Bitter Business (6 page)

I described how Dagny and I had found her as best as I could.

“They said she worked in some sort of factory. What kind was it?”

“It’s a plating plant.”

“Did she work near any chemicals?”

“No. She worked in the office.”

“And after you found her you immediately called nine-one-one?”

“Her boss made the call. I turned her over and started CPR.”

“Had she vomited?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Was there any sign of injury or violence?”

“No.”

“To your knowledge, did she ever regain consciousness?”

“Not while I was with her.”

“And as far as you can tell, she never resumed breathing on her own?”

“No. Is she going to be okay?”

Dr. Kravitz looked at me for a moment. “I’m afraid she’s dead,” she said softly. “We pronounced her a few minutes ago.”

I was quiet for a minute. I wondered how many times the doctor had to break this sort of news. I wondered if it got easier with practice.

“How did she die?” I asked finally.

“We don’t know yet. We probably won’t know until we get the autopsy results. I can send a social worker in to talk to you if you feel that would be helpful.”

“No. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Are you sure?”

“I never laid eyes on her before today,” I answered woodenly. “She really was a stranger.”

When I returned to the waiting room Dagny was there. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get here. We were trying to reach her family,” she explained breathlessly. “And did you get a hold of them?”

“No, not yet. We checked her personnel file. She listed a sister as next of kin, but when we called the number it had been disconnected. We’re still working on it. Do they know what’s wrong with her yet? Is she going to be all right?”

“She’s dead,” I said, wishing I could think of a less naked way to say it.

“Dead?” demanded Dagny, staggering backward at the news as if from a blow. “How can that be? She was fine an hour ago. You saw her yourself. How could something like this happen?”

“They don’t know. They’ll have to do an autopsy.”

“Oh my God,” Dagny whispered, sinking into a chair. “She was so young, just a kid. I think she was only twenty-two. What could have killed her so fast like that?”

“They wanted to know if there were any chemicals where she worked.”

“There are chemicals in the plant, but we’re tremendously conscious of safety. Besides, she worked in the office. She’d never come into contact with any of them.”

“They also wanted to know whether she used drugs.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Dagny replied, obviously still struggling to digest what had just happened. It was hard enough for me, but for Dagny, who had worked side by side with the dead woman, it must have been even worse.

“I feel so terrible,” Dagny continued. “I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know where she lived or if she had a boyfriend. I was so concerned with the superficial things that annoyed me about her that I never took the time to find out the big things.”

“You cannot start blaming yourself,” I said firmly. “Whatever happened, it isn’t your fault.”

Dagny looked up sharply. “That doesn’t matter. Philip is still going to blame me.”

“That’s nonsense,” I replied. “They don’t even know how she died. How can he be worried about whose fault it is?”

“You don’t understand my brother. Placing blame is how he reacts to a crisis.” She cast her eyes vaguely around the waiting area. “Do you think we need to stay here for anything? I should get back to the office and see if they’ve been able to reach her family. I’ve got to tell everyone what’s happened.”

“I don’t know.”

As we discussed what to do, a tall, thin man in his late thirties approached us. He had thinning hair and a reddish-gold beard that gave him a vaguely professorial air. From the pocket of his tweed jacket he produced a gold detective’s shield. Leading us to a relatively quiet comer of the waiting room, he explained that the police are called in to investigate any case of death that cannot readily be explained by the person’s age or medical condition.

Drawing a small notebook from his pocket, he asked us questions that took us efficiently through the events of the last two hours. We answered as best as we could, though I was surprised at the extent to which the crisis had fogged my memory. I had been so focused on Cecilia that there were a hundred things I seemingly hadn’t noticed—the time, whether anyone had been in the next room when we found her, whether she’d had anything in her hand. Still, for a man whose job it was to question the newly bereaved, sobbing mothers and fresh widows, Dagny and I must have made for a pleasant, if unproductive change.

In the end, his questions hadn’t taken very long, and when we were finished, I gave him Cecilia Dobson’s purse, for which he laboriously wrote out an evidence receipt. He also gave me one of his cards. I tamed it over in my hand. It read: DETECTIVE JOE BLADES—HOMICIDE.

5

When I got back to the office, Cheryl had already gone for the day. On Monday nights she had civil procedure and left at five o’clock on the dot. Shrugging off my coat, I dialed Daniel Babbage’s extension only to be told by the switchboard operator that he’d already left the office. I tried his home number but got no answer. I felt too restless to do anything but flip blindly through the message slips that Cheryl had left for me. From every available surface the stacks of files rebuked me for work undone, but I was powerless to begin. Cecilia Dobson might have been a stranger, but her death had dealt me a sucker punch nonetheless. Sitting impotently in my own office, I realized that I simply had no idea how to pick up the routine of my life after someone died.

When the phone rang I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Please, God,” I whispered as I picked up the receiver, “let it not be my mother.”

“Hey, Kate. It’s Stephen,” came a familiar voice, hollow from his speakerphone. “I just called to see what you were up to tonight.”

“I’m going out to get drunk,” I replied. “You’re more than welcome to join me if you’d like.”

In the wood paneled bar of the University Club I put as many scotches as I could between myself and the death of Cecilia Dobson. Stephen, who is six-foot-five and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds, can, as a rule, carry a bigger load of Chivas than I can, but tonight he didn’t even try to keep up.

