The Helium Murder

by Minichino, Camille

  I’d hoped for a reference to the helium vote, but the Globe reporter focused more on Hurley’s personal life and overall professional accomplishments, noting that her minor in chemistry at Boston’s Simmons College added value to her political science major, and got her a choice spot on the Science and Technology Committee. Hurley’s only survivor was her brother, Brendan “Buddy” Hurley. No details of the accident, if that’s what it was.

  I wondered if Matt would see this death as science related and invite me to work on the case. I envisioned myself tutoring him on helium as I had on the hydrogen case. I thought I’d begin by emphasizing how difficult it is to capture helium in a useful form on earth, in spite of its abundance—hydrogen and helium together make up almost ninety-nine percent of the universe.

  I mentally prepared a chart for Matt, showing him the uses of helium at various temperatures. I titled it, “The Coldest Liquid in the Universe.”

  The picture of us working together was very appealing. Matt was a widower, and eight months younger than me, as I’d found out during a spontaneous party for his fifty-fifth birthday in the fall. Was I actually looking for more police work? Or a way to spend more time with Matt? Neither motive was appealing to me, since I was still uncomfortable with this adventuresome life I seemed to have adopted recently.

  I got busy at my computer, searching the Internet for information on who stood where in Congress on the helium vote. According to the sites I browsed, it seemed that Congress was leaning toward selling the reserves. I wondered how Hurley would have voted, resolving to check earlier newspapers for a clue as to which way she was leaning.

  I’d just gotten a computer hit on a report submitted by a physicist, Vincent Cavallo, a consultant hired by the government to do an independent analysis of the program, when the phone rang.

  “Hi, Glor. Any new murders lately?” Elaine Cody, a technical editor at the lab I’d worked at for many years, was teasing me long distance, from her Berkeley, California, home.

  Elaine and Rose had much in common, starting with their wardrobes—designer suits and dresses, Italian leather handbags and pumps for work, and fancy sandals for evening. Even their sweat suits were plush and beautifully tailored. No matter which coast I live on, I thought, my friends are thinner and classier than I am.

  Rose’s husband Frank was also in that category, a natty dresser, staying fit and trim in spite of his healthy appetite for Italian food. So far, of all the people I was attracted to in one way or another, Matt Gennaro was the only one who looked like me—between two and three sizes overweight, with naturally graying hair and a closet full of dark clothes, designed to disappear into the wallpaper.

  “I want to be like Marie Curie,” I’d told Elaine once when she tried to persuade me to buy a frothy peach dress for one of her weddings. “When Marie’s family offered to give her a wedding outfit, she asked them to buy her a dark dress that she could wear to her lab the next day.”

  “Well, her marriage lasted longer than any of mine,” Elaine had said, “so maybe there’s something to that.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  With Elaine on the phone now, I took the opportunity to talk about Margaret Hurley’s death and my idea that it might not have been accidental. I brought up the tricky helium vote and what I knew about Cavallo’s report. Cavallo worked at the lab on Charger Street in Revere, the same one that had a lot to do with why my left arm was sore, and how I’d come to know Matt so well.

  “I was only kidding when I asked about new murders,” Elaine said. “You’re really getting into this homicide business. This is not the Gloria I know. I can’t picture it.”

  “Maybe you should come for a visit and see for yourself.”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ll wait till you have a real apartment. I was a little freaked out by your living situation. Is this congresswoman’s body going to be waked in your house, too?”

  I drew in my breath at the reminder of where I lived. I carried my cordless phone to my rocker where I’d left the Globe and scanned to the end of the article. I let out a near whistle, and Elaine knew the answer to her question.

  “She’s going to be right there in your living room, isn’t she?” Elaine said, mimicking the voice of the narrator of a scary radio show.

  “Not exactly in my living room,” I said, straightening up as if Elaine could see my defensive posture. “On the first floor of the building I live in.”

