Fatal Reaction

missed the worst of the morning rush hour. My first day Working in Oak Brook and already I was developing a commuter’s obsession with traffic.
    While Danny was in Japan and in the days following his death, a small tide of work had washed up on his desk. Besides the scores of phone messages from people I’d never heard of concerning matters that were completely unknown to me, there were dozens of faxes from Takisawa, some received as recently as that morning, all requesting information in preparation for their upcoming visit. Scanning them, I could see there was nothing Takisawa didn’t want to know about the ZK-501 project in particular and Azor Pharmaceuticals in general. Even taking into account the well-known appetite of the Japanese for detail, their inquiries struck me as excessive. Budgets, both actual and projected, personnel records, and depreciated equipment costs were all respectfully requested as a prelude to further discussions.
    Putting the faxes in my briefcase to take back to Callahan Ross with me, I turned my attention to the mail, which was stacked a foot high. Flipping through the junk mail and the routine correspondence I came upon a certified letter that had been received and signed for in Danny’s absence. I scrabbled in the top drawer of the desk looking for a letter opener and, with a growing sense of dread, slit it open. One look at the contents confirmed my worst fears.
    It was another lawsuit.
    Azor Pharmaceuticals was currently defending itself against a suit involving its newest drug offering, a compound used in the treatment of schizophrenia. Serezine, tortuous to develop and expensive to produce, had been a controversial drug from the first. Azor had taken its hits in the press when it was announced that a year’s treatment with Serezine would cost $10 thousand. Despite the fact that this was only a fraction of what it cost to institutionalize these patients, the media had fed on stories of greedy drug companies for weeks.
    Six months after the drug was first made available, Azor was served with a lawsuit, filed in Texas by plaintiffs alleging that the drug had improved the condition of a previously institutionalized nineteen-year-old man to the point where he could be returned home to his family. Unfortunately, once there, he proceeded to murder both his parents and a furnace repairman who had the bad luck to be in the house at the time. Although it appeared that the patient had stopped taking the drug soon after his discharge from the hospital, Azor had nonetheless already racked up close to $100 thousand in legal fees defending itself.
    As I read through the complaint in my hand my stomach churned. The family of an East Lansing woman was bringing suit alleging that she had become so despondent while taking Serezine that she killed her three-day-old infant, then took her own life. Feeling sick, I dialed Stephen’s extension only to have Rachel tell me smugly that Stephen was in a meeting with the Hemasyn clinical trial group and had left explicit instructions not to be interrupted. Nothing I said was able to sway her, so I hung up the phone and called Callahan Ross to speak to Tom Galloway.
    Tom was the litigator at the firm who was preparing the Texas suit for trial. While Tom and, more important, Azor’s insurer were both convinced the first suit was baseless, the existence of a second suit could under no circumstances be construed as good news. When I got Tom’s secretary on the line she explained that Tom was out of the office for a few days due to a death in the family.
    “Just my luck,” I thought to myself callously as I slammed the receiver into the cradle. Now I had another crisis that was mine to deal with because someone else had inconveniently dropped dead.
     
    * * *
     
    I arrived back downtown in a foul temper without having managed to speak to Stephen and with the news of the second Serezine lawsuit nagging at me like a sore tooth. As soon as I got in I had to spend a couple of hours putting out fires in the Nuland Petroleum deal. After that I devoted the rest of the day to a series of thirty-minute meetings with the various associates to whom I was delegating my routine cases. It was nearly four o’clock before I finally found myself with five free minutes for the corned beef sandwich that my secretary had brought me as either a very late lunch or an early dinner. I had managed to wolf down half of it when Cheryl buzzed to say that Elliott Abelman was in