Bitter Business (33 page)

I got the good doctor on the phone and introduced myself. He sounded young and eager to please. Better still, he got right to the point.

“Dr. Azorini asked me to test the two samples that I got yesterday from Dr. Julia Gordon. I’m sure you know that all they’re set up for at the medical examiner’s office is gas chromatography, which is pretty basic stuff. Here we can use something called a spray mass spec, which is what I used on the two samples.”

“And what did you find?”

“Lots of things, actually. I hadn’t realized how chemically complex perfume is. There were more than twenty compounds in the control sample that we ran. But I’m assuming you’re interested in the differences we turned up between the two samples, not the composition of the control.”

“Exactly.”

“It turns out that the other sample is pretty scary. In addition to the cyanide—and there was enough in the two-cc sample that we tested to take out an elephant— there was another compound called FC-170C. That’s its generic chemical name. It’s sold commercially as Fluorad. Ever heard of it?”

“No,” I replied, beginning to take notes. “What is it?”

“Fluorad is a halogenated hydrocarbon, which is just a generic term for fluorinated hydrocarbon, which is related to chlorinated hydrocarbons. Those are the agents that environmentalists are currently going apeshit about— you know, things like PCBs which are supposed to harm the ozone layer, but I don’t think that Fluorad is one of the ‘bad’ fluorinated hydrocarbons—”

“You’re losing me with all of this. Tell me, what exactly is Fluorad used for?”

“I had to make some calls to find out exactly,” he confessed. “As far as I can tell, it’s a kind of surfactant.”

“What’s that?”

“You can think of a surfactant as a penetrating agent; it works kind of like a very powerful water softener that’s used to decrease surface tension. Most often Fluorad is added to embalming fluid. I’m sure you realize that embalming fluid is injected into arteries and veins to preserve a dead body. Well, in this case the Fluorad lowers the surface tension of the body fluids as well as the body surface linings—like the lining of the arteries—which allows for better penetration of the embalming fluid out to the capillary beds.”

“So what would be the point of putting it in the perfume?”

“No point, unless you also happened to mix it up with cyanide first.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Think of Fluorad as a messenger, a carrier molecule that picks up another molecule and carries it through a barrier—like skin.”

“Are you telling me that someone mixed Fluorad with cyanide so that when it was put in with the perfume, the

Fluorad molecules would carry the cyanide molecules through a person’s skin? Is that possible?”

“Oh, it’s possible all right,” Dr. Dorskey replied. “And it wouldn’t take too much Fluorad either. It’s very powerful stuff.”

“How powerful?”

“Let’s put it this way: If you put a drop of Fluorad in a martini and then stuck your finger in the glass, you’d get drunk.”

28

I met Elliott Abelman and Detective Blades at Flannagan’s, a comer tavern three blocks from police headquarters. It was a cop bar and well patronized despite the fact that it was only three in the afternoon. I’d immediately phoned Joe Blades after I’d hung up with Dr. Dorskey and told him of the chemist’s findings. I offered to bring him the copy of the doctor’s preliminary report, which I’d asked him to fax to my office. Blades was just coming off of his shift and on his way to meet Elliott for a drink.

The entire way to Flannagan’s, all I could see was the bottle of perfume laced with Fluorad and cyanide. All I could think of was the level of hate or pathology that must have possessed whoever was behind the crime. I was haunted by images of Cecilia Dobson sneaking a dab of her boss’s expensive new perfume and paying for it with her life. Of Dagny brushing her hair and putting on fresh perfume to go to the funeral and ending up in agony, collapsed on her own floor, as she crawled toward the phone for help.

I found the two men at a table in the back. Both had bottles of Old Style in front of them, but neither was drinking. I took a seat and laid copies of the spray-mass-spec tests and the material safety sheets on Fluorad on the table.

“I don’t see how the ME’s office will be able to do anything except rule both deaths homicides,” announced Blades once he’d finished reading, “especially since you said that they make the stuff at the plant where both women worked.”

“They make it in the specialty chemicals division. It’s a new product that Philip unveiled at the last board meeting. He even did a little show-and-tell to demonstrate the compound’s properties. I remember reading about it in the minutes.”

“So what’s the big deal?” Elliott asked. “I thought you said this was some sort of additive for embalming fluid.”

“According to Philip Cavanaugh, embalming chemicals are a four-hundred-million-dollar market that’s growing all the time.”

“No shortage of customers, that’s for sure,” remarked Elliott.

“According to the material safety sheet, up until now there’s only one company that’s made this Fluorad stuff and that’s 3M. It’s odorless, colorless, and very expensive.”

“How expensive?” I asked.

“Two hundred and fifty dollars a gallon.”

Elliott whistled softly.

“The reason that Philip was so eager to show it off to the board is that his people have come up with a cheaper way to make the stuff. I’m sure he figures the company can make a lot of money breaking up 3M’s monopoly,” I said.

“I wonder how he’ll react when you tell him that it was used to kill his mistress and his sister?” Elliott demanded in a hard voice.

“I’m going to see him, now,” Blades replied, “but it wouldn’t hurt if you put one of your guys on him, Elliott, once I’m done with him, just to see if he does anything stupid.”

“You meeting him at his office, you said?” Elliott asked. Blades nodded. “Then let me go and make a call.”

The homicide detective and I faced each other across the sticky top of the bar table.

“You’re right,” I said, “this isn’t turning out at all like I expected.”

