by Lois Winston
“The first one, and they’re both wrecks. George says it’s worse than a stakeout for irregular sleeping patterns.”
“Does he know anything about this case yet?” I asked.
“No, that’s why I might see if I can get him started. Unless we solve this case by Monday. What are you doing this weekend?”
I nearly jumped in feet first, making a fool of myself by suggesting dinner and a movie. Narrow escape, but I realized in time that Matt was talking about working, not socializing.
“I’ll clear my calendar,” I said.
We both laughed and I guessed that it dawned on Matt after he said it that his question could be taken two ways. He kept his eyes on the road, looking straight ahead.
“What ever made you go into physics?” he asked.
Just like a man, I thought, casting a vote for sexism. Ask the first almost personal question while you’re driving and you don’t have to make eye contact. It had started to rain and the windshield wipers provided an extra level of noise to eliminate any possibility of intimacy. I decided to keep my response equally objective and factual.
“I had two excellent women science teachers in high school,” I said. “A definite statistical rarity for those days, but I didn’t know any better. I thought all scientists were women and they encouraged me. So I just kept studying math and physics.”
“Are you glad to be back in Revere?”
I almost said, “This must be what it feels like to be one of your suspects,” but although he had one of the friendliest faces I could imagine, I still wasn’t comfortable joking with Matt.
“I’m still thinking about that,” I said. “I came back almost on an impulse, just the way I left a long time ago.”
“I know,” Matt said. “Frank told me a little about the circumstances, how you were engaged to Al Gravese. Not that I was prying. It’s just that it’s pretty unusual for someone to leave a town and return thirty or so years later.”
“I don’t have any dramatic reasons or big secrets,” I said, “just some strange decisions in my life, I guess.”
I neglected to mention that I was happy he’d thought of me as a real human being with a history he was interested in. I’d been working on the assumption that I didn’t exist for Matt before I met him in June.
“I remember the crash and the investigation. I’d just joined the force,” he said.
I almost asked whatever made him join the force, but I was afraid he’d think me sarcastic. I thought me sarcastic, so it wasn’t a great leap to guess that others did. I continued to play it straight.
“A couple of nights ago I was looking through some clippings that I’d kept at Galigani’s all these years,” I said. “It’s possible that I came back to find some resolution, to satisfy myself about how he died.”
“You mean you think the crash wasn’t an accident?”
“Not necessarily, but whatever it was, I ran away from it, and now I need to face it.”
With that explanation, as muddy as the lab parking lot on this rainy Thursday, our time in the car was up. In one way, I was sorry we’d arrived since I wanted to bare my soul to Matt and see his in return. In another way, I was grateful for the interruption. As we shared Matt’s enormous black umbrella on our walk to the lab entrance, we switched to talk of Eric’s murder investigation.
“Let’s go downstairs first,” Matt said, “and check out the toys on the desk.” He held the envelope with the crime scene photographs close to his chest, under the umbrella.
We entered through the basement, dark and shadowy even in the middle of the day, and went down the ramp to the gas gun lab. Since Eric’s desk was so close to the edge of the ramp, as soon as we opened the door we could see that the line-up of figures didn’t match the photographs. And Einstein was missing.
“Okay,” Matt said, as if he were checking off items on a mental list. “I guess your scientific eye is good for a lot of things.”
“I’m sure you would have seen it,” I said, trying to hide my pleasure. If nothing else, maybe I was earning my money.
We left the lab and went up to the second floor.
A very heavy woman in jeans was sitting on a long wooden bench in the corridor outside the department office, a white lab coat stretched across her wide hips. The woman was looking down at a clipboard on her lap, snapping the metal clip up and down. Her hair, in many shades of brown, fell in curly disarray around her shoulders.
She looked up as we approached and I was surprised to see a fresh young face above the matronly body. She stood up and clutched the clipboard to her generous bosom.
“Are you the police?” she asked.
“Detective Gennaro,” Matt said, casually showing his badge. “Andrea Cabrini?”
“I’m Andrea Cabrini,” she said, her voice heavy with resignation. At that moment she seemed ready to raise her wrists for handcuffing.
Here’s someone too large even for my wardrobe, I thought, and probably only about twenty-five years old. So much for Leder’s comment about “our little technician.” And so much for stereotyping what “the other woman” will look like. I wondered if Andrea’s size was also the reason Connie couldn’t picture Eric sleeping with her. I considered Connie a good candidate for the pool of people who think only the young and fit can have fun.
Matt introduced me and told Andrea he’d like to ask her a few questions.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” he asked.
“I have a cubicle downstairs but it’s roped off. I’ve been using the library.”
“Why don’t we go down to your cubicle,” Matt said. “It’s time to remove the tape anyway.”
“Doctor Leder will be glad to hear that,” Andrea said.
“I’ll bet you’re glad, too,” I said.
She let out a sigh. “I guess so.”
This time we took the elevator and approached the ramp door from a different direction. On the way, Matt asked Andrea what her work was in the lab.
“I’m just the technician for the group,” she said. “After I got my bachelor’s degree, I needed money so I took this job. I might go back to school later. Right now I build chassis, do all the wiring, and maintain the equipment. I work with Jim Guffy mostly.”
