The Nitrogen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  “And see if his suitcases are missing.” Elaine was still on the he’s-having-second-thoughts theme, I noticed.

  Dana shrugged. Tall as she was, she looked like a child who’d been dragged on a family outing.

  Once inside Phil’s home, I had second thoughts about big, sprawling houses in the hills. The real estate agent’s flyer, prominent in the high-ceilinged foyer, promised lavish living room suite wlbalcony and magnificent gg bridge view—not an exaggeration. An enormous redwood deck offered panoramic views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Also correct was the description of the state-of-the-art kitchen with cherrywood cabinets, granite counters, hardwood floors, and exquisite light fixtures.

  Beautiful as it was, however, the house had an eerie feeling, partly because it was unnaturally neat—to impress prospective buyers, I guessed—and partly because I knew its owner might be missing. I sniffed the air, as if to test for human presence, alive or dead.

  “It’s creepy in here,” Dana said. Her sigh sounded nervous to me, as if she dreaded what we might find. “Like his cleaning lady just came through and sucked up everything with the vacuum. Let’s get some sound at least.”

  “Judy Collins is in the CD player,” Elaine said. “We play it all the time, once we found out we were both at a concert she gave in the seventies in the Greek Theatre.”

  Dana uttered a disgusted grunt, plucked Judy Collins from the player, and tossed her carelessly onto the couch. “That’s so last century,” she said.

  A new side of Dana Chambers. Now I was sure she was more stressed out than she let on. She pushed the radio on, scanned around the frequencies, and settled on something loud and jerky.

  I resigned myself to the fact that we’d be searching the three thousand square feet quoted in the broker’s flyer to the strains of something I’d never be able to hum.

  “Evanescence,” Dana said. I wasn’t sure if that was the artist or the song. She moved her body to the rhythm. Elaine and I tried to follow suit and were rewarded by a full-throated laugh from Dana. Mission accomplished.

  Our plan: Elaine would take the more personal areas of the house, Phil’s bedroom and office; Dana and I would comb the downstairs rooms.

  “Look at this,” Dana said, pointing to a photo mounted on Phil’s refrigerator. “It’s me and Scott. I guess Dad’s not up-to-date.” The photo was of Dana and a young man with hair almost as long as hers, both in serious hiking clothes. A rectangular magnetic frame held the photo to the refrigerator door. Next to it, in a similar frame and aligned with the edges of the door, was a snapshot of Phil and Elaine, with the same misty mountainous backdrop. Not like my fridge photos, which were askew, precariously held at their corners by clunky decorative magnets. A Cape Cod lighthouse, Paul Revere on his horse, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a miniature bumper sticker—TRUST ME, I’M A SCIENTIST—stuck at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor.

  Dana removed the photo of her and Scott, folded it, and put it in her pants pocket, leaving the magnetic frame empty. I had a feeling its life was over. I caught a snippet of the Evanescence lyrics, something like fifty thousand tears I’ve cried. By actual count? The scientist in me wondered.

  A cork bulletin board was bolted to the wall over a small desk in the kitchen. Dana and I reviewed the contents together. A fractals calendar, for looks or reference only, apparently, since there were no appointments listed. A postcard from Hawaii—from a cousin, Dana said. A list of speakers for the BUL chemistry department colloquia. An agenda for the next department meeting. A two-dollars-off coupon for a pizza.

  On the counter was an old book, verification of Elaine’s claim that Phil loved science history as I did. I picked it up and breathed the slightly musty smell of its worn brown cloth covers. It was dated 1919—a treatise on the manufacturing and testing of military explosives. Not “regular” history, as I called it, with stories of kings and queens and one country invading another that left me cold. Scientific biographies and early science texts, on the other hand, intrigued me. This old book, by John Albert Marshall, described work he did for what was then the War Department.

  I flipped through a chapter on the history of nitrogen as a component of explosives, first suggested in 1890. I smiled at the description of TNT as “resembling powdered maple sugar” and wished current texts would be so easy to read and so accessible to the layperson.

