Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (32 page)

His silence this time was longer. The temptation to urge him on was hard to resist. Cosgrove clenched his teeth and waited.

“She blamed me and, of course, herself, angry at me because I didn’t help. She got the idea that if she accused me of what was being done to her by someone else, I’d reveal what I knew to save myself.”

He was through talking. He might be lying. Cosgrove didn’t think so. It didn’t matter. Emily Yates was dead without recanting. Whatever denials he made would be baying at the moon.

“She never forgave you.” Cosgrove said. “She tried to kill you. She was the shooter in your office. Took out her revenge on Donnelly for what he did to her, and later her father for what he did, and tried to get you, too.”

Larkin looked at him blankly.

“You knew she’d try again, so you got to her first.”

*   *   *

“What happened?” Ambler asked.

Kay and Benny began talking at once, standing in front of the library table in the crime fiction reading room.

“Slow down. You were where when you saw Laura Lee and this man?”

They looked at each other and then at the floor. “A hotel downtown, the Liberty Inn.” Benny mumbled, his eyes downcast. “That’s not important. It’s what he said when Kay told him the woman had been murdered. He acted like she’d murdered her—”

“No.” Kay interrupted him. “He said she was a shell—or something like that—for his brother.”

“A shill?” Ambler asked. “She called him Dominic? Can you describe him?”

They combined forces to come up with a description that might fit Dominic Salerno but would also cover half the men his age on and around Arthur Avenue, many of them also named Dominic.

“Do you know what he meant by a shill for his brother?”

Kay turned from Ambler to face Benny and looked at him for a long time. “I’m sorry you have to hear all this, Benny.” She turned to face Ambler. “I remember where I saw him. Upstate. During the time we were at Hudson Highlands. He came to meet Max twice. It was strange. They met at a rest area, a scenic overlook on Route 9-W. Max had told me his father was a gangster and so was his brother. He’d broken away, changed his name, and had nothing to do with them. I thought it was bragging, part of the bad-boy image he cultivated. When I saw him with this man, Dominic, I didn’t think it was bragging anymore. When Arthur Woods died right after that and Max dropped me and picked up with Laura Lee—”

Benny’s expression clouded. “You were with Max Wagner?” He cocked his head, like a dog listening to something he couldn’t quite make out, maybe his master’s voice from far away, waiting for her to clear things up.

Kay kept her eyes trained on Ambler. “They got out of their cars to talk. I thought it peculiar … and sinister.”

Ambler needed to sort things out. Dominic Salerno knew Max years before. He was in Hudson Highlands when Laura Lee’s first husband, fell, jumped, or was pushed off a cliff. Dominic spent the morning at an hourly rate hotel with Laura Lee—and when he found out Emily had been murdered suspected Max of the murder. It was a lot to digest. “Was Max having sex with Emily at Hudson Highlands?”

Kay’s expression hardened. “Yes. Everyone was, including my husband and her father.”

Benny stared at her. She kept her eyes averted.

Ambler had trouble keeping his voice under control. “You knew this?”

“Not until after Emily ran away.” She paused, squeezed her eyes closed, and seemed to steel herself. “Nelson and Max did something with Emily. I finally got out of Max that they’d taken pubescent, erotic photos. After she ran away, Nelson went nuts. He didn’t know Max and James and Arthur were having sex with her, and I guess Max told him.”

The puzzle was coming together for Ambler. He needed one more connection for everything to add up. “Did Max ever see Emily again after she ran away?”

Kay took a deep breath. “I’m sure Max didn’t because he was looking for her. But James did. He found her a couple of years ago but none of us knew that until the day before he was killed. He tricked her into giving him letters her father wrote to her trying to get her to forgive him for what happended to her when she was young … what he’d done to her. After a while, Emily caught on to what James was up to and told him she wanted the letters back.”

“Did he give them to her?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Kay nodded. “That’s what the argument Benny overheard was about. James had the letters. He showed them to Max. He wanted to make a deal, coauthor the biography. Max said no.” She smiled weakly. “Max was never very good at sharing. He wanted to interview Emily for the book. He wanted her quotes. The letters weren’t enough for him. When James was killed, and then Nelson, Max began falling apart. He thought the murders were retribution. He convinced himself that Emily was the murderer … and he was next.”

