The Oxygen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  Right now she wished she could zoom up and see if there was a name and title on that office door. Preferably PRESIDENT, or better yet, MARRIED PRESIDENT WITH A LOT TO LOSE. Speaking of a lot to lose, Rachel might be in deep trouble if whoever was subsidizing her lifestyle found out. It took a minute for Lori to admit to herself the extent to which she was building a case out of pure imagination. She had no direct evidence that Rachel even had a sugar daddy, let alone one who would object to extracurricular activities. For all she knew, Rachel’s ankle was in the sugar daddy’s office.

  Nevertheless, she told herself, she did some of her best work this way. There was nothing wrong with a little wild theorizing as long as no one was listening just yet.

  If that shapely calf was Rachel’s, then it was likely that Rachel was another potential victim for Amber. Lori figured Rachel approached Amber and tried to talk her out of blackmailing her. When that didn’t work, she wrote threatening letters, including one to Lori just in case. She’d obviously gotten smarter the second time, with Lori’s letter, and had torn off the letterhead.

  The big question was, Did Rachel stop at letters, or did she end up suffocating Amber with one of Lori’s pillows? The police had taken the offending pillow, but Lori still glanced over at her couch, where similar ones were stacked, and shivered.

  The second big question was what she should do next. She could go to the NYPD directly, or to Uncle Matt, but with what? The tape certainly didn’t show anything incriminating, not even that it was definitively Rachel on the floor.

  She thought back to their interview. What if she had Rachel’s fingerprints on something? The police could compare them to the prints on the two letters they had in custody. If Rachel was dumb enough to leave the hotel letterhead intact the first time, she probably didn’t use gloves to handle the paper.

  Too bad Lori hadn’t stuck one of those expensive china teacups in her purse. Rachel had offered to take her jacket, but Lori had kept it. Well, probably fingerprints didn’t stick to fabric anyway. It would have to be wood or ceramic or paper or—

  Paper. That was it. She jumped up and went to her desk. Luckily she hadn’t tossed the PR package Rachel had foisted on her.

  Lori rushed back to the kitchen, found her rubber gloves under the sink, and looked for a plastic storage bag big enough to hold the nine-by-twelve envelope. She settled for a freezer bag from the bagel shop and carefully inserted the package. Too little, too late, she thought, but she might as well do what she could to preserve any evidence.

  An image flashed through Lori’s mind. Rachel’s ankle bracelet again. What if . . .

  She removed the envelope from the bag and emptied the contents onto her kitchen counter. Rachel had mentioned a recruiting brochure in the packet.

  There it was, and sure enough the team photo on the cover featured Rachel standing at the front tip of a small triangle of people. Rachel Hartman, PR, and her team, the caption said.

  Rachel Hartman had a wide smile across her face and a thin bracelet around her ankle.

  Lori switched from her thick kitchen gloves to the thin white cotton gloves she kept handy in the darkroom and took the brochure to her scanner. What she needed was a dual image on the screen so she could compare bracelets. The triangle of people had been shot from an angle, from above, but Amber had shot from above also. Not the same angle, since in the brochure photo Rachel was upright on the lawn in front of Blake’s, but it might work.

  Lori scanned in the front page of the brochure and worked at the two pictures on her monitor—the frame from the office video and the photo from the brochure—so the dual images were the same size and magnification. No doubt in Lori’s mind. It was the same ankle and the same bracelet. She figured the NYPD had a better system and could make some meaningful measurements, but this was a good start.

  She printed out the two photos and looked up at the clock over the sink. Eight ten. Not a good time to reach Uncle Matt. She remembered they were all going to visit someone in Rose’s family in the West Seventies. She’d be seeing Gloria tomorrow afternoon at Curry’s. That would be soon enough to lay out her theory and her evidence.

  Lori went to the window and peeked through the blinds. The unmarked was there. Nothing to worry about. It wasn’t as if Rachel was going to come after her tonight. Funny how Uncle Matt thought it was Billy Keenan she should be wary of.

