Grandma Prescott and my mother, though all smiles tonight, had never gotten along particularly well. My mother’s mother had been an accomplished equestrienne and a crack shot in an era when women didn’t shoot and they didn’t ride. She’d grown up under the disapproving eye of her own socialite mother and a puritanical father, both of whom adored my mother and did everything they could to undercut my grandmother’s influence over her.
In one comer by the fireplace I spotted my father, nodding amiably in agreement with his sister, Gertrude, who was one of the richest women in the world—and according to my mother one of the ugliest—on account of having married an elderly Van Buren shortly before his timely demise. She was a spectacular miser and had two sons, one who was completely estranged from her and another who had recently died of AIDS. Through his entire illness his mother had insisted defiantly to all of her friends that it was mononucleosis.
When we sat down for dinner I noticed that Mother had been careful to place the Prescott side of her family as far as possible from the Danforth side on account of a long-standing feud over the distribution of a family trust following my great-uncle Rawley’s death. The dispute was over a relatively trivial sum—especially in a family where everyone invariably lived on interest—but the acrimony it caused had rankled for more than a dozen years.
At the head of the table I could see that my father was already drunk. Mother had kept a sharp eye on him until he’d delivered the toast she’d written for him to offer before dinner, but judging from the way he was listing to one side, he was now only a couple of gin and tonics from oblivion.
I thought about what Daniel Babbage had said to me about my own family the day he handed the Superior Plating file over to me. He was right. There was very little difference between my family and the Cavanaughs.
Dinner was trout meunière caught the day before by some old friends of my grandmother’s from Canada and flown in specially. To serve it, white-gloved waiters placed large Villeroy and Boch plates in front of every person, each with a domed, silver cover. A waiter stood behind each pair of chairs, and at a discreet signal, the domes were simultaneously lifted to well-bred applause.
Stephen listened attentively to my cousin Gregory’s droning stories about grouse shooting in Wales. On my left, my great-aunt Victoria, who was deaf as an adder, bellowed to the dinner partner on her other side. I played with my trout and found myself thinking about cyanide.
Perhaps I had been too hasty in assuming that there was no thread connecting Cecilia Dobson and Dagny 1 Cavanaugh. They had worked in the same office, after all, both possibly privy to the same financial information. According to Jack Cavanaugh, Dagny had been keeping Superior Plating’s books since she was in high school. Perhaps she’d been embezzling money or covering up some other financial impropriety that Cecilia had discovered. Neither Elliott nor I felt that Dagny’s secretary had been above a bit of blackmail. Perhaps Dagny had killed her and then committed suicide in a fit of remorse. The police hadn’t found a suicide note, but I knew that in more than half of the cases where a person takes their own life, they don’t leave a note. Still, it didn’t fit with my impressions of Dagny, but who could tell?
Or perhaps the two deaths were tied together in another way. Perhaps a disgruntled employee with a particular grudge against the financial side of Superior Plating had decided to extract their own brand of revenge. While I was pretty sure that the police would question the Superior Plating employees about the possibility, I made a mental note to have Elliott check through personnel records just in case something might turn up.
After the cake was cut, “Happy Birthday” sung, and the presents unwrapped—Stephen’s gift of a set of hand-tied McGregor trout flies was the hit of the evening—we said our farewells. Stephen had an early meeting with his hematology research group the next morning and I was in a hurry to get back to Hyde Park. I wanted to stop at the hospital and see Daniel Babbage. To my surprise, Stephen offered to come along.
“What was that detective guy doing at your apartment?” he asked as we headed south on Lake Shore Drive. Every day I noticed more boats in the harbor—a sure sign of spring.
A number of answers to his question streamed past each other through my brain, not the least of which was “none of your business,” but I opted for the truth.
“He’s been hired by the Cavanaughs to help find out what happened to the two women who died at Superior Plating. He came to tell me that the medical examiner’s office found out that both of them died of cyanide poisoning.”
