The Helium Murder(10)

I sat facing Matt across his desk and we both sighed the equivalent of “whew.”

“I think fatherhood agrees with him,” I said.

Matt shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, “but your fancy footwork didn’t hurt. Nice work, Gloria.”

Matt was always generous with his compliments, but not so free that I doubted his sincerity. Just the right level for a woman of my generation who had a hard time accepting praise for anything but her spaghetti.

“Before we get into this,” Matt said, lifting a folder from the pile on his neat desk, “I wanted to say something about last night.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know that, but I want to. It was a difficult day for me and I probably shouldn’t have made dinner plans in the first place.”

I debated with myself about mentioning that I knew of the anniversary, worried that Matt had an entirely different reason for leaving without me, so to speak.

“Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Teresa’s death,” Matt said, removing my dilemma. “Sometimes I forget and other times ...”

“I know. Frank told me. I’m sorry. And I suppose we never really forget completely.”

“That’s right,” Matt said. “In my own world here, I forgot about Al.”

Matt and I had talked a little about the circumstances of the death of my late fiancé, Al Gravese. Matt had just joined the police force at the time and remembered the rumors of foul play. I wondered if this were a good time to tell him that I intended to do some research on Al’s business connections and the car crash that killed him, and that I could use his help. I looked at him, still appearing vulnerable, and decided not to.

“I knew Al only a short time compared to you and Teresa,” I said.

“Thanks for understanding, Gloria,” he said. “Maybe we can make it up this weekend?”

“You have nothing to make up,” I said. “But I do happen to have some time this weekend.” If I were filling out one of the dozens of questionnaires that I’d seen in my lifetime, I would have called myself “extremely satisfied.”

Matt turned to his desk and I knew that personal talk was over and it was time for business. He had a way of shifting abruptly from one to the other with the speed of a bullet. He handed me a manila folder thick with papers.

“Here are some of the documents we found in Ms. Hurley’s briefcase,” he said, holding up one of the widest attaché cases I’d ever seen. “They probably have nothing to do with this hit-and-run, but it bothers me to have papers in my file that I can’t understand. Why don’t you get a start on these while I dig out a contract. And if you can hold off on coffee for the moment, maybe we can catch an early lunch with the real thing at Russo’s?”

I gave a grateful nod and watched him as he left the office, until he rounded a corner. I thought how lucky I was to have met him and, with a nod to Josephine, questioned whether I deserved him.

I put the folder on my lap and opened it. The first document was printed on bright blue shadow-print letterhead—CompTech, Inc., William E. Carey, President and Chief Executive Officer.





Chapter Five

Matt’s side of the room was almost completely without decoration. The only photo on his desk was one of his parents at an anniversary celebration. A bulletin board behind his desk held a haphazard arrangement of memos, lists, and telephone messages on small yellow slips of paper. I wondered if Rose would consider a framed fine-arts poster a personal enough Christmas gift.

By the time Matt returned, I’d gone through at least two inches of documents, many of them contracts between CompTech and the various government agencies charged with maintaining the helium operations, principally the Bureau of Mines and the Department of the Interior.

I thought it was strange that a facility that Congress was about to close would still be awarding multimillion-dollar contracts for services such as computer upgrades and training for its more than two hundred employees. I wondered if Congresswoman Hurley thought it was strange, too. Why else was she carrying this material around during her Christmas vacation?

Matt presented me with my contract, a simple two-pager, looking even more straightforward than I remembered, next to the legal jungle I’d just been struggling through.

“Will it do any good for me to remind you of your limited duties?” Matt asked. “No work on your own; you’re not an officer of the city, and so on?”

“Is this like reading me my rights?”

“This time you may not even have to leave this office. I just want some intelligent notes on the technical contents of Ms. Hurley’s papers.”