Bitter Business

overalls carrying heavy-equipment boxes marked cook county crime lab—and from the waiting room came the faint crackle of two-way radios.
    I heard Eugene Cavanaugh before I saw him. Bellowing unintelligibly, he charged toward Dagny’s office, oblivious to the scrum of blue uniforms attempting to restrain him. His face was terrible to see—almost disfigured by anguish and disbelief. I saw him and could think only of the little boy who’d lost his mother and his power of speech; his brother and control over his life; and had struggled so hard both times to regain what had been lost.
    Finally, the cops managed to turn the tide of his progress and led him back down the hall toward the reception room. For a long time after that I heard him through the thin plastic paneling.
    “Oh my God, not Dagny!” he wailed over and over again.
     
    When I met Detective Joe Blades for the first time at the hospital after Cecilia Dobson died, I hadn’t really paid him much attention. But this time I found myself observing him much more closely. Suddenly he was a man from whom I expected a great deal.
    At first glance he looked almost too young to be a policeman, and certainly a homicide cop. Tall and thin, he had a reddish-gold beard and a quiet, almost scholarly manner. He pulled up a chair from behind another desk, turned it around, and sat on it so that his hands rested along the top of its back. Without saying a word, he fished for something in the pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled out a Hershey bar.
    “You’d better eat this,” he said. His voice was cultured and deliberate.
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “I know. But it’ll still do you good. You’ve had a shock. In the bad old days I would have given you whiskey.”
    I took the candy bar, but would no doubt have preferred the whiskey. My hands were shaking so badly that it took me a few seconds to get the chocolate out of its wrapper. Self-consciously, I ate the whole thing. Even under the most appalling circumstances, I find chocolate impossible to resist.
    Blades took off his gold-framed glasses and began to polish them slowly with the fat end of his tie. Without them he looked even younger, a high-school kid who’d somehow managed to produce a beard.
    “What happened to your forehead?” he asked. “I should have one of the EMTs come back and have a look at you.”
    With trembling hands I reached up and touched my face. Slippery with sweat and blood, the lump in the middle of my forehead was definitely getting bigger. I winced at my own touch.
    “Her head hit me....” I stammered in explanation. “She had this seizure... at least I think that’s what it was. Her body arched up and I remember falling backward....”
    “Why don’t you just take it from the beginning and tell me what happened here today,” he suggested, pulling a small notebook from the pocket of his jacket.
    I tried to begin, but I could not organize my thoughts. Events were jumbled with emotion and my body and my brain were seemingly disconnected. In frustration, I forced myself to imagine that I was standing in one of the big lecture halls in law school, having been called upon to recite the facts of a case. It worked. Focusing on the main points, laying out events in a clear voice, I managed a semicoherent account of what had happened—the story of two apparently healthy women who died suddenly in the same office, one during the funeral of the other. By the time I was finished, Joe Blades looked grim.
    I had felt something turn inside of me as well. The sweating had stopped. So had the shaking. The panic, the shock of what had happened, had receded. But in its place was something else, something that gripped me by the entrails and would not let go. Clear and pure, unadulterated by ambiguity, unmitigated by circumstance, what I felt was anger. What I wanted was revenge.
     
    According to Elliott Abelman, the Monadnock Building is the perfect place for a private investigator’s office—halfway between the courthouse and the jail. Nonetheless, the building is a strange landmark. Sixteen stories tall and occupying an entire city block, it was built by John Root in 1891 as the tallest structure ever erected using wall-bearing masonry construction. At its foundation the walls are six feet thick. But less than a dozen years after its completion the technique of steel-frame construction was introduced and the sky was opened up to architects. John Root’s accomplishment had become