The Hydrogen Murder (2 page)

"Remember the articles in all the popular news
magazines last month?" I said. "This hydrogen work is connected to
superconductivity. The potential for utilities and big business is
enormous—one hundred percent efficient power lines and magnetically
levitated railroad trains, to name only a couple of hot new technologies."

"From hydrogen?" Peter asked. He was sitting up as
straight as he could on the deep corduroy cushions, his hands folded on a
napkin in his lap as if he were in Sunday School at Saint Anthony's.

I was impressed at the lengths to which Peter was going to
be polite. As a history major in college, with a minor in European languages,
he'd never liked anything remotely scientific. And he followed up that distaste
with a stunning avoidance of technology. According to Rose, who'd given me
updates through the years, Peter still had a rotary dial phone and a black and
white television set that he kept hidden in an antique oak cupboard.

I took advantage of the moment.

"We've never been able to produce hydrogen in useful
metallic form. Eric Bensen's mentor, who directs the project, is hinting to the
scientific world that they've met the challenge. The technical articles won't
be released until next month, but high tech businesses are already fighting to
get in on the profits."

"And where there's big money there's a motive for
murder even among scientists, I guess," Rose said.

"Right. And this is not your mother's hydrogen
research. Let me show you how Eric's gas gun works."

Rose stood up and poured more iced tea into our glasses.
She'd already expressed disapproval at my meager selection of beverages. I
don't drink alcohol and always forget to keep wine or beer on hand for guests.
Peter, on his best behavior, claimed to prefer iced tea.

I went to my desk for a pad of paper, but by the time I
returned, their eyes had glazed over. I knew I'd lost them, just as I had in
our school days when I was excited about a science fair project and my friends
wanted to go for pizza. I solved the problem back then by talking about levers
and pulleys at the pizza parlor. That's what I'll do now, I thought.

"Okay," I said, "let's go for pizza."

Peter's face, dark and unwrinkled at fifty-six, took on the
expression of a schoolboy caught stifling a yawn in class.

Rose threw up her hands and let out her deep throaty laugh,
still marked by the telltale hoarseness of a smoker, although she'd quit years
ago. "It's Gloria's famous physics-on-the-back-of-the-napkin trick,"
she said.

It amazed me how easily the three of us fell into our old
pattern of negotiating. We made a deal—we'd go out for science-free
pizza, but not until I made a phone call to Sergeant Matt Gennaro at the Revere
Police Department, the detective I'd worked with on the convicted chemist case.
I wanted a copy of the police report on Eric Bensen's murder. And, as Rose
figured, I hoped he'd ask for my help with the investigation.

"I think it's strange that the Police Department would
hire a physicist," Peter said.

"Frank was able to set that up through his connections.
It's certainly no stranger than hiring a psychic," Rose said, making me
proud of her. "And Gloria has an outstanding reputation as a
scientist."

"I know that," Peter said, addressing Rose.
"Hasn't the
Journal
been
documenting her career for us? Every time Doctor Lamerino has a new publication
or gets an award, they print a notice. You'd think she never left town."

"That wouldn't be because the editor is Rose and
Frank's son, would it?" I asked.

"Not at all," Rose said, "it's more like
'local girl makes good.' And John is always looking for feel-good-about-Revere
stories. It beats headlines like 'townies drive out newcomers'."

"None of this explains why you need to sell yourself to
the police," Peter said, finally turning to me. "If you need
money—"

"It's not the money." I said, interrupting Peter
before he could finish his sentence, which sounded like the beginning of an
offer I'd have to refuse.

It was hard to explain, but I still didn't have quite enough
to do in Revere. I'd signed up as a volunteer at the library and set up my
computer to network with science consultants in the area. I also had a couple
of science education contracts to finish for a museum in San Francisco, but
that was a far cry from the number of projects I was used to handling at one
time.

I had to admit, at least to myself, that my social life was
also a factor in wanting to work on Eric's murder investigation. I'd wanted to
get to know Matt Gennaro personally ever since I met him on the tungsten case,
and I wasn't used to acting on such feelings without an excuse.

I brushed aside the embarrassing thought that Eric Bensen's
murder was designed to enrich my intellectual and my social life.

Matt was my age, a widower for ten years, and had the look
of all my favorite Italian-American movie stars, including a shadowy beard that
never went completely away, and dark brown eyes that looked droopy and sad
until you got them smiling. I knew he owned a house on Fernwood Avenue, close
to the center of the city, and I wished I could think of a safe way to
determine whether he lived alone. Is it normal, I wondered, for a woman to work
at a career until retirement and then consider dating? Or was it the death of
my fiancé, Al Gravese, three months before our wedding that shaped my romantic
life?

It was always easy to put off answering the big questions,
and with Rose and Peter waiting for me, I had a good excuse. I left a message
for Matt and drove my friends in my new Cadillac to The Fenway Pizzeria, a few
blocks from the City Hall on Broadway, one of Revere's main streets.

