Boric Acid Murder, The Page 3

  I made a note to ask Matt for more details, wondering why he hadn’t mentioned the incident before. Two deaths in the same spot, ten years apart. In my mind, no coincidence was too small to investigate when John Galigani’s life was at stake. I looked at Dorothy Leonard’s tall, slender figure and constructed a variation on the black widow theme—she brushes back her stylish bangs and shoves first her husband, then Yolanda Fiore down the same narrow metal staircase. Why, I’d yet to figure out.

  Matt stood up, bringing me and Leonard back to the present.

  “Sorry,” she said, in a monotone, as if she wasn’t sure why or to whom she owed an apology. I wished I were better at reading faces. Did a flat stare mean guilty or not guilty?

  “Why don’t we let you get back to work. We’ll take a walk around by ourselves,” Matt said.

  “Would you mind? I’ve already been through everything with Detective Parker and his team. I’ll be here another half hour or so, if you have any questions.”

  “Uh, technically, I’m not on the case.”

  Leonard made a silent snapping gesture with her fingers. “Oh, of course not. The Galiganis.”

  I wondered how she’d learned about John’s alleged involvement so quickly and mentally filed it under “suspicious behavior.” Any suspect but John would do.

  Matt touched his forehead, as if to salute the director, and followed me down to the main reading room.

  When we were out of earshot, I cleared my throat in a deliberate ahem. Matt picked up on my unspoken question. “I didn’t think of Irving Leonard’s death until I saw Dorothy,” he said. “As I remember, it was ruled an accident after a brief investigation. Nothing suspicious. No extra bruises or bumps on his body.”

  “Still …” I said, leaving the rest of the thought in the air.

  We stopped in front of a small redbrick model, a three-dimensional rendering of the library-to-be—the present structure, with renovations, plus a new wing extending into the back property. I had a vague memory of seeing the model at the fund-raiser.

  A city councilman had listed the shortcomings of the current facility, from its lack of handicap accessibility to the treacherous—in fact, twice lethal—stairway to the basement, not up to code by several measures. I’d found myself rooting for the grant proposal they’d submitted to the state, though I doubted I’d frequent the new building any more than I had the old.

  Matt and I walked to the northwestern corner, to the top of the deadly stairs. As we started down, I held on to the wooden railing, as if to brace myself against a sudden forward thrust.

  One of the cleaner crime scenes I’d visited, the area where Yolanda Fiore’s body had been found was now bloodless and unremarkable. A door marked CUSTODIAN was immediately behind the staircase, the children’s reading section spread out to the side. We looked in on the staff lounge and a storage area, completing the tour of the north wing’s bottom floor.

  Matt took notes, though I couldn’t imagine what he found worthy of recording. Especially since he wasn’t “on the job” as he’d put it. I hoped I’d be able to read the official police report, figuring Parker and his crew had combed the whole building for physical evidence. But how likely was it the library would be free of fibers and prints from John Galigani, a writer and a great reader who worked in the Journal office, only a few blocks away?

  “There’s nothing more we can do here,” Matt said. What have we done? I wondered, growing more anxious every minute John was in custody. He flipped his notebook closed. Jet-lagged though I was, I hated to leave the building. I felt we were just beginning to explore its nooks and crannies.

  The area above the circulation desk was open to the roof, past two unconnected mezzanines, one of which housed Leonard’s office. I stretched to survey the strangely arranged lofts. What rare books might be stored under their rafters? More to the point—where might a murderer lurk? I resolved to return soon.

  As we passed the model library again on the way out I stared at it, as if it might come to life. I wished it could provide a mini-reenactment of the murder John had been accused of. I’d hoped to return to my apartment with a long list—suspects, motives, evidence. All I had from an evening’s work was an unidentified controversy over boron and a respectable widow of ten years.

  I climbed into Matt’s car, straining to see the vacant lot designated for the library expansion, hoping John would be freed before the first shovel went into the ground.

  MATT HAD PICKED ME UP at Boston’s Logan Airport at three-thirty in the afternoon, East Coast time, and driven me directly to the Galigani residence. I’d been away only ten days, but Rose had planned what was supposed to be a happy reunion.

  “Come straight to our house, Gloria, and we’ll have an early dinner,” Rose had told me over the phone the night before. “Robert and John will be here, too. Besides, I want to see you and make sure you’re home to stay.”

  Although her voice was full of laughter, Rose had good reason to worry—thirty years earlier, after my fiance died in a car crash, I’d left my oceanside hometown and gone to Berkeley, California, where I stayed until a year ago. At fifty-five I decided to return and find out if I’d missed anything. It turned out, I had.

  My luggage was still in the trunk of Matt’s steel-blue Camry—my clothes stuffed into a duffel bag, unlaundered. I felt like a level four biohazard worker running from one crisis to another. But the circumstance of John’s arrest had sent enough adrenaline through my system to sustain however many more waking hours I needed. Besides, I had three hours on everyone else in town.

  We carried my luggage up the two flights of stairs. Neither of us liked to ride the elevator in the Galigani Mortuary. Spots of blood and other displaced organic material haunted my fantasy of the closed, padded space that Frank and Robert used to transport their clients, as they referred to them.

