The Boric Acid Murder (26 page)

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Authors: Camille Minichino

Tags: #Revere Beach (Mass.), #Police Procedural, #Mystery & Detective, #Boric acid, #General, #Boston (Mass.), #Lamerino; Gloria (Fictitious character), #Women Sleuths, #Fiction, #Women physicists, #Detective and mystery stories; American, #Massachusetts

BOOK: The Boric Acid Murder
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TONY WAS MUCH heavier than I and had no trouble marching me, half carrying me, the few remaining steps to the building. I tried to squirm until I felt the butt of his gun in my back, one click away from ending my life. My heart pounded in my chest, my brain sending flashes of bright light across the optics of my eyes, as if a prism had been installed there.
I was still in the clothes I’d worn to dinner—lightweight pants and a raw silk short-sleeved top, all khaki, and now all soaking wet.
Up to now no other traffic had passed in the area, but at that moment an enormous white delivery truck pulled noisily up to the Beach Street entrance of the library. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth, prepared to scream, but Tony quickly tied a sweaty cloth around my face, covering my mouth. I gagged at the smell, at the same time relieved it wasn’t soaked in chemicals.
He dragged me roughly inside the building through a trapdoor. The opening did not lead to the basement, as I’d thought, but only to a stairwell. I heard the heavy doors of the truck outside open and close. A delivery? More lions? Two other virtues? I knew my brain was rattled when I started to joke about a critical situation.
“Shit.” Tony drew the word out so it became a hissing sound. “I’m going to have to take you upstairs. This may be the delivery entrance.” He forced me up two flights of stairs to the attic mezzanine, opposite the level that held the administrative offices. I looked down on the area between the mezzanines—the
circulation desks, now empty and fruitless as a source of help.
Tony pushed me down, and I landed between Patience and Fortitude, surrounded by other relics of the Historical Society. Photographs, fruit crates filled with scrolls, the old spinning wheels, part of the bootleg liquor still, a pile of old cloths that might once have adorned the dining-room tables of Revere’s upper class. I looked at the artifacts, as if at the milieu of my final resting place.
“You have a short reprieve while I check on those men,” he told me. Tony’s eyes seemed to be bulging out of his head and perspiration had formed deep circles around the sleeves of his navy-blue polo shirt. He was out of breath, but not as much as I was.
I tried to plead with my eyes as Tony picked up a slat of wood from the old still and drew his arm back. I ducked, and the blow landed on the side of my head, hitting my right ear. The pain set off bells in my head—and also the beginnings of a plan. I collapsed onto my side and closed my eyes. If he thinks I’m dead, I thought, I have a chance.
When he prodded at my arms, attempting to tie them behind my back, I pressed my body into the wooden floor so that he was forced to bind my wrists in front. Acting like dead weight was not a stretch.
Below, the deliverymen banged on the front door of the building.
That’s my car in front of your truck,
I wanted to scream—
don’t you recognize it? I’m in here!
The effort served only to make me nauseous.
In spite of my stellar performance, Tony added one more shackle—he tied my ankles together and twisted the remaining rope around the leg of a large walnut case halfway across the attic. Ironically, it was the cabinet with antique guns and ammunition, useless on this Friday night in the twentieth century.
Tony left me, with a warning. “Nothing funny, Gloria,” he said to my utterly still body.
Or what? I wondered. Wasn’t I going to be shot anyway? When I knew he’d reached the first floor, I hoisted myself up.
My limited range of motion—a radius of about eight feet, I guessed—allowed me to hop to the small window, high up on the brick wall. I could barely see over the sill. Two men, in white uniforms, black supports in place around their waists, one of them talking on a cell phone. Probably calling Derek Byrne or Dorothy Leonard.
I knew Tony wouldn’t risk the sound of a gunshot while they were out there. I couldn’t see my watch in the dark attic, but I estimated it was near ten o’clock, time for their shift to be over. As I realized my attempts to get their attention would never work, tears formed, clouding my vision, and adding to the sorry state of my face.