Once inside the large lab room, Andrea led us to her cubicle, two past Eric’s. She walked by Eric’s desk without looking at it and dragged chairs from the center of the room into her space. An assortment of sweaters and jackets on a coat rack in one corner partly covered a periodic table of the elements tacked to the wall. Andrea’s desk looked more like a workbench, strewn with tiny electronic components, wire cutters, circuit diagrams and rolls of multi-colored cable.
Once seated, Matt took out his traveling pad, a small spiral bound notebook like the kind stenographers use. Andrea stood her clipboard upright on her sloping lap and leaned on it. In spite of her size, she looked like a child about to take a spelling test she hadn’t prepared for.
“When was the last time you saw Eric Bensen?” Matt asked.
“Monday,” Andrea said, “I said good-bye to him about five o’clock when I left.”
“How close were you and Eric?” Matt asked.
His voice had a nonchalant ring, hardly in keeping with the significance of the question, and the answer. I waited.
“I’m sure everyone’s told you or you wouldn’t be here,” Andrea said. “When the first policeman didn’t ask me, I thought I was safe.” Andrea’s voice was high-pitched, coming from a tiny mouth buried in the mounds of flesh that were her cheeks.
“Safe from what?” Matt asked.
“Talk, suspicion,” she said. “Eric and I were good friends. We weren’t lovers, if that’s what they told you.”
“Why do you think anyone would say you were lovers?” Matt asked.
I was feeling out of place with this line of questioning, but decided Matt knew what he was doing and would have told me if he wanted to be alone with Andrea.
“Because we hung out together, I
guess, and we gave each other little cards and presents. I knew he was just flirting with me, because Janice is so unloving.” She stopped for a minute and caught her breath. “I shouldn’t have said that. Janice is a good person. She’s just always picking at Eric, even in front of his friends.”
“Do you have a lot of contact with Mrs. Bensen?”
“Not that much, she came to the Memorial Day picnic and open house, and sometimes we all have breakfast together in the cafeteria on days when she drops him off.”
“Did you ever see Eric alone outside the lab?”
“No,” Andrea said, dragging out the vowel sound as if she’d been accused of stealing candy from the corner drugstore. “It wasn’t like that. I knew once he got his degree he’d move away and I wouldn’t see him again. I think he had a girlfriend in California, too. I used to hear him whispering into the phone. My roommate says he was using me, but I just enjoyed him while I had him.”
Matt looked away as Andrea started to cry.
“Eric was really nice to me,” she said, drying her eyes with a tissue she’d dug out of her pocket. “He was my friend.”
In an effort to be as nonintrusive as possible, I looked beyond Andrea, my eyes on the wall above her head where a large sepia poster of Einstein riding his bicycle was held up by push pins. Before I could weigh the merits of asking the question, I had already blurted it out.
“Did you give him the little figure of Einstein?” I asked.
She looked at me as if I’d just looked into a crystal ball and come up with her life. Matt kept his eyes on his notepad.
“Yes,” she said, making no attempt to hide her amazement.
“Did you also take it back?” Matt asked, not missing a beat.
Andrea’s eyes widened and her clipboard fell from her lap. She probably figures we were both sent by the devil, I thought.
“Yes, I took it back,” she said. “I know I wasn’t supposed to come in here, but it was the last thing I gave him. For his birthday. And I wanted it as a remembrance. I messed up the other figures so no one would notice, but I guess it didn’t work.”
Andrea was still sniffling and blew her nose at the end of each sentence, her tissue ending up in shreds.
“How did you get in here?” Matt asked, as if he were merely curious and not taking notes for his murder book.
“One of my roommates got the guard to leave for a couple of minutes. She told him there was a problem in the parking lot. I don’t want her to get into trouble. It was my fault.”
She’s not the only one in trouble, I guessed, thinking of what might happen to a police guard who leaves his post. Remembering all the create-a-diversion plots I’d seen in movies, I pictured Andrea’s roommate in a short leather skirt and fishnet stockings tottering on red sandals with four-inch heels.
“Just one more question, Ms. Cabrini,” Matt said, “and we’ll let you get back to work. Do you know why anyone would want to kill Eric?”
“No, I just know I didn’t. I loved him.” she said, her voice barely a squeak. Andrea looked at me, her eyes narrow slits above the padding of her cheeks. “I didn’t kill him,” she said.
For what it was worth, I patted her soft wide shoulder as we left.
When we reached the top of the ramp, Matt approached the policewoman and I heard him ask for a list of the men who shared the crime scene duty. I walked ahead to give them privacy as he continued to talk to her and write in his notebook.
After a few minutes, I saw her gather up the yellow tape as Matt caught up with me and we walked in silence back to his car.
TEN
After a day that began with too little sleep and ended with an emotional interview, I was glad to be home. By six o’clock I’d changed into jeans and my Fisherman’s Wharf sweatshirt and was settled in my glide rocker with 1950’s instrumental music and a cup of coffee. My thinking scenario.
