The Oxygen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  “Dee Dee’s boyfriend Zach Landram is a purchaser for Curry Industries,” I said.

  Silence while Matt processed this information. I pictured a crooked expression, his left cheek scrunched up.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it means Zach knew Amber.” I realized this was a stretch since Zach was merely in the background on the Curry video, but it did put them in the same place at the same time. “What if Zach was cheating on Dee Dee with Amber? It gives Dee Dee a motive for murder. She went to the loft to confront Amber, and things got out of hand.”

  “It’s worth mentioning to Buzz,” Matt said.

  Was it my imagination or was this the first of my theories this week that Matt thought respectable? Maybe the air was changing.

  I bolstered my idea with more information. “Dee Dee never mentioned to the police that her boyfriend worked for Curry. She told them she went to the loft with some business question connected to the Tina Miller Agency.”

  “You know this how?”

  “Uh . . . well, first, I’m glad you’re interested in pursuing this motive.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not trying to connect this to ozone.”

  A light went on in the cab.

  Or was it my brain finally putting things together? I was embarrassed that Matt had thought of it first. Wasn’t I getting paid (in Revere, anyway) to study potential links between science and crime?

  Here it had fallen into my lap and I hadn’t thought of it. We were all thinking that Amber’s blackmail enterprise was limited to the personal secrets of Tina’s clients—infidelity or a past that included lap-dancing, perhaps—but a true businesswoman like Amber would see opportunities everywhere. It occurred to me again that if Amber had applied her business skills to something legal and worthwhile, she might have been pictured next to Tina on the cover of New York City Today.

  If Curry had ozone problems, Amber might very well approach the management—Zach?—with the same kind of proposition she used with her other clients. She was the cameraperson and could easily have kept evidence from Lori.

  There was no end to the problems Curry or any other industry could have with ozone. Faulty monitors and poor ventilation were the key issues for Blake, Lori had told me, whereas she was looking into Curry for potential CFC violations. In any case, all provided excellent material for blackmail.

  “Where are you going now?” Matt asked.

  “You’re a genius, Matt. Your investigative skills are unmatched.”

  We both knew I was setting him up, and he humored me with his reply. “It’s what I do,” he said. Then, “And now you’re on your way to . . . ?”

  “To see Dee Dee.” I hoped the traffic noise, not to say my own driver’s incessant honking, would drown me out. I made a note to investigate the routes of the water taxis I’d heard Lori talk about.

  “Gloria, let me speak to your cabbie.”

  I nearly bought it, but ultimately heard the tease in his voice.

  “I thought I might get more out of Dee Dee than . . .”

  “Than the NYPD?”

  “Well, woman to woman, you know.”

  “I’m going to have to call Buzz, you know that. He needs to know that Zach works for Curry. What he does with it is up to him.”

  I nodded, as if he could see me. “I’ll call you in a while—and don’t worry. I’ll be in a public place,” I said.

  And what better place to be attacked than in a hospital? I thought.

  In the moments between hanging up with Matt and paying the cabbie, I almost talked myself out of visiting Dee Dee. I knew Buzz would send detectives back to the hospital as soon as Matt gave him the new information. I should bow out now. Even so, I couldn’t shake the idea that, number one, Dee Dee would feel less threatened and maybe inadvertently confess to me (although that had never happened in all my cases with the Revere Police Department), and number two, I might relieve a little of the guilt I still felt at letting Amber die (expert opinion notwithstanding) if I could be of any help now.

  Number three was a little worrisome: There was a tiny but nonzero possibility that I wanted to get a little ahead of the NYPD. Finally, since I was already here, I might as well follow through.

  From the hospital entrance I could see the outlines of the American Museum of Natural History and the planetarium. If I lived near here, I’d volunteer as a docent, I thought. I made a mental note to check into such opportunities at Boston’s Museum of Science. I told myself it was a good sign that I was beginning to picture myself at home.

  I’d looked forward to having Nurse Pogel see that my name was on Dee Dee’s welcome roster, but a different woman, wearing a different pastel smock, was behind the desk.

