The Nitrogen Murder (20 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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I dug for the car remote as I ran painfully to the Saab. I got into the car and drove away. I didn’t look back except mentally, to berate myself. One more second and I would have seen the current occupant of Patel’s house. Also, one more second and the occupant might have seen me. It was a trade-off, and I’d played it safe. For once.
I didn’t relax my shoulders until I reached the Claremont-Ashby intersection and saw nothing that looked like a car in pursuit behind me. Then I remembered the odor from the bathroom window. It came to me. It was aftershave. Citrus aftershave. The last time I’d smelled it was in a bagel shop on Monday afternoon.
I’d found Phil Chambers.
 
I drove to the Berkeley marina, at the end of University Avenue, wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and the open bathroom window on Woodland Road. Though I would have appreciated a walk on the long public fishing pier stretched out before me into San Francisco Bay, I sat in the Saab, in case a quick getaway was in order.
Also, my ankle hurt badly. Not enough that I thought it was broken; just a sprain, I hoped. I removed my shoe, rubbed the sore spots, and took two aspirin. That would have to do for medical attention.
It seemed clear that Phil had been hiding out in Patel’s Claremont home. I hadn’t allowed myself the leisure of checking to see if there was a number 128 Woodland Road, but I felt sure Phil’s fingerprints were on that pizza box. I pictured him at an upper window, watching for the delivery truck, then sneaking across the street, probably at two o’clock in the circle, to pick up his dinner.
Why he was there, I could only guess. At the top of my list was fugitive Phil, guilty of two murders, hiding from the police. That thought made me want to climb into one of the lovely boats berthed in the water to my right and sail away before I had to face Elaine with what I suspected. I tried to declare Phil not guilty, on the basis that a double murderer would flee farther than a few miles from his own home. Still, innocent people didn’t go into hiding at all. And the home of a dead man was as good a place as any to lie low, especially since Patel apparently had no family, and the police were not likely to return.
I tapped my steering wheel, deciding on my next step. Matt was unavailable, unless I wanted to call his cell phone and interrupt his meeting with Dana and Russell at the Berkeley PD. Also, I wanted more evidence. More accurately,
some
evidence that Phil was at Patel’s. If I’d thought to grab the pizza box, I might have been able to persuade Russell to dust for fingerprints. As a government employee at BUL, Phil’s prints would be on file. So would mine, I realized, a match for those on the gate and the garbage cans of 127 Woodland Road.
I had one other idea.
I picked up my phone, hit 411 for information, and then punched in the number I was given.
“Giulio’s,” said an upbeat, young, female voice.
I smiled; I’d been right about the cheerleader. “Oh, hi. Are you the one who’s nice enough to arrange for my husband’s pizza to be left outside the door?”
“Um. Yeah, is this Mrs. Boyle?”
Ha.
Boyle’s Law, a key topic in every freshman chemistry class. I had to give Phil points for keeping his sense of humor in a crisis. He’d taken the name of a seventeenth-century chemist credited with formulating the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas.
I almost hung up then, having assured myself the Boyle connection was no coincidence, but Courtney, or Ashley, or whoever was on the other end of the line seemed too sweet to leave hanging.
“Yes, this is Mrs. Boyle. Thanks for being so accommodating,” I said.
“Hey, no prob. Your husband says he doesn’t want the doorbell to wake the kids.”
“He’s a doll,” I said. “And by the way, could you please put anchovies on the next order? He always forgets to ask.”
W
hen my cell phone rang, it woke me from a fantasy world where I tell the police where to find Phil Chambers; they arrest him for the murder of Lokesh Patel (co-spy, who wanted to turn Phil in for revealing secrets of a new nitrogen-based weapon) and Tanisha Hall (wrong place, wrong time); and at last my best West Coast friend, Elaine Cody, thanks me for saving her from marrying a traitor to the country.
“I have some news,” Matt said.
“Me, too.” I leaned back and enjoyed the sounds of seagulls, carried on a rejuvenating breeze that flowed through the open windows of Elaine’s car. Not quite Revere Beach, though. For crashing surf I’d have to drive to San Francisco.
“Let’s meet somewhere,” Matt said.
“Fine. Where’s Dana?”
“They’re holding her a little longer.”
I gasped and sat up straight. “She’s arrested?”
My fault
. I’d failed to account for Phil’s daughter in my dream world, where everything works out fine.
“No. I’m pretty confident they won’t arrest her.” Matt sounded tired, and I felt a pang of concern that he was overstressed. “They’re checking out her statement. Anyway, I’m taking her Jeep until they’re ready to release her.”
“Is that your news?”
“No.”
“I’m at the marina, in Elaine’s car.”
“Is that
your
news?”
“No.”
 
