Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  Rose was twisting her napkin, her eyes darting from me to Peter as if she were a spectator at a tense volleyball game. I knew she could tell I wasn’t having a good time. Rose had eaten only one slice of pizza, while I’d had three and contemplated a fourth as I became more and more uncomfortable with Peter’s inquisition. Another clue about why there was such a huge difference in weight between Rose and me.

  After a couple more rounds of questions without answers—Why had I sneaked back to see my father when he was dying and not contacted anyone except Rose and Frank, who buried him? Why did I finally leave California and come ‘home?’ Was I back for good?—I was happy to see our venerable waitress hovering over us with a pitcher of dark beer in one hand and our check in the other, using her penciled-in eyebrows to ask which we wanted.

  With a passing glance at the crumbs on our dented tray and a quick check of the plates in front of Rose and Peter, I said, “I’ll take the tab.”

  I looked across the table at Peter, saw the surprised look on his face and realized that feminism had left him behind. I was sure that the last time I had pizza with him, he called the shots and paid the bill. Probably even held my coat for me. I was beginning to think that two or three hours with Peter every thirty years were enough.

  I pulled my wallet out of my purse. “My treat,” I said.

  THREE

  Anxious to get back to my apartment and check my answering machine for a message from Sergeant Matt Gennaro, I managed to leave no doubt about my lack of interest in nightcaps. I dropped my friends at the curb and suggested that Peter drive Rose to her home across town.

  “I’m beat,” I said, with as loud a sigh as I could muster after three-and-a-half slices of pizza. Rose had weighed in at one-and-a-half slices.

  Peter frowned as he climbed out of my spacious back seat, then leaned into my window and gave me a kiss, something halfway between the friend and the lover varieties. I found myself leaning toward the friend variety and responded accordingly. It hadn’t taken me long to remember why we’d broken up in the first place.

  “I’ll call you, Gloria,” Peter said. “It’s not going to be another thirty years.”

  I smiled and let him have the last word for the moment.

  I pulled in to the enormous mortuary garage, parked my car next to one of the Galigani hearses, and headed up the inside stairs to my apartment, passing the main funeral parlor on the first floor. Although there was no body laid out that evening, the air was heavy with left over flower smells. I’d have sworn that I also smelled formaldehyde and Silktex, Frank’s standard anticoagulant, but figured it was my imagination.

  “The prep room is very well ventilated, following O.S.H.A. standards,” Frank had assured me. “And we use the latest in low-fuming chemicals.”

  A graduate of the New England Institute of Mortuary Science, Frank was as proud as any scientist would be of his policy of keeping up with the changing technology in his field. Although he had outside assistants and had successfully groomed his first-born son, Robert, to follow in his footsteps, Frank participated in every aspect of his undertaking business, from comforting bereaved families to performing an occasional embalming.

  Full or empty, funeral parlor rooms always seemed quieter to me than other spaces, as if the dead were able to absorb all natural background noise. Galigani’s was on a busy side street, but once inside, it felt like what I imagined the interior of a vacuum tube to be like.

  The second floor offices of Galigani’s, at the top of a beautiful old stairway with a mahogany banister, were visible from the street-level foyer. Arranged symmetrically around the landing were two rooms where Rose and her assistant, Martha, worked during the day, in charge of correspondence, bookkeeping, and general management of the business. Frank had a smaller first-floor office between the main parlor and the casket showroom.

  My apartment was on the third floor, a one-bedroom flat, with a small kitchen and good-sized living room, originally meant for a resident caretaker in the days before alarm systems. Except for two matching pale blue glide rockers, I’d given my furniture to a women’s shelter in Berkeley, and started over in Revere with a few new pieces of modern design, in grays and blues to match the rockers.

  Above me at Galigani’s was an attic where Rose and Frank had been storing some of my belongings for the last thirty years. I’d planned to make regular trips up there to sort through my cartons, but hadn’t made much headway in four months. Or in thirty years, for that matter.

