by Lois Winston
As far as I could tell, there were no goodbyes.
TWELVE
Walking down the hall toward Matt’s office I realized I still hadn’t looked at the computer printout he’d given me. That’s what I should have been doing instead of playing in the attic, I told myself, remembering what it was like to be behind in my homework.
Matt had on either the same dark blue suit I’d seen him in all week, or its twin. I wondered who bought his ties, all conservative stripes in blues and browns.
“I have a few updates,” he said, alerting me to the reason I was there. “First, we talked to Leder’s wife. We found out she takes sleeping pills occasionally and can’t be completely sure she didn’t take one on Monday night. So that shakes his alibi a little.”
So much for spousal loyalty, I thought, and wondered if Mrs. Leder, whom I’d never met, was looking for a way to get even with her flirting husband. I took notes as Matt continued, reading from the top sheet of a thick file on his desk.
“The Bensens had life insurance, $100,000 on each of them, payable to the other.”
“Not exactly a fortune these days,” I said.
“No, but more than an average secretary like Janice sees in a lump sum very often. Here’s what makes it more interesting. We tracked down a phone number on Eric’s calendar—turns out he had a meeting scheduled with a divorce lawyer next week.”
I shot Matt an aha look, but his gaze had wandered to the doorway as we heard an eruption of loud noises. Within a minute Matt’s office was filled with balloons, a large sheet cake, and about a dozen adults tooting on multi-colored paper horns. I was in the middle of Matt’s birthday party.
“Surprise!”
“Happy Birthday!”
“Party time!”
Pam, the department secretary, slipped a giant card onto the notebook on my lap and pointed to a place for me to sign. I took the red felt-tip pen she offered and wrote ‘Gloria Lamerino’ in what I hoped was festive script. Pam did her best to introduce me to the reveling crowd while she arranged cups on a tray and poured cola from a giant plastic soft drink bottle.
Matt gave me a helpless look as a tall young policewoman led a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and then read from a Libra horoscope card—classy, cool, and even-tempered, always in balance, but now’s the time to throw back your shoulders and have a ball.
Matt looked less uncomfortable than I would have been in the same circumstances.
“Let’s cut the cake and get rid of that number,” he said. Mimicking an evil grin, he picked up a white plastic knife and cut into the center of the cake, slashing through the outline of a speed limit sign with the numbers 55 in black and white icing. I did a quick calculation. He was younger by eight months. Probably a year behind me in school. Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t meet in high school, I thought, when the age barrier would have been an issue. Not that it would have been likely since Matt had gone to Everett High, three or four miles away. In the days before every teenager had a car, we might as well have been across the country from each other.
Matt’s birthday cake tasted like a discount supermarket special, but that didn’t keep me from eating every crumb on my little white paper plate. The party was over almost as quickly as it had begun and Matt and I were left with the Mylar decorations and a wastebasket overflowing with crumpled napkins and dripping cups. The remains of the cake had been whisked away to the lounge and I felt like the survivor of a heavy but benign windstorm that left the air with the over-sweet smell of cheap frosting.
Matt pinched his nose where his glasses rested, and laughed.
“Wasn’t that fun?”
“I’m glad I was invited.”
“I’m glad you were, too.”
I liked the way he said that. An image of Rose passed before my eyes and I almost invited Matt to dinner, picturing the four of us around Rose’s elegant candlelit dining room table. I let the feeling pass.
“Wonderful cake,” I said instead, realizing that Rose would have been ashamed of me. Matt laughed again and cleared his throat.
“The divorce lawyer,” he said, and I remembered where we’d left off.
“I wonder if Janice knew,” I said, “I can’t believe Andrea did, or she would have told us.”
I paused and rummaged in my briefcase for a pen to give myself a few seconds to debate the wisdom of telling Matt about Annie Lee. Would he consider it meddling, I wondered? Although both Leder and Andrea had mentioned the possibility of a West Coast girlfriend, to my knowledge Matt hadn’t pursued it. I plunged in.
“I was talking to a friend in California,” I said. “And she reminded me that Eric had the same sort of relationship to another woman out there. A young Asian woman named Annie Lee. Not an affair, exactly, just flirting and ‘hanging out,’ as Andrea called it.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Matt said. “I figure anyone still in California is not worth following up at this point. Anyway, none of this necessarily means anything.”
“Unless Janice got word of the divorce and was unhappy that Eric would take his degree and run off with someone else. Unhappy enough to murder him,” I said, wondering why I was being so pushy.
“Janice is our problem, not yours, since she’s not involved in the technical stuff. It’s just as well if you keep out of those lines of inquiry.”
I felt my face heat up and folded my hands like a first grader as I absorbed the mild rebuke. I have my answer, I thought, he does consider it meddling.
“The next item is Connie’s alibi,” Matt said, “she says she was home alone and made calls to her boyfriend at his hotel in Chicago. The phone logs show nothing after about nine o’clock, so that doesn’t help. I’m telling you because you might see something in the computer printout or other lab documents that indicates otherwise. If so, I’d like to know about it.”
