Fatal Reaction (17 page)

We waited for our names to be checked off from the list and then passed into a tall, narrow room, which looked like the interior of a very large, white shoe box. In the center of it stood an enormous golden sphere about twelve feet in diameter. The wall plaque announced that the piece was titled,
Monument to Language.

I turned to Stephen. “I need a drink,” I said.

I spotted my parents on the far side of the room, talking to the mayor, who I decided looked more like his father every day. Tribute having been paid, the mayor moved on. Most of the $46 million that it had cost to erect the new building had been donated by the people in this room. His honor had many more hands to shake before the night was through.

Stephen reappeared at my side with two glasses of white wine and thus armed we made our way through the black-clad crowd toward my parents, who were having their picture taken by the photographer for the society page. The
Sun-Times
society columnist hovered malevolently in the background waiting for him to finish.

As we made our way toward them we stopped every few feet to shake hands and say hello. I couldn’t help but marvel at Stephen. With his most trusted business advisor dead, control of his company threatening to weaken, and the deal of his lifetime looming ever closer on the horizon, he amiably worked the cocktail crowd, effortlessly remembering names and lightheartedly flirting with my mother’s friends and my partners’ wives. I’d long ago concluded, albeit enviously, that it was a masculine talent, this ability to compartmentalize, to focus completely on what was at hand.

We finally reached my parents. Mother was radiant and in her element, stunning in a Halston gown of midnight blue. Even though she managed to convey the impression that somehow the party was being given in her honor, the truth is she wouldn’t have entertained in a woodshed most of the people who were gathered here. But as an icon of arts philanthropy in this city, she felt it necessary to make an appearance at the event. She wasn’t even staying for dinner. After cocktails she and my father were headed to the cystic fibrosis benefit at the Four Seasons. Catching sight of us, Mother greeted me with more warmth than I’d seen her muster of late, while Father, in his usual semiinebriated state, was as sweet, and vague, as ever.

“That dress looks lovely on you,” she said, congratulating herself on her choice.

“Thank you.”

“Have you said hello to Skip and Bitsy yet?”

“Yes, Mother,” I replied, wondering how it was that she always managed to make me feel like I was exactly nine years old. “It was the very first thing we did.”

“Very good,” she said.

“Well then, let’s have a look around this joint,” suggested my father, adding under his breath, “it’s not like we’re ever going to be coming back.”

Stephen chuckled and my father flagged down a waiter to bring him a fresh drink. Once my father had enough gin and tonic in hand to safely make the trip, we made our way into the closest of the museum’s barrel-vaulted galleries.

A sign beside the entry explained that the gallery housed a show whose intention was to demonstrate how the concept of rapture transforms lives and is expressed through modem art. After looking at the first couple of paintings I was secretly grateful they hadn’t chosen depression as a theme. Whoever thought that several large, black panels communicated anything about rapture was completely out of their mind.

I went to say something to Stephen, but he was reading the explanatory text beside one of the installations with such great concentration that I stepped back to look at it myself.

It was a large painting, eight feet by six feet, painted white and superimposed with a thinly lined grid of pale red squares. I didn’t bother reading the description. They were all so pretentious and absurd that they only reinforced my deep-seated belief that much of modem art is to our century what the new clothes were to the emperor— nothing but a very elaborate fraud.

“What do you think?” demanded Stephen, appearing at my side. “Shall we buy it and hang it in our new living room?”

“Thank god they’re not for sale,” I replied. I studied his face and was alarmed to find no trace of a smile.

“It must have been hard to get all those thin lines perfectly straight using a brush.”

“I wouldn’t care if you told me it was painted by an armless Buddhist monk holding a toothpick in his teeth using his own blood. It still looks exactly like a big sheet of graph paper.”

