The Oxygen Murder (4 page)

Rose and Frank left for their own room, three floors down. I knew they’d appear in the lobby at eight o’clock, even more sharply dressed and put-together than they were now. For us, on the other hand: Matt would straighten his tie and put on a dry jacket, and I would give some consideration to brushing my hair before rendezvousing at the concierge’s desk.

Matt insisted on accompanying Lori to the street and seeing that she and a bag of food got into a taxi headed for Queens. He wrote down her friend’s phone number before they left the room. I was sure Matt’s solicitude stemmed from a number of things—ranging from the concern of a loving uncle to the precautionary outlook of a homicide detective who worried about her being a target.

Matt had given me family background on the plane ride to New York: Lori’s mother died when she was barely nine years old, and her father moved a new wife into their home within three months.

“Rita, the new stepmother, wasn’t the maternal kind,” Matt said. “So I sort of adopted Lori until she left Revere and came here to go to college at Columbia. She’s lived in New York ever since.”

My heart went out to the young woman who’d done so well after such a tough start in life, effectively orphaned at nine. I also wondered
what Lori had held back from the NYPD, and whether Matt had been able to coax it out of her.

To think, until this morning, I had only a vacation to worry about.

Now I had a murder.

I also had an errand to do.

It had stopped raining, but I shoved a fold-up umbrella into my tote, between a notebook and a copy of
New Scientist,
always handy in case I became bored with Gotham.

I went out the side door of our hotel and headed up Eighth, knowing Matt would be with Lori, in front of the hotel on West Forty-fifth Street, either in the deli or on the street waiting for a taxi.

The first block offered everything a person might need. Flowers, prizewinning produce, a falafel wagon, a check-cashing office, T-shirts, used books (on a sidewalk table, in spite of the low temperatures), Rolex watches displayed in an attaché case. I tried to pick out the natives on the crowded street. It was easier years ago, when most New Yorkers wore black, no matter what the season. Then, you could pick out the visitors simply by clothing color: White jeans and a pink sweatshirt in December signaled a tourist from Stockton, California, or Phoenix, Arizona. Now, pink was the new black, and I couldn’t tell the natives from the tourists.

I felt at home myself. Rose and I had arranged annual extended weekend reunions in New York during the years I lived in California, many times coinciding with an American Physical Society conference I’d attend at the Sixth Avenue Hilton. She’d take a train from Boston to Penn Station, I’d fly into JFK, and we’d meet in a downtown hotel. Rose would choose one cultural event, like a drama on Broadway, to force me to, and I’d drag her to the Hayden Planetarium or to some abstruse exhibit of the notebooks of Sir Isaac Newton to peruse four-hundred-year-old prose, some of it in Latin.

The rest of the time we walked and talked, about her three children, the state of the world, or my latest lab mishap.

The air today was cold and fresh, perfect for mental acuity.

I started a mental list.

Number one: check noise—my reason for this trip to Lori’s building. I felt compelled to survey the outside area around her West Forty-eighth Street address, to see if there even was a fire escape, or a trash can that could have been knocked over in the alleged escape attempt I thought I’d heard.

No one, I rationalized, could call that
investigating.

Number two: check TOMS. I needed to review the data on ozone depletion from TOMS, NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer. I knew about the Montreal Protocol, implemented in the late 1980s. Member countries approved a plan to control the production and consumption of substances that can cause ozone depletion. The agreement had been amended to ultimately ban CFCs altogether, with consideration given to developing nations that might need time to improve quality-of-life technologies.

What I hadn’t kept up on was the quantitative data. The last I’d heard, early in the new century, was that the earth had lost 3 percent of its ozone layer.

Number three: brush up on ozone monitoring in the workplace. At the other end of the ozone spectrum was the problem of too much of it. In some industries, employees were at risk of serious overexposure to ozone inadvertently generated through their occupations.

I wished I’d brought my laptop, but at the last minute, I’d given the space to a pile of science magazines (the only kind I read). I’d look up the locations of Internet cafés so I could do some research and have a coffee at the same time. I figured New York would have one on every corner.

