Bitter Business

that we’d think he would hurt her.”
    “Who knows what someone with bat shit for brains thinks? Maybe he thinks that if he kills her, he’ll be saving her from the aliens. Maybe he got jealous and decided the only way he could keep her from Jack would be to kill her. You never know. Joe pulled copies of the phone records for all of the Cavanaughs. There’s no denying that Leon started calling her the day he got out of prison. Maybe he turned violent in jail. It’s been known to happen.”
    “Again, I’m no expert, but I could see Leon breaking into her house and killing her in a jealous rage, even lying in wait for her. But putting together something as sophisticated as mixing cyanide with Fluorad? And what about the package? How would he have gotten his hands on the business cards? All those things would be hard for him to get. Even if he could have thought of it—and how the hell would he know about the Fluorad and what it can do?—I can’t imagine that he’d be able to think clearly enough to pull it off. The space aliens would always be getting in the way.”
    “Joe showed his picture around the Superior Plating plant this morning.”
    “And?”
    “Nobody’s seen him.”
    “So where does that leave us?”
    Elliott stared thoughtfully into his coffee. “It leaves us exactly nowhere,” he said.
     
    * * *
     
    Back at the office there were still no messages from Jack Cavanaugh. Just to be on the safe side, I had Cheryl call his office to make sure that he had indeed received Philip’s letter. Loretta, his secretary, assured her that he had, but when Cheryl asked if he was available to speak to me, his secretary said that he wasn’t taking calls.
    Fine, I thought to myself, when Cheryl came in to tell me about it. Be that way.
    “Did you still need to see Madeline?” asked my ever-efficient secretary as she turned to go back to her desk.
    “Is she in today? I’d have thought she’d at least take the afternoon off after the funeral.”
    “No. She’s here. I just bumped into her in the ladies’ room, that’s what made me think of it. I’ll ring her extension and see if she’s free. And while I’m thinking about it, don’t forget you’re going to dinner at Hard Rock at five-thirty.”
     
    I dug through the papers on my desk for the things I’d set aside to ask Daniel’s secretary about.
    “I see you’ve put that picture of Dagny out,” Madeline observed. “It was a favorite of Mr. Babbage’s, too. I guess he must have been right about the two of you hitting it off. He was a good judge of people, you know. That’s one of the things that made him so good at what he did.”
    I reflected that in the short time I’d had the Superior Plating file, I’d managed to piss off practically every member of the Cavanaugh family. And with Jack Cavanaugh I’d done such a good job that he wasn’t even taking my calls. But I didn’t say anything about it to Madeline.
    “Here’s what I’m looking for,” I announced, finally pulling the documents out from underneath the Frostman Refrigeration file and passing them to her. “There were just a couple of things with no explanation. I didn’t want to bother Jack Cavanaugh unnecessarily, so I thought I’d check with you to see if you knew what they were about.” She took a quick look at the hank statements and handed them back to me.
    “This one’s easy. It’s a retirement fund that Mr. Cavanaugh asked Mr. Babbage to set up when their old housekeeper retired. Her name’s Henrietta Roosevelt, but they always called her Nursey. I’m not exactly sure how it’s set up, but I think the money came from Superior Plating. Dagny transferred it into an account with a bank in Chicago every quarter and they paid it out to her bank in Georgia.”
    I wrote a note to Cheryl and clipped it to the statements. She would need to figure out the mechanics of the transfer. I didn’t want old retired Nursey to miss out on one of her checks.
    “What about this?” I asked, handing her the yellowing trust agreement pertaining to Zebediah Hooker. “It looks like some sort of trust was set up and I was curious what it was all about.”
    “I couldn’t tell you anything about that,” Madeline said tersely. I could tell immediately that she knew more than she was willing to tell.
    “I just thought you might remember something about it,” I said, flipping to the last page where the originator of the document and typist’s initials were noted. “See,