  Entering my apartment, I went immediately to the answering machine and pushed the button. Unlike Peter, I had all the conveniences of twentieth century technology that I could afford, from a top-of-the-line computer system and cordless phone to an electronic Rolodex file that I carried in my purse.

  Matt Gennaro’s hoped-for message was there and I smiled as I listened to his low, scratchy voice.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said. “I’d like to talk about the possibility of having your help with a new investigation. I’m wondering if you’ll be able to meet me for lunch tomorrow. Say, Russo’s on Broadway at 12:30. I’ll look for you there unless I hear otherwise.”

  “Yes,” I said out loud to my empty rooms, tossing my head back like a rookie cop snapping to attention.

  ~*~

  Two for one. A job and a date. I decided to wait until morning to call the Police Department. I knew from my previous experience working with him that Matt Gennaro’s regular routine was to have a breakfast of black coffee and a bagel at his desk at about eight o’clock, his “form-filling-out time,” he called it.

  It was the first time since hearing about Eric Bensen’s death that I was alone and able to absorb the fact that someone I knew had been murdered. I looked out my window, amazed at the calmness of the October evening, although I’d been out in it only a few minutes earlier. I looked carefully into the dark night and wouldn’t have been surprised if a bolt of lightning shot across the cloudless sky to denounce the unnatural event that had taken place on Charger Street.

  I put on a CD of piano music and settled in one of my rockers with the newspaper, a notebook, and pencil, but before I looked at them I rocked back and forth letting Mozart’s sonatas calm my mind. Although we hadn’t been close, Eric was a friend and a colleague at the beginning of a promising career, and I hated the idea that he’d been the victim of violence.

  I opened the newspaper and read the brief account. A clear case of murder, according to the police.

  The victim was a thirty-one year old physics graduate student, the reporter noted. Three shots had been fired from a distance into his upper body, some time between midnight and four in the morning on Tuesday. He was found by a security guard in his lab at the northern edge of Revere on Charger Street, in a building that was an off-campus annex to the Physics Department of Massachusetts University. No sign of struggle. Nothing missing as far as anyone could tell. The lab had a great deal of expensive equipment, the article said, but nothing very portable or valuable for trading on the street. Physics Department officials hadn’t had a chance to examine the room closely to see if small items were missing.

  I checked the digital clock on my desk. Nine forty-five P. M., six forty-five in California. I usually talked to my good friend Elaine Cody on weekends, but I knew she’d want to hear about Eric’s murder as soon as possible. I punched in her Berkeley phone number and reached her immediately.

  “Gloria,” she said. “I was just going to call you. What happened to Eric Bensen? I heard just the briefest snippet on my car radio driving home.”

  I told Elaine all I knew about the murder and offered to make arrangements for flowers for Eric. Across the miles I pictured Elaine in a pleated skirt, expensive sweater, and pearls. With her classic preppy wardrobe and shoulder-length hair, blonde in her youth, Elaine had earned the nickname “Radcliffe.” Unlike most Californians, she always dressed up for her work as a technical writer at our lab.

  “I don’t believe in clothes that have
no buttons or zippers,” she’d say as we observed the parade of lab employees arriving for work in sweat suits in the winter and cut-offs and T-shirts in the summer.

  “Are you going to work on the murder case?” Elaine asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I hope so.”

  “Be careful, Gloria.”

  I laughed at the thought that there might be danger connected to my police work.

  “I’m only a consultant,” I said. “I work with pencil and paper, no guns or gangs.”

  “Still,” Elaine said. “Be careful. When are you coming out? You said after the summer.”

  “Maybe before Christmas.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  We hung up, both knowing that I had no intention of going to the West Coast before the holidays. I felt I needed at least one stable year in my new home to determine which coast I wanted to spend the next thirty years on.

