Fatal Reaction

offered, only half joking.
    “I was actually thinking about your parents’ house. You have to admit it would be perfect. Old man Takisawa would love the idea that he could go home and tell all his rich old friends he’d been entertained in Astrid Millholland’s house.”
    “You know my mother,” I replied dubiously. “She’s perfectly capable of snubbing people she’s known for years. I can’t even begin to imagine how she’d feel about a bunch of strange Japanese businessmen in her house.”
    “She wouldn’t even have to be there. We could have the whole thing catered.”
    “I don’t know....” I ventured uncertainly.
    “It can’t hurt to ask.”
    I thought to myself that it very well might.
    “Well, what do you think?” pressed Stephen. “Do you think there’s a chance she’ll say yes?”
    “Oh, I’m sure I can get her to say yes,” I replied weakly. “It’s the concessions she’s going to wring out of me in exchange that have me worried.”
     
    I went back to Danny’s office and started pulling out his file on Takisawa. While I was at it I grabbed the ones on Okuda, too. The previous year Azor had been involved in an aborted courtship with the Okuda Corporation. For months Danny had pursued the possibility of a joint venture with that Japanese drugmaker in the hopes of financing the development of an HIV integrase inhibitor that would block the ability of the HTV virus to take over healthy cells. Unfortunately, right before the deal was signed, Merck published findings putting them ahead in the race to develop the drug and Okuda hastily bowed out. But not before they’d come to pay a four-day visit to Chicago to tour Azor’s labs.
    I was hoping to free ride on Danny’s experience with Okuda and I was not disappointed. Orderly to a fault, Danny had saved everything, from his correspondence with the general manager of the Hotel Nikko, the city’s premier Japanese-owned hotel, to a detailed itinerary setting out every aspect of Okuda’s visit. Stephen was wrong about it being like planning a state visit; after I read through the file I realized it was more like organizing the invasion of a foreign country. Meals, gifts, the logistics for dozens of people, all planned to the minute... I had no time for this.
     
    As soon as I got back to my office I asked Cheryl to get my mother on the phone so that I could set up a lunch date. Cheryl looked at me, stood up, calmly walked over to my side of the desk, and put her hand on my forehead.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.
    “I’m just checking to see if you have a fever. It’s the only logical explanation.”
    “Oh, come on, I can invite my own mother to lunch, can’t I?”
    “You can do anything you want,” replied Cheryl with great deliberation, “but do you realize how many times in the years I have worked for you that you have made me lie to your mother so that you didn’t have to even talk to her on the phone? Do you know how often I have had to beg you to return her calls? Let me remind you that last year you deliberately scheduled the Cranfield Tire deposition in L.A. for the week of her birthday so that you could get out of going to her party. So it seems only natural to assume that there’s some physiological reason for this aberrant behavior.”
    “I need to ask her a favor,” I said sheepishly.
    “That’s kind of what I figured,” replied Cheryl, grinning as she returned to her desk.
    If anything, Mother greeted my invitation with even more suspicion than Cheryl, but curiosity won out and she agreed to meet me for lunch at the Four Seasons the following day. I had just hung up the phone when Tom Galloway appeared at my door. His look of roughened grief made me feel ashamed of myself. Cheryl said that according to the secretarial grapevine it was his brother who had died. One look at his face and I found myself wondering whether it might have been his twin.
    Tom was one of the firm’s up-and-coming stars, a talented litigator who’d had the good sense to marry into a well-connected political family—his wife’s father was a U.S. senator, her uncle an appeals court judge. It was widely rumored that Tom would seek his father-in-law’s senate seat when he decided to step down.
    “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, shaking his hand. He was tall—enough so I looked him in the eye—and had jet black hair and the fair skin of an Irishman. The same good looks that made him a favorite with