I wondered why Tony didn’t just open the door and talk to them, make up an excuse about how he was in charge tonight, and they’d made an error—which I assumed they really had, since no one was on duty to receive a delivery. Then I realized Tony would not want anyone to see him, if it came to identifying him after …
The thought depressed me, and I fell back onto the floor. The window was too high up for me to open it and I couldn’t see anything I could use to break it. I was doomed to die within the same few square yards as three other people. Not a quadruple homicide, however, but two doubles. One killer responsible for the deaths of Sabatino Scotto and Irving Leonard, the other for Yolanda Fiore and …
I shook the image away and allowed my rational side to take over. Tony Taruffi lined up perfectly in the places where Matt and I had problems fitting Councilman Byrne into our theory of Yolanda’s murder. Eliminating her didn’t help Byrne if the library project went through, but it did help Tony. It wasn’t hard to figure a motive. I could easily imagine if I’d had an affair with my boss, and then he fired me, I might threaten to tell his wife. Not that I’d ever done that, nor would live long enough to do so.
And who knew what else Yolanda might have on an unscrupulous PR man. There might have been a controversy over boron safety practices after all. Possibly Tony just wanted to
talk to her, make a bargain as he had with me. Another shudder as I remembered my meeting with a killer in the shadows of Tuttle Street.
Strangely, my faith in judges, mayors, and other elders of Suffolk County was renewed. Brendan Byrne really was playing pinochle with the boys while Yolanda was being sent to her death. He may have killed Sabatino Scotto and Irving Leonard, but it took another man, another motive, to murder Yolanda Fiore.
Not that I had time to work this out.
I took stock of the situation. I was in the attic, a dirty cloth in my mouth, a screaming headache, breathless from a crying jag, tied to a cabinet.
What was up here that I could use to survive? I wished, foolishly, that I had my cane—the cane that would split in two at the first contact with Tony’s muscular frame. My eyes, adjusted to the moonlight streaming through the small window, landed on a stack of photographs. From one elaborate frame, a Victorian gentleman in a stiff white collar gave me a stern look, as if he were reprimanding me for getting into these straits. He had what I’d come to think of as a take up sewing look.
I stood up and peered into the glass-topped case I was tethered to. I’d admired the antique weapons when Derek Byrne had pointed them out on our tour. Now I wished they were functional. Long, sleek, black barrels, scratched wooden handles, boxes made of worn cardboard, with bullets, some shiny, some rusty. But useless. Through the glass, I examined the dull knives lined along the back edge of the case. Although the guns wouldn’t fire, the knives would work, but it was a moot point since the top of the case was locked.
Patience and Fortitude had their eyes closed, as if to take the high road, and keep themselves above the flesh and blood incidents in the environment. Each lion had a paw on a ball about the size of a bowling ball. Patience had her right paw on the sphere; Fortitude her left. Or vice versa. I wasn’t sure if they were boy and girl or the same gender. I wasn’t even sure if
lion’s feet were called paws. The beasts were a pale green and had very curly manes and identical openmouthed expressions. I remembered Derek’s stats—cast bronze, three hundred pounds each. Not something I could pick up and hurl at Tony when he came back upstairs.
I picked up the speaker from an old record player, holding it in my close-knit hands, and wondered, irrelevantly, what would be in the attics of the year 2020. Cell phones. Track balls. Keyboards. Pieces of satellite dishes. Why was I thinking twenty-five years into the future? Would I even be alive in the morning?
The thought sent an intensely cold shiver through me, competing with the extreme heat of the attic. I started to calculate my average temperature, as if to record it in a log book. Temperature, pressure, volume, density.
The roaring crank of the truck engine starting up startled me back to action. I tried once more to scream through the cloth, causing a massive fit of coughing that got me nowhere. Panicked, I hopped as far as I could with my tethered ankles, almost reaching the top of the stairs, when I ran into something that felt like a headless body.
My heart jumped in my chest, until I realized it was the dusty old dressmaker’s form. Headless, naked, cut off at the thighs, but possibly enough of a body to save my life. My plan took shape. In the next moments my mind took over from my out-of-control pulse and I flew into action, limited though it was.
