Bitter Business (34 page)

“Sally called this morning and said that he was in bed with the flu,” Eugene explained. Judging from his tone of voice it was clear he’d been defending his brother all morning.

“That’s no excuse,” snapped Jack. “He could have at least pulled himself together for an hour. Daniel was like a member of the family. It’s wrong that he wasn’t here.”

We walked several yards in silence, neither Eugene nor I willing to break into Jack’s angry reverie.

“The police came to the house again this morning to talk to Peaches,” Jack said finally. “They seem to think it’s that psycho that she had all that trouble with who’s behind everything. As soon as he got out of jail, we started getting those calls again. I told that judge at the parole hearing he should never be released. He’s a nut. But he didn’t have the balls to keep him behind bars, which is where he belongs. Now two innocent women had to pay with their lives. I suppose now they’ll give him the electric chair. So what? It won’t bring my Dagny back. I ask you, what’s wrong with this world?”

“If it was him, how did he get access to the plant? Not only would he have to get into Dagny’s office, but he’d have had to get into the specialty chemicals building as well, and that has a security system,” I remarked.

“The swipe cards get lost all the time,” answered Eugene. “Dad’s secretary just came to me to get hers replaced. She told me she lent it to you and you never gave it back.

“And another thing,” Eugene continued, “the cops said they picked the guy up for vagrancy the night of Dad’s anniversary party. He was hanging around the neighborhood.”

“I’m still surprised,” I replied. “I’d always imagined that there was a big leap between mooning around someone’s house and sending them poison in the mail, but I don’t have much experience with these things.”

“You sure as hell don’t.” Eugene was suddenly angry. “Don’t you think my family has been through enough without you making small talk about it like it was some kind of guessing game?”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I want to find out the truth as much as you do.” If the police didn’t find the killer soon, I reflected, everyone in the Cavanaugh family was going to have a breakdown. As it was, everyone’s nerves were frayed. “How is Peaches handling all of this?” I inquired of Jack.

“Naturally she’s upset,” he said. We had come to a stop beside his shiny black Lincoln. “Have you spoken to Lydia yet?”

“I went to see her yesterday at her new office. She’s already rented space for the foundation she plans on funding with the proceeds from the sale of her stock.”

“What did she say?”

“She’s determined to sell. Not only that, but she’s named her price. She says she wants ten million dollars from the family for her shares or she’s selling to an outsider.”

“She’s only doing this for attention,” Jack announced gruffly, lowering himself into his car.

“It doesn’t matter why she’s doing it,” I insisted through the open window. “She’s doing it.”

Jack Cavanaugh didn’t bother to respond. His face was set like stone as he drove away.

When I got back to the office I found a copy of a letter from Philip Cavanaugh on my desk. It was from his new attorneys and it had arrived by messenger while I was at the funeral. It said that unless Lydia resigned from the board of directors of Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals and signed the original buyback agreement within seven days, Philip was going to put his shares of the company’s stock up for sale. No doubt the original of the letter was waiting on Jack Cavanaugh’s desk at his office. Suddenly Philip’s bout with the flu made perfect sense. If I’d sent that letter to Jack Cavanaugh, I’d be at home hiding in bed, too.

I waited for the rest of the morning for an angry phone call from Jack and was surprised when none came. By lunchtime I wondered whether he had still not returned to his office, or perhaps it was just that his powers of denial were so strong that he was treating Philip’s threat with the same lack of seriousness as he had Lydia’s.

I was busy deciding if I should do anything about it when Cheryl came in to say that Elliott Abelman was in reception asking whether I had the time to see him. Grateful for an excuse to put off a call to Jack, I told her to bring him back to my office.

Elliott slouched in wearing a nondescript navy-blue parka, a pair of jeans, and sneakers. Against the backdrop of Callahan Ross, he looked like a kid, a partner’s son home from college for the weekend. He didn’t sit down, choosing instead to lounge in my doorway.

“I was just on my way to pay a call on Leon Walczak.”

“Who’s that?”

“Peaches’s not-so-secret admirer. It turns out he works about a block from here washing dishes at a coffee shop on Quincy. I figured you might want to have a look at him.”

I took a look at my watch. “What the hell,” I said, getting up to grab my coat.

Leon Walczak worked in the filthy kitchen of the coffee shop in the Liberty Building. It was still the tail end of the lunch hour, so Elliott was careful to slip twenty dollars to the Greek behind the cash register who owned the place. He accepted the bill with a cynical shrug and pointed the way to the back of the restaurant.

We found Walczak hunched over a basin of dishwater, dipping greasy plates into the suds and then loading them into a plastic rack. He was a big man turned to fat, with greasy hair escaping from under a paper cap, a pasty face splattered with acne, and a grimy T-shirt showing beneath his dingy apron. His jaw was slack as he worked, his small eyes squinting through the steam. I felt sorry for Peaches. Walczak was a low-life creep. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the focus of his obsession.

When Elliott introduced himself Leon’s face was so flooded with fear that for a moment I half expected him to bolt and run. But Elliott, speaking firmly, managed to steer him out the back door into the alley behind the restaurant. Even so, it took several minutes for Leon to calm down. The police, it seems, had come to see him earlier in the day and his panic at all the sudden interest in him was palpable.

Still, he was eager to convince us of his innocence, at least of trying to harm Peaches.

“I would never hurt my Peaches! Never!” he insisted in a juvenile whine. “She’s my wife, you know. A man never does nothin’ to hurt his wife!”

“She’s not married to you, Leon,” Elliott said in the tone of someone breaking bad news. “She’s married to some guy named Jack Cavanaugh who owns a big factory in Bridgeport.”

