The Helium Murder (4 page)

“Is the body here now?” I asked. I wanted no surprises, like a garage door opening in the middle of the night to admit a hearse.

“There has been no release to us yet,” Frank answered. I could always count on Frank’s language to be smooth and bloodless, disguising the real nature of his “clients,” as he referred to them. An eavesdropper this evening might think we were talking about the release of new government data or a pop music album.

Frank stopped at his office, at the back of the first floor, and Rose came up two more flights to my apartment. She headed for my kitchen and started water for tea, mumbling as usual about my meager larder of food and drink. I thought I was doing well to have coffee, several varieties of herbal tea, and cookies from the gourmet section of the supermarket. We both wished we’d taken home orders of Anzoni’s tiramisu or tartufo. I blamed Matt for distracting us by his untimely exit.

The water was hardly boiling when Frank came in, with a wide grin on his face.

“I was right,” he said, “but I wanted to be sure. I thought I remembered that it was around the holidays that Matt’s wife died. Sure enough, I checked the file, and it was December fifth, nineteen eighty-six. That’s ten years ago today.”

Frank looked at me, standing straight, palms up, as
if he’d just finished a brilliant summary in a courtroom trial.

“Thanks, Frank,” I said, my long sigh in harmony with Rose’s.

Chapter Four

A
s predicted, a light snow was falling on Tuesday morning, mounting in even piles on my east-facing windowsills. I turned on my TV and heard the weatherperson say that the snowfall for November and December had exceeded amounts in previous years. I felt it was my own private welcome home. Especially now that I didn’t have to shovel my own driveway, or commute to work every day, snow seemed even more romantically beautiful than I remembered.

TV clips of Margaret Hurley featured her youth in Revere and Boston, her relationship with Frances Whitestone, and her short career in Congress. I was a little embarrassed at myself for grabbing a notebook when the announcer turned to her personal life and hinted at her brother’s shady deals and her stormy parting with her fiancé, Patrick Gallagher, also of Revere. And, to add a little spice, listeners were
reminded of how Margaret had publicly denounced both men, at different times, for different reasons. So much for speaking ill of the dead, I thought.

I’d forgotten to check my answering machine after Anzoni’s, so I had to drink my breakfast coffee to the sound of Peter Mastrone’s voice.

“Just a reminder that your talk is next Monday. I’ve missed seeing you, Gloria. Turns out that Monday is a half-day for us, so maybe we can have lunch after class. It’s been a while.”

In fact, it had been a couple of weeks since I’d seen Peter, but what was that compared to the thirty-odd years we hadn’t been in touch at all? Rose claimed that Peter kept up with her and Frank just to keep track of me, and I was beginning to think she was right. If so, it didn’t say much for the choices Peter had made in life.

I decided that instead of returning his phone call, I’d work on his class. But not until I’d brushed up on helium. I had no intention of meeting Matt Gennaro unprepared. Especially if his partner, George Berger, was in the office. I’d managed to get along with Berger during my previous contract only because he was out most of the time helping with his new baby. The child was a couple of months old by now, so I could hardly hope that he’d still be on paternity leave.

Berger had made no secret of his dislike and distrust of me. He probably wouldn’t have made as much fuss if the department had given a contract to a tarot-card reader. The first time we met he listed his own credentials in science: several classes at Revere High
School, plus college chemistry, plus forensic chemistry when he trained as a detective. I put him somewhere above
Reader’s Digest
, but below
Scientific American
, though I didn’t tell him that. I could hardly wait to see how we’d work together this time, if we had to.

To brighten my mood, I put on a disc of Christmas music, a medley of old favorites by Perry Como. I pulled out my “interesting articles” folder and took it with my mug of coffee to my new, cushy, blue-gray corduroy couch. Relocating three thousand miles away had given me an excellent excuse to buy new furniture. I’d ended up keeping only my two favorite rockers, plus anything that plugged in. As a technology junkie, I got attached to computers and stereo equipment, but hardly ever to wood or fabric. I wondered if Perry Como had a PC.

