The Nitrogen Murder(16)

“What about them?”

“Phil hates anchovies, just as you do. There’s something else in common.”

We laughed together, the way we used to before I suspected her fiance of evil deeds.

I told myself I wasn’t snooping. Wasn’t it the duty of an official witness to a marriage to ensure there were no objections to the union  ? Once satisfied, I’d forever hold my peace.



Before Matt and I left Revere for this so-called vacation, Rose Galigani gave me two phone cards, each with five hundred minutes prepaid.

“That’s almost seventeen hours, Rose,” I’d told her. Now I thought it might take that long to finish our first cross-country conversation. We both missed our daily contact.

“There’s some drama here, Gloria, even without you,” Rose said. “Not a murder, though, so don’t worry” I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d reveal that I’d dragged the murder MacGuffin with me to Berkeley Not now, I decided, and settled back on the easy chair in Elaine’s guest room.

“It’s boring here without you, Rose,” I said. “Tell me something dramatic.”

She plunged right in. “Remember how Sandy Caputo died before you left last week?”

“You mean two days ago? Sure.” I didn’t remind Rose that I didn’t know Sandy Caputo and even now couldn’t remember whether Sandy was male or female. Rose, on the other hand, had lived in Revere all her life and was her own one-woman historical society.

“Well, he was scheduled for this afternoon, Parlor B, the closest to the stairway.”

That I wouldn’t forget—the layout of the Galigani Mortuary building where I’d lived before moving in with Matt, daily breathing in the aroma of funeral flowers, passing Parlors A and B, and sometimes a makeshift C, on the way up to my third-floor apartment.

“You won’t believe what happened,” Rose continued. “The Caputo family’s in an uproar. They were trying to reach Frank, but he was setting up a nun from Holy Names downstairs, and since it’s Sunday, no one was in the office, and Robert was picking up the Higgins boy, who should have gone to O’Neal’s in Chelsea, really, and I guess I had my cell phone off—” Rose took a breath. “Are you still there, Gloria?”

I smiled to myself. “I’m here, waiting for the punch line.” I was used to Rose’s story-building and had learned to follow the plotline in spite of the extraneous threads.

“They’re saying Sandy’s in the wrong suit.” Rose’s voice registered extreme stress and incredulity “Sandy’s wife says he’d never wear a yellow shirt and the jacket is way too small and not his.”

“The body’s in the wrong clothes? How did that happen?”

I’d made a clothing run for the Galiganis more than once, picking up an outfit from a dry cleaners or from the family of the deceased. I’d mark the bag or valise carefully before stepping out of my car with it and, holding my nose against the odors of death, would deliver it to the Galigani prep room.

In fact, I knew more than the ordinary layperson about the process of prepping a client for presentation in a casket. Rose and Frank and I had been friends from grade school, never losing touch, even when I moved to California after college and didn’t return home, as Rose called it, for thirty years. Frank had been in the funeral service business forever, starting as an informal security guard for a Boston mortuary when he was a chemistry major at Boston College.

“I wish you and Matt were here to do a little investigating, Gloria.” No matter that I wasn’t a real detective, private or public, and that the rest of Matt’s Revere Police Department was still on duty in her city.

I didn’t bother to suggest that two clothing deliveries might have been switched accidentally by a Galigani employee. Frank and Rose, and their son Robert, ran a very tight ship.

“It wouldn’t be the first time a grieving family got a little confused,” I offered. “Or tried to take their anger out on the mortuary staff.”

Frank and Robert had told me stories of spouses and parents who turned their anger on the funeral directors, as if the person arranging for the burial of their loved one was responsible for his death. It usually happened, I learned, when the deceased met an especially tragic end or was “too young to die,” as we say. As if anyone were old enough to die.

“Want to know what I really think?” Rose asked, bringing me to the problem at hand. “I have an idea how it happened, but I can’t prove it. I think it was Bodner and Polk.”

“The mortuary chain in Boston?”