  Elaine had visited me in Revere, the first of the rash of visitors I’d had during my first two months back. As I took her and other California friends to Boston’s fine museums and for walks around the Freedom Trail, I felt like a tourist myself, a feeling I was trying to get over. Every time I went to Logan Airport to pick up or deliver a guest, I wondered if I was the one who should be getting on the plane. Invariably during my weekly phone conversations with Elaine, she told me about a wedding or birthday party that I wished I could have attended—very distracting in terms of my ability to feel like a New England native again.

  “If you got through the hot sticky summer, you’re a native,” Rose had told me on Labor Day, not without self-interest.

  Although I knew I was in a minority, for me, the gray humid air was a welcome relief from the stark sunlight of California that required polarizing lenses nearly every day of the year.

  I called a few other people in Berkeley who knew Eric at least as well as I did, and collected names for flowers. Then I slid my notepad on top of the folded newspaper and started to organize my thoughts. Not that I’d been hired for detective work. I was simply available to explain any science that might be relevant to the circumstances of the crime. But I saw only a thin line between science and police investigative work.

  Eric’s mentor, Doctor Ralph Leder, was much older than Eric, probably in his late fifties. I’d met him only three or four times when he visited Eric in California. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Midwesterner, with thick blond and gray hair and a large square face, his slow movements in sharp contrast to his quick mind. He was well published and respected, but he’d made it obvious that he was counting on the gas gun experiments for further recognition in his field. I remembered a talk Leder gave to our group in California in the spring, following the news releases in the popular press. His ambitions filled the overhead screen in the large conference room:

  “Our work in metallic hydrogen will push the envelope in understanding the composition of Jupiter. It will secure our place in the development of superconductivity for commercial use and put us out front in the transfer of technology to American industry.”

  He’d left off “bring us fame and fortune,” but the message was clear. I couldn’t help thinking that with so much money at stake, if Leder thought Eric was going to expose any shady activities on the part of the research team, he might be unhappy enough to kill him. I put four stars next to Leder’s name, my equivalent of “most likely suspect.”

  Besides Leder and Eric, two other Revere-based physicists worked on the journal article that was to catapult the hydrogen research team to award-winning status—Connie Provenza and Jim Guffy, post-docs who were stretching their funds and their dissertation research into one more year after receiving their doctoral degrees. Like Eric, they’d spent most of the year in California and had been back in the Boston area slightly longer than I had, arriving some time in late May.

  Connie Provenza had just turned thirty and lived in Chelsea, a city bordering Revere on the south, with her boyfriend Bill Gordon, a third year law student at Boston’s Northeastern University. Connie, the main theorist in the group, seemed to me very ambitious, often talking about breaking through the glass ceiling. Her announced plans were to capitalize on the success of the hydrogen experiments, get a quick MBA, and head for corporate America. Bright and attractive, one of the main difficulties of her present life seemed to be warding off the advances of Ralph Leder, who was also her mentor.

  In deference to her gender, which she would not like, I gave Connie only three stars, for “possible suspect.”

  Jim Guffy was a little younger than Connie, an Irish-American Catholic, unmarried, and as conservative as if he’d never heard of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of Vatican II. Jim had gone unmoved by the heated debates about the old and new Catholicism. Jim’s contribution to the research team was his skill as an experimentalist. Thoroughly involved with the hardware, Jim could kludge together a high-voltage power supply or a digital temperature probe in a matter of hours.

  Thinking about Jim’s moral high ground and daily mass, I gave him no stars, for “unlikely suspect.”

  Both Connie and Jim were among the people in our occasional dinner group. Each month we’d explore a different San Francisco fish emporium or a new ethnic menu, which Berkeley offered on almost every street corner—Thai, Indian, Persian, plus cuisine from places that had been countries for only a month or so.

  Not that anyone was asking, but I decided I could rule out the six scientists who were permanent residents of California, once I verified that they were still on the West Coast.