  Although I was getting used to having my home address constantly in the obituary column of local newspapers, I renewed my determination to look for an apartment in a real building, one with no noises from an embalming prep room or stacks of funeral-car stickers and prayer cards on a table in my foyer. I wasn’t about to give in to Elaine, however.

  “I like this apartment,” I said. “It’s light and comfortable, and I’m settled in. You know how I hate to move.”

  “Right.” Elaine laughed. “You only go for dramatic moves—leave your hometown when you’re twenty-two and don’t go back, not even for a visit. You stay in the same place for thirty-three years, then leave and return to your hometown. Doesn’t everybody do that?”

  After Elaine’s call, I wandered around my apartment, unable to focus my attention on a single task. I took out my notes for the presentation I had to give in a week for my friend Peter Mastrone’s Italian class. After an unsuccessful attempt to renew our high-school romance, Peter and I were now working on an unsuccessful friendship. Peter had been unhappy about my work with Matt from the beginning, and except for the commitment I’d made to visit his classroom once a month, I would have enforced a no-contact rule.

  Fortunately, I loved the interaction with Peter’s students and looked forward to the next visit, timed to coincide with the anniversary of Marconi’s invention of the radio—December 12, 1901. The overall theme of my talks was the contribution of Italians and Italian-Americans to science and technology. I gave the talks in English, but the students wrote their reports in Italian, thus helping me brush up on the language of my parents at the same time. There hadn’t been many Lamerinos, Galiganis, or Gennaros in my blond California neighborhood. People whose names did end in a vowel were more likely to celebrate El Cinco de Mayo, Mexican Independence Day, than Columbus Day.

  After a brief review of Marconi’s wireless system and the first message transmitted across the Atlantic, I put down my notes and renewed my wandering. Thanks to Josephine’s neatness gene, even in my idleness I accomplished something, picking up a crumb here, a stray piece of paper there, straightening a pile of newspapers. My version of good housekeeping was much less compulsive than Josephine’s, however; I couldn’t claim as she did that “you can eat off my floors.”

  Each time I passed my phone, I had a strong urge to call Matt. I had no such urge to use my exercise bicycle, situated at the foot of my bed, like a legless soldier with arms open to capture me.

  I reminded myself that I’d see Matt at dinner with Rose and Frank in a couple of hours. I still wasn’t comfortable calling Matt “for no reason,” or just because I couldn’t wait to compare notes on an item in the news.

  I walked to my window and studied my favorite scene—the Romanesque tower of St. Anthony’s Church outlined against a dull gray sky, streaked with a tiny remnant of sunset red. We’d had an early storm over the weekend, and the trees were heavy with snow. I mentally renewed my minority position that a murky East Coast sky was more soothing than the stark bright sun of the Pacific.

  Rose and Frank saved me from further daydreaming by coming upstairs after closing their offices on the floors below me. We’d planned to ride together to Anzoni’s restaurant and meet Matt there.

  “Then he can drive you home,” Rose had said, “and, you know, you can invite him up.” Rose was convinced that I didn’t know the first thing about dating, and she wasn’t shy about giving me advice.

  “Just met what’s left of the Hurley family,” Frank said, entering my living room. He plucked a tiny piece of lint from
his perfectly pressed jacket. The Galiganis are the lint police, I thought, and I pictured their closets beating out an industrial laboratory, meeting all the government requirements for a class-A clean room.

  “That brother is something else,” Frank said. “Now I remember the stories of his gambling, and how the grandmother cut him out of her will.”

  “Tell me more,” I said, trying to sound casual, while at the same time avoiding a disapproving look from Rose.

  “Frank,” was all she said, and Frank went silent.

  I guessed she was using a certain pitch that Frank recognized as the director’s sign for “cut.”

  “Rose,” I whined, “you know I can keep a confidence.”

  “And you know that’s not why I’m cutting this off. I know you, Gloria. You’re just looking for an excuse to call this a murder. That bullet didn’t teach you anything, did it?”

