Bitter Business

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “When I first came to work at the firm there was a secretary named Bernice Simmons who was a fully trained lawyer. She’d fought tooth and nail to get into law school at Northwestern—the only woman in her class. But after she graduated, the only job they’d give her was typing for Mr. Ross. She retired five or six years ago, just before you came. My friend Lucille ended up marrying a young man in the tax department, but it turns out secretaries were a hard habit for him to break and they ended up divorced. I worked for two years in the typing pool before I was assigned to Mr. Babbage. I’ve worked for him ever since. God knows what I’ll do now.”

  “You didn’t have to come in today,” I told her. “I can’t imagine that there’s anything that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I’m not doing anything that couldn’t wait until a year from tomorrow,” Daniel’s loyal secretary replied. “But when I got through with church this morning, I didn’t want to go back to my empty apartment. Somehow it seemed better to come in here and get a start going through his papers. There’s quite a bit of old material that will need to be put with the newer sections of the files. It’ll take weeks to get it all sorted out. Besides, this was his favorite place,” she said, indicating the office. “It just seemed right to be here today.”

  “Madeline, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “You probably knew Daniel better than anybody and I know he discussed his cases with you. Did he ever talk to you about why he decided to give certain files to certain lawyers after he learned he was ill?”

  “You mean, did he ever tell me why he chose you for Superior Plating?”

  “Yes. Why me?”

  “There were a number of reasons,” she replied. “For one thing, he thought you and Dagny Cavanaugh would hit it off. Mr. Babbage believed that more than anything else when you were dealing with a family business, it was important that the lawyer and the decision-making family member have a good relationship. Over the years he and Jack Cavanaugh became very close. Mr. Babbage thought over time the same kind of relationship would grow between you and Dagny.”

  “But when you say decision-making family member, wouldn’t that mean he’d want someone who’d get along with Philip Cavanaugh? After all, it’s Philip who’s going to succeed Jack as head of the company.”

  “Mr. Babbage told me that would never happen. He was convinced that Dagny would find some way to take over the company—or at least the main plating business. He assumed that after Jack died, Philip would spin off the specialty chemicals business—he never has had any real interest in plating, and according to Mr. Babbage, he has a real flair for the chemical business. He said you were the perfect person to structure that kind of transaction.”

  “He was probably right,” I replied grimly. “Unfortunately, things haven’t turned out like anyone expected. Dagny’s dead and my relationship with the rest of the Cavanaughs feels suspiciously like a group-therapy session from hell. With Dagny out of the picture I honestly don’t see what I bring to the party that’s going to be of any use to the Cavanaughs.”

  “I know that Mr. Babbage wouldn’t have agreed.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He said there was something else that you had that the other lawyers he was considering for the Superior Plating file didn’t have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  22

  All through the afternoon, as I worked at my desk, what Elliott had said about the police investigation gnawed at a part of me. I have been a lawyer long enough to have seen demonstrated with metaphysical certainty the fact that there is no force in the universe as powerful as the inertia of bureaucracy. I was chilled by the prospect of Joe Blades squeezing his search for the truth about what had happened to the two women into the odd moment between drug murders and domestic homicides.

  I believed it when Elliott told me that Blades was a good cop. But even a good cop can’t unravel one crime while he’s interviewing witnesses at the scene of another. Every time Blades took another call, it was going to take time away from the Cavanaugh case. And time wouldn’t be the only thing that would be lost. Physical evidence would disappear, memories would erode, and witnesses— if any had ever existed—would quietly fade away. It wouldn’t be too long before whatever urgency Blades might feel would be invariably diminished by the red heat of fresh murders.

  Of course that’s why I’d urged Jack Cavanaugh to hire a private investigator in the first place. But as tenacious and well connected as Elliott Abelman might be, he was still working from the outside. There were some things you could only manage if you were a cop, people who you could get to talk only if you wore a badge.

  The thing that rankled most—the thing that had rankled from the very beginnings—was the leisurely pace at which the toxicology lab seemed to operate. They had stumbled upon the cyanide by accident. What if they hadn’t? We’d still be waiting the two or three weeks for the toxicology results from Cecilia Dobson—which, when they eventually came back negative, would leave us exactly where we’d started.

  Suddenly the thought of all the evidence I’d seen the crime-lab technicians take out of the bathroom at Dagny’s office consumed me. Which of the little jars and vials in the bathroom medicine chest had contained the poison, if any? Once that was known, at least there would be a place to start. But how long was that going to take? A week? A month?

  Somewhere in this town there was someone with the juice to get what needed to be done done in a day instead of a week. The question was who and how to get to them. I thought about calling Elkin Caufield, my defense-attorney friend, but decided that whatever influence he’d managed to salt away had to be cashed in for his clients.

  Swallowing my pride, I reached for the phone to call Skip Tillman, the firm’s managing partner. Skip played golf with the governor and tennis with several members of Congress. In addition, Callahan Ross had always coughed up generous contributions to both political parties in the pragmatic belief that it always pays to cover yourself both ways.

