The Oxygen Murder (16 page)

“You’d have loved that session, Gloria,” Matt said. “They were demonstrating all these new electronic weapons. There’s even a gun that gives you two choices. You can switch instantly between two barrels. One has beanbag rounds, the other has bullets. You can stun or kill.”

“What will they think of next?” Rose asked. She took a small bite of meat. “I wish Frank were here to help with all this food.” She had a hopeless, overwhelmed look.

Rose had eaten about one-half of the one-quarter sandwich she’d cut off. Matt and I had consumed a good portion of our meat, combining the leftovers into a single half sandwich that we’d take back to the hotel. We’d left room for dessert but decided to delay it until later in the evening.

Chirp chirp. Chirp chirp. Chirp chirp.

Matt’s distinctive cell phone ring. The one new technology he couldn’t do without. We were midway through pulling on vests, coats, scarves, and hats, but Matt had kept the phone handy through the meal.

He looked at me, and I knew he was thinking
Buzz,
as I was.

I would have been completely focused on Matt’s side of the phone call, except for Rose’s next maneuver. Under her coat was the magazine that had kept her company in the ice skating line:
New York City Today.
Now she put it on the table between us while she dressed for the outdoors.

Staring up from the cover was Tina Miller.

I leaned over for a closer look. The cover design was a collage of the year’s ten best, from clubs to galleries to books. There was no doubt—one of the little squares framed Tina’s face, more made up than when I’d seen her. Under her image was the caption:
MEET NYC’S TOP SMALL BUSINESSWOMEN
.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to read a subcaption:
LETTER STOLEN FROM LOCAL PI OFFICE. THIEF A TOURIST FROM REVERE, MASS
. I surreptitiously fished around in my purse, as if Karla’s letter were still there and Rose could see through the black leather.

At the same time, I heard Matt’s voice.

“Are you charging her?”

If I didn’t know better, I’d say my dizzy feeling was from too much roast beef.

C
HAPTER
F
URTEEN

I
t wasn’t easy for me to sit in our hotel room while Matt was at the precinct. He’d convinced me that it would be better if he went alone to deal with Buzz, Lori, and an assistant district attorney who was called in to talk about Lori’s case. Exactly what the case was, we still didn’t know, except that it involved a potential blackmail charge against Lori. Buzz had told Matt over the phone that Lori wasn’t yet free to go and that he’d called in a “friendly” ADA.

Fortunately, I had the latest issue of
New York City Today
to peruse.

Rose hadn’t given the magazine up right away.

“You never read this kind of thing, Gloria,” she said. She fanned out the glossy pages of the periodical as if it were a children’s flip book, like the one I’d given her daughter when she was a little girl that pictured the spinning planets. “Look at this. The feature articles are on the hot new dance floors, the ten best places to buy wine—you didn’t even drink champagne at my wedding. Speaking of weddings . . . we’ll come back to that. Remember, you gave your toast with iced tea?” She turned a few more pages of the magazine. “Then we have Broadway show reviews, ten cheap tours you can take around the five New York City boroughs—” She slapped the pages closed. “This is not you.”

I realized she was trying to spare me wasted time, lest I be searching the slick publication for news of the New York Academy of Sciences.

“I need something light and distracting,” I’d told her, then felt guilty when she acquiesced. Under normal circumstances, I would have admitted what drew me to the magazine, but I didn’t want to call her attention to Tina Miller, someone I’d recently ripped off, nor to the nature of the stolen item.

I was off the hook when Rose’s cell phone rang near the end of this negotiation. It was Frank, calling to say he’d arrived home safely, and by the time she was off the phone with him, the matter had faded to the background.

“Okay, then, I’m going down to my room and make some calls. William has a cold, and I want to check on him. Also I need to talk to Karla because I forgot which one of us is supposed to get him the iPod for Christmas. MC had a teacher’s meeting, and I want to find out if they discussed a field trip to the mortuary—there’s a lot of chemistry to this business, you know.” Here Rose winked at me. “And John thought it was over with him and Joyce, so I’ll see how that’s going. Robert is swamped without Frank and me for a few days. He might need me for something. They’re helpless with the records in my office, since Martha’s on vacation, too. I’ll give Martha a call, to confirm the date she returns.”

I was exhausted listening—that was more phone calls than I made in a week. I wished her well with the project as I locked the door behind her.

I sat on the less-than-comfortable bed, more like a futon, wearing very fuzzy purple socks Rose had given me at dinner. A sale at Strawberry, which she happened to drop into, and they’d come in handy, she’d said. She was right. The room was chilly even with the thermostat as high as the forced stops would allow.

I envied the ease with which Rose shopped, all year long, building up an inventory of gifts and merchandise that would be distributed as occasions arose. She always had something on hand for a birthday or anniversary, expected or unexpected, or for a host and hostess. For my part, I was having trouble figuring out a Christmas present for Matt and the fewer than half a dozen other people that made up my list.

On my lap was the magazine with Tina Miller on the cover. I checked the table of contents and went right to page thirty-two,
NEW YORK CITY’S SMALL BUSINESSWOMEN OF THE YEAR
. I zipped past Katy the florist, Melinda the copy shop owner, and Leslie the veterinarian, each of whom had a page devoted to an interview and photos.

Tina’s full-page spread was impressive. The graphics people had been creative. A PI agency didn’t have the allure of flower arrangements and
cute puppies, but the photographer had managed to make Tina’s file cabinets and the certificates on her wall look interesting. Of course, unlike Judy the deli manager and Patricia the jeweler, Tina couldn’t parade her clients in front of the
NYC Today
camera. Instead, the shots of her and her office were taken at odd angles for artistic appeal, and close-ups emphasized a miniature car collection and other objects on her bookshelf, which I hadn’t noticed during the few minutes I’d been in her office. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the magazine had supplied the props.

