Fatal Reaction

insured for a million bucks.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “Anything missing?”
    “I don’t think so,” I replied slowly. “As far as I can tell there’s no big empty space on the wall that catches my eye, but it’s so hard to tell. Danny liked to move things around, and besides, the stuff all looks the same to me.” Elliott put his hands in his pockets and rocked backward on his white sneakers, surveying the room. “That’s at least twenty grand’s worth of stereo equipment,” he said with a note of jealousy in his voice. “Bang & Olufsen CD player with tape-to-tape dubbing. It doesn’t look like whoever was here with him was interested in boosting anything. I guess we should have a look in the bedroom.”
    I led the way, relieved at the idea of a change of venue. “These are some interesting pictures,” observed Elliott after we arrived in the bedroom and he’d had a chance to look at the photographs.
    “Mapplethorpe is considered by a lot of people to be a great artist,” I replied, embarrassed nonetheless.
    Elliott sniffed and pulled open the bifold doors of Danny’s closet.
    “Wow!” I exclaimed. It was the male version of my mother’s closet. Danny had more shoes than Imelda Marcos, more ties than Countess Mara, not to mention sweaters in every shade, and shirts and jackets all arranged with Danny’s fanatical tidiness by color and style in a system of racks and drawers from one of those closet-organizing companies. On one side, suits hung from wooden hangers with military precision, ranging from dark to light. On the other side, the hangers had been pushed to one end and several garments had fallen to the floor.
    “It’s weird that everything’s shoved over to one side like this,” said Elliott, carefully examining the inside of the closet door.
    “Maybe that’s why whoever was with him cleaned himself up afterward. Even if he didn’t come to steal the stereo, he might have come looking for something else.”
    Elliott stepped into the closet and felt all along the back wall and then got down on his hands and knees, picking up racks of shoes to examine the carpeting underneath.
    “What are you looking for?”
    “A safe or some other kind of hiding place,” he said, his voice muffled from kneeling.
    While I waited for him to complete his search I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered what it would be like to go to bed looking at pictures of naked men in various S & M poses every night. Then again, I could never come home to some of the abstract paintings in the living room either.
    “I can’t find anything,” reported Elliott, getting back up onto his feet with a small grunt. “Just clothes.”
    “Maybe that’s what he was looking for,” I replied slowly.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean maybe he was just looking for something to wear. Think about it. Do you think the only thing that got bloody was the person’s shoes? I bet whoever was with him must have gotten blood all over himself. He couldn’t just walk out the door and onto the street that way. I bet you he just took off what he was wearing and put on something of Danny’s.”
    “So what happened to the clothes that he was wearing?”
    “Thrown away, burned, dropped from the Wacker Street Bridge....”
    “I’ll still have my people go through' the garbage dumpster in the off chance that whoever was with him was stupid—or lazy,” Elliott said. “Let’s take a look at the kitchen.”
    As we walked through the living room I realized that familiarity was beginning to inure me to its horrors. The puzzle of it, the unanswered questions of what had happened, was taking over. The lawyer’s instinctive response— head over heart.
    The kitchen, like everything else in the apartment, was exactly as it had been when I was there with Stephen. But now that the shock of seeing it had subsided, I found myself seeing it in much sharper focus—thinking about it instead of just letting it assault me.
    “I wonder why he used this sink to wash up,” I said.
    “You’d think it would have just been easier to step into the shower.”
    “Maybe he was cleaning off something besides himself.”
    “Maybe, or maybe in the heat of the moment he didn’t think of it.”
    From the front of the apartment I heard the chime of the doorbell. “That’ll be my guys,” explained Elliott.
    While he went to let them in I stayed in the kitchen. From the other room I could hear Elliott as he instructed his operatives on their