Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  There was talk at the time that Al’s death was not an accident. A brief inquiry had turned up nothing suspicious and the matter was put to rest. The gossip was that Al was mixed up with an undesirable element that flourished in the city in the late fifties, local bookies and small time criminals left over from the moonshine whiskey days.

  One of the biggest mysteries of my life was how I’d become engaged to someone I knew so little about. I’d met him while I was a junior in college, several years after Josephine died and I was living alone with my father. Al had come to Revere to work at Rose’s father’s nursery. He was an expert landscaper and had a passion for the big flower shows in Boston every year.

  It was about that time that I’d broken up with Peter, and Al was an attractive, available alternative. He always had a lot of money, and his refusal to tell me what kind of meetings he slipped off to at a moment’s notice seemed romantic. I was desired by a rich, mysterious older man—Al was nearly thirty; I was twenty.

  Eventually I’d stopped chastising myself for being so naive. It was a different, more private era, I told myself. Not like now, when relationships are the subject of bestsellers and every little intimacy or state of mind gets its own talk show slot.

  “If you’re interested in doing any research,” Frank said, “just tell John. And the young guy who keeps the old files at the newspaper now is a good friend of ours, too. We buried three of his grandparents. He’ll give you all the help you need.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea at all,” Rose said, as she did every time the subject of investigating Al’s death came up. “If Al really was in some kind of trouble when he died, it could be dangerous to start poking into it. Besides, Gloria’s here to start a new life, not to dig up the old one.”

  As if on cue from the old life, the phone rang. Peter was calling to remind me that I was scheduled to give a talk in his Italian class the next morning. We’d worked out a monthly series of sessions on the contributions of Italians and Italian Americans to science and technology. I’d give a technical presentation in English, and the students would write follow-up papers in Italian on the person’s life and times. Not wanting to be tied to chronological order, I’d planned to start with Enrico Fermi and how he achieved the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

  Once that was settled, Peter invited me to a dinner-dance at Wonderland Ballroom on Saturday night, sponsored by Saint Anthony’s Knights of Columbus. I told him I wanted to be available to the Bensen murder investigation, and couldn’t make plans.

  “I’m not happy with this new career of yours,” Peter said. “I hope this cop isn’t putting you in any danger.”

  Something in his tone said “possessive” to me, and I responded a little too harshly.

  “I’m not doing it to make you happy, Peter,” I said. “I’ll see you about seven forty-five in the morning. I’ll need an overhead projector.”

  Rose and Frank were perusing my coffee table museum books, but I could tell that they’d followed the gist of my conversation.

  “I think Peter’s been waiting for Gloria since 1962,” Frank said to Rose when I returned to the seating area.

  “Well, that’s his problem,” Rose said.

  I decided I didn’t need to enter into this conversation even if it was about me. We gathered our jackets and purses and I ended up having my second meal of the day at Russo’s. There wasn’t a lot of choice in our immediate neighborhood, and none of us felt like driving too far.

  ~*~

  I asked Frank to drop me off a few blocks before the mortuary so I could take advantage of the perfect weather. I’d been through the toughest part of the year, the hot, muggy summers, and felt that this was a just reward. There was enough of an east wind to carry the smell of salt air inland and I took a deep breath to catch a whiff of the Atlantic Ocean. I walked at a brisk pace for me, through quiet streets, past rows of one- and two-story houses interspersed with neighborhood markets, repair shops, and cleaners. No California-style strip malls, at least not in this part of Revere. Every time I passed a video store or nail salon, I tried to remember what had been in that spot when I was a child.

  I’d already prepared my Fermi talk, but I still had to decide whether to include his flight from Italy with his Jewish wife. Enrico and Laura Fermi went legitimately to Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize, but then to America to avoid her persecution. As I walked, I tried to think of a way to relate the experience to a generation that probably hadn’t even heard the word holocaust.

  I got home feeling clear-headed and ready for bed. I took a quick look at my e-mail and paper mail and settled on what I’d wear to class, and then to the police station, knowing I wouldn’t have time to come home in between.

  As I got into bed with a stack of transparencies for one last look at the radioactive decay scheme I’d drawn for my Fermi talk, my phone rang.

  A man’s voice, but not one I expected.

  “This is Ralph Leder,” he said. “I want you to know I wasn’t pleased with what you were implying this afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you, Ralph, but what exactly is it that bothered you?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. I’m not going to play games with you. I’m calling to remind you that I have wide-ranging influence in this business. And you’re too young to retire completely.”

  I tried to make a light-hearted response, but it came out tight and high-pitched.

  “This sounds like, if-I-ever-want-to-work-in-this-town-again...”

  “Take it however you want to,” he said, and hung up.

  SEVEN

  I’ve never been a morning person, but after a fitful night it was even harder than usual to get up on Thursday morning. Leder’s call shook me more than I thought it deserved. After all, what could he do to me? Poison my name with all the police departments in Boston and vicinity? Call all the schools and cancel my guest appearances?

  More importantly, did this mean he killed Eric Bensen? No, I decided, he couldn’t afford to give himself away like that if he were the killer. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford not to.

