Bitter Business

by Hartzmark, Gini

“So when did they find all this out?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Have they told the family yet?”

  “You’d better leave that to Joe. He told me in confidence and that’s how I’m telling you.”

  We walked through a set of automatic doors into the indoor parking garage. Elliott’s car was parked in the towaway zone, a Chicago patrolman’s hat prominently displayed in the back window. I asked him about it.

  “It was a present from my dad. Cops don’t give other cops parking tickets, at least not in this town,” he said, unlocking the door and holding it open for me. “Why don’t we go someplace where we can talk? Joe gave me a copy of the autopsy report, but I was in such a hurry to meet your plane I haven’t had a chance to look at it.”

  I looked at my watch. “I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to get home and get dressed to go somewhere.”

  “Hot date?” Elliott asked. I thought I detected a note of something other than professional inquiry in his voice.

  “A birthday party for my grandmother,” I answered sweetly. “If you don’t mind giving me a ride back to Hyde Park, you can read the report out loud to me while I get ready.”

  Traffic was heavy heading into the city as suburbanites swarmed downtown for a good time on Saturday night. After the near summer of the Georgia spring, Chicago seemed cold and dreary. But when we swung around on the Stephenson and I caught the first glimpse of the rugged promontory of the downtown skyline, I felt the same quiet thrill I always do.

  “So what do the police think?” I asked, turning in my seat to look at Elliott while I talked. He drove fast but I easily, skirting construction barrels and keeping his eyes on the road. He was wearing the same jacket of chocolate-colored leather that he’d worn to breakfast at the Valois. Underneath, he had a plain white T-shirt and a pair of jeans. His hands were both strong and elegant, resting lightly on the steering wheel. I wondered why I had never noticed them before.

  “The police aren’t saying what they think, at least not yet,” Elliott replied, seemingly oblivious to my scrutiny. “But if I know Joe, he’s not jumping to any conclusions, though I can tell just from talking to him that he still hasn’t ruled out the possibility that the two deaths were accidental.”

  “How could they be an accident? Cyanide isn’t exactly the sort of thing you find lying around.”

  “If you work in a metal plating plant, it is. Joe says they get the stuff in fifty-pound shipments at Superior Plating every week. It’s the same stuff that you read about jealous wives slipping into their husband’s coffee in murder mysteries. According to the medical examiner’s office, there was enough cyanide in both women to have killed an elephant. I stopped over at Superior Plating on Friday while the guys from the health department were there. You can’t believe the number of poisonous chemicals they have just lying around. The company is required to keep something called an MSD book—a looseleaf notebook with a sheet for every hazardous chemical they use in the plant, with information on where it’s kept and what to do in case it’s accidentally spilled or swallowed. It’s as thick as a phone book. If you worked there and wanted to kill someone, you’d have your pick of poisons.”

  “Come on. They must take precautions. I can’t believe the cyanide’s just left lying around where anybody has access to it.”

  “No. It’s not. It’s kept in the hazardous chemicals room, which is actually a locked closet at the end of the hall between the administrative offices and the plant. A little old lady could kick down the door.”

  “Were there any signs that it was broken into?”

  “None that I could see. Joe’s going to go back over there tomorrow to see if he can nail down who had keys, whether any of the stuff was missing, that kind of thing. He’s also planning on bringing back the crime-lab boys to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb. For all anybody knows right now, someone could have accidentally filled the sugar bowl with cyanide and Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh liked their coffee sweet.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Don’t laugh. It could be as simple as that.”

  “And what if it’s not?” I demanded as Elliott pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment—another no-parking zone. “What if someone deliberately poisoned them?” I got out and said across the hood of his car, “No, I take that back. What if someone deliberately poisoned one of them?”

  “You mean that one of them was the intended victim and the other was what—some sort of accident?”

  I dug through my satchel bag for my keys, fumbling through the half dozen or so that were on the ring. Every lock in our building took a different key. According to the landlord, it made the apartment more secure, but I always felt that it increased my chances of being mugged on my own doorstep as I went from key to key.

  “Call it what you want—accident, camouflage, dress rehearsal,” I offered, finally managing to get us into the apartment. “The two women had almost nothing in common. What reason could there be to kill them both? It almost reminds me of the Tylenol poisoning case. I’ve never bought the police explanation that it was some demented lunatic who just wanted to kill people. The cops could never figure it out, so that’s the explanation they had to settle for. It always seemed much more likely to me that one of the people who died was the intended victim and the others were just window dressing. It would be so easy if you really wanted to kill somebody and not get caught, provided that you didn’t care how many other innocent people you murdered, too.”

  “Yeah, and it was probably a calculating attorney who slipped the cyanide into the Tylenol capsule—talk about cold. Do the people at work know you think about stuff like that?”

  I checked the time. I had a little more than forty-five minutes to get myself showered, dressed, and able to pass muster with my mother.

  “Listen. I’m going to run into the shower. Make yourself at home; help yourself to anything that doesn’t have mold on it.”

  Elliott looked around the living room dubiously. I knew that he was a meticulous housekeeper. Dust bunnies admonished me from every comer. I turned my back on them and headed for the bathroom.

  I emerged ten minutes later wrapped in a white terry-cloth bathrobe with damp hair wrapped in a towel, turban style. Elliott was stretched out in the black leather Eames chair that had briefly had a home in the library of my mother’s house. Dad had bought it for himself, arguing that it was good for his back, but in less than a month it had been banished by my mother and her decorator.

  “It’s weird the things you find out from an autopsy report,” said Elliott, looking up.

  He looked at me and something passed between us, a moment lasting a heartbeat, maybe two. I knew that everything that Joe Blades had said about his friend was true and the same stab of attraction that I’d felt in the past for Elliott was not a fluke. Furthermore, in the heat of our discussion about what had happened to Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh, I’d made a mistake: I should never have had Elliott come back to my apartment. In my head I heard the unmistakable bell of warning. I chose deliberately to ignore it.

  “So what did you find out?” I asked, slowly rubbing my hair with the towel. Elliott took a breath. I saw him choose to let the moment pass.

  “Cecilia Dobson had an old fracture of her right femur, probably from when she was eight or nine years old. She’d had rhinoplasty—that’s plastic surgery on her nose—one or two years ago. She’d also had breast implants and her tubes tied. Her last meal was a cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake—strawberry.”

  “Is that where the poison was? In the milkshake?”

  “They’re running the tests on the stomach contents today. Joe expects the results sometime tomorrow.”

  “What about Dagny Cavanaugh? What did she have to eat before she died?”

  Elliott flipped through the photocopied sheets in his lap.

  “That’s weird,” he said finally. “It says here that her stomach was almost completely empt
y.” He flipped back to the page he’d been reading from before. “Cecilia Dobson ate two and a half to three hours before she died, but it looks like Dagny had nothing to eat at all the day she died. What time did she die?”

  “It was close to four o’clock,” I said. Somehow it didn’t seem real to be talking about it this way. Dagny Cavanaugh had died in my arms, and here I was, five days later, standing and discussing it in my bathrobe with Elliott Abelman like it was some sort of abstract exercise in deduction.

  “Why would she have gone the whole day without eating?” asked Elliott, who, I knew, liked his meals regularly.

  “Maybe she wasn’t feeling well,” I offered. “Or maybe she just got busy. There are lots of days I’m so busy I wouldn’t get a chance to eat if Cheryl didn’t bring me a sandwich. Don’t forget, Dagny didn’t have a secretary anymore. Besides, you’ve been to the Superior Plating plant. The neighborhood’s not exactly a mecca for restaurants.”

  “But if she didn’t eat anything, what was the poison in?”

  “Won’t the tests they’re running tell us? Why don’t you come and talk to me while I put on my makeup?” I asked, keeping my eye on the time. Elliott extricated himself from my father’s chair and followed me down the long hall to my bedroom. The apartments in Hyde Park were built in the twenties, railroad style—living room and kitchen in the front, bedrooms along a single hall like a railroad car.

  Elliott perched himself gingerly on the end of my unmade bed and tactfully ignored the piles of clothes on the floor. The warning bells were louder now, but I told myself that if I were a male attorney discussing a client with a private investigator, there would be no awkwardness. I pulled my makeup bag out of my suitcase and went into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar for the sake of conversation.

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” came Elliott’s voice from the bedroom. “If Dagny didn’t eat anything the day she died, how was she poisoned?”

  “Maybe she drank something. Don’t you always read about putting cyanide in coffee to hide the bitter taste?”

  I dotted my face with foundation, cursing my own clumsiness as I knocked the bottle over and quickly picked it back up. I was strangely nervous, and the more I hurried the worse I got.

  I heard the rustling of pages.

  “It doesn’t say anything about coffee in either of them,” he reported.

  “I guess we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.” I selected an eye-shadow compact at random from the bag. My entire inventory of makeup was composed of samples accumulated by my mother and passed along to me. I told myself that I liked the small sizes because I traveled so much, but the truth is that I hadn’t been to a department-store makeup counter since becoming a lawyer and saw no reason to start now. “Let’s just assume for argument’s sake that only one of the women was the intended victim. Who would have wanted to kill Cecilia Dobson? Who would have benefited from her death? Have you managed to find her boyfriend yet?”

  “I drove down to Champaign to see him yesterday. I think I told you that he plays in some kind of grunge band. They were performing in a college bar down there. I’ve got to tell you, I heard them play. It really made me feel like my dad—you know, the music’s too loud, it just sounds like noise.... Anyway, the boyfriend didn’t seem too broken up about what happened—though I’m not sure he really understood everything I was telling him. Either he’s not very bright or he’s ingested one too many illegal substances. All of which is beside the point, on account of the fact that he’s got an alibi. It turns out he was in Iowa playing a gig the day she died. The other members of his band and the guy who owned the bar where they were playing backed him up.”

  “Was she insured?”

  “The police are looking into it.”

  “So who else might have wanted to have her out of the way?”

  “Philip Cavanaugh for one. He was having an affair with her and he wanted to break it off. What if she got nasty and told him she was going to go to his wife instead?”