I sorted through the wide accordion folder and located several clippings on the helium reserves.

One name that kept coming up was that of William Carey, the CEO of CompTech, a software company based in Texas and specializing in database management. The company also had a branch office and a small distribution plant in Chelsea, one town away from Revere.

One article reported on Carey’s appearance at a Congressional hearing on the helium-storage program. In his prepared remarks, Carey had stressed the need for the government’s maintaining control over enough helium to guarantee our predominance in future technologies.
Why did a software company care so much about helium? I wondered.

As I looked through my own stockpile of helium literature, I realized that the political maneuverings were far more complicated than the physical principles underlying the accumulation of helium. As difficult as it was to mine helium, it seemed easier than distilling the truth about the program from vested-interest doublespeak.

No two articles agreed on how long the helium supply would last. Factoring out all the differences in the way the calculations were made, I concluded that the best estimates were: about ten years for worldwide use, and close to one hundred years if limited to federal government use.

It was even more difficult to figure out the budget for the program—did it cost only two million dollars a year as one group suggested, or was it 1.2 billion dollars in debt as another claimed?

I’d had success in the past when I prepared lists and charts for Matt, so I decided to do that again, starting with the simple part, the science. I made a list of facts about helium that made it a special commodity, and desirable to have on hand:

• Helium occurs naturally in small amounts in natural gas deposits.
  
• It must be extracted and stored as soon as the gas is mined, or it escapes into the atmosphere and can’t be reclaimed for useful purposes.
  
• No other element can reach the low temperature of liquid helium.
  
• This low temperature is required for many emerging technologies.
  
• Demand for helium is rising about ten percent a year.
  

There was a lot more I could go into—details about how the federal government got involved in the first place, for example, since private companies also mine and sell helium. For the moment, I decided I’d done enough. For all I knew, this science lesson was far off the mark and I’d wasted my time.

At nine o’clock I dropped my notes into my briefcase and headed for the closet to choose a light-snowfall outfit. Since this was my first New England winter in a while, my cold-weather wardrobe choices were limited. I did have one pair of black knee-length boots, suitable for walking through slush, so I built around them, choosing a wide black skirt with silvery threads and a gray cowl-neck sweater—uninspired, but at least warm and coordinated.

I poked around in my box of scatter pins, sustaining only minor stab wounds, and came up with a neutral holiday design, an abstract ceramic sleigh that I’d picked up at a crafts fair in Berkeley. I wasn’t sure about Berger’s religious connections, if any, and didn’t want to annoy him any more than I already did by my presence. Surely the father of a newborn couldn’t take offense at the suggestion of Santa’s vehicle.

As for my own vehicle choices, I’d finally gotten rid of the Jeep I’d driven from California, so my only source of transportation now was the shiny black Cadillac I’d bought from the Galiganis. I still couldn’t bring myself to say “my Cadillac,” but there it was, and it got me safely to Matt’s office at the Revere Police Department on Pleasant Street.

I entered the old building and identified myself to the uniformed officer sitting behind a thick pane of glass, which I supposed to be bulletproof. Except that it was no larger than a few square feet, the foyer, painted in a bright blue, looked more like the box office for a theater than the stepping-stone to law enforcement.

As I approached Matt’s office, I could see Berger’s short, stocky frame through the frosted-glass window. He stood with his back to the door, facing Matt. I threw my shoulders back, shifted my briefcase to my left hand, and entered the office, ready for battle.

With only the briefest nod to Matt, I launched into my offense.

“Sgt. Berger,” I said, “I hope you have pictures to show me.”

Berger’s eyebrows went up into the shape of a question mark just briefly, then he reached into his jacket and brought out a yellow envelope full of Kodak moments.

I saw a wide grin come over his face and knew that my strategy had worked, at least for the moment. As I shuffled through the photos, I made noises of admiration,
wishing I knew the gender of the child. After counting no fewer than six different shades of pink in the clothing and general environment of the baby, I used my skills as a physicist/detective and took a risk.