  I dialed Skip’s number but hung up before it rang. However juvenile and perverse it might be, I hated the idea of crawling to the firm’s managing partner for a favor. I could just hear his well-bred, deprecating laugh as he explained to his lunchtime cronies what he’d managed to accomplish with a couple of phone calls. Besides, I suddenly thought of someone who was much better connected than Skip, someone who would be thrilled to have me owe her a favor....

  Which is why, when I picked up the receiver, it was my mother’s number that I dialed.

  Stephen called me from his office and asked what I was planning on doing for dinner. I looked at my watch; it was almost seven. I’d spent more than an hour on the phone with my mother—an all-time record, especially considering that we’d managed to remain on friendly terms throughout the conversation.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” I replied honestly. “Are you hungry?”

  I thought about it for a second. “I’m starved.”

  “How about Chinese food? We could stop in Chinatown on our way back to Hyde Park.”

  “That sounds good. I just have to finish up one or two things. Can you pick me up in about half an hour?”

  “Sure thing. I’ll meet you out front.”

  Thirty minutes later, give or take the time it took me to make sure that Daniel’s secretary, Madeline, had locked up his office and gone home, I found Stephen, good as his word, waiting behind the wheel of his dark blue BMW.

  “Did you get a lot of work done?” he asked as he pulled away from the curb. The streets were deserted, the windows of the office buildings on either side of us dark and empty. I was probably the last person to leave work in the loop—just in time to have dinner, catch some sleep, and get up bright and early to begin another week.

  “I did, but it’s never enough,” I replied, taking the pins from my hair and rubbing my scalp where it ached from the weight of my French twist.
“It doesn’t help that I’m burning all sorts of time on this Cavanaugh thing.”

  “You never told me what the funeral was like.”

  “It was awful. The worst part is that Dagny was the reasonable one in the family—the peacemaker. With her out of the picture, the Cavanaugh family is like a big driverless bus. I have no idea where it’s headed.” I went on to tell him in mortifying detail about the rapid disintegration of the Cavanaugh family meeting and how I’d resorted to climbing on a chair to restore order.

  “Sounds like a load of laughs,” Stephen remarked dryly, turning off of State Street onto Cermak.

  “It was so awful I’m seriously considering giving up the practice of law,” I said, groping in my purse for a rubber band and slipping my hair into a loose ponytail. “I’ve decided to work as a ticket taker at Disneyland for a year in order to restore my belief in the essential goodness of human nature.”

  “I’m sure your mother has some suggestions about what you could do with your time if you wanted to quit your job.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him, but I don’t know if he could see it in the dark.

  Chinatown is just two miles south of my office, but to drive there is a lesson in the strange physics that governs the city of Chicago. Offices, lofts, town houses, and rundown but still respectable businesses give way to block after block of abandoned real estate—crack houses, junkyards, and vacant lots that after dark become open-air drug markets. Turning west onto Cermak takes you through some of the meaner streets of this city.

  When it was built, the Hilliard Center Public Housing Project was heralded as a model of urban planning and contemporary architecture. But it’s a good bet that none of the dignitaries who traded self-congratulatory smiles at the ribbon cutting have been anywhere near the place since.

  Now the concrete walls have been spray-painted with graffiti and most of the windows shot out and boarded over. The little balconies that once had been lauded as a suburbanizing luxury were now covered over with chicken wire in an effort to channel traffic in and out of each building through the metal detectors at the single street-level entry.

  This stretch of Cermak is one of the city’s most shameful islands of hopelessness. A place where children play in the dirt in which some idealistic bureaucrat once dreamed of seeing grass, a place where violence is a more commonplace occurrence than employment, and even the most trivial of disagreements is settled by the exchange of gunfire.

  Once you pass under the Twenty-third Street viaduct, everything about the landscape changes. At the comer of Cermak and Wentworth, an ornately carved and painted archway canopies the street and welcomes you to Chinatown. The signs are in English letters and Chinese characters and the language spoken in the shops is the same nasal patter you’d hear on the streets of Hong Kong or Beijing. It is a neighborhood known for its hard work and prosperity, a place for the newly arrived and the newly affluent as well as the shopping center for the city’s burgeoning Asian population.

  Crime is not tolerated here, at least not the kind that is so flagrantly apparent at the Hilliard Center four blocks away. By tradition, the Chinese gangs concern themselves primarily with gambling and protection. Yuppy round-eyes like Stephen and me, who come for the food, are safe as long as we stay on the right side of the viaduct.

  While I was in law school a Canadian physician attending a professional meeting at McCormack Place, the city’s enormous convention center, had grown impatient trying to flag down a cab in Chinatown and had decided to walk the ten blocks back to his hotel. The city that woke up to read about his murder in their Sunday papers the next morning was shocked but not surprised. Chicago neighborhoods form a checkerboard of anarchy and gentrification, well-known to residents, but seldom spoken of in any tourist guide.