  “Make up an excuse for him to not come here,” he’d said.

  She drew a nervous breath and stretched out on her couch. After a minute she got up, took the remaining pillows that matched the one used to smother Amber to the kitchen, and stuffed them all into a large garbage bag. She dragged the bag across the loft to the fire escape window and threw the pillows four stories down to the Dumpster. She should have done that right away.

  She checked the chain on her door and went back to her pillowless couch.

  Lori woke up with a stiff neck, disoriented, and hungry. Midevening naps were not her norm. Neither was skipping dinner. It was almost ten o’clock, and as good as lunch had been, it was way too long ago. If she was going to work for another couple of hours she needed sustenance.

  She was glad her fridge was full of leftovers from Raoul’s. Lori piled a plate with helpings of roast chicken and olive salad and two slices of dill bread. She grabbed a sesame cookie from the jar on the counter on her way to the living room.

  This session called for her TV setup only. She planned just to review the latest Curry DVD so it would be fresh in her mind for tomorrow. She shifted a couple of pillows from her chairs to the couch and placed her dinner and a glass of white wine on the coffee table. She’d spend a few minutes reviewing the video and then take a break and watch the news or a Lifetime movie.

  Lori looked through the DVDs on her Currently Active shelf. She plucked CURRY II, the second of the Curry DVDs Amber had burned. The police still hadn’t returned all her videos. She pictured some rookie bleary-eyed going through boring outtakes.

  She opened the neon green jewel case and stared at the round label on the disk inside.

  Julia Roberts, her hair blond and in an upsweep, carrying a child, looked off to the side of the cover art.

  What?

  A DVD of the movie Erin Brockovich was in the case marked CURRY II: CFCS. Strange. How had this happened? Where was the CURRY II disk?

  A duh moment. She must have put the Curry DVD in the Erin Brockovich case she’d returned to the video store.

  She’d recently rented Erin. It was the kind of movie she wished she’d written—a little person bringing a big corporation to its knees. Like the old Paul Newman favorite The Verdict, but with even wider social consequences. She’d studied Erin and then returned it when she got her third late notice from Red Carpet Video. She hadn’t gotten around yet to buying her own copy.

  Now she wondered what was in the CURRY I case she’d given Gloria.

  You’d think the video store would have called her. Probably some kid, like chunky Eddie at Family Suites, logged it in without opening the case, just marking time at a minimum wage job.

  She picked up her landline and her address book and punched in the number for the video store.

  “Red Carpet.” After about ten rings, a voice as young as Eddie’s. At least they were still open and had an actual human answering.

  Lori told the clerk about leaving a personal DVD in the Erin Brockovich case.

  “Oh, yeah. We were just going to call you.”

  Right. “Can I come down now and switch them?”

  “Uh, no. We’re almost closing. We open at nine tomorrow.”

  “I’m just a couple of blocks away, and I really need to see that other DVD.”

  “Sorry. I’m all packed up here, and I got a date. And you know you’re gonna have to pay for the extra days.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lori said, and hung up. Fat chance that guy had a date.

  Not that she did, either. It had been a while, in fact. Too busy. She sighed loudly, puffing out her cheeks. More
likely just too lazy to try again. She’d been with Sean for so long she didn’t even know the dating protocol, as evidenced by her pitiful attempt with Craig.

  Lori thought of the box full of photos she had of Sean and of the two of them together. She couldn’t bring herself to toss them, but she didn’t display them, either. They were in the basement with other relics of her past. She pictured Sean in a Back Bay apartment now with—who knew?—some hotshot lawyer. At least Sean had never lived in this loft, so it was easier to move on.

  Well, no Curry footage, and certainly no date. The perfect excuse to watch a Lifetime movie. She had several in the bank on her DVR. She scrolled down the list. Kelli Martin and Tori Spelling in that cheerleader movie. Susan Lucci seducing her hunk of a contractor, with the sexy stubble on his cheeks. Nancy McKeon as a Mafia wife. Gail O’Grady leading three lives.

