The Helium Murder
Authors: Camille Minichino
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 1998 by Camille Minichino
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477834183
ISBN-10: 1477834184
To my husband and greatest supporter, Richard Rufer, and my cousins Gloria, Jean, and Yolanda
My thanks to the many relatives and friends who have helped me with this manuscript, especially Robert Durkin, Ellen Patey, Sue Stephenson, and Penny Warner. I’m very grateful also for the wonderful support from Marcia Markland and the staff at Avalon Books.
This title was previously published by Avalon Books; this version has been reproduced from the Avalon book archive files
.
Contents
C
ongresswoman Margaret Hurley has a lot on her mind as she drives her rented Honda through icy streets toward the Whitestone home in Revere, Massachusetts. Among more serious matters, like how to survive the holidays with her impossible brother, and a showdown with her ex-fiancé, she toys with the issue of more snowplows for this city where she grew up.
As she strains her long, thin neck for the best view through the streaky windshield and tightens her grip on the steering wheel, Margaret is also thinking of helium.
If she were in her own car, she thinks, a more substantial Lincoln Continental, she’d reach down and start the tape recorder. For now, she has to be content with mental lists.
Number one, talk to Frances Whitestone, her chief benefactor and mentor, about the helium reserves.
Number two, visit Vinnie Cavallo at the lab on Charger Street and check on the progress of his report. Unless Vinnie has a big surprise, she’s determined to vote to sell the government’s reserve: thirty-two billion cubic feet of helium now stockpiled in a gas field near Amarillo, Texas. Margaret smiles as she thinks of the dumb but irresistible jokes about how many party balloons does a country really need?
Number three, meet with Bill Carey, the CEO of CompTech, and set him straight on his dealings with the helium storage program managers. Margaret glances at her briefcase on the floor of the passenger seat, as if she can see through the leather to the contracts inside.
Numbers four and five are the personal matters—try to reason with her brother Buddy, maybe get him some help for his gambling addiction; and confront Patrick Gallagher, whose latest hobby seems to be calling and writing Margaret with reminders of their warlike relationship.
Margaret stops at a traffic light on Broadway, in front of Revere City Hall, grateful for a chance to relax her neck. In spite of her thick fleece-lined gloves, she manages a few finger exercises. She breathes deeply and catches a whiff of pine. The picture of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree comes to her mind before she realizes that the fragrance stems from the green cardboard air freshener hanging from the Honda’s cigarette lighter.
Out of habit, Margaret checks her image in the rearview mirror, knowing that she can count on Frances
Whitestone, still elegant at seventy-six years old, to comment on Margaret’s out-of-control, frizzy red hair and the coffee stain on the front of her green loden jacket. But she realizes with relief that for a few days she doesn’t have to struggle to look older than her thirty-four years, or bulkier than her one hundred and twenty pounds, to get the attention of her colleagues in the House of Representatives.
Margaret cracks her window open to hear the carolers on the corner. She smiles as she pulls away, imagining that the choir has materialized at the intersection of Broadway and Pleasant Street just for her, other drivers being too intelligent to be on the road under these conditions.
As she hits patches of ice along Broadway and skids around the corner onto Revere Street, she hears the jingle of the bells on the packages that fill two shopping bags in the backseat. With only two blocks to go, she feels a twinge of holiday spirit and swears she can smell pumpkin pie as she passes a bakery that’s clearly sealed up for the night.
Just before eight o’clock, Margaret pulls up in front of the stately Whitestone home, a few blocks from St. Anthony’s Church. She leans her forehead on the steering wheel and lets out a long sigh. The trip from Logan Airport has seemed longer than a Science and Technology Committee meeting.
Margaret is grateful for the strings of colored lights decorating almost every house on Oxford Park, the wide, oddly named, tree-lined street that Frances Whitestone lives on. She frowns as she notices that all
the streetlights are out, and the tiny red and green holiday bulbs provide the only illumination. She grumbles about the city budget as she unfolds her tall frame from the small car and walks to the back with great care, her boots cracking ice under her feet, her neck freezing as her scarf flies loose of her collar. Her purse-sized flashlight creates an eerie oval patch in front of her, like a poor spotlight in a second-rate theater production.
