Maybe they wanted to humor me, but once we'd ordered our extra-large combination pizza and drinks, Rose and Peter asked me to tell them about the murder victim, Eric Bensen.
"Did you know him personally?" Peter asked.
I nodded and took a breath. I realized I hadn't fully absorbed the fact of Eric's death.
"He was in California at the Berkeley lab for about a year," I said. "It was a kind of internship, to learn supercomputer programming techniques that he could apply to the equations for his hydrogen research back here. Two other local physicists were with him. We had mutual friends who introduced us because we're all from this area and we formed a dinner group that included Eric and his wife."
For some reason, I left out details about Eric's wife, Janice Bensen, and her incessant whining. When Janice was around, we were all embarrassed for Eric. She was tired of being poor, she'd remind us, working at a dead-end clerical job while waiting for Eric to finish his degree.
"My biological clock is ticking," Janice said often, as we tried to enjoy world-class Berkeley and San Francisco seafood restaurants. "I don't see why we can't move back to Revere and be near our families."
In spite of my agreement with Rose and Peter, I made another attempt to explain what was so different about the hydrogen experiments Eric had worked on. After all, they did ask what I knew about Eric. This time they were more patient. Maybe it was the yeasty smell of thick-crust pizza dough and the promise of mushrooms, anchovies, and extra cheese, plus Michelob on tap. I noticed Peter didn't order iced tea.
I spread a napkin on the scratched red Formica tabletop and drew a long narrow rectangle, working around the little map of Italy in the corner and being careful not to tear the thin paper. I added a pointed section to one end of the rectangle, and a placed a round target next to it.
"Just like a regular gun and target," I said, my fingers working to add detail to the drawing. "Except in this case the gun is a sixty-foot long compression chamber and the target is liquid hydrogen. After a build-up of pressure, the shock wave from the gun is enough to turn the hydrogen target into a metal."
I sketched in a piston, and some arrows to show the direction of the shock waves, then sat back, admiring my art, once again filled with awe at the wonders of technology.
"For a fraction of a second the hydrogen becomes metallic and conducts electricity with almost no resistance—superconductivity. Very exciting."
Apparently my companions didn't experience this exhilaration. Our waitress, who also looked like a member of my high school class, had delivered our pizza and Peter was forcing the slices into neat triangles and arranging them on The Fenway's heavy white plates.
"A fraction of a second," Rose said, her voice rising above Julius La Rosa's. "That's worth making a fuss over?"
"I still don't get how it could be connected to a murder," Peter said.
I already had a theory about that, but I wasn't sure I wanted to share it. My theory involved thinking bad things about physicists, something I was always reluctant to do. There were shrines in my heart to Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Marie Curie. I didn't want to clutter my mind with anything that implied that scientists of today were less than perfect.
I finally decided that Rose and Peter could be trusted, and besides, I needed to get my thoughts out in the open so I could analyze them better. I rationalized that the noise from the jukebox would shield our conversation from the general public that crowded the pizza parlor.
"There's a lot of money involved," I said, "as well as careers and reputations on the line. Just before he left California to come back here, Eric hinted that there might be something wrong with the data his team submitted to an important journal. I know his mentor and colleagues were upset that Eric wanted to look into some discrepancy before they published their data."
As I talked, an image of the evening came back to me—Eric getting our attention with loud talk about data tampering, deception, and fraud. We were at a Saint Patrick's Day party thrown by one of his colleagues, Jim Guffy, and I had a vague memory of Eric's mentor, Ralph Leder, rushing to Eric's side and ushering him out of the room.
"I thought scientists were supposed to be objective and above all that," Rose said. "Are you sure you're not talking about lawyers?" From Rose, the mother-in-law of a lawyer whom she loved, this comment had a light-hearted ring.
"What happened to our science-free pizza?" Peter asked, pulling crumbs from his jacket and placing them in a neat pile on his plate. "Tell us about your life in California."
