The Helium Murder(7)
I’d never been able to break the habit of replaying scenes in my past, especially those that seemed to go wrong, and the scene at Anzoni’s, with Matt’s unexpected leaving, was no exception. I went over every nuance, and thought of three or four alternatives for every word I’d used. If I’d been this careful reviewing my physics research, I thought, I’d probably have won the Nobel Prize.
What didn’t fit together were Matt’s invitation to work with him, indicating that my Hurley question wasn’t totally out of line, and his abrupt departure. Usually—meaning the two other times the four of us had met for dinner—Matt drove me home and came upstairs for coffee.
During those visits, we’d reminisced about the old Revere Beach, and the big stars that had performed at the Wonderland Ballroom and other clubs on the Boardwalk—crooners like Jerry Vale and Freddie Cannon, Liberace, and a very young Barbra Streisand, to name a few.
Matt and I had explored each other’s interests, doing spontaneous film reviews and book reports, although neither one of us was a big fan of movies or fiction. I’d learned to enjoy abstruse foreign films in Berkeley, but not enough to find out where they played in the Boston area.
Matt watched only “Star Trek” and read only Tom Clancy and I stayed with one or two classics a year. We’d both poured more energy into conferences and professional journals. I was amazed to discover that Matt had to do as much as any physicist to keep up with the latest in his field, from new weapons on the street to advances in crime detection techniques. And I’d certainly never heard of the periodicals Matt read, like Forensics Today and The American Detective.
I realized how much I’d looked forward to a similar end to this evening, and felt a wave of disappointment that seemed to fold my shoulders into the posture of a dying swan. As usual, I focused on the negative, almost forgetting that Matt had invited me to work with him again, which was what I’d hoped for from the moment I’d read the Hurley headlines. More credit to Josephine, I thought, who taught me by example to give any negative an order of magnitude more weight than a positive.
I wanted to hop out of the car, to the extent that someone of my size-fourteen frame can hop, and hide in my comfortable bedroom with a box of See’s candy and a disc of Pachelbel’s Canon. I remembered, however, that I was on the wrong coast for See’s and I didn’t own the Canon. I’d started to redesign my self-pity scenario, when Rose and Frank interrupted.
“Mind if we come up?” Rose asked.
“I really think I’m ready for bed,” I said, giving her the girlfriend-to-girlfriend look that begged for understanding.
“Actually, I have to check something in the files,” Frank said. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Before I could say anything else, we were all out of the car, trudging up the Tuttle St. driveway against the cold wind that had come up from the ocean, less than a mile away. I loved the smell of the salt air right at my fingertips, or at least my windowsill, and it no longer bothered me that the trip to my front door included walking past a large but tasteful sign that advertised the presence of a mortuary chapel, with full funeral services.
As we entered the lobby, I noticed the menu-type bulletin board already in place in front of the larger of Galigani’s two first-floor parlors:
MARGARET MARY HURLEY
7:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M.
Rosary 8:00 P.M.
“Is the body here now?” I asked. I wanted no surprises, like a garage door opening in the middle of the night to admit a hearse.
“There has been no release to us yet,” Frank answered. I could always count on Frank’s language to be smooth and bloodless, disguising the real nature of his “clients,” as he referred to them. An eavesdropper this evening might think we were talking about the release of new government data or a pop music album.
Frank stopped at his office, at the back of the first floor, and Rose came up two more flights to my apartment. She headed for my kitchen and started water for tea, mumbling as usual about my meager larder of food and drink. I thought I was doing well to have coffee, several varieties of herbal tea, and cookies from the gourmet section of the supermarket. We both wished we’d taken home orders of Anzoni’s tiramisu or tartufo. I blamed Matt for distracting us by his untimely exit.
The water was hardly boiling when Frank came in, with a wide grin on his face.
“I was right,” he said, “but I wanted to be sure. I thought I remembered that it was around the holidays that Matt’s wife died. Sure enough, I checked the file, and it was December fifth, nineteen eighty-six. That’s ten years ago today.”