The Nitrogen Murder (19 page)

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Authors: Camille Minichino

Tags: #California, #Lamerino; Gloria (Fictitious Character), #Missing Persons, #Security Classification (Government Documents), #Weddings, #Women Physicists, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Women Sleuths, #Reference

BOOK: The Nitrogen Murder
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No one expressed the obvious out loud: All the West Coast people who knew I’d be in California for two weeks were now in Elaine’s bright kitchen. Except Phil Chambers.
. I looked at the clock above the sink. About four o’clock in the east. Robert wouldn’t be available for PDA hacking for a couple of hours.
Might as well have biscotti.
 
The next call interrupted me in the nick of time. I’d been about to express the theory I’d held for a while: that Phil, Robin, and Patel were involved in industrial espionage, at least, if not treason. I’d concocted scenes where two of them pass by each other in front of the Indian fabric store on University Avenue, and one slips a computer disk into the pocket of the other.
I envisioned Phil taking Patel’s PDA when he killed him—I knew I needed a motive here—and mailing it to me, to get it out of town. It didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t come up with anything else. I tried to think whether I’d ever heard Phil pronounce my name. Did he say Lamerina? I tried to remember, but I realized that if I condemned everyone who mispronounced or misspelled my name, there wouldn’t be enough striped fabric in the world to make their prison uniforms.
I wished Matt and I were alone. I wanted to ask him, among other things, what the chances were that Phil would send damaging evidence—if it was damaging, another
if
-through the mail, where it would ultimately be discovered, rather than toss it into San Francisco Bay, or off the cliffs of Grizzly Peak, or into Tilden Park, very near his Kensington home?
As for Julia’s scams, I’d come up with a plausible scenario where Phil framed Julia, generating the false invoices himself, in order to deflect suspicion from his spy ring.
Whew, quite an exercise
, I thought.
Lucky for me, I hadn’t yet had time to polish the theory for public scrutiny before the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Matt,” Elaine said. “Inspector Russell.”
Matt took the phone and walked to the small hallway off the kitchen, keeping his back to us.
Not fair
. We all strained to hear at least his side of the conversation.
“Uh-huh.”
Pause. A long breath. “Is that right?”
Pause. “Sure, sure. Understood.”
Pause. “How soon?”
“Appreciated.”
I knew before Matt told us, and looked across the table at Dana and Elaine, both of whom wore heavy expressions.
“They found traces of coke in the briefcase.”
“What?” Elaine’s voice had reached a pitch higher than I’d
ever heard from her. “We looked. We didn’t find any drugs.”
“We don’t have trained dogs,” Dana said. Her voice was a match for Elaine’s, high and tight.
“They want us to go down to the station for questioning.”
“Us?” Dana asked. “You mean me.”
“Look, if it were really bad news, they wouldn’t call Matt. They’d come and get you,” I said. The last part came off stronger than I meant. I looked to Matt for confirmation and was relieved to see his nod.
“I’m sure they just want to ask some questions.” He paused. “Dana, they’re going to ask you straight out, do you use? Did Tanisha use? That kind of thing. They’re fishing at this point.”
Dana put her head on the table, landing on the map a little south of where we were sitting, and folded her arms over her head. I had the feeling she had a secret that was on the brink of discovery.
“Do they want me now?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“Sometime in the next couple of hours,” Matt said.
“So, not immediately,” Elaine said. “That’s a good sign.”
“A very good sign,” I said. The lawman’s partner.
 
