Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “We’ll all miss him,” Jim said, sounding once again like the facilitator we all knew and loved.

  For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, the principal suspects in Eric’s murder were eating and drinking together, except that this time it was breakfast, and we had Andrea instead of Janice. It occurred to me that Eric’s death had brought this group together in a way that probably wouldn’t have happened if he’d lived. Once we’d all arrived back in the Boston area, our dinner meetings ended. I’d had a brief encounter with Jim at a science education meeting, and we talked about getting together again, but did nothing about it. Just like many families, I realized, coming together for disasters.

  The restaurant had a vaguely familiar feel to it, like the ones I’d tried to avoid on my way across the country. The menus were old and sticky and the waitresses’ hands seemed to be the same. I ordered coffee and an English muffin.

  “I didn’t see the detective at the funeral,” Leder said, looking at me. “Maybe he had a rough night.”

  I focused on the glass of water in front of me as the rest of the group went into cover-up mode, as they had the night before.

  “Let’s hope he’s busy tracking a killer,” Connie said.

  “I saw some guys at the back of the church who looked like Irish cops to me,” Jim said.

  The things we endure to get a degree, I thought, and silently thanked my own mentor at the University of California for his pleasant and dignified manner.

  I was wrestling with the idea of bringing up the printout or the trigger signal or the conductivity measurements, anything to get on the track of the gas gun work. Matt’s behavior the night before seemed to have cramped my style. I half expected him to burst into the restaurant and yell at me for sitting in the same booth with the suspects.

  While I was debating with myself, the conversation went on without me.

  “Did Dominic have a good time?” Andrea asked Connie.

  “Great,” Connie said. “It was nice to have him while Bill was away. We had some good long talks.”

  Jim, ever vigilant to include everyone, turned to me and asked, “Did you know Connie has a twin brother, Dominic?”

  “How interesting. No, I didn’t,” I said.

  Jim continued after the ancient waitress had filled our mugs with coffee.

  “He’s a big shot chemist for a pharmaceutical company,” Jim said. “On the high-paying end of technology.”

  “Does he still live in Connecticut?” Andrea asked. “It’s Groton isn’t it, where the big R&D facility is?”

  “Yes,” Connie said in a tiny, clipped voice, clearly not wanting to pursue the topic.

  If Connie hadn’t looked at me at that moment, I might have missed the significance of the information—Connie had a visitor from Connecticut in the time frame of Eric’s murder. She and I were sitting directly opposite each other, and I caught her glance, sharp and brief, and speaking volumes.

  “They’re pretty different from each other,” Jim said.

  “I hear they both drive red cars, though,” I said.

  I thought you didn’t know about him.”

  “Just guessing.”

  Connie lowered her eyes and let out a long deep breath. My comment drew enough innocent laughter from the others to cover her reaction. Since no one else had seen the police report, I guessed that they didn’t know about the red Corvette with Connecticut plates in the parking lot on the night of Eric’s murder.

  I tried to process the picture of Connie driving her brother’s car to the lab on Tuesday night, shooting Eric in cold blood, then going back to finish her homework for her management class.

  We stayed at the table for another twenty minutes, discussing The Red Sox, the Boston Symphony and other topics irrelevant to the murder. I’d decided that I’d already learned enough for one meal and didn’t bring up the experiment.

  Connie picked at her omelet, and seemed to have no energy, not even to ward off Leder’s arm, which he’d rested along the back of the booth behind her.

  Jim took on the job of figuring out the parts of the check.

  As we moved out of the booth, Connie said, “Jim, I have to do an errand near the church, so why don’t I drop Gloria off.”

  ~*~

  It didn’t dawn on me until I was buckled into Connie’s car that if the scenario I’d just worked out was true, Connie could make me her next victim. What would Matt say about this?

  We drove in silence until we were on the highway headed south toward Revere.

  Connie kept both hands on the wheel and turned to me.

  “I guess I should go to the police,” she said.

  “I guess you should.”

  “My car was out of oil. You can ask Bill. This Beemer is a ‘73 on its last legs. It needs oil every week,” Connie said, slamming her hand on the steering wheel. “So I took Dominic’s Corvette. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. But after what happened, I was afraid to admit I was there.”

  “What were you doing at the lab at midnight?”

  I’m cross-examining a murder suspect, I thought, while she’s at the wheel of a car doing sixty-five miles an hour. I might have questioned my sanity except that I didn’t believe Connie killed Eric. She isn’t acting like a murderer, I told myself, as if I had any reason to know how a murderer acts.

  Connie’s fingers were gripping the wheel, her eyes focused on the road. Once or twice I felt a lurching as she changed lanes, but for the most part, she appeared in control.

  “I knew Eric was thinking of retracting the journal article,” she said. “I went there to talk him out of it. Eric worked late a lot, so at ten-thirty I decided to take a ride over to the lab and see if he was there. It was better than trying to talk to him during the day with everyone around. I figured if I could catch him off-guard, he might listen to reason. I got there about eleven. I stayed and did some work until a little after one, and when he didn’t show up I left.”

  “So there is something wrong with your data?”

