Bitter Business

circled his wrist and slithered up the inside of his arm. I looked down into the tank. It was filled with hot, bubbling liquid a brilliant shade of yellow—chrome yellow, in fact. It looked like the kind of thing you’d show pictures of to children in order to frighten them about hell.
    “What’s your safety record like?” I asked, stepping back from the edge.
    “We have guys from OSHA and EPA through here every day. In the last twenty-five years we’ve only had one serious accident, and there was no question of it being our fault.”
    “What happened?”
    “One of our workers forgot his paycheck at the plant one Friday a few years back. That night, after about a dozen beers, he decided he couldn’t wait until Monday to come get it. He and a couple of his buddies came by here, broke a window, and climbed in to retrieve it. Nobody knows exactly how it happened—they were all so drunk—but one of them tripped and fell into this very vat.”
    “Did he die?”
    “Dying was the easy part of what happened to him.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Let’s just say,” said Eugene Cavanaugh, his face impassive, “that they decided not to have an open-casket funeral.”
     

3
     
    Dagny Cavanaugh’s secretary came to tell me that her boss was ready to see me. She was a young woman, pretty under too much makeup, with a short black skirt pulled tight across hard haunches and the kind of hairdo that looked like it was the product of a small explosion. For some reason, the very sight of her seemed to send Eugene into a cold fury.
    “Cecilia! What are you doing down here?” he demanded sharply.
    “I’m doing my job,” she snapped, planting her hands firmly on her hips. “You got a problem with that?”
    “You know that you’re not supposed to come into the plant.”
    “Dagny told me to go to your office and get the new lawyer. Loretta said you were giving her the tour. What was I supposed to do?” She shot him a look like a sulky teenager.
    “You should have had me paged.”
    “It’s not my fault if Tammy at the switchboard was busy,” she sassed back.
    They glared each other to a stalemate. Neither of them seemed interested in ending their awkward little scene for my sake, so I decided to rescue myself. I thanked Eugene for showing me around and Eugene, looking murderous, managed a civil reply.
    “Come on,” said Cecilia, with a dramatic flip of her hair. “I’ll take you to Dagny.” After we’d gone a few yards but were still within earshot, she added, “Eugene is so uptight. I guess when you leave the marines they give you a rod up your ass as a going-away present.”
    There being absolutely no appropriate response to that kind of remark, I elected to follow her in silence. We went down the stairs and through a set of fire doors into a large work area where shiny cylinders were moving down a conveyor belt and then being carefully shrink-wrapped and packed into boxes.
    At the sight of Cecilia, all work on the line ground to a halt. The men stopped what they were doing and leered. As we passed I heard catcalls and the sound of lips being smacked. Cecilia made an elaborate show of ignoring them, but I noticed that she turned the swivel up in her hips and every couple of seconds she gave her hair a provocative toss.
    As we left the factory floor a wave of fervent gratitude washed over me. My hardworking and intelligent secretary made my life easier in a thousand ways every day, while I had no doubt that this one was nothing but trouble.
     
    Dagny Cavanaugh received me in a sparsely furnished meeting room where mismatched chairs ringed a conference table that was littered with computer printouts and half-filled Styrofoam cups—no doubt the detritus of her earlier meeting.
    “Thank you so much for coming,” she said, springing to her feet to greet me. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I had my end-of-the-quarter session with our outside accountants, and today, for some reason, everything took longer than I expected.” She waved me into a seat. “My father told me that you’re going to be taking over for Daniel. How’s he doing?”
    “He still comes in to work every day. His secretary told me that he’s finished with chemotherapy and in remission, but no one knows how long it will last.”
    “I’ll have to call him and let him know he’s in our prayers.”
    Dagny was an attractive woman in her early forties who looked thirty and carried herself with a relaxed self-confidence that