Fatal Reaction

head in warning. “Don’t,” I said, meaning it. I looked at him across the table and wished I didn’t want to sleep with him so badly. I was just being a spoiled little rich girl, I scolded myself, wanting what she knew she shouldn’t have.
    The waiter came and we ordered steaks for both of us and a very nice cabernet to wash it down with. Like many clubs, the wine cellar at the Union League was generally much more reliable than the kitchen.
    “So,” ventured Elliott. “Tell me about this guy Galloway. Do you think he’s our bad guy?”
    “How can he be?” I countered. “We both saw the tape. He left the apartment just like he said.”
    “He could have come back in another way, maybe from the garage.”
    “For that matter so could the guy we’re looking for.”
    “Tell me about Galloway anyway.”
    “Well, up until this morning I’d have told you he was a star. You know the type—top of the class without breaking a sweat, good-looking, socially poised. The kind of charmed young lawyer who comes along every couple of years and makes it all look easy. He’s popular with his peers, the partners are falling all over themselves to help his career, and the secretaries are all in love with him.”
    “Good lawyer?”
    “Whatever else he may be Tom Galloway is a crack litigator. He’s equally good in a courtroom or a settlement conference. He made a splash with a couple of big wins with very complicated cases in front of a jury. That’s why I recommended him to Azor for the lawsuit involving Azor’s new antischizophrenia drug.”
    “Is that how he and Danny met?”
    “Apparently.”
    “Now that you know about the two of them what’s your opinion of Galloway?”
    “Beneath contempt pretty much sums it up.”
    “Because he’s secretly gay?” Elliott inquired.
    “No, because he’s a liar,” I replied. “I don’t think I’d feel any differently if he’d been sleeping with his secretary. Come to think of it, as far as I know he could be sleeping with her, too. When a man is not who he says he is then he could be anybody. It opens up whole vistas of deception.”
    Elliott laughed.
    “What is so funny?” I demanded.
    “You know what you sound like?”
    “No. What?”
    “A partner in a large and prestigious corporate law firm.”
    “Your point?”
    “You realize that your reaction is exactly what he’s afraid of, especially since you say he’s up for partnership soon. That kind of fear is a powerful motive.”
    “Motive for what?” I countered. “Danny died of natural causes. Joe’s right, no matter what we find out about what happened in that apartment it’s not going to turn out to be legally actionable.”
    “Then you tell me,” replied Elliott, “why are we doing this?”
    I thought for a minute. The answer I came up with surprised me.
    “Because Stephen is a scientist,” I said.
    “Meaning?”
    “Before I started working at Azor I don’t think I could have told you what that meant. I had always assumed that being a scientist was just another kind of job, like being a teacher or an airline pilot. But on some level being a scientist means operating in the world in an entirely different way. A scientist is someone who embraces a much more rigorous and demanding view of the world. Scientists can’t just accept that something happens. They spend their lives relentlessly asking why things happen. They are driven to know, to explain, to understand what makes things work.” I thought about Michelle Goodwin’s tearful flight from her lab when her crystals failed to diffract. “I never realized it before, but their obsession with finding out can be a terrible thing. With Stephen it’s more than just wanting to know what happened to Danny. I don’t think he has any choice. He won’t be able to stop asking questions until he does know.”
    “What about you?” asked Elliott. “Do you care about what happened to Danny?”
    “Of course, I care,” I replied. “Of course, I’m curious. But I’m a lawyer. Intellectually I live in the gray spaces, somewhere where there are shades of meaning. I want to know what happened to Danny, but on some level I can accept that I might never know what happened in that apartment that day. Stephen can’t.”
    The waiter appeared with salads and refilled our glasses.
    “I found out who called Danny the day he died,” I continued once the waiter had retreated out of earshot. “Who?” '
    “Michael Childress. He’s a