Benny stared straight ahead. He listened to Kay, not interrupting, not commenting. Ambler didn’t know how much he’d known about her past. From his dazed expression, you’d have to guess not much. They might still work things out. A lot of people have pasts they’d rather keep in the past. Better for Kay if some things had been left unsaid. But there it was.

A few minutes later, standing in the hallway outside the crime fiction reading room, he watched them walk away, heads down, not speaking to each other. “A shill for my brother?” Max and Dominic Salerno brothers? He found Frank Robinson in the Milstein history and genealogy division room on the first floor. Frank had a sixth sense that pointed him in directions others couldn’t see, so he was often sought out by the amazing number of people searching for their roots.

“It’s a follow-up, Frank. Adele did the research a couple of weeks ago. Something came up we didn’t think of.”

Twenty minutes later, Frank Robinson called Ambler. “A great family tree—three generations of criminality, at least one felony conviction a generation, sometimes two or three. Dominic Salerno has a brother, Anthony, graduated from Fordham Prep, valedictorian, scholarship to Notre Dame. Didn’t graduate from Notre Dame. A Maximilian Wagner did.”

*   *   *

Ambler stared into the space in front of him. Of course, Emily! He’d half known it all along, sidetracked, blinded, because Dominic was a killer for hire and Emily a mother, because he couldn’t believe she’d kill her father. She’d practically told him, if not in words, by her reactions.

He punched Mike Cosgrove’s number on his cell phone. He was uncomfortable calling him after all that had happened—with Denise and then Adele taking off with Johnny. Mike had a hard shell to begin with. It took years to develop any trust with him. Now, circumstances might have blown it all away.

“I came up with the girl myself.” Mike’s tone was cooler, more formal, than it had been, not as stiff as it might be. “She had every reason to want revenge. And she wasn’t finished. That’s why she was killed. Friar Tuck in the next room could nail it down, but he won’t talk. My guess from the beginning was he saw the shooter. He wouldn’t come clean because she had too much on him.”

“Harry didn’t kill Emily. He didn’t have any reason to. He was trying to help her. He told Adele—”

“Oh?” Ambler could see Cosgrove’s eyebrows go up. “The fugitive? Is this the Adele we’re talking about? Don’t think I’m not going to lock her up when I find her.”

“She’s keeping the boy safe, Mike. Emily killed the men who molested her. Max knew he was next. In all likelihood, years ago he had Dominic kill Laura Lee’s first husband. Max Wagner and Dominic Salerno are brothers.”

“I didn’t see that one coming.” You didn’t often hear surprise in Mike’s voice. “Brothers, eh? I’ll look into it when I can get to it.”

“It may not wait. Dominic might kill his brother because he killed Emily.”

After a long pause, Mike said, “It’s not that I don’t respect your instincts on this. But what you have here is instinct, not proof. I have something else I’m trying out. Emily Yates killed the men who abused her, including her father. We both got that. And the priest, the ex-priest—”

“Adele can tell you. It’s not true.”

“Neither you nor Adele is high on my trust list right now. We have physical evidence on Larkin. And he’s the only one she actually accused of—”

“What kind of physical evidence?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“It’s too soon for DNA.… Prints, right? You found his fingerprints. Harry was in Emily’s apartment. He was there a couple of times, once with me. Question Max Wagner.”

“His brother Dominic is a gangster and you don’t like him, any other reason?”

“Because he has a motive.”

Cosgrove was silent for a moment. “Let’s say he does. Friar Tuck’s still the favorite. She tried to kill him.”

“Harry isn’t going anywhere while you follow this up. And you might save Max’s life.”

After another pause, “I’ll talk to him. That’s all. Any idea where he is?”

“He should be at the library.” He gave Mike the address he had for Max and Laura Lee on the Upper West Side. “If he’s not here, he might be there.”

When Ambler finished on the phone, he went to look for Max. He often worked in the Manuscripts and Archives reading room. The curator at the desk told him the Yates collection reader would come and go a few times a day, never staying long at one time. He tried the Berg reading room, also on the third floor, as well as both halls of the main reading room. Next, he checked the Frederick Lewis Allen Room on the second floor. On the first floor, he checked the periodical reading room. He was on the main staircase between the first and second floor when Laura Lee caught up with him. She grabbed his arm, a wild expression in her eyes, her face bloodless.