As “Autumn Leaves” rippled through my living room, my first thought was that Andrea had demonstrated more grief than Janice had—by an order of magnitude. But I knew that outward signs didn’t necessarily have anything to do with a person’s true feelings. I thought back to my response to Al’s death. I’d been too shocked to cry, which kept me from falling apart publicly. I went around for a while looking and feeling like the universe had contracted to a small, cold core. It wasn’t until many months later when I was in California that I felt the release of several long outbursts of sobbing.
“You need to join a support group,” Elaine Cody had told me, in the fashion of Berkeley in the sixties. “I’m sure there’s one for young widows. Which you are, sort of.”
I’d met Elaine, who was already working as a technical editor, soon after I arrived in California for graduate school. I got over my trauma in a reasonable amount of time thanks to her good humor, mind-wrenching physics homework assignments, and the threat of having to sit on the floor in a circle and share my inner life with strangers.
Thirty years later, I still wasn’t much better at sharing my inner life, I realized, shutting up like an unwilling Revere Beach clam whenever anyone tried to help me work things out, even Rose.
I forced myself out of my rocker and had a meal of pasta and vegetables created out of supplies I’d picked up at a market perilously close to Luberto’s Bakery. Even after eating I was in a low energy state and at loose ends.
I looked at my desk where I’d put the printout from Eric Bensen’s computer and considered working on it. I was also tempted to review my notes and reevaluate all the main suspects, but I knew I needed a break from the murder investigation. I thought of taking a walk until I heard the cold rain beat against the windows of my apartment. While I fantasized about rainy walks on the beach, when it came right down to it I preferred dry ones.
I decided to call Elaine and find out if she’d been aware of a girlfriend in Eric’s California life. I reached her at work, at just after three in the afternoon on the West Coast.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
I knew this deviation from our routine Saturday or Sunday morning call, combined with Eric’s murder, was throwing Elaine off kilter.
“Just a quick question,” I said. “Did you ever hear of Eric having an affair out there?”
“Gloria, you never pay attention. Remember Annie Lee, the young Korean woman who could barely speak English?”
“The one who worked in the department office?”
“Right. Eric hung around her a lot and people talked. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t really an affair. Annie had hardly any friends and I think she just enjoyed the attention.”
“How could you tell?”
“Gloria, when you’re in the library and you see a guy sitting next to a woman and he’s playing with the sleeves of her sweater, you don’t have to be a genius . . .”
“Okay, I get it. I guess I was never in the library when they were both there.”
“Right,” Elaine said, with a humorous twist to her voice.
Elaine had made her point. I always missed subtle interactions in my social circle. Eric certainly wasn’t the typical Lothario in looks, with a small frame, thinning hair, and bifocals, but it was beginning to sound as if he had carved out his niche—find a young woman isolated from society for one reason or another, and give her some harmless thrills. And feed your own ego, I threw in, to complete my unsolicited psychological profile of the murder victim.
“Thanks, Elaine,” I said. “Sorry to bother you at work.”
“No charge,” she said, with a laugh, and we hung up.
For the next few minutes I gave in to nostalgia for my life in California, with Elaine, a familiar daily routine, and no murders. No matter which coast I was on I seemed to prefer the other. I wondered when I’d stop blaming Josephine for giving me no practice making decisions or figuring out my own likes and dislikes.
I came back to the present and thought about whether I should tell Matt about Annie Lee. Girlfriends didn’t fall within the scope of technical aspects of
the investigation, and I didn’t want him to think I was overstepping the limits of my contract. On the other hand, I wanted him to think I was on top of things. I resorted to my usual decision-making strategy—postponement.
Energized by my little talk with Elaine, I thought I could manage a sorting and tossing mission to the attic. It was time to make some decisions about what I’d left up there. Putting my box cutter in my pocket, I walked through a door in my bedroom, into the narrow hallway at the back of my apartment. A strange architectural feature of the building, the hallway ran most of the length of my bedroom and living room. Looking at the layout, I got the impression that the carpenters had made a two-foot mistake in following the building plans and decided to make the difference into a foyer for the attic.
I dragged a short ladder down the corridor to a point under the trap door. The top of the ladder, specially designed for entry to the attic, had small hooked ends that fit into grooves on the attic floor on one side of the opening. I jiggled the ladder until the hooks clicked into place and climbed up.
Although the Galigani family had never lived in the mortuary building, its attic had become the musty storage place for torn-up luggage, cast-off baseball bats and rubber swords from old Halloween costumes. And dozens of cartons in storage for old friends on the road.
I pulled the chain next to the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Not much improvement in illumination, but I ignored the strong temptation to leave the attic and return to it in the daylight. As I walked back through cobwebs and dust toward my boxes, crouching under the low ceiling, I heard the phone ring in my bedroom below me. By the time it reached my ears, the ringing mingled with the sounds of boards creaking and rain hitting the attic window and roof, the eerie symphony leaving me with a sense of isolation. It seemed a great distance to the real world of good illumination and technological contact with other people.
I knew I didn’t have time to reach the phone even if I hurried down, so I let the answering machine take over and made a resolution to carry the cordless phone with me on my next trip to the upper regions of the house. Once that was settled in my mind, I turned to my task.