The Oxygen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  “If you’re in the mood for just walking around, Billy, I’d be glad to give you some company,” Craig said. “I’m a native, remember.”

  “Thanks, dude. I could have used somebody who knows the ropes in all that rain. I had one heck of a time trying to hail a yellow taxicab downtown. I was soaked through. Lori said there are some rules about the lights on the roofs, but I didn’t know about them.”

  “You should have taken the subway,” Craig said.

  “I didn’t trust the subway, from all you hear, you know.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Lori said. “Craig and I take it every day.”

  “Next time,” Billy said, his mouth not quite empty of pasta.

  Chirp chirp. Chirp chirp. Chirp chirp.

  Matt’s cell phone.

  I followed him with my gaze as he excused himself and walked away to take the call. I waited patiently as he finished the call, took a detour to the buffet table, and came back to his chair, next to mine, with more food.

  “Buzz?” I asked. Softly, I thought.

  “Buzz Arnold? Your cop friend?” Lori asked.

  Matt gave a slight nod, clearly not wanting to pursue the topic. I felt as discreet as dry ice.

  “Detective Matt, do you have any way to find out how my sister’s case is going? I mean, I hate to impose on you, but if you have a friend on the force?”

  At last, Billy’s request. It made sense that he’d want to know more than he’d been told officially.

  “I understand you’d want to know everything possible, Billy,” Matt said. “I assume you’ve already talked to the people in charge of the case? I believe it’s Detective Glazer in the lead?”

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t able to tell me much.” Billy looked forlorn. “He wouldn’t tell me why someone would kill her. But I guess this is New York, huh? And you don’t need a reason to kill someone.”

  Craig bristled. “That’s what I’d expect to hear from—”

  Lori put her hand on his arm. I heard a soothing whisper, and Craig sat back.

  I wondered how much the police ever told the relatives of murder victims—something I’d never had the occasion to learn from Matt. Would the NYPD describe Amber’s blackmail business to her brother? Possibly, if they were sure it was connected to her murder. I doubted Lori had filled in those details for Billy.

  “Maybe it has something to do with those ozone things,” Billy said, still thinking about motives for his sister’s murder. I hoped Craig would realize Billy was giving all possibilities equal weight and wasn’t picking on Craig’s hometown.

  “Do you have any reason to think Amber’s work on the video was connected to her death?” Matt asked. I was amused that he was not above doing a little ad hoc interrogation himself. “Did your sister tell you she was frightened, or concerned about the ozone project?”

  Lori sat forward on her chair, her hand to her mouth. I thought she might be biting her nails.

  Craig, too, seemed focused on this spontaneous police drama, and ready to defend New York City. I thought the mayor, whoever he was, would be proud to have Craig as part of a Visitors’ Bureau staff.

  Billy screwed up his face and raised his arms in surrender. “Amber wouldn’t have confided in me. To tell you the truth, we didn’t see eye to eye on most things. I never did understand my sister, you know.” His voice grew louder, with an angry undercurrent, and he seemed to be addressing Amber herself. “She was never happy on the farm, even when she was little. She used to dress up like the folks on TV and pretend she lived in a big city.”

  “But, as far as you know, she wasn’t specifically worried about the nature of her recent work?” Matt asked.

  Billy put his plate down and folded his arms across his chest. “I just think when you mess around with big companies in a megalopolis, you’re asking for trouble.”

  Craig maintained his silence—helped, I was sure, by Lori’s unobtrusively rubbing his back.

  For me, I’d lost track of some of the back-and-forth between Matt and Billy. I had another problem.

  “When did you say you arrived in New York, Billy?” I asked.

  “Monday night, ma’am, kind of late. I checked into one of them motels out by the airport.”

  Then how did you get rained on? I wanted to ask. The rain was over by Sunday night, and it had been clear ever since.

  Instead of speaking out, I pretended Matt was rubbing my back.

