Bitter Business

business having feelings. On top of everything, I felt overcome by a sense of how far I’d traveled from being an idealistic third-year law student like Chelsea Winters to a preoccupied partner who could barely manage to feign interest in a recruiting dinner.
    Stephen let my coat drop beside my briefcase on the floor. Perhaps we don’t know how to talk to each other about how we feel because there are these moments when we just look at each other and understand perfectly what it is that we both want. Never, I thought, when we finished and lay panting on Stephen’s still-made bed, never underestimate the distance truly great sex can take a relationship.
     
    “Tell me again how cyanide works,” I demanded, absently stroking the hair on Stephen’s chest.
    “Cyanide, especially in high concentrations, is a powerful respiratory inhibitor. It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, and very powerful, even in small doses. It occurs naturally in a wide variety of seeds and pits. I remember reading about a case in medical school where a man ate a cupful of apple seeds and died. The coroner’s ruling was poisoning by cyanide, which had been released when he chewed the seeds. Cyanide is commonly used in less concentrated amounts to kill insects and rats, and as you well know, its main industrial use is in the electroplating process.”
    “Yes, I know,” I said, rolling back onto the pillows and staring up at Stephen’s perfect crown moldings. “They have buckets of the stuff at Superior Plating. It looks just like laundry detergent. They also found cyanide in a bottle of perfume in the little bathroom in Dagny’s office.”
    “Did both women use the bathroom?”
    “Apparently.”
    “Was the cyanide mixed with something else, do you know?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Because you realize cyanide is only lethal if it’s released from its host compound by an acid. That’s why it kills you if you eat it—the hydrochloric acid in the stomach releases the cyanide from the sodium.”
    “It’s not absorbed by the skin?”
    “Maybe if you took a bath in it,” Stephen ventured dubiously, “or if you rubbed it in an open wound.”
    “According to the medical examiner, neither woman had any punctures or abrasions on her skin.”
    “Then the poison in perfume probably isn’t the poison that killed them.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”
    “A coincidence?” I demanded, sitting bolt upright in bed.
    “You said yourself that they had buckets of the stuff. Maybe the poisoner wasn’t much of a chemist. Maybe he or she put it in a lot of different things that he thought the person he was trying to kill would use. Then, after he’d succeeded in dispatching his victim, he poured them all down the sink.”
    “What about the perfume?”
    “Maybe the poisoner forgot about it—or maybe it was in a busy place that he couldn’t get back to without attracting notice.”
    “If that were the case, you’d have to assume that Dagny, not Cecilia, was the intended victim.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Because the police didn’t seal off Dagny’s office until after her death. Assuming that the killer didn’t forget about the poisoned perfume, he or she must have chosen to leave it in the bathroom after Cecilia died. What I don’t understand is why the poisoner wasn’t worried about other people accidentally taking the poison and dropping dead?”
    “Maybe,” said Stephen, reaching up to pull me back down into the circle of his arms, “maybe that’s exactly what did happen.”
     
    By now I was getting used to being sent for by the Cavanaughs. This time I was actually relieved. Whatever Jack Cavanaugh might have to say to me would be an improvement over the past two days’ silence. However, I didn’t view the fact that he asked me to come to his house as a good sign. By all accounts, Jack, like most CEOs, was so obsessed with work that he usually had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the office. The fact that he still hadn’t returned there since Dagny’s death was to me a sign that something was seriously wrong.
    As I paid off the cabby I found myself contemplating Lydia’s house, imagining her standing on her front lawn, staring at her father’s house as the photographer took her picture for the article that was to appear in Metal Plating magazine. Arguably, it wasn’t quite the same thing as trashing your family in the Wall Street Journal, but then again probably a higher