The Hydrogen Murder (11 page)

Thirty years later, I still wasn't much better at sharing my
inner life, I realized, shutting up like an unwilling Revere Beach clam
whenever anyone tried to help me work things out, even Rose.

I forced myself out of my rocker and had a meal of pasta and
vegetables created out of supplies I'd picked up at a market perilously close
to Luberto's Bakery. Even after eating I was in a low energy state and at loose
ends.

I looked at my desk where I'd put the printout from Eric
Bensen's computer and considered working on it. I was also tempted to review my
notes and reevaluate all the main suspects, but I knew I needed a break from
the murder investigation. I thought of taking a walk until I heard the cold
rain beat against the windows of my apartment. While I fantasized about rainy
walks on the beach, when it came right down to it I preferred dry ones.

I decided to call Elaine and find out if she'd been aware of
a girlfriend in Eric's California life. I reached her at work, at just after
three in the afternoon on the West Coast.

"Is everything okay?" she asked.

I knew this deviation from our routine Saturday or Sunday
morning call, combined with Eric's murder, was throwing Elaine off kilter.

"Just a quick question," I said. "Did you
ever hear of Eric having an affair out there?"

"Gloria, you never pay attention. Remember Annie Lee,
the young Korean woman who could barely speak English?"

"The one who worked in the department office?"

"Right. Eric hung around her a lot and people talked.
But I'm pretty sure it wasn't really an affair. Annie had hardly any friends
and I think she just enjoyed the attention."

"How could you tell?"

"Gloria, when you're in the library and you see a guy
sitting next to a woman and he's playing with the sleeves of her sweater, you
don't have to be a genius . . ."

"Okay, I get it. I guess I was never in the library
when they were both there."

"Right," Elaine said, with a humorous twist to her
voice.

Elaine had made her point. I always missed subtle
interactions in my social circle. Eric certainly wasn't the typical Lothario in
looks, with a small frame, thinning hair, and bifocals, but it was beginning to
sound as if he had carved out his niche—find a young woman isolated from
society for one reason or another, and give her some harmless thrills. And feed
your own ego, I threw in, to complete my unsolicited psychological profile of
the murder victim.

"Thanks, Elaine," I said. "Sorry to bother
you at work."

"No charge," she said, with a laugh, and we hung
up.

For the next few minutes I gave in to nostalgia for my life
in California, with Elaine, a familiar daily routine, and no murders. No matter
which coast I was on I seemed to prefer the other. I wondered when I'd stop
blaming Josephine for giving me no practice making decisions or figuring out my
own likes and dislikes.

I came back to the present and thought about whether I
should tell Matt about Annie Lee. Girlfriends didn't fall within the scope of
technical aspects of the investigation, and I didn't want him to think I was
overstepping the limits of my contract. On the other hand, I wanted him to
think I was on top of things. I resorted to my usual decision-making
strategy—postponement.

Energized by my little talk with Elaine, I thought I could
manage a sorting and tossing mission to the attic. It was time to make some
decisions about what I'd left up there. Putting my box cutter in my pocket, I
walked through a door in my bedroom, into the narrow hallway at the back of my
apartment. A strange architectural feature of the building, the hallway ran
most of the length of my bedroom and living room. Looking at the layout, I got
the impression that the carpenters had made a two-foot mistake in following the
building plans and decided to make the difference into a foyer for the attic.

I dragged a short ladder down the corridor to a point under
the trap door. The top of the ladder, specially designed for entry to the
attic, had small hooked ends that fit into grooves on the attic floor on one
side of the opening. I jiggled the ladder until the hooks clicked into place
and climbed up.

Although the Galigani family had never lived in the mortuary
building, its attic had become the musty storage place for torn-up luggage,
cast-off baseball bats and rubber swords from old Halloween costumes. And
dozens of cartons in storage for old friends on the road.

I pulled the chain next to the bare bulb hanging from the
ceiling. Not much improvement in illumination, but I ignored the strong
temptation to leave the attic and return to it in the daylight. As I walked
back through cobwebs and dust towards my boxes, crouching under the low
ceiling, I heard the phone ring in my bedroom below me. By the time it reached
my ears, the ringing mingled with the sounds of boards creaking and rain
hitting the attic window and roof, the eerie symphony leaving me with a sense
of isolation. It seemed a great distance to the real world of good illumination
and technological contact with other people.

I knew I didn't have time to reach the phone even if I
hurried down, so I let the answering machine take over and made a resolution to
carry the cordless phone with me on my next trip to the upper regions of the
house. Once that was settled in my mind, I turned to my task.

My boxes were identical brown cartons, marked with
long-forgotten codes. I could only guess that the box labeled PT60-4 contained
four years of back issues of one of my favorite magazines, Physics Today. I
knew that the two with AG in wide black letters were about Al Gravese. He'd
been living with his parents in the North End of Boston when he died, so the
only things I had were souvenirs and presents from him or items that he might
have left around my home.

By the time I met Al, Josephine had died and I was sharing a
bottom-floor apartment in a duplex with my father on Tuckerman Street, a hilly
road not far from the current Bensen residence. Often after a late night with
me or business of his own, Al bunked upstairs with the Corrados, the old couple
who owned the house.

I could almost hear Mrs. Corrado's broken English. "You
got a nice boy," she'd tell me, with as much of a twinkle as her watery
old eyes could hold.

In the four months since I'd been back in Revere, I'd gone
through only three or four boxes, all with codes other than AG. I'd found my
high school yearbook, the dust of years embedded deep in the crevices of the
embossed replica of Paul Revere's lantern that was its logo. For some
inexplicable reason, I'd also kept a collection of essays in Italian that had
won me a prize in the Sons of Italy contest, and a crinoline petticoat, most of
which had disintegrated into a pile of dry white flakes.

