The Hydrogen Murder (23 page)

"Two people I know have been murdered," I said,
grateful at least that Peter hadn't said "cop." "If there's a
way I can help find the person who did it, I can't just walk away."

As I said this, I turned my head back and forth, Ping-Pong
style, between Peter and Matt. I hoped I sounded sure of myself.

"I was just leaving," Matt said. "I wanted to
give Gloria the news in person."

I was distressed that he didn't respond to me and more upset
that he thought he had to apologize to Peter for being there. I walked him to
the door. I put my left hand on his and with my right hand slid the tube of
notes up and out of his fist. I was close enough to catch his smell, a neutral
shaving-cream odor rather than a scent from an after-shave.

"I'll see you in the morning," I said. "Did
you say ten o'clock?"

"Nine," he said, his face in the scrunched up
configuration of a good loser as he left my apartment. I wanted to think I'd
won him over by a combination of impeccable logic that appealed to his brain,
and a sensuous touch that appealed to the rest of him.

Peter had gone to the kitchen and filled my spaghetti pot
with water.

"I made a quick trip to the North End and picked up
some pesto sauce," he said.

There's something to be said for predictability, I thought,
one of the linchpins of the scientific method. Why not make it a requirement
for a personal relationship? Matt brought me surprises—two personal
searches of my home in the late evening hours, a private security guard, two
murders. Peter brought me what I expected from a suitor—chocolates, roses
and gourmet pesto sauce.

I watched Peter make himself at home in my kitchen, filling
it with the smell of garlic and basil, and tried to imagine him in my future.
With one of my aprons covering his forest green polo shirt, he looked like an
advertisement for Mother's Day cards.

"Your fridge is empty, Gloria," Peter said.
"Do you get enough nutrition?"

At that, Peter's face went out of my future and Matt's came
in. What a way to make decisions, I thought, but there it was. Both men seemed
to be trying to take care of me—something I'd managed pretty well without
for my entire adult life—but Matt's solicitude seemed more respectful,
less possessive. Or maybe it was just chemistry, the non-laboratory kind. I
pictured Matt in my bedroom emptying his pockets of handcuffs, loose change and
an index card with the Miranda rights typed on it.

Peter and I sat at my kitchen table and ate freshly made
pasta, garlic bread, and tossed salad, all from Mangia's in the North End. I'd
found some Girl Scout cookies in the freezer and created a respectable dessert
by crumbling mint chocolate wafers over vanilla ice cream.

As we carried our coffee into the living room, I had the
sense that our talk was about to begin. It was nice of him to wait until we'd
finished dinner, I noted. During my childhood, meal times were always
stressful, with unpleasant, critical conversations. Josephine used supper as a
forum to bring up whatever was bothering her, usually about me, while my father
sat eating his macaroni and meatballs, his head a few centimeters from his
plate, no help at all.

Many years after my mother died, my father said to me,
"Your mother was very hard on you. I don't know why. She was just very
hard on you."

That was the only closure I was ever able to get about my
unhappy childhood.

Peter cleared his throat.

"Gloria, I heard you tell the cop you'd see him
tomorrow. Why are you being so stubborn?"

"Is this our talk?"

"You're making fun of me. I don't appreciate
that."

 
We were sitting
on my glide rockers, across the coffee table from each other. The dinner music,
a CD of Neapolitan folk songs was still playing. Music from the old country for
an old-fashioned conversation. I dug into my store of new-fashioned pop
psychology phrases.

"I feel that you're trying to take over my life,"
I said. "I'm not used to having people tell me what I can and can't
do."

"Maybe it's time to let someone take care of you."

"That's not what I want, Peter."

"You never answered my letters when I wrote that first
year or two."

"I thought I did."

"Well, you sent post cards of the redwoods and the
Pacific Ocean, if that's what you mean."

"I had a lot to work through, Peter. And my graduate
program was very demanding."

Peter was sitting with his legs crossed, his right ankle
over his left knee. His voice sounded like that of the chairman of the board
who has a certain number of agenda items to cover. From the white skin on the
tips of his knuckles, I sensed that he thought he was losing some important
vote.

"You never married. Did you ever come close?" he
asked.

"Not even close," I said, coming up behind him
from the kitchen. "How about you?"

I didn't like the way our little talk was going, but I
decided to cooperate. To gain some distance from the touchy subjects, I
refilled our coffee mugs and took the empty dessert dishes to the sink.

"Because of Al?" he asked, skipping right over my
question about the history of his love life. I figured he could tell by my tone
that I didn't really care about the answer.

"Because it just never came up," I said.

"What if I bring it up?"

"Let's not do this," I said. "We haven't seen
each other in thirty years. Why don't we see if we can be friends first?"

I was proud of myself for coming up with a nice compromise,
hoping Peter didn't interpret "friends" as people who go on cruises
to the Caribbean together. I thought I was offering something open-ended,
gentle but not misleading, the perfect win-win solution. Peter apparently
thought less of my bottom line than I did.

"While you date one of Revere's finest?" he asked.

"I certainly hope so," I said.

Peter looked at his watch and stood up.

"I'd better be going," he said.

