Bitter Business (22 page)

To my utter astonishment, they all got up and left, including Jack Cavanaugh, who said not one further word to me the rest of the time I was down in Georgia.

I was snapping the catches shut on my briefcase, silently berating myself for that afternoon’s debacle. I didn’t know what Daniel Babbage would have done to avert the total meltdown of the Cavanaugh family, but I was pretty sure he would have done something. After five years of practicing in one of Chicago’s most high-powered law firms, I thought I’d begun to acquire a certain confidence in my own abilities. A little less than a week’s acquaintance with the Cavanaughs had eroded it badly. I found myself wondering, once again, what had prompted Daniel to choose me for the Superior Plating file.

Dagny’s daughter, Claire, slipped into the room, quiet as a ghost.

“Jules is going to do the Mount McKinley climb with us this spring,” she said without preamble from the doorway. “He was Mom’s climbing partner. I think they used to sleep together. What do you think?”

“I think you should definitely climb Mount McKinley,” I replied, not knowing which question she meant and choosing the safer one. “Nothing would please your mother more than the thought of you standing at the summit. She’d be happy to know that you’d managed to get up to the top without her.”

“It’s so hard to believe she’s gone. I keep pretending that she’s just gone away for a few weeks, like the times she’d go climbing in the Alps with Jules. I don’t think that I can face the thought of her not coming back. I can’t believe she’d do this to me.”

“She didn’t do this.”

“I know, but who did? Nobody will tell me anything. They just keep on patting me on the head and telling me that my mother would want me to be strong. My mother would want to be alive, dammit. What happened to her?”

“Don’t worry. We’re going to find out.”

“Now you’re patronizing me, too!”

“No, I’m not. I’m just telling you what I’ve been telling myself. I know it’s frustrating, but I promise you we’ll find out what happened to your mother.”

“How? By sitting back and waiting for the police to do their job like Uncle Philip says, or should we follow Aunt Vy and Uncle Eugene’s example and just pray for enlightenment?”

“I don’t know whether I’m supposed to tell you this, but your grandfather has hired a private detective to help the police. I know him and he’s good. Believe me, in the end we’ll find out how she died.”

“Then what was the big fight about with all the adults? And don’t tell me nothing. I just got off the phone with Peter and he says that his mother’s storming around the house screaming and throwing things into suitcases. They were supposed to stay down here until Tuesday, but now they’re leaving in the morning. When I walked past Sally and Philip’s house on the way over here, I heard them arguing. Does all this have something to do with Mom dying?”

“Yes and no. Do you know what’s going on with your Aunt Lydia and her shares?”

“No. Mom never said anything about it.”

“Well, now that you’re a shareholder, I think you need to know.”

As simply as I could, I filled her in on Lydia wanting to sell her shares in Superior Plating.

“Grandpa says I have to go and see some lawyer back in Chicago when I get back on Monday. Is that what it’s about?”

“I don’t think so. You’re probably going to see one of my partners by the name of Ken Kurlander. He’s the lawyer who prepared your mother’s will. I’m sure he wants to explain the arrangements she made for you.”

“As long as I get to live with Aunt Vy and Uncle Eugene, I don’t care about the rest. According to my mom, I inherited enough money for college when my dad died. I don’t want anything to do with Grandpa’s stupid company. All it does is start fights and cause trouble. You can’t believe the stuff that goes on—just one big fight after another. It’s so immature. It’s like a bunch of little kids who can’t share. Sometimes I feel like I must have been adopted. I mean, the way they act, it’s just so
stupid."

You don’t get problems this big when people are stupid,” I replied sadly. “You get these kinds of problems when intelligent people decide to use their skills against ; each other.”

18

When I got off the plane in Chicago I was surprised to find Elliott Abelman waiting for me at the gate.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as he took my heavy trial bag out of my hand and fell into step beside me. “I have something I wanted to tell you.”

“How did you know when I’d be here? Who told you what plane I was taking?”

Elliott flashed me a major-league smile. “I’m a detective, Kate. I find things out for a living.”

“So what did you find out that you had to come out to the airport to tell me?” I asked.

“The medical examiner just ruled on a cause of death for Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh.”

“And?” I demanded.

“It turns out both women died of cyanide poisoning.”

“What?” I cried, my feet slowing involuntarily to a stop. Harried airline passengers, eager for their luggage, streamed past us down the concourse. “How can that be possible? If it was cyanide, how did they miss it when they autopsied Cecilia Dobson?”

“They just didn’t look for it. According to what Joe tells me, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office doesn’t routinely test for cyanide. It’s too expensive to test every case. Usually the medical examiner has to request it.”

“So they requested it for Dagny Cavanaugh, but not Cecilia Dobson?” I demanded.

“No. It was just an accident that they tested Dagny Cavanaugh. You see, even though they don’t test everybody for cyanide, they test every fifth case for everything.”

“What?”

“It’s part of their quality-control program. Any case with a number ending in a five or a zero gets a full toxicology screen—that’s every toxicology test they can do, including the one for cyanide. Cecilia Dobson’s case number ended in three, which is why she wasn’t tested. In her case, the ME suspected an overdose of street drugs, so they only ordered her checked for opiates. But since Dagny Cavanaugh’s number ended with a zero, she got the full treatment. According to Joe, they sometimes turn up an unexpected overdose that way. This is the first time they’ve turned up cyanide.”

“So how did they find out about Cecilia Dobson?”

“After they got the test results for Dagny Cavanaugh, Joe asked them to test the Dobson woman.”

“But she was already buried!” I protested.

“Whenever they issue a pending death certificate, they save and freeze blood and tissue samples.”

“So when did they find all this out?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Have they told the family yet?”

“You’d better leave that to Joe. He told me in confidence and that’s how I’m telling you.”

