“We all get huffy now and then,” Rose said, looking at me, not quite kicking me under the table, but nudging me with her eyes.
It was my turn to accept Jean’s apology. I wanted to, but I was stuck on the image of Matt writing a letter. Like a will, I asked myself, his last words? I looked at Rose and she read the questions in my eyes. Is Matt going to die? Is this the last scene, where the hero dies after doing one last good deed for those he loves?
“Gloria, this is a good thing,” Rose said to me, locking her eyes on mine. “Matt is getting better as we speak.”
Jean nodded.
The tears came again, filling my eyes. Jean moved her chair closer to me and hugged me. Rose gave us both a wide, beaming smile. I wondered if she was thinking of her dear departed mother-in-law.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
By evening, Jean and I had seen Matt two or three times, separately, for a few minutes each time. Rose made trips back and forth, checking on us and bringing coffee. I knew she was dying to get me alone to discuss the new Jean Mottolo.
“It’s Tuesday. Why don’t you call MC, and maybe we can have a Girls’ Night Out,” I whispered during one of her appearances.
She brightened. “Even Girls’ Night In would be great.”
Dr. Rosen wanted to keep Matt overnight again, assuring me that they would “get it right” and this would be the last time Detective Gennaro would be spending a night away from his fiancée.
I went into Matt’s room to say good night. I’d decided he wasn’t alert enough for a serious conversation, so I hadn’t mentioned anything about microchips, buckyballs—or the bodies in the deadly Rumney Marsh—all day.
Jean hadn’t held back, however, and he was up to date on my newly developed sisterhood with her.
“I guess it’s okay, between you and Jean now?”
“Yes, it is, thanks to some missive you authored. Did you keep a copy?”
He smiled. “You mean on my computer?”
Matt and Rose were among the last holdouts—no computers, no email, no Internet. They still wasted the cost of first-class stamps to pay their bills. Rose’s assistant, Martha, had put the Galigani business files on a PC and it was Martha who accessed the data when needed.
“I have everything I need right up here,” Rose would say, pointing to her lovely head, which got a more intense shade of auburn every year.
“Won’t Thanksgiving be fine,” Matt said. “One big, happy, Hallmark family.”
I grinned. “Whatever you want.”
“Well, good, now’s my chance. I think we should get married.”
I took a long breath. “Are you on something?” I asked.
“I was on two things. That apparently was the first problem. Now. I’m on nothing except some sleep medicine, I guess. But my head is clear. I just can’t get down on my knees yet.”
I thought of a conversation I’d heard in the last week or so between two young female clerks at Northgate’s supermarket. I was next in line with my cart full of pastas and produce, unable to tune out the checker and the bagger, chatting about their love lives as they processed the items of the woman in front of me.
“Do you think Aaron’s going to propose?” the dark-haired bagger asked, not losing her rhythm. Three large cans on the bottom, a head of lettuce on top. Bananas on the bottom, grapes on top, a baguette stuck down the side.
The blond checker, sporting inch-long fingernails with sparkly decals, shrugged her shoulders. “I wish I knew. I’d like to, you know, plan.”
“Maybe he’s waiting for Christmas, you know, to give you a ring?”
The checker shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’ll be too late by then. I’m sure Billy will beat him to it. And I’ll be all, Yes, yes, yes, Billy.” They both laughed, seemingly at Aaron’s misfortune.
I’d felt I’d been listening not only to a foreign language, but to another species, with different wiring from mine. I imagined the various brands of orange juice in Aisle 4 waiting on the shelf for a customer to choose one or the other, sighing with disappointment when Mrs. Kaplan passed them by, but acquiescing when selected by Mrs. Renaldo.
But I had no right to be disturbed by the scene, I thought—hadn’t my engagement to Al Gravese been somewhat the same? He’d teased me about a special present coming up, and a certain question he wanted to ask me, and how I shouldn’t have anything monogrammed for a while until he gave me this present. I shuddered at the silliness of it, dismayed that an important decision like the marriage of two people would be so controlled by one of them.
