The Oxygen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  Every now and then I remembered that I was in an excellent seat at a widely acclaimed Broadway show and looked across the orchestra to the stage below. I saw humans dressed as animals, dancing and singing. One time I saw creatures wearing large hats the color and shape of a thatched hut.

  I went back to my notes.

  I’d commuted to college from Revere to Boston, fewer than ten miles away, but more than an hour on buses and subway lines via the limited public transit routes of those days. I did my calculus homework on the MTA, the one Charlie was famously lost on in song. If nothing else, the experience was good preparation for doing mental work in the midst of noise and hubbub.

  Here in the theater I was able to concentrate on the pieces of the puzzle that was Amber’s murder. I was unbothered by the stampeding dance troupe or the thunderous orchestra.

  Neither was I making any headway.

  “How do you like the performance, Gloria?” Rose asked at intermission.

  I knew how hard she’d worked to garner tickets at the last minute. After all, we were supposed to be back in Revere this evening. Playing our usual canasta game, albeit in the hotel room, would have been good enough for me, but I didn’t say that.

  “This is wonderful,” I said, waving my glass of lime-flavored mineral water in a toasting gesture.

  “Good to multitask by?”

  “I’m getting all there is out of the drama, complex as it is.”

  “Shall I give you a quiz?”

  Matt shuffled his feet and bit his bottom lip. A nervous gesture, one I’d seen in the past when he thought Rose and I were arguing seriously. But I could read all of Rose’s different smiles, and the one she wore throughout this interchange was her good-sport smile. She didn’t mind my not showing overwhelming gratitude for all her work getting the tickets. In fact, she probably saw my willingness to even attend the performance as a sign that I might someday become cultured.

  “Just don’t ask me to name the animals in the jungle,” I said.

  Matt, still not completely attuned to the decades-old patterns Rose and I had built up, broke in.

  “Time for some police humor from the precinct?” he asked. “I have a couple of those how-stupid-can-they-be stories that cops tell about the bad guys. Buzz swears these are true.”

  Matt started in, before we could shake our heads no or start another round of flippant teasing. “Here’s one: The cop asks the suspect, ‘How old is your son, the one living with you?’ The guy says, ‘Ten or eleven, I can’t remember.’ Cop asks, ‘How long has he lived with you?’ Guy says, ‘About twelve years.’ ”

  Rose rewarded Matt with a good laugh. “Congratulations, Matt, you’ve got the attention of me and your wife.” She paused. “Hmmm, your wife. Funny, I don’t have much recollection of the ceremony. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t have one.”

  Matt cleared his throat and looked at me. “Please,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, and Rose knew at once that she’d been given the go-ahead to have a reception for us. If arranging a party—invitations, cleaning, ordering food, then milling around, chatting, and more cleaning afterward—would give her pleasure (as evidenced by her immediate, though discreet, clapping when I agreed), who was I to deny her?

  At my request Matt had stepped aside to check his phone messages before the gongs signaled us back to our seats.

  “Maybe Buzz called to say there’s been a breakthrough in the case,” I’d said.

  “Don’t know that I’d be the first to know, but will do.”

  Now he came back from a corner of the mezzanine where there were at least a half dozen other people on cell phones. I didn’t like his frown or the anxious look on his face.

  “You were right in a way,” he said.

  “A new lead?” I asked, though I knew better. I’d seen his new-lead look, and this wasn’t it.

  “Not exactly.”

  A chill went through me. “What?”

  “A message on my voice mail. There was a mugging on a jogging path in Central Park.”

  So what? I thought. A response that embarrassed me when I considered it later.

  “How awful,” Rose said. “Imagine the poor family, and around holiday time.”

  Not that it was news to me, but I marveled that my friend could care so deeply about an anonymous mugging victim. Surely this wouldn’t make headlines in New York City. Why would Buzz leave Matt a message about a mugging?

  Unless . . .

  I held my breath. Lori? No. Uncle Matt would be much more distressed. I looked again at his face, for reassurance.

