Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (12 page)

Ambler put down his fork and placed his napkin on top of his plate. “I hope you have an expense account for this.”

“Yeh, right.” Cosgrove poured the last of the wine into both of their glasses. “In homicide, we entertain a lot—expense-account lunches with suspects, a corporate box at the Garden for when we take out hit men and serial killers.” Folding his napkin, he put it on the table in front of him. “The duck was cooked perfectly, crisp but not dry, the sauce a touch sweet for my money. How was your sole?”

“Good,” said Ambler, who had no way of judging.

Cosgrove searched Ambler’s face for a moment. “So what’s the connection between Donnelly and Yates? You think it’s something that happened back then that’s working itself out now, right? That’s one of your patented theories.”

Ambler didn’t hesitate. “It’s a possibility. Max Wagner’s a connection—not only in the past. Max and Donnelly may have been writing competing biographies of Nelson Yates. I told you about the argument they had, or Benny did, possibly about plagiarism. That’s an accusation not lightly made in academic circles.”

Cosgrove eyed Ambler with his practiced police interrogator stare. “No offense, professor. It doesn’t seem to me anyone cares enough about this literary crap to kill someone over it.”

Ambler took a deep breath. Even so, his tone was sharp. “Not a professor. I’m a librarian. You asked. Take it for what it’s worth.”

Cosgrove shifted his gaze. Ambler regretted his reaction, which surprised and embarrassed his friend; no reason for Cosgrove to know the professor comment was insulting. Lots of water under the bridge. After a moment, Cosgrove said. “Let me try again. Back to the library, Larkin’s a strange duck—”

“Why?” Something in Cosgrove’s tone put him on alert.

Cosgrove snorted. “Because he acts like that, like you just did. Like he’s covering something up.”

Ambler remembered something. “Tourists. Tourists have cameras. Someone—”

Cosgrove nodded. “We thought of that. A group of Japanese college students, most of them had cameras. There’s diplomacy involved. We’re working through the State Department.” His manner softened. “I know you don’t like what I’m asking. Think of it this way. We need to do more than catch the killer. We need to eliminate as a suspect anyone who had access to the room and might have had a reason to kill either of them. If we don’t have an ironclad case, if we miss something, once we do have the killer, a good defense lawyer will ask why we didn’t investigate Jack the Ripper or Marty the Mugger or Kate the Killer, all with motive and opportunity to kill the victim. And if we didn’t investigate him or her, how do we know the aforementioned Jack or Marty or Kate isn’t the murderer, rather than the accused?”

What Cosgrove said was true but not the whole story. Ambler waited.

Cosgrove took out his notebook. They went back and forth about Harry for another twenty minutes. Harry was hiding something; they both knew that. Where they differed was on what it meant, and whether he had a right to keep things to himself.

“If he knew who the killer was, he’d tell you.”

Cosgrove raised his eyebrows, opened his eyes wider, his expression suggesting patience. “I’ve put off bringing him in for a lot of reasons, one of them isn’t that I don’t think he has anything more to tell us.”

Chapter 10

After a couple of espressos and when enough time had passed for the wine to wear off, Cosgrove began the drive home to Queens. At that time of night, through the Midtown Tunnel, he’d be home in twenty minutes, with luck. As always, the case was foremost in his mind. This one could get away if he didn’t get a break soon. Too little evidence, no witnesses, everyone holding his cards close to the vest. Not that it was the first case where everyone had something to hide and lied. Scholars and librarians, a murder in the hood, a body in the library, the response was the same. No one gave up anything easily.

Ray was protecting his boss, understandable enough, also protecting the Italian kid who was getting it on with the ex-wife of the first victim. If he were honest with himself, despite the suspicions he laid out for Ray, he didn’t have a suspect. The first murder looked like vengeance—another “Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.” The ex-wife, with the Italian kid to pull the trigger, was a good bet, certainly not the only one. The victim could have done any number of people wrong. The shooter was efficient. The shock of brains and blood spurting out of the guy’s head, spattering the floor and walls, would’ve caused most people to jerk the gun, put the next bullet in the ceiling, the wall, the floor. You had to be pretty cold to stay on target. A pro would stay on target—and maybe someone filled with hate. He didn’t see that in the kid Benny. But you never know.

