The Hydrogen Murder (3 page)

With a passing glance at the crumbs on our dented tray and a
quick check of the plates in front of Rose and Peter, I said, "We'll take
the tab."

I looked across the table at Peter, saw the surprised look
on his face and realized that feminism had left him behind. I was sure that the
last time I had pizza with him, he called the shots and paid the bill. Probably
even held my coat for me. I was beginning to think that two or three hours with
Peter every thirty years were enough.

I pulled my wallet out of my purse. "My treat," I
said.

CHAPTER
3

Anxious to get back to my apartment and check my answering
machine for a message from Sergeant Matt Gennaro, I managed to leave no doubt
about my lack of interest in nightcaps. I dropped my friends at the curb and
suggested that Peter drive Rose to her home across town.

"I'm beat," I said, with as loud a sigh as I could
muster after three-and-a-half slices of pizza. Rose had weighed in at
one-and-a-half slices.

Peter frowned as he climbed out of my spacious back seat,
then leaned into my window and gave me a kiss, something halfway between the
friend and the lover varieties. I found myself leaning towards the friend
variety and responded accordingly. It hadn't taken me long to remember why we'd
broken up in the first place.

"I'll call you, Gloria," Peter said. "It's
not going to be another thirty years."

I smiled and let him have the last word for the moment.

I pulled in to the enormous mortuary garage, parked my car
next to one of the Galigani hearses, and headed up the inside stairs to my
apartment, passing the main funeral parlor on the first floor. Although there
was no body laid out that evening, the air was heavy with left over flower
smells. I'd have sworn that I also smelled formaldehyde and Silktex, Frank's
standard anticoagulant, but figured it was my imagination.

"The prep room is very well ventilated, following
O.S.H.A. standards," Frank had assured me. "And we use the latest in
low-fuming chemicals."

A graduate of the New England Institute of Mortuary Science,
Frank was as proud as any scientist would be of his policy of keeping up with
the changing technology in his field. Although he had outside assistants and
had successfully groomed his first-born son, Robert, to follow in his
footsteps, Frank participated in every aspect of his undertaking business, from
comforting bereaved families to performing an occasional embalming.

Even empty, funeral parlor rooms always seemed quieter to me
than other spaces, as if the dead were able to absorb all natural background
noise. Galigani's was on a busy side street, but once inside, it felt like what
I imagined the interior of a vacuum tube to be like.

The second floor offices of Galigani's, at the top of a
beautiful old stairway with a mahogany banister, were visible from the
street-level foyer. Arranged symmetrically around the landing were two rooms
where Rose and her assistant, Martha, worked during the day, in charge of
correspondence, bookkeeping, and general management of the business. Frank had
a smaller first-floor office between the main parlor and the casket showroom.

My apartment was on the third floor, a one-bedroom flat,
with a small kitchen and good-sized living room, originally meant for a
resident caretaker in the days before alarm systems. Except for two matching
pale blue glide rockers, I'd given my furniture to a women's shelter in
Berkeley, and started over in Revere with a few new pieces of modern design, in
grays and blues to match the rockers.

Above me at Galigani's was an attic where Rose and Frank had
been storing some of my belongings for the last thirty years. I'd planned to
make regular trips up there to sort through my cartons, but hadn't made much
headway in four months. Or in thirty years, for that matter.

Entering my apartment, I went immediately to the answering
machine and pushed the button. Unlike Peter, I had all the conveniences of
twentieth century technology that I could afford, from a top-of-the-line
computer system and cordless phone to an electronic Rolodex file that I carried
in my purse.

Matt Gennaro's hoped-for message was there and I smiled as I
listened to his low, scratchy voice.

"I was just about to call you," he said. "I'd
like to talk about the possibility of having your help with a new
investigation. I'm wondering if you'll be able to meet me for lunch tomorrow.
Say, Russo's on Broadway at 12:30. I'll look for you there unless I hear
otherwise."

