The Hydrogen Murder (7 page)

On my way home in my big car, I tried to replay in my head the
sound of Matt's whooping laugh. I also told myself that so far there was not
one shred of evidence that Matt thought of me as anything but PSA-6, his sixth
Personal Services Agreement this year.

I stopped at the florist across from Saint Anthony's and made
arrangements for a spray of white chrysanthemums for Eric, the first time I'd
ordered funeral flowers to be delivered to my home address. I ordered a
separate spray of yellow mums with a card from Elaine and Eric's other friends
in California.

~~~~

Back at Galigani's, I stopped in at the first parlor. Rose
and Frank were there with Martha and the ushers they'd assigned to Eric's wake.
The body wouldn't be available for viewing until the weekend, but they were
already arranging the room.

"Here's our resident detective," Frank said.
"What's new, Gloria?"

With no clients around, Frank dropped his somber voice, but
not his impeccable grooming. He almost always wore a dark suit and tie at the
mortuary. If our yearbook had a category "most likely to be an undertaker,"
Frank would have been first choice—always the one to comfort and put
things in perspective, calming his friends in the face of teenage traumas.

Since it was close to the end of the workday, I suggested we
all go upstairs to my apartment for a snack.

"Great," Rose said, "I made a wine run, just
in case you asked."

While I never remembered to buy wine or beer, I usually had
a good supply of fruit and cheese and crackers. Topped off with a good vanilla
ice cream, I often considered that dinner.

Martha, whom I knew only slightly said she had to get home
to her children.

"Good luck on the case," Martha said before
leaving, "I'm sure you'll crack it." Clearly Martha's employers had
given her an overblown description of my role in the investigation.

Rose and Frank and I sat around my coffee table with plates
of food and got into another memory lane conversation. This time it was about
my late fiancé, Al Gravese, and the car crash that killed him just before
Christmas in 1962.

"I always thought you'd do more to find out what
happened," Frank said.

"I might still do that," I said.

It was one more thing, like the long walk along the beach
that I'd been putting off. And one more reason my involvement in Eric's murder
investigation was such a welcome distraction.

There was talk at the time that Al's death was not an
accident. A brief inquiry had turned up nothing suspicious and the matter was
put to rest. The gossip was that Al was mixed up with an undesirable element
that flourished in the city in the late fifties, local bookies and small time
criminals left over from the moonshine whiskey days.

One of the biggest mysteries of my life was how I'd become
engaged to someone I knew so little about. I'd met him while I was a junior in
college, several years after Josephine died and I was living alone with my
father. Al had come to Revere to work at Rose's father's nursery. He was an
expert landscaper and had a passion for the big flower shows in Boston every
year.

It was about that time that I'd broken up with Peter, and Al
was an attractive, available alternative. He always had a lot of money, and his
refusal to tell me what kind of meetings he slipped off to at a moment's notice
seemed romantic. I was desired by a rich, mysterious older man—Al was
nearly thirty; I was twenty.

Eventually I'd stopped chastising myself for being so naive.
It was a different, more private era, I told myself. Not like now, when
relationships are the subject of bestsellers and every little intimacy or state
of mind gets its own talk show slot.

"If you're interested in doing any research,"
Frank said, "just tell John. And the young guy who keeps the old files at
the newspaper now is a good friend of ours, too. We buried three of his
grandparents. He'll give you all the help you need."

"I don't think it's a good idea at all," Rose
said, as she did every time the subject of investigating Al's death came up.
"If Al really was in some kind of trouble when he died, it could be
dangerous to start poking into it. Besides, Gloria's here to start a new life,
not to dig up the old one."

As if on cue from the old life, the phone rang. Peter was
calling to remind me that I was scheduled to give a talk in his Italian class
the next morning. We'd worked out a monthly series of sessions on the contributions
of Italians and Italian Americans to science and technology. I'd give a
technical presentation in English, and the students would write follow-up
papers in Italian on the person's life and times. Not wanting to be tied to
chronological order, I'd planned to start with Enrico Fermi and how he achieved
the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

Once that was settled, Peter invited me to a dinner-dance at
Wonderland Ballroom on Saturday night, sponsored by Saint Anthony's Knights of
Columbus. I told him I wanted to be available to the Bensen murder
investigation, and couldn't make plans.

"I'm not happy with this new career of yours,"
Peter said. "I hope this cop isn't putting you in any danger."

Something in his tone said "possessive" to me, and
I responded a little too harshly.

"I'm not doing it to make you happy, Peter," I
said. "I'll see you about seven forty-five in the morning. I'll need an
overhead projector."

Rose and Frank were perusing my coffee table museum books,
but I could tell that they'd followed the gist of my conversation.

"I think Peter's been waiting for Gloria since
1962," Frank said to Rose when I returned to the seating area.

"Well, that's his problem," Rose said.

I decided I didn't need to enter into this conversation even
if it was about me. We gathered our jackets and purses and I ended up having my
second meal of the day at Russo's. There wasn't a lot of choice in our
immediate neighborhood, and none of us felt like driving too far.

~~~~

I asked Frank to drop me off a few blocks before the
mortuary so I could take advantage of the perfect weather. I'd been through the
toughest part of the year, the hot, muggy summers, and felt that this was a
just reward. There was enough of an east wind to carry the smell of salt air
inland and I took a deep breath to catch a whiff of the Atlantic Ocean. I
walked at a brisk pace for me, through quiet streets, past rows of one- and
two-story houses interspersed with neighborhood markets, repair shops, and
cleaners. No California-style strip malls, at least not in this part of Revere.
Every time I passed a video store or nail salon, I tried to remember what had
been in that spot when I was a child.

