Murder at the 42nd Street Library Read online

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  Author’s Note

  In the spirit of the times, I’ve made some alterations to the iconic 42nd Street Library. For the most part, I’ve left reading rooms and stairways and such things—and most importantly, the stacks—where the original architects of the library put them. I did add an office, Harry’s, and a reading room, the crime fiction collection, to the second floor, and moved a couple of other rooms to places I could better get at them. While the New York Public Library has world-renowned collections, including the Manuscript and Archives Division, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and others, alas, you will look in vain for the library’s crime fiction collection. It is a figment of my imagination, as are all of the characters populating these pages. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is coincidental.

  I and the public know

  What all schoolchildren learn,

  Those to whom evil is done

  Do evil in return

  —W. H. AUDEN

  Prologue

  Dr. James Donnelly climbed out of a cab on Fifth Avenue in front of the marble stairway that led to the entrance of the 42nd Street Library, pulling his worn leather shoulder bag behind him. He wore a green tweed sport jacket over a green sweater-vest, brown gabardine slacks, and brown loafers; his salt-and-pepper beard was neatly trimmed and shaped. A passerby might have seen his bearing and his expression as haughty, and thought him arrogant, as he studied the building in front of him. A scholar, he felt awe in the presence of one of the world’s great libraries. The haughty expression was to steel himself for what lay in front of him.

  As he started up the steps between the two marble lions to the main entrance, he didn’t notice the person who watched him from the curb and climbed the stairs a few seconds later. Donnelly, unaccustomed to being followed, didn’t think to look behind him. Had he done so he would have recognized the person. Certainly, he would have been surprised. It’s far from certain he would have been fearful, though he should have been.

  After catching his breath in the rotunda, he headed up another set of marble stairs to the second floor. The person following lingered for a moment in the lobby before setting off behind him. If Donnelly heard footsteps, he paid them no attention. He knocked on the door to the office of Harry Larkin, the director of library Special Collections, and waited until he was buzzed in. He took a few steps into the room, letting the door close. Seconds later, the door beeped, clicked, and opened behind him. He turned to look. At that moment, he recognized the face that was inches from his, felt cold, hard steel pressing against his neck, and knew he was about to die and why. If he heard the explosion that ripped his throat open, shattered his jaw, and sent a bullet through his mouth into his brain, it wouldn’t have been for more than a fraction of a second. The second bullet wasn’t necessary.

  Harry looked up as Donnelly entered. He saw the door open again, caught a fleeting glimpse of the person who came in next. He didn’t notice the gun until after he heard the shots that killed Donnelly and saw the barrel turn toward him. Diving behind his desk, Harry heard the next two shots splintering the wooden desk and caroming off the marble wall. Waiting to die, he didn’t see or hear anything else, not the clatter of footsteps echoing along the marble hallway toward the back staircase, not the startled cries of a group of Asian teenagers as the killer bowled through them on the way down the stairs.

  The killer, not looking like anyone would imagine a killer to look, sprinted down the stairs on the 42nd Street side of the library to the ground floor and left by the side door next to Children’s Center, walking calmly past the guard in his booth, turning right, ducking into the subway entrance, and boarding a Queens-bound 7 train, as if it were a waiting getaway car.

  Chapter 1

  The morning was chilly, damp, and gray, an April Friday morning in a Brooklyn cemetery. Early April shouldn’t be so cold, but such cruel days descended on New York almost every spring. The damp, chilly air, portending rain, reminded Raymond Ambler of playing baseball as a boy on such a day, the grass recently starting to grow in green, forsythia bright yellow against the dull gray of the day, daffodils bobbing in the cold wind in the yards of row houses across the street from the parade grounds in Windsor Terrace. Your hand stung if you caught a line drive and both hands stung unmercifully if you held the bat too loosely when you hit the ball.

  Ambler shivered as he waited in the chilly wind, flecked with drops of rain, for Harry Larkin, his friend and supervisor at the 42nd Street library. That Harry was late wasn’t surprising. A medieval historian, former Jesuit, and absent-minded scholar, Harry wasn’t noted for his promptness. He ran the library’s Special Collections Division as haphazardly as the proprietor of one of the dust-covered odds-and-ends stores you once found along Broadway below 34th Street before the garment district began to gentrify. What you were looking for might be there in the store, but the proprietor was the only person with a hope of finding it.

  Adele Morgan, who also worked in Special Collections, where Ambler was the curator of the collection in crime fiction, asked Harry, even though he was no longer a priest, to perform the Catholic burial service for her mother. Ambler hadn’t known Adele was Catholic. He came to the funeral because in recent years she’d become his best friend.

