The Helium Murder Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1998 by Camille Minichino

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477834183

  ISBN-10: 1477834184

  To my husband and greatest supporter, Richard Rufer, and my cousins Gloria, Jean, and Yolanda

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to the many relatives and friends who have helped me with this manuscript, especially Robert Durkin, Ellen Patey, Sue Stephenson, and Penny Warner. I’m very grateful also for the wonderful support from Marcia Markland and the staff at Avalon Books.

  This title was previously published by Avalon Books; this version has been reproduced from the Avalon book archive files.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Prologue

  Congresswoman Margaret Hurley has a lot on her mind as she drives her rented Honda through icy streets toward the Whitestone home in Revere, Massachusetts. Among more serious matters, like how to survive the holidays with her impossible brother, and a showdown with her ex-fiancé, she toys with the issue of more snowplows for this city where she grew up.

  As she strains her long, thin neck for the best view through the streaky windshield and tightens her grip on the steering wheel, Margaret is also thinking of helium.

  If she were in her own car, she thinks, a more substantial Lincoln Continental, she’d reach down and start the tape recorder. For now, she has to be content with mental lists.

  Number one, talk to Frances Whitestone, her chief benefactor and mentor, about the helium reserves. Number two, visit Vinnie Cavallo at the lab on Charger Street and check on the progress of his report. Unless Vinnie has a big surprise, she’s determined to vote to sell the government’s reserve: thirty-two billion cubic feet of helium now stockpiled in a gas field near Amarillo, Texas. Margaret smiles as she thinks of the dumb but irresistible jokes about how many party balloons does a country really need?

  Number three, meet with Bill Carey, the CEO of CompTech, and set him straight on his dealings with the helium storage program managers. Margaret glances at her briefcase on the floor of the passenger seat, as if she can see through the leather to the contracts inside.

  Numbers four and five are the personal matters—try to reason with her brother Buddy, maybe get him some help for his gambling addiction; and confront Patrick Gallagher, whose latest hobby seems to be calling and writing Margaret with reminders of their warlike relationship.

  Margaret stops at a traffic light on Broadway, in front of Revere City Hall, grateful for a chance to relax her neck. In spite of her thick fleece-lined gloves, she manages a few finger exercises. She breathes deeply and catches a whiff of pine. The picture of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree comes to her mind before she realizes that the fragrance stems from the green cardboard air freshener hanging from the Honda’s cigarette lighter.

  Out of habit, Margaret checks her image in the rearview mirror, knowing that she can count on Frances Whitestone, still elegant at seventy-six years old, to comment on Margaret’s out-of-control, frizzy red hair and the coffee stain on the front of her green loden jacket. But she realizes with relief that for a few days she doesn’t have to struggle to look older than her thirty-four years, or bulkier than her one hundred and twenty pounds, to get the attention of her colleagues in the House of Representatives.

  Margaret cracks her window open to hear the carolers on the corner. She smiles as she pulls away, imagining that the choir has materialized at the intersection of Broadway and Pleasant Street just for her, other drivers being too intelligent to be on the road under these conditions.

  As she hits patches of ice along Broadway and skids around the corner onto Revere Street, she hears the jingle of the bells on the packages that fill two shopping bags in the backseat. With only two blocks to go, she feels a twinge of holiday spirit and swears she can smell pumpkin pie as she passes a bakery that’s clearly sealed up for the night.

  Just before eight o’clock, Margaret pulls up in front of the stately Whitestone home, a few blocks from St. Anthony’s Church. She leans her forehead on the steering wheel and lets out a long sigh. The trip from Logan Airport has seemed longer than a Science and Technology Committee meeting.

  Margaret is grateful for the strings of colored lights decorating almost every house on Oxford Park, the wide, oddly named, tree-lined street that Frances Whitestone lives on. She frowns as she notices that all the streetlights are out, and the tiny red and green holiday bulbs provide the only illumination. She grumbles about the city budget as she unfolds her tall frame from the small car and walks to the back with great care, her boots cracking ice under her feet, her neck freezing as her scarf flies loose of her collar. Her purse-sized flashlight creates an eerie oval patch in front of her, like a poor spotlight in a second-rate theater production.

  Margaret pulls on the strap of her brown leather garment bag and has lifted it free of the trunk when she hears a thunderous noise. She turns to see blinding high beams of white light barrel down on her, then fade to black. Margaret clutches her luggage to her chest like a plate of armor. As her eyes recover, she tries to determine what kind of car or van has disturbed the peace of Oxford Park, as if that were her only problem as the vehicle heads straight for her.

  By the time she understands what’s happening, a ton of metal rams into her, slamming her into the trunk of the Honda, where she lands like a discarded laboratory specimen, her head pushed into the crack between the back of the car and the raised trunk, her legs hanging over the license plate at odd angles.

