Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (4 page)

Ambler didn’t like Maximilian Wagner, the truculent reader who stood in front of him. “Benny’s a good researcher, Max. I wouldn’t know who to replace him with. Besides, that’s Harry’s job.”

“That’s a no?” He squared his shoulders. His thick chest heaved. “You’re assigned to work with me on this kind of thing.”

“I don’t think so, Max.”

Wagner’s stance, legs apart, feet firmly planted, and demeanor, combative, were more that of a fight promoter than the literary biographer he’d made his name as, especially when he was angry, as he was now. He sputtered. “You haven’t changed much have you?”

“What’d he mean by that?” Benny asked when Wagner turned on his heel and left.

“Once, in the dim, murky past, we were friends—“friends” probably isn’t the right word. We knew one another.”

“At Columbia?”

“At Columbia.”

Benny waited. Ambler knew he wanted to ask what happened to Ambler at Columbia—something he never talked about—but knew better than to ask.

“I wouldn’t mind being replaced,” Benny said. “I don’t like the guy.”

“I understand. Max doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. That’s his advantage over civilized people.”

“What I came to tell you…” Benny lowered his voice. “Did you know he had an argument with the guy who was killed?”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t hear the whole thing. The guy who got killed used to be married to Kay, Wagner’s assistant.”

“A love triangle?”

Benny’s eyebrows shot up. “Love?… Kay? No. God, I hope not. She’s—” He stopped. “No. It was something scholarly—plagiarism. I’m not sure. The guy was mad at Kay, too. He accused them both.”

“Of what?”

He wrinkled his brow, seeming perplexed. “Something to do with the Yates biography, not a love thing.”

“Did you tell the police about it?”

“I told Harry. That’s why I wanted to ask you. You’re friends with that detective, right? Harry said I shouldn’t get involved.”

“Too bad. I don’t know why he’d say that. You need to tell the police.” He dialed Cosgrove’s number on his cell phone and handed the phone to Benny.

*   *   *

A while later, Ambler again looked up from his work—writing finding aids for a backlog of crime fiction collections that hadn’t been processed—to see Kay Donnelly standing at the reading room door. Her face showed the strain she was under. Quite a bit younger than Wagner, her boss, probably in her mid-thirties, she was, as he’d told Cosgrove, tightly wound. Yet something in her bruised expression was appealing, a depth of understanding or possibly sympathy in her eyes, the kind of understanding that’s a product of having understood some pain of your own.

“Hi,” he said cheerfully. He didn’t want to bring up the murder but thought it disingenuous to say nothing. He gestured toward a chair. “Sit down, Professor Donnelly. Kay, isn’t it? May I call you Kay? I’m sorry about your ex-husband’s death.”

She frowned, making it clear she didn’t want to sit down, didn’t want to be called Kay, and didn’t want to talk about her ex-husband’s murder. Flashing a smile as sincere as a banker’s handshake, she said, “Dr. Wagner doesn’t understand how the Yates collection is organized. He wants you to arrange for me to go into the stacks, so I can see the entire collection.”

Ambler scowled. Harry made him liaison between Wagner and the library staff, despite his objection, based on logic available only to Harry.

Kay Donnelly’s rigidity—what they used to call “uptightness”—irritated him. “Sorry. Readers don’t have access to the stacks, not even renowned scholars like Max.”

“I’m sure exceptions have been made—” Her face was a mask.

“If they have, I didn’t make them. We haven’t processed the collection. No one could make sense of it. Max knows that.”

He could see anger seeping around the edges of the mask. “What should I tell Dr. Wagner … that you won’t help?”

She phrased the question carefully, a sneaky rebuke she couldn’t be challenged on. He wasn’t much into character analysis, but her style was that of an angry, aggrieved person who ducked out of the bushes, took her shot, and ducked back in, rather than go toe-to-toe with someone. He couldn’t blame her if she spent a lot of time around Max Wagner.

“Try Harry.”

After she left, he sat for a few moments wondering if he’d been chatting with a murderer. Cosgrove didn’t say so, but according to the homicide book of Hoyle—she’d be at the top of the list of suspects.

*   *   *

“You’re Mrs.—” As he was leaving for the day, Ambler thought he recognized the woman standing near the top of the main staircase in the second floor hallway.

