Bitter Business (14 page)

I didn’t hear from Dagny until lunchtime and then it was only to remind me about Cecilia Dobson’s funeral, which I had already forgotten about completely.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t mind swinging by the plant and picking me up,” Dagny ventured. “That way I’d have an excuse for not going with my father or Philip. They’re both insane about the article in the
Journal
this morning and I’m frankly sick of hearing about it.”

“I’d be happy to. What time do you want me to be there?”

“I’ll wait for you in front of the building at three-thirty,” said Dagny. “You won’t even have to get out of the car.”

I asked Cheryl to hold my calls and I shut the door. I kicked off my shoes, dragged my disc player out from my bottom drawer, and pulled a CD from the pile—The Smiths, as it turned out. Cranking up the volume, I happily immersed myself in the Frostman Refrigeration file—a dull-as-dishwater corporate restructuring, blessedly devoid of any and all family entanglements.

When it was time to leave and pick Dagny up, I’d gotten the Frostman memo and a full third of the other tasks off my most urgent to-do pile. So it was with a much lighter heart than at any other time in that horror show of a week that I set off to Cecilia Dobson’s funeral.

As I drove south on State Street, with its odd assortment of auto parts stores and wig emporiums, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I really needed to get rid of my old Volvo and buy a new car. Russell and I had picked out the station wagon, a wedding present to ourselves that we planned on filling up with dogs and kids. For a long time after his death it really was sentiment that made me hang on to it. Recently, I realized, it was more like entropy.

I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d had it washed. The man in the parking garage in my building offers—no, I take that back—begs me to let him wash it. But I’ve let it go for so long that I’m almost afraid of what I’ll see once all the layers of urban grime are rinsed away. Besides, if he washed the outside, then I’d have to do something about the interior, too.

I glanced over my shoulder at the backseat. I saw old newspapers, a dirty blanket, a crumpled bag from Harold’s Fried Chicken, and so many empty Diet Coke cans that every time I hit a pothole I heard a tinny clang. If a car could have mice, I concluded, mine would.

I pulled into the Superior Plating lot, grateful for being a few minutes early. The lot was almost completely empty and I remembered what Dagny had said about closing early in order to let employees attend the funeral. I spent the next few minutes frantically cleaning up the worst of the mess in my car, including some McDonald’s wrappers of uncertain provenance and more empty bags of M&M’s than I’d like to confess to. That done, I checked the front door, but there was no sign of Dagny.

She had said that the cemetery was close to the plant, so I waited a few more minutes, growing increasingly uncertain. Perhaps I’d gotten the time wrong or misunderstood her directions about where to meet. There was a reason, I realized, that I usually left these kinds of arrangements to Cheryl. I picked up my car phone—a concession to the firm’s obsession with having partners constantly available—and dialed the Superior Plating number, but got their after-hours recording.

Finally, not knowing what else to do, I got out of my car and went into the building to look for Dagny. The front door was open, but the reception desk was empty. I made my way through the deserted administrative wing toward Dagny’s office, passing no one. The door was closed. I knocked.

“Dagny?” I called.

There was no answer.

Afraid that I’d hopelessly screwed up, I turned the handle and pushed the door open. I could not believe what I saw.

Dagny Cavanaugh lay on the floor of her office— facedown.

11

For a minute, maybe longer, I just stood there. It was all too much to absorb. Dagny Cavanaugh sprawled facedown on the carpet. Just like Cecilia Dobson.

Then she moved.

Her arms and legs jerked as if she were a rag doll being shaken by some invisible hand. Suddenly her limbs twitched in an uncoordinated spasm. Then, just as suddenly, they were still.

Relief flooded through me. At least she was alive.

I ran to her side, dropped to my knees, and rolled her onto her back, calling her name. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t look all that bad. Her cheeks were pink. Her skin was warm. There were flecks of white foam on her lips and her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably. I checked her throat for a pulse and found none. I watched her chest and put my hand above her mouth—but no air moved and as I put my face near hers the unmistakably sour smell of vomit mingled with her perfume.

I shouted for help, but knew that no one would hear me. They’d all gone to the funeral. I willed myself to be calm. I had to call 911 before I began CPR.

Suddenly Dagny’s arms shot out and she clutched me in an iron grip. Startled, I cried out. My heart was beating wildly. I looked at Dagny. Her face was convulsed in terrible pain, her mouth moving as if she were trying to speak. I bent closer in order to hear her.

Without warning, her back arched up off the floor as if her body were being electrified by some internal agony. Her head jerked up violently, hitting mine and knocking me back onto my heels. From her mouth came a hideous, wordless roar that seemed to rise up out of her throat from some primitive source. It was a sound I shall never forget—a rasping, whooping cry like a rusty door being pulled from its hinges, like a desperately wounded animal giving voice to unspeakable torment.

And then she fell silent, her body completely slack. Frantically, I bent over her and called her name. Her eyes were open but vacant. In them I searched desperately for some glimmer of the woman whom the night before I’d rejoiced in as a friend. Instead, all I saw was the face of a corpse. Blue eyes fixed under half lids in an expression of vague wonder, like a flustered schoolchild to whom the logic of a simple equation has just been revealed. It was the same look of sudden, silent comprehension that I had last seen on the face of Cecilia Dobson.

I watched it all like a movie I had seen before—the tube down the throat, the IV drip, the same futile search for pulse, reflexes, respiration. I stood out of the way, an onlooker on these last pointless efforts. Sweat was pouring off my face and the thin silk of my blouse was as cold and wet as if I’d been caught in the rain.

This time I did not go to the hospital. Despite their best efforts to convince me that I really should have a doctor look at the bump on my head, I explained as calmly and as firmly as I could that I would just stay right where I was and wait for the police.

