Bitter Business Read online

  Stephen Azorini is a client—the one I sleep with— which is, of course, against the rules. But then Stephen has been breaking rules from the first day I met him, when we were both in prep school and he walked off the lacrosse field in the middle of a game against Culver Academy to ask me out. Since then we have been many things to each other, not all of them easy to explain. In high school our relationship was fueled by a combination of lust and rebellion; in college, with Stephen at MIT and me at Bryn Mawr, we passed naturally into a casual albeit intermittent friendship. When we both found ourselves at the University of Chicago for graduate school— Stephen picked up a Ph.D. in chemistry during medical school the way another man might acquire a second pair of pants—we saw each other seldom despite the fact that we were separated by no more than a city block.

  Stephen came to my wedding. There is a photograph of him dancing with my little sister, Beth, in a silver frame in the music room of my parents’ house, though I honestly don’t remember seeing him there. So much of what happened that day is a blur. What is clearer in my memory is the first night, just after Russell was admitted to the hospital after being diagnosed with cancer, when

  Stephen appeared unbidden at his bedside to offer whatever help he could.

  And now? Stephen is the CEO of Azor Pharmaceuticals, the company he founded straight out of medical school and which has been streaking across the high-tech heavens ever since. I am his lover and his lawyer. Beyond that I can’t be sure of anything.

  After Russell died I was horrified by how quickly well-meaning colleagues began circulating word of my “availability.” I reacted by asking Stephen to be my escort whenever I had an unavoidable social obligation. It worked. There is something about Stephen that tends to discourage competition.

  Stephen Azorini is handsome the way that professional basketball players are tall. Women actually stop to stare at him in the street. They want to run their fingers through the luxuriant waves of his dark hair, to stare deeply into the smoky blue of his eyes, and, I suppose, to have his babies—or at the very least have the fun of trying. When he’s in my office Cheryl is visited by a steady stream of secretaries with invented excuses who come in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I honestly have no idea how he stands it.

  Tonight Stephen was looking tired, but it suited him. He had spent the last several months trying to organize a joint venture between Azor Pharmaceuticals and Gordimer A.G., the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, in order to speed development of a new immunosuppressant drug. Stephen’s scientists had laid the groundwork for the creation of a new compound that could potentially prevent organ transplant rejections.

  While their scientific achievement was nothing short of dazzling, Azor lacked the financial muscle to make the arduous journey from discovery to drug development. Stephen, who was relentlessly pushing the deal toward closure, had entered what he referred to as his “full-sell mode”: flying between Chicago and Geneva alternately begging, threatening, and cajoling; granting the concessions and making the promises that would sustain a project that he believed in with a fervor approaching mania.

  Stephen knew that something was bothering me. I didn’t often feel the need to hide out at the bottom of a bottle. But I was grateful that he didn’t ask.

  All the time that Russell was dying we never talked about it. We had endless discussions about tests and treatments, of course, drug choices and surgical options, issues of morbidity and mortality. Stephen even helped me choose the clothes that Russell would be buried in. He stood beside me at the funeral, filling in for my absent older brother and a father who did not share my sorrow. But we never talked about feelings, what it was like to walk with full knowledge into a pit of unspeakable grief.

  Since then we seem unable to grasp the vocabulary of emotions. Perhaps we never had it in the first place. Tonight I was just grateful for the scotch and the companionship, the familiar rumble of Stephen’s baritone as he filled me in on the progress he’d been making with the Swiss.

  I didn’t tell him about Cecilia Dobson until I was ready and then I barely touched on the desperate scene on the floor of Dagny’s office.

  “It’s just an accident that I was there when she was found. We didn’t say ten words to each other and now I feel like I’m going to be carrying her around with me for the rest of my life.”

  “You will,” Stephen answered simply. “It happens to doctors and nurses. Ask anyone who routinely deals with death. They all have one that stays with them.”

  “The worst part is not that it happened but that no one seems to have any idea why.”

  “She probably overdosed on something.”

  “That’s what the paramedics think. But when will they know?”

  “They’ll probably do the autopsy in the next day or so, but if it was drugs it’ll take longer—a week to ten days to get the toxicology results back.”

  “Ten days?” I wailed, surprised at how much the thought of waiting bothered me. I wanted it all to be over, her death explained, her body buried.

  “I think I’m going to have to start shopping around for another lawyer,” Stephen chided. “You can’t be as tough as they say you are if you let a little thing like this rattle you.”

  “It’s easy for you to joke,” I protested. “You weren’t there. My arms are sore from doing CPR on somebody who was probably dead already. I can still smell her perfume in my hair....” I picked up my glass and drained it in order to keep from crying.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I wasn’t there. And you didn’t spend four years in medical school learning to pretend that suffering doesn’t bother you.”

  “I don’t know if she suffered,” I answered, searching the depths of my glass for who knows what.

  “It wasn’t her I was talking about,” he said. “It’s you.”

  I got to the office later than I expected, but with less of a hangover than I deserved. Cheryl stopped me as I passed her desk.