"Yes," I said out loud to my empty rooms, tossing
my head back like a rookie cop snapping to attention.

~~~~

Two for one. A job and a date. I decided to wait until
morning to call the Police Department. I knew from my previous experience
working with him that Matt Gennaro's regular routine was to have a breakfast of
black coffee and a bagel at his desk at about eight o'clock, his
"form-filling-out time," he called it.

It was the first time since hearing about Eric Bensen's
death that I was alone and able to absorb the fact that someone I knew had been
murdered. I looked out my window, amazed at the calmness of the October
evening, although I'd been out in it only a few minutes earlier. I looked
carefully into the dark night and wouldn't have been surprised if a bolt of
lightning shot across the cloudless sky to denounce the unnatural event that
had taken place on Charger Street.

I put on a CD of piano music and settled in one of my
rockers with the newspaper, a notebook, and pencil, but before I looked at them
I rocked back and forth letting Mozart's sonatas calm my mind. Although we
hadn't been close, Eric was a friend and a colleague at the beginning of a
promising career, and I hated the idea that he'd been the victim of violence.

I opened the newspaper and read the brief account. A clear
case of murder, according to the police.

The victim was a thirty-one year old physics graduate
student, the reporter noted. Three shots had been fired from a distance into
his upper body, some time between midnight and four in the morning on Tuesday.
He was found by a security guard in his lab at the northern edge of Revere on
Charger Street, in a building that was an off-campus annex to the Physics
Department of Massachusetts University. No sign of struggle. Nothing missing as
far as anyone could tell. The lab had a great deal of expensive equipment, the
article said, but nothing very portable or valuable for trading on the street.
Physics Department officials hadn't had a chance to examine the room closely to
see if small items were missing.

I checked the digital clock on my desk. Nine forty-five P.
M., six forty-five in California. I usually talked to my good friend Elaine
Cody on weekends, but I knew she'd want to hear about Eric's murder as soon as
possible. I punched in her Berkeley phone number and reached her immediately.

"Gloria," she said. "I was just going to call
you. What happened to Eric Bensen? I heard just the briefest snippet on my car
radio driving home."

I told Elaine all I knew about the murder and offered to
make arrangements for flowers for Eric. Across the miles I pictured Elaine in a
pleated skirt, expensive sweater, and pearls. With her classic preppy wardrobe
and shoulder-length hair, blonde in her youth, Elaine had earned the nickname
"Radcliffe." Unlike most Californians, she always dressed up for her
work as a technical writer at our lab.

"I don't believe in clothes that have no buttons or
zippers," she'd say as we observed the parade of lab employees arriving
for work in sweat suits in the winter and cut-offs and T-shirts in the summer.

"Are you going to work on the murder case?" Elaine
asked.

"I don't know yet. I hope so."

"Be careful, Gloria."

I laughed at the thought that there might be danger
connected to my police work.

"I'm only a consultant," I said. "I work with
pencil and paper, no guns or gangs."

"Still," Elaine said. "Be careful. When are
you coming out? You said after the summer."

"Maybe before Christmas."

"I miss you."

"I miss you, too."

We hung up, both knowing that I had no intention of going to
the West Coast before the holidays. I felt I needed at least one stable year in
my new home to determine which coast I wanted to spend the next thirty years
on.

Elaine had visited me in Revere, the first of the rash of
visitors I'd had during my first two months back. As I took her and other
California friends to Boston's fine museums and for walks around the Freedom
Trail, I felt like a tourist myself, a feeling I was trying to get over. Every
time I went to Logan Airport to pick up or deliver a guest, I wondered if I was
the one who should be getting on the plane. Invariably during my weekly phone
conversations with Elaine, she told me about a wedding or birthday party that I
wished I could have attended—very distracting in terms of my ability to
feel like a New England native again.

"If you got through the hot sticky summer, you're a
native," Rose had told me on Labor Day, not without self-interest.

Although I knew I was in a minority, for me, the gray humid
air was a welcome relief from the stark sunlight of California that required
polarizing lenses nearly every day of the year.

I called a few other people in Berkeley who knew Eric at
least as well as I did, and collected names for flowers. Then I slid my notepad
on top of the folded newspaper and started to organize my thoughts. Not that
I'd been hired for detective work. I was simply available to explain any
science that might be relevant to the circumstances of the crime. But I saw
only a thin line between science and police investigative work.

Eric's mentor, Doctor Ralph Leder, was much older than Eric,
probably in his late fifties. I'd met him only three or four times when he
visited Eric in California. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Midwesterner, with
thick blond and gray hair and a large square face, his slow movements in sharp
contrast to his quick mind. He was well published and respected, but he'd made
it obvious that he was counting on the gas gun experiments for further
recognition in his field. I remembered a talk Leder gave to our group in
California in the spring, following the news releases in the popular press. His
ambitions filled the overhead screen in the large conference room:

"Our work in metallic hydrogen will push the envelope
in understanding the composition of Jupiter. It will secure our place in the
development of superconductivity for commercial use and put us out front in the
transfer of technology to American industry."

He'd left off
 
"bring
us fame and fortune," but the message was clear. I couldn't help thinking
that with so much money at stake, if Leder thought Eric was going to expose any
shady activities on the part of the research team, he might be unhappy enough
to kill him. I put four stars next to Leder's name, my equivalent of "most
likely suspect."

Besides Leder and Eric, two other Revere-based physicists
worked on the journal article that was to catapult the hydrogen research team
to award-winning status—Connie Provenza and Jim Guffy, post-docs who were
stretching their funds and their dissertation research into one more year after
receiving their doctoral degrees. Like Eric, they'd spent most of the year in
California and had been back in the Boston area slightly longer than I had,
arriving some time in late May.

Connie Provenza had just turned thirty and lived in Chelsea,
a city bordering Revere on the south, with her boyfriend Bill Gordon, a third
year law student at Boston's Northeastern University. Connie, the main theorist
in the group, seemed to me very ambitious, often talking about breaking through
the glass ceiling. Her announced plans were to capitalize on the success of the
hydrogen experiments, get a quick MBA, and head for corporate America. Bright
and attractive, one of the main difficulties of her present life seemed to be
warding off the advances of Ralph Leder, who was also her mentor.

In deference to her gender, which she would not like, I gave
Connie only three stars, for "possible suspect."

Jim Guffy was a little younger than Connie, an
Irish-American Catholic, unmarried, and as conservative as if he'd never heard
of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of Vatican II. Jim had gone unmoved by the
heated debates about the old and new Catholicism. Jim's contribution to the
research team was his skill as an experimentalist. Thoroughly involved with the
hardware, Jim could kludge together a high-voltage power supply or a digital
temperature probe in a matter of hours.

Thinking about Jim's moral high ground and daily mass, I
gave him no stars, for "unlikely suspect."

Both Connie and Jim were among the people in our occasional
dinner group. Each month we'd explore a different San Francisco fish emporium
or a new ethnic menu, which Berkeley offered on almost every street corner—Thai,
Indian, Persian, plus cuisine from places that had been countries for only a
month or so.

Not that anyone was asking, but I decided I could rule out
the six scientists who were permanent residents of California, once I verified
that they were still on the West Coast.