  To make the night a complete failure for rest, I kept dreaming of Al. In one vision we were at a flower show in the middle of winter and someone shot him three times right in front of me. In another scene, Al was being buried under the old high school building.

  I forced myself out of bed at six o’clock. I had coffee and a muffin from a batch I’d baked in an attempt to wean myself from stopping at Luberto’s Bakery every day.

  By seven thirty, I was parking in the faculty section of the lot behind the high school. The refrain Cheer Re-vere High was running through my head, but this building, built long after I’d left, held no nostalgia for me.

  It was another clear, sunny fall day, and I watched the students as they lingered outside.

  After wrestling with Al’s death, Peter’s unwanted attention, Matt’s apparent disinterest, and Leder’s threatening phone call, I found it relaxing to focus on something simple, like nuclear physics.

  I met Peter at the main office where I signed in on a clipboard.

  I’d chosen a black raw silk suit, black flats, and a hot pink blouse. From previous experience with high school visits, I knew at least I’d blend in with the many girls who’d be all in black. I wore my standard jewelry for such occasions, a pendant with a hologram, a three-dimensional image of Albert Einstein. My lapel ornament for the day was a tiny bronze likeness of Dante, the pin I’d received as Italian Club secretary in 1958.

  Though I knew I’d never be able to stand full-time teaching, I always loved giving talks at schools. An occasional speaker had all the advantages of a guest and none of the disadvantages of maintaining discipline and handling administrative headaches.

  “Doctor Gloria Lamerino and I were classmates,” I heard Peter say as he introduced me. You’d never guess I’d practically hung up on him twelve hours earlier.

  I started my talk with a
favorite quote from Enrico Fermi: “Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused, but on a higher level.”

  The quote brought the hoped-for laugh and the whole hour went rather well, with thoughtful questions from Peter’s students. One asked why scientists did research that might be used for destructive purposes. Another wanted to know about the current status of nuclear power. Several asked me what I thought would be done about the problem of nuclear waste. I did my best to be honest without using the hour as a forum for my political leanings, which were slightly to the left on almost all matters except technology, where I tipped to the right.

  By the end of class I was promising to send the students lists of resources for their papers. They knew I’d be back next month to present Galileo Galilei, the sixteenth century Italian scientist. I teased them with the question of whether Galileo really did investigate gravity by dropping balls of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa. They’d have to wait a month for the answer.

  Peter walked me to my car and leaned on the window ledge as I got settled.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “It’s just that I worry about you.”

  I was proud of myself for not asking him if he’d been worrying for thirty years, or just since I’d been back in his life, for the last two days.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said instead, turning my key in the ignition. “Matt isn’t going to let anything happen to me. In fact, I’m going to meet him at ten, so I have to rush.”

  Peter straightened up, his shoulders stiffening. “If you change your mind about the dance, give me a call,” he said.

  “I will.”

  Driving off I asked myself why I’d deliberately made Matt and me sound a lot chummier than we were. The answer had something to do with teen-agers and dating, so I dismissed it in a flash.

  With just enough time for a cappuccino, I stopped at a new Starbuck’s at the edge of Revere by the Chelsea border. I used the break to switch my brain from one kind of physical evidence to another. I’d managed to find an old issue of a science magazine that carried the original story of the breakthrough by Leder’s group. I looked over the article as I drank my coffee and refreshed my memory of the experimental set-up.

  ~*~

  Matt was in his office when I arrived, seated behind one of two completely outfitted desks occupying the small space behind a door with a frosted glass window. The other belonged to his partner, George Berger, whom I’d met on previous department visits. My memory of Berger, a short, heavy man in his early thirties, was not pleasant—he’d made it clear from the beginning of my contract that he’d taken physics in high school and chemistry in college and didn’t need my help solving a murder.

  “You have any experience in detective work?” he’d asked.

  “Just a lifetime in scientific research,” I’d replied, less confident than my clever remark indicated. It was hard enough for me to get over my feeling of intimidation simply walking into a building full of police officers, in spite of only one moving violation in my thirty-five years of driving. Just as every driver on a California freeway automatically slows down at the sight of a black and white highway patrol car, I straightened my shoulders and walked with careful strides every time I entered the tiny high-security vestibule of the Revere police station.

  “Here’s her resume,” Matt had said that first day, holding out my complete professional history. Meager, I thought, fitting on six pages stapled together, hardly more than a page for every ten years of my life. But Matt made a lot of what he had to work with.

  “She has everything but the Nobel Prize,” he said. “She has all these publications and she’s an honorary fellow of three different scientific societies.” Overblown as his summary was, I was grateful to Matt for his support. My pre-retirement research was of the everyday garden variety, basic experiments on the properties of crystals. Almost every workday for years, I’d plug away at some step in my experimental procedure—zap a small piece of solid crystalline material with a laser, collect the light that bounced off, put the data into a computer and analyze it for information about the structure of the material. Not even close to brilliant or award winning, but my perseverance and hard work had paid off with recognition in my narrow specialty of crystal spectroscopy.