It was time to dig deeper, I decided. I dragged the box
marked AG#1 under the light bulb and slit open the top. My fingers sifted
through enough dried flowers to line a casket and picked out a sour-smelling
brown photograph album. I took a seat on a rickety director's chair by the
small attic window and put the dusty book on my lap.

All the pictures I had of Al were in the album. I'd left it
behind in Revere and hadn't seen it since. I took a deep breath, and flipped
through the black pages, made of thick construction paper. I looked at dozens
of photographs in front of the same background. First me on the sand at the
beach, then Al in the same spot, then a whole group. I paused over a few
pictures with Rose and Frank at a flower show and other couples whose names I
couldn't remember. Enough of this I thought, I'll try another box.

I repacked the first carton and slit open AG#2. Everything
in this box was contained in a wrinkled brown paper bag sealed with transparent
tape, yellow and cracked with age. Along the side of the bag was written,
"from M. Corrado," in the oddly curled script of people from the old
country. I barely remembered getting this bag from our landlord right after
Al's funeral. It seemed I'd stuffed it in a box without even opening it. From
the weight and feel of it, I guessed it held clothing.

I opened the bag and pulled out three shirts that I
recognized as Al's. There was a toothbrush, a dark green chenille robe, some
socks and underwear and a square-faced travel clock in a plain silver case. The
clothing had a putrid smell that did nothing for the already dank air of the
attic. This one's easy, I thought, give the clock to the Salvation Army and
toss everything else.

As I shook out the robe a small object fell onto my
lap—a tiny address book, not more than three inches long and two inches
wide, with a black leather cover, brittle and dry. The pages were in good shape
for their age and as I leafed through them, I saw line after line of names and
numbers in Al's handwriting. Some of the numbers were obviously phone numbers,
others had dollar signs next to them.

I sat back on the floor and tapped the book against my leg.
I groaned out loud, tapped a few more times, and put the book in my pocket for
a later decision.

By ten o'clock my knees were hurting and I decided to go
downstairs and soak in my tub. In the old days at ten o'clock Al and I and Rose
and Frank might be just starting an evening together, heading out for an
all-night diner. But my knees didn't hurt then, either.

I carried a glass of water and the latest New Yorker
magazine into my bedroom, counting on the cartoons for complete distraction
from decisions about my belongings and from the emotional lows of the day.

As I placed my glass on the nightstand, I noticed the
blinking light on the answering machine. For all the nervousness it produced at
the time, I'd forgotten about the call that came in while I was in the attic. I
pushed the button on top of the unit and heard Rose's voice.

"Hi, hope you had a good day," she said, her voice
too cheerful for the message to come. "I just want to tell you not to
worry if you hear noise downstairs tonight. The guys will be moving Eric
Bensen's body into the first parlor around midnight. Have a good night. Talk to
you later."

CHAPTER
11

I'd become accustomed to living two floors above dark
parlors where corpses appeared regularly. Galigani's was one of only three
funeral homes in a city of nearly forty-five thousand people, so they had
'clients' as they called them, at least four days out of every seven. On my
first night in the apartment I had to walk past a small white casket holding
the body of a stillborn baby girl. Images of the grieving young parents and the
tiniest pale pink flowers I'd ever seen haunted me for days.

But this was my first experience living in the same building
as the wake of a friend, a murdered one at that. Another restless night, with
dreams of cardboard coffins falling apart in rainy graveyards. The shifty-eyed
rats I hadn't met in the attic visited my subconscious in the middle of the
night. I stayed in bed until almost ten o'clock on Friday morning, lazily
sipping coffee, to make up for a busy, nerve-wracking dream life.

Since I wasn't due at Matt's office until one-thirty, I used
the rest of the morning to catch up on some other work. I had to finish a
junior high science education project on lasers for a San Francisco science
museum, and in three weeks I was scheduled to speak at a high school physics
club meeting.

 
I'd deliberately
arranged my physics club talk for November 7, the common birthday of two of my
heroines, Marie Curie in 1867 and Lise Meitner in 1878. I planned to open with
the story of the first meeting between Meitner and the other great nuclear
physicist Ernest Rutherford.

"Oh," he'd said as a greeting, "I thought you
were a man."

Having been nearly invisible at many physics conferences
myself, I had no trouble believing the anecdote—that Rutherford was
unaware of Meitner's gender although he had read her publications and followed
her research with interest.

I sat down with my third cup of coffee and started my yearly
reading of my favorite biography of Marie Curie, written by her younger
daughter, Eve. I thought again what a wonderful, simple realm of reality
physics provided. Eric's murderer couldn't possibly be another physicist, I
told myself again, and revisited the temptation to rule out Leder, Connie, and
Jim for that reason alone.

Just before eleven o'clock Rose called up to me on the
intercom that connected the three floors at Galigani's Mortuary.

"How are you doing?" she asked. "Have you
seen Eric?"

For the second question, Rose went into her graveside voice.
After years in the business, she moved easily from her normal light tones to
her compassionate business voice. Anyone listening to her would know that Eric
was lying dead in a funeral parlor, and not someone you might have seen walking
along Broadway that morning.

"No, I'd rather not go in until the family sees
him," I said.

"Frank did a good job," Rose said.

"I'm sure he did," I said. I remembered Frank's
pride when he first worked out a formula that gave the skin of his corpses a
more life-like color. He added a pink dye to the formaldehyde mixture and was
able to eliminate much of the heavy make-up I saw at most viewings. Every time
I paid my respects to shapeless faces with crusty orange make-up I renewed my
resolution to be cremated. I hadn't told that to Rose and Frank yet.