“It was never more than pot,” Dana said. “I have no idea where that coke came from. I know they think Tanisha was stealing those medical supplies to feed her habit, but that’s crap, too. And now, why do they think I had something to do with it?”
“The briefcase was in your custody,” Matt said.
And Phil’s
, I thought, but not out loud.
I was surprised to hear marijuana still called “pot” and wondered if it was a Berkeley thing. After all, you could still buy hand-dipped tie-dyed T-shirts on Telegraph Avenue. And I’d heard about a new campus hot spot called the Mario Savio Cafe, after the young man credited with starting the Free Speech Movement in the sixties.
For me, I’d hidden in the basement of the physics building during those turbulent times, playing it safe under a white lab coat.
“How much?” Matt asked. “Daily, weekly, what?”
Dana blew out a breath. She’d finally raised her head and moved her folded arms down to chest level.
“It’s probably better to practice here, with us,” Elaine said.
Dana nodded and looked at me, though it was Elaine who’d spoken. I was sure she wasn’t happy talking about her illegal habits in front of her future stepmother.
“We never got into the hard stuff. No E, no crack, none of that junk. All the EMTs use weed now and then. Well, all the ones I hang with. It’s a very stressful job.”
“What color is it?” Elaine asked. “Just out of curiosity.”
I stifled a laugh, but Dana answered as if she were taking a quiz. “Some is brown, some is green, kind of like grass grass, but never as green as
grass
grass.”
“Did you smoke alone or in groups?” Matt asked, his questions being more in tune with what the Berkeley PD might ask. I expected they knew what color pot was.
I had a flashback to the days of confession with Father Matussi at St. Anthony’s Church in Revere.
Did you sin alone or with others?
he’d ask, in a heavy Italian accent.
“Both,” Dana said. “Sometimes when I get home, I just light up a joint, get quiet. A few guys smoke on the job, if you can believe it. Not me. And not Tanisha. Once in a while at a party we might pass around a pipe.”
“Does it make you more social? Uninhibited?” I asked. It wasn’t every day I had a chance to learn firsthand about the wild side. I’d heard about marijuana-laced brownies, which was the only way I’d ever try a drug, if pushed.
“Not more social, though it depends on the particular strain of weed and on the person.” Dana shrugged. “It’s like alcohol in a way. It affects different people differently. But mostly with
weed you kind of go into your own space, almost like an anesthetic. You get introspective. If you start out depressed, it could make you more so, depending …”
“Let me see if I have this right. You go to a party, smoke a joint or pass a pipe around, and then retreat into your own separate relaxed or depressed states?”
Uh-oh,
I thought,
I’m sounding like someone’s old-school parent
.
Or my cousin Mary Ann
. I was relieved to see Dana smile at my borderline sermon.
“That’s about it,” she said.
“Where do you get this stuff?” Elaine asked.
I wasn’t sure if this was still the practice quiz or whether Elaine thought she could use some herself. I had the same question about availability, however. This was Berkeley. Was there a weed section on some supermarket aisle that I avoided, like those full of pet foods or baby products?
Medicinal marijuana was legal in Massachusetts, and Matt’s oncologist had offered the program to Matt to alleviate the effects of his cancer treatments. I wasn’t surprised when he declined.
Matt put his hand on Dana’s. “I’m sure Elaine doesn’t want you to name your sources. We’re just curious, is all.” Matt the mediator.
“You just know someone who knows someone. It’s not that we go down to the docks and meet a boatload from Colombia or anything. Once you’re out of school, it’s harder. The network dries up, but you’ll always find a friend’s friend’s friend who brings it around, you know.”
“Do you have any with you?” Elaine asked.
“I think it’s time to go,” Matt said.
 
