Bitter Business

we sat down for dinner I noticed that Mother had been careful to place the Prescott side of her family as far as possible from the Danforth side on account of a long-standing feud over the distribution of a family trust following my great-uncle Rawley’s death. The dispute was over a relatively trivial sum—especially in a family where everyone invariably lived on interest—but the acrimony it caused had rankled for more than a dozen years.
    At the head of the table I could see that my father was already drunk. Mother had kept a sharp eye on him until he’d delivered the toast she’d written for him to offer before dinner, but judging from the way he was listing to one side, he was now only a couple of gin and tonics from oblivion.
    I thought about what Daniel Babbage had said to me about my own family the day he handed the Superior Plating file over to me. He was right. There was very little difference between my family and the Cavanaughs.
    Dinner was trout meunière caught the day before by some old friends of my grandmother’s from Canada and flown in specially. To serve it, white-gloved waiters placed large Villeroy and Boch plates in front of every person, each with a domed, silver cover. A waiter stood behind each pair of chairs, and at a discreet signal, the domes were simultaneously lifted to well-bred applause.
    Stephen listened attentively to my cousin Gregory’s droning stories about grouse shooting in Wales. On my left, my great-aunt Victoria, who was deaf as an adder, bellowed to the dinner partner on her other side. I played with my trout and found myself thinking about cyanide.
    Perhaps I had been too hasty in assuming that there was no thread connecting Cecilia Dobson and Dagny 1 Cavanaugh. They had worked in the same office, after all, both possibly privy to the same financial information. According to Jack Cavanaugh, Dagny had been keeping Superior Plating’s books since she was in high school. Perhaps she’d been embezzling money or covering up some other financial impropriety that Cecilia had discovered. Neither Elliott nor I felt that Dagny’s secretary had been above a bit of blackmail. Perhaps Dagny had killed her and then committed suicide in a fit of remorse. The police hadn’t found a suicide note, but I knew that in more than half of the cases where a person takes their own life, they don’t leave a note. Still, it didn’t fit with my impressions of Dagny, but who could tell?
    Or perhaps the two deaths were tied together in another way. Perhaps a disgruntled employee with a particular grudge against the financial side of Superior Plating had decided to extract their own brand of revenge. While I was pretty sure that the police would question the Superior Plating employees about the possibility, I made a mental note to have Elliott check through personnel records just in case something might turn up.
    After the cake was cut, “Happy Birthday” sung, and the presents unwrapped—Stephen’s gift of a set of hand-tied McGregor trout flies was the hit of the evening—we said our farewells. Stephen had an early meeting with his hematology research group the next morning and I was in a hurry to get back to Hyde Park. I wanted to stop at the hospital and see Daniel Babbage. To my surprise, Stephen offered to come along.
    “What was that detective guy doing at your apartment?” he asked as we headed south on Lake Shore Drive. Every day I noticed more boats in the harbor—a sure sign of spring.
    A number of answers to his question streamed past each other through my brain, not the least of which was “none of your business,” but I opted for the truth.
    “He’s been hired by the Cavanaughs to help find out what happened to the two women who died at Superior Plating. He came to tell me that the medical examiner’s office found out that both of them died of cyanide poisoning.”
    Stephen gave a soft whistle that rang through the dark interior of his BMW. We were passing through the noman’s-land between the projects and home. On our left, fires glittered on the beach.
    “So do the police think it was murder?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. I guess there’s a lot of cyanide used in plating, so it could have been an accident.”
    “Cyanide is bad stuff. It’s odorless, tasteless, and a little goes a long way. You actually die of asphyxiation, which is what makes it hard to trace postmortem. Chemically, cyanide interferes with the enzymes that control the oxidative process.