I'd already prepared my Fermi talk, but I still had to
decide whether to include his flight from Italy with his Jewish wife. Enrico
and Laura Fermi went legitimately to Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize, but
then to America to avoid her persecution. As I walked, I tried to think of a
way to relate the experience to a generation that probably hadn't even heard
the word holocaust.

I got home feeling clear-headed and ready for bed. I took a
quick look at my e-mail and paper mail and settled on what I'd wear to class,
and then to the police station, knowing I wouldn't have time to come home in
between.

As I got into bed with a stack of transparencies for one
last look at the radioactive decay scheme I'd drawn for my Fermi talk, my phone
rang.

A man's voice, but not one I expected.

"This is Ralph Leder," he said. "I want you
to know I wasn't pleased with what you were implying this afternoon."

"I'm sorry if I offended you, Ralph, but what exactly
is it that bothered you?"

"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. I'm
not going to play games with you. I'm calling to remind you that I have
wide-ranging influence in this business. And you're too young to retire
completely."

I tried to make a light-hearted response, but it came out
tight and high-pitched.

 
"This
sounds like, if-I-ever-want-to-work-in-this-town-again ... "

"Take it however you want to," he said, and hung
up.

CHAPTER
7

I've never been a morning person, but after a fitful night
it was even harder than usual to get up on Thursday morning. Leder's call shook
me more than I thought it deserved. After all, what could he do to me? Poison
my name with all the police departments in Boston and vicinity? Call all the
schools and cancel my guest appearances?

More importantly, did this mean he killed Eric Bensen? No, I
decided, he couldn't afford to give himself away like that if he were the
killer. On the other hand, he couldn't afford not to.

To make the night a complete failure for rest, I kept
dreaming of Al. In one vision we were at a flower show in the middle of winter
and someone shot him three times right in front of me. In another scene, Al was
being buried under the old high school building.

I forced myself out of bed at six o'clock. I had coffee and
a muffin from a batch I'd baked in an attempt to wean myself from stopping at
Luberto's Bakery every day.

By seven thirty, I was parking in the faculty section of the
lot behind the high school. The refrain
Cheer
Re-vere High
was running through my head, but this building, built long
after I'd left, held no nostalgia for me.

It was another clear, sunny fall day, and I watched the
students as they lingered outside.

After wrestling with Al's death, Peter's unwanted attention,
Matt's apparent disinterest, and Leder's threatening phone call, I found it
relaxing to focus on something simple, like nuclear physics.

I met Peter at the main office where I signed in on a
clipboard.

I'd chosen a black raw silk suit, black flats, and a hot
pink blouse. From previous experience with high school visits, I knew at least
I'd blend in with the many girls who'd be all in black. I wore my standard
jewelry for such occasions, a pendant with a hologram, a three-dimensional
image of Albert Einstein. My lapel ornament for the day was a tiny bronze
likeness of Dante, the pin I'd received as Italian Club secretary in 1958.

Though I knew I'd never be able to stand full-time teaching,
I always loved giving talks at schools. An occasional speaker had all the
advantages of a guest and none of the disadvantages of maintaining discipline
and handling administrative headaches.

"Doctor Gloria Lamerino and I were classmates," I
heard Peter say as he introduced me. You'd never guess I'd practically hung up
on him twelve hours earlier.

I started my talk with a favorite quote from Enrico Fermi: "Before
I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture
I am still confused, but on a higher level."

The quote brought the hoped-for laugh and the whole hour
went rather well, with thoughtful questions from Peter's students. One asked
why scientists did research that might be used for destructive purposes.
Another wanted to know about the current status of nuclear power. Several asked
me what I thought would be done about the problem of nuclear waste. I did my
best to be honest without using the hour as a forum for my political leanings,
which were slightly to the left on almost all matters except technology, where
I tipped to the right.

 
By the end of
class I was promising to send the students lists of resources for their papers.
They knew I'd be back next month to present Galileo Galilei, the sixteenth
century Italian scientist. I teased them with the question of whether Galileo
really did investigate gravity by dropping balls of different weights from the
leaning tower of Pisa. They'd have to wait a month for the answer.

Peter walked me to my car and leaned on the window ledge as
I got settled.

"I'm sorry about last night," he said. "It's
just that I worry about you."

I was proud of myself for not asking him if he'd been
worrying for thirty years, or just since I'd been back in his life, for the
last two days.

"I'll be fine," I said instead, turning my key in
the ignition. "Matt isn't going to let anything happen to me. In fact, I'm
going to meet him at ten, so I have to rush."

Peter straightened up, his shoulders stiffening. "If
you change your mind about the dance, give me a call," he said.

"I will."

Driving off I asked myself why I'd deliberately made Matt
and me sound a lot chummier than we were. The answer had something to do with
teen-agers and dating, so I dismissed it in a flash.

With just enough time for a cappuccino, I stopped at a new
Starbuck's at the edge of Revere by the Chelsea border. I used the break to
switch my brain from one kind of physical evidence to another. I'd managed to
find an old issue of a science magazine that carried the original story of the
breakthrough by Leder's group. I looked over the article as I drank my coffee
and refreshed my memory of the experimental set-up.