“Have you seen Max?” Her question was simple. The way her eyes begged for an answer changed the question utterly.

“No. Is something wrong?”

“His brother—” She froze. She searched his face. It didn’t take her long. A flash of rage—or hate—narrowed her eyes. She understood he knew. Wasting no more time on him, she continued her dash up the stairs.

Ambler returned to the crime fiction reading room and called Cosgrove’s cell phone to tell him Max and Dominic were in the library.

“We’re not there yet,” Cosgrove said. “I got to clear up something before I can go after Dominic Salerno.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Internal stuff. It’s complicated. Stay away, like I told you. I’ll get after him as soon as I can.”

“Could you get a warrant for Max Wagner?”

“And what do I tell the judge to get a warrant—that you have a hunch he killed the girl? I’ve got to clear something. Damn it, Ray! Let me do my job.”

When he disconnected, Ambler saw Benny and Kay in the hallway outside the crime fiction reading room and brought them in.

“Laura Lee’s trying to stop Dominic before he kills Max,” Kay told him.

“Where’s Max?”

“No one knows.”

“Call 911,” he told Benny. “Tell them a man with a gun is loose in the library.” He called Cosgrove and told him the situation had changed.

“I’m on my way.”

“We have to warn Max,” Kay said. Her face was a mask, the expression she wore when he first met her, the attitude she wore like a severely cut business suit.

“It’s too late for that,” Ambler said, “and too dangerous. The police need to handle it now.”

Benny put his arm around Kay. She slid out from under it. He stood back from her, seeming both surprised and embarrassed. “Why do you care, Kay?” His tone was sharp, irritated. “Let them work it out.”

“You don’t understand.” Her eyes blinking rapidly gave her a look of uncertainty. “I’m not sure I understand myself.” Her glance went back and forth from Benny to Ambler. “I owe some loyalty to Max. Don’t I?”

Ambler tried to sound sympathetic. He’d known Max a long time also. Like or dislike him, he didn’t want him murdered. If you could keep someone from being killed, you’d have to do that. “The police are on their way. Laura Lee is trying to warn him. If you know where he is, that’s one thing—but you don’t want to get in between him and Dominic.”

Kay’s eyes locked on his, as she weighed what he said. For a few seconds, she seemed frozen in place and then she was out the door.

“Where are you going?” Benny shouted after her.

When she looked back at Benny, her eyes, wild, unhinged, she was already running, her heels echoing against the marble hallway. Benny ran after her.

For a moment, Ambler watched the empty space in the doorway, not thinking but knowing what would happen, and what he would do now.

Chapter 28

Ambler hadn’t been in the stacks for months. Wending his way down the narrow, iron stairs from the third-floor reading room, he came to the top level, the seventh floor. The cast iron and Carnegie steel shelving stretched out before him for two city blocks, nearly a hundred miles of shelves.

If Max holed up down here, he’d be safe. No one came down into the stacks except library staff. Benny would know how to get in. Laura Lee could probably charm her way in. Max couldn’t know for sure the police weren’t after him, though if he saw them taking Harry out of the library in handcuffs, he might think he had breathing room. Did he think Dominic would come after him?

The Yates papers were part of the Manuscripts and Archives Division so they were stored under Bryant Park. The tunnel to those stacks was on the ground floor. Yates’s collection of first editions signed and inscribed by his writer friends, which Max had been going through, was shelved beneath the main reading room. He didn’t remember which level.

As he made his way down the narrow stairway to the next lower level, he heard the unmistakable echoing report of a gunshot. Before the thought fully registered, another shot rang out. At the moment of the first shot, he felt a rush of adrenaline, a strange, physical sensation of something rushing through him—instinct, developed over millennia, took over.

He paused in his steps down the stairs, his hand on the thin iron tubular railing. After the pause, he took another step and paused again. After each step, he paused, and after each pause, he stepped again. He could die if he kept going. Never before had he thought dying was imminent. Of course, he’d thought about dying but abstractly. Now he could be dead in a matter of minutes. A man with a gun was down in the stacks and he was walking toward him, thinking he had to do this, that it had become his duty to stop the shooting, so he kept going down the stairs and when he passed the sixth floor and was on his way down to the fifth level, he hollered, “Dominic!”