Fatal Reaction

CHAPTER 1
     
    I always knew that Stephen Azorini’s bed was a dangerous place for me. After all, his company, Azor Pharmaceuticals, was my most important client—which is why everyone was willing to ignore what was going on between us. Still, all it would take was the smallest sign that Azor was slipping from my grasp and there was absolutely no question of who would be sacrificed. My partners would not hesitate for a second before showing me the door.
    That’s why I was nervous about being summoned to John Guttman’s office. Guttman had been my predecessor as Azor’s chief outside counsel and he was still deeply unhappy that Stephen had chosen to replace him. A complicated man, Guttman was rankled by my success even as he sought ways to take credit for it. I also knew him well enough to be certain that nothing good could come out of his wanting to see me.
    I’d spent my first years at the firm as Guttman’s apprentice, indentured to its most vituperative partner through a combination of default and design. At the time, my arrival at Callahan Ross had been viewed with suspicion. Everyone assumed that I had been hired because of who I am, either to add the Millholland name as ballast to the letterhead or because my family had pulled strings to get me there.
    My widowhood, at age twenty-five, also formed a sort of barrier around me that many, no doubt, found difficult to breach. I’m sure my own attitude did little to help. Looking back, that entire period of my life seems to have been characterized by a kind of bewildered belligerence. That after having been raised in a world of almost storybook privilege I’d chosen to toil as an associate at Callahan Ross, a firm notorious for their sweatshoplike treatment of new lawyers, was held to be further evidence of my eccentricity.
    It didn’t take me long to learn that John Guttman just chewed up associates. Irascible, unreasonable, and given to inexplicable fits of rage, he was nonetheless considered to be one of the best lawyers of his generation. Even so, no one wanted to work for him and no one who did work for him lasted very long. In a firm peopled almost exclusively by difficult, demanding men, John Guttman had managed to earn a reputation for being impossible.
    I don’t know what they were thinking when they assigned me to him. Perhaps they hoped that I’d cave in after his first tirade and run home clutching my debutante picture to my breast. Who knows? But I stuck it out for almost five years, finally earning my release in the form of an early partnership.
    It was a grueling apprenticeship, but one that I was grateful for. I’d cut my teeth with one of the most infamous tyrants of the law. After being on the receiving end of Guttman’s shit, there was nothing any other lawyer could dish out that I hadn’t tasted already. Nevertheless, walking down the corridor to his office I felt the old terror return.
    Arriving at his office, I found him on the phone, as usual, conducting business a few decibels shy of a shout.
    “Of course it’s an ambiguous question,” he bellowed, waving me into my old associate’s chair, “and I say we give him an ambiguous answer.” He made a face at me. It was either a grimace or a smile. “Yeah, we tell him to go fuck himself.”
    He was an unattractive man in his mid-fifties, beetle-browed with a thick brush of black hair going to gray. His desk was a long rosewood table turned sideways which he invariably kept bare except for the single file he was working on and a Baccarat vase, a gift from a client, that he kept filled with freshly sharpened yellow pencils. He hung up the phone and I reflexively jerked to attention.
    “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on with Danny Wohl?” demanded Guttman without preamble. Danny Wohl was Azor’s in-house counsel and there were several possible answers to this, none of which I cared to share with Guttman. “I’ve been trying to get him on the phone all morning,” he continued without waiting for an answer, “and nobody seems to know where he is.”
    “What do you need him for?” I asked with the caution born of experience. With Guttman everything was a crisis—closing a $400 million deal, making sure his dry cleaning got picked up—in his world it was all the same; there were no gradations of urgency.
    “Jim Cassidy called me this morning, very upset. He has some rather major concerns about this deal with Takisawa.” Jim Cassidy was one of my fellow