  “Yes, I’ll show you. I’ll show the police. I’ve had it with trying to cover it. Leder’s going to get us all in trouble.”

  I kept my eyes on her, as if my surveillance could prevent any dangerous moves on her part. A steak house that was famous in the area, several motels and fast food restaurants whizzed by behind Connie’s profile.

  Connie turned her eyes back to me.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said.

  I remembered Thursday’s interview with Andrea.

  “You’re the second person who’s told me that,” I said.

  SIXTEEN

  As Connie pulled up at Galigani’s, I remembered the fuss Matt had made about potential murderers in my apartment. I told myself that this was different—only one person instead of four, and she was tiny. With this sloppy reasoning at the front of my brain, I brought Connie into my home.

  We sat at my kitchen table, the computer sheets spread out in front of us, a paper road paved with alphanumeric characters, while Connie explained the cover-up around the conductivity measurements.

  “Here’s the real measurement,” she said, marking several lines with a red pencil. “We got exactly the kind of negligible number you’d expect for a gas, far from the number we would have gotten if we’d really made a metal.”

  She’d taken off her navy blue suit jacket and her cropped knit top showed off her trim form. Connie had the figure of a teenager, although not me as a teenager. I always smiled when my women friends referred to getting back their “girlhood figures.” Mine was nothing to go back to. Even at fifteen, I was uncomfortable tucking a blouse into my skirt, and at fifty-five I didn’t own a single belt.

  Connie looked more like the cheerleaders I’d envied in high school. I realized that she probably had to work against that image to get as far as she had in a male-dominated field. One more reason for her to wear extra-large T-shirts and a lab coat on the job. And to cultivate an abrasive personality, I added, giving her the benefi
t of the doubt for a moment.

  Connie pointed to a line that ended with EX10-26, their computer’s shorthand for a number that represents a tiny fraction of a unit. I was already planning how I’d explain the numbers to Matt—the minus sign between the 10 and the 26 represented an infinitesimally small fraction, one so small that there wasn’t a name for it like hundredth or even billionth of a unit. In other words, Connie’s team had observed virtually no conductivity for the hydrogen in the target chamber.

  “Here’s where we fudged it,” she said, moving the pencil down a few lines, her jaw and shoulders more relaxed than her usual posture. She underlined an entry with a string of at least a dozen characters that ended with EX10+32. This number, added to the real number put the measurement in the correct range for a metal.

  “We just inserted these extra lines into the program. There’s almost zero chance that anyone would notice.”

  Listening to Connie’s voice, you’d never guess she was explaining how she and her colleagues had committed fraud in an attempt to obtain a great deal of money from an unsuspecting industrial partner. I guessed her composure was due to her relief at finally being able to tell the truth.

  I wasn’t sure how much tutoring Matt would need to understand this, but I thought of making the analogy of being $26 in debt in your checkbook, then just writing in a deposit of $32, with no cash to back it up, making it seem you were $6 in the black. In the same way, adding EX10-26 to EX10+32, gave the net result of EX10+6. For reference I’d explain to Matt that pure copper metal had about that same conductivity, and that’s why the team chose 32 as the fudge factor.

  Once I understood the technical aspects of the cover-up, which I’d never have been able to figure out on my own, I picked up my cross-examination of Connie. It was hard for me not to show the anger I felt at this betrayal of my profession, but I remained placid while I still needed more information from her.

  “Who else knew about this?” I asked.

  “Leder, of course. It was his idea, but Eric and I went along with it. We rationalized that by the time the new facility was built, we would have worked out the problem, and no one would be the loser.”

  Connie had put the pencil down and sat back in her chair. She took a deep breath and accepted my offer of coffee. I put out a plate of white and yellow cheeses left over from the night before and she had several slices. Since I’d apparently ruined her breakfast, I felt an obligation to feed her. I ignored what I thought might be Matt’s response if he knew I was entertaining an admitted fraud and possible murderer as if she were my cousin Mary Ann from Worcester.

  “So Jim’s electronic trigger worked as it was supposed to?” I asked.

  “Yes. As drunk as he was, Eric didn’t give anything away at Jim’s party. If anyone checked the trigger signal, everything would be in order. I doubt that Jim knows what we did. He’s not that involved in the computations, and he’s the last one we’d tell if we didn’t have to. He’d be running off to confession.”

  I winced at her disregard of Jim’s integrity, but I let it slide. First, I wasn’t through with her, and second, just in case this physicist who looked like a homecoming queen was really a killer.

  “I’ll bet it ruined the party for Leder,” I said.

  “You bet. He was pissed at Eric. He called a meeting of anyone who might be worried, and smoothed everything over. He’s a master at that.”

  “So, basically, Leder, Eric and you are the only partners in this fraudulent scheme?”

  Connie broke down in tears, maybe at my choice of words. I should have seen it coming, but I’d been focusing on her answers to my questions. I wished I had current statistics on how crying related to innocence or guilt. So far, all the women involved in this investigation had gotten choked up or cried, including me. If all the women were innocent and Jim was a saint, that left Leder as the only remaining suspect. I breathed deeply and decided it might be time to tell Matt about Leder’s phone call to me.