The evening was cool and crisp and the maples and birches
wore the glorious reds and yellows that I'd missed so much during my years in
California. With each leaf, I felt a tiny—micro-, really—bit at
home.

~~~~

The Fenway had the best pizza in this neighborhood where at
one time blondes and blue eyes were scarce. All of us had grown up second or
third generation Italian. Looking at our eighth grade class photograph you'd
think all thirty or so students were related. Boys and girls alike, most of us
had olive skin, dark hair, and about ten too many pounds on our short bodies.
Peter was one of the exceptions, having the long, thin torso and angular
features that were more characteristic of his Sicilian grandparents.

 
We'd all learned
Italian as children and Peter had taught Italian language and literature, along
with European history, at the new Revere High. He still had a full-time
schedule of classes with no plans for retiring. I didn't ask why he'd never
married. I figured he'd tell me soon enough.

As I looked around The Fenway, the routine meeting place
after basketball games when I was in school, I half expected to see my old
Revere High chums. For all I knew these
were
my old chums. Evidently the youth of present-day Revere hung out in a different
spot. From the jukebox music that greeted us at the door—Julius La Rosa's
"That's Amore"—I was able to pinpoint just where The Fenway got
stuck in time.

Maybe they wanted to humor me, but once we'd ordered our
extra-large combination pizza and drinks, Rose and Peter asked me to tell them
about the murder victim, Eric Bensen.

"Did you know him personally?" Peter asked.

I nodded and took a breath. I realized I hadn't fully
absorbed the fact of Eric's death.

"He was in California at the Berkeley lab for about a
year," I said. "It was a kind of internship, to learn supercomputer programming
techniques that he could apply to the equations for his hydrogen research back
here. Two other local physicists were with him. We had mutual friends who
introduced us because we're all from this area and we formed a dinner group
that included Eric and his wife."

For some reason, I left out details about Eric's wife,
Janice Bensen, and her incessant whining. When Janice was around, we were all
embarrassed for Eric. She was tired of being poor, she'd remind us, working at
a dead-end clerical job while waiting for Eric to finish his degree.

"My biological clock is ticking," Janice said
often, as we tried to enjoy world-class Berkeley and San Francisco seafood
restaurants. "I don't see why we can't move back to Revere and be near our
families."

In spite of my agreement with Rose and Peter, I made another
attempt to explain what was so different about the hydrogen experiments Eric
had worked on. After all, they did ask what I knew about Eric. This time they
were more patient. Maybe it was the yeasty smell of thick-crust pizza dough and
the promise of mushrooms, anchovies, and extra cheese, plus Michelob on tap. I
noticed Peter didn't order iced tea.

I spread a napkin on the scratched red Formica tabletop and
drew a long narrow rectangle, working around the little map of Italy in the
corner and being careful not to tear the thin paper. I added a pointed section
to one end of the rectangle, and a placed a round target next to it.

"Just like a regular gun and target," I said, my
fingers working to add detail to the drawing. "Except in this case the gun
is a sixty-foot long compression chamber and the target is liquid hydrogen.
After a build-up of pressure, the shock wave from the gun is enough to turn the
hydrogen target into a metal."

I sketched in a piston, and some arrows to show the
direction of the shock waves, then sat back, admiring my art, once again filled
with awe at the wonders of technology.

"For a fraction of a second the hydrogen becomes
metallic and conducts electricity with almost no resistance—superconductivity.
Very exciting."

Apparently my companions didn't experience this
exhilaration. Our waitress, who also looked like a member of my high school
class, had delivered our pizza and Peter was forcing the slices into neat
triangles and arranging them on The Fenway's heavy white plates.

"A fraction of a second," Rose said, her voice
rising above Julius La Rosa's. "That's worth making a fuss over?"

"I still don't get how it could be connected to a
murder," Peter said.

I already had a theory about that, but I wasn't sure I
wanted to share it. My theory involved thinking bad things about physicists,
something I was always reluctant to do. There were shrines in my heart to
Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Marie Curie. I didn't want to clutter my mind with anything
that implied that scientists of today were less than perfect.

I finally decided that Rose and Peter could be trusted, and
besides, I needed to get my thoughts out in the open so I could analyze them
better. I rationalized that the noise from the jukebox would shield our
conversation from the general public that crowded the pizza parlor.

"There's a lot of money involved," I said,
"as well as careers and reputations on the line. Just before he left
California to come back here, Eric hinted that there might be something wrong
with the data his team submitted to an important journal. I know his mentor and
colleagues were upset that Eric wanted to look into some discrepancy before
they published their data."

As I talked, an image of the evening came back to
me—Eric getting our attention with loud talk about data tampering,
deception, and fraud. We were at a Saint Patrick's Day party thrown by one of
his colleagues, Jim Guffy, and I had a vague memory of Eric's mentor, Ralph
Leder, rushing to Eric's side and ushering him out of the room.

"I thought scientists were supposed to be objective and
above all that," Rose said. "Are you sure you're not talking about
lawyers?" From Rose, the mother-in-law of a lawyer whom she loved, this
comment had a light-hearted ring.

"What happened to our science-free pizza?" Peter
asked, pulling crumbs from his jacket and placing them in a neat pile on his
plate. "Tell us about your life in California."

As hard as I tried, I couldn't keep the conversation on safe
science instead of drifting to more personal matters. Peter was pushing hard,
and not just with his long legs that I kept bumping into under The Fenway's
table.

"Why did you run away and stay away all these years,
Gloria?" he asked.

"I don't think of it as running away. I went to the West
Coast to study physics."

"As if there aren't places to study physics in
Boston."

"I needed a change."

"Well, that's called running away."

"If that's how you see it. I don't," I said,
hoping my voice carried more conviction than I felt. Whether I'd run away or
not was one of the questions I'd come back to answer, but not in this
environment, and not at Peter's will.

Rose was twisting her napkin, her eyes darting from me to
Peter as if she were a spectator at a tense volleyball game. I knew she could
tell I wasn't having a good time. Rose had eaten only one slice of pizza, while
I'd had three and contemplated a fourth as I became more and more uncomfortable
with Peter's inquisition. Another clue about why there was such a huge
difference in weight between Rose and me.

After a couple more rounds of questions without
answers—why had I sneaked back to see my father when he was dying and not
contacted anyone except Rose and Frank, who buried him? why did I finally leave
California and come 'home?' was I back for good?—I was happy to see our
venerable waitress hovering over us with a pitcher of dark beer in one hand and
our check in the other, using her penciled-in eyebrows to ask which we wanted.