Bitter Business

the time to find out the big things.”
    “You cannot start blaming yourself,” I said firmly. “Whatever happened, it isn’t your fault.”
    Dagny looked up sharply. “That doesn’t matter. Philip is still going to blame me.”
    “That’s nonsense,” I replied. “They don’t even know how she died. How can he be worried about whose fault it is?”
    “You don’t understand my brother. Placing blame is how he reacts to a crisis.” She cast her eyes vaguely around the waiting area. “Do you think we need to stay here for anything? I should get back to the office and see if they’ve been able to reach her family. I’ve got to tell everyone what’s happened.”
    “I don’t know.”
    As we discussed what to do, a tall, thin man in his late thirties approached us. He had thinning hair and a reddish-gold beard that gave him a vaguely professorial air. From the pocket of his tweed jacket he produced a gold detective’s shield. Leading us to a relatively quiet comer of the waiting room, he explained that the police are called in to investigate any case of death that cannot readily be explained by the person’s age or medical condition.
    Drawing a small notebook from his pocket, he asked us questions that took us efficiently through the events of the last two hours. We answered as best as we could, though I was surprised at the extent to which the crisis had fogged my memory. I had been so focused on Cecilia that there were a hundred things I seemingly hadn’t noticed—the time, whether anyone had been in the next room when we found her, whether she’d had anything in her hand. Still, for a man whose job it was to question the newly bereaved, sobbing mothers and fresh widows, Dagny and I must have made for a pleasant, if unproductive change.
    In the end, his questions hadn’t taken very long, and when we were finished, I gave him Cecilia Dobson’s purse, for which he laboriously wrote out an evidence receipt. He also gave me one of his cards. I tamed it over in my hand. It read: DETECTIVE JOE BLADES—HOMICIDE.
     

5
     
    When I got back to the office, Cheryl had already gone for the day. On Monday nights she had civil procedure and left at five o’clock on the dot. Shrugging off my coat, I dialed Daniel Babbage’s extension only to be told by the switchboard operator that he’d already left the office. I tried his home number but got no answer. I felt too restless to do anything but flip blindly through the message slips that Cheryl had left for me. From every available surface the stacks of files rebuked me for work undone, but I was powerless to begin. Cecilia Dobson might have been a stranger, but her death had dealt me a sucker punch nonetheless. Sitting impotently in my own office, I realized that I simply had no idea how to pick up the routine of my life after someone died.
    When the phone rang I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Please, God,” I whispered as I picked up the receiver, “let it not be my mother.”
    “Hey, Kate. It’s Stephen,” came a familiar voice, hollow from his speakerphone. “I just called to see what you were up to tonight.”
    “I’m going out to get drunk,” I replied. “You’re more than welcome to join me if you’d like.”
     
    In the wood paneled bar of the University Club I put as many scotches as I could between myself and the death of Cecilia Dobson. Stephen, who is six-foot-five and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds, can, as a rule, carry a bigger load of Chivas than I can, but tonight he didn’t even try to keep up.
    Stephen Azorini is a client—the one I sleep with— which is, of course, against the rules. But then Stephen has been breaking rules from the first day I met him, when we were both in prep school and he walked off the lacrosse field in the middle of a game against Culver Academy to ask me out. Since then we have been many things to each other, not all of them easy to explain. In high school our relationship was fueled by a combination of lust and rebellion; in college, with Stephen at MIT and me at Bryn Mawr, we passed naturally into a casual albeit intermittent friendship. When we both found ourselves at the University of Chicago for graduate school— Stephen picked up a Ph.D. in chemistry during medical school the way another man might acquire a second pair of pants—we saw each other seldom despite the fact that we were separated by no more than a city block.
    Stephen came to my wedding. There is a photograph of him