The Helium Murder (2 page)

“I’m not surprised,” Rose said with a groan. She gave me a look of hopelessness. “You keep forgetting, you’re not only his science consultant anymore. You’re his girlfriend. That was at least one good thing that came of those two awful murders last fall.”

“It’s not that we’re engaged either, Rose,” I said. “We’re just starting to become friends.”

Another sigh from Rose. “Still, here’s your first serious relationship since 1963 and you’re thinking of work clothes? A shirt and tie is what you should buy Frank,” she said, referring to her husband of three decades and my good friend for as many years.

Rose and Frank were also my landlords for the six months that I’d been back in town. They’d set me up in an apartment above their place of business, so for the moment, my address was the same as the one in their yellow-pages ad: Galigani’s Mortuary on Tuttle Street.

The Galiganis also sold me last year’s Cadillac from
their fleet—a side benefit that took some getting used to. For the first few weeks, I’d arrived early for every gathering and parked in dark corners to avoid being seen behind the wheel of a long, black luxury car.

“How about something personal?” Rose said, bringing me back to the task of shopping. “It’s a perfect time to show Matt you think of him more as a friend than a boss.”

At the word “friend,” Rose lifted her penciled-in dark brown eyebrows and puckered her lips, a gesture I tried to ignore. She picked a piece of white lint from my new winter coat, as if that was all it would take for me to look as stunning as she always did.

“What if I have his initials embroidered on the pocket of the shirt?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a slow-dancing tape in the pocket of a bathrobe,” Rose said, sending us into a preteen laughfest again.

Just to humor her, I let Rose take me through the men’s department, past the ties, to the more personal aisles. Before she said anything out loud, I shook my head wildly when she pointed to a headless plastic torso wearing orange-and-black-tiger-striped underwear. Rose knew it would take more than one visit for me to be as comfortable in the menswear section as I would be in a hardware store, so she didn’t press me to buy anything. However, I could tell from the slight smile on her well-made-up face that she was devising a plan for a future trip. As for me, I made a mental note to visit Radio Shack on my own.

We headed for the Park Street subway station, walking past a long row of newspaper vending machines. Rose was five feet ahead of me before she noticed that I’d stopped in front of a
Boston Globe
display. I was staring wide-eyed at the headline:
Seventh District Rep Hit-and-Run Victim
.

Rose joined me at the blue metal case that stood in front of us like a truncated TV anchorman announcing the day’s bad news. Since neither of us had change, we leaned our shopping bags against the rack, and read as much as we could see of the folded front page.

“Wow,” Rose said. “Whitestone lives in that beautiful white house on Oxford Park, the one that has green shutters with shamrock cutouts.”

“I know the one you mean,” I said, still stooped over, “only because it was the only non-Italian symbol in that neighborhood.”

“I remember when Margaret was elected to Congress, two years ago, largely due to the widow Whitestone, by the way, but we didn’t know her very well. Did you?”

I straightened up with a jolt, when I finally remembered why her name was familiar.

“She’s the helium vote,” I said.

“She’s the what?”

“She’s on the House Science and Technology Committee. I wonder if her death had anything to do with the helium vote?”

“Oh-oh,” Rose said. “Here we go again.”

Chapter Two

N
ot that I didn’t like my new career as science consultant to the Revere Police Department, but I needed a longer break after the last murder investigation I’d gotten involved in. That case was only two months earlier, and didn’t end until I got my first taste of a bullet wound.

Back in my apartment after an afternoon of shopping with Rose, I rubbed my shoulder, not so much from residual pain as from the memory of wrestling with the murderer. Before I could get too upset, however, I realized that my boss and, as Rose would say, boyfriend, Sgt. Matt Gennaro, dealt with many more homicides than that. I was called in only if the murder involved science or scientists as suspects, like the case of the murdered hydrogen researchers I’d just helped with.

From the headlines, I had no reason to believe that
Hurley’s death had anything to do with science, and I certainly didn’t know her personally. So why was I giving this case a second thought? It was none of my business. It was a simple hit-and-run, I thought, as if random violence is any more simple to understand than premeditated murder.

This newest phase of my life had begun when I’d retired from my physics lab in California and returned to Revere, as abruptly as I’d left. It had been more than thirty years since my departure, right after my fiancé at that time, Al Gravese, died in a car crash. My plan, if I could call it that, was to see how it felt to be back in the city I was raised in.

I had some unanswered questions about Al’s death, and any day now I was going to do something about the little notebook of his that I’d found in one of the cartons Rose and Frank had stored for me in their attic—now my attic, too.

My return to Revere also unleashed unresolved feelings centering around Josephine Lamerino, my mother and worst enemy in my formative years.

“You’ll never amount to anything, Gloria,”
Josephine told me almost daily during the first twenty years of my life.
“You’re fat and lazy.”

I’d expected her to stop taunting me when I did all my chores, or when I was valedictorian in high school, but she never did. Not even after she died, when I was in college—her voice never left my head. Josephine’s early message to me was louder than that of my father, who whispered that he was proud of me; stronger than that of my professors as
I earned a Ph.D. in physics; more powerful than that of friends like Rose and Frank. It was my life’s work to drown her out and build some measure of self-confidence.

My whistling kettle brought me back to the present. I settled in my favorite glide rocker with a mug of French-pressed coffee, which added as much rich aroma as good taste to my afternoon. I opened my copy of the
Boston Globe
and read the full article about Margaret Hurley. A sidebar about her career profiled Margaret as one of a new crop in the House of Representatives. At thirty-four years old, she was the elected spokesperson for the people of the Seventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, which included Revere.

