Bitter Business (29 page)

“You got two Federal Express envelopes,” Cheryl reported. “They’re by the phone on your desk.”

I found them and opened the first one.

“I fucking can’t believe it!” I exclaimed as I scanned the contents of the first envelope.

“Why? What is it?” Cheryl demanded.

“It’s a letter from some lawyer in Zion, Illinois, who claims to represent Cecilia Dobson’s estate. He wants me to call him to discuss a possible settlement so we can, as he so eloquently puts it, avoid the necessity of a wrongful-death suit against Superior Plating. Jesus, the world is full of shakedown artists.”

“Funny how they all have the initials
J.D.
after their name, isn’t it?” Cheryl piped in.

“That’s awfully cynical for a woman who’s only three semesters away from the bar exam.”

“So do you want me to get this guy from Zion on the phone for you?”

“No. I’ll dictate a buzz-off letter after I talk to Jack Cavanaugh—if I talk to Jack Cavanaugh. He hasn’t called, has he? I need to talk to him about his crazy family.”

“He’s out of town today,” came a soft voice from the doorway. Cheryl and I both looked up, startled.

It was Dagny’s daughter, Claire, looking pale but composed in the doorway.

“Claire, come in,” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet while Cheryl swept the stack of files off of the visitor’s chair. “Can I offer you anything? Coffee, tea, a Coke?”

“A glass of water would be good, thank you,” she said as Cheryl disappeared to get it.

“Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

“I can only stay a minute. Aunt Vy’s waiting for me out front. I told her that I left my scarf and had to run back for it. I just had a meeting with Mr. Kurlander about my mom’s will and stuff.”

“How did it go?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, looking around my office uncertainly. “Wow,” she exclaimed in a kind of hushed awe, “this is even worse than my room.” Cheryl came back with the water and Claire took a sip before continuing. “It was pretty weird, I mean, hearing about the money and all. It
is
my money, isn’t it? I mean, I know I’ve got to have an adult in charge of it until I turn eighteen, but after that it’s mine no matter what, right?”

“It’s yours no matter what right now,” I told her. “Only you have to have your aunt and uncle’s permission to spend it or invest it while you’re still a minor. It’s to keep you from blowing it all on motorcycles and trips to the Caribbean until you’re old enough to supposedly know better.”

“And then I can blow it all on trips and motorcycles?” she demanded, with a faint smile.

“When you’re eighteen you can do whatever you want with it,” I assured her. “Though I’m sure Mr. Kurlander will have all sorts of sensible advice about what you can do with your inheritance so that you’ll have enough money for the things you want for a long time.”

“Mr. Kurlander has plenty of sensible advice,” she replied scornfully. “Whenever I asked him a question he basically told me not to worry my pretty little head about it. I might be young, but that doesn’t make me stupid. And I don’t understand how I’m going to learn enough to be ready to make decisions about my own money when I do turn eighteen if all he’s going to do is patronize me.”

“I guess Mr. Kurlander rubbed you the wrong way?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised. Kurlander had the same effect on me. What I did find remarkable was Claire’s intelligence and poise in the face of what most sixteen-year-old girls would find an intimidating situation.

“How can I even be sure he’ll be alive when I turn eighteen? He looks like he’s at least a hundred.”

I laughed. “You don’t have to use him as your attorney. If you’d like, I can help you find someone at the firm who you’ll like who might be closer to your own age.”

“Could you be my lawyer?”

“I already am,” I replied, flattered by the question. “I’m the lawyer for Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals, of which you are a significant shareholder. You need an attorney who’s knowledgeable about how trusts work for the other stuff. Don’t worry. I’ll find you someone who won’t patronize you. And you know you can always call me if you need advice about anything at all.”

“Even if I just want to talk about my crazy relatives?” she asked with a sly smile.

“If you want to talk about the crazy Cavanaughs, I’m definitely the woman to call,” I replied.

As I climbed over the boxes of Superior Plating files in order to leave for the day, I reflected that I was now both physically and emotionally overwhelmed by the Cavanaughs—a situation that the prospect of dinner with Chelsea Winters did little to improve. No doubt the editor of the
Yale Law Review
was a very bright young woman setting out on a brilliant legal career, one that I would do my part to ensure included Callahan Ross. But I remembered the dewy-eyed idealism that I’d worn to dinner during the months that I was being recruited by law firms. Tonight I was feeling much too jaded and worn-out to enjoy being on the receiving end of Chelsea Winters’s routine.

I had finished packing up my briefcase and was just getting ready to turn off the light when the phone rang. I picked it up. It was Elliott.

“You’re not going to believe it,” he exclaimed breathlessly. “Somebody kicked somebody who kicked somebody in the medical examiner’s toxicology lab. They’re almost finished testing the stuff they took out of Dagny Cavanaugh’s office yesterday.”

“I believe it,” I said, smiling to myself.

“I bet you’ll never guess what they found?”

“Cyanide?”

“In a bottle of perfume—enough to kill a horse.”

“That’s great! Now that we know how they got the poison, we have a place to start!”

“There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Think about it. They found the poison in a bottle of perfume.”

“So?”

“So how did it get into their bodies? What did they do? Drink it?”

24

As soon as I could, I ducked out of dinner pleading a crushing amount of work—probably not the most politically correct excuse, but what the hell. From dinner I could tell that Chelsea Winters was an intelligent and capable young woman with excellent table manners. I honestly hoped that she’d choose to come to the firm, but I wasn’t about to lie in order to convince her. Besides, I was too preoccupied with poison to care one way or the other.

I called Elliott from the restaurant and again from my car. Both times I got his answering machine. I wondered if he was out working on the Cavanaugh case. I also admit that I wondered if he was just out. I detected a twinge of unease at the thought of him on a date and was disgusted with myself. I dialed Stephen’s number, first at the office and then at home.

