The Oxygen Murder Read Online Free PDF

“Later.”
    I gave him my best smile. “Later.”

C HAER F OUR
    Z io Giovanni’s must have been the narrowest restaurant in this city of extremes. There was room for one short row of tables for four along one wall, and one row of tables for two along the other.
    So, when the marching band came through, we barely had room to lift our forks without pulling elbows in, close to our bodies.
    Seven old men, all looking like my father, Marco Lamerino, in Santa outfits with floppy hats, marched in with big brass instruments. The Mulberry Street Marching Band (a name we created for them, on the spot) lined up in the skinny aisle and played holiday music for about ten minutes.
    The four of us joined the other diners in singing the words now and then, when we knew them, and humming when we didn’t.
    The medley was eclectic. “Silent Night” morphed quickly into “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and then back to “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” The group was gone before anyone could think of tipping them.
    “I didn’t think they did things like that anymore,” Frank said after they’d left.
    “They do everything in New York,” said our young waiter.
    I believed him.
    The four of us had dinner together in Revere so often, it seemed quite natural for Matt and me to be sitting across a red-checked tablecloth from Rose and Frank Galigani in New York City. We’d selected Zio Giovanni’s mostly because it was a nongentrified restaurant, with scuffed, uneven floors—increasingly hard to find, with blond wood paneling and ferns creeping into the neighborhood’s dining facilities.Another plus: Zio Giovanni’s had no hawker on the sidewalk recruiting customers.
    We resorted to our firmly established rhythm as each of us took a turn at leading the conversation. Like a four-way
How was your day?
    Frank, who’d worked in one or another aspect of mortuary service since he was in college, always had stories of questionable appropriateness for mealtime. His particularly tough challenge of reshaping the mouth of a young woman who died in a head-on collision. A new glass trocar, providing visible flow of the fluids drawn from his “clients.” A state-of-the-art technique for sculpting an ear out of wax and pieces of tape and plastic to replace one lost in a shooting accident.
    Tonight he described a missing nose on the last client he’d prepped before our trip. That he simultaneously hacked off a piece of salami from the antipasto tray only added to the realism of the story.
    Rose announced that she would enlighten us on the mortician’s role in disaster preparedness. After she and Frank had breakfasted (while I was alone in a creaky elevator) with their daughter-in-law Karla’s parents, Grace and Roland Sasso, they’d met with a woman who was a member of a DMORT—Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team.
    Rose started, however, with a report on the Sassos, their oldest son Robert’s in-laws. For Rose, family always came first. I was glad to be part of hers.
    “Grace and Roland are such wonderful people. They’ve lived in that same apartment building all their lives. They wouldn’t give it up for anything. Last year—”
    “DMORT, Rose?” Frank said. I figured he didn’t want to waste a perfectly good turn at conversation with family gossip.
    “DMORT. It was so interesting. It’s not something that gets publicized,” Rose said, neatly buttering a warm slice of Italian bread that I knew she would never finish eating. My plate of eggplant, on the other hand, would soon be so clean as to look unused by the time the kitchen crew got to it.
    “You don’t necessarily want people knowing that a bunch of embalmers are standing around an accident scene, or whatever,” Frank said. “We’re thinking of joining the regional group in Massachusetts.They need funeral directors, MEs, X-ray technicians, fingerprint specialists, you name it.”
    Frank paused for a sip of wine and Rose stepped in again. “When there are mass