  “He could always have paid her off. From what you told me, she probably picked up with Philip in the first place thinking there was money in it for her.”

  “But what if she was asking for too much? Maybe little Philip decided murder was cheaper than blackmail.”

  “But then what about Dagny?” I countered. “After Cecilia Dobson died, everyone assumed that she’d just overdosed on drugs. No one would have known about the cyanide if Dagny hadn’t died. Besides, Philip didn’t have a motive to kill his sister.”

  “Why not? Maybe he resented the competition. According to what Joe’s been hearing at Superior Plating, Dagny was the real brains of the outfit. Maybe he finally got tired of being shown up by his little sister.”

  “That’s an awfully big stretch,” I protested, holding my eyes open wide and stroking on the mascara. I looked at my watch. Six minutes. I abandoned the idea of doing anything special with my hair. Instead, I gave it a quick brush and wound it up into a French twist. I thought of the scene I’d witnessed that afternoon during the Cavanaugh family meeting. “I’m not going to tell you that these guys are the Waltons. It’s actually pretty clear that they all hate each other’s guts, but Dagny was the only one who seemed to have been generally liked and respected.”

  “You know that when we’re spinning different scenarios for a motive, they all work much better with Dagny as the intended victim.”

  “Hold that thought,” I said, closing the door and squirming into the midnight-blue cocktail dress I’d bought especially to wear to Grandma Prescott’s birthday party. It was a Jil Sander, the German designer who was making a name for herself in this country with elegant, pared-down clothes. The dress was simplicity itself, a scoop neck and long sleeves, but when I’d first tried it on, it struck me that there was something almost magical in the way it was cut. I also remember thinking when I looked at the price tag that there had damned well better be. I leaned over the sink and put on some lipstick.

  When I opened the door to the bathroom Elliott rose slowly to his feet.

  “You look beautiful,” he said in a hushed voice. Suddenly my bedroom seemed very small indeed. Elliott was so close.

  “You missed a button in back,” he said. “Here, if you turn around I’ll get it for you.”

  “That’s okay,” I murmured hoarsely. There seemed to be something wrong with my voice.

  “Come on. I won’t bite,” he urged, smiling.

  Suddenly I felt prudish and silly. An overworked lawyer letting her imagination run away with her.

  But when I turned and felt his fingertips brush the nape of my neck, I knew it had been dangerous to turn my back.

  19

  Only the doorbell saved me from doing something foolish. I heard the harsh sound of the buzzer and took a step away from Elliott. The moment dissolved into motion—Elliott stooping to pick up the copies of the two autopsy reports from the foot of my bed—me to the intercom panel in the front hall to buzz Stephen Azorini into the building.

  The two men shook hands in the foyer. They had never met before and each eyed the other with suspicion thinly veiled by civility—two cats circling each other at their first meeting. Elliott knew I had a relationship with Stephen, but I had never offered to explain it, holding firm the line between personal and professional involvement no matter what sparks of attraction might sometimes flash between us. Stephen, on the other hand, clearly did not expect to come to my apartment on Saturday night and find another man there already.

  I smiled radiantly at them both and gathered up the glittering excuse for a purse that I used for parties.

  “Did you remember to buy your grandmother a present?” Stephen inquired in paternal tones.

  The look on my face was most likely explanation enough, since he did not bother to wait for whatever excuse I might offer.

  “That’s okay.” He sighed. “I did. We’ll just sign the card from both of us.”

  As I preceded both men out the door I couldn’t help b
ut wonder what Elliott Abelman, private investigator, would deduce from that last exchange.

  The private dining room at the Whitehall Club was almost as pretty as my mother’s, though not nearly as large. She stood by the door greeting guests, flanked by my father and Grandma Prescott—a no-nonsense old woman who lived for fly-fishing and duplicate bridge.

  “Happy birthday, Grandma,” I said, kissing the papery skin of her powdered cheek.

  “Thank you, my dear,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length to look at me. “Your dad says that you’ve been working too hard and I won’t tell you what your mother’s been saying.” She gave a wicked chuckle. Her voice was gravelly from a lifetime of cigarettes and scotch, almost as low as a man’s.

  “When did you buy that dress?” my mother demanded as I moved on to give my grandmother a chance to talk to Stephen. She liked to joke that she might be too old to do anything about it but she still liked at least to look at a handsome man.

  “I was in Bonn this winter on business. One of the German attorneys working on the deal took me shopping.”

  “It’s very attractive,” my mother remarked, making the dress worth every single penny. I didn’t even let it bother me when she criticized my hair.

  Stephen and I did our duty during cocktails, saying hello to all the aunts and second cousins. Stephen was a much bigger draw than I was. No one ever knew quite what to say to me since I didn’t fit into any of the neat pigeonholes of their limited experience—no husband, no country club, a career that frankly baffled them. Stephen, on the other hand, with his movie-star good looks, had undeniable appeal.

  I drank less than I usually do at family gatherings, concentrating on the hors d’oeuvres, which were wonderful, especially the little puffs filled with a mixture of goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, which went a long way to compensate for the fact that I hadn’t had lunch. I also found myself paying more attention to the family dynamics, which I had up until now taken for granted.