  “Twelve-thirteen,” the new nurse told me.

  I made a stop at the small gift shop, then walked toward the elevator. The doors opened, letting out an elderly man and two children. There was no one standing with me to get on.

  I stood still, waves of tension flooding my body.

  This is not good, I thought. Middle age is no time to develop new phobias, and New York City is no place to have elevator issues.

  “Are you coming?” A woman’s voice.

  I shook myself alert. While I’d been frozen in place, a middle-aged woman had walked around me and entered the elevator car. She was pushing the button to hold the door open for me.

  Saved. For now I could put off the phobia discussion with myself. I was beyond happy when I saw that she’d selected the eighteenth floor. She’d be alone for six floors, but I doubted she’d mind.

  On the way up, the elevator made only one stop, for a wheelchair-bound man in the custody of a candy striper. Good. The more company the better.

  I reached Dee Dee’s wing (already hoping for elevator company when it was time to return to street level), rounded the corner, and followed yellow dots on the floor and arrows on the walls to Room 1213. Though I couldn’t see a kitchen, I smelled boiled peas and baked potatoes—odors much less enticing than those of the many delis we’d been in lately.

  Men and women in hospital uniforms moved about with clipboards and trays. I saw few civilians, but one of them was familiar.

  Tina Miller was walking toward me.

  We closed the gap between us a few doors from Dee Dee’s room, if the numbering system meant anything.

  We both stopped.

  “We meet again, Gloria. Visiting a relative? A close friend?”

  “You might say that. We’re all neighbors in a way, aren’t we?”

  Tina bit her bottom lip, the most visibly annoyed I’d seen her (though no one could say I hadn’t been trying). “Nice of you to think that way.”

  “How is Dee Dee?” I asked. “I’m sure she’s anxious to get to the bottom of what put her in the hospital.”

  “Not that I doubt that you’re a Good Samaritan, Gloria, but if you’re still on a mission to connect everything to Amber Keenan’s murder, you’re on a wild goose chase. Just because a person comes in contact with a shady character or two doesn’t mean that everything that happens to them is related.”

  “I guess you’re right.” I leaned in a bit. “By shady character I assume you mean Amber, the murder victim herself. Her blackmail schemes were unconscionable.”

  “No, I did not mean poor Amber. She was a part-time consultant for us, and her work for me, at least, was above reproach. I’m talking in general about all the dirty little secrets that you learn in my business. But it’s the stuff of movies and bad novels that PIs or their employees are in constant danger of being attacked. We’re just doing a job, is all, like anyone else.”

  “I guess I’m just a novice,” I said, surprised at how close Tina had come to losing her self-control.

  “In fact, I thought I addressed this very point in that New York City Today article—the one you were so fond of. The PI business is a profession to be taken seriously, and not full of slimy characters pulling dirty tricks.”

  I recognized the sentence from
Tina’s acceptance speech and pictured her giving the same talk at power breakfasts all over town.

  “I guess time will tell whether it’s the center of this particular case.”

  Tina glowered and looked at her watch. No telephone call or crowded room to save her from me this time. “Well, I have a meeting.”

  As much as I wanted to think of ways to detain Tina and pursue the current dirty-trick count, I wanted more to get to Dee Dee before the NYPD showed up.

  “Nice to see you again,” I said, without trying for sincerity.

  “Enjoy your visit.”

  As I walked on toward Dee Dee’s room I felt a chill.

  Someone had brought Dee Dee a bed jacket in the peachy quilted fabric that I hadn’t seen in years. Maybe they were making a comeback, like ponchos and capri pants (née pedal pushers). Dee Dee had makeup on, also. I knew I looked more under the weather than she did. I recognized an iPod on her lap and figured she was on her way back to normal.

  I added a small plant and a package of chocolate-covered apricots to the array of flowers, cards, and gift bags, many in Christmas designs, that filled the top of the nightstand beside her bed.

  “This is so sweet. Thanks, Dr. Larino.”

  Another interesting variation. “Call me Gloria,” I said. “I hope you feel as good as you look.”

