The Hydrogen Murder (4 page)

Brilliant powers of deduction. If this was the best I could
do, I'd better go to bed.

~~~~

Just after I turned out my reading lamp, I heard the now
familiar noise of the garage door opening, two floors below my bedroom. I
stretched across the bed to look out the window. Through my parted white linen
drapes, I saw a Galigani hearse leave the driveway and pull out onto Tuttle
Street. The long black vehicle moved slowly across the gray shadows cast by the
streetlight, and for a moment I thought I'd tuned in to a classic movie
channel.

At the same time, my phone rang and Rose's voice came over
the line.

"I don't want to freak you out," she said.
"But it turns out Eric Bensen is going to be waked at our place—your
place."

I tried not to register too much dismay, although this would
be a first for me. Usually I didn't know the corpses laid out in my building.

"Isn't Cavallo's closer to where the Bensens
live?" I asked, trying not to sound like I was rooting for the
competition.

"Not at all. They're way over by the Chelsea overpass,
remember? And anyway, Eric's grandmother lives in the senior apartments across
from Saint Anthony's, right down the street, so they signed on with us. Does
that bother you?"

"No, it's just different," I said, still looking
out the window. I was aware of the new housing for the elderly that Rose was
talking about. Almost nightly I heard ambulances and police vehicles screaming
past my apartment on their way to the facility.

"One of the hearses will be leaving soon to pick up the
body," Rose said, not having the advantage I did of seeing the hearse
already turning the corner onto Revere Street. "It didn't take them very
long at the morgue. I guess the cause of death was cut and dried. Frank's going
to work on Eric himself and he'll be ready at the end of the week, probably
Friday evening."

I'd learned a lot more than I cared to about how Frank
"worked on" his clients. When I first moved in, Frank gave me a tour,
taking me down in the rickety old elevator used to transport the bodies between
the floors. Most unforgettable was the prep room where Frank and his staff,
headed by his older son Robert, did the embalming. The shiny facility, looking
as clean as an operating room, which in a sense it was, was at the back of the
building, in the basement. Often when I was home during the day I'd hear the
sound of the pumping machines. Thanks to Frank's excellent presentation, I
could envision pint after pint of human blood being drained from a body and
replaced with embalming fluids.

The washer and dryer were also in the basement, and so far I
had managed to arrange my laundry chores so they coincided with a lack of
activity in the prep room.

I dropped the curtain as the taillights of the Galigani
hearse disappeared around a bend in the street.

"Thanks for telling me," I said to Rose. "By
the way, you didn't seem surprised to find Peter here tonight."

"He told me not to warn you. I knew he was going to
drop in on you unannounced, but not necessarily tonight. I hope I didn't spoil
a twosome."

"I'm very glad you did."

"I gathered as much," Rose said, with a laugh.
"Thanks to your bickering I ate more than I needed to."

"Really? I didn't."

"Have you heard from your detective?"

"Yes. I'm going to have lunch with him tomorrow."

I expected something like "aha" from Rose, and
wasn't disappointed.

"Yeah," she said. "Let's invite
him—"

"No, no," I said, interrupting her. "It's
just business."

"We'll see," Rose said as we hung up, making me
regret telling her about lunch. Ever since I'd been back, Rose's pace in the
matter of my personal life had more acceleration than I was comfortable with.
She'd dragged out every unattached man over fifty that she knew in an attempt
to make me part of a pair. She was also after me to "do something about my
appearance," telling me she saw more make-up on the nuns who taught
catechism at Saint Anthony's.

"And just a little rinse to soften the gray,"
she'd say to me, reaching for the wiry curls around my face.

"I love you dearly," I'd tell her. "I envy
your figure and your family, but not your auburn highlights."

I settled back in my bed, feeling very fortunate to have a
friend to talk to that way. As I drifted off to sleep, three questions paraded
in front of my brain. Was Eric Bensen's body going to be worked on that night
in the prep room downstairs? Should his wife, Janice, be on my suspect list?
What should I wear to lunch with Matt Gennaro?

I couldn't quite remember if we were still at the
Doctor-Sergeant stage or if we'd gotten as far as Gloria and Matt.

CHAPTER
4

I woke up to Columbus Day, October 12.

Besides the changing seasons, another thing about the East
Coast that I'd missed were holidays like Patriot's Day on April 19 and Bunker
Hill Day on June 17. Berkeley parking meters called October 12 'Indigenous
Peoples Day,' and California residents in general emphasized a different set of
holidays, like a Mexican battle victory, Cinco de Mayo on May 5.

The most curious to me was Admission Day on September 9.

"Is that some holiday for school registration?"
I'd asked when I was new on the West Coast. My greatly amused friends informed
me that the holiday was to commemorate California's admission into the union.

To recover some dignity, I reminded them that I was from
Massachusetts, one of the states that was on the admissions committee.

"You ought to thank me," I'd said, and we called a
truce.

I looked at my wardrobe choices. I had clothes in several
sizes, some for my thinner times and others, more often used, for my fuller
figure phases. My resolution to get to the smaller sizes by fall hadn't worked
out so I put on my mid-range dark gray suit and a white cotton shell. I added a
necklace of hematite beads and pinned a small replica of crossed Italian and
American flags to my lapel.

Just as when I was a kid, there'd be a parade later in the
day starting at the base of the statue of Christopher Columbus outside Saint
Anthony's Church and flowing down Revere Street to the beach. I remembered
years long past, watching my father march with the Sons of Italy, carrying the
huge bass drum around his strong dark neck. I wondered if they kept the custom
of ending up back at the church with a special mass at its main altar. No
wonder we used to think Columbus was one of the saints.

