The Oxygen Murder (5 page)

Z
io Giovanni’s must have been the narrowest restaurant in this city of extremes. There was room for one short row of tables for four along one wall, and one row of tables for two along the other.

So, when the marching band came through, we barely had room to lift our forks without pulling elbows in, close to our bodies.

Seven old men, all looking like my father, Marco Lamerino, in Santa outfits with floppy hats, marched in with big brass instruments. The Mulberry Street Marching Band (a name we created for them, on the spot) lined up in the skinny aisle and played holiday music for about ten minutes.

The four of us joined the other diners in singing the words now and then, when we knew them, and humming when we didn’t.

The medley was eclectic. “Silent Night” morphed quickly into “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and then back to “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” The group was gone before anyone could think of tipping them.

“I didn’t think they did things like that anymore,” Frank said after they’d left.

“They do everything in New York,” said our young waiter.

I believed him.

The four of us had dinner together in Revere so often, it seemed quite natural for Matt and me to be sitting across a red-checked tablecloth from Rose and Frank Galigani in New York City. We’d selected Zio Giovanni’s mostly because it was a nongentrified restaurant, with scuffed, uneven floors—increasingly hard to find, with blond wood paneling and ferns creeping into the neighborhood’s dining facilities.
Another plus: Zio Giovanni’s had no hawker on the sidewalk recruiting customers.

We resorted to our firmly established rhythm as each of us took a turn at leading the conversation. Like a four-way
How was your day?

Frank, who’d worked in one or another aspect of mortuary service since he was in college, always had stories of questionable appropriateness for mealtime. His particularly tough challenge of reshaping the mouth of a young woman who died in a head-on collision. A new glass trocar, providing visible flow of the fluids drawn from his “clients.” A state-of-the-art technique for sculpting an ear out of wax and pieces of tape and plastic to replace one lost in a shooting accident.

Tonight he described a missing nose on the last client he’d prepped before our trip. That he simultaneously hacked off a piece of salami from the antipasto tray only added to the realism of the story.

Rose announced that she would enlighten us on the mortician’s role in disaster preparedness. After she and Frank had breakfasted (while I was alone in a creaky elevator) with their daughter-in-law Karla’s parents, Grace and Roland Sasso, they’d met with a woman who was a member of a DMORT—Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team.

Rose started, however, with a report on the Sassos, their oldest son Robert’s in-laws. For Rose, family always came first. I was glad to be part of hers.

“Grace and Roland are such wonderful people. They’ve lived in that same apartment building all their lives. They wouldn’t give it up for anything. Last year—”

“DMORT, Rose?” Frank said. I figured he didn’t want to waste a perfectly good turn at conversation with family gossip.

“DMORT. It was so interesting. It’s not something that gets publicized,” Rose said, neatly buttering a warm slice of Italian bread that I knew she would never finish eating. My plate of eggplant, on the other hand, would soon be so clean as to look unused by the time the kitchen crew got to it.

“You don’t necessarily want people knowing that a bunch of embalmers are standing around an accident scene, or whatever,” Frank said. “We’re thinking of joining the regional group in Massachusetts.
They need funeral directors, MEs, X-ray technicians, fingerprint specialists, you name it.”

Frank paused for a sip of wine and Rose stepped in again. “When there are mass fatalities—like in an airplane crash or an earthquake or a flood or—” Rose paused, her face taking on a sad expression, and we all automatically looked south.

“Or an attack,” Frank said softly, patting Rose’s hand. “We’re talking about large numbers of people who need to be identified and stored.”

“Stored?” I asked. I’d been a tenant in the Galiganis’ mortuary—a live one, that is—until I moved in with Matt, so I might have known better than to ask about storage. I figured it out in time to hold off an explanation. “Never mind,” I said.

“Not exactly what you find listed in the
I Love New York
tour book,” Frank joked.

Matt had nothing to report. He confessed he’d napped through one of his conference sessions and slipped out for coffee with a buddy during another. He deferred to me, to report on what he called “the oxygen front.”

“What I don’t get,” Rose said, “is how come we survived the old, unregulated days. I mean, we sat on Revere Beach for hours without sunscreen number such-and-such, and we ate raw cookie dough, right? Suddenly all the things we thought were okay when we were kids aren’t safe anymore? Like these CDCs, or whatever was making our refrigerators run. Were we that stupid? Or are we being paranoid now?”

Rose always got to the heart of things, in spite of mixing up acronyms. Understandable that CFC would be replaced by CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, in her memory, given her profession.

“Very good questions,” I said sincerely. “A little of both, I suppose. CFCs were a boon when they first came on the market—around the time we were kids.”

Rose patted her nicely highlighted hair. “Maybe when
you
all were kids,” she said, with a wide grin. She wore a short jacket with fringe on the collar and cuffs and all the way down the front—the new frayed look that I didn’t understand. Especially when you added a large faux flower, constructed from more of the frayed fabric and pinned to her
lapel. My black washable knit outfit came from an outlet store that specialized in travel clothes.

“About CFCs,” I said. I knew my minutes were numbered, so I kept on track. “We used to think CFCs—like Freon—were ideal for both industrial and home refrigerators, among other things. They were so much better than the stuff they replaced. Originally, sulfur dioxide and ammonia were the refrigerants of choice. So everyone was thrilled to substitute something nontoxic, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and very stable, like CFCs. Then we realized that the chlorine part of the CFC molecule was a hidden hazard.”

I surveyed my audience, all paying rapt attention to their food and drink. Frank caught the last segment of spaghetti on his fork. Matt picked at the crumbs on his bread plate, looking at the basket as if deciding whether to have another piece. Rose sipped water after unobtrusively swallowing a calcium supplement.