  “Frank,” I begged, “what exactly was Buddy’s demeanor?”

  Rose and Frank roared with laughter and even I couldn’t believe what had happened to my vocabulary. “Now I know you’ve gone off the edge, Gloria,” Rose said. “You sound like Court TV.”

  I had to admit she had a point.

  Chapter Three

  Most of the changes I’d come back to in Revere were for the better, with the grand exception of the Boulevard. Once famous for its beach and boardwalk, Revere’s Boulevard had been lined with roller coasters and Ferris wheels, carousels, hot dog vendors, and frozen custard stands. My first pay envelope, with fifty cents for every hour I’d worked, came from my skilled labor at Johnny’s Cotton Candy Counter.

  The Boulevard now held multilevel condominium complexes, liberally sprinkled with miniparks of a few benches and trees. All of the rides and, with only a couple of exceptions, all of the food concessions of the first public beach in the United States had been leveled to the ground one way or another.

  Anzoni’s new restaurant was on the site of the old Tilt-A-Whirl. If it weren’t for my overwhelming sadness at the loss of the entire two-mile strip of amusements, I would have considered a good Italian restaurant an improvement over a thrill ride. I’d worked behind counters on the Boulevard all through my years at Revere High School, but never once rode anything more risky than a bumper car. My guess is that Josephine told me I’d be scared.

  As soon as we pulled up in back of Anzoni’s, just after seven o’clock, I saw Matt’s steel blue Camry. I felt the now familiar twinge in my chest and paused only a fraction of a second before acknowledging that it was not due only to the thirty-degree air that greeted us outside the car.

  Matt stood up as we entered, hitting a faux Italian olive tree, and catching the few strands of hair that covered the top of his head in its leaves. Anzoni’s was done up in deep burgundies with faux Tiffany lamps and faux sculptures. Only the food and the tiny poinsettia plants on the tables were authentic.

  Matt caught my eye and smiled.

  “Gloria,” he said, nodding. “Rose. Frank.”

  His smile was warm, his voice comfortably deep, but from his clipped tone, you might have thought we were preparing for a lineup. Matt had been widowed for many years and, by his own account, had given all his attention to his job. He was as awkward as I was in social situations. One of his charms, I thought.

  Matt ran his hand along his dark blue tie, tucking it into his brown suit jacket. As usual, he took my coat, a long lapis lazuli blue that Rose had talked me into. I’d held my ground on jewelry, however, and wore a small hand-painted set of wooden bells instead of the elaborate holiday pin Rose suggested.

  I had mixed feelings about Matt’s chivalry, of course, since I’d lived my life in a man’s profession and without a partner. I’d never allowed any deference to my gender in the laboratory, but when Matt pulled out a chair or held the door for me, it was a different story. I resolved to research the latest feminist thinking on male/female etiquette.

  We settled around the small square table, juggling hats and gloves and scarves—another difference between the coasts. In California I kept my winter clothes with my luggage since I needed them only on business trips to cold climates. I’d forgotten what it was like to need an extra chair for woolens.

  “How are your classes, Gloria?” Matt asked. He knew about my series for Peter as well as a science education project I was finishing up for a school in San Francisco, and always acted interested—something else I liked about him.

  “I’m ready for Marconi,” I said, picking up a napkin. “Shall I draw you a picture?”

  “Oh, no,” said Rose as she snatched the cloth from my hand and told Matt how that was my trademark—using restaurant napkins as a chalkboard for unsolicited science lessons.

  “Just kidding,” I said, placing the linen across my lap. “I’d never deface a cloth napkin.”

  I wondered how long it would be before Matt and I had our own stories. We’d only been seeing each other socially for a few weeks, five to be exact. Two jazz concerts, one movie, and four dinners, two of them alone, to be even more exact. Each event had ended with affectionate, huglike contact, such as I exchanged with my cousin Mary Ann in Worcester at the beginning and end of our infrequent visits. So far, that was enough for me. I hadn’t experienced more physical intimacy than that since my late fiancé, Al, and I practiced “safe necking” many years ago.

