Lissy’s husband, Herbert, served as ambassador to Japan under Reagan. They contributed so much money to his campaign that Lissy really thought they ought to have been sent to France. Well, compared to Paris you can understand how Tokyo was a tremendous shock. For one thing, the ambassador’s residence was ever so much smaller than her house in Lake Forest. And besides being very foreign, the Japanese are very peculiar about things. Everything has to be done a certain way or they take terrible offense. After four years she said she finally began to appreciate what the country had to offer, but I think in the end she was relieved when Bert started having trouble with his angina and decided to return to the States.”

  “Then you can understand how important it is that everything go perfectly when they come and visit.”

  “You’re in for quite an education, young lady. You may have been to your share of parties and dinners, but I don’t think you have any idea of the amount of work that goes into planning one.”