The Nitrogen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  I tapped my steering wheel, deciding on my next step. Matt was unavailable, unless I wanted to call his cell phone and interrupt his meeting with Dana and Russell at the Berkeley PD. Also, I wanted more evidence. More accurately, some evidence that Phil was at Patel’s. If I’d thought to grab the pizza box, I might have been able to persuade Russell to dust for fingerprints. As a government employee at BUL, Phil’s prints would be on file. So would mine, I realized, a match for those on the gate and the garbage cans of 127 Woodland Road.

  I had one other idea.

  I picked up my phone, hit 411 for information, and then punched in the number I was given.

  “Giulio’s,” said an upbeat, young, female voice.

  I smiled; I’d been right about the cheerleader. “Oh, hi. Are you the one who’s nice enough to arrange for my husband’s pizza to be left outside the door?”

  “Um. Yeah, is this Mrs. Boyle?”

  Ha. Boyle’s Law, a key topic in every freshman chemistry class. I had to give Phil points for keeping his sense of humor in a crisis. He’d taken the name of a seventeenth-century chemist credited with formulating the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas.

  I almost hung up then, having assured myself the Boyle connection was no coincidence, but Courtney, or Ashley, or whoever was on the other end of the line seemed too sweet to leave hanging.

  “Yes, this is Mrs. Boyle. Thanks for being so accommodating,” I said.

  “Hey, no prob. Your husband says he doesn’t want the doorbell to wake the kids.”

  “He’s a doll,” I said. “And by the way, could you please put anchovies on the next order? He always forgets to ask.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When my cell phone rang, it woke me from a fantasy world where I tell the police where to find Phil Chambers; they arrest him for the murder of Lokesh Patel (co-spy, who wanted to turn Phil in for revealing secrets of a new nitrogen-based weapon) and Tanisha Hall (wrong place, wrong time); and at last my best West Coast friend, Elaine Cody, thanks me for saving her from marrying a traitor to the country.

  “I have some news,” Matt said.

  “Me, too.” I leaned back and enjoyed the sounds of seagulls, carried on a rejuvenating breeze that flowed through the open windows of Elaine’s car. Not quite Revere Beach, though. For crashing surf I’d have to drive to San Francisco.

  “Let’s meet somewhere,” Matt said.

  “Fine. Where’s Dana?”

  “They’re holding her a little longer.”

  I gasped and sat up straight. “She’s arrested?” My fault. I’d failed to account for Phil’s daughter in my dream world, where everything works out fine.

  “No. I’m pretty confident they won’t arrest her.” Matt sounded tired, and I felt a pang of concern that he was overstressed. “They’re checking out her statement. Anyway, I’m taking her Jeep until they’re ready to release her.”

  “Is that your news?”

  “No.”

  “I’m at the marina, in Elaine’s car.”

  “Is that your news?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t clear why Matt and I decided not to share our biggest news cell phone to cell phone, since they were better than landlines, as far as not being able to trace calls or set bugs. I’d brought my Galileo book and had read only a few pages before I saw Matt pull up in Dana’s Jeep. He parked it a few slots away and joined me in Elaine’s car.

  “Want to walk on the pier?”

  I pointed to my ankle. “Not today. I’m a little lame right now.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I just … tripped.”

  Matt clicked his tongue, willing to move on, but I knew he’d come back to it.

  It couldn’t have been a more beautiful setting, in spite of our agenda. It was five-thirty still light out, but the promise of a magnificent sunset was ahead of us, with the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline as backdrop.

  I wished we were on vacation.

  “I know where Phil is,” I said.

  “So do I,” Matt said. “You first.” Our version of cop banter, the kind that Matt claimed was necessary to survive day after day of stressful, life-and-death situations.

  “I saw him,” I said. Meaning, I saw evidence of him. The way scientists say they see atoms.

  Matt raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “He’s hiding out at Lokesh Patel’s home in the Claremont district. Remember the address was on Patel’s PDA? Well, I—” Oops. I hadn’t meant to be quite so open about my adventure in snooping. I swallowed. “He’s there, is what I’m telling you.”

