Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (9 page)

As soon as he stepped through the saloon door and the sunlight and spring breeze hit him, he had a moment of panic. He was disoriented, not sure where he was, where he meant to go. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the bar, he had a déjà vu moment seeing himself as if from a window a couple of stories overhead. He was on Ninth Avenue, where he lived in a coldwater flat and drank at a bar on the corner of 49th Street. He lived alone. It was soon after Lisa left him. He was on his way back to his apartment after eating lunch at the bar. But that couldn’t be it.… No. He’d lived on Ninth Avenue years ago. What he was remembering happened now, happened yesterday. He’d come out of an apartment, and he was disoriented, as he was now.

He shook himself. His memory was running away from him again. Was he on Ninth Avenue yesterday? Was that what he remembered? But what was he doing there? Did he get a phone call? Did he remember a phone call? Everything was a jumble. Trying to bring himself back to the moment, he conjured up a method he’d developed to fight off his forgetfulness, a kind of cognitive game he played with himself: What street did he live on? Who was he married to? Where had he been last?

A couple of things started to come back. He was on Ninth Avenue yesterday, yet he had no idea why. Last night, he was drunk when he got home. He could only come up with bits and pieces, pictures, scenes, like remembering a dream, Mary screaming at him. She left. That was it. In a storm of tears, she ran out of the apartment.

That was too bad. What he did, who he was, wasn’t her fault. He didn’t know why she thought she was responsible for him. She probably went to her sister’s in Forest Hills. Maybe she’d stay there this time—one more marriage down the drain. He didn’t remember how many wives he’d had. Most of them went through a lot worse than Mary had to deal with. Some even liked him; he drove them away, too. And there was Lisa, who saw into his soul and loved him anyway. Even she didn’t stay.

More of what happened yesterday came back. There’d been a phone call, he remembered, though not whom it was from or what it was about. Later, he’d been in a bar, more than one bar; something ugly happened at the door. Was he pushed out, knocked down on the sidewalk? He felt his face for bruises but didn’t find anything, though he found a welt on the back of his head. Then came the argument with Mary. Some things came back. But not Ninth Avenue. What was he doing on Ninth Avenue? He hadn’t had a reason to go there in thirty years.

After he’d walked down Broadway a couple of blocks, he began to gain control again. This latest scare, though, meant he needed to trust someone with what he knew, in case the time came when his memory didn’t come back at all. It was ironic that the source of his writing—his memory reworked into stories—the faculty that sustained him, made him a writer, gave meaning to his life, in the end was betraying him. He couldn’t imagine telling someone. He wasn’t sure he could. After a couple of more blocks, he thought about Ambler. Something about the man appealed to him, a sense he got that the librarian had suffered himself and would not be quick to judge.

At the Library Tavern, Yates found McNulty the bartender and left a message for Ambler to meet him in Bryant Park when he left work that evening. The bartender wasn’t as chatty as usual, so after a couple of beers, he went to sit in Bryant Park where he watched a group of boys and girls who came out of the library and were waiting for a school bus to take them home. They wore Catholic school uniforms and playfully chased and tussled with one other across the lawn, the preteen girls with their uniform skirts swishing against their slim thighs.

When a group of girls flopped down on the grass, laughing and squealing, he walked over and sat where he could see them better. One of the girls, small and blonde, her legs folded in front of her Indian-style, her skirt bunched in her lap, noticed him watching and smiled. Talking animatedly with her friends, she bounced about, shifting her position, stretching out her slim legs, carelessly lifting her skirt, holding it suspended over her bare thighs for a few seconds before letting it drape back over her legs, oblivious to Yates, whose gaze was glued to her thighs.

A second later, two loud pops echoed off the buildings on either side of Bryant Park and Nelson Yates pitched forward off the café chair he was sitting in, falling face forward onto the lawn, dead with two bullet holes in the back of his head.

The young girl who’d smiled at him screamed.

*   *   *

“What’s up?” Adele asked Ambler when he showed up at her modular office behind the main reference desk.

He shifted himself uncomfortably. “I found out something disturbing about Nelson’s daughter, something Mike Cosgrove told me a little while ago. Right before she ran away, she’d been with a married man who died under suspicious circumstances.”

