Bitter Business

same jacket of chocolate-colored leather that he’d worn to breakfast at the Valois. Underneath, he had a plain white T-shirt and a pair of jeans. His hands were both strong and elegant, resting lightly on the steering wheel. I wondered why I had never noticed them before.
    “The police aren’t saying what they think, at least not yet,” Elliott replied, seemingly oblivious to my scrutiny. “But if I know Joe, he’s not jumping to any conclusions, though I can tell just from talking to him that he still hasn’t ruled out the possibility that the two deaths were accidental.”
    “How could they be an accident? Cyanide isn’t exactly the sort of thing you find lying around.”
    “If you work in a metal plating plant, it is. Joe says they get the stuff in fifty-pound shipments at Superior Plating every week. It’s the same stuff that you read about jealous wives slipping into their husband’s coffee in murder mysteries. According to the medical examiner’s office, there was enough cyanide in both women to have killed an elephant. I stopped over at Superior Plating on Friday while the guys from the health department were there. You can’t believe the number of poisonous chemicals they have just lying around. The company is required to keep something called an MSD book—a looseleaf notebook with a sheet for every hazardous chemical they use in the plant, with information on where it’s kept and what to do in case it’s accidentally spilled or swallowed. It’s as thick as a phone book. If you worked there and wanted to kill someone, you’d have your pick of poisons.”
    “Come on. They must take precautions. I can’t believe the cyanide’s just left lying around where anybody has access to it.”
    “No. It’s not. It’s kept in the hazardous chemicals room, which is actually a locked closet at the end of the hall between the administrative offices and the plant. A little old lady could kick down the door.”
    “Were there any signs that it was broken into?”
    “None that I could see. Joe’s going to go back over there tomorrow to see if he can nail down who had keys, whether any of the stuff was missing, that kind of thing. He’s also planning on bringing back the crime-lab boys to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb. For all anybody knows right now, someone could have accidentally filled the sugar bowl with cyanide and Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh liked their coffee sweet.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    “Don’t laugh. It could be as simple as that.”
    “And what if it’s not?” I demanded as Elliott pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment—another no-parking zone. “What if someone deliberately poisoned them?” I got out and said across the hood of his car, “No, I take that back. What if someone deliberately poisoned one of them?”
    “You mean that one of them was the intended victim and the other was what—some sort of accident?”
    I dug through my satchel bag for my keys, fumbling through the half dozen or so that were on the ring. Every lock in our building took a different key. According to the landlord, it made the apartment more secure, but I always felt that it increased my chances of being mugged on my own doorstep as I went from key to key.
    “Call it what you want—accident, camouflage, dress rehearsal,” I offered, finally managing to get us into the apartment. “The two women had almost nothing in common. What reason could there be to kill them both? It almost reminds me of the Tylenol poisoning case. I’ve never bought the police explanation that it was some demented lunatic who just wanted to kill people. The cops could never figure it out, so that’s the explanation they had to settle for. It always seemed much more likely to me that one of the people who died was the intended victim and the others were just window dressing. It would be so easy if you really wanted to kill somebody and not get caught, provided that you didn’t care how many other innocent people you murdered, too.”
    “Yeah, and it was probably a calculating attorney who slipped the cyanide into the Tylenol capsule—talk about cold. Do the people at work know you think about stuff like that?”
    I checked the time. I had a little more than forty-five minutes to get myself showered, dressed, and able to pass muster with my mother.
    “Listen. I’m going to run into the shower. Make yourself at home; help yourself to anything that doesn’t have mold on