  Remembering the interaction with Berger, I was happy to find him out of the office as I started work on a new contract. Matt gave me the schedule for the day—Jim Guffy was first, due at ten-thirty, then Connie Provenza after lunch. He hadn’t been able to reach Andrea Cabrini, Eric’s possible East Coast love interest.

  “Let me give you a progress report,” he said, his voice soft and comfortable, but sounding more like a bank loan officer than a friend. “First, I got a printout from Casey, our computer guy. I’m not sure it’s useful, but I’ll get you a copy. Also, since Janice Bensen and Leder have registered guns, we checked them out. Both guns are clean.”

  I wasn’t happy to hear that Leder owned a gun, and it occurred to me that I ought to tell Matt about my bedtime phone call. Not yet, however. Leder didn’t threaten me physically, and I didn’t want to scare Matt into removing me from the case.

  Whenever I could sneak a look, I glanced around Matt’s desk and file cabinets for telltale photographs, like a slim young girlfriend framed in a bikini. I knew he hadn’t remarried, but not much more about his current status. There was only one picture on his side of the office—an older couple in formal dress seated behind an elaborate cake, presumably his parents at an anniversary celebration.

  Matt sat forward in his chair, pulled a yellow pad of paper in front of him, and picked up his pencil.

  “One more thing,” he said. “The security guard saw a late model Corvette in the lab parking lot just before midnight. He remembers that it was red and had out of state plates, but doesn’t remember which state. Sound familiar?”

  “No. Not off hand.”

  “Okay. Let’s move to the physics. Can you tell me again exactly what this group has accomplished?” he asked. He’d twisted his nose and set his face into a grimace. Frown lines appeared on his forehead.

  “It’s not going to be that bad,” I said. I thought of reciting the Fermi quote I’d used with Peter’s students, but ruled against it. This was serious business that I was getting paid for. I cleared my throat and forged ahead.

  “Under normal conditions, like the air temperature and the pressure in this room, hydrogen is a gas,” I said, trying to sound friendly, as if I were giving directions to my apartment.

  “For at least fifty years scientists have been predicting that hydrogen could be made into a metal if the conditions were right. But they also knew that the so-called right conditions involved extremely high pressures. We’ve never been able to reach those pressures. But now with lasers and modern electronics, we can create the conditions we need. Are we okay so far?”

  “So far.”

  “Furthermore, still talking about fifty years ago, they predicted that although it would take extraordinary conditions to produce the metal hydrogen, once it was made, hydrogen would stay a metal even at normal temperatures and pressures.”

  Matt had been doodling, but I thought I saw him write an actual word or two during my last sentence.

  “And we care about this because ...?” he asked, raising his eyebrows and tapping his eraser on his pad.

  “Because if hydrogen can survive as a metal at room temperature, it might be useful as a superconductor—able to conduct electricity with no resistance.”

  “And that’s where we get these special power lines and the levitated railway trains?” Matt asked.

  “Right,” I said. “What Leder’s group did was the very first step—they claim to have made metal hydrogen that lasted for about a millionth of a second. No one saw it, of course, but the data in the group’s printout says it was there.”

  Matt was getting into the swing of things. The frown had left his face, and he sat ba
ck.

  “So they’re saying, we made metal hydrogen, so give us money to get to the next step,” he offered. “And the next step after that way down the road, we’ll give you trains that run in the air and perfect utility lines.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Whoa,” Matt said, using almost the same non-word as when he saw my Cadillac. “How do we know they really made it?”

  “There’s nothing unusual about the way they’re making their claim. When we’re dealing with something that’s so small or lasts for such a short time that we can’t see it with our eyes, we have to rely on instruments to detect their existence. This is where Jim’s work comes in. He’s the experimentalist in the group. Jim’s the one who designed the equipment that tells us that metal hydrogen appeared for a brief time.”

  Matt nodded in a way that gave me hope about his level of understanding, but before we could go any further, Jim Guffy arrived. With his awkward gait, boyish grin and bright eyes, he had the look of an Irish altar boy. At twenty-something, he wasn’t that much older than Peter’s students. It was hard to think of him as a potential murderer.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said to me. He shook Matt’s hand and stumbled into the chair next to mine, dropping his sunglasses on my feet.

  “Sorry,” he said, brushing back thick brown hair. He sat at the edge of the chair, his hands on his knees in a ready-set-go position.

  Matt went over Jim’s written statement that he hadn’t seen Eric since the end of the workday on Monday. He was at an all-day meeting in Boston on Tuesday, he said, and didn’t go to the gas gun lab at all. He didn’t hear about the murder until lunch break on Tuesday, when everyone was talking about it.

  “I just want to make sure I have this right,” Matt said. “You live with your parents in Everett?”

  “Yes,” Jim said, “I was home that night. I mean I was sleeping when Eric, uh...”

  Jim trailed off, shuffling his feet under his long legs. If nervousness is a sign of guilt, I thought, Jim did it. Lucky for him, I knew he was naturally shy and uncomfortable in strange situations. And this situation was about as strange as you could get. I also figured that, like me, he was afraid one of the officers in the station would ID him as having made an illegal lane change on Route 1A three years ago.