  I led Connie over to the sofa, to the same spot where Jim had comforted Janice the night before. We talked for a while about our careers, how difficult it was to be one of so few women in physics. When I’d received my Ph.D. in 1968, women made up two to three percent of that population. More than twenty-five years later, the figure had mushroomed to four to six percent. It still wasn’t crowded in the ladies’ rooms of the nation’s physics buildings.

  “I know that doesn’t justify doing what I did to succeed,” she said. “But Leder has all this power over us. And he made it sound all right. We’re a good team and we can make a contribution.”

  “What you’ve contributed so far is the worst thing for science as far as I’m concerned,” I said, forgetting the wisdom of being cautious until we knew for sure who killed Eric. “Some people love to think that scientists cheat and make up data to get money. And you’ve helped them believe they’re right.”

  My sermon was more for myself than for Connie. I’d always erred in the opposite direction, wanting to think that only the purest motives drove research scientists. It was hard for me to take this undeniable evidence to the contrary. The fact that the greed of a scientist might have led to a murder made the situation even more horrible for me.

  “I know, I know,” Connie said, standing up and straightening her tiny skirt. “I’m going to talk to Sergeant Gennaro. Will you come with me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like to be there.”

  I called Matt’s pager number and was surprised to reach him at his office on a Saturday afternoon. I explained that Connie had some information to give him about the printout, leaving out the part about who owned the Corvette in the parking lot. I wasn’t anxious to alert him further that Connie might be the murderer. He wasn’t easy to manipulate, however.

  “Is Connie there in your home right now?” he asked, his voice expressing the displeasure that I was starting to get used to.

  “Yes,” I said in a soft voice that I hoped Connie didn’t hear. “Everything’s fine. We’ll be there shortly if that’s all right.”

  “Hold on,” he said, leaving me with a brief interlude of Lawrence Welk-like music. He was back on the line a few seconds later.

  “There’s a cruiser at Broadway and Tapley Avenue,” Matt said. “He’ll pick you up in less than five minutes. Be at the curb. And make sure Connie knows the plan. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, it’s clear,” I said, feeling once more at his mercy.

  I used a significantly different tone when I told Connie that we were being escorted to the police station. I tried to make it sound as though the department routinely provided taxi service as a courtesy to its friends.

  Before we left the apartment for our curbside rendezvous with the police car, I remembered another question and picked up Eric’s computer printout. I thought Connie might be more willing to share information than she had been the night before.

  “What about these characters at the bottom. Do they have anything to do with the false conductivity equations or measurements?” I asked her.

  “I still have no idea what those are,” she said, shrugging her petite shoulders. “They have nothing to do with our data.”

  As she finished her sentence, we heard the police car pull up. I was grateful that at least there were no siren and flashing lights.

  ~*~

  In Matt’s office, Connie told him first about taking her brother’s car and being at the lab on Monday evening until one in the morning, apparently thinking that was the most incriminating aspect of her story.

  I took the printout from my briefcase and Connie showed Matt the lines that were significant to the falsified data. Her voice was higher than usual and she twisted her hair around her fingers like a schoolgirl. I didn’t interrupt while she explained the fudge factor to Matt in terms that I knew were too technical for him.

  I was still unhappy that she didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of what she’d done with physics research data. This is different from working backwards to
get the right answer for the momentum of a ball bearing in a freshman physics lab, I wanted to tell her, but I decided not to speak until I was spoken to.

  A young Asian man in beige slacks and sports jacket came to the door and was introduced as Detective Wu. I pictured him living on Shirley Avenue near where Steiner’s Deli used to be.

  “Doctor Provenza, I’m going to ask you to step outside with Detective Wu and give him a new statement. And I’ll want to see you again before you leave.”

  I stood up, but Matt motioned for me to sit down and I did, clutching my briefcase all the while, feeling like an up-tight puppet. I was not looking forward to this conversation. I changed my mind about keeping silent.

  “Do you think she killed Eric?” I asked.

  “Let’s talk about some other things,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me how all this came about?”

  I started with the revelation about Connie’s brother, then moved on to the session in my apartment with the printout. I felt an enormous letdown when Matt told me they’d already closed in on identifying the car. The police had been back questioning physics department personnel, and of course many people mentioned Connie’s twin brother from Groton.

  “This, on the other hand, I don’t get,” he said, pointing to the printout. Finally I saw the hint of a smile and relaxed. I launched into my explanation of Connie’s data and the way they’d faked it, using the checkbook analogy I’d worked out in my apartment.

  “Why do metals conduct more electricity than other materials?”

  “It’s the way the electrons are arranged in a metal—they’re more free to move.”

  “And these moving electrons produce electricity?”

  “Actually, these moving electrons are electricity—that is, we call moving electrons ‘electricity.’ It may sound like only semantics, but it’s an important distinction in understanding how physicists develop their jargon.”

  For a few minutes, I had a good time, feeling useful and appreciated. Matt asked a few more questions and thanked me, but didn’t let me get away without another warning speech.