“She just says that on account of the aliens,” Leon explained. “They’re trying to confuse her, sending those beams through the TV. They’re tricking her into thinking she’s married to somebody else.” He moved a step closer. “She doesn’t really love him,” he confided. “Her heart belongs to me. To me. She told me that at our wedding. She was a beautiful, beautiful bride.”

“I heard the cops caught you hanging around her house a couple weeks back,” Elliott scolded him. “I thought the judge told you what would happen if he caught you near her again. You don’t want to go back to jail, do you, Leon?”

“She never came to see me in jail,” Leon whined. “Not once. Other guys, their wives came. Wrote letters. Not Peaches. I used to be able to see her at least, see her on the news. But now that man made her stop. He made her quit to keep her from me. He’s very jealous. I know that about him.”

“What were you doing near her house, Leon?” Elliott demanded.

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Leon protested sullenly.

“The police think that someone might have sent her poison in the mail, someone who might want to hurt her.”

“I’d never hurt her! Never!” Leon shrieked.

“What were you doing at her house, Leon? You know what the police think? They think it was you!”

“No, no, no!” Leon shrieked, clamping his hands over his ears as if to blot out the horror of Elliott’s words. “I would never hurt her. I was just watching. Just w-w-w-watching over her.”

I bought Elliott a cappuccino at the Starbucks on the comer of Monroe and LaSalle. We sat side by side on a low brick wall surrounding a tiny patch of public grass at the foot of the El station.

“So what do you think of Leon?” he asked, carefully prying the white plastic lid from his cup.

“Nothing in my background has given me any insights into evaluating psychopaths,” I confessed, taking a sip of coffee. “But I’ll say one thing, aside from being seriously nuts, he doesn’t strike me as being particularly bright.”

“Joe went back to the files and pulled the original arrest jacket and let me read the psychiatric evaluation last night. According to the shrink who wrote the report on him, Leon is a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from delusional psychosis in the form of the belief that Peaches Parkenhurst is his wife and that space aliens are interfering with her memory. According to Leon, he and Peaches are pawns in a secret war being waged between the aliens and NASA.”

“He mustn’t be as dumb as he looks. That sounds like a pretty sophisticated delusion.”

“Don’t be impressed. It’s actually the plot of an old episode of the
Twilight Zone.”

“He seemed very upset that we’d think he would hurt her.”

“Who knows what someone with bat shit for brains thinks? Maybe he thinks that if he kills her, he’ll be saving her from the aliens. Maybe he got jealous and decided the only way he could keep her from Jack would be to kill her. You never know. Joe pulled copies of the phone records for all of the Cavanaughs. There’s no denying that Leon started calling her the day he got out of prison. Maybe he turned violent in jail. It’s been known to happen.”

“Again, I’m no expert, but I could see Leon breaking into her house and killing her in a jealous rage, even lying in wait for her. But putting together something as sophisticated as mixing cyanide with Fluorad? And what about the package? How would he have gotten his hands on the business cards? All those things would be hard for him to get. Even if he could have thought of it—and how the hell would he know about the Fluorad and what it can do?—I can’t imagine that he’d be able to think clearly enough to pull it off. The space aliens would always be getting in the way.”

“Joe showed his picture around the Superior Plating plant this morning.”

“And?”

“Nobody’s seen him.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Elliott stared thoughtfully into his coffee. “It leaves us exactly nowhere,” he said.

* * *

Back at the office there were still no messages from Jack Cavanaugh. Just to be on the safe side, I had Cheryl call his office to make sure that he had indeed received Philip’s letter. Loretta, his secretary, assured her that he had, but when Cheryl asked if he was available to speak to me, his secretary said that he wasn’t taking calls.

Fine, I thought to myself, when Cheryl came in to tell me about it. Be that way.

“Did you still need to see Madeline?” asked my ever-efficient secretary as she turned to go back to her desk.

“Is she in today? I’d have thought she’d at least take the afternoon off after the funeral.”

“No. She’s here. I just bumped into her in the ladies’ room, that’s what made me think of it. I’ll ring her extension and see if she’s free. And while I’m thinking about it, don’t forget you’re going to dinner at Hard Rock at five-thirty.”

I dug through the papers on my desk for the things I’d set aside to ask Daniel’s secretary about.

“I see you’ve put that picture of Dagny out,” Madeline observed. “It was a favorite of Mr. Babbage’s, too. I guess he must have been right about the two of you hitting it off. He was a good judge of people, you know. That’s one of the things that made him so good at what he did.”

I reflected that in the short time I’d had the Superior Plating file, I’d managed to piss off practically every member of the Cavanaugh family. And with Jack Cavanaugh I’d done such a good job that he wasn’t even taking my calls. But I didn’t say anything about it to Madeline.

“Here’s what I’m looking for,” I announced, finally pulling the documents out from underneath the Frostman Refrigeration file and passing them to her. “There were just a couple of things with no explanation. I didn’t want to bother Jack Cavanaugh unnecessarily, so I thought I’d check with you to see if you knew what they were about.” She took a quick look at the hank statements and handed them back to me.

“This one’s easy. It’s a retirement fund that Mr. Cavanaugh asked Mr. Babbage to set up when their old housekeeper retired. Her name’s Henrietta Roosevelt, but they always called her Nursey. I’m not exactly sure how it’s set up, but I think the money came from Superior Plating. Dagny transferred it into an account with a bank in Chicago every quarter and they paid it out to her bank in Georgia.”

I wrote a note to Cheryl and clipped it to the statements. She would need to figure out the mechanics of the transfer. I didn’t want old retired Nursey to miss out on one of her checks.

“What about this?” I asked, handing her the yellowing trust agreement pertaining to Zebediah Hooker. “It looks like some sort of trust was set up and I was curious what it was all about.”

“I couldn’t tell you anything about that,” Madeline said tersely. I could tell immediately that she knew more than she was willing to tell.