  It made sense, I thought. Phil Chambers, working on nitrogen in the twenty-first century, would do as I would—go back to the beginning, for interest and amusement, if not critical information.

  I was starting to like Phil again, but that might have been because he was missing.

  When my cell phone rang, Dana and I jumped. Not that we were on edge. I checked the caller ID: the 781 area code, followed by Rose Galigani’s phone number.

  I’d put Rose off long enough. “I’d better take this,” I told Dana. She gave me a salute and disappeared into the living room.

  “Gloria! I can’t believe you’re there.”

  Rose’s exclamation was suited to a long separation, and it had been only Monday evening that I’d talked to her. I realized I’d given no more thought to her faxed police report on the blown-up hearse, and hoped she hadn’t called to quiz me on it. I decided to tell her right up front.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look at the police report—”

  “No, no, don’t worry about it. There’s been no further action takeover-wise, but we’re all walking on pins and needles waiting for the next little prank. But I’ve been thinking—I’ve been so selfish. You’re the one on vacation, so I’m really calling so you can tell me everything you’ve been doing.”

  “Well, we’re dealing with two murders, a theft of drugs and medical supplies, secret nitrogen files, and a missing person.”

  Rose made no attempt to contain her laughter. “I know you hate wedding things, Gloria, but stop wishing for calamities.”

  “Just kidding,” I said, making a quick decision, too emotionally drained to do anything but let Rose keep her illusion that Matt and I were enjoying a relaxing prewedding vacation. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Did you buy your shoes yet?”

  Shoes. The last thing on my mind. “Not yet.”

  “Elaine has hers, I’m sure. How’s it going with Phil’s daughter? Is she nice?”

  “She’s very nice.” She’s currently searching her father’s house for a clue to his whereabouts. I needed a diversion, lest I break down and tell Rose the truth. “Has Frank persuaded everyone to take the trip to Houston?” I asked her.

  “You know Frank. He can talk his family into an igloo in the heat.”

  I had a passing thought that she meant “cold,” but Rose had her own versions of figures of speech. The important thing was that she was ready to take off with her own agenda. She updated me on Frank’s latest project—organizing a family vacation to the National Museum of Funeral History, in Houston.

  “They have an exhibit of bizarre caskets, Gloria. People who’ve had different shapes to go with the spirit of their lives, like one fisherman was buried in a casket shaped like a giant marlin.”

  I rubbed my forehead, parallel to my frown lines. “Fascinating.”

  The only way I’d be able to handle this conversation—I knew Rose would roll right through the whole family now—would be to multitask. I carried the cell phone to the island in the middle of the kitchen and started opening drawers. Maybe Phil had a junk drawer, as I did, where a scribbled note might land.

  While Rose told me about her lawyer daughter-in-law Karla’s newest case, I shuffled through serving spoons, spatulas, and long forks, careful not to make too much noise.

  “Karla’s doing so well,” I said, feeling that would cover anything I missed.

  When Rose moved on to John, son number two—“He had another date with Denise on Sunday. She’s old man Mattera’s granddaughter, you know”—I’d moved to the counter.

  I quietly pulled the appliances out from their
positions against the wall and checked behind the toaster, blender, can opener, mixer, bread box. Not a crumb. Phil’s cleaning lady had done a perfect job. Not a clue, either, however, and I wondered what we were doing there. Maybe with two hands free, Elaine and Dana were doing better in other parts of the house.

  “John will find the right woman, in his own time,” I said. Another platitude to the rescue.

  By the time Rose started her report on her teenaged grandson, the e-mail whiz William, and his success at basketball last night, I’d covered the whole kitchen and the half bath between the hallway and the family room.

  I turned back to the kitchen and caught a side view of the bulletin board. Its wooden frame wasn’t flush with the wall at the bottom, as if something were pushing it out. I walked up to it for a closer look and saw that the bottom bolt was loose. With a pair of scissors from a drawer, I fished around in the gap at the lower edge. I wedged the phone between my jaw and shoulder and tried using the scissors and my fingers to pry the gap into a reasonable size.