Matt and Dana left for the Berkeley PD. Elaine said she needed to return some work-related phone calls and retreated to her office.
Left alone, what was I to do? It was only three-thirty in the afternoon. The heat wave had broken, and a cool, sunny day awaited me.
I tore off the sheet of paper with Patel’s address and headed for 127 Woodland Road.
P
atel’s neighborhood was the posh district off Claremont Avenue in Berkeley. No ordinary Plexiglas bus stop shelter in this affluent locale; here the shelter looked like a tiny villa, built of stone and wood in an attractive design. Enormous stone pillars with large lanterns on top of them led into an area of winding streets and cul-de-sacs.
Even with Elaine’s worn, but correctly folded, Berkeley map on the seat beside me, I had to make a number of U-turns in my search for Woodland Road. Either there were several tennis courts sprinkled through the region or I passed the same one many times.
One of the false streets I started down had a huge eucalyptus in the middle. The trunks of two trees were twisted together like Watson and Crick’s double helix, rising from the middle of the road, spitting it into two narrow lanes just big enough for one car in each direction.
I drove down the right-hand lane, dense with tall trees—eucalyptus and willows were the only ones I could identify—on both sides. The branches of the trees seemed to reach across the road to meet those on the other side, high up in the air, forming a lovely but eerie arch that stretched the equivalent of a long city block. In this area of Claremont, you could hardly tell it was a sunny day.
Fine with me.
“My car is your car,” Elaine had said when she disappeared for her phone calls, but I doubted she had this trip in mind for her Saab and me.
The houses were magnificent, each a different style, but all architecturally complex and interesting. Long sets of multilevel stairs led up and around the backs of the homes. The landscaping reminded me of the Rose Garden in miniature, with rustic terraced designs and colorful blooms.
I finally arrived at Woodland Road, another densely wooded street. I slowed down to check the addresses, discreetly lettered on homes and mailboxes. I knew better than to expect a linear array of numerals when it came to assigning numbers to residences in Berkeley, where a single street could end at one intersection and then pick up half a block away at another intersection with the same name but a new numbering sequence.
Woodland was a short street ending in a wide cul-de-sac that served as a turnaround. I came to the end and breathed a sigh of relief; there was no house with the number Rose had given me as Patel’s address. It dawned on me that I’d been hoping the address was bogus, since I had no plan for the reality of finding (and entering?) Patel’s home. In fact, it was stupid coming here alone, I reminded myself. What had I been thinking? If Matt knew, he’d be irritated beyond argument.
I bore left, around the circular part of the road, heading home. An enormous house faced me as I passed the eleven o’clock position in my counterclockwise drive. Flat gray and orange stone, as many of the houses were, this home was set closer to the road than most, but its trees hid most of the facade. The address was spelled out in blue and white tiles, probably imported from Holland, over an elaborate wood-and-glass door.
127 WOODLAND ROAD.
My stomach clutched.
Not that I couldn’t simply keep Elaine’s car in drive and continue on.
The whole of Woodland Road was quiet, and even more so around the house isolated at the end. I cocked my head to get a closer look at the large stone structure. Like the other houses in this neighborhood, it seemed to belong in another country and time, with its dark, majestic lines and overwhelming greenery. I imagined servants’ quarters in the basement. A stark contrast to the bright new developments growing up these days, where the trend was pastel stucco landscapes with only the hint of trees to come.
There was no sign of life inside or outside the home, no open windows, no mothers with strollers or minivans, no gardener’s truck on the street. The newspaper reports of Patel’s death hadn’t mentioned a family, and I felt certain we would have known by now, from the media or from Verna Cefalu, Patel’s Dorman Industries secretary, if there had been a widow or children.
The Saab was in park. My palms were sweaty, my fingers alternately slipping and tapping on the shiny wooden knob of the gearshift. I needed to make a decision. Go shopping and surprise Elaine with a little gift from a bath shoppe? Take in a movie at the nearby Elmwood Theater? Get some exercise on a long walk through the winding campus roads? Just because I’d found the address didn’t mean I had to do anything about it.
In fact, this might not even be where Patel lived. Rose could have read the address incorrectly. PDA screens were hard to read, and her eyes weren’t what they used to be. Or Patel might have entered a false address. He was a spy, wasn’t he?
I reasoned carefully. If this was
not
Patel’s house, and I went in, it would be a serious B&E perpetrated on some innocent people. If this was Patel’s house, the police had surely been here, and there would be nothing for me to discover.
Either way, it was a bad idea to enter.
But what’s one more bad idea in a career full of them?
I asked myself.
I moved the car about twenty yards farther around the circle
and partly onto the gravel that served as a sidewalk, until tree branches brushed the windshield. I was grateful I wasn’t driving my own car, a Cadillac handed down from the Galigani Mortuary fleet and much too difficult to maneuver on these roads or to hide under a tree.
I turned off the ignition, got out of the virtually hidden car, and walked toward 127 Woodland Road.
 
