Bitter Business (16 page)

“He said it has to be in person.”

“I’m not leaving the office again today,” I replied wearily. “Call and tell him that if he needs to see me in person, he’s got to come here.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Cheryl asked, looking up and cocking her head to one side.

“I guess I’ll live.”

“Good,” replied my secretary, flashing me an impish grin. “It’s a real pain being so nice to you. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep it up.”

Philip Cavanaugh walked into my office looking haggard and defeated. The expression on his face was of someone who sees an incredible catastrophe approaching but is powerless to stop it.

“What can I do for you?” I asked after he’d taken a seat and Cheryl had come and gone offering coffee.

“The police came to my house this morning,” he reported. “They were asking all kinds of questions.”

“It’s just routine. They have to talk to all the members of her family.”

“They were asking about Cecilia Dobson.” He gave one of his dry little coughs.

“That’s only to be expected. Your sister’s death puts what happened to her secretary in a new light.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I answered, puzzled that he needed to have it spelled out for him, “two apparently healthy young women who worked in the same office died under almost identical circumstances. Don’t you think there must be some sort of connection?”

“I don’t know what to think!” Philip wailed. “Isn’t it bad enough Dagny’s dead and now I have no one to help me run the company? The police showed up at my house this morning and started asking all sorts of embarrassing questions—”

“What kind of questions?” I demanded, something in his voice setting off alarm bells in my head.

“Stupid questions,” Philip answered warily.

“Give me an example,” I said, thinking I didn’t have the stomach for coaxing it out of him.

“You know. Questions about who knew her. What she did outside of the office.”

“What Dagny did outside of the office?”

He shook his head.

“Questions about Cecilia, then,” I continued.

He nodded mutely. The stamp of misery on his face was unmistakable. In an instant enlightenment dawned.

“Were you seeing Cecilia outside of the office?” I demanded, trying to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

He nodded wretchedly, acknowledging it to be true.

“I was going to break it off,” he said finally. “Honest. We were going to have dinner tonight. Sally—that’s my wife—plays Bonko with some of the ladies from church on Thursdays. I was going to take Cecilia out to dinner and tell her that we were through.”

“Why?” I asked, with a mounting sense of alarm. All I could think of was what this was going to look like to the police.

“She’d started asking for money. Hinting that she really needed a nicer apartment, that I should buy her a car. She thought that because my family owns the company that I must be rich. I tried to explain to her that the house, the car, all of that belongs to my father. But she Wouldn’t believe it. God knows what he’d have done if he found out I was sleeping with one of the secretaries.” He gave an involuntary shudder at the thought. “And she was getting so bold. She started wearing these sexy outfits to work. Some days she’d just walk into my office and start flirting. It scared me to death. I’ve never done anything like this before. The whole thing was like a sickness. You know that it’s wrong. You know that it’s dangerous. You’re terrified and yet you can’t help yourself. You go ahead and do it anyway. And then, after a while, the thrill wears off and all that’s left is the fear— the fear that you’ll get caught and you’ll have ruined everything that you’ve worked your whole life for—”

“You have to go to the police and tell them,” I broke in—no-nonsense advice that was much easier to give than to receive.

“I couldn’t possibly,” Philip stammered spinelessly. “What if it turns out there’s something funny about the way they died? I can’t be involved in that.”

“You’re already involved,” I countered, deliberately taking a very tough tone. If Philip came to me expecting a sympathetic confessor, he’d been mistaken. “And believe me, if there’s ‘something funny,’ as you so eloquently put it, about the way they died, the longer you wait to tell the police, the worse it will look.”

The expression on Philip’s face was hard to read—mulish and miserable.

“But she’s dead,” he protested. Philip Cavanaugh, master of the obvious.

“The police don’t care whether you were cheating on your wife,” I told him. “But believe me, they’ll care a great deal if they find out you’ve been withholding information.”

“What difference can it make?”

“To you? A great deal. If they find out that you lied about Cecilia Dobson, they’re going to assume that you’re lying about other things—and they’re going to assume there’s some reason. If you think they were asking embarrassing questions at your house this morning, wait until they find out you lied to them. Besides,” I added, taking another tack, “don’t
you
want to find out what happened to them? You probably know things about Cecilia that nobody else knows, things that might be relevant to how she and your sister died.”

“She had a boyfriend, you know,” said Philip, tossing off the information like throwing a bone to a dog. “He’s some sort of musician.”

“Did she say anything else about him?” I asked.

“Not really. Only that he was the jealous type.”

Before I arranged for Philip to give his statement to the police, I called a criminal lawyer I am friendly with. I wasn’t sure what Philip’s confession about Cecilia meant, but of one thing I was sure: I know less about criminal law than your average felon in the street, and I was sorely in need of advice. At the very least I was hoping that Elkin Caufield would be able to arrange for one of the associates in his office to accompany Philip on his visit to the police.

“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” Elkin concluded once he’d heard me out. “Not unless you think there’s some possibility of your client being arrested and charged in the future.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don’t even know how they died.”

“That’s exactly my point. If he goes marching into police headquarters with a criminal lawyer in tow, the only thing that’ll happen is that the cops will assume he’s guilty of something.”

“But...” I began to protest, some vague recollection having to do with the right to have an attorney present stirring in the back of my brain.