  Lori clicked on the Mafia movie. She cleaned her plate of the last shreds of chicken and pasta, then leaned back. She was ready for Julia’s brother, Eric Roberts, who always made a convincing bad guy.

  Thump! Creak!

  Lori snapped upright. The elevator. Passing the third floor. She pushed the mute button and tipped the glass of wine over putting the remote back on the table.

  Click. Click. The noise sounded louder than a welding torch.

  She sat still, listening.

  She remembered the unmarked and took a breath. They must know not to let Billy up—but would they be suspicious of an attractive, nicely dressed woman?

  Bzzzz. Bzzzz.

  She tightened her sweater around her and went to the peephole.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOR

  Ahat shop? I don’t think so,” I told Rose at breakfast in the café attached to our hotel.

  Matt and Rose had brought their outer clothing downstairs so they could leave after breakfast without going back to their rooms. It was the same at every table in the café—one chair per group was used exclusively to hold all the coats, scarves, hats, and gloves that were needed in the increasingly low temperatures outside. Although I’d planned to stay put for a while and use one of the computers at the back tables, I’d brought my outerwear, too. I tried to convince myself that it was not because I didn’t want to take a chance on being in the elevator alone again.

  Rose picked at a low-fat bran muffin. “Grace wants to show us the shop her mother opened up on her own years ago. It’s over on East Sixty-fourth, off Lexington. The place has been sold many times over since then, and they’ve added some premade things, but they still do custom millinery for special clients.”

  “That’s very interesting, Rose. I wish I could join you, but I have to do a little prep work for my trip to Curry Industries with Lori this afternoon.”

  Matt pretended to choke on a crumb. He and I should have been eating low-fat muffins, too. Instead Matt had a frosted lemon scone, and I was enjoying a thick slice of pumpkin bread with cream cheese frosting. A seasonal treat. Might as well have it while it was available, I told myself.

  Rose looked at Matt, smiled, and pointed at me. “You’d think I’d be used to the idea that she’d rather be in a welding shop than a hat shop.”

  “They both take a lot of creativity,” I said. A weak argument, one that made them both smirk.

  “You don’t see this kind of craft much anymore,” Rose said. I assumed she meant hatmaking and not joining two metals together at high temperatures. “Young people don’t even know what a milliner is.”

  “Are you planning to have a hat made for yourself?” Matt asked her.

  “I’m thinking of ordering one for MC for Christmas, to go with the scarves I bought. And maybe for Karla, too, as a surprise. They’d really be good for just about anyone.”

  I had a sudden insight into what Rose was getting at. “Not for me, Rose, okay?

  “Of course not.” She cleared her throat. “I’d never buy you a hat, Gloria. Matt, maybe, but not you.” Chuckles rippled through the air between the two of them. “Where are you going this morning? Want to meet us for lunch in Little Italy?”

  “I have another cop date,” Matt said.

  Lori and I were due at Curry’s at two o’clock. I could have an early lunch with my friend to make up for rejecting her hat shop—and her hat.

  “I could meet you at, say, eleven thirty?”

  “Grace likes the more upscale places down there,” Rose said.

  “I can do upscale.”

  Another choking sound from Matt.

  “Good,” Rose said. “I’ll call you on your cell and tell you the address once we pick a spot.”

  Rose wrapped herself in her fashionable winter outerwear and went off to meet Grace. Matt stood and got ready to head in the opposite direction to a precinct on the West Side where he’d been invited to see the latest in gun technology.

  “They call it a shot spotter,” he said. “It does this computer calculation, and it can tell you almost exactly where the gun was located when the shot was fired. Some kind of automated triangulation, like figuring out where a telephone call came from.”

  It sounded a lot better than a hat shop.