As hard as I tried, I couldn't keep the conversation on safe science instead of drifting to more personal matters. Peter was pushing hard, and not just with his long legs that I kept bumping into under The Fenway's table.
"Why did you run away and stay away all these years, Gloria?" he asked.
"I don't think of it as running away. I went to the West Coast to study physics."
"As if there aren't places to study physics in Boston."
"I needed a change."
"Well, that's called running away."
"If that's how you see it. I don't," I said, hoping my voice carried more conviction than I felt. Whether I'd run away or not was one of the questions I'd come back to answer, but not in this environment, and not at Peter's will.
Rose was twisting her napkin, her eyes darting from me to Peter as if she were a spectator at a tense volleyball game. I knew she could tell I wasn't having a good time. Rose had eaten only one slice of pizza, while I'd had three and contemplated a fourth as I became more and more uncomfortable with Peter's inquisition. Another clue about why there was such a huge difference in weight between Rose and me.
After a couple more rounds of questions without answers—why had I sneaked back to see my father when he was dying and not contacted anyone except Rose and Frank, who buried him? why did I finally leave California and come 'home?' was I back for good?—I was happy to see our venerable waitress hovering over us with a pitcher of dark beer in one hand and our check in the other, using her penciled-in eyebrows to ask which we wanted.
With a passing glance at the crumbs on our dented tray and a quick check of the plates in front of Rose and Peter, I said, "We'll take the tab."
I looked across the table at Peter, saw the surprised look on his face and realized that feminism had left him behind. I was sure that the last time I had pizza with him, he called the shots and paid the bill. Probably even held my coat for me. I was beginning to think that two or three hours with Peter every thirty years were enough.
I pulled my wallet out of my purse. "My treat," I said.
CHAPTER 3
Anxious to get back to my apartment and check my answering machine for a message from Sergeant Matt Gennaro, I managed to leave no doubt about my lack of interest in nightcaps. I dropped my friends at the curb and suggested that Peter drive Rose to her home across town.
"I'm beat," I said, with as loud a sigh as I could muster after three-and-a-half slices of pizza. Rose had weighed in at one-and-a-half slices.
Peter frowned as he climbed out of my spacious back seat, then leaned into my window and gave me a kiss, something halfway between the friend and the lover varieties. I found myself leaning towards the friend variety and responded accordingly. It hadn't taken me long to remember why we'd broken up in the first place.
"I'll call you, Gloria," Peter said. "It's not going to be another thirty years."
I smiled and let him have the last word for the moment.
I pulled in to the enormous mortuary garage, parked my car next to one of the Galigani hearses, and headed up the inside stairs to my apartment, passing the main funeral parlor on the first floor. Although there was no body laid out that evening, the air was heavy with left over flower smells. I'd have sworn that I also smelled formaldehyde and Silktex, Frank's standard anticoagulant, but figured it was my imagination.
"The prep room is very well ventilated, following O.S.H.A. standards," Frank had assured me. "And we use the latest in low
-fuming chemicals."
A graduate of the New England Institute of Mortuary Science, Frank was as proud as any scientist would be of his policy of keeping up with the changing technology in his field. Although he had outside assistants and had successfully groomed his first-born son, Robert, to follow in his footsteps, Frank participated in every aspect of his undertaking business, from comforting bereaved families to performing an occasional embalming.
Even empty, funeral parlor rooms always seemed quieter to me than other spaces, as if the dead were able to absorb all natural background noise. Galigani's was on a busy side street, but once inside, it felt like what I imagined the interior of a vacuum tube to be like.
The second floor offices of Galigani's, at the top of a beautiful old stairway with a mahogany banister, were visible from the street-level foyer. Arranged symmetrically around the landing were two rooms where Rose and her assistant, Martha, worked during the day, in charge of correspondence, bookkeeping, and general management of the business. Frank had a smaller first-floor office between the main parlor and the casket showroom.
