Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (18 page)

*   *   *

The Donnelly woman was so nervous she made Cosgrove jittery, like the Jesuit, a nervous wreck. In this line of work, you got used to giving people the jitters. Lots of people have something to hide and are afraid it will come out when the police get into their business. Even so, usually the folks who got nervous and jittery were not the ones to worry about. The sure-of-themselves, never-get-rattled folks who swindled widows and orphans, robbed poor boxes, or murdered their families could lie without a drop of sweat.

Ed Ford turned up something on James Donnelly. It looked like he had a thing for young girls. A couple of times at the college, there’d been complaints about inappropriate behavior with a student. No one pressed charges. The college had no record of any discipline or even a warning. They expunged the names of the students.

Cop logic said if Donnelly got caught twice he’d done it more times when he didn’t get caught. If someone took him out because of one of those liaisons, it would be hell to try to find out who. Go back through eighteen or twenty years of students to find someone who remembers one of the incidents? Ford talked with current students who thought him creepy, but nothing inappropriate, nothing concrete. Something wasn’t right with the guy. Still, it would be a lot less work if the ex-wife turned out to be the killer.

He could make a case for it under the hate-my-ex exclusion, if nothing else. The problem was how to connect her to Yates—he could as easily have pulled in a bum off the street as his suspect—nothing at all, until the skirmish at the funeral. A conversation with the widow the next day confirmed what he’d guessed. You never can tell about these bookworm types once they take off their glasses and let their hair down.

Kay Donnelly sat stiffly in a forbidding-looking wing chair in the sparsely furnished sitting room of the austere and lifeless woman’s residence where she was staying. She acted like she expected him to attach electrodes and administer electric shocks if she didn’t answer his questions the way he wanted. With those big brown eyes staring up at him, and this demure woman shrinking back from him, he felt like a thug.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said. “My lawyer said I could ask for him to be present.”

Cosgrove looked her directly in the eye. “You could. It’s up to you. We could go downtown, give him a call, and talk there. I want to ask about Nelson Yates. Do you need your lawyer to tell me about that?”

Her eyes blazed. “There’s nothing to talk about. Whatever you think happened is a figment of that deranged woman’s imagination.”

“You spent time with him not so long ago, she said, visited him at their apartment in New York.”

“A few years ago, Max wanted to do an article on Nelson. Nelson wouldn’t talk to him—some falling out in the past—so he sent me. I talked with him, interviewed him. It was an assignment. I can show you the notes from the interviews.”

“Why would Mrs. Yates think you were sleeping with her husband?”

“Because she’s paranoid and delusional—jealous. She married a philanderer. He was married when he took up with her. What did she think was going to happen?

“He made passes at me during the interview. I had to finesse my way out of a number of awkward situations, without making him angry enough to end the interview. On one of those passes, he trapped me on the couch. He had my dress up and had gotten his hand between my legs when his wife opened the door. I should have bashed him between the eyes. I didn’t. I giggled like a schoolgirl. She blew up, so I left them to fight it out.”

She looked up at Cosgrove. “I suppose I shouldn’t have told you this. My lawyer warned me you’d twist whatever I told you to make me seem guilty.”

“Did I?”

“No. Not yet. I assume you will … or I think you might.” Her expression was an entreaty, her voice small. “I hope you won’t.” She shook her head. “I’m so easy to take advantage of.”

Cosgrove hesitated. Was that an invitation? He told himself it wasn’t. She looked down at her hands in her lap as she spoke and seemed to be talking to herself. So what did it mean? He was falling for this innocence act like a novice. What the hell was happening to him? Twenty years on the job, and he’s turning into Tinker Bell. He took a moment to look at his notebook. “You didn’t like Nelson Yates.”

She looked up, speaking softly, no inflection. “He was a good writer. Personally, he was a fraud. I found him disgusting. But I didn’t hate him. A giant ego, an insatiable appetite for sex, even as an old man, no wonder Mary hated him. He abused her.”

“Abused her?”

“Not physically, psychologically. He acted like she was stupid, like she’d been inflicted on him and he had to put up with her. He demeaned and embarrassed her.”