Stephen gave a soft whistle that rang through the dark interior of his BMW. We were passing through the noman’s-land between the projects and home. On our left, fires glittered on the beach.
“So do the police think it was murder?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I guess there’s a lot of cyanide used in plating, so it could have been an accident.”
“Cyanide is bad stuff. It’s odorless, tasteless, and a little goes a long way. You actually die of asphyxiation, which is what makes it hard to trace postmortem. Chemically, cyanide interferes with the enzymes that control the oxidative process. It prevents the body from using the oxygen in blood by crippling the cytochrome oxidase system that converts oxygen’s energy to a form the body can use. That’s why cyanide poisoning is sometimes referred to as internal asphyxia because even though the person may be taking in air through the lungs, it isn’t being absorbed into the bloodstream.”
“Which is why CPR doesn’t do any good,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.
Stephen said nothing as we turned off the drive at Fifty-seventh Street and headed for the hospital.
* * *
It was eleven o’clock at night, but in the emergency room at the University of Chicago Medical Center, it might as well have been noon. Most of my roommate Claudia’s patients come to her through the ER, and while there’s no such thing as a slow night in the combat zone of a big-city hospital, she, like most people who work there, is fond of predicting whether it will be busy based on all sorts of outside factors—hot weather, a holiday weekend, a full moon—all of which are held to add to the regular number of gunshots and overdoses, women in labor, and general gore that come through their doors.
Once the elevator carried us above the first floor, however, things grew quieter. Stephen, who’d done his medical training there, had lived five of the most intense years of his life in this building. Since then his work had carried him away from the hands-on practice of medicine. He said he didn’t miss it, but looking at his face, I wasn’t sure.
When we got to Daniel’s room it was empty. The bed had been stripped down to the obscene black plastic of the hospital mattress. The cards and the flowers were all gone.
“Maybe he’s been moved,” said Stephen, quickly anticipating my alarm. “Let me go and see if his chart’s at the nurses’ station.” He stepped out into the hall and turned back. “Are you going to be okay?”
I nodded mutely, staring at the vacant bed, not wanting to move. When Stephen came back the news was no surprise. Daniel had died at three-twenty that afternoon while I was in the air flying back to Chicago. I bit my lip. It had been no secret that he was dying. That was why I’d wanted to come to the hospital tonight and not wait until morning. I thrust my hands miserably into the pockets of my raincoat and felt the plastic sarcophagus of one of the cigars I’d bought for him.
Suddenly it all seemed so hopeless. Daniel was dead and so was Dagny. The rest of the Cavanaugh family seemed to have embarked on an unalterable course of self-destruction, and in the end what difference did any of it make?
“I want to go now,” I said, wrapping my coat around myself against the sudden chill.
Even though he lived only a few blocks away, Stephen rarely came to my apartment. His appetite for luxury was enormous and he lived so beautifully that when he came to my apartment he felt like he was slumming. But tonight he took me home without demur, coming in without being asked.
I knew that I
did not love Stephen. I knew that if I did, my heart would not beat faster whenever Elliott Abelman was in the room. But tonight what I felt for Stephen was not about love. I had had a plateful of death and loss and sorrow. That night in my apartment I quite simply hungered for something else.
I know that women look at Stephen Azorini and imagine what he must be like in bed—what it must be like to possess and be possessed by a man like him. For Stephen and me, sex had always been the constant, the chemistry invariable and dramatic like indoor fireworks. That night, in my own bed, I was seized by the need to drive out the demons of the past week, to exorcise them with the sweat of sex.
By morning we did such a good job that I think Stephen was going to be hard-pressed to stay awake during his morning meeting.
* * *
I woke up late and made myself coffee. There was a pair of size-six Nikes under the kitchen table. I realized Claudia must have come home sometime during the night—hopefully during one of the lulls in the action.