Once I realized how absurd it was to try to break into the house, it seemed quite reasonable to just look around outside.
I’m thinking of relocating to this area and I thought I saw a FOR SALE sign on this house
, I could tell a suspicious neighbor. Or the police. I put thoughts of my cop fiancé out of my mind.
I wished I’d seen more contemporary movies—I was sure there was a standard way to do this. I began by slipping into the side yard through the unlocked garden gate. The heavy, old wooden door was splintery, reminding me I should have gloves, for more reasons than one.
I stepped onto the loose gravel path that surrounded the house and faced the side wall, glad I’d changed into indestructible black oxfords. I kept my body close to the building, my shoulder brushing the cool stone. I moved along the wall slowly.
The first window I came to was almost as large as a typical patio door, but raised a couple of feet from the ground. I peered in through gauzy curtains at an elaborate living room suite with a maroon velvety look that reminded me of the Galigani Mortuary parlors. The objets d’art seemed perfectly placed. Godlike statues on small tables, vases in all sizes on the floor and mantel, paintings hung in complementary groups of three. Everything said
professional
interior decorator
—no ordinary Pottery Barn shoppers had furnished this home.
A breeze ruffled the trees behind me, making a low, whispery sound, almost hissing, as if to warn me. If the noise had been a word, it would have been
tresssspassing
.
I traveled more quickly to the other side of the window, still conscious of the crunching gravel, scanning the room as I moved. There were no photos or personal items that I could see; no books other than a matched set in the built-in bookshelves. Too far away for me to make out the titles. The Harvard Classics, or the works of Shakespeare, I guessed. Or the Indian equivalent.
Maybe Patel had a family still in India. My grad school classes in the sixties had been filled with men whose families had stayed behind in other countries. Wives who’d been given in arranged marriages waited in China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, for their husbands to return. One Korean student I’d gotten to know hadn’t seen his children in more than two years. The plan was that Ha-Neul would earn his degree and then go home to make a good life for them. I wondered if that cultural pattern had survived into the new century
Reminiscing, philosophizing. Sure signs that I’d found nothing of interest in the present moment.
I decided to give the grounds in the back a quick sweep and then leave. The area behind the house stretched to about twenty yards, not large by mansion standards. It was nicely landscaped with bushes and flowers of modest proportions. It was also empty—no toys, bikes, swings, outdoor furniture, barbecue grill. There was no sign that anyone lived here recently.
I turned to make my getaway, calling myself lucky I hadn’t gotten arrested, and spotted two medium-sized garbage containers.
No, I told myself.
But I lost the argument.
I stayed close to the walls of the house and approached the small, raised wooden pallet that held the cans. I lifted the top of the first one and peered in.
Empty.
On to the second one.
Not empty; in fact, quite full.
I stepped back and slammed the lid shut, as if the contents might attack me. I thought back. Patel died almost a week ago, on a Friday. There must have been a garbage pickup since then. Both barrels should be empty. The only way this one could be full was if pickup was last Friday, the morning of the day Patel died, and he’d managed to fill it up again in the hours before he was shot.
At the top of the refuse container was a thin white box. The unmistakable shape of a takeout pizza box. Was Patel’s last meal a pizza?
I lifted the cover of the trash barrel and tilted the carton so I could read the top. I noticed many more takeout containers underneath. The pizza place was an independent, evidently, named Giulio’s, on Ashby. A delivery slip, filled out in neat handwriting and marked with oil stains, was Scotch-taped to the top of the box.
128 WOODLAND RD., it read. Not Patel’s address but across the road. Under special instructions:
leave outside by tree, pick up cash in mailbox
.
The handwriting was clear cursive, like Palmer Method, except the is were dotted with small circles. I envisioned the writer as a sixteen-year-old girl with a tiny waist, earning money for her cheerleading outfit. Unfortunately, my imaginary minimum-wage employee wasn’t as careful with the date. In that section, she’d written only
Wednesday
. Probably only days of the week mattered at that age, I figured. Work Wednesdays, study Thursdays, party on Fridays and Saturdays. Since there were no mortgage payments or pension checks to keep track of, the month and date weren’t relevant.
No matter. Either someone had eaten pizza in Patel’s house last night or the folks at number 128 dumped their garbage here. I could look for that address on my way out. But in my single-mindedness, I discounted that possibility and others quickly. That the police had been snacking on the job, for example. Or
teenagers partying in the neighborhood. Or that an empty box in a garbage can meant nothing in the first place.
Above the garbage pallet was a small window. The frosted glass said
bathroom
. It was transom-shaped and slightly open. Before I could talk myself out of it, I tipped the empty can over and, with great effort, lifted myself up and stood on it. There was no chance any human other than a toddler could slip through the opening, but I got a good look around the side of the metal frame, through the triangular gap. I felt I’d sunk to a new low, peeping through a man’s bathroom window. Fortunately, the shower curtain was open and the tub unoccupied.
I saw a razor, shaving cream, and a small bottle of aftershave on the counter around the sink. The fixtures seemed old, either original equipment or new faucets designed to appear old. I’d come to accept the Restoration Hardware look, though I couldn’t understand it. I knew I’d never own a telephone that had a 1940s look on the outside and the latest digital technology on the inside.
The door to the rest of the house was closed. A distinctive citrus smell wafted through the opening.
Nothing unusual—except the toiletry items were spread out on the counter in front of a black carrying case. And the toothbrush lay half inside a long blue holder, probably plastic.
Question: Why would a man groom himself out of a travel kit in his own home?
Answer: It’s not his own home.
Click
.
The noise startled me. To me, in my edgy state, it rang out in the silence, sounding like an entire lab cabinet of beakers crashing to the floor. Someone was entering the bathroom. I ducked down and lost my balance, falling onto the ground, making another noise that thundered through the quiet Claremont afternoon.
I got up as quickly as I could and limped out of the yard. To minimize the sound of my footsteps, I moved out from the
house onto the grass, aware that I could be seen more easily.
A cat. A raccoon
.
A squirrel
. I gave these words emphasis in my thoughts, as if to put them into the mind of the resident of 127 Woodland Road.
Let him think an animal tipped over his garbage can
, I pleaded to no one in particular. My only saving thought was that no adult could fit through the bathroom window opening to pursue me. I wondered how long it might take for a person to run through the house and meet me as I crossed in front of the entryway My heart pounded in my ears as I slipped through the garden gate and out to the gravel sidewalk.

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