  When Matt’s beeper went off, I knew a long kiss was all I could hope for before Matt would leave.

  “Don’t make any plans for tomorrow,” he said.

  “Day or night?”

  “Both,” he said, and we kissed again.

  IT TOOK LESS THAN an hour to reconnect with my life. My E-mail and phone messages were light since I’d accessed them from Elaine’s house in Berkeley. One phone message had come in during the morning from Peter Mastrone, an old friend who expected more than renewed friendship from me. I deleted it, with a resolution to be clearer than ever about how I felt, or didn’t feel, about him.

  One quick look at the U.S. mail, a call to Rose, then I’d take a nap. It was only six o’clock California time, but I felt I’d already lived those extra three hours. I sifted through flyers, magazines, and bills, filtering out the first-class letters. A few letters from former professional colleagues, sure to be part business, part personal. A bright pink envelope from my cousin Mary Ann in Worcester, probably a late-arriving bon voyage card. A thick letter from the youngest Galigani child, Mary Catherine, a chemical engineer living in Houston. I wondered if she’d been told yet about her brother’s arrest.

  The last piece of first-class mail had no return address. A small off-white envelope of good quality, postmarked REVERE. I slit it open and pulled out a plain sheet of matching paper.

  My throat tightened as I scanned the neatly typed lines, then reread every word.

  KEEP OUT OF POLICE WORK. TAKE UP SEWING. END YOUR NEW POLICE CAREER, OR I WILL.

  My fingers gripped the note. I looked around quickly, as if the author might be standing over me with a coat rack, ready to push me out the door and down my own staircase.

  FOUR

  IT MEANS NOTHING, I told myself as I chained my door and set the intrusion alarm. I carried the letter, stuffed back into its envelope, to one of my pale blue glide rockers—the only furniture that survived my cross-country move—and put it on my lap. Was I hoping it might have a different message when I pulled it out again?

  I’d looked forward to returning to my neat apartment—simple furnishings, framed prints of
San Francisco and the Bay Area. I hoped for a little breeze to carry the smell of salt air to my window onto Tuttle Street and St. Anthony’s Church. A threatening note was not part of my welcome home plan.

  I read the letter again, and annoyance replaced my initial reflexive panic. Sewing indeed. I thought of astronomer Maria Mitchell and her complaints about needlework. When she was a young woman, she’d been forced to learn to sew although she wanted to study astronomy, her father’s profession. As a treat to counteract the nasty note, I made an espresso and took a copy of her diary from my bookcase. I found my favorite passage, from an entry in 1853.

  The needle is the chain of woman, and has fettered her more than the laws of the country. I would as soon put a girl alone into the closet to meditate as give her only the society of her needle.

  Too bad I don’t have a return address on my threatening note, I thought. I’d send him—or her—this quote.

  I’d received intimidating notes and phone calls working on other cases with the Revere Police Department, but not so early in the game. The only person I’d met so far in connection with Yolanda Fiore’s murder was Dorothy Leonard, whom I’d left less than an hour ago. Certainly not enough time for a posted letter to reach me.

  I studied the cancellation mark, but couldn’t make out a date. While I was in California, Rose, whose office was one floor below my apartment in the mortuary building, had piled my mail into a basket on the floor of my small foyer. I decided against asking if she remembered which day this letter had arrived—no need to worry her over what would probably be useless information.

  It had been less than forty-eight hours since Yolanda had been killed. Not much time, unless the killer had dispatched Yolanda down the library stairway with one hand and mailed the letter with the other. It was even more curious to think the note could have been written before the murder. Curious. And not a little frightening.

  I abandoned the idea of a nap and took out a notebook. I headed the first page SEWING LETTER, to remind me of the perseverance of Maria Mitchell, who eventually discovered a comet and became the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The impact of the rude note was softened by the title I’d given it, and I was able to analyze it with a level head.

  I made a list of potential meanings.

  Possibility number one—the note had nothing to do with the current case. Perhaps the writer thought I’d receive it before my trip to California. He could have been warning me off the now-completed Berkeley murder investigation.

  Number two—the revenge of an unhappy relative of someone I’d helped put behind bars. I scribbled the names of the key people in earlier cases. No one stood out as the likely author.

  I briefly considered a misdelivery, but since there wasn’t another Dr. Gloria Lamerino in Revere, or in the state as far as I knew, I didn’t bother to write it down.

  On to possibility number three. I was being warned off investigating Yolanda Fiore’s murder.

  The implications were clear and chilling: the murder was committed by someone who knew me, or knew about me. I shuddered at the idea that I was specifically sought out by a cold-blooded killer. More probably, I decided, the person was aware of my contracts with the police department or my connection to the Galiganis, and figured I’d get involved.

  At the bottom of the page I wrote my view of the case so far:

  1. Possible motive: controversy over boron? Suspects: nuclear scientists at the Charger Street lab.

  2. Possible motive: unrelated to boron? Suspects: everyone else.

  3. Killer’s strategy: frame John Galigani. Dissuade Lamerino from investigating.

  Under ACTION, I wrote

  1. Visit Charger Street lab.

  2. Get library card.

  My work on the Fiore case was under way.