If I thought the dummy was a person, maybe Tony would, too. I pulled a large piece of cloth from a pile, ignoring the spiders and nameless insects that would otherwise repulse me, and draped it across the shoulders of the stiff, musty form. As I looked around for a head, I pictured Frank reattaching a little girl’s head to her torso and calmed myself with thoughts of returning to my mortuary home.
I heard the delivery truck pull away.
In the corner was an old globe. I struggled to grab the sphere with the small angle afforded by my bound wrists. I dropped it several times before, finally, it stuck to the perspiration on
my hands. I added another piece of fabric, over the globe. It fell loosely, like hair, I hoped, or an old-fashioned mantilla.
I heard Tony’s footsteps, heading up the stairs. No time for artistic arrangement.
One more item and I’d be ready. I rehearsed my tactics as Tony’s footsteps drew closer—hop into the shadows, wait until Tony approached the fake person, then whack him with … what? Something heavy? Something sharp?
My ankles were bruised from the rough rope that tied them together. I took a painful hop to survey the contents of the attic, pulling and pushing on possible weapons. I found the piece of wood Tony had slammed into my head. Next to it, attached to the old still, was another slab with a nail on the end of it. I heard Tony’s labored breathing. Using all my strength, I wrestled with the still until I’d unhinged the stick with the nail and hopped back to the shadows near the top of the stairs.
I swallowed hard—a difficult process with the cloth still in my mouth, and shuddered at what I needed to do next. I’d struck more people in the last year in Revere than in my whole life. I crouched down, pulling the loose rope close around my feet and out of sight.
I’d positioned the dummy far enough away from the top of the stairs, in the shadows, and the first thing Tony would see. Since the lobby’s night lights were fairly bright, his eyes would be less accommodated to the dark of the attic than mine were. His height was also to my advantage—like Derek Byrne, Tony had to hunch over to avoid hitting the beams on the low attic ceiling.
When he reached the top step he was so close I thought he would sense my position, but he took two steps toward the dummy. “What the—”
Whack. Whack.
I hit him with all my might. Once, twice, or maybe three times. Enough so that he stopped talking, dropped his gun, and fell to the floor.
“ROPE BURNS?” The young intern seemed to be as embarrassed as I was that I’d been taken to the ER at Whidden Hospital in Everett with nothing more than a sore throat, a few bruises on my wrists and ankles, and a raging headache.
Later, a female psychiatrist posing as a nurse asked me questions no doubt designed to determine the level of hysteria I’d reached in the library attic.
Do you have any plans for the Fourth of July?
probably meant Are
you suicidal?
And
How do you like this lovely plant?
was a ruse for Do
you think those green ferns are about to attack you?
I have no idea why she asked who the president of the United States was.
At least I’d won the battle of overnight or not overnight, and I was released from the hospital before midnight. Matt drove me home, and this time came upstairs with me.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said, without conviction.
He answered by serving me a glass of water and a pain pill and tucking me in. Then he took up residence on the upholstered chair next to my bed.
If I’d told Matt or the medics the whole truth about my last moments in the attic, they might have detained me.
For a while—I couldn’t tell how long—I’d sat on the floor next to Tony’s body, thinking I’d killed him. Beside me was the wooden slat, now splintered and bloody. Tony was facedown, blood from the back of his neck running onto the floor, seeping into the hem of my khaki pants.
I’d had the presence of mind to prod at his hand to shake his gun loose. I slid it next to me, my wrists still tied together,
then gave it a shove that sent it hurtling down the stairs to the lobby. Finally, I stood and hopped around slowly, tears in my eyes, looking for an object sharp enough to cut through the rope that bound my ankles together and to the cabinet.
I found a pair of rusty garden shears under a pile of fabric, and sliced the rope apart, slowly, thread by thread.
Once my feet were free, I made my way painfully down the stairs, holding on to the banister, lest I fall from own weakness. I picked up the phone at the reference desk with my stillfettered hands and pushed 911.
Not until I knew Tony was alive, about an hour later, did I take a calm breath.
MATT’S PAGER went off in the middle of the night.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hate to leave you.”
