The Helium Murder (3 page)

After a brief review of Marconi’s wireless system and the first message transmitted across the Atlantic, I put down my notes and renewed my wandering. Thanks to Josephine’s neatness gene, even in my idleness I accomplished something, picking up a crumb here, a stray piece of paper there, straightening a pile of newspapers. My version of good housekeeping was much less compulsive than Josephine’s, however; I couldn’t claim as she did that “you can eat off my floors.”

Each time I passed my phone, I had a strong urge to call Matt. I had no such urge to use my exercise bicycle, situated at the foot of my bed, like a legless soldier with arms open to capture me.

I reminded myself that I’d see Matt at dinner with Rose and Frank in a couple of hours. I still wasn’t comfortable calling Matt “for no reason,” or just because I couldn’t wait to compare notes on an item in the news.

I walked to my window and studied my favorite scene—the Romanesque tower of St. Anthony’s Church outlined against a dull gray sky, streaked with a tiny remnant of sunset red. We’d had an early storm over the weekend, and the trees were heavy with snow. I mentally renewed my minority position that a murky East Coast sky was more soothing than the stark bright sun of the Pacific.

Rose and Frank saved me from further daydreaming by coming upstairs after closing their offices on the
floors below me. We’d planned to ride together to Anzoni’s restaurant and meet Matt there.

“Then he can drive you home,” Rose had said, “and, you know, you can invite him up.” Rose was convinced that I didn’t know the first thing about dating, and she wasn’t shy about giving me advice.

“Just met what’s left of the Hurley family,” Frank said, entering my living room. He plucked a tiny piece of lint from his perfectly pressed jacket.
The Galiganis are the lint police
, I thought, and I pictured their closets beating out an industrial laboratory, meeting all the government requirements for a class-A clean room.

“That brother is something else,” Frank said. “Now I remember the stories of his gambling, and how the grandmother cut him out of her will.”

“Tell me more,” I said, trying to sound casual, while at the same time avoiding a disapproving look from Rose.

“Frank,” was all she said, and Frank went silent.

I guessed she was using a certain pitch that Frank recognized as the director’s sign for “cut.”

“Rose,” I whined, “you know I can keep a confidence.”

“And you know that’s not why I’m cutting this off. I know you, Gloria. You’re just looking for an excuse to call this a murder. That bullet didn’t teach you anything, did it?”

“Frank,” I begged, “what exactly was Buddy’s demeanor?”

Rose and Frank roared with laughter and even I
couldn’t believe what had happened to my vocabulary. “Now I know you’ve gone off the edge, Gloria,” Rose said. “You sound like Court TV.”

I had to admit she had a point.

Chapter Three

M
ost of the changes I’d come back to in Revere were for the better, with the grand exception of the Boulevard. Once famous for its beach and boardwalk, Revere’s Boulevard had been lined with roller coasters and Ferris wheels, carousels, hot dog vendors, and frozen custard stands. My first pay envelope, with fifty cents for every hour I’d worked, came from my skilled labor at Johnny’s Cotton Candy Counter.

The Boulevard now held multilevel condominium complexes, liberally sprinkled with miniparks of a few benches and trees. All of the rides and, with only a couple of exceptions, all of the food concessions of the first public beach in the United States had been leveled to the ground one way or another.

Anzoni’s new restaurant was on the site of the old Tilt-A-Whirl. If it weren’t for my overwhelming sadness at the loss of the entire two-mile strip of amusements,
I would have considered a good Italian restaurant an improvement over a thrill ride. I’d worked behind counters on the Boulevard all through my years at Revere High School, but never once rode anything more risky than a bumper car. My guess is that Josephine told me I’d be scared.

As soon as we pulled up in back of Anzoni’s, just after seven o’clock, I saw Matt’s steel blue Camry. I felt the now familiar twinge in my chest and paused only a fraction of a second before acknowledging that it was not due only to the thirty-degree air that greeted us outside the car.

Matt stood up as we entered, hitting a faux Italian olive tree, and catching the few strands of hair that covered the top of his head in its leaves. Anzoni’s was done up in deep burgundies with faux Tiffany lamps and faux sculptures. Only the food and the tiny poinsettia plants on the tables were authentic.

