The Oxygen Murder (37 page)

Traffic on Lori’s elevator and fire escape had been high that Sunday morning as Dee Dee interrupted Tina’s attack on Amber, and then I interrupted Dee Dee’s B and E.

I learned that Dee Dee and Rachel had hired lawyers to take care of their respective misconduct, a B and E charge for the first and misuse of the U.S. Postal Service for the second.

I sincerely hoped Dee Dee would consider unhooking herself from Zach.

I was satisfied that Blake Manufacturing and Curry Industries would be accurately represented in Lori’s documentary and duly fined for their real-life violations—Blake for poor ventilation in the welding area and Curry for illegal CFC purchases.

“Thanks for all your help, Gloria,” Buzz said, giving me a surprise hug.

“Probably as much nuisance as assistance, I know,” I said, conscious of all the little false leads I’d gotten excited about.

He shook his head. “Don’t think about it. In the end, you know, cops just want a case solved, and it doesn’t matter where we get the help to solve it.”

I was happy to get away without another Yogi Berra quote.

The second debriefing took place in Rose’s room. She wanted to combine a case update with showing us her purchases for the week and giving us each a present.

“Presents? Now? But we’ll all be together in Revere for Christmas,” I said. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t done any December twenty-fifth shopping, let alone end-of-vacation shopping.

“Lori’s coming, too,” Matt said, clearly pleased that his niece would be joining us for the holiday.

“And maybe Craig,” Lori said. We clapped at the news.

“These aren’t really Christmas presents,” Rose said. “They’re just . . . souvenirs.”

She lined up three small red and green foil gift bags on top of her luggage. The rest of the room, including what most likely used to be Frank’s side of the bed, was piled high with shopping bags. A couple of the logos were familiar—the lowercase
b
for Bloomingdale’s and the rose for Lord & Taylor. Other names I recognized from previous trips with Rose, though I’d never been in Bergdorf’s, Dolce & Gabbana, Barney’s, or Harry Winston’s.

“First, a little clarification,” Rose said. “What was the story with Billy Keenan? I never met him, but I thought you suspected him for a while.”

“She suspected everybody for a while,” Matt said, meaning me. He’d given his solemn word, however, never to bring up the matter of Karla Sasso and the
Fielding v. Fielding
letter.

“I never suspected Rachel Hartman,” I corrected.

“And you, Gloria, I can’t believe what you went through with Tina. I didn’t think they let people use those elevators without an operator.”

“They don’t. Buzz said Tina evidently drugged him. She has a lot of resources, remember.”

“Maybe I don’t want to hear all this,” Rose said. “As long as you’re safe.”

Lori raised her hand, as if asking permission to speak. “Billy called me last night, from his home in Kansas. He wanted to explain why he’d come to New York in the first place. He thought he could talk Amber into going back home or at least giving him some money to help out the family. I don’t think he has any idea where Amber’s money came from, and I didn’t tell him. He just knew she had a lot of it, from her general lifestyle, and he was ticked off since he and his mom were just making it on the farm. That’s why they fought.”

Another breathless report from Lori, who was hard to stop once she
got going. Like Rose. I felt so lucky to have such energetic, engaged people in my life.

“So once his sister was found murdered, Billy lied because he knew we might suspect him,” Matt said.

“Yeah, you bet,” Lori said. “Especially when he was told not even to pick up his stuff from my apartment. He wanted to talk to me yesterday, but he saw me run away from him and figured, why bother? I’m really sorry I wasn’t nicer to him. I think he has a very bad opinion of New York.”

“We’ll just have to invite him back,” Rose said.

I waited for her to offer to take him shopping.

Though we’d been there often through the years, Rose talked us all into an excursion to the Empire State Building for our final evening in New York.

“Only if you promise not to give us too much history,” I said.

She agreed—but found a way to slip in her data on our walk, four abreast, toward the Fifth Avenue skyscraper, probably the most famous in the world.

“It’s so familiar, I don’t have to tell you it’s been in more than ninety movies.”

“And a number of documentaries,” Lori reminded us.