“Hmmm?” I rolled over to face him, and the clock. Through sleep-filled eyes I saw 4:13. The little dot in the upper left corner told me it was a.m.
“Do you want me to see if I can raise Berger instead?”
“No, it’s OK. I’d better get used to this.”
“What?”
I gave him a groggy smile. “Well, if we’re going to live together—”
Matt leaned closer. “Are you sure this is not the pills talking?”
I reached over and convinced him I was serious.
ROSE HAD GRACIOUSLY let me sleep most of the day on Saturday. By all appearances she’d needed the time to prepare the elaborate meal that accompanied the debriefing on the murder investigations for Sabatino Scotto, Irving Leonard, and Yolanda Fiore. And almost Gloria Lamerino, I thought.
A large tureen of cioppino dominated the long dining-room table, with bowls of salad and baskets of warm bread at each end. I was glad I’d slept through breakfast and lunch.
John Galigani, still a little tired from his Detroit-Boston trip,
looked better than ever to us, nonetheless. He’d decided not to take Carolyn Verrico, or any other companion, on the upcoming charter trip to Bermuda, but instead to use the time to “put some things behind me,” as he’d called it. To straighten himself out, is what we would have said in the old days.
“Before we even get to the gory details, Gloria—I can’t believe you were going through all this other stuff with Matt. You had to make this decision and I never knew. I feel so egotistic and self-absorbed, self-involved—” Rose waved her hands, as if she needed to pull as many words out of the air as possible, to make up for her neglect of me.
“You had enough to deal with and, besides, it wasn’t a tough decision.”
Not once I’d made it.
“Piece of cake,” Matt said with a grin.
Glasses were raised—sparkling cider for Matt and me, a lovely rose-colored wine for the Galiganis.
“I heard about your headless torso,” Frank said. “I like to think I helped you figure that out.”
“You certainly did.” I dipped my Italian bread in rosemary oil, no longer squeamish about the combination of dinner and mortuary talk. As Robert had told me after his first case, FUNERAL is an anagram for REAL FUN. I took it as the mortician’s way of dealing with the heavy side of life on a daily basis.
“So fill us in,” Rose said. “Did someone actually convince Byrne to confess to the earlier murders?” She scooped second helpings into everyone’s bowl but her own.
Matt nodded. “Covering up the Scotto murder worked for Byrne ten years ago. Killing Irving Leonard also killed the library project. He could put his own man in the director’s job since he controlled the Council at the time. But Berger and Parker convinced him that if a body was dug up and IDed as Scotto, or if anything in the grave could be traced to him, he’d have no more bargaining power. So his lawyers—about six of them—advised him to tell the truth.”
“Apparently he’d been thinking about it anyway,” I said, sharing what I’d learned from Matt earlier. “They found several newspaper clippings in Byrne’s desk—articles on how far
we’ve come in being able to identify people from small amounts of DNA, from the tiniest flake of skin or fabric left behind.”
“And I suppose we all know how he got the entire Roman Catholic Church to back him,” Frank said. Nods from everyone. “Money talks, even in the heavenly choirs.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together for emphasis.
“Then there’s Tony Taruffi—” Rose put her hand on my arm. “If it’s not too hard for you, Gloria?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine. Matt called the hospital before we came here. Tony’s going to pull through. I’m not as strong as I thought.” I smiled as if there were no ill effects from my violent encounter. “I guess Tony was responsible for the childish pranks on me, but we won’t know for sure until he’s well enough to answer questions. And it looks like he’ll be good as new pretty soon.”
“Except that he’ll be in prison,” Matt said.
“I keep thinking about Yolanda’s grandmother,” John said. “I want to keep in touch with her. I called her this morning to tell her all this and she was so happy. It was as if she’s lived this long so she could vindicate her husband.”
“Not that he wasn’t a criminal,” Matt said, spoiling things a bit.
“Oh, that,” John said with a grin. “Nana Celia is sure her jewelry will be in the grave with Sabatino.”
“Did you get the feeling she sent Yolanda to unmask Byrne in particular?” I asked.
