Fatal Reaction

earlier in the day. The detectives who’d been summoned searched his apartment and found a copy of the power of attorney I’d drawn up more than a year ago. However, it had taken some time to process the information and locate Stephen’s home address.
    We pressed for details, but there were only a few forthcoming. Apparently a building engineer had let himself in to the apartment to check a faulty thermostat and discovered the body. Immediately recognizing that Danny was dead he’d called 911. When we asked the officers how Danny had died they could give us only the official answer. In cases of an unattended death it was up to the medical examiner to determine the cause of death. An autopsy would have to be performed.
    While they were obviously reluctant to offer us anything more, they did manage to leave us with the distinct impression that Danny had died peacefully—his life claimed by something from the doctor’s lexicon of sudden death—an aneurysm or an embolism, perhaps. Later, after they had gone and the initial shock had worn off, we consoled ourselves with that.
    As an intern, Stephen had had a chance to see firsthand the prolonged agony of a death from AIDS. Patients in excruciating pain, robbed of their sight, their strength, their dignity... At least, we told each other, at least, whatever malady had claimed him, he’d been spared that.
     
    The next morning we were woken by the telephone. It was the woman from the management company shrilly demanding that Stephen come and see Danny’s apartment for himself. He was perplexed by her insistence, her refusal to discuss over the telephone something as simple as having an apartment cleaned. Compared to the enormity of Danny’s death, her concerns about getting the carpets cleaned seemed petty and ridiculous.
    Of course, now that we were actually in the apartment, it all made sense. Her anger as we first spoke in her office. The way she’d bitten off her syllables as she told us how they’d found his body. The almost savage way she’d twisted her passkey in the lock and pushed open the door to let us in, careful not to cross over the threshold herself.
    The last time I had been in Danny Wohl’s apartment it was an elegant place, festive with fresh flowers and lit with candles for a dinner party. Today it looked like a slaughterhouse. The living room was in shambles. The glass top of the coffee table had been tumbled off its props. Cushions, covered with ominous dark stains, had been torn from the couch and lay scattered across the floor. Blood was everywhere. The walls were covered with it, splashed in arcing, elliptical stains, or worse, smeared with frantic, sliding hand marks.
    I glanced over at Stephen to see how he was taking it. His leonine head was bent, his smoky eyes hooded, his face registering no emotion other than objective interest. It was all an act, of course. A trick he’d picked up in medical school. But I am a lawyer, not a doctor, and I was completely unequipped to deal with what I was seeing in Danny’s apartment. I tried closing my eyes, but it did not help. Even the smell of blood was overwhelming—cloying and feral. What on earth had happened here?
    Danny would have hated to see his place like this. He had loved his new apartment with its high ceilings and glorious views. An avid art collector, he’d recently been forced to move when his taste had turned to works larger than the Mapplethorpe photographs with which he’d begun his collection.
    Had the woman from the management company known that Danny had AIDS? I doubted it. So far Danny had done his best to keep his illness secret. All that blood and all of it HIV positive. I wondered who Stephen was going to find to clean it up.
    I tried to look away, but there were no safe vistas. Even the carpet, sticky under my feet, bore testimony to the violent drama that had been played out here. Mottled footprints started near the sofa and turned to drag marks where Danny must have fallen and then crawled through his own blood, trying desperately to reach the phone. He had died just a few feet short of his goal. A lake of blood marked the spot, so big that it still hadn’t had time to dry.
    A dark soot covered everything. At first I thought it was just the urban grit that drifts through every open window in the city, but the windows were shut tight. Then I realized it was the powder that the police had used to look for fingerprints. The dust scratched at my lungs while