“Well, it sure surprised the hell out of me. I thought I’d seen it all, but someone dying from a drop of perfume is a new one. It’s also going to be a bitch to prove, even if we figure out who did it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Let me tell you how cops solve murders—not Columbo, mind you, real cops: physical evidence, witnesses, and confessions.” He raised a long finger as he counted each one off. “First the physical evidence. So far the physical evidence in this case is slim, to say the least. The first death was originally thought to be accidental, so there was no attempt made to preserve or analyze the crime scene, and even after the second murder the scene yielded shit. All we’ve got so far is the bottle of perfume. The only solid fingerprints on the bottle are of the two dead women. We also have the box that it was mailed in. It’s got only the fingerprints of people we already know handled it. It was postmarked on the twelfth of February, which is not exactly a breakthrough since it was supposedly sent as an anniversary present. You never know, we may get lucky with the business cards that were used to address the box, but according to the sales rep whose name is on them, he’s been handing them out twenty times a day for about the last ten years. Likewise, we may get a break on the Fluorad. I’ve got the crime lab scheduled to dust at Specialty Chemicals for prints once Philip shows me where it’s kept. I’m also sending some uniforms to see if anybody noticed anything unusual. But again, I’m not holding my breath. So far our killer hasn’t made any mistakes, and I’d be surprised if we started finding fingerprints now. So that’s your physical evidence.” He held up a second finger.

“As far as witnesses, that’s pretty easy. You’re the only one and you saw diddly. And third”—he put up another finger—“confessions. I guess there’s a chance that someone will come in beating their breast and confess. Not likely, but always possible.”

Elliott returned to the table. “I sent a man over to Superior Plating. He’ll stick to Philip Cavanaugh like glue,” he reported.

“What about the perfume?” I demanded. “Surely there’s a chance you’d be able to trace the sale of the bottle. You said it was expensive.”

“That’s the angle we’re working on now,” Blades replied, taking his bottle of beer in his hand. He took a swallow and made a face. “Elliott’s got four people on it, too. But I’m telling you, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. The perfume could have been bought anywhere—Chicago, the suburbs, the duty-free shop at a dozen airports. At this point there’s no way of knowing whether the perfume was doctored before or after it arrived in the mail. We can’t even be sure who the intended victim or victims were. Did someone help themselves to cyanide and Fluorad from Superior Plating, lace the perfume with it, and send it to Peaches? Or did someone slip into Dagny’s bathroom to put the poison in?”

“It sounds like you’ve ruled out Cecilia Dobson as the intended victim either way,” I observed.

“So far we’ve got no possible motive.”

“What about Philip Cavanaugh? I think we can all agree that he might have had a reason for wanting her out of the picture,” Elliott suggested.

“But then why leave the perfume in the bathroom, where his sister was likely to use it?” Blades countered. “Surely, in the days following Cecilia Dobson’s murder, he had more than enough opportunity to get rid of it. Even if for some reason he wasn’t afraid of his sister using it, why leave it lying around? It’s the one piece of physical evidence that might link him to the murder.”

“Did anyone benefit financially from any of the deaths?” Elliott asked.

“As far as I can see, no one. Except for Dagny’s daughter, Claire, of course, but so far we have no reason to treat her as a suspect.”

“What about malice?” I suggested. “It seems to me that Lydia Cavanaugh hates every member of her family enough to want to poison them. By all accounts, she was pathologically jealous of her sister, Dagny, and her mother-in-law. For a while she changed her hair and started dressing like Peaches. They even traced crank phone calls they were getting last year to her.”

“I know. And we’re running a check on the phone records for the entire family for the last three months. Believe me, we’re not ruling out anybody at this stage. Especially since Peaches was the victim of a felonious stalker two years ago.”

“Surely that can’t be tied in to all of this?” I demanded, remembering the newspaper clippings Babbage had saved.

“The Fluorad points to it being someone inside the company,” said Elliott. “But from what Joe tells me about the guy who was stalking Peaches, I don’t think we can rule him out.”

“How could he have found out about the Fluorad,” I demanded, “much less have gotten his hands on it?”

“The guy’s a real piece of work—not smart, but cunning. He managed to get a job as a janitor at the station where Peaches worked so that he could steal her keys and have copies made. He broke into her house on a number of occasions. When we finally went in to arrest him, his room was plastered with pictures of Peaches.”

“So what happened to him?” I asked.

“We sent him to jail for eighteen months with three years’ probation.”

“So where is he now?”

“He got out of jail on February first of this year,” said Blades, his voice heavy with resignation. “According to his parole officer, he’s living in an SRO on Halsted— about two miles from Peaches and Jack Cavanaugh’s house.”

29

Daniel Babbage, a man who’d spent his whole life in the city, was laid to rest in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb he would have visited only at gunpoint while he was alive. The day was sunny but it was cold, and the wind blew so sharply that it ripped the petals off the flowers that had been mounded on top of the casket. In the wind, the lawyers who had come to see him buried seemed to flap around the graveside in their black coats like a flock of crows.

Skip Tillman, the firm’s managing partner, spoke movingly at the internment—as ever, the consummate public man. His remarks were anecdotal. He recalled Daniel’s early years at the firm, his determination to serve family-owned businesses over the objections of his partners, his service, his loyalty, and above all his love for his clients. He talked from the heart about the bravery with which he faced his final illness.

I look back at the morning of Daniel’s funeral as one of the low points of my life. Emotionally exhausted by the blitzkrieg of crisis surrounding the Cavanaughs and at sea about my personal life, I was tormented by the unsolved murders of Dagny Cavanaugh and Cecilia Dobson as by open sores. I had also quite simply been to too many funerals in too short a time. The fact that they had been for people I had really cared about just darkened the water at the bottom of the well.

I had spotted Jack Cavanaugh across the crowd during the service and sought him out after the final benediction. Eugene, ever dutiful, was at his side. Father and son both seemed beaten down by the events of the past few weeks.

“It was a beautiful service,” I said, falling into step beside them as we began to walk back to our cars.

“Philip should have been here,” Jack complained.