  The vehicle screeches backwards, then roars away, leaving an ugly trail of exhaust and blood to pollute the falling snow. One final jingle from a tiny bell sounds from the backseat of the Honda as it recovers from its blow, settling again into stillness.

  Chapter One

  “It’s a mystery,” my best friend Rose said to me. “A grown woman. How can you not like shopping? Especially Christmas shopping?”

  She stamped her tiny foot on the ground—to get rid of the snow, I hoped, and not to make a statement about my reluctance to go into one more store full of cartoon Santas and special deals on mitten-and-scarf sets. “It’s a wonder we’ve stayed friends for fifty years.”

  “I think it’s only forty-six years,” I said, “and maybe we wouldn’t still be friends if I hadn’t lived three thousand miles away for more than thirty of them.”

  “No, no, don’t say that, Gloria,” Rose said. “I’m so glad you’re back.” And we hugged right there on the street. Our shopping bags twisted around each other; my new leather gloves fell into a pool of cold, slushy, brown water in the gutter; and we laughed like a coupl
e of junior-high schoolgirls cutting history class together. If passing shoppers noticed our two short, middle-aged frames embracing—mine wide and soft, Rose’s small and wiry—no one said anything.

  With soft snow falling all around us on the streets of downtown Boston and bells ringing on every corner, I had to admit that shopping for Christmas presents was more fun than, say, sweeping broken glass from a laboratory floor.

  “I think it’s all those years you spent in a physics lab,” Rose said. “It’s not like you could browse through catalogs for hydrogen or spend a day at a helium sale.”

  “Now there’s where you’re wrong,” I said, jumping at the chance to talk science, and impressed that she knew the first two elements of the periodic table. By now we’d arrived at the doorway of Filene’s, famous for its many basement levels, with dramatic markdowns on each one, and I realized that Rose had used her small technical vocabulary to distract me so she could drag me inside. Rose and I often engaged in this unspoken trade-off. If she’d let me have my science fix, I’d follow her into a dressing room where she tried on her size sevens, or maybe I’d listen to a bit of gossip about our hometown of Revere, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston.

  “First,” I said, forging ahead in spite of the distractions of what seemed like tons of merchandise, “I did often browse through catalogs to purchase hydrogen—that’s how I bought the gas tubes for my spectrum studies. And second, helium actually is now for sale—by the federal government.”

  I guessed that Rose probably hadn’t followed the debates in Congress about whether the United States government should “be in the helium business,” as they put it. I’d listened to the sessions on C-Span and agreed with those who favored keeping the helium the government has been collecting since the Kennedy Administration. Like them, I was concerned that in a few years helium would be rare and we wouldn’t have enough for important applications, like magnetic imaging in hospitals or state-of-the-art upgrades for future transportation systems.

  “Tell me more,” Rose said, fingering a dark green silk scarf. “What do you think?” she asked, holding the scarf up to her hair, still a deep brown with red highlights, thanks to modern technology. Although I had enormous faith in science and had all sorts of electronic gadgetry in my life, my short, mostly gray hair was proof that I didn’t trust chemistry as much as I did physics.

  “I think I will tell you more,” I said, “as long as we’re in this nice, warm store. There’s an important vote coming up on the federal helium reserves. And before you make a joke about high-pitched giggles, let me point out that helium plays an important role in many industries, including medicine.”

  I hoped I sounded appropriately reproachful, but it was lost on Rose.

  “Gloria, you’re home after spending half a lifetime in California,” she reminded me. “It’s going to be a white Christmas, chestnuts are roasting right here on the street carts, and you even have a boyfriend. Forget helium. By the way, what are you going to get Matt for Christmas?”

  “I was thinking of a nice shirt and tie.”

  I pictured Sergeant Matt Gennaro at his desk, flipping through homicide files in a new pale blue shirt and perhaps a rakish paisley tie. I saw myself admiring the outfit as we lunched together at Russo’s, around the corner from the old red-brick building that houses the Revere Police Department where Matt has spent his whole career.

  “I’m not surprised,” Rose said with a groan. She gave me a look of hopelessness. “You keep forgetting, you’re not only his science consultant anymore. You’re his girlfriend. That was at least one good thing that came of those two awful murders last fall.”

  “It’s not that we’re engaged either, Rose,” I said. “We’re just starting to become friends.”

  Another sigh from Rose. “Still, here’s your first serious relationship since 1963 and you’re thinking of work clothes? A shirt and tie is what you should buy Frank,” she said, referring to her husband of three decades and my good friend for as many years.

  Rose and Frank were also my landlords for the six months that I’d been back in town. They’d set me up in an apartment above their place of business, so for the moment, my address was the same as the one in their yellow-pages ad: Galigani’s Mortuary on Tuttle Street.

  The Galiganis also sold me last year’s Cadillac from their fleet—a side benefit that took some getting used to. For the first few weeks, I’d arrived early for every gathering and parked in dark corners to avoid being seen behind the wheel of a long, black luxury car.

