Bitter Business

everyone?” I asked as she paused for breath.
    “They quit when they heard about the cyanide,” she replied grimly. “These young girls are so ignorant. You must be Miss Millholland. I’m Loretta, Mr. Cavanaugh’s secretary. Mr. Jack Cavanaugh that is. Philip is waiting for you over in the specialty chemicals building.”
    “Will Jack be in today, do you know? I need to speak to him.”
    “He just got off the phone with Philip, but he won’t be coming into the office until tomorrow. There’s some sort of problem with one of our big customers, so he took the plane to Dallas this morning. I guess when it rains it pours.”
    The phones started ringing again and I waited until she’d answered them.
    “I’ve never been to the specialty chemicals building,” I told her. “Can you tell me how to get there?”
    “Do you know how to get to receiving?”
    “I think so.”
    “Then the best way is to just go out the loading dock and turn right. You’ll see a long, white, one-story building. There’s no sign or anything, but you can’t miss it.” She unclipped the ID card from the front of her jacket. “Here, you’ll need this to work the lock. It’s a swipe-card security system. You’ll see the doohickey on the side of the door. I wish I could show you the way myself, but I’m the only one here. If you just drag the card through it, you’ll hear the click when the door opens.”
    “What do you keep over there that you need such tight security?” I asked, accepting the card. I couldn’t help thinking about the poisons that were kept behind a simple locked door in the equivalent of a hall closet.
    “There’s nothing valuable or anything, unless you count the lab equipment,” she answered, punching the button on her ringing phone. “When it was so very cold this winter, Philip found out that the factory workers were sneaking into the specialty chemicals building to smoke. That’s why he had the swipe-card system put in.”
     
    I found the specialty chemicals building without difficulty. Antiseptic and nondescript, it looked as if it had been built within the last five years. Like the rest of Superior Plating, function and the desire to avoid unnecessary expense seemed to have been the guiding principles in its construction. The swipe-card reader was mounted, just as Loretta had said, by the side of the door. I pulled the card through three different ways before finally hitting on the right one—yet another reminder that technology hates me.
    Once inside, there was a spartan entry with vending machines on one wall and a vinyl couch on the other—no doubt a good spot for a smoke when it was thirty below outside. At the other end were two glass doors that opened onto a flight of linoleum-covered stairs. At the top was a large room laid out like every chemical lab I have ever been in, from Dr. Allen’s sophomore chemistry class in high school to any of the research divisions at Stephen’s company, Azor Pharmaceuticals.
    Four rows of black-topped lab benches, all crowded with equipment, filled the room. Neon lights and a system of ventilation hoods hung from the ceiling. There were Gary Larson cartoons taped up every few feet and someone had hung one of those stuffed animals with suction cups on its feet upside down from the ceiling. White-coated technicians looked up from their work as I passed, obviously unaccustomed to seeing visitors.
    I asked a woman with a pipette in one hand where I might find Philip Cavanaugh. She directed me to an office at the far end of the lab.
    From the few words we had exchanged earlier that morning, I expected to find Philip in full rant mode. Instead, he was sitting calmly behind a cluttered desk, going over test results with another man, who excused himself as soon as I entered the room.
    “You’ve never been over in this building before, have you?” Philip asked in a weary voice. His body was slumped in the chair, his hands flat on the desk in front of him, as if he found himself without the energy to move them.
    “No. When I was here last week I never got this far.”
    “It’s hard to believe it’s only been a week since everything started happening.” There was a catch in his voice when he said the word everything. Philip Cavanaugh was obviously a man strained to the breaking point. It was taking everything he had just to maintain his composure.
    “I don’t know whether you read the obituaries, but it was in the paper this morning,” I said.