Number four: check violators. While I was there, roaming around in the ether, I might as well research some of the companies that had already been found in violation of the guidelines. I hoped that would lead me to other possible noncompliance spots: If Lori and Amber were about to expose anyone for violation of CFC regulations or ozone monitoring, it would be a powerful motive for murder. The penalties for smuggling CFCs or evading the special excise taxes on them were severe, sometimes including a prison term—an unwelcome prospect for a high-living CEO. The same was true for ozone monitoring violations.

I didn’t linger long on the idea that it was Lori’s apartment that was
the crime scene—and Lori who would be the more likely target in this scenario, not Amber. I swallowed hard. Surely no one would mistake the honey-haired Amber for the short, dark Lori Pizzano.

My alibi was ready, in case I got caught doing more than what might be required to help Lori with the documentary. I’d tell my husband and my friends that I was preparing for my next Revere High School science class talk. In fact, I probably would use the material for that purpose, thus adding truthfulness to my résumé.

I breathed easier.

I used the long block between Eighth Avenue and Broadway to focus my attention on Lori’s building, looming ahead.

From the outside, at a casual glance, the building showed no signs of a recent struggle, except for the presence of a uniformed officer on the front stoop. I walked past the building, then turned to pass it in the other direction. As far as I could tell, no one noticed this peculiar maneuver, not even the cop. Like the other pedestrians—the pretheater dinner crowd, I guessed—I kept my eyes guarded, not making eye contact with anyone, except for the occasional
’scuse me
after a bump.

On my second walk-by, I stopped in front of the narrow passageway between Lori’s building and the next one. I peered down the alley and took a few steps into it. A row of trash cans as long as my first helium-neon laser tube lined one wall. Fire escape steps and platforms stood out from the buildings on both sides of the alley, nearly meeting in the middle. The set of steps on Lori’s building stopped about three feet above one of the cans, next to a large Dumpster. I counted windows and saw broken flowerpots on the old metal landing at the fourth floor.

Never did a dark, trash-filled alley look so good to me.

Rumble. Crash. Crash.

I heard the sounds again in my mind. I knew that if I still lived in California I’d have run for the doorjamb, thinking an earthquake was rumbling through.

I shuddered at the idea that I might have shared Lori’s airy loft, even if only for a few seconds, with Amber Keenan’s killer. I wished I’d had the time to ask Amber what she’d gotten herself into lately, what might have caused Lori to worry about her.

I looked up again at the fourth-story windows. I wished I’d been able to commandeer tanks full of oxygen, grasp Amber’s last breaths, and stretch them into enough for a lifetime.

Matt was waiting for me in our room. He wanted to know how and why I’d snuck by him as he ushered Lori into a cab.

“I thought you’d be visiting with her for a while,” I said.

A brief
huh,
not a question, was his only utterance.

“I left you a note,” I said, doing what I supposed many of Matt’s interviewees did during his silences—digging in deeper. In any case, I never was convinced that my simple
OUT FOR A WHILE
on a scrap of paper would suffice.

“That’s
what,
not how, or why, or where.”

I gauged the response seventy-thirty, teasing-serious. Making this calculation was an important skill I’d developed over our time together.

“I needed some air?” I hadn’t meant it to be a question, but Matt’s frown, with its yellowish glow from the walls, intimidated me.

“You’re aware this is not even
my
jurisdiction, let alone yours?”

I could tell that
What could you possibly mean by that?
wouldn’t work. “I know, and I swear I did nothing even vaguely illegal.” I crossed my heart and saw the hint of a smile.

Another
huh
from Matt.

“Not even an obstruction of justice.”

He held up his palm. “Okay.”

It seemed too easy, but I didn’t question his willingness to drop the subject. I had a new topic ready.

“Is it time for an ozone lesson?” I asked.

A smile. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt.”

Whew
.

“We’ll start with oxygen, which you already know is number eight on the periodic table. So it has?”