  “A woman named Dee Dee Sanders. She worked for Tina Miller, the PI that Amber Keenan—” Matt paused. “Well, you know who she is.”

  The one you robbed, I heard in his voice, but it might have been my guilt picking up a nonexistent nuance.

  For the second time in a little more than two days I’d thought Lori was a victim, and it was another woman instead—and I’d failed to revive one of the victims and I’d stolen from the other.

  I had a lot more to think about during the second act but gave it up when my tiny notepad became too overrun with stars, bullets, and arrows. I leaned back and tried to enjoy the music.

  Matt reached over and took my hand. “Now that it’s available,” he said.

  “You should have asked.”

  We wrapped ourselves in our layers of wool and knit and elbowed our way past theatergoers waiting for taxis. Our destination was just around the corner, a bistro on Eighth Avenue, where dessert beckoned.

  We were so close to our hotel, it felt like we were sitting in an extension of our lobby.

  “This is okay,” Rose said, pushing away the long-stemmed glass that held her zabaglione. “But I still miss Rumplemeyer’s.”

  I, too, longed for an amazing brownie sundae from the restaurant that once graced Central Park South. However, that didn’t stop me from finishing the dessert in front of me—a decent affogato all’amaretto. This lack of discrimination on my part, where desserts were concerned, was one of the reasons I outweighed Rose by many kilograms.

  Instead of eating, Rose was surveying the rest of the after-theater crowd. She eyed a young woman wearing a fur pom-pom scarf and leaned over to me. “Fifteen dollars,” she whispered. “On the streets.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I’m going to pick one up for MC. I was waiting to see how many people were wearing them around here.”

  I wondered what MC’s high school chemistry students would think of the pom-poms, and whether it would matter to MC that her mother had arrived at the purchase through a statistical fashion analysis.

  When the discussion came around to Dee Dee, it was brief enough, since we had no information besides Buzz’s message. It was hard to explain to Rose how I knew Dee Dee without having my face turn red thinking of my inadvertent lifting of her daughter-in-law’s correspondence.

  “Remember yesterday . . . I told you I’d be doing some research. I was in that office. Do you want to taste this gelato, by the way?”

  Rose, stirring her espresso, gave me only half her attention, training the other half on the scarves entering the bistro. That suited me perfectly. “Maybe a little, if you don’t finish it.” (She was kidding.)

  “Do you think Buzz will call again tonight?” I asked Matt.

  “I left a message for him. If he checks in, he’ll find it and get back to me. Otherwise I expect it will be sometime tomorrow.”

  “Is your phone on?” I asked. I gave Matt my sheepish look, so he’d know I’d wanted to resist checking but couldn’t.

  He gave me a pity look, which I took for a yes.

  “I almost forgot,” Matt said. “There was another message at intermission. From Lori. Billy Keenan, Amber’s brother, is in town from Kansas. They had trouble locating him, but he’s here now to officially ID his sister’s body and escort it home when they’re ready to release it.”

  “The poor guy” was Rose’s first comment.

&n
bsp; How can I meet him? was my first thought.

  “Lori’s inviting us to her place for lunch tomorrow if we’d like to meet him, to offer our condolences, make him feel welcome,” Matt said.

  Meet Billy Keenan and get into Lori’s loft without conniving? A double coup. “Tomorrow?” I asked. “That’s Wednesday, right? I was hoping to catch a matinee.”

  My penance for my facetiousness was to help Rose blot out the espresso she spilled on one of her new scarves. That’s how hard she’d laughed.

  Every night in New York our small bedside table was crowded with Matt’s and my cell phone chargers and the docking station for our digital camera. This evening I checked the phones to make sure they were on, though usually we charged them in the OFF position.

  “Buzz isn’t going to call in the middle of the night,” Matt said, coming out of the bathroom as I was making the switch. I had intended my obsessive-compulsive behavior to go unnoticed.

  “You never know,” I said. “He might also be OC.”

  Buzz didn’t call, though, and I drifted in and out of sleep with images in my mind of Dee Dee in her high-heeled boots, her pleasant demeanor as she offered me candy, her free and easy manner, her flowery perfume.