My apartment was on the third floor, a one-bedroom flat, with a small kitchen and good-sized living room, originally meant for a resident caretaker in the days before alarm systems. Except for two matching pale blue glide rockers, I'd given my furniture to a women's shelter in Berkeley, and started over in Revere with a few new pieces of modern design, in grays and blues to match the rockers.
Above me at Galigani's was an attic where Rose and Frank had been storing some of my belongings for the last thirty years. I'd planned to make regular trips up there to sort through my cartons, but hadn't made much headway in four months. Or in thirty years, for that matter.
Entering my apartment, I went immediately to the answering machine and pushed the button. Unlike Peter, I had all the conveniences of twentieth century technology that I could afford, from a top-of-the-line computer system and cordless phone to an electronic Rolodex file that I carried in my purse.
Matt Gennaro's hoped-for message was there and I smiled as I listened to his low, scratchy voice.
"I was just about to call you," he said. "I'd like to talk about the possibility of having your help with a new investigation. I'm wondering if you'll be able to meet me for lunch tomorrow. Say, Russo's on Broadway at 12:30. I'll look for you there unless I hear otherwise."
"Yes," I said out loud to my empty rooms, tossing my head back like a rookie cop snapping to attention.
~~~~
Two for one. A job and a date. I decided to wait until morning to call the Police Department. I knew from my previous experience working with him that Matt Gennaro's regular routine was to have a breakfast of black coffee and a bagel at his desk at about eight o'clock, his "form-filling-out time," he called it.
It was the first time since hearing about Eric Bensen's death that I was alone and able to absorb the fact that someone I knew had been murdered. I looked out my window, amazed at the calmness of the October evening, although I'd been out in it only a few minutes earlier. I looked carefully into the dark night and wouldn't have been surprised if a bolt of lightning shot across the cloudless sky to denounce the unnatural event that had taken place on Charger Street.
I put on a CD of piano music and settled in one of my rockers with the newspaper, a notebook, and pencil, but before I looked at them I rocked back and forth letting Mozart's sonatas calm my mind. Although we hadn't been close, Eric was a friend and a colleague at the beginning of a promising career, and I hated the idea that he'd been the victim of violence.
I opened the newspaper and read the brief account. A clear case of murder, according to the police.
The victim was a thirty-one year old physics graduate student, the reporter noted. Three shots had been fired from a distance into his upper body, some time between midnight and four in the morning on Tuesday. He was found by a security guard in his lab at the northern edge of Revere on Charger Street, in a building that was an off-campus annex to the Physics Department of Massachusetts University. No sign of struggle. Nothing missing as far as anyone could tell. The lab had a great deal of expensive equipment, the article said, but nothing very portable or valuable for trading on the street. Physics Department officials hadn't had a chance to examine the room closely to see if small items were missing.
I checked the digital clock on my desk. Nine forty-five P. M., six forty-five in California. I usually talked to my good friend Elaine Cody on weekends, but I knew she'd want to hear about Eric's murder as soon as possible. I punched in her Berkeley phone number and reached her immediately.
"Gloria," she said. "I was just going to call you. What happened to Eric Bensen? I heard just the briefest snippet on my car radio driving home."
I told Elaine all I knew about the murder and offered to make arrangements for flowers for Eric. Across the miles I pictured Elaine in a pleated skirt, expensive sweater, and pearls. With her classic preppy wardrobe and shoulder-length hair, blonde in her youth, Elaine had earned the nickname "Radcliffe." Unlike most Californians, she always dressed up for her work as a technical writer at our lab.
"I don't believe in clothes that have no buttons or zippers," she'd say as we observed the parade of lab employees arriving for work in sweat suits in the winter and cut-offs and T-shirts in the summer.
"Are you going to work on the murder case?" Elaine asked.
"I don't know yet. I hope so."
"Be careful, Gloria."