Matt tugged at my arm. “Are you with me here, Gloria? Jean’s ready to pick out wedding favors. How about those little packages of Jordan almonds? I’ve always liked those.”
I laughed. “We can have Jordan almonds anytime, and without the white netting and ribbon,” I said. But I was surprisingly in tune with marrying Matt. It doesn’t have to be like the first time, I told myself. Not all engagements end in the death of one party. Nor do all hospital stays have unhappy endings. Nor all cancers. “As long as we can have chocolate wedding cake, I’m there.”
“Ahhh,” Matt said. “Terrific. Think how nice it will be not to have to lie to the doctors and nurses.”
I kissed him. “You’re so romantic.”
“You wouldn’t stand for romance.” He paused. “Gloria, will you do me the honor of becoming Mrs. Gennaro?” His voice was raised in pitch, a clue to his teasing.
Fortunately, Matt already knew how I felt about Mrs. Anybody. “Do you want my speech again about how women abandon their names and allow themselves to disappear into a man’s family name, and then wonder why they don’t get paid as much?”
Matt laughed, a weak laugh that caused me great pain. It seemed a long time since I’d seen him physically strong.
“See, I knew that’s how you’d respond to romance. Listen, I’ll probably be asleep again in a few minutes. But the next time I’m awake, have your calendar ready so we can pick a date, okay?”
“Matt …” I paused, partly because his eyes had already started to close, partly because I didn’t know what to say. I love you? We’d said it often enough. Thank you? Not quite appropriate.
“Sorry, I’m all doped up. I feel like my tongue is coated with something thick.” Ith coded … is what it sounded like. “See you tomorrow, Gloria?”
I stared at his body as he fell into a sleep, as if I were qualified to evaluate his health.
I kissed him, and left the hospital, engaged to be married.
I called Rose from my cell phone on my way home. “I’ve been in these clothes all day,” I told her, involuntarily sniffing the sleeve of my merino wool jacket. “Do you think we can move Girls’ Night Out to my house? I’d like to be in my bathrobe as soon as possible.”
“No problem. MC can’t make it anyway. She’s started this new gym class.” I heard a clicking sound. “Imagine paying to walk around a pool or exercise or whatever they do. I had enough of that in junior high.”
“I don’t think they call it gym class anymore. And I know they don’t wear those awful blue outfits.”
Rose laughed. “I forgot about those costumes. The itty-bitty dresses with the bloomers to match!”
“Mine wasn’t so itty-bitty, remember?”
“Anyway, MC is doing so much better. I know you’ve been a great help to her, Gloria.” I didn’t want to mention that the person who killed her daughter’s boyfriend was still at large. Rose had seemed more than willing to believe that the investigation was going well, and that it had nothing to do with her daughter. “I’ll be over in a half hour and I’ll bring some goodies.”
“I’ll have a goodie for you, too, when you get here. A bit of news.”
What is this? I asked myself. Have I been influenced by the checker/bagger duo, playing a silly guessing game about an engagement between two consenting adults?
Rose gasped. “What fun. Is this about Jean?”
No going back now. Rose would be into this, and I owed it to h
er for all her trips to the hospital. For her big part in getting Matt and me together. For sticking with me when I’d tried to leave Revere behind forever.
I stopped at a light on Broadway just after the Chelsea overpass. Ahead of me to my left in the clear night was a building complex on the former site of the Revere Theater. The memory of Saturday matinees with newsreels, cartoons, and short subjects put me in the right frame to continue the little drama with Rose.
“Better than that,” I said into my tiny cell phone speaker.
A pause. “You and Matt are engaged.”
I moved with the green light. “Rose! How could you possibly … ?”
“It’s what I do.”
Before Rose arrived I had time for a shower and a phone call to Elaine Cody in Berkeley.
