Bitter Business (23 page)

“So what did you find out?” I asked, slowly rubbing my hair with the towel. Elliott took a breath. I saw him choose to let the moment pass.

“Cecilia Dobson had an old fracture of her right femur, probably from when she was eight or nine years old. She’d had rhinoplasty—that’s plastic surgery on her nose—one or two years ago. She’d also had breast implants and her tubes tied. Her last meal was a cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake—strawberry.”

“Is that where the poison was? In the milkshake?”

“They’re running the tests on the stomach contents today. Joe expects the results sometime tomorrow.”

“What about Dagny Cavanaugh? What did she have to eat before she died?”

Elliott flipped through the photocopied sheets in his lap.

“That’s weird,” he said finally. “It says here that her stomach was almost completely empty.” He flipped back to the page he’d been reading from before. “Cecilia Dobson ate two and a half to three hours before she died, but it looks like Dagny had nothing to eat at all the day she died. What time did she die?”

“It was close to four o’clock,” I said. Somehow it didn’t seem real to be talking about it this way. Dagny Cavanaugh had died in my arms, and here I was, five days later, standing and discussing it in my bathrobe with Elliott Abelman like it was some sort of abstract exercise in deduction.

“Why would she have gone the whole day without eating?” asked Elliott, who, I knew, liked his meals regularly.

“Maybe she wasn’t feeling well,” I offered. “Or maybe she just got busy. There are lots of days I’m so busy I wouldn’t get a chance to eat if Cheryl didn’t bring me a sandwich. Don’t forget, Dagny didn’t have a secretary anymore. Besides, you’ve been to the Superior Plating plant. The neighborhood’s not exactly a mecca for restaurants.”

“But if she didn’t eat anything, what was the poison in?”

“Won’t the tests they’re running tell us? Why don’t you come and talk to me while I put on my makeup?” I asked, keeping my eye on the time. Elliott extricated himself from my father’s chair and followed me down the long hall to my bedroom. The apartments in Hyde Park were built in the twenties, railroad style—living room and kitchen in the front, bedrooms along a single hall like a railroad car.

Elliott perched himself gingerly on the end of my unmade bed and tactfully ignored the piles of clothes on the floor. The warning bells were louder now, but I told myself that if I were a male attorney discussing a client with a private investigator, there would be no awkwardness. I pulled my makeup bag out of my suitcase and went into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar for the sake of conversation.

“It still doesn’t make any sense,” came Elliott’s voice from the bedroom. “If Dagny didn’t eat anything the day she died, how was she poisoned?”

“Maybe she drank something. Don’t you always read about putting cyanide in coffee to hide the bitter taste?”

I dotted my face with foundation, cursing my own clumsiness as I knocked the bottle over and quickly picked it back up. I was strangely nervous, and the more I hurried the worse I got.

I heard the rustling of pages.

“It doesn’t say anything about coffee in either of them,” he reported.

“I guess we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.” I selected an eye-shadow compact at random from the bag. My entire inventory of makeup was composed of samples accumulated by my mother and passed along to me. I told myself that I liked the small sizes because I traveled so much, but the truth is that I hadn’t been to a department-store makeup counter since becoming a lawyer and saw no reason to start now. “Let’s just assume for argument’s sake that only one of the women was the intended victim. Who would have wanted to kill Cecilia Dobson? Who would have benefited from her death? Have you managed to find her boyfriend yet?”

“I drove down to Champaign to see him yesterday. I think I told you that he plays in some kind of grunge band. They were performing in a college bar down there. I’ve got to tell you, I heard them play. It really made me feel like my dad—you know, the music’s too loud, it just sounds like noise.... Anyway, the boyfriend didn’t seem too broken up about what happened—though I’m not sure he really understood everything I was telling him. Either he’s not very bright or he’s ingested one too many illegal substances. All of which is beside the point, on account of the fact that he’s got an alibi. It turns out he was in Iowa playing a gig the day she died. The other members of his band and the guy who owned the bar where they were playing backed him up.”

“Was she insured?”

“The police are looking into it.”