Margaret pulls on the strap of her brown leather garment bag and has lifted it free of the trunk when she hears a thunderous noise. She turns to see blinding high beams of white light barrel down on her, then fade to black. Margaret clutches her luggage to her chest like a plate of armor. As her eyes recover, she tries to determine what kind of car or van has disturbed the peace of Oxford Park, as if that were her only problem as the vehicle heads straight for her.
By the time she understands what’s happening, a ton of metal rams into her, slamming her into the trunk of the Honda, where she lands like a discarded laboratory specimen, her head pushed into the crack between the back of the car and the raised trunk, her legs hanging over the license plate at odd angles.
The vehicle screeches backwards, then roars away, leaving an ugly trail of exhaust and blood to pollute the falling snow. One final jingle from a tiny bell sounds from the backseat of the Honda as it recovers from its blow, settling again into stillness.
“I
t’s a mystery,” my best friend Rose said to me. “A grown woman. How can you not like shopping? Especially Christmas shopping?”
She stamped her tiny foot on the ground—to get rid of the snow, I hoped, and not to make a statement about my reluctance to go into one more store full of cartoon Santas and special deals on mitten-and-scarf sets. “It’s a wonder we’ve stayed friends for fifty years.”
“I think it’s only forty-six years,” I said, “and maybe we wouldn’t still be friends if I hadn’t lived three thousand miles away for more than thirty of them.”
“No, no, don’t say that, Gloria,” Rose said. “I’m so glad you’re back.” And we hugged right there on the street. Our shopping bags twisted around each other; my new leather gloves fell into a pool of cold,
slushy, brown water in the gutter; and we laughed like a couple of junior-high schoolgirls cutting history class together. If passing shoppers noticed our two short, middle-aged frames embracing—mine wide and soft, Rose’s small and wiry—no one said anything.
With soft snow falling all around us on the streets of downtown Boston and bells ringing on every corner, I had to admit that shopping for Christmas presents was more fun than, say, sweeping broken glass from a laboratory floor.
“I think it’s all those years you spent in a physics lab,” Rose said. “It’s not like you could browse through catalogs for hydrogen or spend a day at a helium sale.”
“Now there’s where you’re wrong,” I said, jumping at the chance to talk science, and impressed that she knew the first two elements of the periodic table. By now we’d arrived at the doorway of Filene’s, famous for its many basement levels, with dramatic markdowns on each one, and I realized that Rose had used her small technical vocabulary to distract me so she could drag me inside. Rose and I often engaged in this unspoken trade-off. If she’d let me have my science fix, I’d follow her into a dressing room where she tried on her size sevens, or maybe I’d listen to a bit of gossip about our hometown of Revere, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston.
“First,” I said, forging ahead in spite of the distractions of what seemed like tons of merchandise, “I did often browse through catalogs to purchase hydrogen—that’s how I bought the gas tubes for my spectrum
studies. And second, helium actually is now for sale—by the federal government.”
I guessed that Rose probably hadn’t followed the debates in Congress about whether the United States government should “be in the helium business,” as they put it. I’d listened to the sessions on C-Span and agreed with those who favored keeping the helium the government has been collecting since the Kennedy Administration. Like them, I was concerned that in a few years helium would be rare and we wouldn’t have enough for important applications, like magnetic imaging in hospitals or state-of-the-art upgrades for future transportation systems.
“Tell me more,” Rose said, fingering a dark green silk scarf. “What do you think?” she asked, holding the scarf up to her hair, still a deep brown with red highlights, thanks to modern technology. Although I had enormous faith in science and had all sorts of electronic gadgetry in my life, my short, mostly gray hair was proof that I didn’t trust chemistry as much as I did physics.
“I think I will tell you more,” I said, “as long as we’re in this nice, warm store. There’s an important vote coming up on the federal helium reserves. And before you make a joke about high-pitched giggles, let me point out that helium plays an important role in many industries, including medicine.”
I hoped I sounded appropriately reproachful, but it was lost on Rose.
“Gloria, you’re home after spending half a lifetime in California,” she reminded me. “It’s going to be a
white Christmas, chestnuts are roasting right here on the street carts, and you even have a boyfriend. Forget helium. By the way, what are you going to get Matt for Christmas?”
“I was thinking of a nice shirt and tie.”
I pictured Sergeant Matt Gennaro at his desk, flipping through homicide files in a new pale blue shirt and perhaps a rakish paisley tie. I saw myself admiring the outfit as we lunched together at Russo’s, around the corner from the old red-brick building that houses the Revere Police Department where Matt has spent his whole career.