Bitter Business

Sunday morning dressed in Saturday night’s high heels.
    After the emotional upheaval of the last several days, I finally felt at ease with myself. Whatever it was that I had been trying to drive out with the past night’s exercise was gone. Strangely enough, I even found a sense of comfort in the knowledge that Daniel was finally dead. As long as he was alive, he had hovered over the Superior Plating file as I continually second-guessed myself, wondering how differently he would have chosen to deal with every new situation. Now the file was mine and I was ready to reassess and start from scratch. It was no use beating myself up over the debacle of the Cavanaugh family meeting. From here on in it wasn’t Daniel’s show, it was mine.
    As I prepared to leave for the office I was surprised to see Joe Blades climbing the stoop to my apartment. His step was slow and his face pale with fatigue. Homicide cops, I guessed, just like ER docs, had busy Saturday nights.
    “Detective Blades, what a pleasant surprise,” I said. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”
    “Suspicious death call on Fifty-eighth Street. Turns out it was an eighty-seven-year-old piano teacher who died in her sleep. As long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d look you up.”
    “Do you want to come in? I can make some fresh coffee,” I volunteered, still uncertain whether this was an official or a social visit.
    “Actually,” he said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with the fat end of his tie, “I was wondering whether you might have a few minutes.”
    “Sure,” I replied.
    “Then, if you wouldn’t mind taking a ride with me, there’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”
     

20
     
    “I assume Elliott already told you about the cyanide,” Detective Blades remarked amiably from behind the wheel of his official police vehicle—OPV for short. Elliott had once pointed out that all OPVs had license plates beginning with the letters QF, thereby forming a code recognized by every small-time hoodlum in the city. This one was a sorry white Chevy Cavalier that smelled of spilled coffee and old cigarette smoke. Blades hadn’t mentioned where we were going and I didn’t ask.
    “I saw Elliott yesterday. He told me that they were poisoned.”
    “What can you tell me about Dagny Cavanaugh’s relationship with her secretary? Were they on good terms?”
    “I don’t know if they were on good terms,” I hedged, strangely reluctant to say more. Somehow, in the light of what had happened, Dagny’s irritation with her secretary seemed magnified and strangely out of proportion.
    “The first time we met, the day that Cecilia Dobson died, as a matter of fact, Dagny told me that Cecilia was actually a very competent secretary.”
    “But she didn’t like her.”
    “There were things about her behavior at work that Dagny felt were unprofessional.”
    “For example?”
    “Cecilia had begun to dress provocatively.”
    “One of the secretaries at Superior Plating said that the day she died Cecilia had defied Dagny’s standing order forbidding her from going down onto the plant floor. How did Ms. Cavanaugh feel about that?”
    “I think she was annoyed,” I said. “But so was her brother Eugene, who was in the plant giving me a tour— actually, he was furious. But I don’t think their concerns were about Cecilia herself, but rather that her presence in the plant was unsafe. I don’t think that any of it was personal, which is why I don’t see what you’re getting at. Believe me, lots of people get mad at their secretaries, but they don’t kill them.”
    “Was it your impression that Dagny Cavanaugh was an emotionally stable woman?”
    “She struck me as being exceptionally levelheaded.”
    “To the point of being calculating?”
    I found myself getting annoyed, but I tried not to show it. After all, the man had a job to do. But I couldn’t help wondering what it must be like to be married to a cop, a man whose job it was to wring the worst possible interpretation from the most simple declarative sentence. It would, I concluded, be even worse than marriage to a lawyer.
    “I didn’t know Dagny Cavanaugh very well,” I continued patiently. “We’d only known each other for a few days, but in that time she seemed like a very intelligent and reasonable person—the kind who acts more from the head than the heart.”
    “Not the kind who would poison her secretary in a rage and then, three days later, swallow