  “Oh, the makeup helps. I’m still bruised everywhere, but not bad, considering.”

  I didn’t want to be insensitive to a woman who’d been attacked, maybe by her own boyfriend, but I was conscious of my time restrictions. I needed to be in Little Italy close enough to eleven thirty that Rose wouldn’t take it as a slight against Grace Sasso and her gentrified taste, and I needed to be out of the hospital before the police arrived. Tina’s comment had brought home to me the fact that she’d been working with the NYPD on a routine basis for several years. I knew I’d aggravated her this morning, and she’d had other firsthand experience of my meddling ways. She might be on the phone with them at this moment, tattling on me.

  “Dee Dee, you need to tell me about Zach and Amber.”

  Dee Dee frowned and winced, as if she’d just eaten green gelatin with rancid marshmallows. “Zach and Amber? As in—” Dee Dee crossed her middle finger over her index finger. “I don’t think so. She was definitely not his type, and we’re practically engaged.”

  Dee Dee wouldn’t be the first woman to be loyal to a philandering almost-fiancé, but I had to move on. “What were you doing in that loft, Dee Dee? Other than fighting with Amber?”

  Make it sound like an accident, so she’ll make a deal for manslaughter, no intent to cause death, I thought, forgetting I wasn’t an ADA.

  “I had to get something for Zach. A DVD.”

  “Is this about Curry Industries and some ozone problem?”

  Dee Dee winced again. “I don’t know what that is.”

  Though it pained me to leave her uninformed, I had no time for a complete lesson on O3. “Amber shot some footage at Curry for a documentary. The production company she worked for was investigating environmental issues involving a form of oxygen called ozone. Have you heard of ozone depletion, CFCs, the hole in the ozone layer, anything like that?”

  Dee Dee brightened. “Oh, like global warming?”

  “A similar problem.” Always one to give partial credit. “Dee Dee, was Zach involved in something illegal at Curry? Something that would be against the government’s environmental regulations?”

  Dee Dee picked at the threads of her bed jacket. “Zach said Amber had a video of Curry that wouldn’t be very good for the company image.”

  The image, I noticed, not the environment or the workers. “But Zach isn’t the president or—”

  “I guess he was”—Dee Dee took a breath—“involved in whatever it was.”

  “So you went to the loft to get a DVD and . . . ?”

  “Two DVDs,” Dee Dee said, correcting me. “Zach said it would be better for me to go in case someone saw me. It would be better than anyone seeing a man hanging around, he said.”

  Nice going, Zach, I thought. “And . . . ,” I prodded. I wanted to hurry Dee Dee along without losing any bits of information. Every time a shadow crossed the doorway I started, expecting the NYPD to come for both of us. Dee Dee, on Buzz’s orders; and me, on Tina’s orders.

  “I went on Saturday the first time, and I saw Amber on the sidewalk in front of the building. She was fighting with someone—a young guy. I didn’t know if she was coming or going, so I just left.”

  “A young guy? Can you describe him?”

  “Tall. Big, but not fat, just broad shoulders. Very blond. Some kind of sports jacket. Nothing special about him.”

  “Could it have been Amber’s ex-boyfriend?”

  “Kevin? No, I would have recognized him. He used to hang around the office all the time.”

  The young blond man could have been Billy Keenan—or any one of a million and a half other young blond men, I mused.

  “Okay, so you went back on Sunday morning.”

  Dee Dee nodded. “Zach found out somehow that Lori went ice-skating every Sunday morning, so the loft was supposed to be empty. It wasn’t that hard to climb up the fire escape and get in through the window. See, that’s where it was better for me to go than Zach. If anyone saw a guy climbing up, they might have—”

  “I need you to concentrate, Dee Dee.”

  She shifted in her bed, and I knew this wince was from pain. “When I got there, Amber was on the floor and there was all this blood.”

  Dee Dee broke down in tears. I had to ease off. The last thing I wanted was for a nurse to hear her and usher me out.

  “I’m sorry to bring it all back, Dee Dee. I’m just trying to find out what happened so everyone will be safe.”

  Or in jail.