  THE TELEPHONE woke me from an unintentional nap in the rocker. My notebook had slid to the floor, my espresso cup was perilously close to the edge of the end table.

  “You were asleep,” Rose said, her own voice far from upbeat.

  I groaned when I realized I’d forgotten to call her. “I didn’t mean to be. I took a couple of pain pills.”

  “Are your feet still bothering you?”

  “A little.” I paused. I had so many questions for Rose, but I wasn’t sure how to phrase them and I was worried about the answers. I settled for the simplest one first. “How’s John?”

  Rose sighed. I heard a pain beyond the reach of little white pills. “They’re keeping him overnight, Gloria. I didn’t think they could do that.”

  “I didn’t either.” Rose sounded so fragile, I hesitated to ask even the most basic questions, like whether they’d retained a lawyer for John.

  “Frank called Judge Sciacchitano,” she told me. I waited for Rose to give me the stats on Sciacchitano—parish, number of children, recent deceased loved one laid to rest with Frank’s help. But this was not a normal conversation, and even the judge’s gender remained undisclosed to me.

  “So John might be home soon?” I asked in a hopeful tone.

  “Yes. He told us there was no reason John shouldn’t be allowed to come home, and he’s going to look into it.”

  Neither of us wanted to articulate the worst—that John might be detained. Surely a judge who knew the Galiganis well enough to talk to them on a weekend would work hard to get John home. I carried the phone to my window and stared across Revere Street to the gray brick tower of St. Anthony’s Church. The prayers of my youth came back to me, as if it hadn’t been decades since I’d knelt at Tuesday night novena services. Saint Anthony, our patron and our advocate, grant us what we ask of thee.

  I knew the Galiganis had no financial problems, but I made the offer anyway.

  “Thanks, Gloria. I’m sure we’ll be able to take care of it. We need you to …” Rose’s voice broke.

  “I’m already on it.”

  SATURDAY NIGHT was not a handy time to begin an investigation. Both the lab and the library would be closed until Monday morning. I wandered around my apartment, halfheartedly unpacking, uninterested in reading or television. I wondered where Matt was, and how I was going to acquire necessary information without his formal participation. I knew he wouldn’t cross the line drawn by department canons.

  I blamed my impasse on how pitifully few friends I’d made during my year back in my hometown, leaving me no resources, no contacts. When John was cleared, I decided, I’d be more responsive to Rose’s attempts to draw me into Revere society. As if I hadn’t made that resolution before.

  If Rose and Frank could command the services of a judge on a weekend, I should be able to do some small thing off-hours. My friends are a small group, but of high quality, I told myself. I picked up the telephone and pushed Andrea Cabrini’s number.

  “Hi, Gloria. It’s great to hear from you. I knew you were coming back from California today.”

  “I got in a little while ago. I hope I’m not calling too late.”

  “Oh, no, I’m a night person. I hope you had a good time.”

  I’d met Andrea, a technician at the lab, on my first case with Matt. A friend of hers—a hydrogen researcher—had been murdered. Since then she’d attached herself to me as a kind of disciple for my work on homicide cases. She’d introduced me to scientists and engineers I needed to interview, taken me to seminars, given me the scoop on the latest in laboratory politics. Andrea was what plus-size clothing ads called a big, beautiful woman. She had fewer friends than I did, and I’d convinced myself that she really enjoyed helping me.

  I thought I’d spare Andrea the details of my harrowing ten days and wounded feet. “I have a souvenir for you,” I told her instead.

  Andrea’s delighted gasp sent a wave of guilt through me—first because I planned to exploit our friendship one more time, and second because I hadn’t even picked out her souvenir myself. At the end of my stay in Berkeley I’d taken advantage of my slight disability and talked Elaine into shopping for me, something I dreaded e
ven with perfect soles.

  “I read the awful news about Yolanda Fiore’s murder,” Andrea said. “She used to work here. I didn’t know her though.”

  “But you knew I’d have some questions for you.”

  “Yeah. About boron, right? I’ve already copied some material from our library. And I got you a pass in case you wanted to get on-site tomorrow.”

  “Andrea, you’re a gem.”

  “I love helping you. It’s the most fun thing I do.” She paused and I heard a small cough. “Not that I hope for more murders or anything.”

  I pictured Andrea in one of her oversized tunics, her pudgy hands flying to her mouth in dismay at the thought of giving me the wrong impression.

  “I know, Andrea. And I would love to get into the lab tomorrow. Why don’t I take you to lunch first? Say, Russo’s, at noon?”

  “Yeah, I’m free for lunch. That would be perfect. Thanks, Gloria.”

  After we hung up, I wondered why I hadn’t told Andrea how John Galigani’s near-arrest made this case different from the others we’d worked on. Could I be in denial about the serious trouble my friends’ son was in? I knew I would never believe John capable of murder.

  During the years I’d lived in California, the Galiganis had visited often. At least once a year the whole family would fly west, crowding my condo, filling its small rooms and me with pleasure. Rose and I had seen each other more often, one highlight a week-long trip to Rome in our fortieth birthday year.