Bitter Business

wife—plays Bonko with some of the ladies from church on Thursdays. I was going to take Cecilia out to dinner and tell her that we were through.”
    “Why?” I asked, with a mounting sense of alarm. All I could think of was what this was going to look like to the police.
    “She’d started asking for money. Hinting that she really needed a nicer apartment, that I should buy her a car. She thought that because my family owns the company that I must be rich. I tried to explain to her that the house, the car, all of that belongs to my father. But she Wouldn’t believe it. God knows what he’d have done if he found out I was sleeping with one of the secretaries.” He gave an involuntary shudder at the thought. “And she was getting so bold. She started wearing these sexy outfits to work. Some days she’d just walk into my office and start flirting. It scared me to death. I’ve never done anything like this before. The whole thing was like a sickness. You know that it’s wrong. You know that it’s dangerous. You’re terrified and yet you can’t help yourself. You go ahead and do it anyway. And then, after a while, the thrill wears off and all that’s left is the fear— the fear that you’ll get caught and you’ll have ruined everything that you’ve worked your whole life for—”
    “You have to go to the police and tell them,” I broke in—no-nonsense advice that was much easier to give than to receive.
    “I couldn’t possibly,” Philip stammered spinelessly. “What if it turns out there’s something funny about the way they died? I can’t be involved in that.”
    “You’re already involved,” I countered, deliberately taking a very tough tone. If Philip came to me expecting a sympathetic confessor, he’d been mistaken. “And believe me, if there’s ‘something funny,’ as you so eloquently put it, about the way they died, the longer you wait to tell the police, the worse it will look.”
    The expression on Philip’s face was hard to read—mulish and miserable.
    “But she’s dead,” he protested. Philip Cavanaugh, master of the obvious.
    “The police don’t care whether you were cheating on your wife,” I told him. “But believe me, they’ll care a great deal if they find out you’ve been withholding information.”
    “What difference can it make?”
    “To you? A great deal. If they find out that you lied about Cecilia Dobson, they’re going to assume that you’re lying about other things—and they’re going to assume there’s some reason. If you think they were asking embarrassing questions at your house this morning, wait until they find out you lied to them. Besides,” I added, taking another tack, “don’t you want to find out what happened to them? You probably know things about Cecilia that nobody else knows, things that might be relevant to how she and your sister died.”
    “She had a boyfriend, you know,” said Philip, tossing off the information like throwing a bone to a dog. “He’s some sort of musician.”
    “Did she say anything else about him?” I asked.
    “Not really. Only that he was the jealous type.”
     
    Before I arranged for Philip to give his statement to the police, I called a criminal lawyer I am friendly with. I wasn’t sure what Philip’s confession about Cecilia meant, but of one thing I was sure: I know less about criminal law than your average felon in the street, and I was sorely in need of advice. At the very least I was hoping that Elkin Caufield would be able to arrange for one of the associates in his office to accompany Philip on his visit to the police.
    “I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” Elkin concluded once he’d heard me out. “Not unless you think there’s some possibility of your client being arrested and charged in the future.”
    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don’t even know how they died.”
    “That’s exactly my point. If he goes marching into police headquarters with a criminal lawyer in tow, the only thing that’ll happen is that the cops will assume he’s guilty of something.”
    “But...” I began to protest, some vague recollection having to do with the right to have an attorney present stirring in the back of my brain.
    “I know. It’s not what they taught you in law school. But believe me, even though you think he’d be acting prudently if he brings someone from my office with him, the cops will just think he’s acting guilty.”
    “He’s