  “William’s a natural,” I said. I’d heard Frank use that phrase when William took off on his first set of Rollerblades; I hoped it applied to all sports.

  With my head pressed against the wall, the phone in the crook of my neck, and my arms contorted to hold a gap open, I noticed the corner of a piece of white paper hanging below the bulletin board, partially obscured by the pizza coupon.

  “ … in the next couple of months,” I heard. Rose was now talking about her youngest, Mary Catherine, my godchild, who was living in the mortuary apartment I’d abandoned to live with Matt.

  “So MC is moving out?” I hoped I got that right.

  “No, Gloria. This must be a bad connection. I have your mail here. Is this a good time to go through it? Lots of catalogs and junk mail, but there are a couple of first class pieces.”

  A long distance reading of my mail was so far down on my list of priorities, it reached the status of contemporary poetry.

  “Rose, I hate to go, but Elaine is waiting, and—”

  “Oh, you should have told me you were busy. Sorry, Gloria. I wish I could go shopping with you two. We’ll finish later. Miss you.”

  I hung up and went to find Dana and Elaine. I needed help with some carpentry.

  “Nothing missing that I can see,” Elaine said. She’d already come down the stairs. “His closet’s full. His large suitcases are there. I can’t speak for his carry-ons—he has so many. And there might be a few missing shirts and pants.”

  “Did you find a calendar or date book?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “How about his computer?” I asked. “Did you look through the files?”

  “As many as I could access, which was most of them. Nothing.”

  “I have nothing, either,” Dana said, looking as though she needed a nap.

  “I might have something,” I said.

  Thanks to Dana’s familiarity with her father’s garage and tools, in a few minutes the bulletin board was off the wall and standing against an island cabinet. The bolts that had held it to the kitchen wall rolled around the ivory granite of the island, surrounding the pile of business cards from the real estate broker.

  As the only one who’d turned up anything vaguely useful, I was assigned the task of extricating the several eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets from the back of the cork panel. They were unbound and had been held in place by masking tape. What I’d seen during my acrobatics was the page closest to the panel, which had slipped a bit from the package.

  We spread the pages—five in all, obviously photocopies—on the island and peered at them. Elaine had made coffee, decrying the lack of snack food in Phil’s cabinets or refrigerator, as well as the absence of an espresso machine.

  “Not that I’ve rushed out to replace mine,” Elaine said. Her voice sounded wistful, full of nostalgia for her normal life.

  “I don’t get this,” Dana said. “These are Valley Med invoices. What are they doing in my dad’s house?”

  “And why would Phil hide them?” Elaine asked. I wondered if she was at all relieved that we hadn’t uncovered evidence that indicated a cold-feet theory might be in order—a perfumed love letter, perhaps, or a note saying Thanks for last night.

  “This is a laugh,” Dana said, pointing to the letterhead: VALLEY MEDICAL AMBULANCE COMPANY, and under that, ACCOUNTING DEPARTEMENT. “Julia is the accounting department.”

  We continued to stare at the invoices, as if the words were one half of an equation, about to rearrange themselves into the other half, making the whole understandable, giving us a reason why Phil had the copies in the first place, and then thought it necessary to hide them.

  The suite of Evanescence songs ended, emphasizing the silence that settled over us, the excitement of finding “something” overshadowed by “so what?” The last words I heard as the music came to a halt were bring me to life.

  “Not bad,” I told Dana as a commercial for a tranquilizer replaced the music. “Not Tony Bennett, but not bad.”

  In the short-lived thrill at finding the invoices, I’d forgotten about the briefcase, which I now noticed standing in front of the oven.

  “It was in the same place,” Elaine said, in tune with my gaze. “Still empty. I thought we should take it with us this time.”

  I nodded agreement. I was sure Matt would want to take it to Russell, though by now there’d be a sufficient number of overlapping fingerprints to make it useless, I guessed.