  Dee Dee nodded and gave me a brave look. “I wanted to forget the DVDs and just get help and make up a story about why I was there, but I knew Zach would kill me.” Dee Dee waved her hands wildly. “No, no, not kill me, but, you know . . . be mad. He’d told me to switch DVDs. I was supposed to find two movies in Lori’s loft and put them in the cases marked CURRY—he knew there were two Curry DVDs because Amber told him. I mean, this would take a long time, and all the while, Amber was over there. She was facedown . . .”

  I realized Dee Dee didn’t know that I’d seen Amber also. “Try not to picture it,” I said. To both of us.

  “Anyway, I couldn’t do it. I totally had to get out of there, so I called 911 and left.”

  Dee Dee drew a long breath and took a sip of water from a plastic cup.

  I felt sorry for her, but there were still gaps to fill. “Then did you go back to the building later? Did you nearly knock me over in the alley?”

  She nodded. “Zach made me go back. I told him one more time and that was it.”

  You tell him, Dee Dee, I thought.

  “At least the next time there was no body. I was still freaked out, though. I made the switch between a movie and one of the Curry DVDs, but I couldn’t find a second one after all that.”

  That missing DVD would be CURRY I, and Lori had had it in her purse to give to me.

  “Why didn’t you just take the Curry DVD? Why the complication of putting a movie in its case?”

  Dee Dee sat up straight and gave me a proud smile. “Zach had it all figured out. If Lori opened the Curry cases and found them empty, she’d be suspicious that someone stole them, but if she found movies, she’d think she just made a mistake and put the wrong DVDs in the cases.”

  “But the movie cases would be empty. When she opened them—”

  Dee Dee interrupted, clearly way ahead of me. “Who checks the cases before they bring them back to the store?”

  I couldn’t answer that, primarily because Matt and I hardly ever rented movies. I went back to the more important question. “You’re saying that you don’t know what was on those DVDs that Zach had to have so badly?”

  “I honestly don’t.”


  Dee Dee might be the best liar I’d met lately or the most innocent, uncurious person. I took in the sight of the patient in her pastel wrap, her thin legs barely making lumps in the hospital-issue bedspread. I chose to believe Dee Dee had no idea of the content of the DVDs—however hard it was to accept the notion that a bright young professional woman would put herself in harm’s way acting blindly on the orders of her boyfriend.

  When would there be a magazine article on that? I wondered.

  “You told the police that you have no idea who attacked you in the park. Is that the truth?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  I’d reached my limit on the Dee Dee interrogation. I realized that if any of the hospital staff had been paying attention, I’d have been blamed for a great setback in her recovery process. Dee Dee’s hair looked disheveled from the many times she’d run her fingers through it while I grilled her. She’d drained her pitcher of water, and now her lips looked parched.

  I thought of one more question. “Did Tina know about your little escapade to the loft?”

  Dee Dee’s blue eyes widened. “Oh, no. She’d have been furious. She was raging mad at Amber when she found out what she was doing to our clients. In fact, I’m not supposed to talk about that at all. It’s bad for the agency image to even acknowledge it, Tina says. We’re just lucky there won’t be any more of it.”

  Another image problem solved. Lucky indeed.

  I was relieved not to see anyone I recognized on my walk back to the elevator. I had no time to stop to make notes, but I reviewed what I’d learned mentally so I wouldn’t forget.

  CURRY I was the DVD I’d just looked at, and other than the appearance of Zach in the background I’d seen nothing worth his feverish attempts to retrieve it. From Dee Dee’s story, I gathered Zach was now in possession of CURRY II, and Lori had a movie in its case.

  The scales of my suspicions had tipped away from Dee Dee (it was hard to think of a woman in a peach bed jacket as a cold-blooded killer) and toward Billy (who may have fought with his sister while he was supposed to have been home in Kansas) and—a newcomer to my list—Tina (who’d lied to me early on about knowing Amber well, and lately about her knowledge of Amber’s schemes). Granted, Tina’s lies might be construed as professionally acceptable, in the interests of not broadcasting her agency’s business, and might be nothing to dwell on.