“So who else might have wanted to have her out of the way?”

“Philip Cavanaugh for one. He was having an affair with her and he wanted to break it off. What if she got nasty and told him she was going to go to his wife instead?”

“He could always have paid her off. From what you told me, she probably picked up with Philip in the first place thinking there was money in it for her.”

“But what if she was asking for too much? Maybe little Philip decided murder was cheaper than blackmail.”

“But then what about Dagny?” I countered. “After Cecilia Dobson died, everyone assumed that she’d just overdosed on drugs. No one would have known about the cyanide if Dagny hadn’t died. Besides, Philip didn’t have a motive to kill his sister.”

“Why not? Maybe he resented the competition. According to what Joe’s been hearing at Superior Plating, Dagny was the real brains of the outfit. Maybe he finally got tired of being shown up by his little sister.”

“That’s an awfully big stretch,” I protested, holding my eyes open wide and stroking on the mascara. I looked at my watch. Six minutes. I abandoned the idea of doing anything special with my hair. Instead, I gave it a quick brush and wound it up into a French twist. I thought of the scene I’d witnessed that afternoon during the Cavanaugh family meeting. “I’m not going to tell you that these guys are the Waltons. It’s actually pretty clear that they all hate each other’s guts, but Dagny was the only one who seemed to have been generally liked and respected.”

“You know that when we’re spinning different scenarios for a motive, they all work much better with Dagny as the intended victim.”

“Hold that thought,” I said, closing the door and squirming into the midnight-blue cocktail dress I’d bought especially to wear to Grandma Prescott’s birthday party. It was a Jil Sander, the German designer who was making a name for herself in this country with elegant, pared-down clothes. The dress was simplicity itself, a scoop neck and long sleeves, but when I’d first tried it on, it struck me that there was something almost magical in the way it was cut. I also remember thinking when I looked at the price tag that there had damned well better be. I leaned over the sink and put on some lipstick.

When I opened the door to the bathroom Elliott rose slowly to his feet.

“You look beautiful,” he said in a hushed voice. Suddenly my bedroom seemed very small indeed. Elliott was so close.

“You missed a button in back,” he said. “Here, if you turn around I’ll get it for you.”

“That’s okay,” I murmured hoarsely. There seemed to be something wrong with my voice.

“Come on. I won’t bite,” he urged, smiling.

Suddenly I felt prudish and silly. An overworked lawyer letting her imagination run away with her.

But when I turned and felt his fingertips brush the nape of my neck, I knew it had been dangerous to turn my back.

19

Only the doorbell saved me from doing something foolish. I heard the harsh sound of the buzzer and took a step away from Elliott. The moment dissolved into motion—Elliott stooping to pick up the copies of the two autopsy reports from the foot of my bed—me to the intercom panel in the front hall to buzz Stephen Azorini into the building.

The two men shook hands in the foyer. They had never met before and each eyed the other with suspicion thinly veiled by civility—two cats circling each other at their first meeting. Elliott knew I had a relationship with Stephen, but I had never offered to explain it, holding firm the line between personal and professional involvement no matter what sparks of attraction might sometimes flash between us. Stephen, on the other hand, clearly did not expect to come to my apartment on Saturday night and find another man there already.

I smiled radiantly at them both and gathered up the glittering excuse for a purse that I used for parties.

“Did you remember to buy your grandmother a present?” Stephen inquired in paternal tones.

The look on my face was most likely explanation enough, since he did not bother to wait for whatever excuse I might offer.

“That’s okay.” He sighed. “I did. We’ll just sign the card from both of us.”

As I preceded both men out the door I couldn’t help but wonder what Elliott Abelman, private investigator, would deduce from that last exchange.

The private dining room at the Whitehall Club was almost as pretty as my mother’s, though not nearly as large. She stood by the door greeting guests, flanked by my father and Grandma Prescott—a no-nonsense old woman who lived for fly-fishing and duplicate bridge.

“Happy birthday, Grandma,” I said, kissing the papery skin of her powdered cheek.