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

“Her name’s Cynthia,” Berger said, still grinning.

“Beautiful,” I said again, and actually meant it. I was a traditionalist when it came to names, making fun of the new trends and the unlikely cultural combinations. In a class I taught in San Francisco one semester, I had two young men named Ian Wong. Not that I was against interracial marriage, just interracial names.

If I had children, I thought, I’d probably number them until they were old enough to choose for themselves—too much responsibility to give a lifetime label to a person. Another advantage I’d noticed in moving back to Revere was that people here, at least the old-timers, could spell and pronounce my name without trouble.

“‘Cynthia Berger’ has the ring of a cellist at Carnegie Hall or a Nobelist in literature,” I said, happy to be flattering and honest at the same time. “You must be really proud.”

“We are,” Berger said. What I saw in the vicinity of Matt’s eyes came very close to a wink.

I took a seat and Berger excused himself to go to a meeting. As he left the office he shook my hand and said, “I told Matt you were the one to help us with this. Most of it is pretty straightforward, and I could
handle it, but there are a couple of things I think you could clear up.”

I sat facing Matt across his desk and we both sighed the equivalent of “whew.”

“I think fatherhood agrees with him,” I said.

Matt shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, “but your fancy footwork didn’t hurt. Nice work, Gloria.”

Matt was always generous with his compliments, but not so free that I doubted his sincerity. Just the right level for a woman of my generation who had a hard time accepting praise for anything but her spaghetti.

“Before we get into this,” Matt said, lifting a folder from the pile on his neat desk, “I wanted to say something about last night.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know that, but I want to. It was a difficult day for me and I probably shouldn’t have made dinner plans in the first place.”

I debated with myself about mentioning that I knew of the anniversary, worried that Matt had an entirely different reason for leaving without me, so to speak.

“Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Teresa’s death,” Matt said, removing my dilemma. “Sometimes I forget and other times ...”

“I know. Frank told me. I’m sorry. And I suppose we never really forget completely.”

“That’s right,” Matt said. “In my own world here, I forgot about Al.”

Matt and I had talked a little about the circumstances of the death of my late fiancé, Al Gravese.
Matt had just joined the police force at the time and remembered the rumors of foul play. I wondered if this were a good time to tell him that I intended to do some research on Al’s business connections and the car crash that killed him, and that I could use his help. I looked at him, still appearing vulnerable, and decided not to.

“I knew Al only a short time compared to you and Teresa,” I said.

“Thanks for understanding, Gloria,” he said. “Maybe we can make it up this weekend?”

“You have nothing to make up,” I said. “But I do happen to have some time this weekend.” If I were filling out one of the dozens of questionnaires that I’d seen in my lifetime, I would have called myself “extremely satisfied.”

Matt turned to his desk and I knew that personal talk was over and it was time for business. He had a way of shifting abruptly from one to the other with the speed of a bullet. He handed me a manila folder thick with papers.

“Here are some of the documents we found in Ms. Hurley’s briefcase,” he said, holding up one of the widest attaché cases I’d ever seen. “They probably have nothing to do with this hit-and-run, but it bothers me to have papers in my file that I can’t understand. Why don’t you get a start on these while I dig out a contract. And if you can hold off on coffee for the moment, maybe we can catch an early lunch with the real thing at Russo’s?”

I gave a grateful nod and watched him as he left
the office, until he rounded a corner. I thought how lucky I was to have met him and, with a nod to Josephine, questioned whether I deserved him.

I put the folder on my lap and opened it. The first document was printed on bright blue shadow-print letterhead—
CompTech, Inc., William E. Carey, President and Chief Executive Officer
.

Chapter Five

M
att’s side of the room was almost completely without decoration. The only photo on his desk was one of his parents at an anniversary celebration. A bulletin board behind his desk held a haphazard arrangement of memos, lists, and telephone messages on small yellow slips of paper. I wondered if Rose would consider a framed fine-arts poster a personal enough Christmas gift.