I went for a long run. The sun was out and I decided to brave a course through the cultural gardens behind the Museum of Science and Industry. I ran through the immaculately maintained Japanese garden and all the way to South Shore and back without incident. Then I came home and took a long shower. It was nice, I reflected, to spend the night at home for a change. It was nice to avoid that funky walk home on Sunday morning dressed in Saturday night’s high heels.
After the emotional upheaval of the last several days, I finally felt at ease with myself. Whatever it was that I had been trying to drive out with the past night’s exercise was gone. Strangely enough, I even found a sense of comfort in the knowledge that Daniel was finally dead. As long as he was alive, he had hovered over the Superior Plating file as I continually second-guessed myself, wondering how differently he would have chosen to deal with every new situation. Now the file was mine and I was ready to reassess and start from scratch. It was no use beating myself up over the debacle of the Cavanaugh family meeting. From here on in it wasn’t Daniel’s show, it was mine.
As I prepared to leave for the office I was surprised to see Joe Blades climbing the stoop to my apartment. His step was slow and his face pale with fatigue. Homicide cops, I guessed, just like ER docs, had busy Saturday nights.
“Detective Blades, what a pleasant surprise,” I said. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”
“Suspicious death call on Fifty-eighth Street. Turns out it was an eighty-seven-year-old piano teacher who died in her sleep. As long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d look you up.”
“Do you want to come in? I can make some fresh coffee,” I volunteered, still uncertain whether this was an official or a social visit.
“Actually,” he said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with the fat end of his tie, “I was wondering whether you might have a few minutes.”
“Sure,” I replied.
“Then, if you wouldn’t mind taking a ride with me, there’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”
20
“I assume Elliott already told you about the cyanide,” Detective Blades remarked amiably from behind the wheel of his official police vehicle—OPV for short. Elliott had once pointed out that all OPVs had license plates beginning with the letters QF, thereby forming a code recognized by every small-time hoodlum in the city. This one was a sorry white Chevy Cavalier that smelled of spilled coffee and old cigarette smoke. Blades hadn’t mentioned where we were going and I didn’t ask.
“I saw Elliott yesterday. He told me that they were poisoned.”
“What can you tell me about Dagny Cavanaugh’s relationship with her secretary? Were they on good terms?”
“I don’t know if they were on good terms,” I hedged, strangely reluctant to say more. Somehow, in the light of what had happened, Dagny’s irritation with her secretary seemed magnified and strangely out of proportion.
“The first time we met, the day that Cecilia Dobson died, as a matter of fact, Dagny told me that Cecilia was actually a very competent secretary.”
“But she didn’t like her.”
“There were things about her behavior at work that Dagny felt were unprofessional.”
“For example?”
“Cecilia had begun to dress provocatively.”
“One of the secretaries at Superior Plating said that the day she died Cecilia had defied Dagny’s standing order forbidding her from going down onto the plant floor. How did Ms. Cavanaugh feel about that?”
“I think she was annoyed,” I said. “But so was her brother Eugene, who was in the plant giving me a tour— actually, he was furious. But I don’t think their concerns were about Cecilia herself, but rather that her presence in the plant was unsafe. I don’t think that any of it was personal, which is why I don’t see what you’re getting at. Believe me, lots of people get mad at their secretaries, but they don’t kill them.”
“Was it your impression that Dagny Cavanaugh was an emotionally stable woman?”
“She struck me as being exceptionally levelheaded.”
“To the point of being calculating?”
I found myself getting annoyed, but I tried not to show it. After all, the man had a job to do. But I couldn’t help wondering what it must be like to be married to a cop, a man whose job it was to wring the worst possible interpretation from the most simple declarative sentence. It would, I concluded, be even worse than marriage to a lawyer.
“I didn’t know Dagny Cavanaugh very well,” I continued patiently. “We’d only known each other for a few days, but in that time she seemed like a very intelligent and reasonable person—the kind who acts more from the head than the heart.”