Stephen Azorini is a client—the one I sleep with— which is, of course, against the rules. But then Stephen has been breaking rules from the first day I met him, when we were both in prep school and he walked off the lacrosse field in the middle of a game against Culver Academy to ask me out. Since then we have been many things to each other, not all of them easy to explain. In high school our relationship was fueled by a combination of lust and rebellion; in college, with Stephen at MIT and me at Bryn Mawr, we passed naturally into a casual albeit intermittent friendship. When we both found ourselves at the University of Chicago for graduate school— Stephen picked up a Ph.D. in chemistry during medical school the way another man might acquire a second pair of pants—we saw each other seldom despite the fact that we were separated by no more than a city block.

Stephen came to my wedding. There is a photograph of him dancing with my little sister, Beth, in a silver frame in the music room of my parents’ house, though I honestly don’t remember seeing him there. So much of what happened that day is a blur. What is clearer in my memory is the first night, just after Russell was admitted to the hospital after being diagnosed with cancer, when

Stephen appeared unbidden at his bedside to offer whatever help he could.

And now? Stephen is the CEO of Azor Pharmaceuticals, the company he founded straight out of medical school and which has been streaking across the high-tech heavens ever since. I am his lover and his lawyer. Beyond that I can’t be sure of anything.

After Russell died I was horrified by how quickly well-meaning colleagues began circulating word of my “availability.” I reacted by asking Stephen to be my escort whenever I had an unavoidable social obligation. It worked. There is something about Stephen that tends to discourage competition.

Stephen Azorini is handsome the way that professional basketball players are tall. Women actually stop to stare at him in the street. They want to run their fingers through the luxuriant waves of his dark hair, to stare deeply into the smoky blue of his eyes, and, I suppose, to have his babies—or at the very least have the fun of trying. When he’s in my office Cheryl is visited by a steady stream of secretaries with invented excuses who come in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I honestly have no idea how he stands it.

Tonight Stephen was looking tired, but it suited him. He had spent the last several months trying to organize a joint venture between Azor Pharmaceuticals and Gordimer A.G., the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, in order to speed development of a new immunosuppressant drug. Stephen’s scientists had laid the groundwork for the creation of a new compound that could potentially prevent organ transplant rejections.

While their scientific achievement was nothing short of dazzling, Azor lacked the financial muscle to make the arduous journey from discovery to drug development. Stephen, who was relentlessly pushing the deal toward closure, had entered what he referred to as his “full-sell mode”: flying between Chicago and Geneva alternately begging, threatening, and cajoling; granting the concessions and making the promises that would sustain a project that he believed in with a fervor approaching mania.

Stephen knew that something was bothering me. I didn’t often feel the need to hide out at the bottom of a bottle. But I was grateful that he didn’t ask.

All the time that Russell was dying we never talked about it. We had endless discussions about tests and treatments, of course, drug choices and surgical options, issues of morbidity and mortality. Stephen even helped me choose the clothes that Russell would be buried in. He stood beside me at the funeral, filling in for my absent older brother and a father who did not share my sorrow. But we never talked about feelings, what it was like to walk with full knowledge into a pit of unspeakable grief.

Since then we seem unable to grasp the vocabulary of emotions. Perhaps we never had it in the first place. Tonight I was just grateful for the scotch and the companionship, the familiar rumble of Stephen’s baritone as he filled me in on the progress he’d been making with the Swiss.

I didn’t tell him about Cecilia Dobson until I was ready and then I barely touched on the desperate scene on the floor of Dagny’s office.

“It’s just an accident that I was there when she was found. We didn’t say ten words to each other and now I feel like I’m going to be carrying her around with me for the rest of my life.”

“You will,” Stephen answered simply. “It happens to doctors and nurses. Ask anyone who routinely deals with death. They all have one that stays with them.”

“The worst part is not that it happened but that no one seems to have any idea why.”

“She probably overdosed on something.”

“That’s what the paramedics think. But when will they know?”

“They’ll probably do the autopsy in the next day or so, but if it was drugs it’ll take longer—a week to ten days to get the toxicology results back.”

“Ten days?” I wailed, surprised at how much the thought of waiting bothered me. I wanted it all to be over, her death explained, her body buried.

“I think I’m going to have to start shopping around for another lawyer,” Stephen chided. “You can’t be as tough as they say you are if you let a little thing like this rattle you.”

“It’s easy for you to joke,” I protested. “You weren’t there. My arms are sore from doing CPR on somebody who was probably dead already. I can still smell her perfume in my hair....” I picked up my glass and drained it in order to keep from crying.

“You’re right,” he said. “I wasn’t there. And you didn’t spend four years in medical school learning to pretend that suffering doesn’t bother you.”

“I don’t know if she suffered,” I answered, searching the depths of my glass for who knows what.

“It wasn’t her I was talking about,” he said. “It’s you.”

I got to the office later than I expected, but with less of a hangover than I deserved. Cheryl stopped me as I passed her desk.

“Don’t go in there,” she warned, pointing at the closed door to my office.

‘‘Why not? What’s going on?”

“Philip Cavanaugh is in there. He was already here when I got in to work this morning.”

“Why isn’t he in the reception room? What’s he doing in my office?”

“He was making Lillian crazy, pacing back and forth and asking her every five minutes when you’d be here, so I said he could wait in your office. Between you and me,” Cheryl confided, “he seems like a real prick.”

“Could you bring us some coffee, please?” I asked, taking a deep breath and squaring my shoulders to face Philip Cavanaugh.

“Oh, and your mother called,” she added as I prepared to open the door. “Twice.”