He wasn’t mad at Ray for stonewalling him. Ray wasn’t a cop. What he knew about crime and investigation—and for someone not a cop, he knew a lot—he didn’t know crime the way a cop did. Ray felt sorry for everyone. When he saw the fear and the lying and the regret once the suspect was nailed, he felt sorry for the person. A cop couldn’t do his job if you felt sorry for all the poor miserable bastards you had to lock up. You called them scum and garbage and assholes and you thought about what they did and who they did it to, rather than what went wrong in their miserable lives to make them what they were.

Cosgrove didn’t like the train of thought he was on. The black hats and white hats were taking on shades of gray. He was thinking about the Yates book he’d been reading. It wasn’t that you had illusions about the killer. It was that at the end you didn’t have a sense of someone or something triumphing, certainly not good over evil. He was almost finished with the book now—he’d finish it tonight—and realized the anxious, hopeful feeling that welled up as he turned into his street was the anticipation of getting back to the book.

He found a parking space not far from the house and walked the short distance, not conscious of how alert he was to his surroundings. After dinner with a friend, on a quiet street in Queens’s safest neighborhood, territory as familiar as his living room, he was like a rabbit in the field, senses heightened, ears alert to any sound, eyes sweeping the street in front of him, behind him, between parked cars, amongst the shrubbery, in the shadows of trees. He wasn’t afraid, yet he believed with his entire being that danger was around him.

The house was dark, so he hoped Denise was home, and, as usual, he hoped Sarah was asleep. Ray hadn’t asked about her. A couple of years now he stopped bringing Sarah along to dinner with Ray. He didn’t take her to department social events anymore either. He’d lugged her out of too many of them. Cops’ wives got tipsy at parties, often plastered. For too many of them, becoming a drunk or getting a divorce were options one and two. Trouble with wives and trouble with kids. It could happen to any cop—there but for the grace of God.

The thing with Sarah was he should never have married her, and because he did, marrying her when he loved someone else, what she became was his fault. After two or three times at dinner with Ray when she got shitfaced, he didn’t bring her anymore. The first time he didn’t bring her Ray asked, and he never did again.

Ray’s ex-wife was a drunk, too. He didn’t talk about her either. What they did talk about was their kids. Years ago, Ray came to him when his son John hit the wall. He’d often regretted not helping more. At the time, he didn’t know the librarian well and didn’t know what to make of him and his son. The boy was raised by his mother. That got him some sympathy. But Ray, as desperate as he was, seemed distant, acting out of guilt maybe, not the love you’d expect from a parent. He learned later, when he knew Ray better, that he’d been wrong on this. Ray was distant and aloof. That was how he was. It didn’t mean he didn’t love his son. There was nothing he wouldn’t have done for the boy. He was crushed when he was sent to prison.

More recently, he talked to Ray when he worried himself sick about Denise. Thirteen years old, she came home drunk. He didn’t know what to do with her. Hadn’t she seen what happened to her mother? He was cursed, payback for the wrongs he’d done. Inside, Cosgrove found everyone home and asleep. What amazing peace that brought him.

*   *   *

Saturday morning, Harry barged into the tiny reading room, rousting Ambler from his work. “You’ve created a real firestorm.” His eyes were blazing. “The president’s office called me. He wants to answer an opinion article in the
Times
yesterday by some detective novelist blasting the library for closing the crime fiction reading room.”

“That was—”

“I don’t care who it was. The president is furious.” He lowered his voice. “I have to draft the rebuttal.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I have to. If the president asks me to do something, I do it. It’s my job.” Harry clasped his hands together in front of his formidable midsection. “You have to realize your reading room is only a small part, a tiny part, of a grander plan—hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. You need to tone things down.”

Ambler stared at him. “Jesus Christ, Harry, you told me I had to do something to try to keep the reading room open.”

“Not that! I wasn’t expecting a public fight, protests and such. We don’t want the whole city up in arms criticizing the library. I meant things like a well-reasoned letter to the president.”