We walked through a set of automatic doors into the indoor parking garage. Elliott’s car was parked in the towaway zone, a Chicago patrolman’s hat prominently displayed in the back window. I asked him about it.

“It was a present from my dad. Cops don’t give other cops parking tickets, at least not in this town,” he said, unlocking the door and holding it open for me. “Why don’t we go someplace where we can talk? Joe gave me a copy of the autopsy report, but I was in such a hurry to meet your plane I haven’t had a chance to look at it.”

I looked at my watch. “I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to get home and get dressed to go somewhere.”

“Hot date?” Elliott asked. I thought I detected a note of something other than professional inquiry in his voice.

“A birthday party for my grandmother,” I answered sweetly. “If you don’t mind giving me a ride back to Hyde Park, you can read the report out loud to me while I get ready.”

Traffic was heavy heading into the city as suburbanites swarmed downtown for a good time on Saturday night. After the near summer of the Georgia spring, Chicago seemed cold and dreary. But when we swung around on the Stephenson and I caught the first glimpse of the rugged promontory of the downtown skyline, I felt the same quiet thrill I always do.

“So what do the police think?” I asked, turning in my seat to look at Elliott while I talked. He drove fast but I easily, skirting construction barrels and keeping his eyes on the road. He was wearing the same jacket of chocolate-colored leather that he’d worn to breakfast at the Valois. Underneath, he had a plain white T-shirt and a pair of jeans. His hands were both strong and elegant, resting lightly on the steering wheel. I wondered why I had never noticed them before.

“The police aren’t saying what they think, at least not yet,” Elliott replied, seemingly oblivious to my scrutiny. “But if I know Joe, he’s not jumping to any conclusions, though I can tell just from talking to him that he still hasn’t ruled out the possibility that the two deaths were accidental.”

“How could they be an accident? Cyanide isn’t exactly the sort of thing you find lying around.”

“If you work in a metal plating plant, it is. Joe says they get the stuff in fifty-pound shipments at Superior Plating every week. It’s the same stuff that you read about jealous wives slipping into their husband’s coffee in murder mysteries. According to the medical examiner’s office, there was enough cyanide in both women to have killed an elephant. I stopped over at Superior Plating on Friday while the guys from the health department were there. You can’t believe the number of poisonous chemicals they have just lying around. The company is required to keep something called an MSD book—a looseleaf notebook with a sheet for every hazardous chemical they use in the plant, with information on where it’s kept and what to do in case it’s accidentally spilled or swallowed. It’s as thick as a phone book. If you worked there and wanted to kill someone, you’d have your pick of poisons.”

“Come on. They must take precautions. I can’t believe the cyanide’s just left lying around where anybody has access to it.”

“No. It’s not. It’s kept in the hazardous chemicals room, which is actually a locked closet at the end of the hall between the administrative offices and the plant. A little old lady could kick down the door.”

“Were there any signs that it was broken into?”

“None that I could see. Joe’s going to go back over there tomorrow to see if he can nail down who had keys, whether any of the stuff was missing, that kind of thing. He’s also planning on bringing back the crime-lab boys to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb. For all anybody knows right now, someone could have accidentally filled the sugar bowl with cyanide and Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh liked their coffee sweet.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Don’t laugh. It could be as simple as that.”

“And what if it’s not?” I demanded as Elliott pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment—another no-parking zone. “What if someone deliberately poisoned them?” I got out and said across the hood of his car, “No, I take that back. What if someone deliberately poisoned one of them?”

“You mean that one of them was the intended victim and the other was what—some sort of accident?”

I dug through my satchel bag for my keys, fumbling through the half dozen or so that were on the ring. Every lock in our building took a different key. According to the landlord, it made the apartment more secure, but I always felt that it increased my chances of being mugged on my own doorstep as I went from key to key.

“Call it what you want—accident, camouflage, dress rehearsal,” I offered, finally managing to get us into the apartment. “The two women had almost nothing in common. What reason could there be to kill them both? It almost reminds me of the Tylenol poisoning case. I’ve never bought the police explanation that it was some demented lunatic who just wanted to kill people. The cops could never figure it out, so that’s the explanation they had to settle for. It always seemed much more likely to me that one of the people who died was the intended victim and the others were just window dressing. It would be so easy if you really wanted to kill somebody and not get caught, provided that you didn’t care how many other innocent people you murdered, too.”

“Yeah, and it was probably a calculating attorney who slipped the cyanide into the Tylenol capsule—talk about cold. Do the people at work know you think about stuff like that?”

I checked the time. I had a little more than forty-five minutes to get myself showered, dressed, and able to pass muster with my mother.

“Listen. I’m going to run into the shower. Make yourself at home; help yourself to anything that doesn’t have mold on it.”

Elliott looked around the living room dubiously. I knew that he was a meticulous housekeeper. Dust bunnies admonished me from every comer. I turned my back on them and headed for the bathroom.

I emerged ten minutes later wrapped in a white terry-cloth bathrobe with damp hair wrapped in a towel, turban style. Elliott was stretched out in the black leather Eames chair that had briefly had a home in the library of my mother’s house. Dad had bought it for himself, arguing that it was good for his back, but in less than a month it had been banished by my mother and her decorator.

“It’s weird the things you find out from an autopsy report,” said Elliott, looking up.

He looked at me and something passed between us, a moment lasting a heartbeat, maybe two. I knew that everything that Joe Blades had said about his friend was true and the same stab of attraction that I’d felt in the past for Elliott was not a fluke. Furthermore, in the heat of our discussion about what had happened to Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh, I’d made a mistake: I should never have had Elliott come back to my apartment. In my head I heard the unmistakable bell of warning. I chose deliberately to ignore it.