Matt caught my eye and smiled.

“Gloria,” he said, nodding. “Rose. Frank.”

His smile was warm, his voice comfortably deep, but from his clipped tone, you might have thought we were preparing for a lineup. Matt had been widowed for many years and, by his own account, had given all his attention to his job. He was as awkward as I was in social situations. One of his charms, I thought.

Matt ran his hand along his dark blue tie, tucking it into his brown suit jacket. As usual, he took my coat, a long lapis lazuli blue that Rose had talked me into. I’d held my ground on jewelry, however, and
wore a small hand-painted set of wooden bells instead of the elaborate holiday pin Rose suggested.

I had mixed feelings about Matt’s chivalry, of course, since I’d lived my life in a man’s profession and without a partner. I’d never allowed any deference to my gender in the laboratory, but when Matt pulled out a chair or held the door for me, it was a different story. I resolved to research the latest feminist thinking on male/female etiquette.

We settled around the small square table, juggling hats and gloves and scarves—another difference between the coasts. In California I kept my winter clothes with my luggage since I needed them only on business trips to cold climates. I’d forgotten what it was like to need an extra chair for woolens.

“How are your classes, Gloria?” Matt asked. He knew about my series for Peter as well as a science education project I was finishing up for a school in San Francisco, and always acted interested—something else I liked about him.

“I’m ready for Marconi,” I said, picking up a napkin. “Shall I draw you a picture?”

“Oh, no,” said Rose as she snatched the cloth from my hand and told Matt how that was my trademark—using restaurant napkins as a chalkboard for unsolicited science lessons.

“Just kidding,” I said, placing the linen across my lap. “I’d never deface a cloth napkin.”

I wondered how long it would be before Matt and I had our own stories. We’d only been seeing each other socially for a few weeks, five to be exact. Two
jazz concerts, one movie, and four dinners, two of them alone, to be even more exact. Each event had ended with affectionate, huglike contact, such as I exchanged with my cousin Mary Ann in Worcester at the beginning and end of our infrequent visits. So far, that was enough for me. I hadn’t experienced more physical intimacy than that since my late fiancé, Al, and I practiced “safe necking” many years ago.

By the time my three present-day companions and I had finished an antipasto and four orders of Anzoni’s special, eggplant parmigiana, we’d covered all the neutral topics—holiday shopping, the stock market, and the doings of the three Galigani children. Rose was especially proud that their middle child, John, who was the editor of the
Revere Journal
, had just won an award for best regional reporting in Suffolk County.

Frank told us about his week at a convention in Houston, sponsored by funeral home suppliers. He described the exhibits, but it didn’t take long to exhaust the subject of caskets and vaults, at least at the level appropriate for dinner conversation.

Finally, I plunged in.

“How about that Hurley case,” I said to no one and everyone, including the young waiter in a short white jacket who was setting down our cappuccinos, as if the question couldn’t be more casual. My voice had risen in pitch, however, like the whistle of an oncoming train, and I knew I was fooling no one.

Each of my dinner companions turned to me, heads slightly tilted, looking like a poorly orchestrated puppet
show. Even
I
tilted my head, as if the mouth that uttered those words didn’t really belong to me.

“It certainly is a great loss,” said Frank, the first to recover. He was, after all, trained as a bereavement counselor. “Margaret Hurley was doing an excellent job for us.”

Usually I could tell when Frank was in his funeral director mode, but this time I couldn’t guess whether he actually knew how Hurley was performing in Congress or if he pulled the line from his undertaker script. I was a little off-balance from Anzoni’s low-level lighting and the tightness in my throat as I tried to read Matt’s expression.

“A great loss,” Matt said, and put down his cup. “As a matter of fact, Gloria, I’d like to talk to you about working with us on a limited basis. The congresswoman’s briefcase was full of technical papers and notes and we’d like to understand a little more what they are. Not that we think the material had anything to do with the incident; it’s just for completeness.”