I checked the clock. For two reasons, I wanted to arrive
early at Russo's Cafe where I was to meet Matt. The first reason was tied to
another inherited trait from my mother. Josephine would have the table set for
dinner—she called it supper—by four in the afternoon. If you were ten
minutes late, she'd be furious. She'd have been waiting two hours and ten
minutes by then, and blamed you for every second.

 
"Why did
you even bother to come?" she'd ask, blowing smoke through her nose and
breathing heavily under her flowered cotton apron.

I was a little better than that since my lifestyle didn't
permit all-day meal preparation, but still, I had a reputation among my friends
for always being way ahead of schedule.

The second reason I wanted to be early is that I was
resisting the image of Matt and the rest of Russo's lunch crowd seeing me pull
up in my sleek Cadillac. I didn't want people to think I was running for
office. I began to doubt the wisdom of my deal with the Galiganis.

"You'll get used to it," Rose had told me. Small
comfort, since it came from someone who thought of six cylinder cars as toys
for teenagers.

Russo's Cafe, an up-scale sandwich and coffee shop a block
from the post office on Broadway, was at the site of the old five-and-ten where
I bought all my Christmas presents until I was in college. The new owners had
taken advantage of the large room and high ornate ceiling to create the look of
old Rome, with plaster columns and murals of chariots and ancient fountains.
Several armless white sculpted figures were scattered among the small round
tables, as if waiting to be fed.

 
Although I'd
arrived early enough to park in one of the few spots around the back of the
restaurant, Matt was already at a table with an espresso and a stack of papers
and manila folders in front of him. As I approached, I could tell he didn't
know whether or not to stand. Feminism confuses a lot of men, I remembered. He
rose halfway and rearranged the table so that the piles of paper were out of
the way of the second place setting. Smooth move.

I guessed that Matt also had two wardrobes. He was a little
thick around the middle, but not fat, just enough to give him a solid
appearance. His hair had about the same amount of gray as mine, still showing
up dark in photographs, but mostly gray as it fell on the hairdresser's cloth.
His long nose, with its straight downward slope, was also like mine and fit
right in with the Mediterranean decor. As I considered the similarities in our
appearances, I wondered if I was infatuated with my twin. I remembered reading
a pop psychology article that said it was a sign of high self-esteem if you
were attracted to people who look like you. I decided not to pursue that
concept, conscious that a little psychological knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The second awkward moment after the should-I-stand-for-a-lady
dilemma consisted of a round of call-me-Matt, call-me-Gloria. We eased the
situation by getting to business.

"Here's the report," Matt said, his voice gravely
as I had remembered. "Not much to go on, but since you know a lot of the principals,
you might have some ideas."

I settled down to the six pages of single-spaced type and a
sheaf of crime scene photographs while Matt excused himself. I watched him walk
past the kitchen to the men's room, his dark rumpled suit receding into a row
of fake Italian palms. I wondered what percent of my excitement was from seeing
him again and what percent from the challenging puzzle before me. I'd long ago
accepted the occupational hazard of a lifelong career in science—trying
to measure everything. Even excitement.

I opened the envelope of photographs, keeping it low on my
lap so as not to offend the sensibilities of those dining at tables around me.
Most of the other patrons at Russo's were in business suits and career dresses
and I envisioned them as tax accountants and retail clerks and at other
non-bloody occupations.

I noted with relief that these crime scene photographs were
a little easier to take than the ones I'd had to look at for my first case,
which were of a gruesome murder in a chemistry lab. Eric Bensen had been the
victim of a relatively clean murder. I found it easier to take the pools of
blood around his torso, as long as all of his body parts were intact. I saw
that Eric had fallen on his side, and looked almost comfortable spread out on
his lab floor. The fabric of his khaki pants that was visible looked clean, and
his left arm was tucked under his upper body as if he were taking a quick nap
on a small red carpet.

I took a deep breath and a long drink of lemony water to
counteract the queasiness that had come to my stomach in spite of the tidiness
of the crime scene, and moved on to read the pages of text.

I was ready with some questions when Matt returned.

"There's nothing in this report about disks or printout
around Eric's desk," I said. "His computer screen is blank and the
area around him looks bare in these photographs. Would the officers have listed
papers and disks if they were there?"

"Absolutely," Matt said. "Maybe he was doing
something else that didn't require the computer?"

I thought about this as our waiter brought my dry cappuccino
and eggplant and pepper sandwiches for both of us.

I pulled out the photograph with the best shot of Eric's
workplace. His computer monitor and keyboard were surrounded by yellow sticky
notes and dozens of small figures, a few of which I could
identify—Batman, Spiderman, Wonderwoman, Superman. Among the other action
heroes in different sizes was a small white plaster bust of Albert Einstein,
similar to ones I'd seen in science museum gift shops. I could also make out a
soft drink can, a framed photograph of his wife Janice, and a mug full of pens
and pencils, but there was no sign of floppies or hard copy anywhere.

As I pointed to the peripheral equipment in the photograph,
Matt pulled out a pair of rimless half glasses and followed my fingers with his
gaze.

"This shows Eric had a complete system with his own
printer and drives," I said, "so he wasn't just using a terminal
connected to a mainframe. It's hard to believe all his disks and printout are
stored out of sight."

"So, does that mean you think the murderer stole the
computer stuff?" Matt asked. "And if so, why?"

While we ate, I told Matt my initial theory that the
murderer might be a scientist who stood to lose a lot if Eric retracted the journal
article with their hydrogen data.