“I think I’ll leave it at that,” I said, returning to my eggplant. “Keep you all in chlorinated suspense.”

A laugh all around.

Rose was ready to tell us of their visit with the Sassos, whose residence was in the West Seventies, not far from the American Museum of Natural History (I could live with that).

“Last year the building went co-op, and Karla was able to help them buy their place,” Rose said. “They’re so proud of her success as a lawyer, as we are, too, of course.”

“She makes a very good living,” Frank said. “I guess divorce is lucrative for attorneys, if not for the clients involved.” He paused. “I guess you could say that for me and Robert, too, about the mortuary business.”

Matt and I laughed. Rose gave him a strange look.

“Karla’s due in New York herself later in the week,” Rose said.

“To spend the holiday?” Matt asked.

“As close to Christmas as she can get,” Frank said. “William is at that age where he doesn’t want to leave all his friends while they’re on school vacation. So Karla will do an early celebration with her parents, then be home in Revere for the big dinners.”

“Can’t miss the big dinners,” I said.

“Too bad we’re not going to overlap here,” Rose said. “We’ll be long gone from New York.”

“Maybe not,” I said, all too aware that we had return tickets to Boston for Tuesday morning. Matt’s conference ended tomorrow, Monday afternoon, and we’d allowed ourselves one extra night for enjoying the city together.

Heads turned; forks and knives were silenced.

“Huh,” Matt said, in his
Really?
tone, perhaps the least stunned by my remark.

“Well, there’s Lori to take care of. And the police did ask me to stay around.”

“Indefinitely?” Rose asked, her eyes wide.

“To investigate?” Matt asked.

Frank laughed. Then we all did.

“Well, what do you say?” I asked, swinging my head to encompass everyone at the table.

“I think I’ll head back Tuesday as planned,” Frank said. “I talked to Robert this afternoon, and we’ve got every parlor filled.”

I pictured them all: the main Parlors A and B off the foyer of the Galigani Mortuary. Parlor C at the back, a smaller, makeshift area for busy times. For so many months, my home had been the small apartment on the uppermost floor of the building, topping off the stack that comprised the embalming room in the basement, the parlors and Frank’s office at street level, and Rose’s office above that.

“Hmmm,” Rose said.

I knew the look and the hesitation. Rose needed to hear from me that I wanted her to stay on with me.

I didn’t.

I needed unencumbered sleuthing time, not the special museum exhibits and Broadway shows that were the highlight of Rose’s New York vacations. I couldn’t let her know that, though.

“I hope you can stay, Rose,” I said, with as convincing a smile as I could manage.

“Okay,” she said.

I doubted that I fooled her with my forced enthusiasm, but the special communication of a long friendship was at work. I knew she was pleased.

The three of us looked at Matt, who’d been drumming his fingers on the table next to his bright blue bottle of sparkling water. “Honey?” I asked, in falsetto.

Rose and Frank laughed, a sign that the word hadn’t quite run its course for this trip.

Matt stopped drumming and made a half-and-half motion with his hand. “Can’t deny my bride,” he said. “And I’ve always wanted to see Rikers Island.”

It was all funny enough to cause Rose to drop her multivitamin into her water.

I thought about asking our waiter what the specials were for the rest of the week.

C
HAPTER
IVE

L
ori clutched her purse in front of her and stepped onto the N train. Monday morning commute time. No seats. She wrapped her arm around a pole and adopted the familiar position for reading a newspaper standing up while traveling fifty miles an hour. Although she hadn’t taken the subway much since moving into the midtown loft, she’d had enough experience reading and doing homework underground during her college years at Columbia.

She folded the
Times
arts section lengthwise and tried to focus on a review of a play she’d been wanting to see, but all she could think of was her last fight with Amber yesterday morning. She didn’t know either of them was capable of such angry words.

“You have to stop this, or I’ll turn you in,” she’d told Amber. What did that mean?
In
to what? To Amber’s PI boss? Or was Lori going to storm into the nearest police precinct and tell them that her colleague was a blackmailer?

If she did that, she’d have to tell them she was a blackmailer herself.

It had seemed so innocent at first, collecting a few extra bucks for a good cause—and Pizzano Productions was certainly a worthy recipient of a little money from people who would hardly miss it. All Lori’s videos had important social consequences. Not that she was in the
Fog of War
category yet, but someday maybe. Her piece on charter schools had aired on public television, and she’d done films on the lake cleanup, the right of gay couples to adopt, the sad state of nursing homes, the dwindling resources for at-risk children. All of them meaningful.

She’d have to except that one short piece during her internship, on the homes and gardens of New Hyde Park, Long Island, undertaken only because Professor Simms, who lived there, had insisted.

It was Amber who’d nearly destroyed Lori’s dreams. “Think of this little scheme as collecting grant money or donations,” Amber had said in her speech about why blackmailing was nothing to feel guilty about. “You know, like on PBS, when they say ‘viewers like you.’ ” Her laugh was cynical, unbecoming a lovely twenty-nine-year-old Columbia journalism grad.

Lori thought back to when Amber first took the job with the private investigator, Tina Miller. The gig was to be temporary, just a few cases, to pay off her student loans and get a little ahead. Amber’s assignments were usually low-key, like doing background checks for employers, following up on insurance claims, or taking a telltale photo here and there. Lori had agreed to let Amber use the equipment in her studio for a small fee.

Then Amber made Lori another offer. Instead of paying for studio time, Amber would cut her in on some special deals. Lori still wasn’t exactly sure why Amber didn’t continue to work solo. Maybe she needed to let someone else know about her exciting life, the risks she was taking. Amber had never been one to keep things to herself. More than once she’d called Lori immediately after a date to report on every detail, steamy or otherwise.