Ambler stood. “I don’t care about the new library plan. It’s stupid, a corporate cabal. Bankers, Wall Street lawyers, real estate developers, what do they know about scholarship and research? They’ll turn the library into an amusement park—”

“I’m not going to stand for this, Ray.” Harry tried to come across as defiant, but he looked crestfallen. Poor Harry was more inclined to sit in the field and smell the flowers like Ferdinand than take on the corporate powers and the library president—or deal with murders in his library.

*   *   *

After his encounter with Harry, Ambler called Benny to ask him to arrange a meeting with Kay Donnelly.

“Why do you think I could do that?” Benny asked.

Ambler chuckled. Benny was the only one who thought his secret romance with Kay Donnelly was secret. “You risked your job to stand up for her. You’re joined together as murder suspects. I’m sure she’d listen to you if you told her she should talk to me.”

That evening, Ambler intercepted Kay as she was leaving the library. She stood impatiently in line while the guard checked bags at the Fifth Avenue door, her game face on, no smile, a forbidding expression.

“Benny said you wanted to talk to me. What?”

He walked with her down Fifth Avenue to 34th Street, where she’d catch the Crosstown Select Bus to her residence hall.

“Nelson said your ex-husband was writing a book. He’d contacted Nelson about his papers. Did you know that? Did Max know?”

She faced him. Her eyes met his. She wasn’t evasive. She was scared. “It’s difficult for me to talk about Max. You need to ask him what he knows and doesn’t know about James.” They walked in silence for a moment. After some time, she said, “I’m in a difficult position. I need Max. My academic career depends on his support—”

Ambler nodded. “I understand. Perhaps you could tell me about your ex-husband.”

She searched his face for a moment. “I don’t know about his life in recent years. He was angry over our divorce at first—not because he missed me or loved me. He simply couldn’t accept that I’d dare to leave him. He had a superior, whiny way of bossing me around.” She paused to regroup her thoughts. “James thought he was smarter than everyone else. Maybe he was. The last I knew he was teaching at a women’s college: an inexhaustible supply of privileged, oversexed brats looking up to him as the sensitive poetic interpreter of life and literature. That’s what he wanted from life.

“I was a romantic. I fell in love too easily, was impressed by men I thought more accomplished and smarter than I was. In my imagination, I made James into the dashing, suffering, poetic genius I wanted a man to be. We drank wine and he’d recite poetry. He wrote poems. I thought then they were for me. Later, I realized the poems were always about him. It was idiotic of me to marry him. He married me because I wouldn’t sleep with him if he didn’t.” After a short time, she realized he didn’t really want to be married or have kids. He was the center of his own universe. Everything and everyone else played a supporting role.

“He sounds like Max.”

“He was like Max. They competed … for everything.” Her expression, embarrassed and defiant, was suggestive on the one hand and daring him to ask what “everything” included on the other. He chose not to ask.

“There are things about Max you’re not willing to tell me.”

“That’s right.”

Ambler waited.

She sighed. “Max is hard to understand and harder to like. For reasons of his own, he’s supported me in my career. It’s more difficult than you might think for a woman at elite universities, even now. I owe him a lot.”

“To protect him at all cost?”

She shook her head. “Max is ambitious, ruthless, and unforgiving of anyone who crosses him. He’s not a murderer.”

“You know that for sure? You were with him?”

She shook her head and looked away, splashes of red erupting on her cheeks. “Are you finished?” Her expression was stern, unsmiling. “Benny said I can trust you to keep what I’ve said to yourself.”

“I will, Mrs. Donnelly. Let me know when you’re ready to talk about Max.”

“Call me Kay.” She got into another line of people, this time to get on the bus.

*   *   *

Adele knew Harry was in trouble. Looking into the pasts of people you know and trust and even love can be a shattering experience. What she discovered about Harry, she didn’t want to tell anyone. She didn’t want it to be true and tried to put him out of her thoughts. What was the term? He was “collateral damage.” It was Emily she was interested in. Each day now, she stole some time to pore through the Yates collection—more than a hundred boxes of papers, photos, journals, notebooks, letters, index cards, bar napkins with handwriting on them, Christmas cards, God knows what else—looking for whatever she could find on his daughter.