The Helium Murder(8)
Frank looked at me, standing straight, palms up, as if he’d just finished a brilliant summary in a courtroom trial.
“Thanks, Frank,” I said, my long sigh in harmony with Rose’s.
Chapter Four
As predicted, a light snow was falling on Tuesday morning, mounting in even piles on my east-facing windowsills. I turned on my TV and heard the weatherperson say that the snowfall for November and December had exceeded amounts in previous years. I felt it was my own private welcome home. Especially now that I didn’t have to shovel my own driveway, or commute to work every day, snow seemed even more romantically beautiful than I remembered.
TV clips of Margaret Hurley featured her youth in Revere and Boston, her relationship with Frances Whitestone, and her short career in Congress. I was a little embarrassed at myself for grabbing a notebook when the announcer turned to her personal life and hinted at her brother’s shady deals and her stormy parting with her fiancé, Patrick Gallagher, also of Revere. And, to add a little spice, listeners were reminded of how Margaret had publicly denounced both men, at different times, for different reasons. So much for speaking ill of the dead, I thought.
I’d forgotten to check my answering machine after Anzoni’s, so I had to drink my breakfast coffee to the sound of Peter Mastrone’s voice.
“Just a reminder that your talk is next Monday. I’ve missed seeing you, Gloria. Turns out that Monday is a half-day for us, so maybe we can have lunch after class. It’s been a while.”
In fact, it had been a couple of weeks since I’d seen Peter, but what was that compared to the thirty-odd years we hadn’t been in touch at all? Rose claimed that Peter kept up with her and Frank just to keep track of me, and I was beginning to think she was right. If so, it didn’t say much for the choices Peter had made in life.
I decided that instead of returning his phone call, I’d work on his class. But not until I’d brushed up on helium. I had no intention of meeting Matt Gennaro unprepared. Especially if his partner, George Berger, was in the office. I’d managed to get along with Berger during my previous contract only because he was out most of the time helping with his new baby. The child was a couple of months old by now, so I could hardly hope that he’d still be on paternity leave.
Berger had made no secret of his dislike and distrust of me. He probably wouldn’t have made as much fuss if the department had given a contract to a tarot-card reader. The first time we met he listed his own credentials in science: several classes at Revere High School, plus college chemistry, plus forensic chemistry when he trained as a detective. I put him somewhere above Reader’s Digest, but below Scientific American, though I didn’t tell him that. I could hardly wait to see how we’d work together this time, if we had to.
To brighten my mood, I put on a disc of Christmas music, a medley of old favorites by Perry Como. I pulled out my “interesting articles” folder and took it with my mug of coffee to my new, cushy, blue-gray corduroy couch. Relocating three thousand miles away had given me an excellent excuse to buy new furniture. I’d ended up keeping only my two favorite rockers, plus anything that plugged in. As a technology junkie, I got attached to computers and stereo equipment, but hardly ever to wood or fabric. I wondered if Perry Como had a PC.
I sorted through the wide accordion folder and located several clippings on the helium reserves.
One name that kept coming up was that of William Carey, the CEO of CompTech, a software company based in Texas and specializing in database management. The company also had a branch office and a small distribution plant in Chelsea, one town away from Revere.
One article reported on Carey’s appearance at a Congressional hearing on the helium-storage program. In his prepared remarks, Carey had stressed the need for the government’s maintaining control over enough helium to guarantee our predominance in future technologies. Why did a software company care so much about helium? I wondered.
As I looked through my own stockpile of helium literature, I realized that the political maneuverings were far more complicated than the physical principles underlying the accumulation of helium. As difficult as it was to mine helium, it seemed easier than distilling the truth about the program from vested-interest doublespeak.
No two articles agreed on how long the helium supply would last. Factoring out all the differences in the way the calculations were made, I concluded that the best estimates were: about ten years for worldwide use, and close to one hundred years if limited to federal government use.
It was even more difficult to figure out the budget for the program—did it cost only two million dollars a year as one group suggested, or was it 1.2 billion dollars in debt as another claimed?