  I had to stop thinking of every conversation as an interrogation, I told myself. Not everyone was obsessed with logic and consistency, day and night. Not everyone gave answers to questions as I did, to three decimal places. Rose and Frank chuckled when I said my average monthly phone bill was $116.38 or that I’d drop by her office at 1:12 P.M.

  The inconsistencies in Billy’s statements rattled me. Things got worse when I insisted on helping Lori clean up.

  “It will be so much easier for you later,” I’d said. “I’m sure you have work to do. We can at least take things to the kitchen, consolidate the trash.” I’d held back on Many hands make light work, thinking it sounded too old-fashioned and not New York cool.

  I made a trip around the circle of chairs, picked up papers and after-dinner-mint wrappers, and carried a load over to the only wastebasket I could see, by the small table near the front door.

  “Is this okay for recyclables?” I called out, but high-amplitude sound waves from the TV filled the air between Lori and me, and I realized she couldn’t hear me. I glanced down at the contents of the wicker basket and saw catalogs and pieces of mail. The right container, I thought. A few bits of paper fell in before I noticed a corner of an envelope. An envelope with the logo showing a stick-figure family. The letterhead on the threatening letter Buzz Arnold had shown us. The do-not-expose letter.

  The killer’s letter, as far as we knew.

  I stopped short, holding the rest of the trash in midair.

  My heart leapt. The air in the loft turned cold. I was as shocked as if Lori’s wastebasket had become alive and wouldn’t let me toss my handfuls of used paper goods into it. I bent down, trying to determine if there was a matching letter. In the top layer there were other envelopes and some unopened junk mail, but I couldn’t see a letter with what I now considered an ugly design.

  I looked around at Lori’s luncheon guests, all of whom seemed to be occupied. Matt and Billy were watching a sports news channel on TV. I knew Matt was just being sociable; he couldn’t tell one team from another. Unless Buzz’s Yogi Berra quotes were rubbing off on him. I hoped not.

  Lori and Craig were collecting plates and glasses. I heard phrases like “continuity errors,” “establishing shot,” and words that were more familiar, like “fade” and “dissolve.” They were absorbed in their conversation—was Griffith’s smooth cutting better than Eisenstein’s overt “see the cut” method?

  I wished I could cut everyone but me out of the scene. They were so close to me, I didn’t think I could get away with sorting through the trash. It was surprising enough that no one seemed to notice the freeze-frame: Gloria standing immobile over the wastebasket with an assortment of rubbish.

  I bent my head around one more time, to account for everyone. I felt another episode of theft coming on. I wondered if there was a special legal category: stationery larceny.

  I pulled the envelope out of the wastebasket as I slid the refuse into it, and slipped the stolen property into my pants pocket. Smooth. I was getting good at this.

  Rose would never own an outfit with as many compartments as my clothes had. “It ruins the line,” she’d say.

  “My lines are already ruined,” I’d counter.

  I liked a lot of pockets. They came in handy, like today.

  Wide hips came in handy, too, sometimes. No one would notice the extra 0.185 millimeters (plus or minus 5 percent) on my right hip as I walked over to the couch.

  “We should be on our way,” I said to Matt. “Buzz will be waiting.”

  He gave me a strange lo
ok, but we’d learned to trust each other’s signals. “Right,” he said. “I’ll get the coats.”

  We engaged in a round of good-byes that seemed endless to me, promising Billy we’d let him know if we found out anything new on the case, Craig that we’d check out a documentary on the Vietnam War that he judged the best of the decade, and Lori that we’d talk soon.

  “Thanks for the plant,” she said, hugging us. “I’m all inspired to put up my ornaments now. I sorted through them last week and separated the nice ones from the ones that I should never have packed up in the first place. I trashed quite a few.”

  It was all I could do not to ask for the contents of her current trash.

  CHAPTER NETEEN

  Matt and I left the overheated lobby of Lori’s building and went out into the cold. Temperatures in the thirties, I’d read. It felt like it. I hadn’t planned to show Matt the envelope I’d recovered from Lori’s trash al fresco, but there’d been no opportunity to talk to him alone in the loft.

  “We need to see Buzz right away,” I said.