Adele spun her chair to face him. “What does suspicious circumstances mean?” Her voice rose. “She’s an escaped murderer?”

He gestured with his hands to quiet her. “No. She disappeared before the police could talk to her. They thought her father was hiding her. He wouldn’t talk to the police either.”

“So, you think Nelson Yates killed the man for being with his daughter? Nelson Yates is a murderer? You think
he
killed James Donnelly?”

Ambler flapped his arms like a flustered rooster, turning his head this way and that, looking behind him and over the top of her cubicle at whoever was behind her, trying to get her to lower her voice. “I don’t think any of those things; for God’s sake, quiet down.” He spoke barely above a whisper. “The man Emily Yates was with died from a fall. It seems it was a hiking accident. But there’s some mystery about it. The police investigating the case never actually talked to Nelson’s daughter.”

“I’ll see if I can find out more about it.” Adele swung her chair around to attack her computer.

*   *   *

After closing the reading room shortly before 6:00, Ambler, as he did most evenings, walked over to the Library Tavern for a beer on his way home, and was told by McNulty that Nelson Yates was waiting for him in Bryant Park.

The world seemed to wear heavily on the bartender. “I’ve seen too many drunks in my life.”

“Yates?”

McNulty nodded. “My guess is he was on the wagon and took a tumble. He’s on a bender.”

“Great. Dementia and a bender. His wife is looking for him,” he told McNulty as he left. “I suppose I’ll have to try to get him home again.”

Ambler saw the police cars on 42nd Street before he crossed Fifth Avenue in the streetlight-lit twilight. Police action near the park wasn’t so unusual, yet he sensed this would be different. Picking up his pace, he reached the scene as an unmarked police car pulled up to the curb and his friend Mike Cosgrove hauled himself out.

“What happened?” Ambler asked.

“You don’t know?” the detective raised his eyebrows. “Right here in your backyard?… I thought you’d have the first one solved by now. And here we have another.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Someone murdered someone.” Cosgrove’s tone was heavy. “Happens more often than you’d expect in a supposedly sane world. What brings you out here if you don’t know what happened?”

Cosgrove had him there. The truth was he didn’t expect to find a random killing. He expected that when he was told who the victim was, it would mean something to him. Sure enough, a few minutes later, when Cosgrove gave instructions to a couple of detectives and rejoined him, Ambler had his answer.

“Nelson Yates.”

The strange thing, he wasn’t surprised. He should be shocked, but he wasn’t.

Cosgrove gaze bored into him. “More chickens came home to roost, Ray. Why’d someone kill him?”

Ambler shook his head. He spoke slowly, not sure even he was speaking to Cosgrove. “You’d have to think whoever killed James Donnelly did this.”

“Maybe.… That’s a supposition, based on what? What you see is not always what you get.”

“You think the murders aren’t connected?”

Cosgrove was stone-faced. “I don’t think anything. Any facts you got, I’d be happy to take a look at.” He looked at the murder scene, taking everything in for a moment. “We’ll want a statement.”

Ambler stared blankly.

“Ray?”

He came out of his trance. “I will. I will, but not now.” He sat down on a wobbly chair on the terrace behind the library.

Cosgrove gestured with his head toward a detective who was questioning two young girls in Catholic school uniforms, huddled together clutching one another, their faces white with fear. “Ed Ford will talk to you when he’s finished with the witnesses. I suspect as usual no one will have seen the shooting. How it happens, on a crowded street, someone pulls a gun, fires off three or four rounds, and no one sees it, is beyond me.”

“Okay,” Ambler said absently. He watched the activity in front of him: clusters of uniformed police officers, EMS medics, the crew from the medical examiner’s office wheeling the gurney with the black body bag. Cosgrove was right. He shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It could be a random shooting, or someone from Yates’s past with a grudge, payback for skipping out on a loan shark, mistaken identity, any one of a dozen explanations. Yet this was the second murder at the library in a week. Who was he kidding?

Detective Ford introduced himself to Ambler and stood in front of him, closer to him than Ambler would have liked. Ford was younger than Cosgrove, not as jaded, aggressive in a peculiarly cheerful New York way that suggested he’d be happy to be your friend or kick your ass: take your pick.