“As he did you?”

“He didn’t embarrass me. I embarrassed myself.” She raised her gaze to look into his eyes. He didn’t like what he saw in hers, defeat; she’d rolled over, belly up, was at his mercy.

He had other questions but decided to wait. He could bear down on her. She was exposed, vulnerable, shame weakening her defenses. He didn’t have enough on her to do that. She might give something up. On the other hand, she might not have anything left to give, and he’d leave her there a wreck for no good reason. She’d brought Mary Yates into sharper focus. Maybe it was guile, raising suspicion about the woman’s jealousy. Maybe. You couldn’t tell. He’d have to look into it.

*   *   *

“So…” Lisa Young took Ambler to the Algonquin for lunch. She seemed at home in the elegant dining room, the maître d’ welcoming her without being familiar, calling her by her married name, leading them to a table. Ambler suspected the elegant dining room, the trappings of luxury were meant to intimidate him.

“If you think I’m wondering what you’re up to, you’re right,” he said when they were seated.

“I’m a woman of contradictions. As you find out more about me—as I’m sure you intend to—you’ll see what I mean.”

“I will?”

The waiter appeared. She ordered a romaine salad with poached shrimp, Ambler a twenty-two-dollar cheeseburger. When the waiter left with their order, she sat back and smiled. “So you’re not only a curator of things detective, but an actual detective, a counterpart of your fictional heroes.”

Ambler sipped from his water glass; it was stemware with a slice of lemon floating in it. “I want to know who killed Nelson Yates, if that’s what you mean.”

Her face brightened. “You think I know who killed him?”

“Did you know him?”

She folded her hands beneath her chin and leaned on them. “Do you think I know who killed Nelson Yates because I made a donation to the library?”

“Why did you?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Do you have something to hide?”

“I don’t need anything to hide to tell you something is none of your business.” She wasn’t angry. She was cheerful, beaming. When she lowered her hands to the table in front of her, the fingers she folded around one another were long and elegant. “Suppose we talk about you? What do you get out of snooping?”

It was a good question. What did he get out of it? He didn’t believe justice necessarily prevailed in a criminal case or anywhere else in life. He didn’t care for investigative work; much of it was routine, the outcome depending on luck more often than not. What interested him was why: the level of desperation that makes someone murder and the missteps and misfortunes that make someone else a killer’s victim, the twists and turns of life’s paths that bring them together, this was what interested him. In unraveling all that, outing the murderer, so to speak, was almost a byproduct.

“When I first solved a crime, it was because I saw through something. I saw a murder where most others thought they’d seen an accident. Proving the truth of that was a kind of arrogance,” he told her. “Later, I thought if I could solve a crime, understand why a murder happened, I might stop another murder.” What he couldn’t do was find the words to tell her he did what he did in some part to atone for what his son had done, and what he had done to his son.

She folded her manicured fingers under her chin and leaned on her hands, watching him as if he were about to do something entertaining. “And what do you find? Why do people kill?”

Despite her expression, which might be skeptical, he wanted her to understand. “Sometimes, it’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time; other times, a split-second choice, an impulsive act followed by a lifetime of regret. There are calculated, cold murders—for benefit, financial or otherwise; murders from hatred or rage, for slights real or imagined; some people murder because it’s their job. Others, I guess, are the sad ones, from pain … of betrayal, unrequited love, or love that’s too intense to bear.”

Her expression became wistful as she listened. She seemed to acknowledge his seriousness and lowered her gaze. “I wonder if someone might commit a crime as bad or worse than murder and the punishment would be simply having to live with it.”

He watched the waiter deliver his hamburger—large enough to feed a family of four—and found himself growing angry at this regal dining room with its white tablecloths, wood paneling, wall paintings, and oriental rugs, men in tailored pinstriped suits clinking silverware against china plates and sipping from crystal goblets, people with a sense of entitlement.

“I’m a person of wealth and privilege,” she said, as if she read his thoughts. “I’m not especially proud of it. I didn’t do anything to deserve it.” Ambler searched her face. Impassive, inscrutable, this wasn’t a confession. She was a self-assured woman. He didn’t understand what she was getting at.