It was hard to hear myself over the sighs of Rose and Frank, but I managed a weak, “I could come by tomorrow morning?”

My brain was swimming with messages. From Matt I sifted out “limited basis,” as opposed to “whole hog,” which more aptly described my involvement in the last case I’d worked on. Rose’s deep intake of breath carried the worry that I’d be in danger again, and Frank’s outtake expressed relief that no protocol had been breached.

What I wasn’t prepared for was Matt’s next comment.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I have to be going. About ten tomorrow morning, Gloria?” He’d already taken out his wallet and slid several bills over to Frank.

So much for Rose’s plan
, I thought.

“Ten is fine,” I said.

The ride back to Galigani’s Mortuary and my home seemed as long as the wait for a calculation from the computer I’d used in graduate school in the 1960s. Rose chattered about how well their older son Robert managed the business on his own while Frank was in Houston, and how Mary Catherine, their youngest and my godchild, was getting used to her new job as a chemical engineer for an oil company.

I mentioned that I had a lot of reading to do for Peter’s class next week. I stressed the time-consuming tasks of preparing student handouts and transparencies, and compiling virtually tons of reference material, as if I didn’t have a minute to spare for the likes of Matt Gennaro.

I’d never been able to break the habit of replaying scenes in my past, especially those that seemed to go wrong, and the scene at Anzoni’s, with Matt’s unexpected leaving, was no exception. I went over every nuance, and thought of three or four alternatives for every word I’d used.
If I’d been this careful reviewing my physics research
, I thought,
I’d probably have won the Nobel Prize
.

What didn’t fit together were Matt’s invitation to work with him, indicating that my Hurley question wasn’t totally out of line, and his abrupt departure. Usually—meaning the two other times the four of us had met for dinner—Matt drove me home and came upstairs for coffee.

During those visits, we’d reminisced about the old Revere Beach, and the big stars that had performed at the Wonderland Ballroom and other clubs on the Boardwalk—crooners like Jerry Vale and Freddie Cannon, Liberace, and a very young Barbra Streisand, to name a few.

Matt and I had explored each other’s interests, doing spontaneous film reviews and book reports, although neither one of us was a big fan of movies or fiction. I’d learned to enjoy abstruse foreign films in Berkeley, but not enough to find out where they played in the Boston area.

Matt watched only “Star Trek” and read only Tom Clancy and I stayed with one or two classics a year. We’d both poured more energy into conferences and professional journals. I was amazed to discover that Matt had to do as much as any physicist to keep up with the latest in his field, from new weapons on the street to advances in crime detection techniques. And I’d certainly never heard of the periodicals Matt read, like
Forensics Today
and
The American Detective
.

I realized how much I’d looked forward to a similar end to this evening, and felt a wave of disappointment that seemed to fold my shoulders into the posture of a dying swan. As usual, I focused on the negative,
almost forgetting that Matt had invited me to work with him again, which was what I’d hoped for from the moment I’d read the Hurley headlines. More credit to Josephine, I thought, who taught me by example to give any negative an order of magnitude more weight than a positive.

I wanted to hop out of the car, to the extent that someone of my size-fourteen frame can hop, and hide in my comfortable bedroom with a box of See’s candy and a disc of Pachelbel’s
Canon
. I remembered, however, that I was on the wrong coast for See’s and I didn’t own the
Canon
. I’d started to redesign my self-pity scenario, when Rose and Frank interrupted.

“Mind if we come up?” Rose asked.

“I really think I’m ready for bed,” I said, giving her the girlfriend-to-girlfriend look that begged for understanding.

“Actually, I have to check something in the files,” Frank said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

Before I could say anything else, we were all out of the car, trudging up the Tuttle St. driveway against the cold wind that had come up from the ocean, less than a mile away. I loved the smell of the salt air right at my fingertips, or at least my windowsill, and it no longer bothered me that the trip to my front door included walking past a large but tasteful sign that advertised the presence of a mortuary chapel, with full funeral services.

As we entered the lobby, I noticed the menu-type bulletin board already in place in front of the larger of Galigani’s two first-floor parlors: