The Hydrogen Murder (10 page)

"How nice. Their first child?" I asked, showing
magnanimous good will and forgiveness.

"The first one, and they're both wrecks. George says
it's worse than a stakeout for irregular sleeping patterns."

"Does he know anything about this case yet?" I
asked.

"No, that's why I might see if I can get him started.
Unless we solve this case by Monday. What are you doing this weekend?"

I nearly jumped in feet first, making a fool of myself by
suggesting dinner and a movie. Narrow escape, but I realized in time that Matt
was talking about working, not socializing.

"I'll clear my calendar," I said.

We both laughed and I guessed that it dawned on Matt after
he said it that his question could be taken two ways. He kept his eyes on the
road, looking straight ahead.

"What ever made you go into physics?" he asked.

Just like a man, I thought, casting a vote for sexism. Ask
the first almost personal question while you're driving and you don't have to
make eye contact. It had started to rain and the windshield wipers provided an
extra level of noise to eliminate any possibility of intimacy. I decided to
keep my response equally objective and factual.

"I had two excellent women science teachers in high
school," I said. "A definite statistical rarity for those days, but I
didn't know any better. I thought all scientists were women and they encouraged
me. So I just kept studying math and physics."

"Are you glad to be back in Revere?"

I almost said, "This must be what it feels like to be
one of your suspects," but although he had one of the friendliest faces I
could imagine, I still wasn't comfortable joking with Matt.

"I'm still thinking about that," I said. "I
came back almost on an impulse, just the way I left a long time ago."

"I know," Matt said. "Frank told me a little
about the circumstances, how you were engaged to Al Gravese. Not that I was
prying. It's just that it's pretty unusual for someone to leave a town and
return thirty or so years later."

"I don't have any dramatic reasons or big
secrets," I said, "just some strange decisions in my life, I
guess."

I neglected to mention that I was happy he'd thought of me
as a real human being with a history he was interested in. I'd been working on
the assumption that I didn't exist for Matt before I met him in June.

"I remember the crash and the investigation. I'd just
joined the force," he said.

I almost asked whatever made him join the force, but I was
afraid he'd think me sarcastic. I thought me sarcastic, so it wasn't a great
leap to guess that others did. I continued to play it straight.

"A couple of nights ago I was looking through some
clippings that I'd kept at Galigani's all these years," I said. "It's
possible that I came back to find some resolution, to satisfy myself about how
he died."

"You mean you think the crash wasn't an accident?"

"Not necessarily, but whatever it was, I ran away from
it, and now I need to face it."

With that explanation, as muddy as the lab parking lot on
this rainy Thursday, our time in the car was up. In one way, I was sorry we'd
arrived since I wanted to bare my soul to Matt and see his in return. In
another way, I was grateful for the interruption. As we shared Matt's enormous
black umbrella on our walk to the lab entrance, we switched to talk of Eric's
murder investigation.

"Let's go downstairs first," Matt said, "and
check out the toys on the desk." He held the envelope with the crime scene
photographs close to his chest, under the umbrella.

We entered through the basement, dark and shadowy even in
the middle of the day, and went down the ramp to the gas gun lab. Since Eric's
desk was so close to the edge of the ramp, as soon as we opened the door we
could see that the line-up of figures didn't match the photographs. And
Einstein was missing.

"Okay," Matt said, as if he were checking off
items on a mental list. "I guess your scientific eye is good for a lot of
things."

"I'm sure you would have seen it," I said, trying
to hide my pleasure. If nothing else, maybe I was earning my money.

We left the lab and went up to the second floor.

A very heavy woman in jeans was sitting on a long wooden
bench in the corridor outside the department office, a white lab coat stretched
across her wide hips. The woman was looking down at a clipboard on her lap,
snapping the metal clip up and down. Her hair, in many shades of brown, fell in
curly disarray around her shoulders.

She looked up as we approached and I was surprised to see a
fresh young face above the matronly body. She stood up and clutched the
clipboard to her generous bosom.

"Are you the police?" she asked.

"Detective Gennaro," Matt said, casually showing
his badge. "Andrea Cabrini?"

"I'm Andrea Cabrini," she said, her voice heavy
with resignation. At that moment she seemed ready to raise her wrists for
handcuffing.

Here's someone too large even for my wardrobe, I thought,
and probably only about twenty-five years old. So much for Leder's comment
about "our little technician." And so much for stereotyping what
"the other woman" will look like. I wondered if Andrea's size was
also the reason Connie couldn't picture Eric sleeping with her. I considered
Connie a good candidate for the pool of people who think only the young and fit
can have fun.

Matt introduced me and told Andrea he'd like to ask her a
few questions.

"Is there somewhere we can talk?" he asked.

"I have a cubicle downstairs but it's roped off. I've
been using the library."

"Why don't we go down to your cubicle," Matt said.
"It's time to remove the tape anyway."

"Doctor Leder will be glad to hear that," Andrea
said.

"I'll bet you're glad, too," I said.

She let out a sigh. "I guess so."

This time we took the elevator and approached the ramp door
from a different direction. On the way, Matt asked Andrea what her work was in
the lab.

"I'm just the technician for the group," she said.
"After I got my bachelor's degree, I needed money so I took this job. I
might go back to school later. Right now I build chassis, do all the wiring,
and maintain the equipment. I work with Jim Guffy mostly."

Once inside the large lab room, Andrea led us to her
cubicle, two past Eric's. She walked by Eric's desk without looking at it and
dragged chairs from the center of the room into her space. An assortment of
sweaters and jackets on a coat rack in one corner partly covered a periodic
table of the elements tacked to the wall. Andrea's desk looked more like a
workbench, strewn with tiny electronic components, wire cutters, circuit
diagrams and rolls of multi-colored cable.

Once seated, Matt took out his traveling pad, a small spiral
bound notebook like the kind stenographers use. Andrea stood her clipboard
upright on her sloping lap and leaned on it. In spite of her size, she looked
like a child about to take a spelling test she hadn't prepared for.

"When was the last time you saw Eric Bensen?" Matt
asked.

"Monday," Andrea said, "I said good-bye to
him about five o'clock when I left."

"How close were you and Eric?" Matt asked.

His voice had a nonchalant ring, hardly in keeping with the
significance of the question, and the answer. I waited.

"I'm sure everyone's told you or you wouldn't be
here," Andrea said. "When the first policeman didn't ask me, I
thought I was safe." Andrea's voice was high-pitched, coming from a tiny
mouth buried in the mounds of flesh that were her cheeks.

"Safe from what?" Matt asked.

"Talk, suspicion," she said. "Eric and I were
good friends. We weren't lovers, if that's what they told you."

"Why do you think anyone would say you were
lovers?" Matt asked.

I was feeling out of place with this line of questioning,
but decided Matt knew what he was doing and would have told me if he wanted to
be alone with Andrea.
 

"Because we hung out together, I guess, and we gave
each other little cards and presents. I knew he was just flirting with me,
because Janice is so unloving." She stopped for a minute and caught her
breath. "I shouldn't have said that. Janice is a good person. She's just
always picking at Eric, even in front of his friends."

"Do you have a lot of contact with Mrs. Bensen?"

"Not that much, she came to the Memorial Day picnic and
open house, and sometimes we all have breakfast together in the cafeteria on
days when she drops him off."

"Did you ever see Eric alone outside the lab?"

"No," Andrea said, dragging out the vowel sound as
if she'd been accused of stealing candy from the corner drugstore. "It
wasn't like that. I knew once he got his degree he'd move away and I wouldn't
see him again. I think he had a girlfriend in California, too. I used to hear
him whispering into the phone. My roommate says he was using me, but I just
enjoyed him while I had him."

Matt looked away as Andrea started to cry.

"Eric was really nice to me," she said, drying her
eyes with a tissue she'd dug out of her pocket. "He was my friend."

In an effort to be as nonintrusive as possible, I looked
beyond Andrea, my eyes on the wall above her head where a large sepia poster of
Einstein riding his bicycle was held up by push pins. Before I could weigh the
merits of asking the question, I had already blurted it out.

"Did you give him the little figure of Einstein?"
I asked.

She looked at me as if I'd just looked into a crystal ball
and come up with her life. Matt kept his eyes on his notepad.

"Yes," she said, making no attempt to hide her
amazement.

"Did you also take it back?" Matt asked, not
missing a beat.

Andrea's eyes widened and her clipboard fell from her lap.
She probably figures we were both sent by the devil, I thought.

"Yes, I took it back," she said. "I know I
wasn't supposed to come in here, but it was the last thing I gave him. For his
birthday. And I wanted it as a remembrance. I messed up the other figures so no
one would notice, but I guess it didn't work."

Andrea was still sniffling and blew her nose at the end of
each sentence, her tissue ending up in shreds.

"How did you get in here?" Matt asked, as if he
were merely curious and not taking notes for his murder book.

"One of my roommates got the guard to leave for a
couple of minutes. She told him there was a problem in the parking lot. I don't
want her to get into trouble. It was my fault."

She's not the only one in trouble, I guessed, thinking of
what might happen to a police guard who leaves his post. Remembering all the
create-a-diversion plots I'd seen in movies, I pictured Andrea's roommate in a
short leather skirt and fishnet stockings tottering on red sandals with
four-inch heels.

"Just one more question, Ms. Cabrini," Matt said,
"and we'll let you get back to work. Do you know why anyone would want to
kill Eric?"

"No, I just know I didn't. I loved him." she said,
her voice barely a squeak. Andrea looked at me, her eyes narrow slits above the
padding of her cheeks. "I didn't kill him," she said.

For what it was worth, I patted her soft wide shoulder as we
left.

When we reached the top of the ramp, Matt approached the
policewoman and I heard him ask for a list of the men who shared the crime
scene duty. I walked ahead to give them privacy as he continued to talk to her
and write in his notebook.

After a few minutes, I saw her gather up the yellow tape as
Matt caught up with me and we walked in silence back to his car.

CHAPTER
10

After a day that began with too little sleep and ended with
an emotional interview, I was glad to be home. By six o'clock I'd changed into
jeans and my Fisherman's Wharf sweatshirt and was settled in my glide rocker
with 1950's instrumental music and a cup of coffee. My thinking scenario.

 
As "Autumn
Leaves" rippled through my living room, my first thought was that Andrea
had demonstrated more grief than Janice had—by an order of magnitude. But
I knew that outward signs didn't necessarily have anything to do with a
person's true feelings. I thought back to my response to Al's death. I'd been too
shocked to cry, which kept me from falling apart publicly. I went around for a
while looking and feeling like the universe had contracted to a small, cold
core. It wasn't until many months later when I was in California that I felt
the release of several long outbursts of sobbing.

"You need to join a support group," Elaine Cody
had told me, in the fashion of Berkeley in the sixties. "I'm sure there's
one for young widows. Which you are, sort of."

I'd met Elaine, who was already working as a technical
editor, soon after I arrived in California for graduate school. I got over my
trauma in a reasonable amount of time thanks to her good humor, mind-wrenching
physics homework assignments, and the threat of having to sit on the floor in a
circle and share my inner life with strangers.