  For reasons not clear to Ambler, Adele took a liking to him the first day she arrived at the main branch of the library and hung her diploma from the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa on the wall of the cubicle next to his. Since then, with the exuberance of an Iowa cheerleader and the smart-alecky cynicism of a Brooklyn roller-rink queen, she’d taken him under her wing, defending him against the not infrequent fallout from his lack of social graces, pugnacity, and proclivity to take on quixotic battles for truth and justice that no one else much cared about.

  He didn’t know how old her mother was when she died. He suspected still in her fifties, not much older than him. She’d died quickly after a diagnosis of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking—Brooklyn girls of her era began smoking cigarettes in front of candy stores and on neighborhood stoops when they were around thirteen.

  On the morning of the funeral, he rode in the funeral home limousine with Adele, an arrangement that caused him some embarrassment because Adele’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Peter should by rights have been her escort. With no explanation, she took his arm and walked with him from the church to the car, leaving Peter standing on the sidewalk in front of the church. Wearing a black dress, a black veil over her pale face, her lips red with a thin line of lipstick, his friend, whom he’d always thought pretty, became, in her grief, hauntingly beautiful.

  “It’s not that she died young, still in her prime,” Adele said three days earlier when she told Ambler of her mother’s death. “She never lived. She died four blocks from the house she grew up in, married you
ng, never left the neighborhood. She went into Manhattan a half-dozen times in her life.”

  Adele cried in his arms after that, her head pressed against his chest, her tears dampening his shirt. He’d gone with her from the hospital back to the house where she’d lived with her mother since she was a child, except for her time away at college. She’d made him dinner, leftover chicken casserole of some sort that seemed appropriate to the modest, working-class neighborhood in South Brooklyn.

  They drank wine. When neighbors called on the phone, she spoke to them briefly. The few who knocked on the door, she spoke to on the stoop. When it got late and Ambler made to leave, she asked him to stay. He slept with her nestled in his arms, both of them fully clothed. Yet at some time during the night, their mouths met. They kissed gently and went back to sleep, Adele still in his arms. When he left in the morning, neither of them mentioned the kiss or their night together.

  At the cemetery, by the time Harry finally arrived, tumbling out of a taxi a few rows of gravestones from the burial plot, the chilly wind whipped droplets of rain against Ambler’s face. He’d worn only his suit, no topcoat. The same wind pressed Adele’s black knit dress against her thighs and carried most of Harry’s words off toward Jamaica Bay. The group around the grave was small, mostly women from the neighborhood, most of them past middle age. Fewer than expected showed up because of an informal boycott by the strict-constructionist Catholics who saw the proceedings as sacrilegious because of Harry’s defrocked status. Ambler found it strange that Adele seemed to have no relatives.

  Harry, normally a cheerful, roly-poly sort, a veritable Friar Tuck, was this day distracted and out of sorts but didn’t explain why until after the handful of folks who’d gathered after the funeral at what was now Adele’s home, or stopped by carrying chafing dishes of meatballs, tuna salad, and such things, were gone—and after he’d gulped down a good-sized tumbler of brandy.

  “Someone was shot in the library?”

  “Killed,” Harry said. “Murdered. Right in front of my eyes.”

  “Who?”

  “A man who came to my office.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “God, if I know … a crazed killer.”

  “Is there any other kind?” Adele asked. She was frozen to the spot, a glass in one hand, bottle in the other, about to pour Ambler a glass of wine.

  “A philosophical question,” said Ambler. “Does someone need to be insane to commit a murder? Perhaps. Practically speaking, insanity doesn’t provide much of a murder defense.”

  “It wasn’t really a question,” said Adele.

  “The killer got away?”

  “It seems so.” Harry looked helplessly at Ambler, seeming bewildered by what happened, drifting off into his thoughts or memory every few seconds, staring blankly into space.

  * * *

  “What now?” Ambler asked Adele. He was helping her wash dishes and wrap and put away leftovers after they’d poured frazzled, tipsy Harry into a car service cab and sent him off.

  “I want to get out of this neighborhood as quickly as I can. I’m terrified I’ll end up like my mother.” Her face was drawn, with lines at the corners of her mouth he hadn’t seen before. Her voice was strained.

  “Your life will be different than hers,” Ambler said.

  She straightened up from stuffing the last of the plastic containers of leftovers into the refrigerator and faced him. “How different, Raymond? How will it be different?” She sounded irritated, angry, but really she was sad. “Life is pretty miserable for most people, isn’t it? Sad, painful, lonely—” Her eyes sought his, a rebuke; then, in seconds, the sadness returned; her lip quivered. He hesitated before walking closer to her and placing his hand on her shoulder. Leaning into him, her voice small, she said, “I’m missing so much in my life.” In another few seconds, she broke away from him.

  Adele was pretty, with blondish hair cut short, soft, full lips, and dimples so she looked impish when she smiled. Her prettiness seemed a kind of afterthought, as if she didn’t pay much attention to it; even so, he sensed she knew she was pretty. Her sadness made her seem fragile. He didn’t know what to say to comfort her. Like her voice, she seemed to have grown smaller. He wanted to take her in his arms. But he didn’t think she wanted that. She did want to talk, so he let her.

