Bitter Business (24 page)

Or perhaps the two deaths were tied together in another way. Perhaps a disgruntled employee with a particular grudge against the financial side of Superior Plating had decided to extract their own brand of revenge. While I was pretty sure that the police would question the Superior Plating employees about the possibility, I made a mental note to have Elliott check through personnel records just in case something might turn up.

After the cake was cut, “Happy Birthday” sung, and the presents unwrapped—Stephen’s gift of a set of hand-tied McGregor trout flies was the hit of the evening—we said our farewells. Stephen had an early meeting with his hematology research group the next morning and I was in a hurry to get back to Hyde Park. I wanted to stop at the hospital and see Daniel Babbage. To my surprise, Stephen offered to come along.

“What was that detective guy doing at your apartment?” he asked as we headed south on Lake Shore Drive. Every day I noticed more boats in the harbor—a sure sign of spring.

A number of answers to his question streamed past each other through my brain, not the least of which was “none of your business,” but I opted for the truth.

“He’s been hired by the Cavanaughs to help find out what happened to the two women who died at Superior Plating. He came to tell me that the medical examiner’s office found out that both of them died of cyanide poisoning.”

Stephen gave a soft whistle that rang through the dark interior of his BMW. We were passing through the noman’s-land between the projects and home. On our left, fires glittered on the beach.

“So do the police think it was murder?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I guess there’s a lot of cyanide used in plating, so it could have been an accident.”

“Cyanide is bad stuff. It’s odorless, tasteless, and a little goes a long way. You actually die of asphyxiation, which is what makes it hard to trace postmortem. Chemically, cyanide interferes with the enzymes that control the oxidative process. It prevents the body from using the oxygen in blood by crippling the cytochrome oxidase system that converts oxygen’s energy to a form the body can use. That’s why cyanide poisoning is sometimes referred to as internal asphyxia because even though the person may be taking in air through the lungs, it isn’t being absorbed into the bloodstream.”

“Which is why CPR doesn’t do any good,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

Stephen said nothing as we turned off the drive at Fifty-seventh Street and headed for the hospital.

* * *

It was eleven o’clock at night, but in the emergency room at the University of Chicago Medical Center, it might as well have been noon. Most of my roommate Claudia’s patients come to her through the ER, and while there’s no such thing as a slow night in the combat zone of a big-city hospital, she, like most people who work there, is fond of predicting whether it will be busy based on all sorts of outside factors—hot weather, a holiday weekend, a full moon—all of which are held to add to the regular number of gunshots and overdoses, women in labor, and general gore that come through their doors.

Once the elevator carried us above the first floor, however, things grew quieter. Stephen, who’d done his medical training there, had lived five of the most intense years of his life in this building. Since then his work had carried him away from the hands-on practice of medicine. He said he didn’t miss it, but looking at his face, I wasn’t sure.

When we got to Daniel’s room it was empty. The bed had been stripped down to the obscene black plastic of the hospital mattress. The cards and the flowers were all gone.

“Maybe he’s been moved,” said Stephen, quickly anticipating my alarm. “Let me go and see if his chart’s at the nurses’ station.” He stepped out into the hall and turned back. “Are you going to be okay?”

I nodded mutely, staring at the vacant bed, not wanting to move. When Stephen came back the news was no surprise. Daniel had died at three-twenty that afternoon while I was in the air flying back to Chicago. I bit my lip. It had been no secret that he was dying. That was why I’d wanted to come to the hospital tonight and not wait until morning. I thrust my hands miserably into the pockets of my raincoat and felt the plastic sarcophagus of one of the cigars I’d bought for him.

Suddenly it all seemed so hopeless. Daniel was dead and so was Dagny. The rest of the Cavanaugh family seemed to have embarked on an unalterable course of self-destruction, and in the end what difference did any of it make?

“I want to go now,” I said, wrapping my coat around myself against the sudden chill.

Even though he lived only a few blocks away, Stephen rarely came to my apartment. His appetite for luxury was enormous and he lived so beautifully that when he came to my apartment he felt like he was slumming. But tonight he took me home without demur, coming in without being asked.

I knew that I did not love Stephen. I knew that if I did, my heart would not beat faster whenever Elliott Abelman was in the room. But tonight what I felt for Stephen was not about love. I had had a plateful of death and loss and sorrow. That night in my apartment I quite simply hungered for something else.

I know that women look at Stephen Azorini and imagine what he must be like in bed—what it must be like to possess and be possessed by a man like him. For Stephen and me, sex had always been the constant, the chemistry invariable and dramatic like indoor fireworks. That night, in my own bed, I was seized by the need to drive out the demons of the past week, to exorcise them with the sweat of sex.

By morning we did such a good job that I think Stephen was going to be hard-pressed to stay awake during his morning meeting.

* * *

I woke up late and made myself coffee. There was a pair of size-six Nikes under the kitchen table. I realized Claudia must have come home sometime during the night—hopefully during one of the lulls in the action.

I went for a long run. The sun was out and I decided to brave a course through the cultural gardens behind the Museum of Science and Industry. I ran through the immaculately maintained Japanese garden and all the way to South Shore and back without incident. Then I came home and took a long shower. It was nice, I reflected, to spend the night at home for a change. It was nice to avoid that funky walk home on Sunday morning dressed in Saturday night’s high heels.

