Fatal Reaction

get first priority from the cops—investigating the death of a gay lawyer who was going to die of AIDS anyway or gathering enough evidence to convict the serial killer of the century?”
     
    Back at my office I asked Cheryl to bring us both a cup of coffee and shut the door behind her. There was no question about what I was going to do. Even if Guttman was wrong about what was at stake there was really no way I could say no to Stephen. Personal considerations aside, we are talking about a man who once recruited an entire twelve-man lab from NIH and moved them to Chicago over a three-day weekend. Any reservations I might have had about taking a leave of absence from Callahan Ross were sure to be quickly overridden.
    Even so I had my misgivings. I was currently billing close to 260 hours a month, a crushing load even by this firm’s macho standards, and unlike most of my partners who surrounded themselves with a cadre of ambitious associates, I preferred to work alone. It helped that I was blessed with a secretary who was smart enough to do much of the routine work I would normally shunt off to a first-year associate. For more complex legal legerdemain I relied on a brilliant lawyer named Sherman Whitehead who’d joined the firm the same year I did. Sherman was a nerd-savant whose complete lack of interpersonal skills guaranteed that he would never achieve partnership— much less meet a client. However, he was a nimble legal thinker and realistic enough about his fate to not spend all his time jockeying for my attention or approval. Until today Cheryl and Sherman had been enough.
    But the real problem was even bigger than that. What I really needed was not more help but less work. In the years immediately following Russell’s death I’d found a haven from my grief at the office. The work anesthetized me and in consequence I’d piled it on greedily. Besides, I’d had things to prove. Now I wanted something else. I wanted a life. I wanted to read novels and go to the movies. I wanted to stop giving dictation in my sleep and to carve out some small corner of the week that had nothing to do with the law, or business, or my obligations to the firm that had somehow managed to invade the very fabric of my life. Recently I’d made some efforts to cut back on my workload. I’d started playing squash again and was volunteering a couple of times a month at the free legal clinic in my neighborhood. Now this.
    Not surprisingly, my secretary greeted the news of my new responsibilities with well-considered trepidation. If, as Guttman had suggested, I was indeed on the high wire, then it was Cheryl who was standing at ground zero holding the net. There was no getting around the symbiosis inherent in our situations. When I was overwhelmed, so was Cheryl—and at about a quarter of my salary at that. And even though we didn’t talk about it, we both worried what effect the additional pressure would have on her at night while she was enrolled in law school at Loyola. Six courses shy of graduation, the day was rapidly approaching when I would lose her. I viewed the prospect roughly the same way I would the pending amputation of a limb.
    Cheryl was smart. She was funny. Loyal as a soldier, she compensated for my shortcomings, lied to cover my ass, and put up with my mother. While I pretended to be above office politics, she resolutely kept her ear to the watercooler and watched my back for me.
    For the remainder of the day, between meetings and telephone calls, Cheryl and I barricaded ourselves in my office going through my files like a pair of triage nurses at the scene of an accident. Those too volatile or complex to survive a change in counsel went onto the stack of files that I would attempt to juggle on top of my duties at Azor. Matters that could be routinely moved ahead by associates went into another. The rest would, with a wink and a prayer, be allowed to lie dormant until either the ' deal between Azor and Takisawa had been hammered out—or it blew up in my face.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    The telephone woke me from the darkness. Numbly I groped for the receiver as research abstracts and financial projections slid off the bed and onto the floor, scattering dust bunnies silently through the darkness. I struggled to focus on the glowing digits of the clock radio. It was five o’clock in the morning.
    “Hello,” I croaked. As a rule I try to avoid all human contact until after seven o’clock and at least two cups of