John shook his head. “I don’t think so. There were so many others who could have wanted Scotto out of the way—his partners in the business were afraid Scotto would turn them in under pressure, and a lot of people got sick or damaged in some way by the liquor, though none as severely as the Byrnes. Celia gave me several other names, which she’d apparently also given Yolanda. In fact, I might look into it—maybe do a feature on the Prohibition era in Revere.”
His mother gave him a look that I suspect he’d seen before, perhaps as a teenager.
“Never mind,” John said.
ROSE CALLED ME OUT to the kitchen, to help prepare coffee and dessert, she said, but I knew she wanted some private girl talk.
She clapped her hands together and beamed. “This is going to be so wonderful. You and Matt. A wedding, maybe?”
“Hold on, Rose. Don’t make me drop this
pizza dolce
.”
“Well, just let me know if you want help with the guest list. I know MC will be here in a flash. She’s been calling almost every day over this thing with John, and she would have come if I’d wanted her to. She’s in love with an oilman.”
“He’s a petroleum chemist, Rose.”
“I know. I’m just teasing. Don’t lose your sense of humor just because you’re engaged.”
“I’m not exactly—”
“Have you told Elaine, Andrea, Peter, your cousin?”
Some of the above. I wasn’t sure how to tell Mary Ann. My seventy-something cousin had expressed her displeasure many times about the wrong way things were done these days.
“It used to be we’d date, get pinned, announce an engagement, buy a hope chest, get married,” she’d said.
One good thing—Mary Ann loved Matt. He often volunteered to make the round-trip to Worcester so she could attend “family” events in Revere. Maybe I’d let Matt, the professional interviewer, explain things to her. Right after he explained to his own sister, Jean, who was not my biggest fan.
Rose had gone off on another tangent. “Or if you need any wedding night consultation …”
“Rose!”
She laughed, in her easy way that had been missing for a while. “By the way, I ran into Annie Senato—the Civic Ladies had a meeting at her house. I told her you were back in town and she wants to get together.”
“I don’t remember her.”
“Sure you do,” Rose said.
I laughed. We’d had this conversation several times, with different names. Rose was always trying to jog my memory
about our classmates, most of whom had lost their place in my brain cells long ago.
“I’m not getting any recollection of an Annie Senato.” I tapped my head, as if to show her where the information would be if I had it.
“But you were in the same homeroom.”
“I guess it was a big room.”
Rose lowered her voice to a near-scolding tone. “Gloria, she showed me her yearbook. You wrote in it.”
I swallowed hard, fairly sure what was coming next. “What did I write? ‘I’ll never forget you. Love, Gloria’?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, dear. Did I ever write in your yearbook, Rose?”
She leaned across the counter, dislodging a shower of powdered sugar from the
pizza dolce,
and slapped my arm, barely holding in her laughter.
BACK IN MY APARTMENT with Matt, I looked around with a new eye. What would I take with me to Fernwood Avenue, what would I leave behind? My two blue glide rockers were the only furniture that had traveled with me from California. I put them, with my computer system, on the list of
indispensable items.
I could do without nearly everything else.
In the corner, by the archway to the kitchen I saw a package I didn’t recognize. A large package, about six inches thick, leaning against the wall.
“What’s this?”
“Something for your new home.”
I knew before I’d torn the paper all the way off. A set of prints of Revere Beach Boulevard, mounted, ready for hanging on my new walls. The largest poster showed the Cyclone roller-coaster, which had dominated the skyline of the Boulevard for many decades. A pale maroon car sat perched on the topmost hill, full of people with excited expressions, ready to plunge forward.
Like me. “It’s a good thing I’m moving. These won’t fit here. They need a bigger wall.”
“I have a bigger wall.”
I smiled at Matt. “What else do you have?”
“A driveway big enough for your Caddie. And a fireplace to keep you warm.” He looked at the digital thermometer/clock on my desk. The outside temperature registered ninety-one degrees at ten o’clock at night.
“Wonderful. Let’s go there now and throw some logs on.”
“Maybe not. It hasn’t been cleaned since last winter.”
“No problem. I don’t mind a little carbon.”
“Whoa,” he said, in an uncontrolled laugh. “I love you, Gloria.”
“And I love you, Matt.”

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