  I sat up on one elbow. The clock read 12:30 A.M. Perfume? The perfume I’d smelled on the person who’d bumped into me leaving the alley by Lori’s building? I looked over at the luminous purple bar on the camera’s docking station. Foggy bits of conversation crept into my head: Matt telling me about a new instrument called RUVIS, for reflectance ultraviolet imaging system, a technique where you just shined ultraviolet light on surfaces to collect fingerprints. No more annoying black powder. I’d also read about smell-capturing technology, but it wasn’t widely available. I imagined a simple RUVIS-type scope that let cops retrieve the last odor left at the scene of a crime.

  That silly idea put me to sleep, until another one intruded. This one was a candy connection. I’d picked up crinkled foil paper in the alley. Not wrapping paper, as I’d thought then, but candy wrappers. Like the wrappers in the candy dish on Dee Dee’s desk.

  I almost woke Matt to give him the news about the perfume and the candy—and my brilliant conclusion that Dee Dee must have been in the alley the night I went snooping. The killer returning to the scene of the crime? Dee Dee had just been mugged. Not one to believe in coincidences, I had to believe the attack on her was somehow related to Amber’s murder.

  Did all this make Dee Dee a suspect or a victim? I needed to talk to Matt about the dilemma, even though it meant copping to my nosing around in the alley on West Forty-eighth.

  I shifted and moved from side to side in bed, hoping to “accidentally” bump Matt awake, but he was fast asleep. I thought of turning on the TV, but I realized that if the street noises, still considerable in the middle of the night, didn’t wake him, the TV wouldn’t, either.

  It would have to wait until morning. By then I might have more inane ideas to add to these.

  CHAPTER VENTEEN

  Blip blip blip. Blip blip blip.

  My cell phone. I peered at the clock. One in the morning. Buzz? It’s a good thing we left the phones on, I told myself and my sleeping husband. I wondered briefly why Buzz would call me and not his friend Mattie.

  Blip blip blip. Blip blip blip.

  I reached over, dislodged the phone from its charger, and clicked the TALK button.

  “This is Gloria.” My semiformal phone greeting in spite of the hour, though softer than usual.

  “Hey, I’m sorry to call this late.” Lori’s voice.

  “Is anything wrong?” The universal question when a phone rings in what some think of as the middle of the night.

  “No, no. I wanted to know if you’d be interested in coming with me tomorrow morning. With all that’s going on, I completely forgot until two minutes ago. I know Uncle Matt wouldn’t want to come, but I have an extra ticket.”

  Ticket? What was I missing here? I’d barely recovered from the ticketed event on Broadway a few hours ago. I carried my cell phone into the bathroom, though Matt was a very sound sleeper. “You know, Lori, I’m also a little distracted and forgot—what are these tickets for?”

  “Oh, duh, I thought I told you. I belong to a small businesswomen’s group, and there’s a special breakfast meeting tomorrow morning. Oops, I guess that would be this morning. It’s called—ta da—The New York City Today Magazine Power Breakfast.”

  “The magazine that featured Tina Miller.”

  “Yeah. They’re going to give plaques to her and all the business-women featured in that issue. It would be a chance for you to . . .you know . . .”

  “Lori, you know me so well already.”

  “Thanks, Gloria.”

  I was happy for the bonding moment, except for the discomfort of sitting on a toilet seat cover. “When and where?”

  “It’s at the new MOMA. They’re letting us use their café for this event. The bad news is, the so-called gala is at 8:00 A.M. Working women, you know.”

  “Not a problem. I might even be able to attend and be back here before your uncle wakes up.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll see you there,” Lori said. “I’m on the setup committee, so I have to be there even earlier.”

  I couldn’t believe the good fortune. A chance to meet Tina again, as well as hobnob with those at the heart of the city’s commerce.

  A moment before signing off with Lori, I had an important thought. Rose, a member of a similar group in Revere, would never forgive me if I didn’t invite her. Although a thriving business, the family-owned and -operated Galigani Mortuary was independent, and qualified as small. I knew Rose would give anything to participate in a power breakfast in Manhattan. She’d work the room and acquire enough material for a year’s worth of anecdotes.