The lights flickered, signaling dinner. We took our leave of my parents, who would wait until the majority of the guests were seated before slipping out to their next function. Stephen and I made our way up the stairs to where tables had been set up in the galleries housing the museum’s permanent collection. Ours was beneath a series of Calder mobiles from the thirties that I recognized from art history class. I wondered whether that made them too old to be classified as contemporary, but I was so grateful that they’d decorated the tables with flowers instead of something more avant-garde that I didn’t feel inclined to quibble.

I took my seat beside a partner from corporate whom I barely knew. His wife, plump and pretty, seemed flustered to find herself seated beside Stephen, who immediately applied himself to the task of charming her. My other dinner companion had not yet arrived. I thought nothing of it until, turning my head to tell the waiter that I wanted wine, I chanced to glance at the place card, partially obscured by flowers. I must have said something, or at least drawn back in shock, because Stephen turned to me, a look of concern on his face.

Memory flooded back. A heated discussion about art over lunch at the Standard Club nearly three months ago. Danny raving about the work of Dorothea Lange, a famous realist photographer whose work was scheduled for an exhibition during the coming year. A note jotted down and cast from memory as soon as it was handed to Cheryl. Until that moment I had completely forgotten I’d invited Danny to join us at the benefit that evening.

CHAPTER 14

Sunday morning when I came home from Stephen’s I was surprised to find my roommate sitting at the kitchen table companionably enjoying coffee and bagels with Elliott Abelman. For the first time in months Claudia wasn’t wearing scrubs. Instead she was dressed in a brown turtle-neck and corduroy pants. She’d put her hair into a French braid and she was smiling. She looked like a completely different person.

“Well, good morning, all,” I announced. “What’s the occasion?”

“I’m leaving for the airport in a couple minutes. I’m going to California for my Stanford interview.”

“And I’m on a mission of mercy,” chimed in Elliott with a grin. “I took a look in your refrigerator yesterday and realized you ladies are in danger of starving to death.”

“Oh yes,” replied Claudia, patting her stomach. “The dietitians are always stopping me in the halls to tell me how undernourished I look.”

The front door buzzer sounded harshly. “That must be my cab,” she announced, rising to her feet and brushing crumbs from her lap.

“Good luck tomorrow,” said Elliott, standing up. “Do you need any help with your bag?” Obviously they teach more than hand-to-hand combat in the marines.

“No thanks. I just have the one,” replied Claudia.

“I’ll walk you out,” I said, itching with curiosity. From the looks of things Elliott had been there for quite a while. I was dying to hear what they’d been talking about.

“Okay, what were you saying about me?” I whispered as soon as we were out of earshot.

“You are out of your mind.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“This guy is terrific. I don’t know what you’re doing with Stephen. You know, somebody just told me he was listed in the
Guiness Book of World Records
as the world’s coldest human.”

“You must be mistaken,” I replied dryly. “I know for a fact that my mother still holds that title.” All joking aside, I was less than happy with the direction this conversation was taking. “If you think Elliott is so marvelous maybe you should go out with him yourself.”

“I would,” replied Claudia as she opened the door to the cab, “except for one little problem.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“He’s completely in love with you.”

“Bagel?” inquired Elliott innocently as I returned to the kitchen.

“Did Joe tell you about the autopsy results?” I asked, rooting in the bag for a pumpernickel.

“Yeah, the ME thinks he bled to death from a perforated ulcer. Nasty.”

“So what does that mean from the point of view of the police?”

“Joe says he’ll push for a continued investigation, but he thinks he won’t get it.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that barring new evidence they’ll close the case.”

“And if Sarrek had been pulled over in Gary instead of here?”

“They’d still probably close it.”

“How can that be?”

“Face up to it, Kate. Even if they could find the guy who was with him, the chances they’d be able to gather enough evidence to charge him with a crime—much less convict—are practically zero.”

“Don’t you think you’re being unduly pessimistic?” I asked, tearing the bagel in two.

“Well, according to what the ME told Joe, there was only something like a fifty-fifty chance that Wohl would have survived even if the paramedics had gotten there.”