  “Don’t go in there,” she warned, pointing at the closed door to my office.

  ‘‘Why not? What’s going on?”

  “Philip Cavanaugh is in there. He was already here when I got in to work this morning.”

  “Why isn’t he in the reception room? What’s he doing in my office?”

  “He was making Lillian crazy, pacing back and forth and asking her every five minutes when you’d be here, so I said he could wait in your office. Between you and me,” Cheryl confided, “he seems like a real prick.”

  “Could you bring us some coffee, please?” I asked, taking a deep breath and squaring my shoulders to face Philip Cavanaugh.

  “Oh, and your mother called,” she added as I prepared to open the door. “Twice.”

  Philip Cavanaugh looked like a watered-down version of his father. I knew that he was only forty-six, but nature had already imprinted him with the crueler marks of middle age. Short and almost completely bald, he held himself very straight, as though straining for every extra inch of height. Instead of making him look taller, it merely made him seem pompous, a puffed-up little Napoleon stretching to look down on the world. When he spoke he affected a dry little cough, as if something worrisome had gotten caught in his throat and he was constantly trying to dislodge it.

  “I understand you were at the plant yesterday for that unfortunate business with Cecilia Dobson,” he said after a frosty exchange of introductions.

  “How’s Dagny holding up?” I asked, and made a mental note to call her later in the day and ask her myself.

  “This whole thing has upset everybody. It’s been a terrible inconvenience. I didn’t get back from Dallas until late last night, but I understand the police kept the office staff late turning the place upside down and asking everybody questions.”

  “What were they looking for?”

  “A suicide note, apparently.”

  “Did they find one?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Were they able to locate her family?”

 
“I have no idea. I’ve instructed Dagny to turn her entire personnel file over to the police.” He gave one of his dry little coughs. “As far as I’m concerned, the entire episode is closed. I won’t have our office routine disrupted and I won’t tolerate time wasted on gossip.” Cheryl came in with coffee in a silver carafe and cups and saucers on a tray. Philip primly accepted a cup and I gratefully poured one for myself.

  “I understand that we’re going to be dealing with you over this mess with Lydia,” he began once Cheryl had withdrawn. “Why isn’t Daniel handling it? It would be so much simpler. He knows everyone. He’s dealt with Lydia before.”

  I explained about Daniel’s illness. But surely he could make an exception and take care of just this one case? protested Philip.

  I couldn’t believe that he had the audacity to make the suggestion, but refrained from saying so. Working in a large law firm, I had no shortage of experience in dealing with pompous, difficult, anal-retentive men, but Philip Cavanaugh seemed an especially extreme case. I won-dered what had happened to turn him into such an uptight jerk and wondered how Dagny, who had grown up in the same family and worked in the same business, managed to seem so intelligent and straightforward.

  “I understand you saw my father and my sister yesterday,” he said in an aggrieved voice. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was fear of being left out that had propelled him to my office. “What did you and Dagny talk about?”

  “Lydia’s letter,” I answered, taken aback by the question. His sister’s office couldn’t be more than ten feet from his own. Why didn’t he ask her himself? Why drag all the way downtown and waste an hour in order to ask me? “We discussed the possibility of the family buying back Lydia’s shares.”

  “Lydia will never sell those shares,” Philip announced, shaking his head in a gesture of disapproval that bordered on disgust. “This is just another case of Lydia standing up and saying ‘Look at me.’ She wants to make us jump through hoops. She’ll keep us negotiating until we’re blue in the face, but I guarantee we’ll never reach an agreement. Believe me, this stunt is no different from any of the others.”

  “What others?”

  “Lydia pulls crap like this all the time. For example, last year she announced that she was going to take her job as director of community relations more seriously. More seriously, what a joke. You’ve been to the plant— what do we need a director of community relations for? It’s just a title my father made up so that we can justify Lydia’s phony salary to the 1RS. But Lydia went ahead with it. She pushed our sales manager out of his office and ordered ten thousand dollars’ worth of new furniture.

  Her first week on the job all three secretaries gave notice.”

  “Why?”

  “They refused to work with her. Dad had to give them raises. By the end of the second week they were all calling her Princess Lydia. By the third week they were saying it to her face.”

  “And by the fourth week?”

  “She stopped coming in. She told Dad that her doctor didn’t want her near all the toxic chemicals in the plant. She was pregnant with the twins at the time.”

  “And was that the real reason?”

  “There are no toxic chemicals in the office,” snapped Philip. “She’d gotten bored, that’s all. She thought it would be glamorous getting dressed up and coming to work every day. She’s always envied Dagny... but it’s all a game to her. At first she got a kick out of pretending to be the big important businesswoman, but when she got down to the nitty-gritty—the grind of getting up and going to work and actually doing a job—then she lost interest.”

  “Dagny seemed to think that you’d be happier with Lydia off the board.”

  “Happier? I’d be ecstatic. But as I said before, I think the possibility of that actually occurring is remote.”

  “Because you think she doesn’t really want to sell?”