  “Well, you’re half psychic, but not foolproof,” Matt said. “How did you know Buzz wanted to meet us? I didn’t tell you what that phone call was about. However, you got the time wrong. He’s not expecting us until four o’clock, and it’s not even three.”

  I looked at Matt’s peaceful expression—no frown lines, and the hint of a crooked smile at the ready—and regretted that what I had to show him would transform it. “I have my own agenda,” I said.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  I smiled. My eyes lingered a moment on a little boy approaching us on the sidewalk. I looked at him wistfully—skipping along, each mittened hand enfolded by an adult’s, his parents, I assumed. His pale blue down snowsuit was so thick his arms stuck out almost straight from his sides. His red nose and eyes, framed in a fur-lined hood, were dripping from the cold, but the icy weather didn’t affect his warm and uncomplicated laughter, making me long for a simpler stage of life. I considered turning as they passed and calling out a Merry Christmas.

  My nostalgic mood and desire to interact with the family passed quickly, however. They probably celebrated something other than Christmas and didn’t even speak English, I thought. The number of international accents I’d heard the past few days rivaled the number of different holiday tunes.

  I pulled Matt into the doorway of a shoe repair shop. I chose it figuring there would be much less traffic in and out than for the card and gift shops in the vicinity.

  “I have to show you something,” I said, digging under my jacket, into my pants pocket.

  A frown, and he hadn’t seen anything yet. “Am I going to like this?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Buzz? Matt. Listen, we’re still on target to meet you at four, but I have a favor to ask.” The advantages of being a cop: immediate “service and protection” from your buddies.

  I let out a long breath and felt marginally better. Buzz agreed to have a uniform, as I’d long ago learned to call regular police officers, go to Lori’s apartment on some pretext and check out the scene there. A car would also be assigned to her building.

  The call to Lori would be more difficult. Matt needed to explain that he had to have the letter that accompanied the envelope I showed him, and he had to get it without alarming her unduly. I heard only snatches of his conversation with her, since I was off on another branch of my logic tree.

  With a slightly clearer head, now that Lori was about to be surrounded by the NYPD, I put together my version of Billy’s true schedule: He came to New York City earlier than he claimed, probably a week ago, while his sister was still alive. He stayed at the hotel with the stick figures logo and mailed letters to everyone. Not to be prejudiced, but wasn’t that what a farm boy might do? I asked myself.

  Matt’s voice came through a lull in my thinking. “Just hold on to it, honey, okay? We’ll come by and pick it up in a few minutes.”

  Billy had means (anyone could have hit Amber with a surprise blow, then smothered her with a pillow) and opportunity (Amber would certainly let Billy into the loft, and I was convinced he was in town at the time).

  I needed motive.

  “Not a big deal. I’ll tell you when I get there, okay?” Matt was saying to Lori.

  I considered having my shoes shined, both to breathe some warm indoor air and to repay the proprietor for not booting us (I smiled) from his doorway.

  So, I asked myself, what was Billy’s motive? Probably a difference in taste between urban and rural lifestyles wouldn’t drive a brother to murder. At that moment, however, it seemed a possibility—gridlock at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and West Forty-sixth Street resulted in a crescendo of blaring horns. The cacophony was deafening, the situation compounded by a stretch limo that was double parked and an ambulance making its way north on Eighth. I wondered how Matt could carry on his cell phone conversation.

  I ruled out lifestyle as motive for murder nevertheless and considered another: Billy might have been aware of Amber’s lucrative blackmail scheme and wanted in on it. According to Lori, Amber wasn’t the most discreet person, even about her nefarious behavior. Billy could have come to town to extort money from his sister.

  The biggest problem with my theory of Billy as the killer was that the text of the letter, as I remembered it, didn’t jibe with Billy as the author. I hadn’t seen Lori’s letter, but what I recalled of the one sent to Amber didn’t fit a sibling. It was addressed to Ms. Keenan (too formal), at Lori’s apartment (Billy would know his sister’s address), and told Amber not to act on certain unnamed footage. If Billy wanted money, he wouldn’t care about footage. Unless the footage was of Billy himself?