“Fifty-fifty is a hell of a lot better than the odds he ended up with,” I replied. “You know as well as I do that the guy who was with Danny fought with him to keep him from getting help. And afterwards he tried to conceal the fact that he’d been there. You don’t think that’s guilty behavior?”

“I’m not denying that’s probably how it happened, but that still doesn’t make it murder.”

“Stephen thinks whoever was with him was somebody well-known, someone who was afraid the paramedics or the police would recognize him.”

“That would make sense. Remember I told you yesterday I was going to send my people through the building and recanvass the neighbors?”

“Did you turn up anything?”

“A witness.”

“A witness to what?”

“Someone who claims they saw Danny leaving his apartment around four o’clock last Sunday afternoon.”

“When did he die?”

“According to Joe the ME put the time of death between ten and two.”

“Then I don’t get it. Either your witness is wrong about the time or he’s wrong about what he saw. I don’t see how it gets us anywhere.”

“He’s positive about the time. The guy’s name is Mark Freelig. He manages the Italian restaurant across the street from the Steppenwolf Theater, a place called Biscotti’s. He says he got to work around quarter to five last Sunday. The restaurant is closed on Mondays, so he stayed over at his girlfriend’s and slept in. That’s why the police didn’t interview him on Monday when the body was discovered.”

“What does he say he saw?”

“Freelig lives in 12C, the apartment diagonally across the hall from Danny’s. He says he was just getting ready to leave for work when he remembered he’d left some clothes in the dryer in the laundry room. You know how it is in an apartment building. You leave your laundry in the dryer and you come back to find half of it gone.”

I nodded, though I had no practical experience in the matter. I dropped my dirty clothes at the Chinese laundry on Harper and 53rd Street and picked them up neatly folded the next day. Mrs. Chen had a son at Northwestern and I figured with what she charged I was making a nice dent in his tuition bill.

“So anyway, this guy Freelig decided he’d better run down to the basement and retrieve his stuff. He said he’d just opened the door of his apartment when he heard the elevator bell ring at the end of the hall and he saw Danny standing in front of it waiting for the doors to open.”

“What made him think it was Danny?”

“He recognized his raincoat. A real expensive gray Armani number. I guess Freelig had seen him wear it before.” I nodded. I’d seen him in it, too.

“What else was he wearing?” I asked.

“A Yankees baseball cap pulled down low. He was carrying a yellow and black athletic bag, the kind that’s on a strap so that you can carry it on your shoulder.”

“Did Freelig speak to him?”

“Freelig just called out to ask Danny to hold the elevator.”

“And did he?”

“No. That’s why this guy Freelig remembered it. According to him Danny was normally really friendly, so he was surprised when he didn’t hold it. Freelig figured Danny must have been in a hurry—either that or he didn’t hear him.”

“You and I know why he must have been in a hurry.”

“Oh, yeah. There was one more thing. According to Mr. Freelig it looked like the man’s hair was wet under the baseball cap.”

It took me a couple of seconds to grasp the significance of this. “So what you’re saying is the guy we’re looking for cleaned up as best as he could, put his bloody clothes in the sports bag, put on Danny’s coat and hat, and hoped to make it out of the building unnoticed,” I said.

“I bet it gave him a heart attack when Freelig asked him to hold the elevator,” observed Elliott.

“True, but I’m still not sure where all of this gets us.”

“For one thing it gives us a physical description of who we’re looking for.”

“How’s that?”

“Now we know that whoever was with Danny was close enough in size and build to wear Danny’s clothes and to be mistaken for him—at least at a distance. I’d say we’re probably looking for a white man about five foot ten, one hundred sixty pounds, between twenty and fifty years old.”

“That narrows it down to a couple million guys,” I said dubiously.

“There’s also a chance the security camera in the lobby might have picked up something. I’ve got someone tracking down the tape, but the company that has the security contract on that building isn’t open on the weekend so we won’t know until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“I also had a pair of operatives showing Wohl’s picture around last night. I sent them out to all the bars and restaurants that showed up on his American Express bill for the past two months.”