“I can’t believe I’m not there to hug you, Gloria. I am so excited. You have to tell me immediately when you know the date. And I have dibs on providing the cake. There’s this on-line wedding-cake site—I looked into it many times for my near-miss engagements. They do chocolate of course.”
I laughed, remembering most of her near misses. Bruce, Paul, José, and others whose names escaped me. “Hold on,” I said. “This is not going to be a big event.”
I heard Elaine’s sigh. “Never mind. I’ll just deal with Rose.”
I didn’t have many friends, but I did know how to pick them, I told myself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“How do you feel, Gloria?” Rose asked me from Matt’s chair in the reading area.
She sipped white wine from a crystal glass that Matt owned from his marriage to Teresa. When I lived at the mortuary Rose kept a couple of her own wineglasses in my cupboard for emergencies like this. Elaine, whom Rose had met several times, had given her the idea.
“No need to use Gloria’s recycled jelly jars,” Elaine had teased.
I hoped my engagement wouldn’t result in an influx of crystal and china and silverware. Managing household goods was boring, unlike inventorying and caring for lab equipment.
“I’m much better after my shower,” I told Rose.
She waved one hand at me and with the other filled my wineglass with sparkling cider. “You know what I mean. Listen, we’re going to have an engagement party, like it or not. I’ll have to see if Elaine will come out. As soon as Matt is up to it.”
“I’ll never be up to a party.” I sighed. “You know, maybe I should be all excited, but now that we’ve made the decision, in some ways I feel I’ve been engaged to Matt almost from the beginning.”
“I’ve felt that way, too. You know, MC really likes that cute blond teacher—Daniel.” A smooth segue to her daughter’s love life. I’d introduced MC and Daniel only a couple of days ago so they could talk about MC’s appearance at the Science Club. I doubted MC had told her mother anything about her personal feelings so quickly. “Did you know the Endicotts used to live across the street from the mortuary? Isn’t that a coincidence? Right across from where MC lives now. The father worked in City Hall for years, in the clerk’s office, and the mother used to help out at a florist we dealt with back then.”
I was sure the only engagement that Rose would have been happier about than mine was MC’s. Preferably to a young man from Revere whose family Rose knew.
“Daniel’s a nice guy,” I said. I wasn’t ready to vouch for him as anything but an excellent teacher.
Rose sighed and left me for a while, mentally. I watched her eyes roam the room without focusing. Her thin legs were crossed at the ankles, but the perfect creases in her beige wool slacks did not touch each other. Like Elaine, Rose would never dream of stepping outside her house without dressing well. The two of them joked about having nothing in their closets with elastic around the waist.
“I wish the guys were here tonight,” Rose said when she came back from her trip—down the aisle with MC, I guessed. “We are definitely due for a celebration of good news. Too bad Frank is out of town, and Matt is doped up!”
Doped. A strange word. Until Matt’s current intimacy with medicines, my first free-association matching word would have been semiconductors. Doping a semiconductor material meant adding “foreign” atoms to it, to increase the electron content, and therefore, the current flow. My mind shot off in the direction of semiconductor physics. Germanium could be doped. Also silicon. The stuff of microchips.
But the doping material would be trapped in the chip, of no use to the host. The horse in this case. What was the other word Matt had used? His tongue was … coated. He felt as though his tongue had been coated.
What if the microchips had been coated with something?
I sprang to life and off the chair. “A coating. That’s it. The EID microchips are coated. That’s what the processing step is all about. That’s why Lorna gives the chips to the doctors at practically no cost. The vets think they’re on the payroll for future animal testing. As far as they know, all they’re doing is chip implantation and receiving money slightly illegally. They’re making a big profit on the product, but that’s it. As if that weren’t enough. Or maybe the vets know about this scam. Maybe Dr. Schofield was confessing to the lesser crime to hide the bigger one. Hmm. I don’t think so.”
Rose knew better than to interrupt—it wasn’t the first time she’d been present at one of my solo brainstorming sessions. By the time I finished talking I’d gathered all the material and spread it on the coffee table between us.
