The Hydrogen Murder by Camille Minichino

the bag and pulled out three shirts that I
recognized as Al's. There was a toothbrush, a dark green chenille robe, some
socks and underwear and a square-faced travel clock in a plain silver case. The
clothing had a putrid smell that did nothing for the already dank air of the
attic. This one's easy, I thought, give the clock to the Salvation Army and
toss everything else.
    As I shook out the robe a small object fell onto my
lap—a tiny address book, not more than three inches long and two inches
wide, with a black leather cover, brittle and dry. The pages were in good shape
for their age and as I leafed through them, I saw line after line of names and
numbers in Al's handwriting. Some of the numbers were obviously phone numbers,
others had dollar signs next to them.
    I sat back on the floor and tapped the book against my leg.
I groaned out loud, tapped a few more times, and put the book in my pocket for
a later decision.
    By ten o'clock my knees were hurting and I decided to go
downstairs and soak in my tub. In the old days at ten o'clock Al and I and Rose
and Frank might be just starting an evening together, heading out for an
all-night diner. But my knees didn't hurt then, either.
    I carried a glass of water and the latest New Yorker
magazine into my bedroom, counting on the cartoons for complete distraction
from decisions about my belongings and from the emotional lows of the day.
    As I placed my glass on the nightstand, I noticed the
blinking light on the answering machine. For all the nervousness it produced at
the time, I'd forgotten about the call that came in while I was in the attic. I
pushed the button on top of the unit and heard Rose's voice.
    "Hi, hope you had a good day," she said, her voice
too cheerful for the message to come. "I just want to tell you not to
worry if you hear noise downstairs tonight. The guys will be moving Eric
Bensen's body into the first parlor around midnight. Have a good night. Talk to
you later."

 

 

 
 
 
    CHAPTER 11

 
    I'd become accustomed to living two floors above dark
parlors where corpses appeared regularly. Galigani's was one of only three
funeral homes in a city of nearly forty-five thousand people, so they had
'clients' as they called them, at least four days out of every seven. On my
first night in the apartment I had to walk past a small white casket holding
the body of a stillborn baby girl. Images of the grieving young parents and the
tiniest pale pink flowers I'd ever seen haunted me for days.
    But this was my first experience living in the same building
as the wake of a friend, a murdered one at that. Another restless night, with
dreams of cardboard coffins falling apart in rainy graveyards. The shifty-eyed
rats I hadn't met in the attic visited my subconscious in the middle of the
night. I stayed in bed until almost ten o'clock on Friday morning, lazily
sipping coffee, to make up for a busy, nerve-wracking dream life.
    Since I wasn't due at Matt's office until one-thirty, I used
the rest of the morning to catch up on some other work. I had to finish a
junior high science education project on lasers for a San Francisco science
museum, and in three weeks I was scheduled to speak at a high school physics
club meeting.
      I'd deliberately
arranged my physics club talk for November 7, the common birthday of two of my
heroines, Marie Curie in 1867 and Lise Meitner in 1878. I planned to open with
the story of the first meeting between Meitner and the other great nuclear
physicist Ernest Rutherford.
    "Oh," he'd said as a greeting, "I thought you
were a man."
    Having been nearly invisible at many physics conferences
myself, I had no trouble believing the anecdote—that Rutherford was
unaware of Meitner's gender although he had read her publications and followed
her research with interest.
    I sat down with my third cup of coffee and started my yearly
reading of my favorite biography of Marie Curie, written by her younger
daughter, Eve. I thought again what a