“It has 1,172 miles of elevator cables,” Rose said. “Oops. Sorry, Gloria. Well, you’ll be safe in these elevators, I’m sure.”

Rose dropped her last stack of postcards in a mailbox in Times Square. She’d written at least a dozen postcards a day since we arrived, sometimes scribbling quickly or applying postage before our meals arrived.

“Who’s getting all these cards?” I’d asked her after the first three mail drops.

“Let’s see, there’s MC, John, Robert, and William—he likes to get one addressed especially to him—and Martha at the office. There are fifteen people in my Rotary Club group, and ten on the committee for the historical society’s auction. Also, all my cousins who go to Florida for the winter. They’re always sending me cards. So that’s Paul and Lu, and Don and Liz, and—”

I held up my hand. “I get it.”

“And since Frank left on Tuesday, I’ve sent him a couple every day.”

“Of course.”

I had three possible candidates for postcards: my cousin Mary Ann, who insisted on calling me Gloria Gennaro no matter how many times I explained that I hadn’t changed my name and neither had Matt; Andrea Cabrini, a technician friend at the Charger Street Lab in Revere; and my best California friend, Elaine Cody, a technical editor at the Berkeley lab where I’d worked. I told myself I went for quality, not quantity.

We entered the art deco lobby and
oohed
and
aahed
over the metal relief sculpture of a glowing Empire State Building. We were all sporting the “souvenirs” Rose had given us, from one or another museum shop she’d been in during the week. For me, a beautiful green enamel Christmas tree pin, with tiny white beads strung around the branches. For Lori, a lovely ceramic pin in the shape of an old-fashioned Santa bent over with presents. For Matt, a tie tack with a pattern of a tiny sprig of holly.

Once upstairs (the elevator and escalator rides were smooth and without incident, but the source of much teasing), we headed first for the view to the south, walking above clusters of skyscrapers on all sides. What struck me most about the absent Twin Towers was how much I missed them on this trip even though we hadn’t visited Ground Zero. They’d been your anchor walking around midtown, a compass pointing south to the tip of Manhattan at any hour of the day, in any weather.

“I never did get to tell you all the memorabilia that was in the police museum,” Matt said. “They’ve got interviews, photographs, plus Ground Zero artifacts.” Matt shook his head. You might have thought he’d been there himself, instead of men and women he considered part of his professional family. “It’s heartbreaking. You see pieces of glass and chunks of building, and burned-up respirator masks and police radio caps, flashlights, yellow harnesses . . .”

His voice trailed off, as did our minds, back to the terrible day.

Rose and I had begun our New York reunion trips when I first moved to California, long before the Twin Towers were built. The
World Trade Center was an exciting new place to visit in the early seventies. We’d gone up in the sleek elevators and looked down to Staten Island on one side and up to the Bronx on the other.

Now they were gone. I felt like we’d lived through their birth and their death.

It made me feel very old—and very sad.

On Saturday morning, Lori and Craig came to see us off. Our bags were on a luggage dolly in the hotel lobby where we were saying our good-byes.

Lori was wound up about a sponsor who’d contacted her about including her documentary,
Oxygen—Like Any Good Thing, Too Much or Too Little Can Ruin Your Health,
in the Green Scene Festival next spring.

“They told me they’ve been wanting someone to take on the ozone issue,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

Craig beamed as she talked, adding his own excitement about the “totally cool invitation.” I sensed an excellent hookup was in the works.

Rose felt obliged to include some last-minute trivia—that New York is now known as the second home to the world, for example. Her facts overlapped Lori’s exclamations, causing a happy confusion of words to float up to the high ceiling of the lobby. “This reminds me of a Yogi Berra quote,” Matt said.

“Oh, no,” we women cried.

“Go, dude,” Craig said.

Matt smiled and prepared his throat for a performance. “ ‘It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much.’ ”

Everyone within earshot obliged him with a laugh.

I was ready with a random fact of my own.

“Did you know that all of New York City’s drinking water is treated with a fluoride compound, at a concentration of one-point-zero parts per million?”

I tuned out the groans and thought how much I would miss New York.