I laughed at the thought that there might be danger connected to my police work.
"I'm only a consultant," I said. "I work with pencil and paper, no guns or gangs."
"Still," Elaine said. "Be careful. When are you coming out? You said after the summer."
"Maybe before Christmas."
"I miss you."
"I miss you, too."
We hung up, both knowing that I had no intention of going to the West Coast before the holidays. I felt I needed at least one stable year in my new home to determine which coast I wanted to spend the next thirty years on.
Elaine had visited me in Revere, the first of the rash of visitors I'd had during my first two months back. As I took her and other California friends to Boston's fine museums and for walks around the Freedom Trail, I felt like a tourist myself, a feeling I was trying to get over. Every time I went to Logan Airport to pick up or deliver a guest, I wondered if I was the one who should be getting on the plane. Invariably during my weekly phone conversations with Elaine, she told me about a wedding or birthday party that I wished I could have attended—very distracting in terms of my ability to feel like a New England native again.
"If you got through the hot sticky summer, you're a native," Rose had told me on Labor Day, not without self-interest.
Although I knew I was in a minority, for me, the gray humid air was a welcome relief from the stark sunlight of California that required polarizing lenses nearly every day of the year.
I called a few other people in Berkeley who knew Eric at least as well as I did, and collected names for flowers. Then I slid my notepad on top of the folded newspaper and started to organize my thoughts. Not that I'd been hired for detective work. I was simply available to explain any science that might be relevant to the circumstances of the crime. But I saw only a thin line between science and police investigative work.
Eric's mentor, Doctor Ralph Leder, was much older than Eric, probably in his late fifties. I'd met him only three or four times when he visited Eric in California. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Midwesterner, with thick blond and gray hair and a large square face, his slow movements in sharp contrast to his quick mind. He was well published and respected, but he'd made it obvious that he was counting on the gas gun experiments for further recognition in his field. I remembered a talk Leder gave to our group in California in the spring, following the news releases in the popular press. His ambitions filled the overhead screen in the large conference room:
"Our work in metallic hydrogen will push th
e envelope in understanding the composition of Jupiter. It will secure our place in the development of superconductivity for commercial use and put us out front in the transfer of technology to American industry."
He'd left off "bring us fame and fortune," but the message was clear. I couldn't help thinking that with so much money at stake, if Leder thought Eric was going to expose any shady activities on the part of the research team, he might be unhappy enough to kill him. I put four stars next to Leder's name, my equivalent of "most likely suspect."
Besides Leder and Eric, two other Revere-based physicists worked on the journal article that was to catapult the hydrogen research team to award-winning status—Connie Provenza and Jim Guffy, post-docs who were stretching their funds and their dissertation research into one more year after receiving their doctoral degrees. Like Eric, they'd spent most of the year in California and had been back in the Boston area slightly longer than I had, arriving some time in late May.
Connie Provenza had just turned thirty and lived in Chelsea, a city bordering Revere on the south, with her boyfriend Bill Gordon, a third year law student at Boston's Northeastern University. Connie, the main theorist in the group, seemed to me very ambitious, often talking about breaking through the glass ceiling. Her announced plans were to capitalize on the success of the hydrogen experiments, get a quick MBA, and head for corporate America. Bright and attractive, one of the main difficulties of her present life seemed to be warding off the advances of Ralph Leder, who was also her mentor.
In deference to her gender, which she would not like, I gave Connie only three stars, for "possible suspect."
Jim Guffy was a little younger than Connie, an Irish-American Catholic, unmarried, and as conservative as if he'd never heard of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of Vatican II. Jim had gone unmoved by the heated debates about the old and new Catholicism. Jim's contribution to the research team was his skill as an experimentalist. Thoroughly involved with the hardware, Jim could kludge together a high-voltage power supply or a digital temperature probe in a matter of hours.
The Hydrogen Murder (The Periodic Table Series) Page 2