“Whatcha doing?” I asked after we’d exchanged hellos.

“I’m just playing around with our cash-flow projections for the next quarter, trying to figure out how the Swiss deal is going to affect us,” he replied. I imagined him sitting at the big rolltop desk that he’d had rebuilt to accommodate his computer—his leonine profile illuminated by the glow of the screen. “Where are you? In the car?”

“I’m on my way home,” I replied, swerving to avoid a pothole. Spring had finally come, revealing the winter’s ravages on Chicago’s crumbling streets and avenues. “I was wondering if I could stop by for a drink.”

“Of course,” Stephen replied, obviously pleased. Over the years our relationship had developed an elliptical vocabulary all its own. We never spoke directly about wanting to be together. This was probably as close as I’d ever come to telling him that I wanted to see him.

Stephen’s apartment was right off Lake Shore Drive near the Museum of Science and Industry. I was there in ten minutes. I left my car with the doorman and took the elevator up.

Stephen was waiting for me at the door. He was wearing a pair of cotton shorts and an old Harvard T-shirt. His hair was ruffled and he was barefoot. The muscles of his legs stood out like steel cables.

“You okay?” he asked, taking my coat.

I opened my mouth, but for some reason Stephen’s simple question unleashed a floodgate of answers, all of which tumbled over each other so fast in my brain that no words came out at all. No, I wasn’t okay. I was exhausted, unsure of how to proceed with the Cavanaughs, and confused about my feelings for a private investigator for whom I had absolutely no business having feelings. On top of everything, I felt overcome by a sense of how far I’d traveled from being an idealistic third-year law student like Chelsea Winters to a preoccupied partner who could barely manage to feign interest in a recruiting dinner.

Stephen let my coat drop beside my briefcase on the floor. Perhaps we don’t know how to talk to each other about how we feel because there are these moments when we just look at each other and understand perfectly what it is that we both want. Never, I thought, when we finished and lay panting on Stephen’s still-made bed, never underestimate the distance truly great sex can take a relationship.

“Tell me again how cyanide works,” I demanded, absently stroking the hair on Stephen’s chest.

“Cyanide, especially in high concentrations, is a powerful respiratory inhibitor. It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, and very powerful, even in small doses. It occurs naturally in a wide variety of seeds and pits. I remember reading about a case in medical school where a man ate a cupful of apple seeds and died. The coroner’s ruling was poisoning by cyanide, which had been released when he chewed the seeds. Cyanide is commonly used in less concentrated amounts to kill insects and rats, and as you well know, its main industrial use is in the electroplating process.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, rolling back onto the pillows and staring up at Stephen’s perfect crown moldings. “They have buckets of the stuff at Superior Plating. It looks just like laundry detergent. They also found cyanide in a bottle of perfume in the little bathroom in Dagny’s office.”

“Did both women use the bathroom?”

“Apparently.”

“Was the cyanide mixed with something else, do you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you realize cyanide is only lethal if it’s released from its host compound by an acid. That’s why it kills you if you eat it—the hydrochloric acid in the stomach releases the cyanide from the sodium.”

“It’s not absorbed by the skin?”

“Maybe if you took a bath in it,” Stephen ventured dubiously, “or if you rubbed it in an open wound.”

“According to the medical examiner, neither woman had any punctures or abrasions on her skin.”

“Then the poison in perfume probably isn’t the poison that killed them.”

“Then what is it?”

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

“A coincidence?” I demanded, sitting bolt upright in bed.

“You said yourself that they had buckets of the stuff. Maybe the poisoner wasn’t much of a chemist. Maybe he or she put it in a lot of different things that he thought the person he was trying to kill would use. Then, after he’d succeeded in dispatching his victim, he poured them all down the sink.”

“What about the perfume?”

“Maybe the poisoner forgot about it—or maybe it was in a busy place that he couldn’t get back to without attracting notice.”

“If that were the case, you’d have to assume that Dagny, not Cecilia, was the intended victim.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the police didn’t seal off Dagny’s office until after her death. Assuming that the killer didn’t forget about the poisoned perfume, he or she must have chosen to leave it in the bathroom after Cecilia died. What I don’t understand is why the poisoner wasn’t worried about other people accidentally taking the poison and dropping dead?”

“Maybe,” said Stephen, reaching up to pull me back down into the circle of his arms, “maybe that’s exactly what did happen.”

By now I was getting used to being sent for by the Cavanaughs. This time I was actually relieved. Whatever Jack Cavanaugh might have to say to me would be an improvement over the past two days’ silence. However, I didn’t view the fact that he asked me to come to his house as a good sign. By all accounts, Jack, like most CEOs, was so obsessed with work that he usually had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the office. The fact that he still hadn’t returned there since Dagny’s death was to me a sign that something was seriously wrong.

As I paid off the cabby I found myself contemplating Lydia’s house, imagining her standing on her front lawn, staring at her father’s house as the photographer took her picture for the article that was to appear in
Metal Plating
magazine. Arguably, it wasn’t quite the same thing as trashing your family in the
Wall Street Journal,
but then again probably a higher proportion of her father’s cronies read the former.

Climbing the steps to Jack’s house, I was surprised to see Detective Blades coming out the front door with Elliott Abelman right behind him. A uniformed maid stood at the open front door, waiting to admit me.

“Good morning, Kate,” said Blades cheerfully. “I believe Mr. Cavanaugh is expecting you.” He looked better than he had on Sunday. He’d obviously managed to grab some sleep—either that or he’d gotten his second wind. Elliott gave me a smile that rivaled the sunshine and I felt my ears get hot. I told myself to get a grip.