“Eight protons in the nucleus.”

Another inaudible
whew.
We’d had occasion to discuss the periodic table before this, and it was gratifying to know he’d retained some facts. On the other hand, I didn’t want to resort to kindergarten tactics
and make a big deal out of a small success. Teaching one’s husband, I’d learned, is a tricky business.

“Ozone is a simple molecule, made of three oxygen atoms. It’s just O
₃
.” I showed him three fingers to reinforce the image. “You probably already knew that.”

“I didn’t.”

I reached for the pen and pad of paper by the phone and started a sketch, severely handicapped by the unavailability of PowerPoint. A wiggly circle for the earth. Four more or less concentric rings around it for the layers above the surface: our atmosphere. I shaded an area. “The ozone layer is in the second layer, the stratosphere.”

Matt scrunched his face. Thinking. Remembering. “Let’s see, ninth-grade science—Mr. Russo, who was really hired to be our field hockey coach. We went to the finals that year. Beat Winthrop, as I recall.”

I poked my index finger into Matt’s chest. “Well, therein lies the problem. Mr. field-hockey-coach Russo. We ought to be hiring teachers who know science and let them wing their way through sports coaching, instead of the other way around.”

Matt grinned. I knew he agreed.

Matt was perched on the heating/cooling unit, while I sat on the chair in front of him. I had the superior view. Outside our window was a dense group of New York buildings, their floors and windows lit in a random fashion. Some windows were dark; others offered a bright look into an office or hotel room. I loved the geometry of the view: thousands of rectangular windows, with fire escape ladders slashing diagonally across them at intervals; at street level, an array of conic-section awnings decorated with a street number or the name of a restaurant. In this holiday season, more than the usual number of lights flickered at the tops of skyscrapers.

I stared at small office Christmas trees and festive lighted garlands strung around rooftop gardens.

A mesmerizing scene.

But I had a student in front of me. I picked up where I left off. “The ozone layer acts like a blanket, absorbing the harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.” I drew the sun at the edge of the paper. The completed drawing looked like one that could adorn the refrigerator of a family
with a six-year-old. “Without this ozone cover, when the ozone layer is depleted, in other words, we’re exposed to serious sunburn and potential risk of skin cancer.”

I saw Matt’s attention drift. I needed to remember to limit the length of science sentences.

“That was nice today, by the way, getting Lori to talk about oxygen,” he said.

I waved my hand in the air. “Science cures.”

“So you say.” He leaned forward and kissed me. “I’m trying to compliment you. You put Lori at ease, and that was important.”

I nodded and whispered a thank-you. The best I could do—I hadn’t had a lot of training in accepting praise.

“Were you able to find out what Lori did
not
tell the police? Whatever it was that Amber was too deep into?” I asked, putting quote marks in the air around the last phrase.

“ ’Fraid not. But we’ll see her again tomorrow.”

Matt stood, came behind me, and put his arms around me. I leaned back, my ear at his heart.

We looked at our watches. Almost ten to eight.

In our immediate future, for the Galiganis, Matt, and me, was dinner again in Little Italy. Sure, New York City was known for a wide variety of ethnic restaurants, and you might think we’d try a different neighborhood on our third night. But not two Galiganis (one née Zarelli), a Gennaro, and a Lamerino (me, joining the 17 percent of New England brides who did not adopt their spouse’s name). We were drawn like iron filings to the magnetic Italian neighborhood just east of SoHo.

Frank Galigani had the idea that trying a new Italian establishment each night was diversity enough. He’d ticked them off on his fingers. “You’ve got your Sicilian, your Neapolitan, your Abruzzese . . .”

I guessed that Lori, who’d told us that on Saturday she’d feasted on a Bavarian breadbasket for breakfast at the Neue Galerie off Fifth, and sushi for lunch in Chelsea, would have laughed if she’d been there to hear it.

“Too bad we have to leave,” I said.

Matt squeezed my shoulders. “Later.”

I gave him my best smile. “Later.”

C
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F
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