  “I’m glad you met so many nice people at the conference. I’ll bet you could spend a week just taking them up on invitations to visit their squads.”

  “You mean you’re glad I have enough to keep me busy.”

  I stirred my foam. “Well, that, too.”

  Rose had her felt and ribbons. Matt had his shot spotter. I had my DVD on chlorofluorocarbons.

  New York had something for everyone.

  I took a seat at a new table at the back of the shop and slipped the Curry disk into the DVD drive on one of the PCs available for a small hourly fee.

  I’d read through the Curry brochures Lori gave me and learned that the company made refrigeration products for large restaurants and supermarkets and for other commercial and industrial uses. Their literature contained detailed descriptions and photographs of enormous coolers and freezers and entire refrigerated buildings and vehicles. In case I’d ever need such information, a separate illustrated booklet gave me tips on icing problems in walk-in freezers.

  The DVD was disappointing. Most of the content comprised head-shots of administrators answering standard questions with stock answers. What did I expect from a company that made refrigerators? Nothing fascinating like cyclotrons or atomic force microscopes or grating spectrometers.

  A young man at the computer station next to me in the bakery was watching an animated movie featuring creatures wearing headpieces that reminded me of welding helmets. Even his video looked more interesting than my upright freezer displays.

  I turned back to my screen. Off camera, Amber asked questions of a group of men in suits and ties. It was unnerving to hear her soft, intelligent voice. I couldn’t help picturing her in the only position I’d ever seen her in—dying at my feet. I had a hard time imagining her gentle intonations extorting money from devastated clients. Here, her tones were quiet and smooth, meant to evoke confidence and trust from her subjects. Not that it worked. The Curry subjects gave her the party line anyway.

  “Do you believe that additional UV exposure due to ozone depletion will eventually be significantly harmful to humans?” Amber asked. She sounded as though she were reading from a script. I guessed that Lori had written it. The answers were equally scripted. (No, the data showing the connection is weak, and such claims are premature was the bottom line after three men spoke.)

  Hmmm. I thought I’d read that the FDA found evidence linking sun exposure to skin cancer, with twice as many melanoma-caused deaths in lower latitudes, closer to the equator.

  “Do you think the ozone depletion we’ve already measured is significant enough to warrant government regulations prohibiting CFCs?” (No, the changes are too small to be concerned about, said one executive after another.)

  Hmmm. I knew that an infinitesimal amount of CFCs could deplete an enormous amount of ozone. Besides that, there were countless examples in science and mathematics to in
dicate that even a small change made to an apparently stable system could alter the system radically.

  Would the bureaucratic answers have anything to do with the estimated 130 billion dollars it would take to refit industrial equipment across the country?

  I was getting ready for my Curry meeting, all right, but not in a way that put me in a good mood.

  I scanned past the boardroom scene to see if there was anything more riveting in later chapters on the disk. I played the DVD at regular speed now and then to hear bits from employees in work clothes on the plant floor.

  A refrigeration and air-conditioning mechanic declared, “This is a cool career.”

  Cute.

  A graduate of the New England Institute of Technology in Rhode Island explained his duties as “complex.” “We have to read blueprints and do all the cutting and welding,” he said.

  I paused to learn the difference between reach-ins (refrigerators with pull-out trays, more like pizza ovens I’d seen) and roll-ins (refrigerators with space to wheel in an entire rack of many shelves).

  “Five years ago I used to repair ice machines,” another worker said. “Now I have my degree and I design them.”

  Curry seemed to have many happy workers.

  I thought I’d inadvertently clicked on another program when a mortuary prep room appeared on the screen, but evidently mortuary coolers were among Curry’s products. I had a flashback to my former residence above the Galigani funeral home and the noises and smells of its basement prep room.

  “Our designs store up to six bodies,” a worker said. He stood in front of a large box set on casters. “The unit is ready for the funeral home to put into use immediately. A team of funeral directors assisted us in the development of this product line.”