Bitter Business

it.”
    Elliott looked around the living room dubiously. I knew that he was a meticulous housekeeper. Dust bunnies admonished me from every comer. I turned my back on them and headed for the bathroom.
    I emerged ten minutes later wrapped in a white terry-cloth bathrobe with damp hair wrapped in a towel, turban style. Elliott was stretched out in the black leather Eames chair that had briefly had a home in the library of my mother’s house. Dad had bought it for himself, arguing that it was good for his back, but in less than a month it had been banished by my mother and her decorator.
    “It’s weird the things you find out from an autopsy report,” said Elliott, looking up.
    He looked at me and something passed between us, a moment lasting a heartbeat, maybe two. I knew that everything that Joe Blades had said about his friend was true and the same stab of attraction that I’d felt in the past for Elliott was not a fluke. Furthermore, in the heat of our discussion about what had happened to Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh, I’d made a mistake: I should never have had Elliott come back to my apartment. In my head I heard the unmistakable bell of warning. I chose deliberately to ignore it.
    “So what did you find out?” I asked, slowly rubbing my hair with the towel. Elliott took a breath. I saw him choose to let the moment pass.
    “Cecilia Dobson had an old fracture of her right femur, probably from when she was eight or nine years old. She’d had rhinoplasty—that’s plastic surgery on her nose—one or two years ago. She’d also had breast implants and her tubes tied. Her last meal was a cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake—strawberry.”
    “Is that where the poison was? In the milkshake?”
    “They’re running the tests on the stomach contents today. Joe expects the results sometime tomorrow.”
    “What about Dagny Cavanaugh? What did she have to eat before she died?”
    Elliott flipped through the photocopied sheets in his lap.
    “That’s weird,” he said finally. “It says here that her stomach was almost completely empty.” He flipped back to the page he’d been reading from before. “Cecilia Dobson ate two and a half to three hours before she died, but it looks like Dagny had nothing to eat at all the day she died. What time did she die?”
    “It was close to four o’clock,” I said. Somehow it didn’t seem real to be talking about it this way. Dagny Cavanaugh had died in my arms, and here I was, five days later, standing and discussing it in my bathrobe with Elliott Abelman like it was some sort of abstract exercise in deduction.
    “Why would she have gone the whole day without eating?” asked Elliott, who, I knew, liked his meals regularly.
    “Maybe she wasn’t feeling well,” I offered. “Or maybe she just got busy. There are lots of days I’m so busy I wouldn’t get a chance to eat if Cheryl didn’t bring me a sandwich. Don’t forget, Dagny didn’t have a secretary anymore. Besides, you’ve been to the Superior Plating plant. The neighborhood’s not exactly a mecca for restaurants.”
    “But if she didn’t eat anything, what was the poison in?”
    “Won’t the tests they’re running tell us? Why don’t you come and talk to me while I put on my makeup?” I asked, keeping my eye on the time. Elliott extricated himself from my father’s chair and followed me down the long hall to my bedroom. The apartments in Hyde Park were built in the twenties, railroad style—living room and kitchen in the front, bedrooms along a single hall like a railroad car.
    Elliott perched himself gingerly on the end of my unmade bed and tactfully ignored the piles of clothes on the floor. The warning bells were louder now, but I told myself that if I were a male attorney discussing a client with a private investigator, there would be no awkwardness. I pulled my makeup bag out of my suitcase and went into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar for the sake of conversation.
    “It still doesn’t make any sense,” came Elliott’s voice from the bedroom. “If Dagny didn’t eat anything the day she died, how was she poisoned?”
    “Maybe she drank something. Don’t you always read about putting cyanide in coffee to hide the bitter taste?”
    I dotted my face with foundation, cursing my own clumsiness as I knocked the bottle over and quickly picked it back up. I was strangely nervous, and the more I hurried the worse I got.
    I heard the rustling of pages.
    “It doesn’t