A pair of uniformed officers arrived just as they finished shoveling Dagny onto the gurney. They listened attentively as I explained about finding Cecilia Dobson dead in the same way in the same place three days before. I told them about all of the other employees being at St. Bernadette’s Cemetery for the funeral. With a shiver I acknowledged that that was where they’d find Dagny’s family.

When I finished, one of the officers got on the radio while the other began stringing yellow police-line-do-not-cross tape across the doors. I found a folding chair that someone had left in the hallway outside Dagny’s door and sat down on it. At some point I began shaking as if from some terrible cold. The officers who had taken my statement had disappeared, but other people began arriving—a police photographer, a man in overalls carrying heavy-equipment boxes marked cook county crime lab—and from the waiting room came the faint crackle of two-way radios.

I heard Eugene Cavanaugh before I saw him. Bellowing unintelligibly, he charged toward Dagny’s office, oblivious to the scrum of blue uniforms attempting to restrain him. His face was terrible to see—almost disfigured by anguish and disbelief. I saw him and could think only of the little boy who’d lost his mother and his power of speech; his brother and control over his life; and had struggled so hard both times to regain what had been lost.

Finally, the cops managed to turn the tide of his progress and led him back down the hall toward the reception room. For a long time after that I heard him through the thin plastic paneling.

“Oh my God, not Dagny!” he wailed over and over again.

When I met Detective Joe Blades for the first time at the hospital after Cecilia Dobson died, I hadn’t really paid him much attention. But this time I found myself observing him much more closely. Suddenly he was a man from whom I expected a great deal.

At first glance he looked almost too young to be a policeman, and certainly a homicide cop. Tall and thin, he had a reddish-gold beard and a quiet, almost scholarly manner. He pulled up a chair from behind another desk, turned it around, and sat on it so that his hands rested along the top of its back. Without saying a word, he fished for something in the pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled out a Hershey bar.

“You’d better eat this,” he said. His voice was cultured and deliberate.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I know. But it’ll still do you good. You’ve had a shock. In the bad old days I would have given you whiskey.”

I took the candy bar, but would no doubt have preferred the whiskey. My hands were shaking so badly that it took me a few seconds to get the chocolate out of its wrapper. Self-consciously, I ate the whole thing. Even under the most appalling circumstances, I find chocolate impossible to resist.

Blades took off his gold-framed glasses and began to polish them slowly with the fat end of his tie. Without them he looked even younger, a high-school kid who’d somehow managed to produce a beard.

“What happened to your forehead?” he asked. “I should have one of the EMTs come back and have a look at you.”

With trembling hands I reached up and touched my face. Slippery with sweat and blood, the lump in the middle of my forehead was definitely getting bigger. I winced at my own touch.

“Her head hit me....” I stammered in explanation. “She had this seizure... at least I think that’s what it was. Her body arched up and I remember falling backward....”

“Why don’t you just take it from the beginning and tell me what happened here today,” he suggested, pulling a small notebook from the pocket of his jacket.

I tried to begin, but I could not organize my thoughts. Events were jumbled with emotion and my body and my brain were seemingly disconnected. In frustration, I forced myself to imagine that I was standing in one of the big lecture halls in law school, having been called upon to recite the facts of a case. It worked. Focusing on the main points, laying out events in a clear voice, I managed a semicoherent account of what had happened—the story of two apparently healthy women who died suddenly in the same office, one during the funeral of the other. By the time I was finished, Joe Blades looked grim.

I had felt something turn inside of me as well. The sweating had stopped. So had the shaking. The panic, the shock of what had happened, had receded. But in its place was something else, something that gripped me by the entrails and would not let go. Clear and pure, unadulterated by ambiguity, unmitigated by circumstance, what I felt was anger. What I wanted was revenge.

According to Elliott Abelman, the Monadnock Building is the perfect place for a private investigator’s office—halfway between the courthouse and the jail. Nonetheless, the building is a strange landmark. Sixteen stories tall and occupying an entire city block, it was built by John Root in 1891 as the tallest structure ever erected using wall-bearing masonry construction. At its foundation the walls are six feet thick. But less than a dozen years after its completion the technique of steel-frame construction was introduced and the sky was opened up to architects. John Root’s accomplishment had become obsolete.

Like the building, Elliott Abelman defied easy categorization. The son of a Chicago homicide cop, Elliott had broken with tradition. Decorated for valor during the last, ignominious days of the Vietnam War, he chose law school over law enforcement, only to find after a stint in the prosecutor’s office that like his father, he was really an investigator at heart.

The lobby of the Monadnock is long and narrow, a gallery with shops on either side. An iron staircase of ornately wrought metalwork runs up the center of the building like a knobby Victorian spinal column. Consulting the computer screen that serves as the building’s directory, I learned that Abelman & Associates occupied a suite on the second floor. I decided to take the stairs.

It was after hours and the hallways in the upper floors were dark. But the door to Abelman & Associates was made of smoked glass set in an oak frame with the name of the firm lettered onto it, and light shone from within.

The cozy waiting room was deserted, the armchairs unoccupied, the magazines unread, but beyond another door I could hear the clack of keyboards and the ringing of phones.

Someone came up behind me and took my arm. I jumped in fright. I might have shouted, too. Who knows? At that point my nerves were all over the place. I wheeled around and Elliott put his hand gently over my mouth.

“Shhh,” he said, his face illumined by an enormous, wolfish grin. “You’ll frighten the detectives.” He caught sight of the bump on my forehead and turned serious. “Jesus Christ, what’s happened to your face? Did someone hit you? You look like you’ve had a beating.”