The Helium Murder (7 page)

These reflections were a small lapse in the otherwise great progress I’d been making since my return to Revere, controlling twinge-of-regret moments, replacing them with moments of excitement at new adventures, like dating and police work.

“Mrs. Whitestone would like to have more votive candles at the ready,” I told Robert. “If you tell me where they are, I’d be glad to get them.”

“Thanks, Gloria,” he said. “They’re in the storage closet in the basement, next to the prep room.”

“Oh,” I said, with a grimace that Robert seemed to recognize immediately. The whole family must know, I thought, that I was inordinately squeamish about going into the basement where the embalming process
was carried out. I’d even started to take my dirty clothes to an outside Laundromat rather than use the washer and dryer in the room next to the prep room. It’s a testimony to my fear that I preferred the spectacle of pulling up to a coin-operated facility and dragging my dirty laundry out of a new Cadillac.

“I’ll send Tony,” Robert said. “The boxes are heavy anyway.”

So far
, I thought,
I’ve arrived at work late and reneged on my first chore. It’s a good thing I retired from my old job with a healthy pension
.

“Thanks,” I said to Robert, and looked around for a less intimidating duty.

To my disappointment, there was not much action to this role of mortuary staff person. Although there were more guests than chairs, and the overflow spilled into the lobby, all of the visitors seemed self-sufficient and not very interesting, as far as what I’d come to call The Hurley Case.

I still hadn’t laid eyes on Brendan Hurley, Margaret’s brother. I thought it strange that he wasn’t in charge of his sister’s funeral services.

Although I kept checking the guest register, pretending to be tidying up the table, I’d seen no record of a visit by Vincent Cavallo from the Charger Street lab, or Patrick Gallagher, Margaret’s ex-fiancé. Thanks to Rose, who sneaked looks at the tabloids in the supermarket, I was up-to-date on their headlines:
Dead Congresswoman Dumped Boyfriend for Job in D.C
., and
Woman Rep Mocked Brother in Public
.

I didn’t even have the pleasure of seeing Matt again that evening, since his partner showed up instead. Berger came over to me and I was at least grateful that we now seemed to be friends.

“I thought this would be a good chance to see the family,” he said, “since I’m a little behind on this case. Haven’t been getting much rest.”

“Cynthia?” I asked.

Berger grinned his new-father grin again, and told me a few stories about Cynthia’s cute sounds and movements.

I wanted to question Berger about the case—what was everyone’s alibi, for example, and who were the leading suspects? Matt as much as admitted to me that they were thinking in terms of deliberate homicide and not random hit-and-run anymore. I decided not to disturb the delicate truce Berger and I had reached. I was relieved when he moved away to work the crowd, afraid that I might either inadvertently reveal how bored I was with his baby stories, or blurt out something intelligent like, “Do you think her spurned fiancé was angry enough to kill her?”

When Father Tucci, the pastor of St. Anthony’s, finished the rosary, I made a fuss over him, because there wasn’t much else to do. I served him coffee in the small downstairs office Frank and Robert used for seeing clients. The main offices on the second floor, where Rose and Martha carried out the bookkeeping and management operations, were off-limits during wake hours, as, of course, was the third floor, which housed only my apartment. I listened to the old priest’s
reports on the Christmas cake sale and the funding drive for the new rectory.

I was beginning to think that funeral-home employees spend most of their time standing around, listening to dull tales, when a general stirring of the population occurred. After the rosary, deliberately or not, Margaret Hurley’s brother, Brendan, finally arrived, with a group of four men who made Tony and Sal look like kindergarten teachers.

“Hey, Buddy,” I heard often as he walked into the parlor, shaking hands and bestowing small hand-waves on the crowd, his men around him like the Secret Service around the President.
You’d think
he
was the politician
, I thought,
rather than his sister
.

Buddy looked “dark Irish,” as we on the Italian side of town used to call them. Unlike his fair-skinned sister, Buddy had almost-olive skin and dark brown hair. Only his green eyes and the enormous shamrock tie pin he wore gave away his ethnic background.