  “Lori, is there another ticket available?”

  “Uh-huh, I still have the two that are . . . uh, should have been . . . Amber’s.”

  “Would you mind if I invited Rose?”

  “Great idea. That means I don’t have to give you the address for MOMA or tell you what to wear, right?”

  I might have construed that remark as disparaging, but I knew Lori meant it in the most helpful way.

  “As I said—”

  Lori chuckled. “I do know you, Gloria. And while we’re talking about that, thanks so much for your support this week. Maybe I didn’t say it, but . . .” She choked up.

  “I’m glad we were here, honey.”

  Of all the New York myths, one I hadn’t heard was how the Big Apple turned everyone mushy.

  I checked on Matt—still sound asleep. He couldn’t blame me for not including him in my plans. I returned to the bathroom, choosing to sit on the edge of the tub this time, and used my cell phone to call down to Rose.

  “You don’t sound sleepy,” I said when she picked up.

  “I just got off the phone with Frank. He told me this funny story. You know how I told you our neighbor, Hunter, across Tuttle Street has been trying to see who keeps throwing trash in his driveway? Well, Hunter rigged a video camera—they’re so small these days. He stuck it on his mailbox and—guess what?—it was the paperboy. He arrives around four in the morning, and almost every day he tosses a drink cup or a candy wrapper onto Hunter’s driveway. No one else’s, just Hunter’s. Hunter thinks it’s because he leaves only a small tip at Christmas.”

  “Kids these days,” I said.

  “Oh, Gloria. You’re calling late and I didn’t even ask. Is there anything wrong?”

  “No, it’s good news, in fact. I have tickets for an event.”

  “Now?” She sounded hardly surprised, knowing me, and also being always ready to move and shake. She was ready to go before she knew what the event was.

  I briefed her on Lori’s invitation.

  She gasped. “Gloria, how exciting! I can’t believe it. A genuine New York City power breakfast. And an awards ceremony. And at the new MOMA. It’s a dream.” A pause. “What were you plan
ning on wearing?”

  “Were” indicated that she was about to change whatever strategy I had, but I played along. “My burgundy pantsuit. I don’t have that much with me to choose from.”

  I hoped Rose wouldn’t remind me that she’d suggested I take more outfits in case of a wardrobe emergency. Rose had brought something for every possible occasion from a black-tie party at the Grand Hyatt to a test run of a laser shot in the Columbia physics department.

  “I wonder what time the shops in the lobby open,” she said. “I saw an outfit in the window that would be perfect for you.”

  “Rose, I’m not going to buy a new outfit for an hour-long breakfast meeting.”

  “I’m sure it will run longer than that. Once everyone thanks their mother, their accountant . . .”

  I sighed. It was too late to argue. And I doubted a clothing shop would be open at six in the morning when I’d be dressing. “By the way, do you know where the new MOMA café is?”

  Silence. Then, “Yes, Gloria. I do.”

  Before Rose would hang up, she made me promise to let her choose my jewelry from her collection. I figured I was getting off lightly.

  It was an easy walk from our hotel to the museum, on West Fifty-third.

  One block over, on West Fifty-second, was the Museum of Television & Radio, Rose pointed out, reminding me of the time a couple of years ago that we’d used its comprehensive computerized database to watch an old Perry Como Christmas special.

  Today’s weather suited me perfectly. Another sharp, cold, overcast day, but no threat of rain. I’d often told whoever would listen that I’d had enough dry, unmitigated sunshine in my years in California to last a lifetime.

  We stopped only twice—once to get coffees to go, and once so Rose could get an early-bird special at a sidewalk table. If we had more time, I would have taken Rose’s picture in this typical scenario. This time she bought a bright blue evening purse with a rhinestone chain for Martha, her assistant at the mortuary.

  “Her clothes are too dull, Gloria. Like yours.” Rose said, tucking the purse into her tote. “This might inspire her.”