“Not Mrs.—I’m Laura Lee McGlynn.” She was pretty—glamorous, really—fashionably dressed in a beige blouse, black slacks, and dark green high-heeled shoes, a flash of color he didn’t expect. She spoke with a pronounced southern accent. Dark, almost black hair framed her face and bangs brushed her forehead, her lips were red, her teeth sparkling white; her eyes danced as she held out her hand. “Doesn’t Laura Lee sound better than some old Mrs. Somebody?” She laughed.

Laura Lee McGlynn came across as someone who made her living being attractive, an actress, a TV newswoman, a trophy wife. Yet her easy laughter gave her a certain charm, a kind of down-to-earth aura about her, along with the glamour.

Ambler was chatting with her, smiling more than he ordinarily did, and feeling a bit foolish because of it, when Max Wagner came chugging toward them along the second floor hallway. He kissed the woman’s cheek, which she turned toward him, her expression for the briefest of moments like a child enduring an obligatory kiss from a fussy aunt.

“I see you’ve met my wife,” Wagner said in a tone that suggested Ambler had gotten away with something.

“Just this minute.”

“Max has no manners,” Laura Lee said. “He only believes in—what’s the term—“exchange value,” I think. Social interaction has merit only if it benefits him.”

Max watched his wife as she spoke before turning to face Ambler, meeting his gaze with a hard stare. A kind of systemic anger, low-level rage, simmered beneath his air of disdain, so you thought it just as well he was indifferent to you because if he wasn’t he’d probably sink his teeth into your throat.

Ambler met the stare with his own steady gaze. He wasn’t afraid of Max, and didn’t care much what he did or thought, except to wonder where the anger came from, the anger and the drive—the kind of drive that would run you down or ruin you to get what he wanted, and the anger that must fuel it. Laura Lee had her husband’s number all right. She also wore an engagement ring next to her wedding ring that had a diamond as big as a doorknob—exchange value for her? he wondered.

Max shifted his gaze to her. “I haven’t told you Ray and I are old friends from grad school. He had quite a career.”

“Oh?” said Laura Lee, smiling at Ambler.

The smile asked for an explanation that he didn’t want to provide. “Max can tell you what happened. My academic career was derailed. How and why depends on who you ask.”

“Ray was quite the man on campus: a college baseball player expected to go professional, a major political figure among the campus radicals, an up-and-coming American literature scholar. Now, here he is a librarian.” He didn’t need the smirk to make his point but threw it in anyway. That was Max. Overkill. One push too many. Never able to quit while he was ahead.

Ambler kept his expression placid. “Honest work, Max. Where would you be without librarians?” He turned to Laura Lee. “Max has a knack for fanciful biographies, doesn’t he?”

He was tempted to ask about the argument with the murder victim but thought better of it. Like a lawyer with a hostile witness, he wanted to know the answer before he asked the question.

*   *   *

Laura Lee slipped out from under Max’s arm as they waited in a line for the security guard at the door to check their bags. She wanted to shove him. For Max, putting his arm around her wasn’t a simple gesture but a rite of ownership, showing off. He should know better than that. She wasn’t something he’d won. She resisted the temptation to berate him where they stood, embarrassing him down to his toes, since he looked contrite enough now with his hands stuffed into his pockets like a truculent schoolboy.

Jim Donnelly’s murder had freaked him out. She didn’t get it, and he wouldn’t explain. It was as if he knew who the murderer was, or if she didn’t know better—or at least think she knew better—he’d killed Donnelly himself. Now he was going on about Ambler the librarian. Max wasn’t normally afraid of anyone, one of the reasons she liked him. Yet the librarian made him uneasy.

“Stay away from him.”

“Why?”

“He’ll ask questions. He’s smart. Before you know it, you’ll tell him your life story. He’ll start into that, digging around, tearing it apart. You’ll look up and see he’s pieced things together. Knows a lot more than you intended to tell him. I’ve seen him operate.”

“Don’t be an ass, Max. What do you think I’ll tell him? He’s going to ask me about something that happened thirty years ago?”

Max’s face was a map of troubles. His nerves were eating at him. “He’ll look into Jim Donnelly’s murder. You can bet on it. No matter what he says. That’s what he does when a murder interests him even when it doesn’t happen in his backyard. He’ll discover we know Donnelly and want to know more.”

