The Nitrogen Murder(67)

I wondered which reality would be more upsetting to Elaine—that her fiancé had fled to Hawaii, or that he was on a fast-food diet in hiding a couple of miles away.



My ankle was throbbing, and the bottle of aspirin I kept in my purse was empty. I needed a painkiller and a bandage. I slipped into the downstairs bathroom, minimizing my limp, hoping to find a first aid kit. Elaine didn’t fail me. There was a small white box with a red cross on the cover in the bottom drawer, and aspirin in her updated medicine cabinet. Elaine had had the downstairs bathroom remodeled; the new cabinet featured extrawide glass shelves and lit up when you opened the door, like a minirefrigerator. No rust marks on metal shelves, as in our old Fernwood Avenue cabinet.

It took about ten minutes for my self-medication and self-treatment.

Hooray for pants, I thought, happy that my trouser leg covered the bandage. All I had to do was be careful not to limp and hope Elaine wouldn’t notice that her first aid kit was short about two feet of adhesive bandage. If it came to that, I was prepared with a story about walking on the pier and tripping over a bucket of bait.

I’d persuaded Matt to at least wait until we’d served a decent meal before breaking our news. Matt and I both had enough reserve weight to carry us through the summer, but I was concerned about Elaine and Dana, who looked as though they’d lost several pounds right before my eyes in less than a week.

The table was set, the eggplant parmigiana cooked and ready, and Dana was still not back. We kept it warm, hoping Dana would call soon and not be receiving takeout at the Berkeley PD. Matt played down her absence with Elaine.

“It’s routine,” he said. “They’ll want to check out her story.”

“Her story about what?” Elaine seemed to be running out of patience. I couldn’t blame her.

“Dana, or someone, indicated there were drugs involved in the killing of her partner. That’s number one. Second, drug paraphernalia was found on Tanisha’s body—”

“Rolling papers,” Elaine said, waving her hand. “I might even have some around here.”

I doubted it.

“Third,” Matt said, continuing as if there’d been no interruption, “stolen goods were found in her partner’s residence.”

“It seems like busywork to me,” Elaine said.

Matt raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in what we might have construed as agreement.

Elaine had put on a CD of classical piano, a little too tinkly for me, but I was not a great fan of classical music except for Italian opera, the more tragic, the better. Either that or Perry Como. Still, the piano notes filled the tense silence as we waited for Dana to call for a pickup. During one soft interlude, Elaine leaned forward from her place on the couch.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asked. She lowered her head and seemed to steel herself against an unwelcome answer. She ran her hands through her hair, starting at her ears and ending with both sets of fingers at her temples.

I’d been keeping track of Elaine’s emotional temperature this week. I’d watched her go from EXCITEDLY HAPPY (I envisioned such a check box on a questionnaire) over her wedding and our arrival in town to ANGRY with me for trying to vet her fiancé. Since Phil’s disappearance, she’d kept a NERVOUS BUT STEADY attitude of waiting. Now I thought I was seeing another milestone, where HYSTERIA might step in at any moment.

“Keeping something from you?” I asked.

RRRing.

How lucky can you be? I thought. I grabbed my cell phone from the charger and punched it on.

“Hey, Auntie Glo.” The voice of young William Galigani, Robert’s son, representing the newest generation to call me aunt. “I played around with that PDA Mom gave me. Dad was kind of stuck.”

“Thanks, William. I really appreciate this. I know it’s past your bedtime.”

“I don’t have a bedtime anymore, remember? This was fun. And it got me out of taking out the trash.”

Rose’s usual good negotiating skills at work. “I’m glad there was some reward for you.”

“I’d have done it anyway, but Grandma doesn’t have to know that.”

I was sure she already did. “So, did you find anything interesting?” I thought a moment later how William, a sophomore at Revere High, would have a very different “interesting” list than I did.

“I’m just starting playing around, but I can get a few things right away. There’s a lot of names in an address book.” There are a lot of names, I wanted to say, but William was doing me a great favor and could be allowed a minor slip in grammar. “It’s running Windows, so I can download it into my computer and send that to you.”