“We’re given roles to play,” she said. “We don’t choose them. When I was young, I thought I could change who I was. Trying to do so drove me insane—I mean that literally—and ruined the lives of everyone around me, everyone I loved.” Her voice caught. She blinked a few times before looking down at her plate, poking at the elegantly presented shrimp with her fork. “I want you to hear this now from me, because later, when you know everything, you won’t want to understand, or you won’t care, or it won’t make any difference.”

“What do you want me to understand?” Ambler concentrated on his hamburger. For one thing, he was hungry and it tasted good; for another, he’d been brought up not to waste food; and finally, the woman across from him was going through such emotional pain that looking at her felt like a terrible invasion of her privacy.

When he faced her again, her expression was bleak. “I can’t keep you from digging into my past. It will be painful for me, and it won’t help you find the murderer of Nelson Yates.”

“How do you know?”

His question surprised her. It showed in her face. What had been entreaty became confusion. She wasn’t trying to put anything over on him. He’d presented a contingency she hadn’t considered. She stammered her answer. “I … I … How could it? Nothing in my past that I know—that I can think of—could have anything to do with Nelson Yates’s murder.”

Ambler felt sorry for her. “Did you know Nelson Yates?”

From the desperate look flashing across her eyes, he knew before she spoke that her answer would not suffice. She seemed to know that, too. “I think I already answered you,” she said brightly enough. “It’s no matter.” She took a dainty bite from the luncheon plate she’d previously been trying to maul and touched her napkin lightly to her lips. “I have a plan to preserve your reading room.” Mischief danced in her eyes again. “Do you own a tux?”

“A what?”

“A tuxedo.” She smiled. “I suppose not. A good black suit will do.”

Her change in attitude and manner, from the depths of despair to a bubbling enthusiasm, was bewildering. “Why?”

“I’m taking you to the library’s spring gala.”

*   *   *

“Did you catch up with the society lady yet?” McNulty asked as he delivered a stein of beer to Ambler and one to Adele.

“I did,” said Ambler. “I met her in the King Cole Bar. The next day, she took me to lunch.”

“She’s taking him to the library’s spring gala,” Adele said.

“She hasn’t told me why she donated the money for the Yates collection or if she knew Nelson Yates.”

“Why should she?” McNulty said. “People should be able to keep things to themselves.”

Adele cast a baleful glance at Ambler. “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

McNulty was on his high horse. “There’s a lot happened in my life I’m not going to tell you or anyone else about.”

“Okay, McNulty. I got it.” Ambler said.

“She gave money to the library anonymously, right? There you go. If she wanted people to know, she’d have said so.”

“I think you’ve made your point,” Adele said.

McNulty walked away in a huff, interrupting two patrons who were arguing about the upcoming election to tell them all the candidates were thieves and ax murderers.

“Mike Cosgrove asked you to talk to her. That’s how this began, right?” Adele was angry but not unforgiving, as if whatever there was between them, friendship he guessed, would have to withstand some wrongs he might do. “I hope she never finds out that, on top of everything else, you were investigating her as a murder suspect.”

Ambler hung his head. “Not exactly. I’m not going to tell Cosgrove about this yet. He interviewed Mary Yates after the fracas at the memorial service and wouldn’t tell me what she said, so we’re even.”

Adele wrinkled her nose. “If you ask me, Mary Yates makes a better murder suspect than Mrs. Young.”

Ambler had been thinking that himself. “The way these things go, when you’re looking for a motive, if a murder isn’t for love or hate, it’s probably for money.” He told her what Kay Donnelly said about Mary Yates. “We know she had a motive. That’s about it. We won’t cross her off the list.”

“I haven’t come across anything about Mary Yates in the collection, which is surprising. There should be letters, probably other things, unless she took them out.”

“See what you can find on Mrs. Young, while you’re at it.”

“I doubt she’d turn up in the Yates collection, but I’ll look. I can check the Social Register, too. She’s probably been on the philanthropy circuit since she was a debutante. I wonder if Mary Yates was a debutante.”