Dante's Poison (31 page)

Getting into Jane's penthouse was much easier the second time around. Apparently she had instructed her watchdog that he was to roll out the red carpet the next time I was in the neighborhood, and he greeted me with only a half-suppressed snicker. Also departing from custom, Jane was waiting for me at her door.

“Doctor, how splendid. I was wondering when you'd return.”

I leaned over the threshold and sniffed. “What? No evidence burning in the hearth today?”

She laughed. “What a suspicious mind you have. Come in,” she said, moving aside to clear a path for me. Once again I breathed in her unusual scent, musky like incense but tinged with some type of solvent.

I remembered the way to the sofa and helped myself to a seat. The silk made a sliding sound as I settled in. I laid my cane on the floor and followed her with my ears as she took the seat opposite me.

“That's quite good,” she remarked. “But I suppose you've learned to compensate.”

“For bad manners, certainly. I try my utmost to overlook them. Aren't you going to offer me a refreshment?”

“I'm afraid we'll have to dispense with the social niceties on this occasion. You caught me in the middle of preparing for a deposition.”

“For Atria?”

“Yes, they keep me very busy. But why don't we get on to why you're here. You look like a little boy just bursting at the seams with something to say.”

“We'll get to that. But first, let's go back to the hearsay rules and admissions against interest. I checked with a friend of mine, another lawyer. It's not an admission of anything if I lay out a possible scenario and you simply listen. I can't see you, so no one can ask me if you looked guilty, though I imagine you're a genius at the art of the poker face. If I'm wrong, you can just tell me, since denials don't count as admissions either.”

“I see you've done your homework. Proceed.”

“So here's one theory of what happened on the night your boyfriend died. He came to you with a story he was planning to write, one that would have implicated Atria in something illegal. Maybe he threatened to name you as a source. Or maybe he didn't have to threaten, because you gave the story to him. That's what your pals back at the State's Attorney's office would have supposed. According to them, you'd been feeding Gallagher confidential information for years.”

“My, my, you
have
been digging,” was her only reaction.

“Even a rumor to that effect would have shut down your practice in a heartbeat. You couldn't allow that to happen. So after you dumped a quart of wine over Gallagher's head you went back to your office to consider your options, and there, sitting on your IT person's desk, was the solution. You knew Gallagher was under orders to stay off the servers at the
Sun-Times
, so any drafts would be on his computer at home, and you had a key to his townhouse. With me so far? You can just nod your head.”

“Consider it done.”

“I'm guessing Gallagher was only days away from publishing, so you had to act quickly. You knew his habits—that he'd be hitting the bars for hours that night—which gave you just the window you needed. You went to Gallagher's home, erased his hard drive with the disc-wiping software and took whatever else you could find, and
voilà
—problem solved.”

I noted she hadn't denied anything so far. “Your only misfortune was that you were seen by our Mrs. Van Wagner while you were letting yourself in, and that someone else chose that exact night to slip Gallagher a Mickey Finn.” I stopped and let this sink in. “Unless of course it was you who poisoned him.”

“I prefer we stick to the first hypothesis.”

“All right. Assuming there was another murderer, what was the motive? Gallagher had been washed up for years. If it was some enemy from his past, why wait until now to kill him? The better bet is that somebody connected to Atria found out about the story and murdered him to keep him from breaking it. That would also explain the way it was done—hoisting Gallagher on his own petard, so to speak.”

“Clever. You're much better at this than I anticipated,” Jane said.

“So now, let's fast-forward to when Gallagher's body had been dug up and you were arrested. You knew—or at least suspected—that he was killed to keep Atria's secret from the authorities. But you couldn't send the police in that direction without revealing what the company was up to. As I understand them, the rules governing attorney-client privilege are pretty strict. You could have asked your client for permission to spill the beans, but why would Atria give it to you, especially if the cover-up is what got Gallagher killed? And if you went ahead and disclosed a client confidence, you would have lost your license. Have I accurately summed up the situation?”

“Almost,” Jane said, finally breaking her silence. “You've left out the most critical part: what I knew about Atria wouldn't have helped me defend the murder charge. It would only have given the police another motive—one, I might add, that was far more credible than the idea I killed Rory just to keep him from marrying that little tart. Under the circumstances, my best option was to keep the knowledge to myself.”

“Is that a concession or are we still speaking hypothetically?” I asked.

Jane sighed. “That depends. Why don't you first tell me what you think Rory stumbled onto.”

“Atria's been marketing drugs, Lucitrol prominent among them, for off-label use. It's clearly illegal, and the last company that got caught doing it was slapped with a billion-dollar fine. Not a bad reason for somebody at the company to want to bury him, and the story along with it. Again, assuming the murderer wasn't you.”

“And you have proof of this?”

“Enough to take to the authorities.”

Jane regarded me silently for a moment. “You're bluffing.”

“Maybe. How far are you willing to trust your luck?”

She got up then and went to stand by the window in apparent meditation. I wondered how much of it was an act.

“All right,” she said at long last. “I don't expect proving it will be as easy as you think. If Atria has followed my advice, any wrongdoing has long since ceased. But on the chance that you really do have something incriminating to share, I'll confide in you. It wasn't just that Rory threatened to name me as the source of his wretched news piece. I
was
the source.”