Laura Lee grabbed Max’s arm, turning him to face her. “What do you know about that murder that you’re not telling me?”

He gave her that beady-eyed stare that meant he was keeping something from her. “Nothing. I don’t know anything about it. Let’s hope it was a random act that has nothing to do with us.”

“Why would it have something to do with us?”

“I didn’t say that.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. “I said don’t talk to Ray Ambler. He doesn’t like me. He’ll try to connect us to the murder.”

“What do you mean us?”

They stopped talking while the bored guard made a cursory search of Max’s book bag. Suddenly, the guard stiffened and then pulled a book out of the bag. He looked inside the cover and then held it up. “You can’t take this out of the library.”

Max looked around guiltily. His voice low, barely above a whisper, he said, “I’m a researcher. It’s from the collection I’m working on—”

The guard raised his voice. “You can’t take a book out of the library.”

The line grew longer and people were murmuring to one another. Laura Lee was furious. “Give him the goddamn book, you idiot!”

“Take it,” Max said.

“I’m not going to take it,” the guard said. “Put it back where you got it.”

Max slunk out of line and headed back to the Allen Room, where he kept his research materials.

“I’m going home,” Laura Lee said as she walked out through the half-open revolving door. She didn’t know if Max heard her or not.

Chapter 4

As Ambler left for lunch the next afternoon, he found Benny Barone sitting on the front steps of the library, eating a hot dog from the cart across the street, watching the traffic stream down Fifth Avenue. In the distance, beyond the Empire State Building, fluffy white clouds pushed by a gentle breeze skittered across a blue sky. The warm sun hinted at summer, a perfect spring day, except not for Benny, who looked miserable. Ambler stopped when he noticed his stormy expression.

“If I see that guy on the street, I’m going to push him in front of a bus,” Benny said.

Ambler sat down. Wagner wasn’t someone you wanted to run afoul of. Junior faculty, department heads, even deans who crossed him wound up doing the academic equivalent of selling pencils from a cup on the street. He watched the ebb and flow of pedestrians crossing Fifth Avenue in waves each time the signal lights changed. Benny was a city kid whose Bensonhurst roots ran deep—raised among those who protected their neighborhoods, solved their problems, and settled their disputes pretty much on their own.

“Max Wagner’s not worth getting in trouble over, Benny.”

Benny shook his head. “Fuck him.”

“Better to drop it.”

“What he does ain’t right, Ray.” Benny glared into Ambler’s eyes for emphasis. “He doesn’t know how to treat people, even his own staff.”

Ambler caught on. Benny was talking about Kay Donnelly, whom Max Wagner treated like a scullery maid. Benny saw behind her curt manner, severe expression, and frumpy outfits to a desirable woman lurking beneath. He’d seen them walking together in the hallway, oblivious to everyone around them, like two high-school kids with a crush on each other. Too bad she was trouble. Bad enough she worked for Wagner; having a murdered ex-husband was entirely too much trouble for a wise man to take on.

Ambler took in Benny’s pointed and shiny black leather shoes, stiffly creased black dress pants, open-collar, starched and ironed Italian dress shirt, soft leather jacket. Not the way most librarians dressed. He was who he was. Presented with a bully and a damsel in distress, his choice wasn’t a wise one. Yet such choices had been made for centuries. Who was Ambler to change human nature?

“Be careful.” He patted Benny on the shoulder. “Max doesn’t play by the rules.”

Instead of grabbing a sandwich as he’d intended, Ambler kept walking down Fifth Avenue deep in thought. Walking in the city was as natural as breathing for him. Sometimes for weeks on end, he’d walk everywhere he went. Seldom did he take a cab. He might take a bus on a rainy day; you couldn’t get a cab anyway. If he went some distance, he’d take the subway, although sometimes he’d walk then, too. At lunch, he walked most days, walked and observed the city around him.

On this day, he strolled downtown about twenty blocks, picked up a barbecue sandwich at one of the lunch carts at the north end of Madison Square Park, and found a bench in the park, where he sat, watching people walk by, in the shadow of the Flatiron Building, which if he remembered correctly housed the editorial offices of Nelson Yates’s publisher. He wondered idly if his walk to Madison Square Park had been more intentional than random. Had the idea of Nelson Yates taken over his subconscious because his name popped up when someone talked about James Donnelly’s murder?

*   *   *