It wasn’t clear why Matt and I decided not to share our biggest news cell phone to cell phone, since they were better than landlines, as far as not being able to trace calls or set bugs. I’d brought my Galileo book and had read only a few pages before I saw Matt pull up in Dana’s Jeep. He parked it a few slots away and joined me in Elaine’s car.
“Want to walk on the pier?”
I pointed to my ankle. “Not today. I’m a little lame right now.”
“How did that happen?”
“I just … tripped.”
Matt clicked his tongue, willing to move on, but I knew he’d come back to it.
It couldn’t have been a more beautiful setting, in spite of our agenda. It was five-thirty still light out, but the promise of a magnificent sunset was ahead of us, with the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline as backdrop.
I wished we were on vacation.
“I know where Phil is,” I said.
“So do I,” Matt said. “You first.” Our version of cop banter, the kind that Matt claimed was necessary to survive day after day of stressful, life-and-death situations.
“I saw him,” I said. Meaning, I saw evidence of him. The way scientists say they see atoms.
Matt raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“He’s hiding out at Lokesh Patel’s home in the Claremont district. Remember the address was on Patel’s PDA? Well, I—”
Oops
. I hadn’t meant to be quite so open about my adventure in snooping. I swallowed. “He’s there, is what I’m telling you.”
“Am I going to be upset about how you know this?”
I gave him a special, distracting smile.
My sweetheart
. “Not too much.”
“Is that how you hurt your ankle?”
“Where do you think he is?” I asked. Using Matt’s own technique, answering one question with another. Not bad.
“Russell evidently took me more seriously than I thought the other day, and he did some checking on Phil. Pretty impressive, without a formal report. A Dr. Philip Chambers booked and boarded a flight to Hawaii on Monday night.”
I stopped in my mental tracks. “That can’t be. Are they sure?”
Matt treated it as a rhetorical question.
Elaine’s cold-feet theory came to my mind: Phil got wedding jitters, clutched at the last minute, and bailed. My spy theory wasn’t shot to pieces yet, however. I wondered if the mainland had extradition reciprocity with the Hawaiian Islands. Probably, since Hawaii was a state, I reminded myself. I’d been to Maui a couple of times, and to Oahu to tour Pearl Harbor, and while there I often forgot that I was still in the United States.
“What if whoever Phil works for—” I started.
“Dorman Industries.”
“I mean his … handler,” I said. “Like the KGB. What if they faked his travel?”
“The KGB is defunct.”
“You know what I mean.” I took a breath and formulated a plan. “I have an idea,” I said.
I dug my cell phone out of my purse and hit Patel’s phone number. An answering machine picked up immediately.
“
You’ve reached 510-555-9712. Please leave a
message
.” A nondescript utility-generated voice.
“This is a message for Robert Boyle,” I said. “Please call Galileo on his cell phone. You have the number.”
Matt threw up his hands. He didn’t say anything, but I heard,
Amateurs!
 
 
I knew Elaine would be wondering where I’d taken her car, though she was nice enough not to probe when I called her.
“We’re picking up dinner,” I told her. “And we’re cooking for you.”
“Thanks. I guess I haven’t been a very good hostess.”
“Not true, Elaine. Just have the coffee ready.”
I knew Elaine would have told me immediately if she had any news of Phil. Evidently Russell had charged Matt with updating Elaine on the whereabouts of her fiance. For me, I was getting to be a pro at withholding information from my friend. On the phone with her, I didn’t tell her that I was with Matt, that Russell had allegedly tracked Phil to Hawaii, or that I thought I’d found traces of Phil at Patel’s house. My evidence should also have an “allegedly” tacked on, I admitted.
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.”
“Perfect. Let me give you the e-mail address here.”
“My grandma has it.” Here William laughed. It sounded like
And a lot of good it does her
. “Then there are some things in the Notes section, but they’re written by hand and I can’t make out most of it.” William made handwriting sound like a prehistoric pastime, and in his world, it was probably rare. I pictured a laptop at every desk in his homeroom and USB ports where there used to be inkwells.
“Can you e-mail the notes, too?”
“Done. I’ll keep at it, okay, and I’ll call if I find anything else. I might have to charge it, but it’s okay because me and my friend figured out where to get the right cradle.”
“You’re terrific, William.”
My friend and I
, I said to myself. “Anything I can bring you from California?”
“A Forty-Niners cap.”
“What?”
“Just kidding, Aunt Glo. How about a T-shirt from the physics department at Cal?”
“Now you’re talking.”
 
I sat at Elaine’s computer, which was becoming as familiar to me as my own. I scrolled through subject lines that were clearly junk mail. Shouldn’t it be common knowledge in the world of e-marketing that Elaine Cody had lived in this house more than thirty years and no longer had a mortgage? And that she had no interest in discount clothing or hot teen ch*&^ks?
There was nothing yet from William Galigani.
I got up to stretch and paced the small office. Elaine’s wedding dress hung on the outside, on a hook attached to the closet. If an outfit could look forlorn, this was it. The lovely cream-colored fabric hung loosely on the hanger, as if its owner had shrunk to a skeleton. The dress was what we used to call tea length, the skirt straight, the bodice sparkling with delicate crystals and pearls stitched into a design that reminded me of graph paper.
I wondered if Elaine had done anything about alerting her wedding staff that the groom was missing. She hadn’t mentioned doing so, but I imagined that caterers, photographers, and other wedding vendors needed some notice of change or cancellation. Was there an emergency backup plan, such as all Californians were expected to have for earthquake readiness? I decided not to ask.
I walked to the windows for a glimpse of what was left of the glorious sunset. One window looked down on Elaine’s driveway. Garages and driveways were a novelty in the crowded residential areas of Berkeley; Elaine always claimed she had one of only six decent driveways in the whole city, long enough for two cars and wide enough to allow flower beds on both sides. Her garage, on the other hand, was built for a Volkswagen bug and housed only her gardening tools, old files, and items destined for charitable donation.

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