After the emotional upheaval of the last several days, I finally felt at ease with myself. Whatever it was that I had been trying to drive out with the past night’s exercise was gone. Strangely enough, I even found a sense of comfort in the knowledge that Daniel was finally dead. As long as he was alive, he had hovered over the Superior Plating file as I continually second-guessed myself, wondering how differently he would have chosen to deal with every new situation. Now the file was mine and I was ready to reassess and start from scratch. It was no use beating myself up over the debacle of the Cavanaugh family meeting. From here on in it wasn’t Daniel’s show, it was mine.

As I prepared to leave for the office I was surprised to see Joe Blades climbing the stoop to my apartment. His step was slow and his face pale with fatigue. Homicide cops, I guessed, just like ER docs, had busy Saturday nights.

“Detective Blades, what a pleasant surprise,” I said. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

“Suspicious death call on Fifty-eighth Street. Turns out it was an eighty-seven-year-old piano teacher who died in her sleep. As long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d look you up.”

“Do you want to come in? I can make some fresh coffee,” I volunteered, still uncertain whether this was an official or a social visit.

“Actually,” he said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with the fat end of his tie, “I was wondering whether you might have a few minutes.”

“Sure,” I replied.

“Then, if you wouldn’t mind taking a ride with me, there’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”

20

“I assume Elliott already told you about the cyanide,” Detective Blades remarked amiably from behind the wheel of his official police vehicle—OPV for short. Elliott had once pointed out that all OPVs had license plates beginning with the letters
QF,
thereby forming a code recognized by every small-time hoodlum in the city. This one was a sorry white Chevy Cavalier that smelled of spilled coffee and old cigarette smoke. Blades hadn’t mentioned where we were going and I didn’t ask.

“I saw Elliott yesterday. He told me that they were poisoned.”

“What can you tell me about Dagny Cavanaugh’s relationship with her secretary? Were they on good terms?”

“I don’t know if they were on good terms,” I hedged, strangely reluctant to say more. Somehow, in the light of what had happened, Dagny’s irritation with her secretary seemed magnified and strangely out of proportion.

“The first time we met, the day that Cecilia Dobson died, as a matter of fact, Dagny told me that Cecilia was actually a very competent secretary.”

“But she didn’t like her.”

“There were things about her behavior at work that Dagny felt were unprofessional.”

“For example?”

“Cecilia had begun to dress provocatively.”

“One of the secretaries at Superior Plating said that the day she died Cecilia had defied Dagny’s standing order forbidding her from going down onto the plant floor. How did Ms. Cavanaugh feel about that?”

“I think she was annoyed,” I said. “But so was her brother Eugene, who was in the plant giving me a tour— actually, he was furious. But I don’t think their concerns were about Cecilia herself, but rather that her presence in the plant was unsafe. I don’t think that any of it was personal, which is why I don’t see what you’re getting at. Believe me, lots of people get mad at their secretaries, but they don’t kill them.”

“Was it your impression that Dagny Cavanaugh was an emotionally stable woman?”

“She struck me as being exceptionally levelheaded.”

“To the point of being calculating?”

I found myself getting annoyed, but I tried not to show it. After all, the man had a job to do. But I couldn’t help wondering what it must be like to be married to a cop, a man whose job it was to wring the worst possible interpretation from the most simple declarative sentence. It would, I concluded, be even worse than marriage to a lawyer.

“I didn’t know Dagny Cavanaugh very well,” I continued patiently. “We’d only known each other for a few days, but in that time she seemed like a very intelligent and reasonable person—the kind who acts more from the head than the heart.”

“Not the kind who would poison her secretary in a rage and then, three days later, swallow poison herself in a fit of remorse?”

“It seems far-fetched.”

“Believe me, stuff like that happens all the time. Homicide is definitely on the rise in the workplace.”

“I don’t doubt it, but if you’d met Dagny Cavanaugh, you’d realize what a preposterous scenario that is. Dagny wasn’t some dope-crazed lowlife psychotic living on the fringe. She was a successful executive. She was also one of the most sensible, down-to-earth people I’d ever met. The worst she would have done to Cecilia Dobson was fire her—and even then I think she would have regretted it. I’m telling you, I was with her the night before she died; we sat up until almost midnight talking. There was nothing she said or did that would indicate to me that she was capable of the kind of emotionally driven crime you’ve just described.”

“I’ll give you the fact that poisoning isn’t usually a crime of passion—not like the guy who comes home, finds his wife playing hide the salami with the Maytag repairman, pulls out his trusty Colt forty-five, and blows them both away. Most people kill when they’re angry or afraid or feel that they themselves will be killed. In addition, most homicides involve alcohol or drugs. Poisoning is the exception because it’s almost always either an accident or a crime of premeditation.”

“So which one was this?”

“At this point, Kate, I’ve got to tell you, your guess is as good as mine.”

The office of the Cook County medical examiner occupies a dismal bunker on a barren stretch of West Harrison.

Minicam vans for each of the three major Chicago stations were parked at the curb in front of the entrance.

“What are they doing here?” I demanded, suddenly panicked at the thought that someone acquainted with Superior Plating and the Cavanaughs had contacted the press—Lydia, perhaps, in her thirst for ink. I could imagine the headlines: SERIAL POISONER TERRORIZES SOUTH-SIDE WOMEN…

“They’re waiting for Violet Kramer.”

“Who’s Violet Kramer?”

“She was a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared from the Old Orchard Mall two days before Christmas. Up until this morning she’s been officially listed as missing. It’s been all over the media. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Only the
Wall Street Journal
.” Joe Blades shot me a look of disbelief before he continued.

“They found her body this morning in the woods near Ravinia. Somebody must have tipped the press that they were bringing her in. They’re waiting to get shots of the morgue wagon for the six o’clock.”