The Helium Murder
Chapter One
“It’s a mystery,” my best friend Rose said to me. “A grown woman. How can you not like shopping? Especially Christmas shopping?”
She stamped her tiny foot on the ground—to get rid of the snow, I hoped, and not to make a statement about my reluctance to go into one more store full of cartoon Santas and special deals on mitten-and-scarf sets. “It’s a wonder we’ve stayed friends for fifty years.”
“I think it’s only forty-six years,” I said, “and maybe we wouldn’t still be friends if I hadn’t lived three thousand miles away for more than thirty of them.”
“No, no, don’t say that, Gloria,” Rose said. “I’m so glad you’re back.” And we hugged right there on the street. Our shopping bags twisted around each other; my new leather gloves fell into a pool of cold, slushy, brown water in the gutter; and we laughed like a couple of junior-high schoolgirls cutting history class together. If passing shoppers noticed our two short, middle-aged frames embracing—mine wide and soft, Rose’s small and wiry—no one said anything.
With soft snow falling all around us on the streets of downtown Boston and bells ringing on every corner, I had to admit that shopping for Christmas presents was more fun than, say, sweeping broken glass from a laboratory floor.
“I think it’s all those years you spent in a physics lab,” Rose said. “It’s not like you could browse through catalogs for hydrogen or spend a day at a helium sale.”
“Now there’s where you’re wrong,” I said, jumping at the chance to talk science, and impressed that she knew the first two elements of the periodic table. By now we’d arrived at the doorway of Filene’s, famous for its many basement levels, with dramatic markdowns on each one, and I realized that Rose had used her small technical vocabulary to distract me so she could drag me inside. Rose and I often engaged in this unspoken trade-off. If she’d let me have my science fix, I’d follow her into a dressing room where she tried on her size sevens, or maybe I’d listen to a bit of gossip about our hometown of Revere, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston.
“First,” I said, forging ahead in spite of the distractions of what seemed like tons of merchandise, “I did often browse through catalogs to purchase hydrogen—that’s how I bought the gas tubes for my spectrum studies. And second, helium actually is now for sale—by the federal government.”
I guessed that Rose probably hadn’t followed the debates in Congress about whether the United States government should “be in the helium business,” as they put it. I’d listened to the sessions on C-Span and agreed with those who favored keeping the helium the government has been collecting since the Kennedy Administration. Like them, I was concerned that in a few years helium would be rare and we wouldn’t have enough for important applications, like magnetic imaging in hospitals or state-of-the-art upgrades for future transportation systems.
“Tell me more,” Rose said, fingering a dark green silk scarf. “What do you think?” she asked, holding the scarf up to her hair, still a deep brown with red highlights, thanks to modern technology. Although I had enormous faith in science and had all sorts of electronic gadgetry in my life, my short, mostly gray hair was proof that I didn’t trust chemistry as much as I did physics.
“I think I will tell you more,” I said, “as long as we’re in this nice, warm store. There’s an important vote coming up on the federal helium reserves. And before you make a joke about high-pitched giggles, let me point out that helium plays an important role in many industries, including medicine.”
I hoped I sounded appropriately reproachful, but it was lost on Rose.
“Gloria, you’re home after spending half a lifetime in California,” she reminded me. “It’s going to be a white Christmas, chestnuts are roasting right here on the street carts, and you even have a boyfriend. Forget helium. By the way, what are you going to get Matt for Christmas?”
“I was thinking of a nice shirt and tie.”
I pictured Sergeant Matt Gennaro at his desk, flipping through homicide files in a new pale blue shirt and perhaps a rakish paisley tie. I saw myself admiring the outfit as we lunched together at Russo’s, around the corner from the old red-brick building that houses the Revere Police Department where Matt has spent his whole career.
“I’m not surprised,” Rose said with a groan. She gave me a look of hopelessness. “You keep forgetting, you’re not only his science consultant anymore. You’re his girlfriend. That was at least one good thing that came of those two awful murders last fall.”