Buddy was made much of by everyone except Mrs. Whitestone. I remembered the casual remark Frank made about the bad feeling between Buddy and Frances Whitestone, and I felt I was seeing it firsthand. I wished I knew more, and plotted a way to find out. After all, he was on my list of duties, caring for immediate family. What care I could give Buddy, strutting boldly and powerfully toward his deceased sister, I couldn’t imagine.

I zigzagged my way to Buddy and his group, now assembled around the casket, lighting candles and
making sweeping signs of the cross in the vicinity of their enormous foreheads and chests.

When they’d turned back to the crowd, there I was, a head shorter than the shortest of them, ready to care for them.

“I’m Gloria Lamerino, Mr. Hurley,” I said, my fingers brushing the Galigani ribbon, my heart beating a little more loudly than usual, I thought. “I’m sorry about your sister. If there’s anything I can do ...”

“Thanks,” he said. I thought I heard “danks,” but chalked it up to my imagination and my stereotyping of men in dark shirts and white ties, which was what Buddy and his crew were wearing.

Berger, on the job, I noticed, came over to the group, and introduced himself to Buddy. I wondered if Berger had read Buddy’s statement, assuming he’d given one. I was getting more and more annoyed at how little I knew, and had to hold myself back from stomping to a phone to call Matt and demand some answers.

Next to Buddy was a man who looked at me a moment longer than he needed to, I thought. As we chatted about the tragic accident, and then about the weather, the man made nervous twitching motions, practically hopping from one foot to the other, like a seventh-grader who needed to use the boys’ room. Buddy introduced him to me and Berger.

“This here’s my friend Rocky Busso,” he said, and the soundtrack of
The Godfather
played in my head.

Rocky seemed to have no neck, and I thought I
could see rippling muscles about to break through the sleeves of his dark jacket.

“Hello, Dr. Lamerino,” he said.

“Rocky,” I said, bravely offering my hand, and vaguely aware of a shiver that had started down my spine.

“I bet you’re not used to this weather, huh? California’s always seventy degrees, right?”

“Right,” I said, as a second shiver made its way all through my body, so strong that I felt my skirt and vest must be showing visible signs of a wave as large as those at high tide on Revere Beach.

“Excuse me, please, I need to see if Father Tucci needs anything,” I said, and walked away in what seemed like slow motion. I felt as I did often in dreams, when I’d keep running and running but stayed in the same spot.

I made my way to Tony, who was standing by the door to the foyer.

“I’m glad you’re here, Tony,” I said, touching his arm, feeling his muscle, as if to reassure myself that someone strong was on my side.

Chapter Eight

I
climbed the two flights of stairs to my apartment, looking over my shoulder the whole way. Every time a step creaked under my foot, a tiny shiver went through me. It was only eight-thirty, but I completely abandoned the idea of staying at my post until the wake ended at nine.

I locked my door, then leaned against it, putting all my weight on its dark wood panels, as if that would help keep it locked. I breathed deeply and remembered that after my break-in two months ago, Matt had a police security expert install the latest in locks—a deadbolt with hardened steel inserts, and a specially designed strike plate anchored into the building frame. I felt better thinking of that, but only marginally. For all I knew, Rocky had a key.

I walked to my window and looked down on Tuttle Street. Thanks to the celebrity of the deceased, Frank
had arranged for around-the-clock police presence, and the sight of a white-and-red Revere Police car and two uniformed officers brought my breathing to a normal level. I inhaled as hard as I could, as if to suction their strength and protection up through the wintry air and into my living room. At a certain angle, I could see my reflection in the window. My hair looked grayer and my jowls more droopy, and I seemed to have aged a decade since meeting Rocky. My “staff” ribbon was slightly askew, as if it, too, had suffered a blow.

Following a curious habit of mine whenever I entered a hotel room for the first time, I walked through my apartment, checking under my bed and in my closets, and even under the sink. I’d carried out this procedure once when sharing a suite with Elaine at a conference in San Jose.

“I thought physicists were supposed to be logical,” Elaine had said. “What are you going to do if you find someone?”

I had no sensible defense, but that never kept me from completing my search, then or now. Maybe it was just to eliminate the element of surprise, I’d decided.
If you’re here, I want to know now
.