I guessed our talk was over.

~~~~

After Peter left, I sat on my rocker for a long time wrapped
in guilt because, in spite of Rose's warning, I'd resorted to sarcasm again.
Maybe there's no good way to tell a person that his romantic interest in you is
not mutual. Maybe right now Matt's having the same problem, I thought, deciding
how to let me down gently.

Having had enough emotion for one evening, I turned to the
comfort of physics. I picked up Scientific American and treated my brain to an
article on fusion energy research and helium, thinking life might be simpler
one step higher than hydrogen in the periodic table.

For further enjoyment, and in keeping with the oscillator
pattern of my mood I turned to browsing the web. I clicked on one of my
favorite sites, pages of graphics from the Vatican Art Collection and enjoyed
the magnificent paintings of Michelangelo and Rafael in my own living room.

Once my computer was booted up, I made a gesture towards
efficiency and decided to work on my laser project. I had only a few more
sections to add and I'd have a complete lesson, ready for teachers to use with
junior high students.

For the hands-on part of the lesson, I'd written an
experiment using a water hose. Students would compare the sprays of water
coming from the nozzle of the hose at different settings with the sprays of
light coming from a regular flashlight and a laser. I wrote a few paragraphs of
texts and equations to help the teacher explain the parallel— just as the
narrower beam of water had more power than the wider beam, the narrower beam of
light from the laser would have more power than the spread-out beam of a
flashlight.

At midnight I went to bed with thoughts of seeing Matt the
next day. But when I realized I'd have nothing more to tell him about the
printout, the idea didn't seem so pleasant, especially if Berger were back by
now.

~~~~

I arrived at Matt's office a little before nine o'clock,
wearing a three piece knit suit that was identical to the striped one I'd worn
to Eric's wake, except that this one was in two shades of burgundy. Since it's
not always easy to find attractive professional clothing in large sizes, I'd
followed Josephine's advice, "if it fits, buy two." I pinned a small
gold replica of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, a gift from Elaine, to my
jacket.

Matt was behind his desk in a brown suit and striped beige
shirt, both of which looked new. His tie was as dark brown as his eyes, and the
effect was of someone who'd just had his colors done. Maybe Monday is dress up
day, I thought.

"This is your swan song, right?" Matt said as I
sat down.

It amused me that he was using participatory democracy,
appearing to ask my permission. He'd apparently abandoned the benevolent despot
role he'd assumed on three different occasions in my apartment. I was starting
to feel like an expert in asserting myself with men. And at such a young age, I
thought, not above a little self-inflicted sarcasm.

"Is that the best you can do for a greeting?" I
asked.

"Didn't I ever tell you
I'm crazy about
swans?" he said.

CHAPTER
22

Connie and Jim came in right behind me, dissipating the
effects of Matt's words on my complexion. If they hadn't both looked so
distraught, I would have worried that I looked as though Matt and I had been
caught in an embrace. But their grim faces brought me back to reality and I
worried about them instead, wondering how they got the news of Leder's murder.
Probably not as painlessly as I had, I guessed.

"Let's move to an interview room down the hall,"
Matt said, "I'll have someone direct Andrea and Janice when they get
here."

"I can't believe this," Connie said to no one in
particular, as we walked past desks and ringing phones. "First Eric, now
Ralph."

Except for her casual use of Leder's first name, Connie
seemed as uncomposed as I'd ever seen her, a tight ponytail pulling on the skin
around her ears. She clutched her briefcase, holding it close to her chest as
if it were a pile of schoolbooks without a handle.

"I brought my conductivity notes," she said to me,
"just in case."

Soon after Jim had helped Matt arrange chairs around a gray
metal table, Janice and Andrea were ushered into the room by a young
policewoman. Andrea looked at me and shrugged her shoulders as if to give me a
private sign that probably meant she was wrong about Leder, but I didn't pursue
the interaction.

"Do you have any clues you can tell us about?"
Janice asked Matt, taking a seat next to him.

Matt shook his head and straightened the small pile of
papers he'd carried in.

"We're following some leads," he said. "But
first, coffee. I know it's early."

"Matt pointed to a side table and Jim acted as waiter
for a few minutes, pouring coffee. I thought of asking him for a donut but I
was afraid he'd take me seriously and run out to a bakery. More than that, a
joke seemed out of place. This was the most solemn gathering of our group, surpassing
even Eric's wake in gravity. Two murders seemed more than our little dinner
group could handle.

We settled in our chairs and waited for Matt to speak, all
eyes turned in his direction.

"I have a few things I want you all to hear," Matt
said. "Then I'll need a brief private session with each of you. I know
you're all anxious to move on."

Matt took a sip of his coffee and the five of us followed
suit, as if we were playing "Simon Says." As I glanced around the
table, I couldn't decide which member of the group looked more shell-shocked.

Andrea, looming larger than ever in a shapeless denim
jumper, seemed out of place, like a child admitted by mistake to a kindergarten
faculty meeting. Janice picked at her Styrofoam cup in an uncharacteristically
nervous gesture.

"The good news," Matt said, "is that we're no
longer pursuing technical issues in these cases, so you don't have to answer
any more of Gloria's questions."

If his intent was to lighten the mood, Matt succeeded at
least in part. We all relaxed our bodies a little, smiled, and shifted in our
chairs.

"You have another theory?" Jim asked, sitting
forward in his chair. Jim had chosen the least comfortable furniture in the
room, a gray folding chair with a hard metal seat.

"We're off the hook," Connie said, extending the
new, lighter atmosphere and placing her briefcase down on the floor between us.

Not yet, young lady, I wanted to say. What are you going to
do about the small matter of falsified scientific data? I knew my place,
however, and remained silent. As I moved my feet to accommodate her briefcase,
I noticed a set of gold initials in the corner—CMP—and vaguely
wondered what her middle name was. I looked at the initials longer than I
needed to, not clear why, but something was flitting around in my brain trying
to connect itself to an important piece of a puzzle.