The article was written in Q-and-A style with questions about how Tina got started (her older brother asked her to spy on a younger sister to see if she was stealing his chewing gum) and what her goals were (to be the biggest and best in New York City, of course). Strains of
if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
went through my head, linked to the caricature of Frank Sinatra on the deli wall.

“I want to move people from the idea that the PI is the person slinking around in the bushes with binoculars and a telephoto lens trained on your bedroom window. Sure, we do some of that, but really the business of private investigation these days is very sophisticated. It’s computer based and depends on intelligence and resources as much as canniness. We need to know about alarms and codes and remotely operated devices, not just lock picks.”

Tina talked to the interviewer about her rise from being a one-woman enterprise to heading her current operation, with consultants and a worldwide network of data to tap into. In some ways, the story reminded me of the articles I wrote—and profiles written about me—during my short stint working with classified data at a government-funded lab. We could speak in general terms only, giving no particulars: “A device was tested,” we might write, or “Our theoretical predictions matched experimental data.” Photos would show the outside of a laboratory building against a clear California sky. No real information was given up.

Here, the pictures displayed that Tina had rows of file drawers, but no names could be shown, no investigative techniques described meaningfully, no resources revealed. I guessed I was among the few who’d seen one of her files up close. I cringed at the memory.

Blip blip blip.

In my haste to find my cell phone, Tina Miller toppled to the floor.

“We’re waiting for a decision from the ADA,” Matt said. “But it’s looking hopeful.”

“Hopeful how?”

“I’ll give you details in person.”

“When?”

“I’ll be there as soon as they make a final determination.”

I hung up. Matt’s phone call had been another information-free zone.

I barely had time to hide
New York City Today
under our mattress—you might call it an extreme way of avoiding Tina talk—when the little hotel room was crowded again, with Matt, Lori, Rose, and me.

Matt’s look of relief told me what I needed to know. Lori was out of the woods—at least for now. I felt that until Amber’s killer was found, the reprieve was tenuous.

“I’m so ashamed,” Lori said. “Believe me, nothing any of you say or do can make me feel worse.”

“We’re not going to try,” I said.

Gone was Lori’s sharp, New York City chic look. She wore a jacket more suitable for hiking in the hills of Berkeley, California. (Not that I’d ever done that in thirty years of living there.) Her face was drawn and pale, and she seemed on the edge of tears.

“Nice that you have friends on the NYPD, Matt,” Rose said.

I had to concentrate to remind myself that Rose was referring to Matt’s helping keep Lori out of jail. She couldn’t have known about my own foray into the life of crime.

“A lot of things contributed to Lori’s not being charged,” Matt said. “She has no record, of course. It was clear that she wasn’t heading up the scam herself, she never approached the mark, and the kickback she received from Amber wasn’t completely out of bounds.”

I wondered what “out of bounds” meant in terms of blackmail. Something like petty larceny versus grand larceny? If I ever thought the law was black and white, my tenure with the Revere Police Department had taught me otherwise, and my experience with the NYPD was even more variegated. All of which had worked to my advantage.

Rose tried to foist food on all of us, especially Lori. She’d brought trail mix, bagels, potato chips, brownies, and bottles of water from a deli right off the hotel lobby. Her hostess skills had never been more challenged, I thought, not even during the years she made valiant attempts to help me serve guests in style in my ill-equipped mortuary-apartment kitchen.

“All I can say is, I fell for it,” Lori said, her voice cracking. “Easy money. No one gets hurt. All the slogans you hear on TV dramas. You never see yourself being that stupid, but just like in those scripts, you can always rationalize. I needed to upgrade my equipment, my rent was being raised, I wanted to try some new packaging for distribution, go international, and on and on.”

Lori paused to take a raisin from the trail mix Rose had poured into a hotel glass. I’d already shared a brownie and a bagel with Matt.

Lori went on, relaxing a little as she unburdened herself. “Amber was very persuasive. She convinced me that as long as I wasn’t using the money to take a cruise to Bermuda—although that’s exactly what she had in mind for herself—it was okay. I don’t think she even saw that what she was doing was a crime.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Rose, plucking a single cashew from the glass. “Why is blackmail a crime anyway? I mean, gossiping, or just telling a secret you found out, isn’t illegal, unless, you know, it’s government secrets you’re selling to the Russians.” I noted that Rose was a little behind in her designation of the current evil empire. “Asking someone for money isn’t illegal, either, so why is it illegal when you put the two together?”

It was hard to tell if Rose really believed this or if she was trying to make Lori feel better, but I’d also given some thought to victimless crimes. Strictly speaking, nobody involved in them was an unwilling participant. Blackmail, insider trading, prostitution—all seemed matters of individual choice, and harmless for society as a whole, compared to violent crimes. So what was the point of criminalizing something like blackmail? To protect us from being exploited? People take advantage of each other in many ways all the time without the law intervening.

“If the reverse were to happen—if someone were to offer to pay me to keep his secret—that wouldn’t be a crime, either,” I said.

“I read that eliminating most victimless crimes would double the available jail space and greatly reduce the load on the judicial system,” Rose said.

“The law’s the law,” said the lawman among us. As flexible as Matt was, sometimes his training and long career in the administration of justice came to the fore. “And until it changes, we follow it.”

So much for shades of gray.

He spoke matter-of-factly, so only those who knew him well would hear the uncharacteristic stiffness in his voice. No one dared bring up civil disobedience and other ways of changing the law. Since Matt had gotten two of us out of legal jams in the last twenty-four hours, I supposed he deserved a little respect.