For the next hour, and over the pot of tea Jane insisted on making for us, she told me the story of her tangled relationship with Gallagher.

“I first met Rory when I was starting out at the State's Attorney's office. He was a few years older than I, a media star, and devilishly handsome. Of course, I knew right from the start that he was a liar and a cheat where women were concerned, but then most men are.”

I winced at this but couldn't disagree.

She continued: “But it didn't bother me because I wasn't looking for a commitment, or more significantly, marriage. I can't have children. There's a flaw in my makeup I'm not willing to pass on, and don't see any point in two adults promising themselves to each other for life unless they intend to raise a family. Besides, I always knew my true marriage would be to my career. It's the only thing that doesn't bore me. Rory fulfilled my physical needs and could be terribly amusing, and as the years went by, it was easier to stay involved with him than to go searching for partners in singles bars.

“A few months into our relationship were all it took to discover that his journalistic ethics were no more to be trusted than his steadfastness to me, which is to say that he bribed, paid for, or stole his way into every story he wrote. It put me on my guard, but not enough. In those days, I carried a lot of sensitive files home, long-term investigations I was working on at the State's Attorney's office or internal memoranda that would have made the headlines if they ever saw the light of day. One night, when Rory was sleeping over, I woke to find him reading through my papers, which he readily admitted he'd been doing for some time. I would have reported him, but as he explained to me, the damage was already done. By exposing him I would only have succeeded in exposing myself. At the time, I was still a mid-level assistant and hungry for advancement, so I let it slide on his promise it would never happen again.”

“But you continued to see him,” I pointed out, as I took a sip from a cup of her admittedly exquisite brew. It reminded me it was time for another of my pills. I opened the bottle without taking it from my pocket and downed the tablet as inconspicuously as I could.

“Yes. As I said, it was too much trouble to find another bedmate, and I was confident I could control the situation. Overconfident, as it turned out. He did it again, and at the worst possible moment. I suppose you've heard that I was in line to become First Assistant. Right around that time, we'd received complaints from several defense attorneys about prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence in violation of the discovery rules, and I was appointed to an internal task force charged with looking into the matter. One evening, just before the two of us were to go out, I left some notes on that table right in front of you while I was showering. Rory came early and let himself in and must have read what was there because the next thing I knew, the name of one of my colleagues was splashed across the front page of the
Sun-Times
.”

“Jimmy O'Hara,” I said.

Jane didn't seem surprised that I knew. “Yes, poor man. A decent lawyer who'd made a mistake but didn't deserve the public flaying he was subsequently forced to endure. Of course, everyone at the office assumed I was responsible for the story. Jimmy was also being considered for First Assistant, and they decided I'd leaked the information intentionally—to rid myself of a rival. It didn't occur to them that I would never have acted so stupidly. I told Rory we were over and left the State's Attorney's office to start my own practice, which as you can surmise has been highly successful.”

“And that was it between the two of you?” I asked.

“For a while. But it didn't take long for Rory to come crawling back to me, with renewed promises of reform.”

“You let him back into your bed?” I exclaimed in frank surprise.

“As I said, he was good company. But not here, not in my bed. Only at his place.”

“And you want me to believe you didn't hold a grudge?” I said.

“Believe what you like,” Jane said, sighing and shifting in her seat. “But it's true. My philosophy has always been to make the best of a bad situation. Rory had harmed me, but it wasn't worth losing sleep over, and I soon found the challenges—and rewards—of private practice to be at least as satisfying as my former position. I had no reason to risk them—or deprive myself of a serviceable sexual partner—by getting even with him.”

“Except that his filching from you didn't stop there.”

“Apparently not, though I'm still at a loss to explain how he got his hands on the report. Naturally, I changed the locks to this apartment after he was no longer welcome, and the security here is state of the art. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Some months back, while I was defending Atria in the Lucitrol lawsuit, I came across information suggesting the company might be doing what you said—marketing the drug for off-label purposes. It wasn't pertinent to the case I was handling, but I did what any responsible lawyer faced with possible illegal activity by a client would have done: I took it to Atria's general counsel. Given the potential liability you mentioned, he was obviously concerned and asked me to investigate, which I did over the course of several weeks, interviewing dozens of salesmen and reviewing all of the company's internal marketing materials. I prepared a draft report and sent it off to my client. You can draw your own conclusions about what it said.”

“And that's what Gallagher showed you when you were at Gene and Georgetti's that night?”

“Not showed me. He had the good sense to leave it at home. But he knew everything in it, and when I pressed him about how he'd gotten ahold of a copy, he wouldn't tell me. He merely laughed and said how much he was going to enjoy watching me fall from my high and mighty pedestal. I hadn't realized before just how vindictive he could be.”

“That doesn't mean he got the report from you.”

“True. But it didn't matter. Everyone would assume I'd either been careless or intentionally supplied him with the information, and I'd never be able to prove the contrary. My reputation would have been destroyed, and there almost certainly would have been bar proceedings. I couldn't risk that, so I had to act quickly.”

“So it was you at his house that night?” I said.

“You insult us both by having to ask that. The point is, you wouldn't be helping me at all by disclosing what you suspect. It would only make the case against me stronger.”