Ambler told the detective what he knew about Yates and his connection to the library, including what he’d already told Mike, that Nelson wanted to keep Max Wagner away from the collection, that there had been an argument between James Donnelly and Max Wagner, and about Yates’s “chickens coming home to roost” comment.

“He knew something about the other murder?” The detective raised his eyebrows.

Ambler didn’t bother to answer. If it was up to him, he’d want to question Max Wagner and Kay Donnelly. Whatever this guy was thinking, it wasn’t Ambler’s business to tell him whom he should talk to. “Cosgrove knows where to find me if he wants anything else.” He stood.

“Why didn’t you report it?”

What was this guy’s problem. “I told Mike.”

“But you kept some things to yourself, right?”

So that was it. The guy had an opinion of Ambler, knew his reputation. He was fighting windmills. “I’m not in competition with you, Detective Ford.”

“You told me everything?” His tone implied that Ambler hadn’t.

“Everything I remember. If I think of anything, I’ll call Mike.”

“You can call me, too.” Ford shoved his business card into Ambler’s chest and stood in front of him, wide stance, braced, knees slightly bent, arms at the ready, as if he waited for Ambler to make a move so he could smack him. Ambler turned from him cautiously, surprised by the hostility in someone whom he’d spoken to for less than ten minutes. Ford’s stance was insulting—demeaning—in its suggestion that he would take Ambler on if Ambler had the balls to stand up to him.

Walking away from the hotshot cop felt like backing down from a fight when he was a kid. He hoped Ford and Benny didn’t cross paths.

*   *   *

“God, it’s terrible,” Adele said. She sat with Ambler on the front steps of the library watching the flow of pedestrians crossing Fifth Avenue and 41st Street. It was a cool evening; the police and everyone else who gather at a murder scene were gone. A hot dog vendor on the uptown corner of 41st Street was lowering his yellow and blue Sabrett umbrella and packing up his stainless steel rolling restaurant. “Why would someone murder Nelson?” The combination of anger and grief did something to Adele’s face, gave her a kind of seriousness and depth that hadn’t been there before, a deeper acquaintance with sorrow, a depth of sympathy.

“He left a message with McNulty for me to meet him in the park. He wanted to tell me something. If events were to follow a certain archetypal pattern, it would be that he was about to tell me who murdered James Donnelly, so the murderer killed him to keep him from talking.”

Adele’s eyes widened. “Who was that?”

“Who?”

Adele wasn’t buying it. “You think something. You have someone in mind. And I bet I know who it is. Why won’t you tell me?”

Ambler watched the hot dog vendor wheel his cart slowly north on Fifth Avenue. Somewhere around 45th Street, he’d head west toward Twelfth Avenue and the storage garage.

“Let’s see what the police come up with.”

*   *   *

The next morning, Ambler noticed more uniformed security in the library, in the public areas on all three floors, as well as at least two library special investigators he recognized, and a couple of crew-cut, bull-headed, thick-shouldered, linebacker types from the NYPD trying to look inconspicuous, as well as a couple of Cosgrove’s fellow workers going office to office, desk to desk, asking questions.

He found Adele seated at her desk at a computer.

“I don’t know what this means now that Nelson is dead. I started out looking for Emily Yates and ran into Maximilian Wagner. I’ll tell you at lunch when I’ve finished.”

They picked up lunch at the Chipotle on 42nd Street and found a table under the budding sycamores on the 42nd Street side of the park. When he realized where he was—not far from the spot where Nelson Yates was murdered—he wished they’d gone somewhere else. Since Adele hadn’t been at the murder scene, where they sat didn’t have the same effect on her, so he didn’t say anything, instead sat with his back toward the murder scene.

She put a printout on top of her burrito bowl. “In the mid-eighties, Nelson Yates was a visiting professor at Hudson Highlands University in Rockledge.” She consulted her notes. “At the same time, Max Wagner was an assistant professor of English there, as was James Donnelly. Kay Donnelly was an English graduate student—”

“That’s—”

“Wait. Laura Lee McGlynn, also an English graduate student, was married to another professor, Arthur Woods.” Adele paused to catch her breath. “Arthur Woods was the man Emily Yates was with … the suspicious death.”