  “Am I going to be upset about how you know this?”

  I gave him a special, distracting smile. My sweetheart. “Not too much.”

  “Is that how you hurt your ankle?”

  “Where do you think he is?” I asked. Using Matt’s own technique, answering one question with another. Not bad.

  “Russell evidently took me more seriously than I thought the other day, and he did some checking on Phil. Pretty impressive, without a formal report. A Dr. Philip Chambers booked and boarded a flight to Hawaii on Monday night.”

  I stopped in my mental tracks. “That can’t be. Are they sure?”

  Matt treated it as a rhetorical question.

  Elaine’s cold-feet theory came to my mind: Phil got wedding jitters, clutched at the last minute, and bailed. My spy theory wasn’t shot to pieces yet, however. I wondered if the mainland had extradition reciprocity with the Hawaiian Islands. Probably, since Hawaii was a state, I reminded myself. I’d been to Maui a couple of times, and to Oahu to tour Pearl Harbor, and while there I often forgot that I was still in the United States.

  “What if whoever Phil works for—” I started.

  “Dorman Industries.”

  “I mean his … handler,” I said. “Like the KGB. What if they faked his travel?”

  “The KGB is defunct.”

  “You know what I mean.” I took a breath and formulated a plan. “I have an idea,” I said.

  I dug my cell phone out of my purse and hit Patel’s phone number. An answering machine picked up immediately.

  “You’ve reached 510-555-9712. Please leave a message.” A nondescript utility-generated voice.

  “This is a message for Robert Boyle,” I said. “Please call Galileo on his cell phone. You have the number.”

  Matt threw up his hands. He didn’t say anything, but I heard, Amateurs!

  I knew Elaine would be wondering where I’d taken her car, though she was nice enough not to probe when I called her.

  “We’re picking up dinner,” I told her. “And we’re cooking for you.”

  “Thanks. I guess I haven’t been a very good hostess.”

  “Not true, Elaine. Just have the coffee ready.”

  I knew Elaine would have told me immediately if she had any news of Phil. Evidently Russell had charged Matt with updating Elaine on the whereabouts of her fiance. For me, I was getting to be a pro at withholding information from my friend. On the phone with her, I didn’t tell her that I was with Matt, that Russell had allegedly tracked Phil to Hawaii, or that I thought I’d found traces of Phil at Patel’s house. My evidence should also have an “allegedly” tacked on, I admitted.

  I wondered which reality would be more upsetting to Elaine—that her fiancé had fled to Hawaii, or that he was on a fast-food diet in hiding a couple of miles away.

  My ankle was throbbing, and the bottle of aspirin I kept in my purse was empty. I needed a painkiller and a bandage. I slipped into the downstairs bathroom, minimizing my limp, hoping to find a first aid kit. Elaine didn’t fail me. There was a small white box with a red cross on the cover in the bottom drawer, and aspirin in her updated medicine cabinet. Elaine had had the downstairs bathroom remodeled; the new cabinet featured extrawide glass shelves and lit up when you opened the door, like a minirefrigerator. No rust marks on metal shelves, as in our old Fernwood Avenue cabinet.

&nb
sp; It took about ten minutes for my self-medication and self-treatment.

  Hooray for pants, I thought, happy that my trouser leg covered the bandage. All I had to do was be careful not to limp and hope Elaine wouldn’t notice that her first aid kit was short about two feet of adhesive bandage. If it came to that, I was prepared with a story about walking on the pier and tripping over a bucket of bait.

  I’d persuaded Matt to at least wait until we’d served a decent meal before breaking our news. Matt and I both had enough reserve weight to carry us through the summer, but I was concerned about Elaine and Dana, who looked as though they’d lost several pounds right before my eyes in less than a week.