  “How about something personal?” Rose said, bringing me back to the task of shopping. “It’s a perfect time to show Matt you think of him more as a friend than a boss.”

  At the word “friend,” Rose lifted her penciled-in dark brown eyebrows and puckered her lips, a gesture I tried to ignore. She picked a piece of white lint from my new winter coat, as if that was all it would take for me to look as stunning as she always did.

  “What if I have his initials embroidered on the pocket of the shirt?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a slow-dancing tape in the pocket of a bathrobe,” Rose said, sending us into a preteen laughfest again.

  Just to humor her, I let Rose take me through the men’s department, past the ties, to the more personal aisles. Before she said anything out loud, I shook my head wildly when she pointed to a headless plastic torso wearing orange-and-black-tiger-striped underwear. Rose knew it would take more than one visit for me to be as comfortable in the menswear section as I would be in a hardware store, so she didn’t press me to buy anything. However, I could tell from the slight smile on her well-made-up face that she was devising a plan for a future trip. As for me, I made a mental note to visit Radio Shack on my own.

  We headed for the Park Street subway station, walking past a long row of newspaper vending machines. Rose was five feet ahead of me before she noticed that I’d stopped in front of a Boston Globe display. I was staring wide-eyed at the headline: Seventh District Rep Hit-and-Run Victim.

  Rose joined me at the blue metal case that stood in front of us like a truncated TV anchorman announcing the day’s bad news. Since neither of us had change, we leaned our shopping bags against the rack, and read as much as we could see of the folded front page.

  Congresswoman Margaret Hurley died late last night of injuries sustained after a vehicle ran her down in front of the old Whitestone home in Revere. Neither Mrs. Whitestone, longtime supporter of Hurley’s career, nor Hurley’s brother were available for comment. Police have no witnesses to what appears to be a random hit-and-run.

  “Wow,” Rose said. “Whitestone lives in that beautiful white house on Oxford Park, the one that has green shutters with shamrock cutouts.”

  “I know the one you mean,” I said, still stooped over, “only because it was the only non-Italian symbol in that neighborhood.”

  “I remember when Margaret was elected to Congress, two years ago, largely due to the widow Whitestone, by the way, but we didn’t know her very well. Did you?”

  I straightened up with a jolt, when I finally remembered why her name was familiar.

  “She’s the helium vote,” I said.

  “She’s the what?”

  “She’s on the House Science and Technology Committee. I wonder if her death had anything to do with the helium vote?”

  “Oh-oh,” Rose said. “Here we go again.”

  Chapter Two

  Not that I didn’t like my new career as science consultant to the Revere Police Department, but I needed a longer break after the last murder investigation I’d gotten involved in. That case was only two months earlier, and didn’t end until I got my first taste of a bullet wound.

  Back in my apartment after an afternoon of shopping with Rose, I rubbed my shoulder, not so much from residual pain as from the memory of wrestling with the murderer. Before I could get too upset, however, I realized that my boss and, as Rose would say, boyfriend, Sgt. Matt Gennaro, dealt with many more homi
cides than that. I was called in only if the murder involved science or scientists as suspects, like the case of the murdered hydrogen researchers I’d just helped with.

  From the headlines, I had no reason to believe that Hurley’s death had anything to do with science, and I certainly didn’t know her personally. So why was I giving this case a second thought? It was none of my business. It was a simple hit-and-run, I thought, as if random violence is any more simple to understand than premeditated murder.

  This newest phase of my life had begun when I’d retired from my physics lab in California and returned to Revere, as abruptly as I’d left. It had been more than thirty years since my departure, right after my fiancé at that time, Al Gravese, died in a car crash. My plan, if I could call it that, was to see how it felt to be back in the city I was raised in.

  I had some unanswered questions about Al’s death, and any day now I was going to do something about the little notebook of his that I’d found in one of the cartons Rose and Frank had stored for me in their attic—now my attic, too.

  My return to Revere also unleashed unresolved feelings centering around Josephine Lamerino, my mother and worst enemy in my formative years.

  “You’ll never amount to anything, Gloria,” Josephine told me almost daily during the first twenty years of my life. “You’re fat and lazy.”

  I’d expected her to stop taunting me when I did all my chores, or when I was valedictorian in high school, but she never did. Not even after she died, when I was in college—her voice never left my head. Josephine’s early message to me was louder than that of my father, who whispered that he was proud of me; stronger than that of my professors as I earned a Ph.D. in physics; more powerful than that of friends like Rose and Frank. It was my life’s work to drown her out and build some measure of self-confidence.

  My whistling kettle brought me back to the present. I settled in my favorite glide rocker with a mug of French-pressed coffee, which added as much rich aroma as good taste to my afternoon. I opened my copy of the Boston Globe and read the full article about Margaret Hurley. A sidebar about her career profiled Margaret as one of a new crop in the House of Representatives. At thirty-four years old, she was the elected spokesperson for the people of the Seventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, which included Revere.