  Stephen and I always went to a restaurant called the Divine Palace. It was on the second floor, up a precipitously steep and narrow set of stairs in violation of every known fire and safety ordinance. Indeed, the whole place had been gutted in a fire a few years before. Fortunately no one had been hurt and the owners had managed to rebuild, going so far as to duplicate the tacky red vinyl banquettes of the original dining room. It did, however, take a few months after the grand reopening for the smell of smoke and charred plaster to disappear and for the restaurant’s full complement of roaches to return.

  We were late enough to miss the worst of the dinnertime crowd. The old Chinese grandma who spoke no English but handled the seating showed us to our table. I didn’t even bother looking at the menu. I always order the same thing: six pot-stickers, which I refuse to share, and an order of shrimp with tomato ginger sauce. Stephen, who is a tremendous food snob, always feels the need to remind me that they make the shrimp sauce with ketchup. That’s probably why I like it. Stephen ordered shrimp toast, a whole sea bass with red chilis, and a Tsing Tao beer for each of us.

  “So what did you do today?” I asked, taking a swallow of beer.

  “Mostly tried to get caught up,” he answered, holding his glass up to the light. Satisfied that it was clean, he poured his beer into it. “I’ve spent so much time going back and forth with the Swiss that I’m at least two months behind on everything else. I don’t know why I let you talk me into turning the hematology division over to Richard. I still haven’t been able to find anyone to take his place downtown.”

  Richard Humanski was Stephen’s former personal assistant, a brilliant young man long overdue for promotion. The fact that I’d suggested that Stephen promote him to head the hematology research division had become a familiar lament. But the truth is, Richard had been turning down offers from Stephen’s competitors for quite a while and it was only a matter of time before ambition overrode loyalty. Stephen knew full well that if he hadn’t given Richard his own division to run, some other company would have. That didn’t keep him from complaining to me about it whenever he felt overwhelmed at work, which was pretty much all the time.

  Stephen took a long swallow of beer. “So what do you think is going to happen to that plating company?” he asked. “Do you think that there’s any chance they’d want to unload their specialty chemicals division?”

  “Why?” I demanded. “Are you interested?”

  “Maybe. They make some very interesting proprietary compounds that we use in some of our hospital supply products. I might be interested if we could pick it up for the right price.”

  “If it comes up, I’ll tell them you’re interested,” I answered noncommittally.

  “From what I hear, it’s a tidy little operation. But I don’t see how it fits in with plating. Who knows? Maybe they’ll need the cash if they’re going to buy out that one shareholder.”

  Part of me felt uncomfortable discussing the affairs of one client with another. On the other hand, Lydia had advertised her intention to put her shares on the market in no less a public place than the Wall Street Journal.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” I said as our appetizers came, “I have no idea what is going to happen with this company. For all I know, Jack Cavanaugh is on the phone right now trying to find another lawyer to replace me. I’m sure my stunt standing on the chair impressed the hell out of him.”

  “Maybe he should consider hiring a minor-league hockey official to break up his family meetings. He’d charge a hell of a lot less an hour and he’d even bring his own whistle.”

  “Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.” I stirred the soy sauce around on my plate with the end of my chopsticks. “This case depresses the shit out of me. And it’s not just the dead people and the funerals. A week ago I thought I was a pretty competent lawyer. Now I realize that there’s a big difference between the kind of technical knowledge that I have and the—I’m not sure what to call it—the kind of old-fashioned lawyerly wisdom that Daniel Babbage took to the grave with him.”

  “I’m sure that he didn’t have it at your age either. In lawyer years, you’re still a baby. You don’t have gray hair or a potbelly or anything yet.” Stephen hel
ped himself to a piece of shrimp toast. It looked ridiculously small in his enormous hand. “I did something else this afternoon. I went looking at real estate,” he said, taking a bite.

  “What kind of real estate?” I demanded, chopsticks poised in midair. I knew that Stephen had long dreamed of moving his research facility from the south side out to Schaumberg, but I thought that the money for that was still a long way away.

  “An apartment, actually.” He ducked his chin and ran his fingers through the dark waves of his hair.

  “Why would you think of moving?” I asked, taken aback. Stephen’s apartment was spectacular: six enormous bedrooms with a view of the lake and a doorman named Randolph who made sure that his dry cleaning got delivered on time.

  “I’m not sure that I am,” he replied. “One of my bankers called me last week to tell me about an apartment that might be coming on the market. A big old place that used to belong to a little old lady who just died. Her family all live in California now and they’re thinking of selling.”

  “So you went to look at it?”

  Stephen lifted his bottle, signaling to the waiter for more beer. “Don’t you ever think about leaving Hyde Park, Kate?”

  “No,” I replied. “I’m perfectly happy where I am.” I was also so busy with work I didn’t see where pointless speculation about places to live would fit into my schedule.

  “What about after Claudia finishes her residency?”

  “She won’t be done until a year from June. I still can’t get over the fact that you’d even think about moving. Your apartment’s gorgeous and you just finished putting in an exercise room.”

  “Doesn’t the grunge of Hyde Park ever just get to you? The winos on the street comers, the car alarms going off all night?”