In another display of faulty logic, I put on a CD of light Christmas music, to ward off pending evil. Surely, I reasoned, no harm could come to someone in her own living room listening to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” I resolved to put up a Christmas tree, too, for further protection, although I’d been resisting the effort that would take.

The hardest chore was entering the narrow hallway
that ran the length of my bedroom and living room—a curious structural feature of my apartment. A trap door in the ceiling of the two-foot wide corridor provided access to the attic, which had been the scene of the only physical violence I’ve ever experienced. It was enough for a lifetime, however, and I hadn’t been in the attic since a bullet bounced off my shoulder and into its wall.

I took a flashlight and made my way up the short ladder that was designed to hook into slots on the attic floor. I trained my light around the musty loft, coughed out some dust, and saw that it was empty except for Galigani memorabilia and the boxes I’d kept there in storage. My eyes fell on the cartons labeled AG in thick black marker, and I remembered finding Al’s book, retrieved from the pocket of his robe in one of the boxes.

Back in my living room, I checked again on the officers below my window and decided I’d had enough of fearful cowering for one night. I tried to convince myself that I was overreacting. For one thing, I told myself, it was entirely possible that Rocky had overheard someone say I’d just come from California, or that I was a “Doctor.” But I didn’t really think so. To my knowledge, I’d never laid eyes on either Buddy or Rocky until that moment, and they had only been in the parlor a matter of minutes.

I needed to get to the bottom of Rocky Busso. In the safety of my flat, with no one under my sink, and two policemen within shouting distance, I was beginning to be angry at him. If he was deliberately trying to intimidate me, it had worked for a while.

I always considered myself a neat person, and this situation was remarkably untidy. Could the threads of my investigations, as slight as they were so far, be intertwined? I wondered. The idea that there was a connection between Hurley’s death two days ago and Al’s thirty-four years ago seemed even more far-fetched than a female pope before I died.

First, how did he know me? The only possible connection was Al Gravese. Maybe Rocky’s organization, as I chose to call it, had a tap on the
Journal
’s microfiche system, and when I accessed the records for 1962, an alarm went off in a dark, smoky room over a bar. Too far-out, I thought, but I had to start somewhere.

Al’s book was in my briefcase, with the
Journal
articles I’d printed out. I piled the notebook and papers on my kitchen table, which was actually at the edge of my living room, prepared a snack of cannoli and coffee, and set to work.

I got out my best magnifying glass, with a battery-operated light attached, and studied the photos in the articles. The crash had occurred in the Point of Pines section of Revere, at the northern end of the city, where it meets Saugus. It was a single-car accident, in which Al’s enormous Buick sedan apparently flew off the road and fell into the Pines River. The photos were mostly of the crash scene, with only one of Al, taken when he won a prize for his tulips at Boston’s Horticultural Show.

I sat back in my chair, swallowing the last daub of cream cheese from the cannoli, and asked myself how I expected to recognize Rocky Busso as he looked thirty-four years ago. Al was ten years older than me, thirty-one at the time of his death. If Rocky were the same age, he’d be sixty-six now. I didn’t think so. But, from what I remembered of his slightly graying hair and leathery face, he could be in his early fifties, making him Al’s teenaged friend.

After a half-hour of racking my brain for ideas, I came up with: check the 1962
Boston Globe
for photos, since Al was living in Boston’s North End, not Revere, when he died; ask Frank, who’d lived in Revere all his life, if he’d ever seen Rocky or any of Buddy’s other escorts before this evening; and check the
Journal
’s crime pages for any mention of Rocky Busso.

It took a brief stretching session to ease my stiffness, and another glance at the police car for me to get to the obvious. I opened Al’s book and looked under B. And there it was:
Rocky Busso, 555-6754, $100
.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I picked up my phone and pushed the numbers. I heard only one ring, then a machine hookup. I recognized the voice as that of a generic answering service, and hung up with relief. I certainly didn’t know what I would have said if a real person had answered.

Less than a minute later, at 9:44 by the digital clock on my desk, my phone rang, and I flinched as if I’d been stung by an insect. I carried the phone to the
window before pushing the talk button. As I watched the tiny red light on the front panel run back and forth, seeking the best channel, I felt my heartbeat following the same pattern.