“Thank you, my dear,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length to look at me. “Your dad says that you’ve been working too hard and I won’t tell you what your mother’s been saying.” She gave a wicked chuckle. Her voice was gravelly from a lifetime of cigarettes and scotch, almost as low as a man’s.

“When did you buy that dress?” my mother demanded as I moved on to give my grandmother a chance to talk to Stephen. She liked to joke that she might be too old to do anything about it but she still liked at least to look at a handsome man.

“I was in Bonn this winter on business. One of the German attorneys working on the deal took me shopping.”

“It’s very attractive,” my mother remarked, making the dress worth every single penny. I didn’t even let it bother me when she criticized my hair.

Stephen and I did our duty during cocktails, saying hello to all the aunts and second cousins. Stephen was a much bigger draw than I was. No one ever knew quite what to say to me since I didn’t fit into any of the neat pigeonholes of their limited experience—no husband, no country club, a career that frankly baffled them. Stephen, on the other hand, with his movie-star good looks, had undeniable appeal.

I drank less than I usually do at family gatherings, concentrating on the hors d’oeuvres, which were wonderful, especially the little puffs filled with a mixture of goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, which went a long way to compensate for the fact that I hadn’t had lunch. I also found myself paying more attention to the family dynamics, which I had up until now taken for granted.

Grandma Prescott and my mother, though all smiles tonight, had never gotten along particularly well. My mother’s mother had been an accomplished equestrienne and a crack shot in an era when women didn’t shoot and they didn’t ride. She’d grown up under the disapproving eye of her own socialite mother and a puritanical father, both of whom adored my mother and did everything they could to undercut my grandmother’s influence over her.

In one comer by the fireplace I spotted my father, nodding amiably in agreement with his sister, Gertrude, who was one of the richest women in the world—and according to my mother one of the ugliest—on account of having married an elderly Van Buren shortly before his timely demise. She was a spectacular miser and had two sons, one who was completely estranged from her and another who had recently died of AIDS. Through his entire illness his mother had insisted defiantly to all of her friends that it was mononucleosis.

When we sat down for dinner I noticed that Mother had been careful to place the Prescott side of her family as far as possible from the Danforth side on account of a long-standing feud over the distribution of a family trust following my great-uncle Rawley’s death. The dispute was over a relatively trivial sum—especially in a family where everyone invariably lived on interest—but the acrimony it caused had rankled for more than a dozen years.

At the head of the table I could see that my father was already drunk. Mother had kept a sharp eye on him until he’d delivered the toast she’d written for him to offer before dinner, but judging from the way he was listing to one side, he was now only a couple of gin and tonics from oblivion.

I thought about what Daniel Babbage had said to me about my own family the day he handed the Superior Plating file over to me. He was right. There was very little difference between my family and the Cavanaughs.

Dinner was trout meunière caught the day before by some old friends of my grandmother’s from Canada and flown in specially. To serve it, white-gloved waiters placed large Villeroy and Boch plates in front of every person, each with a domed, silver cover. A waiter stood behind each pair of chairs, and at a discreet signal, the domes were simultaneously lifted to well-bred applause.

Stephen listened attentively to my cousin Gregory’s droning stories about grouse shooting in Wales. On my left, my great-aunt Victoria, who was deaf as an adder, bellowed to the dinner partner on her other side. I played with my trout and found myself thinking about cyanide.

Perhaps I had been too hasty in assuming that there was no thread connecting Cecilia Dobson and Dagny 1 Cavanaugh. They had worked in the same office, after all, both possibly privy to the same financial information. According to Jack Cavanaugh, Dagny had been keeping Superior Plating’s books since she was in high school. Perhaps she’d been embezzling money or covering up some other financial impropriety that Cecilia had discovered. Neither Elliott nor I felt that Dagny’s secretary had been above a bit of blackmail. Perhaps Dagny had killed her and then committed suicide in a fit of remorse. The police hadn’t found a suicide note, but I knew that in more than half of the cases where a person takes their own life, they don’t leave a note. Still, it didn’t fit with my impressions of Dagny, but who could tell?