  The table was set, the eggplant parmigiana cooked and ready, and Dana was still not back. We kept it warm, hoping Dana would call soon and not be receiving takeout at the Berkeley PD. Matt played down her absence with Elaine.

  “It’s routine,” he said. “They’ll want to check out her story.”

  “Her story about what?” Elaine seemed to be running out of patience. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Dana, or someone, indicated there were drugs involved in the killing of her partner. That’s number one. Second, drug paraphernalia was found on Tanisha’s body—”

  “Rolling papers,” Elaine said, waving her hand. “I might even have some around here.”

  I doubted it.

  “Third,” Matt said, continuing as if there’d been no interruption, “stolen goods were found in her partner’s residence.”

  “It seems like busywork to me,” Elaine said.

  Matt raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in what we might have construed as agreement.

  Elaine had put on a CD of classical piano, a little too tinkly for me, but I was not a great fan of classical music except for Italian opera, the more tragic, the better. Either that or Perry Como. Still, the piano notes filled the tense silence as we waited for Dana to call for a pickup. During one soft interlude, Elaine leaned forward from her place on the couch.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asked. She lowered her head and seemed to steel herself against an unwelcome answer. She ran her hands through her hair, starting at her ears and ending with both sets of fingers at her temples.

  I’d been keeping track of Elaine’s emotional temperature this week. I’d watched her go from EXCITEDLY HAPPY (I envisioned such a check box on a questionnaire) over her wedding and our arrival in town to ANGRY with me for trying to vet her fiancé. Since Phil’s disappearance, she’d kept a NERVOUS BUT STEADY attitude of waiting. Now I thought I was seeing another milestone, where HYSTERIA might step in at any moment.

  “Keeping something from you?” I asked.

  RRRing.

  How lucky can you be? I thought. I grabbed my cell phone from the charger and punched it on.

  “Hey, Auntie Glo.” The voice of young William Galigani, Robert’s son, representing the newest generation to call me aunt. “I played around with that PDA Mom gave me. Dad was kind of stuck.”

  “Thanks, William. I really appreciate this. I know it’s past your bedtime.”

  “I don’t have a bedtime anymore, remember? This was fun. And it got me out of taking out the trash.”

  Rose’s usual good negotiating skills at work. “I’m glad there was some reward for you.”

  “I’d have done it anyway, but Grandma doesn’t have to know that.”

  I was sure she already did. “So, did you find anything interesting?” I thought a moment later how William, a sophomore at Revere High, would have a very different “interesting” list than I did.

  “I’m just starting playing around, but I can get a few things right away. There’s a lot of names in an address book.” There are a lot of names, I wanted to say, but William was doing me a great favor and could be allowed a minor slip in grammar. “It’s running Windows, so I can download it into my computer and send that to you.”

  “Perfect. Let me give you the e-mail address here.”

  “My grandma has it.” Here William laughed. It sounded like And a lot of good it does her. “Then there are some things in the Notes section, but they’re written by hand and I can’t make out most of it.” William made handwriting sound like a prehistoric pastime, and in his world, it was probably rare. I pictured a laptop at every desk in his homeroom and USB ports where there used to be inkwells.

  “Can you e-mail the notes, too?”

  “Done. I’ll keep at it, okay, and I’ll call if I find anything else. I might have to charge it, but it’s okay because me and my friend figured out where to get the right cradle.”

  “You’re terrific, William.” My friend and I, I said to myself. “Anything I can bring you from California?”

  “A Forty-Niners cap.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding, Aunt Glo. How about a T-shirt from the physics department at Cal?”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  I sat at Elaine’s computer, which was becoming as familiar to me as my own. I scrolled through subject lines that were clearly junk mail. Shouldn’t it be common knowledge in the world of e-marketing that Elaine Cody had lived in this house more than thirty years and no longer had a mortgage? And that she had no interest in discount clothing or hot teen ch*&^ks?

  There was nothing yet from William Galigani.