  “Wait a minute,” Dana said, waving an invoice in our direction. Elaine and I put down our mugs and gave Dana our full attention. “There’s no Schnur Convalescent Home in Alameda County.”

  “You mean you’ve never heard of it?” Elaine asked.

  “I mean there isn’t one. I know them all. Hospitals, senior centers, convalescent homes, trauma centers, you name it. I have to know them all.” Dana picked up the sheet and held it closer to her face, studying it. “Here’s another one. A bill for a pickup at a Mattson Assisted Living Center. That doesn’t exist, either.” Dana ran her fingers down the page. “Okay, okay, okay,” she said, apparently giving approval to some of the listings. A little more than halfway down the page, she tapped her finger and shook her head. “Absolutely no Jacobs Home in Alameda County. I don’t believe this. There must be at least six care centers listed on this page alone that don’t exist.”

  “Maybe some of them are new?” I asked. “Or really small facilities, so you might not have made a pickup?”

  Dana placed the invoice on the island counter so we could see it. She stepped back and folded her arms across her chest. “Then how come I’m listed as the driver?”

  With a highlighter from Phil’s kitchen-drawer collection, Dana marked the nonexistent facilities Julia had billed, all with post office boxes as addresses. We examined the pages, shuffling them among us, one or two at a time.

  Dana gave us a quick rundown of the acronyms for sites such as convalescent homes, assisted living centers, and the trauma center, and the patient codes that included dates and insurance IDs.

  It was obvious that Julia was running some kind of scam, laundering money through services she never rendered.

  “These billed amounts are all different,” I said.

  “The basic cost of transport is three hundred dollars, then on top of that there’s fees if we need equipment or supplies.” Dana ticked off the list. “Like oxygen, cannulas, bandages, dressings. That’s all extra.” She looked down the list. “Say there’s about six or seven fake trips a week here. She could be hiding, like, ten thousand dollars a month.”

  “Somehow Phil uncovered this swindle,” Elaine said.

  Or was part of it, I didn’t say.

  “This is a new one on me,” Dana said. “I’ve heard some worse things, though, like beating old people so they’ll need the ER and more money comes in from their insurance. Then the ER and the home split the reimbursement.”

  “What?” Elaine seemed stunned, as I was. I
t made taking extra pens and pads of paper from the lab supply room seem not worth noting.

  “I wonder how Phil discovered this,” Elaine said, still on her Phil-is-one-of-the-good-guys tack.

  “Dad met Julia once or twice, but he doesn’t know her well, and I’m sure his only connection to her is through me,” Dana said.

  “And Robin,” Elaine said. This time the lovely bird came out as a growl. When we looked doubtful, she elaborated. “Robin used to work for Julia at Valley Med. Robin had a badge in her closet from the company Phil works with. The briefcase was in Robin’s house, then Phil’s.”

  A little loose and haphazard, but I could almost follow Elaine’s thinking, although she’d skirted two murders.

  “What if Dad’s in danger?” Dana’s voice cracked as she uttered what we were all thinking. “There’s a lot of money involved in this, if it’s ongoing. Dad might be—”

  “The cookies are here!” A cheery voice from the foyer broke into our high-level meeting, just in time. An energetic fifty-something woman, in a red-and-black power suit and pumps, despite the heat, burst into the kitchen. “Sorry I’m a little late, but Brokers’ Open House is now officially under way.”

  The woman tore plastic wrap from a plate of chocolate chip cookies; they smelled warm and homemade.

  We dug in, ready for something sweet and simple.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It didn’t help that there was a stack of wedding presents waiting for us on Elaine’s doorstep. A UPS truck seemed to have dumped half its load of cartons, large and small, meant to cheer and honor the bride and groom. But the pile of boxes was simply one more reminder that, instead of happily anticipating and celebrating a joyous event, we were accumulating one mystery after another.

  Rose’s gift had already arrived, even before Matt and I did. On our first evening in California, Elaine had shown me the beautiful hand-fashioned wine set—eight glasses, a decanter, and a tray, all in bold stained glass colors.