  By the time my three present-day companions and I had finished an antipasto and four orders of Anzoni’s special, eggplant parmigiana, we’d covered all the neutral topics—holiday shopping, the stock market, and the doings of the three Galigani children. Rose was especially proud that their middle child, John, who was the editor of the Revere Journal, had just won an award for best regional reporting in Suffolk County.

  Frank told us about his week at a convention in Houston, sponsored by funeral home suppliers. He described the exhibits, but it didn’t take long to exhaust the subject of caskets and vaults, at least at the level appropriate for dinner conversation.

  Finally, I plunged in.

  “How about that Hurley case,” I said to no one and everyone, including the young waiter in a short white jacket who was setting down our cappuccinos, as if the question couldn’t be more casual. My voice had risen in pitch, however, like the whistle of an oncoming train, and I knew I was fooling no one.

  Each of my dinner companions turned to me, heads slightly tilted, looking like a poorly orchestrated puppet show. Even I tilted my head, as if the mouth that uttered those words didn’t really belong to me.

  “It certainly is a great loss,” said Frank, the first to recover. He was, after all, trained as a bereavement counselor. “Margaret Hurley was doing an excellent job for us.”

  Usually I could tell when Frank was in his funeral director mode, but this time I couldn’t guess whether he actually knew how Hurley was performing in Congress or if he pulled the line from his undertaker script. I was a little off-balance from Anzoni’s low-level lighting and the tightness in my throat as I tried to read Matt’s expression.

  “A great loss,” Matt said, and put down his cup. “As a matter of fact, Gloria, I’d like to talk to you about working with us on a limited basis. The congresswoman’s briefcase was full of technical papers and notes and we’d like to understand a little more what they are. Not that we think the material had anything to do with the incident; it’s just for completeness.”

  It was hard to hear myself over the sighs of Rose and Frank, but I managed a weak, “I could come by tomorrow morning?”

  My brain was swimming with messages. From Matt I sifted out “limited basis,” as opposed to “whole hog,” which more aptly described my involvement in the last case I’d worked on. Rose’s deep intake of breath carried the worry that I’d be in danger again, and Frank’s outtake expressed relief that no protocol had been breached.

  What I wasn’t prepared for was Matt’s next comment.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I have to be going. About ten tomorrow morning, Gloria?” He’d alr
eady taken out his wallet and slid several bills over to Frank.

  So much for Rose’s plan, I thought.

  “Ten is fine,” I said.

  The ride back to Galigani’s Mortuary and my home seemed as long as the wait for a calculation from the computer I’d used in graduate school in the 1960s. Rose chattered about how well their older son Robert managed the business on his own while Frank was in Houston, and how Mary Catherine, their youngest and my godchild, was getting used to her new job as a chemical engineer for an oil company.

  I mentioned that I had a lot of reading to do for Peter’s class next week. I stressed the time-consuming tasks of preparing student handouts and transparencies, and compiling virtually tons of reference material, as if I didn’t have a minute to spare for the likes of Matt Gennaro.

  I’d never been able to break the habit of replaying scenes in my past, especially those that seemed to go wrong, and the scene at Anzoni’s, with Matt’s unexpected leaving, was no exception. I went over every nuance, and thought of three or four alternatives for every word I’d used. If I’d been this careful reviewing my physics research, I thought, I’d probably have won the Nobel Prize.

  What didn’t fit together were Matt’s invitation to work with him, indicating that my Hurley question wasn’t totally out of line, and his abrupt departure. Usually—meaning the two other times the four of us had met for dinner—Matt drove me home and came upstairs for coffee.

  During those visits, we’d reminisced about the old Revere Beach, and the big stars that had performed at the Wonderland Ballroom and other clubs on the Boardwalk—crooners like Jerry Vale and Freddie Cannon, Liberace, and a very young Barbra Streisand, to name a few.