  I got up to stretch and paced the small office. Elaine’s wedding dress hung on the outside, on a hook attached to the closet. If an outfit could look forlorn, this was it. The lovely cream-colored fabric hung loosely on the hanger, as if its owner had shrunk to a skeleton. The dress was what we used to call tea length, the skirt straight, the bodice sparkling with delicate crystals and pearls stitched into a design that reminded me of graph paper.

  I wondered if Elaine had done anything about alerting her wedding staff that the groom was missing. She hadn’t mentioned doing so, but I imagined that caterers, photographers, and other wedding vendors needed some notice of change or cancellation. Was there an emergency backup plan, such as all Californians were expected to have for earthquake readiness? I decided not to ask.

  I walked to the windows for a glimpse of what was left of the glorious sunset. One window looked down on Elaine’s driveway. Garages and driveways were a novelty in the crowded residential areas of Berkeley; Elaine always claimed she had one of only six decent driveways in the whole city, long enough for two cars and wide enough to allow flower beds on both sides. Her garage, on the other hand, was built for a Volkswagen bug and housed only her gardening tools, old files, and items destined for charitable donation.

  Something seemed off this evening. Elaine’s Saab was as far to the front as possible. I’d driven way in to make room for Matt to pull Dana’s Jeep in behind me and clear the sidewalk comfortably. But where was Dana’s Jeep? Maybe I’d been distracted and didn’t notice that he parked on the street instead.

  I called down the stairs. “Matt, where did you park the Jeep?”

  “It’s in the driveway, right behind the Saab.”

  Not anymore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dana sat in the hot, crappy interview room in one of the Berkeley PD’s substations. She took in the peeling paint, the rust spots on the ceiling, and furniture that was a lot worse than in most of the homeless shelters she’d seen.

  Did they purposely not have air-conditioning in police stations? Is this what they meant by sweating a confession out of a suspect? At this point she was almost ready to confess to something, as long as the jail cell was cool.

  Nobody had told her exactly why she was sitting here, waiting. She assumed they were searching her house. Great. Another household was being upset. She wondered if Jen or Robin would be home. She imagined Jen, who didn’t do well under stress, curled up on the overstuffed floral chair Elaine had given them. Jen would be whimpering about how she had homework to do and was going to flunk her summer class in the Age of Enlightenment if the cops upset her papers and lost her place in her textbooks. Robin
, on the other hand, would probably scare the shit out of the cops.

  Dana needed a shower. She needed to change her clothes. Mostly, she needed a smoke. The thought of her stash at home unnerved her. Scenes from all her favorite cop shows came to mind. In nearly every episode, suspects waited in shabby rooms while TV detectives Sipowicz and Clark, or Briscoe and Green, or Benson and Stabler, went out and searched their houses. If the Berkeley cops were searching her house now, how thorough would they be?

  Neither Jen nor Robin knew where Dana kept her little Baggie, but the police might think they did and grill them, too. She didn’t have much left of her latest bag. Would they find it, tucked under the top tray of her jewelry box? It wasn’t enough to send her to jail, but a citation and a fine would not look good on her med school apps. And what if whoever changed her incident report got into her room and planted drugs, the way they’d planted the stolen supplies in Tanisha’s house?

  The crime of “possession” didn’t seem to apply to her. The term should be reserved for somebody with kilos of coke or a truckload of crack, not for the casual user she considered herself and Tanisha to be. It was practically medicinal, she and Tanisha had decided, except that to be legal they’d have needed the approval of a doctor.

  “The job make us sick,” Tanisha had said, using her street grammar as she did whenever she was joking. Dana felt a great sense of loss and renewed her resolve to make things right with Tanisha’s mother. She’d visit Marne as soon as she got out of this pit.

  Dana couldn’t believe the questions they’d asked her.

  “Who’s your dealer?” some guy in a tacky polyester suit had demanded, his face contorted. As if she were connected to some drug lord in East Oakland. Save the loathing for the hardened criminals, Dana wanted to tell him. She was totally sure her friend Sergeant Matt Gennaro wouldn’t use these tactics.