The Nitrogen Murder(59)

“So, Phil told you he slashed his hand here, in the morning.” I turned from Elaine to Dana. “But the intern told you he arrived, bleeding, at the trauma center, just before five o’clock?”

Dana and Elaine nodded. “I believe Evan,” Dana said. “He showed me the log.” She turned away from us, as if embarrassed for her father’s lie.

“Okay,” Matt said. “We can certainly ask Phil to explain some of this, if …”

If we can find him hung in the air.

I wondered if there was a sport that allowed four strikes.



When the phone call came from Rose, we were at an impasse. That might have been the reason I didn’t hesitate to take the call when her number appeared in my cell phone display. It had taken us a moment to determine whose cell phone was ringing, since four of them were on the table, at different angles and positions, like a cross-sectional snapshot of the positions of particles in a plasma.

“Hi, Gloria. Mail call!” Not only was Rose’s voice cheery, it was innocent. I’d told her nothing of the crime wave sweeping through our little corner of the Bay Area.

“Anything interesting?” I asked. Maybe Matt and I had miraculously won the Massachusetts lottery. Doubly miraculous, because we never played the games, and also, I doubted the winners were notified by mail.

“An interesting package came,” Rose said. “Besides the usual, like a note from your cousin Mary Ann. Doesn’t she know you’re away?”

“I told her. She forgets.”

Mary Ann was old-school in many ways, besides her age. She lived in Worcester, only about forty-five miles from Revere—many Californians commuted that far to work every day—but she still wrote me weekly letters rather than call. When I phoned her, she’d end the call within three minutes.

“Before they cut us off,” she’d say. I often wondered if she contacted the operator every time to put the call through for her, as in the old days. Number, please, I remembered hearing on our old party line. I couldn’t imagine Mary Ann adjusting to my new cell phone, with directions for making a call on page twenty-four of the instruction manual.

“What about the package, Rose?” I asked.

“It has an Oakland postmark. I can’t read the date, but I thought you might like to know about it. Maybe someone sent you a present and you should thank them while you’re there.”

Rose’s impeccable logic. I imagined her on her white wicker porch, where her own mail was deposited every day by the same man who’d brought it for decades.

“Is there a return address?”

“None. It’s just your name, not Matt’s, and it’s handwritten. Also, your name is spelled wrong. They have it”Lamerina.“An a instead of an o on the end. It’s one of those brown padded envelopes. I thought it might be a videotape, but it’s bigger than that. And it’s flatter than an audiotape but thicker than a compact disc.”

I wished I could put Rose on speakerphone. It didn’t seem fair that my companions in Elaine’s kitchen were not privy to a comedy routine that could bring smiles to their pensive, straight faces. Or maybe, except for Matt, they wouldn’t realize how amusing it was to hear my near-Luddite friend use electronic devices as measuring criteria, rather than her bread box, knitting needles, and garden tools.

“Rose, please open the package.”

While Rose undid whatever held the package together, I covered the mike and briefed Matt, Elaine, and Dana on the call, mostly to explain my recess from the work at hand, and noted relatively uninterested nods all around.

“Oh, it’s one of those new memo things.” Rose sounded disappointed, as if she might have been hoping for a film with mature language and content. “Robert and John have them, and now even William wants one. Have you seen the new cell phone holders, by the way, Gloria? Some of them are obscene. William’s friend—a girl, but let’s not go there—has one that’s a miniature black leather thong, the underwear kind, with rhinestones. William wants one for his birthday. I don’t think so!”

“If it weren’t for you, Rose, I’d be so out of touch with pop culture. But tell me, is there a tape recorder in the package, after all?”

“No, it’s one of those devices that looks like a mini-mini laptop computer and you don’t even use a pencil.”

“A PDA?” Someone from Oakland sent me a personal digital assistant? Though I was generally on the other end of the scale from Ludditism, I’d resisted the technology that squeezed an appointment calendar, address book, e-mail, music, and games into the palm of my hand. I thought my life was not that busy and my eyesight not good enough to read a three-inch-square screen comfortably.