The Helium Murder (9 page)

“Al’s book? Something the police never saw?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I left some boxes with Rose
and Frank when I went to California, and I’m just getting around to sorting through them.”

Matt had resumed his exercise mode, pacing and scratching his head.

“And you had some of Al’s things?” he asked.

“I didn’t know I did, at least I didn’t remember.”

So far, I couldn’t hear any reproach in his voice, and I continued with my very reasonable explanation.

“Our old landlord lived upstairs from me and my father, and he used to let Al stay with him if we came home late, so he wouldn’t have to drive all the way to the North End. Al kept a few things up there and Mr. Corrado gave them to me in a sealed bag, after Al died.”

“And the police wouldn’t have thought to search your house.”

“No, I guess not.”

“And it never occurred to you to tell them about the bag?”

“I told you, I wasn’t thinking straight at the time.”

I didn’t like Matt’s tone or mine, but I didn’t seem to have any control over either one.

“I’m going to take this,” Matt said, putting Al’s book in his already bulging jacket pocket. “I’m sure you have no use for it?”

I swallowed hard, hearing an exclamation point at the end of his last remark, though it was disguised as a question.

“So, what does this mean about the police files?” I asked. I had nothing to lose, I thought, since the romantic atmosphere had already been shattered.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and moved toward the door.

“I’ll see you at one tomorrow,” I said, hopeful that he wouldn’t cancel his invitation to go with him to Carey’s plant.

“Right,” he said, “Good night, Gloria.”

I closed and locked the door behind him.
This guy is the master of abrupt departures
, I thought.
And I’m only slightly better off now than before he came. I have a little more information about the Hurley case, but I don’t have Al’s book and I don’t have a good feeling about our relationship
.

At least one thing had worked in my favor—after a lifetime of working in science and mathematics, I had excellent recall for numbers.

I took a pad of paper and pencil and wrote down
R. B., 555-6754
.

Chapter Ten

T
hanks to a few unsettling dreams, I woke up several times during the night. In one dream, I was at Al’s wake and hundreds of people were pointing at me, accusing me of killing him. In another, Rocky Busso was pushing Josephine over a cliff on the Pacific Ocean, at the edge of San Francisco, where the real-life Josephine had never stepped foot. Just before I woke, I dreamed I was talking into my telephone, but no sound came out.

Why don’t I ever have pleasant dreams
, I wondered,
like an image of Matt folding his napkin, saying, “that was the best snack I ever had,” and “I love you, Gloria”?
I considered calling Elaine in Berkeley and asking her opinion, since she had a strong belief in the connection between our dreams and our inner lives.

That notion didn’t get very far, and instead I sat at my desk to do a morning’s work. I had Carey’s contracts
to go through, and it was about time I’d given a little attention to my presentation for Peter’s students, only a few days away.

So far, all I’d done was choose the quote I would use to open the class, Marconi’s own observation on his invention of the radio: “My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic, that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice.” Not a bad thing for a homicide investigator to keep in mind, either, I thought.

I started with the pile of consulting agreements from Hurley’s briefcase. I made a list of questions I had for Carey, including the nature of the computer upgrades and the training classes he’d contracted for. I had a hard time weeding out the substance from the legal boilerplate.

About an hour later, I felt I was ready for the Chelsea meeting and called down on the intercom to see if Rose had time for a coffee break.

“You bet,” she said. “I can’t wait to hear about last night.”

“You’re not going to be happy,” I said.

“I’m coming up anyway.”

While I waited for Rose, I started the coffee, loaded my papers into my briefcase, and brought out my file on Peter’s class. I prepared a plate of food, assembling the one cannoli I had left, along with some fruit. The presentation left a lot to be desired, and I whined to myself about how little talent I had for such tasks. I could picture the same tidbits in Rose’s hands, looking like the cover of an expensive coffee-table book.

A rare sight greeted me when I opened the door—Rose in jeans and a California sweatshirt that I’d sent her, with a green-and-white bandanna wrapped artfully around her hair. Rose seldom wore anything but professional attire around the mortuary, but even in her work clothes she looked ready for visitors. I was sorry that I was in jeans and a sweatshirt, too, since I hated the comparisons I always made when Rose and I wore similar outfits.

“We haven’t had so many guests since we waked Bishop Donovan,” she said. “I decided to help a little with the cleanup. The foyer was a mess from people tracking in slush.”

“You don’t look like you’ve been mopping up slush.”

“I haven’t. I’ve been doing everything else while Martha and Tony take care of the slush—I cleaned around the flowers, scraped the wax from the candle rack, did a little vacuuming. Gloria, don’t you think I’ve earned a break?”

“More than I have. The only exercise I’ve had is getting from my bed to my desk.”

“So tell me,” Rose said, cutting off a well-deserved slice of cannoli.

I knew exactly what she meant, so I got to the point.

“We talked business,” I said, “about the Hurley case.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Except, he took Al’s book.”

Rose sat back, a look of smug relief creeping over her face.

“I’m glad. It’s a job for professionals, Gloria. Here’s my dream. You met Matt through some police work, but now you forget about that and settle down with him. Maybe buy that little house for sale across from us on Proctor. Do a little teaching on the side.”

Rose brushed some crumbs from her jeans, and folded her arms as if she’d just made an incontestable judicial decision. She seemed pleased with the details of my life as she’d just planned it. Her courtlike demeanor didn’t last very long, however.

“I did have one little thing to share with you,” she said, leaning her body toward mine where we sat on the couch. We both twisted our necks around in a playful gesture, as if scanning the room for eavesdroppers.

“After you left, Hurley’s ex-fiancé came by.”

“Patrick Gallagher?”