“Not the kind who would poison her secretary in a rage and then, three days later, swallow poison herself in a fit of remorse?”
“It seems far-fetched.”
“Believe me, stuff like that happens all the time. Homicide is definitely on the rise in the workplace.”
“I don’t doubt it, but if you’d met Dagny Cavanaugh, you’d realize what a preposterous scenario that is. Dagny wasn’t some dope-crazed lowlife psychotic living on the fringe. She was a successful executive. She was also one of the most sensible, down-to-earth people I’d ever met. The worst she would have done to Cecilia Dobson was fire her—and even then I think she would have regretted it. I’m telling you, I was with her the night before she died; we sat up until almost midnight talking. There was nothing she said or did that would indicate to me that she was capable of the kind of emotionally driven crime you’ve just described.”
“I’ll give you the fact that poisoning isn’t usually a crime of passion—not like the guy who comes home, finds his wife playing hide the salami with the Maytag repairman, pulls out his trusty Colt forty-five, and blows them both away. Most people kill when they’re angry or afraid or feel that they themselves will be killed. In addition, most homicides involve alcohol or drugs. Poisoning is the exception because it’s almost always either an accident or a crime of premeditation.”
“So which one was this?”
“At this point, Kate, I’ve got to tell you, your guess is as good as mine.”
The office of the Cook County medical examiner occupies a dismal bunker on a barren stretch of West Harrison.
Minicam vans for each of the three major Chicago stations were parked at the curb in front of the entrance.
“What are they doing here?” I demanded, suddenly panicked at the thought that someone acquainted with Superior Plating and the Cavanaughs had contacted the press—Lydia, perhaps, in her thirst for ink. I could imagine the headlines: SERIAL POISONER TERRORIZES SOUTH-SIDE WOMEN…
“They’re waiting for Violet Kramer.”
“Who’s Violet Kramer?”
“She was a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared from the Old Orchard Mall two days before Christmas. Up until this morning she’s been officially listed as missing. It’s been all over the media. Don’t you read the papers?”
> “Only the Wall Street Journal.” Joe Blades shot me a look of disbelief before he continued.
“They found her body this morning in the woods near Ravinia. Somebody must have tipped the press that they were bringing her in. They’re waiting to get shots of the morgue wagon for the six o’clock.”
The security guard who occupied the grimy booth at the entrance to the parking lot waved us in without question, recognizing either Detective Blades, his official white Chevy Cavalier, or both. We parked behind the building across from the loading dock, where two men in orange coveralls lounged in front of the overhead doors, lifted and gaping, no doubt awaiting the mortal remains of Violet Kramer. I fell into step beside the homicide detective, who greeted them both by name as we passed.
Inside, the building was a maze of hallways and stairwells that seemed to have been connected at random in a clear case of municipal architecture gone wrong. The walls were painted the exact same depressing shade of mossy green I’d noticed at police headquarters; the city must buy the paint in quantity, probably from some alderman’s brother-in-law in the paint business. The sickly smell of formaldehyde hung in the air. Beneath it lingered the suggestion of unbelievable stench.
Blades, obviously at home, led the way up a flight of stairs and down a long corridor punctuated by bulletin boards and office doors. From behind a few of them I heard voices, but no ringing of phones, which struck me as odd until I remembered that it was Sunday. The homicide detective stopped and knocked on one of the doors at the far end of the hall. Beside it on the wall was a brown nameplate that read DR. J. GORDON, ASSISTANT MEDICAL EXAMINER.
As we entered, the doctor looked up from a file on the desk in front of her and smiled.
Dr. Julia Gordon was a small woman, tiny in fact, with a short cap of blond curls and translucent skin that made her look, despite the authority of her lab coat, more like a novice in a convent than a person who made her living taking dead bodies apart with a surgical saw. She reached over the top of her desk to shake my hand and pronounced herself grateful that I’d come to see her.
Bitter Business Page 18