  Brilliant powers of deduction. If this was the best I could do, I’d better go to bed.

  ~*~

  Just after I turned out my reading lamp, I heard the now familiar noise of the garage door opening, two floors below my bedroom. I stretched across the bed to look out the window. Through my parted white linen drapes, I saw a Galigani hearse leave the driveway and pull out onto Tuttle Street. The long black vehicle moved slowly across the gray shadows cast by the streetlight, and for a moment I thought I’d tuned in to a classic movie channel.

  At the same time, my phone rang and Rose’s voice came over the line.

  “I don’t want to freak you out,” she said. “But it turns out Eric Bensen is going to be waked at our place—your place.”

  I tried not to register too much dismay, although this would be a first for me. Usually I didn’t know the corpses laid out in my building.

  “Isn’t Cavallo’s closer to where the Bensens live?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was rooting for the competition.

  “Not at all. They’re way over by the Chelsea overpass, remember? And anyway, Eric’s grandmother lives in the senior apartments across from Saint Anthony’s, right down the street, so they signed on with us. Does that bother you?”

  “No, it’s just different,” I said, still looking out the window. I was aware of the new housing for the elderly that Rose was talking about. Almost nightly I heard ambulances and police vehicles screaming past my apartment on their way to the facility.

  “One of the hearses will be leaving soon to pick up the body,” Rose said, not having the advantage I did of seeing the hearse already turning the corner onto Revere Street. “It didn’t take them very long at the morgue. I guess the cause of death was cut and dried. Frank’s going to work on Eric himself and he’ll be ready at the end of the week, probably Friday evening.”

  I’d learned a lot more than I cared to about how Frank “worked on” his clients. When I first moved in, Frank gave me a tour, taking me down in the rickety old elevator used to transport the bodies between the floors. Most unforgettable was the prep room where Frank and his staff, headed by his older son Robert, did the embalming. The shiny facility, looking as clean as an operating room, which in a sense it was, was at the back of the building, in the basement. Often when I was home during the day I’d hear the sound of the pumping machines. Thanks to Frank’s excellent presentation, I could envision pint after pint of
human blood being drained from a body and replaced with embalming fluids.

  The washer and dryer were also in the basement, and so far I had managed to arrange my laundry chores so they coincided with a lack of activity in the prep room.

  I dropped the curtain as the taillights of the Galigani hearse disappeared around a bend in the street.

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said to Rose. “By the way, you didn’t seem surprised to find Peter here tonight.”

  “He told me not to warn you. I knew he was going to drop in on you unannounced, but not necessarily tonight. I hope I didn’t spoil a twosome.”

  “I’m very glad you did.”

  “I gathered as much,” Rose said, with a laugh. “Thanks to your bickering I ate more than I needed to.”

  “Really? I didn’t.”

  “Have you heard from your detective?”

  “Yes. I’m going to have lunch with him tomorrow.”

  I expected something like “aha” from Rose, and wasn’t disappointed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s invite him—”

  “No, no,” I said, interrupting her. “It’s just business.”

  “We’ll see,” Rose said as we hung up, making me regret telling her about lunch. Ever since I’d been back, Rose’s pace in the matter of my personal life had more acceleration than I was comfortable with. She’d dragged out every unattached man over fifty that she knew in an attempt to make me part of a pair. She was also after me to “do something about my appearance,” telling me she saw more make-up on the nuns who taught catechism at Saint Anthony’s.

  “And just a little rinse to soften the gray,” she’d say to me, reaching for the wiry curls around my face.

  “I love you dearly,” I’d tell her. “I envy your figure and your family, but not your auburn highlights.”

  I settled back in my bed, feeling very fortunate to have a friend to talk to that way. As I drifted off to sleep, three questions paraded in front of my brain. Was Eric Bensen’s body going to be worked on that night in the prep room downstairs? Should his wife, Janice, be on my suspect list? What should I wear to lunch with Matt Gennaro?