I’d hoped for a reference to the helium vote, but the
Globe
reporter focused more on Hurley’s personal life and overall professional accomplishments, noting that her minor in chemistry at Boston’s Simmons College added value to her political science major, and got her a choice spot on the Science and Technology Committee. Hurley’s only survivor was her brother, Brendan “Buddy” Hurley. No details of the accident, if that’s what it was.

I wondered if Matt would see this death as science related and invite me to work on the case. I envisioned myself tutoring him on helium as I had on the hydrogen case. I thought I’d begin by emphasizing how difficult it is to capture helium in a useful form on earth, in spite of its abundance—hydrogen and helium together
make up almost ninety-nine percent of the universe.

I mentally prepared a chart for Matt, showing him the uses of helium at various temperatures. I titled it, “The Coldest Liquid in the Universe.”

The picture of us working together was very appealing. Matt was a widower, and eight months younger than me, as I’d found out during a spontaneous party for his fifty-fifth birthday in the fall. Was I actually looking for more police work? Or a way to spend more time with Matt? Neither motive was appealing to me, since I was still uncomfortable with this adventuresome life I seemed to have adopted recently.

I got busy at my computer, searching the Internet for information on who stood where in Congress on the helium vote. According to the sites I browsed, it seemed that Congress was leaning toward selling the reserves. I wondered how Hurley would have voted, resolving to check earlier newspapers for a clue as to which way she was leaning.

I’d just gotten a computer hit on a report submitted by a physicist, Vincent Cavallo, a consultant hired by the government to do an independent analysis of the program, when the phone rang.

“Hi, Glor. Any new murders lately?” Elaine Cody, a technical editor at the lab I’d worked at for many years, was teasing me long distance, from her Berkeley, California, home.

Elaine and Rose had much in common, starting with
their wardrobes—designer suits and dresses, Italian leather handbags and pumps for work, and fancy sandals for evening. Even their sweat suits were plush and beautifully tailored.
No matter which coast I live on
, I thought,
my friends are thinner and classier than I am
.

Rose’s husband Frank was also in that category, a natty dresser, staying fit and trim in spite of his healthy appetite for Italian food. So far, of all the people I was attracted to in one way or another, Matt Gennaro was the only one who looked like me—between two and three sizes overweight, with naturally graying hair and a closet full of dark clothes, designed to disappear into the wallpaper.

“I want to be like Marie Curie,” I’d told Elaine once when she tried to persuade me to buy a frothy peach dress for one of her weddings. “When Marie’s family offered to give her a wedding outfit, she asked them to buy her a dark dress that she could wear to her lab the next day.”

“Well, her marriage lasted longer than any of mine,” Elaine had said, “so maybe there’s something to that.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

With Elaine on the phone now, I took the opportunity to talk about Margaret Hurley’s death and my idea that it might not have been accidental. I brought up the tricky helium vote and what I knew about Cavallo’s report. Cavallo worked at the lab on Charger Street in Revere, the same one that had a lot to do with why my left arm was sore, and how I’d come to know Matt so well.

“I was only kidding when I asked about new murders,” Elaine said. “You’re really getting into this homicide business. This is not the Gloria I know. I can’t picture it.”

“Maybe you should come for a visit and see for yourself.”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll wait till you have a real apartment. I was a little freaked out by your living situation. Is this congresswoman’s body going to be waked in your house, too?”

I drew in my breath at the reminder of where I lived. I carried my cordless phone to my rocker where I’d left the
Globe
and scanned to the end of the article. I let out a near whistle, and Elaine knew the answer to her question.

“She’s going to be right there in your living room, isn’t she?” Elaine said, mimicking the voice of the narrator of a scary radio show.

“Not exactly in my living room,” I said, straightening up as if Elaine could see my defensive posture. “On the first floor of the building I live in.”

Although I was getting used to having my home address constantly in the obituary column of local newspapers, I renewed my determination to look for an apartment in a real building, one with no noises from an embalming prep room or stacks of funeral-car stickers and prayer cards on a table in my foyer. I wasn’t about to give in to Elaine, however.

“I like this apartment,” I said. “It’s light and comfortable, and I’m settled in. You know how I hate to move.”

“Right.” Elaine laughed. “You only go for dramatic moves—leave your hometown when you’re twenty-two and don’t go back, not even for a visit. You stay in the same place for thirty-three years, then leave and return to your hometown. Doesn’t everybody do that?”

After Elaine’s call, I wandered around my apartment, unable to focus my attention on a single task. I took out my notes for the presentation I had to give in a week for my friend Peter Mastrone’s Italian class. After an unsuccessful attempt to renew our high-school romance, Peter and I were now working on an unsuccessful friendship. Peter had been unhappy about my work with Matt from the beginning, and except for the commitment I’d made to visit his classroom once a month, I would have enforced a no-contact rule.

Fortunately, I loved the interaction with Peter’s students and looked forward to the next visit, timed to coincide with the anniversary of Marconi’s invention of the radio—December 12, 1901. The overall theme of my talks was the contribution of Italians and Italian-Americans to science and technology. I gave the talks in English, but the students wrote their reports in Italian, thus helping me brush up on the language of my parents at the same time. There hadn’t been many Lamerinos, Galiganis, or Gennaros in my blond California neighborhood. People whose names did end in a vowel were more likely to celebrate El Cinco de
Mayo, Mexican Independence Day, than Columbus Day.