Matt looked at me over his glasses. “I think that’s all I have that’s new.”
“I’m expecting that some of us will go out for coffee after the wake tonight,” I said. “It won’t be too hard to get the conversation around to the gas gun data. Something new might emerge.”
“Good,” Matt said, “let’s see if we can narrow down what we’re looking for from you.”
He took a second file from a basket on the corner of his desk and I noticed the label ‘LAMERINO’ along the edge. It was my first glimpse into Matt’s organizational style and I didn’t know whether to feel flattered to have my own file or slighted because the file was so thin.
“Is that my rap sheet?” I asked, and immediately regretted the cute remark, blaming the sugar high from the birthday cake for my frivolous mood.
Matt uttered a polite laugh, opened the manila folder and took out a sheet of paper with handwritten text.
“We’ll start with Andrea. We need to know if her work had anything to do with the discrepancy Eric was talking about. Also, how much did the experiment mean to her career, and did it matter to her whether the article got published or not.”
Although heavy duty crying wasn’t proof of innocence, I was tempted to rule Andrea out as Eric’s killer. Her alibi seemed good to me, too—home with her two roommates, sleeping in adjacent rooms in a small apartment. But that wasn’t what Matt was asking me.
“I doubt that her name would be on the journal paper,” I said. “In general a technician just follows instructions from the scientists and engineers. But I’ll try to engage her in a technical discussion and see what comes out. Maybe she was applying to grad school and needed this work as a reference.”
Matt wrote in his notebook and moved on.
“Next is Connie—” he said. “I still don’t quite understand her work, but I’m not ready for a physics lesson right now. Just keep in mind I’ll need a little more on that some time.”
I made a note to think about an easy explanation of conductivity. Connie would be depending on conductivity measurements for their journal article. As for reputation in the physics community, Connie’s was at an
important beginning stage.
“Connie talked a lot in California about how the gas gun work was her ticket to a fast rise in high-tech company management,” I said, trying to be as objective as possible. “Not that ambition is necessarily a motive for murder.”
“Not that it isn’t,” Matt said. “Jim Guffy looks like a choir boy. And his parents say there’s no way he could have left the house without waking them up.”
“Jim coaches softball for St. Aidan’s in Everett,” I said. “He bought a van just so he could take underprivileged kids to ball games.”
“But he’s a key member of the group and if I remember right, you said his trigger thing was what Eric was raving about the night of the Saint Patrick’s Day party.”
I made another note, to review the physics of the trigger thing with Matt.
“I know Ralph Leder is high on the list of who profits from Eric’s death,” Matt said. “We need to know exactly how important these results were to him and this high-tech agreement he’s entered into. How much money are we talking about? How far off was the data? Is it something he really could have compensated for in a short time after receiving funding?”
“I have the article describing the negotiations,” I said. “I’ll look at it more closely and brief you on it.”
“Okay. That’s about it,” he said, closing the LAMERINO folder and putting it back in the basket. He stretched his shoulders back, flexed his fingers, and took a deep breath.
“Which brings me to one final thing,” he said, folding up his glasses. “I want to make it clear that in all of this, you’re not to take any chances. We don’t know for sure, but any one of these people could be a murderer. And they know you’re helping us. It doesn’t matter if they cry. It doesn’t matter if they’re your friends. So you must tell me anything that seems suspicious and keep to your role as a purely technical consultant.”
Hearing the emphasis on the words ‘must’ and ‘anything,’ I wondered if Matt suspected that I was holding something back. I swallowed hard and weighed the merits of telling him about Leder’s phone call. I convinced myself it didn’t matter right now.
“Are you coming to the wake?” I asked.
“Yes. Berger’s back part time, putting in some hours at the Shirley Avenue substation since he lives near there. He’s cleaning up some paper work on old cases, still in no shape for a regular schedule. I’ll see you at the funeral home?”
“I live there,” I said, with a smile, partly from learning that Berger wasn’t on the Bensen case yet.
“Right,” Matt said, returning my smile. He stood up as I gathered my belongings, preparing to leave his office.
“Did you get a chance to look at that printout I gave you?” he asked.
I felt my face redden as I started my confession.
“Not yet, but I’ve set aside tomorrow after the funeral. It’s something I really need a block of time for. It’s very detailed and takes some concentration.”
I was just short of saying “My dog ate it,” when Matt waved his hands in a broad sweep in front of his face.
“No problem,” he said. “As soon as you can. I know you have a life.”
Not really, I thought, but it’s nice of you to think so. I wanted to continue and tell him how unlike me this was, how I’d gotten bogged down temporarily, how I was overloaded by the emotional interview with Andrea, tension between me and Peter, revisiting my life with Al, and having Eric’s dead body in my house.
Matt pulled on the string of a silver balloon with a bright blue caricature of Lady Justice holding her scales.
“Libra,” he said. “Do you think it means that I was born to be in law enforcement?”
His tone was light and I silently thanked him for trying to smooth over my embarrassment at not doing my job.
“What’s your sign?” he asked, the sing-song rhythm of his voice telling me that he wasn’t a fan of astrology. I was relieved at that.