“I know. It’s not what they taught you in law school. But believe me, even though you think he’d be acting prudently if he brings someone from my office with him, the cops will just think he’s acting guilty.”

“He’s already acting guilty,” I interjected. “Talking to him, you’d think he was the first man on the planet to ever cheat on his wife. He’s like a little kid who sticks his hand into the cookie jar and comes out with a handful of snakes. At this point he’s feeling so guilty that I’m afraid he’ll confess to anything.”

“So you’re his lawyer.” Caufield laughed.
“You
go with him. If he starts taking credit for the Lindbergh baby, shut him up. If not, let him talk. Besides, a trip to the police station will do you good. You guys at Callahan need a taste of what real lawyering is all about.”

A burly policewoman with a face like the back of a bus ushered us into a windowless room the size of two parking spaces. One wall was mirrored and I wondered who was watching us from beyond the dark glass. From the way that voices died in the air, I guessed that the room was soundproof. I thought about Elkin Caufield and did not see how this could possibly be doing me any good.

Joe Blades made a casual entrance, a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of forms in the other. He sat down at one end of the scarred wooden table and laid the papers down in front of him.

He began by thanking Philip for coming in, assuring him that the police were truly grateful for any information that might assist them in their investigation. I looked over at my client. He was so nervous he wasn’t shaking—it was more like he was vibrating.

Detective Blades began reading questions from the form in front of him, laboriously filling in the blanks as Philip answered. Orderly and reasonable—like a doctor taking a medical history from a patient with an embarrassing complaint—he struck an attitude of weary routine that was remarkably effective with Philip. Names and dates, times and places—the rhythm of the interrogation resembled nothing more than the filling out of a bank application, and the story that it revealed was scarcely more interesting.

Man Sleeps with Secretary—ho-hum. According to Philip, it had been Cecilia who’d instigated the affair, offering to stay late and behaving provocatively until she finally succeeded in seducing him one night in his father’s office. Soon they were meeting once a week on his wife Sally’s Bonko nights. The only person I could think of who would find that interesting might be one of Lydia’s shrinks.

“What kind of person was she?” asked Blades, in a voice that invited friendly confidence. Philip Cavanaugh actually smiled.

“She wasn’t educated and she wasn’t sophisticated, but she was smart. She was always talking about wanting to improve her situation.”

“Do you know if she took drugs?”

“I don’t know. I never saw her do it. But she was the kind of person who might—I mean, she liked to have a good time.”

“Do you think your wife knew about your relationship with the deceased?”

“No,” Philip bleated. “I was very careful. Sally has a naturally suspicious nature...

I thought I detected a flicker of a smile pass Joe Blades’s lips, but it was gone in an instant. All in all he didn’t seem overly impressed with Philip’s indiscretion.

When he was finished with his questions Blades asked Philip to read and initial each page of his statement.

“Is that it?” Philip asked as he slid the initialed sheets back across the table toward the detective. He sounded almost disappointed.

“That’s all. Thank you for your time, Mr. Cavanaugh. You’re free to go.”

Philip rose, but as I followed suit Joe Blades reached across the table and took my arm.

“I was wondering if I might have a word in private with your attorney.”

13

Cops as a rule don’t make me nervous, but there is something essentially unnerving about any conversation conducted in a homicide interrogation room.

“Thanks for getting Philip Cavanaugh to come in,” Detective Blades began, equably enough. “We’d have found out about him and the Dobson woman eventually, but anytime somebody can save me half a day’s dragging around town, I’ll take it.”

“This is hard for a man like Philip Cavanaugh,” I said. “He feels very guilty about their affair—ashamed actually. But all the Cavanaughs want to cooperate with the police in any way they can.”

Blades took a slow sip of his coffee, no doubt long grown cold. His skin was so pale that it seemed almost translucent, and now that I had a chance to look closely I could see the first strands of gray hair mixed in with the red. He sat quietly for a minute, seemingly measuring me for something while I squirmed inwardly, worried about what had prompted this cozy chat.

“So,” he said finally. ‘Tell me how you know Elliott Abelman.”

So that was it. I hadn’t expected the police to be ecstatic about the Cavanaughs hiring a private investigator. But I also hadn’t expected the news to get out quite so quickly.

“It’s not that the family doesn’t have complete confidence in the police....” I ventured, managing to sound lame and lawyerly at the same time. But Blades acted as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Is it just professional between the two of you?” he asked. “Or is there something else going on?”

“No,” I replied, taken aback by his question. “What makes you think there is?”

“Just the way Elliott talks about you. He gets this goofy look on his face I haven’t seen since he first started seeing Janice.”

“Who’s Janice?” I asked, in spite of myself.

“She works for the
Wall Street Journal.
They split up right around the time Elliott left the prosecutor’s office.”

“Is that why they broke up?” I asked, imagining that some women might be less than supportive when they learned that the man in their life intended to jettison his legal career in order to hang out his shingle as a PI.

“Nah, that’s not it. Elliott wanted kids. Janice wanted to wait. At some point Elliott started wondering what exactly she was waiting for. Then one day he comes home and finds Janice waiting for him, all excited. She’s got a bottle of champagne in one hand and two glasses in the other.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“No. She’d just been named chief of the paper’s Hong Kong bureau.”

“Ouch.”

“It took a little while, but after that it was pretty much over. There really hasn’t been anybody since then.”

“Why are you telling me this?”