  “She had a house. She made a living,” Adele said. Her mother had worked for the telephone company since she graduated high school. “And she had a child she raised by herself. A child was something, even if it was only me.” Adele’s voice held a good deal of regret. Things had gone wrong in her life. Her father left her mother and her early on. She’d had her own difficulties, an early romance that went badly. She didn’t explain and he didn’t ask. He sensed that what they spoke about made little difference. Talking kept her connected to someone. When he left, she’d be alone, alone in a different way than she’d ever been.

  Later, on the long, jerky train ride back to Manhattan, mired in Adele’s sadness, as if it were contagious, he began to think about the murder at the library. The subway car, dingy and dimly lit, with only a few other passengers, tired and bedraggled as he was, had an ominous feel, reminding him he was in the city late at night and danger wasn’t far away—not as much danger as in years past, but reason to keep alert. He eyed his fellow passengers and checked the subway’s doors each time they opened.

  Thinking about the murder depressed him. At the same time, an unsolved, or yet to be solved, homicide piqued his interest. He’d believed since he read Camus in college that taking someone’s life for any reason could not be justified. He saw no irony between this belief, a kind of pacifism, and his interest in homicide investigation. Camus’s characters battled pestilence without hope but without despair. “The task is impossible,” Camus said, “so let us begin.”

  Chapter 2

  The 42nd Street Library stretches along the west side of Fifth Avenue from 42nd to 40th Street. The landmark beaux arts structure houses the humanities and social sciences collections of the New York Public Library, the largest research collection of any public library in the nation after the Library of Congress.

  The collections are available to journalists, historians, and other scholars, graduate students writing dissertations, authors working on books, individuals tracing a family tree, anyone who wants read a newspaper or magazine, and many others. But the books, journals, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers, baseball cards, comic books, don’t circulate. The 42nd Street Library is a research library, not a circulating library. Everything stays in the library. Under such an arrangement, it has served the research needs of millions for decades.

  The Rose reading room, on the third floor, is two city blocks long with rows and rows of long oak tables and chairs. The tables stretch out on either side of a small foyer and a central desk where readers turn in their call slips and pick up materials that have been retrieved by pages from the seven levels of iron and steel shelving beneath the reading room. The Rose reading room is the largest of a number of reading rooms in the building. The Manuscripts and Archives Division reading room is at the north end of the main room, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature is also on the third floor, along with the Arents Tobacco Collection and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Throughout the building are other smaller reading rooms housing collections of various sorts, including Ambler’s tiny crime fiction collection on the second floor.

  On the morning after the funeral, he got to the library early, using the 40th Street entrance, across from the black and gold American Radiator Building—once the proud home office of the eponymous manufacturing company now the Bryant Park Hotel. Two uniformed city cops stood next to the security booth with the library’s guard, reminding Ambler, if he needed reminding, that a murder had taken place.

  After climbing the marble stairs to the second floor, he sat at his cluttered desk, not unaware of the irony that the bookshelves on the walls around him and on ano
ther tier of shelves on a catwalk-like mezzanine above him held many of the finest detective novels ever written. It would be an hour or more before the library opened. In the meantime, he needed to call up the collection of an obscure Dallas mystery writer, Sam Hawkins, who’d written a series of police procedurals in the 1940s featuring a Texas Ranger. A graduate student working on her dissertation e-mailed the library a week earlier requesting the files. He had no idea how she’d found Hawkins or discovered his papers at the library.

  The writer died in combat in Korea, leaving no heirs to claim his effects. His papers ended up in Ambler’s crime fiction collection because he’d entrusted them along with his books and other worldly possessions to his agent when he went off to war. The agent later donated them to the library and the collection gathered dust in the archive stacks until Ambler found it and added it to the crime fiction collection.

  He was filling out the call slips for the boxes when the door banged open and Adele burst into the room. “Have you heard?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “The murdered man is Kay Donnelly’s ex-husband.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s a reader working on the Nelson Yates collection.”

  He recalled an earnest young woman, probably in her thirties, whom you wouldn’t pay much attention to until some liveliness in her eyes suggested her understated manner might be a cover for a more adventurous spirit. “I wouldn’t have thought her the type to have an ex-husband.”

  Adele wrinkled her nose. “I’m surprised you paid so much attention to her. What type of woman does have an ex-husband, by the way? Different I suppose than the type like me who’s never had a husband.”

  Ambler knew he’d said something wrong. He wasn’t sure what.

  “Actually, Kay is the only one of that crew using the Yates collection who’s halfway civil. The head guy’s a pompous ass, and his wife’s a glamour puss who thinks she shits Baby Ruths.”