“My birthday’s the same as Galileo and Kepler,” I said, “February fifteenth. I guess I was born to be in science.”
Matt laughed and walked with me toward the door. As I brushed some newly found party crumbs from my skirt, I responded to a random thought.
“What’s Eric’s sign?” I asked.
Matt gave me a quizzical look.
“Andrea said she gave Eric the Einstein figure for his birthday,” I said, “and Janice mentioned seeing it in the lab with the action figures around Eric’s computer monitor. Janice also said she hadn’t been to the lab since the Memorial Day weekend. Maybe...”
“Maybe...,” Matt said, raising his eyebrows and immediately flipping through the file on his desk.
“September 29,” he said, looking up.
“Enrico Fermi’s birthday.”
“Whose?”
“Fermi, the Italian and eventually American nuclear scientist—I’ve been boning up on him for a class and I just happened to remember his birthday. Sorry.”
Matt laughed and shook his head as if to ask himself what kind of weird woman he’d hired. I hoped he didn’t start suspecting me of Eric’s murder.
“In any case, Janice couldn’t have seen Einstein in May. Nice going, Gloria.”
I wondered how I’d even thought of it and decided that my subconscious mind was working to help me redeem myself for my laziness in other areas.
“It might be nothing,” I said.
“It might be something,” Matt said.
THIRTEEN
Back in my apartment, I went directly to my desk and picked up the computer printout. I hated the idea of black marks in the LAMERINO file. Josephine would not be happy. Whatever her failings, Josephine would never have shirked her responsibilities. Also, I had enough of a competitive spirit to want to solve the case before my designated nemesis and new Daddy, George Berger returned to work.
The format of Eric’s printout was the large, wide variety from a continuous feed printer, one long string of attached pages with perforated edges. The alternating white and green rows were supposed to make it easier to distinguish a line of characters from the one just below it, but still it was tough going. Folded up, the stack was about two inches thick. And I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.
I got through all the pages once without a single insight. The only curious thing about the printout was its last line—a series of three characters, the first of which looked like a small triangle, the second the Greek letter mu, and the third an integral sign. Except for the triangle, the characters were not used anywhere else in the program, neither singly nor as a group.
Following common practice, Eric used small triangles throughout the program to represent minute differences in the values of a particular quantity. In the gas gun calculations, he used T to represent temperature, and the triangle symbol in front of T to represent a small change in temperature. I had no clue, however, how that could apply to the string of three in the printout. The Greek letter mu was popular in texts as a representation of parameters that had to do with magnetism, but it hadn’t been used at all in Eric’s program except for that last line. It was highly unlikely that he was introducing a whole new symbol that far into a calculation.
The third symbol, the integral sign, was from calculus, actually an elongated S, standing for “Sum,” since integration in mathematics is a way to add up quantities. The sign would always be followed by what was being summed, such as a function of x. It was physically and mathematically meaningless to have an integral sign as the last notation, with nothing after it, as it appeared in Eric’s printout.
I went over the series of characters again and again. Even if Eric had been stopped in the middle of a line, the three characters together didn’t make sense in the context of his whole program.
After an hour of getting nowhere, I took a break to make some phone calls. I had a cousin, Mary Ann, a widow in her seventies who lived in Worcester, and I wanted to schedule a weekend with her. Worcester was only about twenty-five miles west of
Boston, but I’d already lost the California habit of driving twice that distance just to meet someone for lunch. In my Massachusetts persona I considered twenty-five miles a trip with a postcard and slides requirement.
After being in touch with Mary Ann only through Christmas letters and long-distance calls, we were trying to renew family ties. She was the only relative I hadn’t completely lost track of.
“I’ll bet you’re happy to be home,” Mary Ann said after we’d picked a mid-November date for my trip.
“Oh, yes, it’s wonderful to be back,” I said, noting how easily I could skip over my deepest inner conflicts with a blood relative. I’d known right away that Mary Ann wouldn’t understand the crazy emotional directions of my life as well as Rose did. And after my cousin’s nervous response to my first police contract, I also knew enough not to tell her about my current work on a murder case.
I made an omelet and spread some scrap paper out on the kitchen table next to my plate. I decided to make a simple outline of the conductivity measurements so I could explain them to Matt. I thought it might also be a good way to get a handle on what to look for in the printout.
I wrote notes as if I were preparing a presentation for an overhead projector, using bullets for items that were key in understanding first, that conductivity was higher for a metal than a nonmetal, and last, what that meant for its useful applications.
I understood the breakthrough that Leder’s team had announced—they claimed they’d been able to measure a conductivity value for hydrogen. From that they inferred that hydrogen existed as a metal, at least for the duration of the measurement, one millionth of a second.
What were the possible ways that the data could be false?
It was Jim’s trigger signal that switched on the measuring device at just the right time. One possibility was that the trigger signal fired at the wrong time. It might have measured a conductivity that wasn’t really for the hydrogen, but for the metal of the container. I made a note to check the conductivity of aluminum, which was what the walls of the target chamber were made of, and compare it to values in the printout.
