Fatal Reaction

suddenly, grinning and unrepentant.
    “Whatcha lookin’ for?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest.
    “Clues,” he said with a big grin.
    “So what have you found?”
    “Packets of soy sauce, take-out menus, breath mints, rubber bands, and four bottles of Maalox. Looks like Stephen must be a rough boss to work for.”
    “That’s not it. Lots of the drugs Danny was taking were hard on his stomach.”
    “What was he taking?”
    “You’d have to ask his doctor,” I said, sliding into the visitor’s chair, “but as far as I know he was on the ‘Crixivan cocktail.’ That’s a combination of Crixivan, AZT, and 3TC taken on a very rigid schedule—three times a day with no food for an hour before and two hours after, ft works out to something like twenty-two pills a day.”
    “And this was to get rid of his AIDS?”
    “The drugs can’t get rid of the AIDS. They just keep it from making more virus.”
    Elliott reached beneath the desk and pulled out Danny’s briefcase. “Your friend Stephen asked me to bring this down to you. He said Danny took it with him on the trip toJapan.”
    “Oh, good. It has all of Danny’s notes in it. I’ve got to go through them.”
    “Notes about what?”
    “The negotiations he and Stephen were having with the Takisawa Corporation.”
    “Was that part of Danny’s job as in-house counsel?”
    “They had to call him something so that was his title but he really did just about everything. In addition to overseeing the company’s legal affairs, he negotiated transactions, managed the financial side of the company, handled shareholder relations...
    “So what’s the impact of his death going to be on the company?”
    “It’s never good to lose key personnel for any reason.”
    “What about the deal he was working on? Could someone have been trying to sabotage the negotiations?” I made a face. “You need to stop seeing so many movies,” I replied. “Besides, if a competitor wanted to torpedo the ZK-501 project they’d go after one of the key scientists, Lou Remminger or Michael Childress. They wouldn’t kill Danny.”
    “What about his personal life?”
    “What about it?”
    “Could he have been involved with anyone from the office?”
    “I don’t know,” I replied, thinking about the homely assemblage at the ZK-501 meeting. “I don’t think so.”
    “Do you know if he was seeing anyone regularly, somebody from outside the office?”
    “Danny was always pretty vague when he talked about how he’d spent the weekend. I mean, he did a lot of great stuff—went to the theater, parties-—but it was always with ‘friends.’ ”
    “And you never got the sense that he was part of a couple, that there was someone special.”
    I shook my head slowly.
    “You’re sure he never mentioned anyone?”
    I thought for a moment.
    “Oh god!” I exclaimed suddenly. “There was someone once, but it was hardly the love of his life. This was a few years ago when we were doing the IPO, taking the company public.”
    “I know what an IPO is.”
    “Well, then you know what an intensely miserable chunk of work it is, all the regulations, all the filings. We were on an all-night jag at the legal printers, punch-drunk from lack of sleep and waiting to go over the proofs. I said something about wanting to get home to my own bed and Danny said something about being perfectly happy right where he was because nobody could find him. When I asked him about it, he told me he’d just started dating someone, but it turned out he was a psycho killer.”
    “Literally?”
    “No, I don’t think he meant it literally,” I replied, thinking that we all had a bit too much of Stanley Sarrek and his freezer on the brain. “But he told me some of the things the guy did.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like leaving creepy messages on his answering machine. Following him. I guess right before Danny and I had had this conversation this guy talked the janitor of fanny’s building into letting him into Danny’s apartment. Danny came home late from work one night and found him sitting there in the living room with all these Candles burning. When I asked Danny how he managed to get rid of him, he said he grabbed the guy’s wallet, dropped it out the window, and then after the guy ran downstairs to get it, Danny says he locked the doors and called the police.”
    “And when did all this happen?”
    “We finished the IPO three years ago last October, so it must have been somewhere