  “Why would she want to sell? If she didn’t own any shares in the company, then she wouldn’t be able to use them to torture us whenever she felt like it. If you knew Lydia you’d realize how ludicrous it is to take her seriously.”

  I thought about my conversation with Dagny and the letter that she’d received from Lydia’s investment bankers. I was getting whiplash bouncing from one family member to another’s prediction of what was going to happen.

  “Have any of you talked to her about this since receiving her letter?” I demanded in frustration. “If it’s attention she’s after, maybe that’s all she wants.”

  “When I want to speak to Lydia about anything, you’ll be the first one to know,” Philip announced, with a dry cough.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I have absolutely no intention of speaking to my little sister without an attorney present.”

  After Philip had gone I buzzed Cheryl and asked her to set up a meeting for me with Lydia Cavanaugh.

  “Sure thing,” she said. “Your mother’s on hold for you on line two.”

  “I’ll give you fifty dollars if you tell her I’m not here,” I pleaded.

  “I bet she’d give me a hundred just to put her through. Would you please stop being a baby and just pick up the phone?”

  I took a deep breath and punched the button.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said sweetly. “Welcome home. How was your trip?”

  My mother had just returned from her semiannual swing through Europe with her friend Sonny Welborn to shop the couture shows.

  “The clothes were awful and the French get ruder every year. The models were all emaciated and very unattractively made up. I don’t think I saw one item of clothing that one could actually wear in public. I did order some things at St. Laurent, so at least the trip wasn’t a complete waste of time. But that’s not why I called. I wanted to remind you of your obligations.”

  “Saturday night at eight o’clock,” I cut in quickly. “It’s been on my calendar for six weeks. Dinner for Grandma Prescott at the Whitehall Club.”

  “I assume you’ve already invited Stephen?”

  “Of course,” I lied, scribbling a note to have Cheryl call Cindy, his secretary, and arrange it.

  “I’m glad that’s all taken care of. But that’s not why I called.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to let you know that we had to change the Children’s Memorial Hospital committee meeting to this afternoon at four, but I was able to have it moved to our house so that it would be more convenient.”

  “Convenient for whom?” I demanded.

  The committee had become yet another source of grievance between us. Fed up with my mother’s constant harping about my lack of community-mindedness, I’d allowed her to browbeat me into working on a committee to raise money for a sorely needed new wing for Children’s Memorial Hospital. Unfortunately, while the goal of the committee was admirable, our inability to successfully schedule our first meeting had proved to be something of an obstacle. Bridge games, trips to Palm Springs, golf tournaments all sprang up and had to be accommodated.

  “You’ll have to go ahead without me,” I said. “I have a new case and there’s no way that I can be in Lake Forest at four o’clock.”

  “But this is the only time that was clear for everyone. Surely you can rearrange your schedule.” If Philip Cavanaugh hadn’t descended on me unannounced, I might have been able to swing it, but now I was so far behind it was out of the question.

  “Mother, you can’t call me at one o’clock and expect me to shuffle things around and be able to drive out to the suburbs the same afternoon,” I protested.

  “I called you twice yesterday and again this morning,” my mother countered archly. “Or didn’t that secretary of yours bother to give you my messages? Perhaps if you’d had the courtesy to return my calls, you’d find yourself with rather more notice.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I replied, recognizing that once again I’d been outmaneuvered.

  “Don’t make us all wait for you,” instructed my mother. I could hear the sati
sfaction in her voice long after I’d replaced the receiver.

  6

  “Nothing surprises me anymore,” Daniel Babbage announced across the white linen of his usual table at the Chicago League Club. “I’ve seen marital favors withheld, board meetings that ended in fistfights, and sons who cleaned out their father’s offices when the old man was out of town. But I have to tell you, Kate, a dead secretary is a first, even for me.”

  “How did you hear about it?” I asked, giving my dinner roll a surreptitious squeeze.

  The Chicago League Club was an institution, a hundred- | year-old bastion of political incorrectness whose unofficial motto had until recently been “No Democrats, no reporters, and no women.” Two years ago the rules were finally changed to allow the great-granddaughter of one of the founding members and a black U.S. Circuit Court judge to become members. Unfortunately, less progress I has been made in the quality of the food.

  “Jack called me at home last night,” replied Babbage. “He told me that you were there with Dagny when she found her.”

  I explained briefly how Dagny and I had discovered Cecilia Dobson’s body. I felt vaguely uncomfortable talking about death in Babbage’s company, but he did not seem in the least bit disconcerted. Cecilia Dobson’s passing was nothing to any of us—an unsettling episode, a gruesome lunchtime anecdote, nothing more.

  “So tell me, what did you think of Dagny?” he asked when I’d finished.

  “I really like her. She’s very impressive.”

  “I’m sure you realize that no matter what it says on the organizational chart, Dagny’s the one who’ll be running Superior Plating after Jack steps down.”

  “That’s not what she says.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Yesterday she told me that she’s had an offer from Monarch Metals to head their coatings division in Boston. She says that if her father doesn’t agree to buy out Lydia, she’s going to take it.”