  No, not the farm boy, I decided.

  I hadn’t been as close to solving the case as I thought. Still, there was no question in my mind that Billy Keenan had lied about when he arrived in New York.

  “I think you should tell Buzz to pick up Billy for questioning,” I said to Matt when he’d hung up with Lori.

  “What? A new theory?”

  We’d started our walk back to West Forty-eighth, our shoes unpolished. “It didn’t rain after Sunday evening,” I said. “It’s been cold and cheer.”

  “You mean cold and clear?”

  “Didn’t I say clear?”

  “You said cheer.”

  “I guess all this merriment is getting to me,” I said. “Call me Scrooge.”

  I’d seen a greater volume of ornaments in New York City since Friday than in all my Christmases put together, I thought. Especially if you counted the pyramid of red balls on Sixth Avenue, each one the size of a seven-kilowatt home generator. Every third child wore jingling bells, either on his shoes, his mittens, or his zipper pull. Velvety gowns in shimmering colors adorned mannequins up and down the avenues. Christmas music poured out of every doorway. Fir trees and wreaths crowded the sidewalks outside the grocery stores and florist shops. Stollen, Santa cookies, and cakes decorated with holly filled deli and pastry shop windows.

  Christmas had taken over my senses. I wondered how the natives stood the holiday buzz week after week between the Thanksgiving Day parade and New Year’s Eve under the falling ball.

  I supposed New Yorkers were used to a constant invasion of their home space. They lived with year-round tourism, tolerating I LOVE NY on key chains, pencils, mugs, plastic bags, shot glasses—too many items to list—in shops all over town. I realized also that this kind of merchandising was becoming more the norm in all cities. The number of items with Revere Beach as a logo had grown from zero when I was a child growing up there to a catalog full this year. The little known Revere, Massachusetts, offered various paraphernalia with images of the now-defunct Cyclone roller coaster and other relics of the once-thriving Boardwalk.

  Matt put his arm around me as we trudged up Eighth. “You need a vacation,” he said. I gave him as warm a smile as thirty degrees would allow and felt bad that I’d required attention from him. It was hi
s niece who might be in trouble. Who might, in fact, be entertaining Amber’s killer. I picked up my pace and Matt followed suit.

  “About Billy,” I said. “He told us he got soaked waiting for a taxi. He couldn’t have been rained on if he didn’t arrive until Monday. It’s been cheery and clear since then.”

  “I just don’t see Billy for this. So the kid was exaggerating, making it sound like he had a tougher time than he really did in the big bad city. Or, you know, he was giving us the old I-walked-two-miles-in-the-snow-to-school complaint.”

  “But why say it was raining? If he wanted to exaggerate, he could have claimed he was farther downtown. If he wanted to make the people look bad, he could have claimed they were rude to him or someone stole his camera, any number of things. Other than rain, which would be the truth if he arrived over the weekend. And you always tell me people revert to the truth when they’re caught off guard or if you wait long enough.”

  Matt smiled. “I love when you quote me to make your point.”

  We had our arms linked now and were approaching Lori’s apartment. I was beginning to know this neighborhood as well as our own in Revere. I’d seen the same man leave a neighboring building with a tiny, flat-faced dog twice now, and I’d been tempted to drop in at a specialty cheese shop below street level. It seemed you couldn’t walk more than ten meters anywhere in the city without seeing or smelling something interesting.

  “Well, can’t we at least get Buzz to think about it?”

  Matt shrugged and blew a steamy breath. “Why not? But much as I’d like to pin this on someone this minute, we’ve got to keep our heads. Let’s see, first it was some anonymous ozone violator, then Dee Dee, now Billy. For a while you even suspected Karla. It seems like you’re flailing around in this case. Not like you. And it’s a case that isn’t yours to begin with, I might add.”

  Matt was right, but his words stung. He must have forgotten momentarily that the worst insult I could hear was an affront to my sense of logic. Flailing was for the uncritical thinkers of the world.