“This is great, Gloria. It’s about the case, I know. Jake’s murder. I haven’t wanted to ask you about it, with Matt being sick and then the engagement.” Rose shook her head and breathed out loudly. “Too much on our plates.”
I gave Rose a briefing on what I’d learned from the horse ID charts. I pointed to the mysterious column in the appendix. “The only question I’ve had was, what’s this step?” I tapped my pen on the heading. PROCESSING. “And now I think I know.”
“Wow.” Rose paused. “What?”
I laughed at her straight-woman caricature. “Coating. They—who, I’m not sure. Lorna and Alex and maybe both of their teams. But they must be sneaking in some drug, putting it onto the chips that are used for identification. It’s like putting a rider on government legislation. Everyone’s focused on the main text, but you’ve added a little clause at the bottom that has nothing to do with it, but that is your real purpose all along.”
“Like the city council did last year, adding a nice little bonus for themselves to the school lunch bill.” I nodded. That would do. “Why would they do that?” Rose asked.
“To get around FDA regulations and the interminably long time it takes to get a drug to market. And that would be why Nina Martin had an FDA business card in her pocket. She must have caught on to the scheme while she was investigating Lucian Five’s death.”
“Whose death?”
“He’s a dead horse in Texas … never mind for now. And I imagine Jake Powers also caught on to them, probably when his horse died.” I walked in front of the fireplace, which we had lit early in the evening. I removed the screen and added a log. Rose and I had a running disagreement about wood-burning fireplaces and the damage they did to the environment, but tonight I’d let her prevail. “I need to make some phone calls.”
“Go right ahead. I’ll put the coffee on. And then if you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here and watch a master at work.”
I gave her a look that said I had no time for her snide remarks.
My first call was to George Berger, at home. I told him my coating theory so far.
“Can you get me Dr. Schofield’s home phone number?” I asked him. “It’s too late to reach him at the office, and he’s not listed.”
“Whatever the Revere Police Department can do to help you, Gloria, we are only too happy to assist.”
Everyone was being snide, but I laughed at Berger’s friendly tone. Matt’s partner liked me, and now so did his sister. I had no enemies anymore.
With the possible exceptions of Lorna Frederick and Ale
x Simpson.
I don’t know what I would have done if Dr. Schofield hadn’t been at home. I was wired from my new theory and from the continuous coffee drinking Rose and I engaged in while we waited for Berger to call back with the telephone number.
The doctor sounded worried when he heard my voice. He must have guessed that I’d eventually uncover the microchip cost imbalance and jumped in quickly, before I could tell him my purpose in calling him at ten o’clock at night. Lately I’d been doing my best work after hours, like coyotes.
“Look, I’ve already decided to give all my customers a discount on the chips, starting now,” he said, as if I were a traffic cop who’d pulled him over for speeding and then realized he didn’t have his seatbelt on, either.
“I’m pleased to hear that. But I have another reason for calling.” I told him my theory of what the title PROCESSING meant in the Charger Street records. “What do you think of that?”
I heard a grunt of anger that I felt was genuine. “We—the veterinarians are being suckered into giving horses unapproved drugs? Without even a NADA?”
“Excuse me?”
“A New Animal Drug Application. There’s a whole procedure set up through HHS. The Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is under HHS.” Dr. Schofield gave a low whistle. “If what you’re saying is true, those guys at Charger Street and Houston Poly have it made. The ID chips make it possible for them to track the horses for as long as they want to. Geez.”
“Track them?”
“Well, not exactly, not like we track the coyotes. But they can follow a particular horse’s history through the ID chip.”
“But the chip insertion is a one-time thing, so they wouldn’t want to follow it for very long, right? Only as long as the drug, whatever it is, lasts from the one dose the horse gets.”
“That’s enough. Depending on the drug, they can get a lot of information from one injection. Let’s say it’s a time-release, and they’re testing the effectiveness of it over time. And they can follow the horse’s medical history, because …”
Carbon Murder, The Page 22