Bitter Business

get rid of it. Even if for some reason he wasn’t afraid of his sister using it, why leave it lying around? It’s the one piece of physical evidence that might link him to the murder.”
    “Did anyone benefit financially from any of the deaths?” Elliott asked.
    “As far as I can see, no one. Except for Dagny’s daughter, Claire, of course, but so far we have no reason to treat her as a suspect.”
    “What about malice?” I suggested. “It seems to me that Lydia Cavanaugh hates every member of her family enough to want to poison them. By all accounts, she was pathologically jealous of her sister, Dagny, and her mother-in-law. For a while she changed her hair and started dressing like Peaches. They even traced crank phone calls they were getting last year to her.”
    “I know. And we’re running a check on the phone records for the entire family for the last three months. Believe me, we’re not ruling out anybody at this stage. Especially since Peaches was the victim of a felonious stalker two years ago.”
    “Surely that can’t be tied in to all of this?” I demanded, remembering the newspaper clippings Babbage had saved.
    “The Fluorad points to it being someone inside the company,” said Elliott. “But from what Joe tells me about the guy who was stalking Peaches, I don’t think we can rule him out.”
    “How could he have found out about the Fluorad,” I demanded, “much less have gotten his hands on it?”
    “The guy’s a real piece of work—not smart, but cunning. He managed to get a job as a janitor at the station where Peaches worked so that he could steal her keys and have copies made. He broke into her house on a number of occasions. When we finally went in to arrest him, his room was plastered with pictures of Peaches.”
    “So what happened to him?” I asked.
    “We sent him to jail for eighteen months with three years’ probation.”
    “So where is he now?”
    “He got out of jail on February first of this year,” said Blades, his voice heavy with resignation. “According to his parole officer, he’s living in an SRO on Halsted— about two miles from Peaches and Jack Cavanaugh’s house.”
     

29
     
    Daniel Babbage, a man who’d spent his whole life in the city, was laid to rest in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb he would have visited only at gunpoint while he was alive. The day was sunny but it was cold, and the wind blew so sharply that it ripped the petals off the flowers that had been mounded on top of the casket. In the wind, the lawyers who had come to see him buried seemed to flap around the graveside in their black coats like a flock of crows.
    Skip Tillman, the firm’s managing partner, spoke movingly at the internment—as ever, the consummate public man. His remarks were anecdotal. He recalled Daniel’s early years at the firm, his determination to serve family-owned businesses over the objections of his partners, his service, his loyalty, and above all his love for his clients. He talked from the heart about the bravery with which he faced his final illness.
    I look back at the morning of Daniel’s funeral as one of the low points of my life. Emotionally exhausted by the blitzkrieg of crisis surrounding the Cavanaughs and at sea about my personal life, I was tormented by the unsolved murders of Dagny Cavanaugh and Cecilia Dobson as by open sores. I had also quite simply been to too many funerals in too short a time. The fact that they had been for people I had really cared about just darkened the water at the bottom of the well.
    I had spotted Jack Cavanaugh across the crowd during the service and sought him out after the final benediction. Eugene, ever dutiful, was at his side. Father and son both seemed beaten down by the events of the past few weeks.
    “It was a beautiful service,” I said, falling into step beside them as we began to walk back to our cars.
    “Philip should have been here,” Jack complained.
    “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,”