“The same. He strolled right up to the casket, knelt down, and started sobbing and talking loudly—to the deceased.”

I’d noticed that none of the Galiganis ever used words like corpse, or body, preferring more abstract phrases like “the deceased” or “departed loved one.” It was easier to learn the language of quantum mechanics, I thought, than that of policemen and funeral directors.

I wanted to know more about Gallagher, and figured it was useless to try to hide my interest from Rose.

“Go on, Rose,” I said, rotating my hand like a camerawoman on a live shoot.

“Well, it was obvious that he’d been drinking,” Rose said. “Luckily, Tony was right there to handle him, but Frances Whitestone was livid.”

“Is that all? Did you hear anything he said?”

“I’ve been saving that,” Rose said. “He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.’”

Rose sat back with a satisfied look on her face. My heart went out to her as I realized the conflict she had between wanting me out of the homicide business, and needing to share with me whatever she knew, just in case it would help me.

“Thanks, Rose,” I said.

After Rose left, I worked on Peter’s class, just enough to ward off the panicky feeling I was getting with only four days till my appearance on Monday. Cruising the waves of the Internet, I located a source of old diagrams showing Marconi’s early wireless systems, and typed out a few pages of notes on his work as a delegate to the peace conference at the end of World War I. I hadn’t resolved the question I had about whether to mention his support of Mussolini.

I had to keep reminding myself how young Peter’s students were, juniors and seniors in high school. I was sure they thought that the wars my peers and I lived through were in the same timeframe as the Trojan War.

While I had the files out, I decided to organize the rest of the series. I’d told Peter I’d give him a list,
outlining six classes to take us through the rest of the school year. After Marconi, I planned to introduce the inventor of the battery, Alessandro Volta, in February, followed by Avogadro, Da Vinci, Galvani, and Torricelli. I’d close with one of my personal favorites, Maria Agnesi, an extraordinarily accomplished eighteenth-century mathematician.

At noon, when the phone rang, I was still in my jeans. I wasn’t over being a little touchy about answering my phone, afraid that Rocky Busso might have used a code to determine who called him last night without leaving a message. Technology, which I usually embraced wholeheartedly, was beginning to show me its dark side.

No problem this time, however, as I heard Matt’s voice.

“Is there a change of plan?” I asked.

“No, we’re still on for one o’clock, in my office. But I wanted to ask you about this weekend. Some civic group came by here this morning offering us tickets to the
Messiah
concert by the Handel-Haydn Society. I guess it’s be-kind-to-policemen week. Anyway, I thought I heard you and Rose say you’d like to go sometime, so I picked up four tickets for Saturday evening. What do you think?”

“I think they’ll be thrilled,” I said, welcoming a pleasant twinge. “I certainly am.”

“Good. Do you have time to check with them? Maybe we can have dinner in Boston near the concert hall?”

It never occurred to me that a native of the Back
Bay wouldn’t be familiar with the name and location of Boston’s Symphony Hall, but it was a great testimony to Matt’s willingness to learn new things. We’d been to two jazz concerts, which he loved, and I guessed he thought it was my turn.

“I’ll take care of that part,” I said.

“Good,” Matt said again, showing the limitations of his social vocabulary. “I’ll see you at one.”

It seemed only right to bring Rose in on this. As I called down to her, I had a flashback to high school when we’d walk home together as far as we could go, then call each other as soon as we got in the door. At that time, it would be something really important, like “what are you going to wear to the party?”

This time seemed equally important, and I wasn’t surprised at the lilt in Rose’s voice when I laid out the plans.

“Gloria, how exciting.”

“Yes, considering that the first time we talked about doing this, Peter was the fourth person in the group.”

“Do you think Peter will remember?”

“Probably. I can hardly wait till he does.”

“Well, I can hardly wait till Saturday,” Rose said. “What are you going to wear to the party?”

I had to cut short Rose’s elaborate wardrobe plans. No, I’d told her, there was not time before Saturday evening to shop for a new outfit.

I went to my bedroom to dress for my Chelsea meeting, humming the Hallelujah chorus on the way. I wasn’t sure why Matt didn’t wait an hour to tell me
about the
Messiah
tickets. I ran through a list of possible reasons. Maybe he didn’t want to mix business with pleasure; maybe he thought my calendar might fill up during the noon hour; maybe he was as excited as I was about our date. The last one was a risky thought, but I took it as a good sign that it even came to my mind.

My cold-weather clothes selections were dismal, and I reconsidered a shopping trip with Rose. I had a charcoal gray wool suit that fit me only within a fraction of an inch before my last cannoli, but I gave it a try. With an overblouse, it would do. I chose a silver mohair knit top, added a strand of hematite beads, and looked for a lapel pin. I knew I had one that would be appropriate for a meeting at CompTech—a small computer chip encased in a pewter frame.

I searched through my pins without success. Just as I was about to give up on finding the chip pin, I remembered that my jewelry box had an extra layer, a narrow one, almost like a false bottom. I picked up the top section, and there on the bottom was the tiny piece of computer jewelry, among earring parts and other notions.

As I reassembled my jewelry box, I had a fleeting image of something with similar construction. I stopped for a minute to clear my head and remembered why this activity seemed so familiar. During the brief period that I’d worked on classified material at the Berkeley lab, I was given a special briefcase, one with a false bottom as an extra safeguard. The idea was that, if a spy held me at gunpoint and searched my
briefcase, he would find only meaningless unclassified reports. The secret restricted data, SRD we called it, was hidden underneath.

I drove to Matt’s office much too quickly, considering the road conditions, picturing Margaret Hurley’s wide briefcase and imagining what could be under the first layer.