Murder at the 42nd Street Library Page 17

  Harry walked west on 46th Street through the diamond district, past a veritable United Nations of street vendors crowding the sidewalks, hawking gold and jewelry in front of dozens of stores whose windows were stuffed with gold watches, diamond rings, necklaces, and bracelets.

  The crowd on the sidewalks thinned west of Sixth Avenue, picked up again near Broadway and Seventh Avenue, where Ambler lost Harry among the tourists gawking through the theater district. He found Harry again near Eighth Avenue and was a block behind when he turned to look behind him before starting uptown on Ninth Avenue. When he turned the corner at 49th Street, Ambler picked up his pace, catching up to him as he entered the doorway that led to Emily Yates’s apartment.

  “We’ve been keeping secrets long enough, Harry.” He put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Let’s talk to Emily.”

  * * *

  “What are you hiding there?” Laura Lee asked her husband.

  “It’s a .357 Magnum revolver.” Max gave her a hard stare as he rewrapped the weapon in a soft black cloth and replaced it in a wooden case.

  She stood over her husband. “Who do you plan to kill?”

  Max glared at her for a long few seconds before he spoke. “It’s for protection. I have a right to protect myself.”

  “Not with a handgun in New York. Where’d you get it?”

  “That’s not something you need to know.”

  “One of your gangster friends from your youth?”

  “As I said—”

  “Dominic?”

  “Not Dominic. Why would you think that?”

  “He’s your brother.”

  “I haven’t seen Dominic in years.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you seen him … again?”

  Laura Lee sidled up to him. She wore a flowing yellow skirt and a brown blouse, open an extra button at the neck. Laughing that free-spirited, tantalizing, lascivious sound that drove him crazy, swaying her hips gently, she moved closer until her body pressed against his. Hiking up her skirt, she sat down on his lap facing him. She licked his ear and whispered, “I’m only interested in your gun.”

  He pushed the case away from her. “I told you—”

  “Not that one.”

  Afterward, they lay on the floor in front of the table, Laura Lee’s skirt twisted around her hips, her blouse open, bra and panties on the floor beside them. Max’s pants were around his ankles, so he had to struggle to sit up.

  “How you can be so goddamn passionate and have such a cold heart is beyond me.”

  Her eyes met his, her expression indifferent. “Help me take off my skirt; I don’t want to tear it.”

  He unzipped the zipper and undid a button at the waist. She lifted her hips and he pulled the skirt out from under her. She slipped out of her unbuttoned blouse and handed it to him. “Please hang them up,” she said, lying naked on the floor. “And get me a drink.”

  He did as he was told, hanging the clothes in her closet, bringing her a vodka and orange juice. Still gorgeous, the most desirable woman he’d ever known. She took his breath away the first time he saw her; an American lit survey class, she sat in the front row, a white blouse, a tight red skirt, red lips, that wispy black hair. She’d crossed her legs and met his gaze with a smile that became a laugh when he tried to look away and begin his lecture. It hadn’t taken long.

  He should have known the trick with the skirt, the wanton, laughing expression in her eyes wasn’t only for him. She came on to most men. How many she actually seduced, he didn’t want to know. He hoped it was none. He certainly hoped it wasn’t Dominic. Getting him involved in their lives was a risk; he knew that then. He didn’t know she’d find his recklessness so exciting. He thought she’d be repulsed by it. But no, she began flirting with his brother right in front of his eyes.

  “The gun isn’t going to help you, Max.” She lit a cigarette. Naked, she walked over to the couch and sat down. “Why don’t you get Dominic to protect you?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She took a drag on her cigarette and let the smoke out. Bad enough she smoked. He hated that she smoked in the apartment. She said she wouldn’t and did anyway when she felt she had the advantage. “Jealous, Max?”

  * * *

  Emily’s face went white when she opened the apartment door. Sizing things up, she tried to close it again. Ambler blocked it with his foot.

  Harry spoke softly. “This is Ray Ambler, Emily. He knows who you are.”

  She glared at Ambler. “I know him. Is that why you’ve been sneaking around here?”

  “No,” Ambler said. “I found out today.”

  “God damn it. Everyone I’ve ever known has lied to me, tricked me, fucked me over. Why would I think you and that damned woman—who pretended to be my friend—were different? I’m soft in the head.” She turned on Harry. “So they know everything, now?”

  Harry spoke calmly. “Ray and Adele found out who you are. I haven’t told them anything.”

  Some change came over her, like the wind dying down. Without acknowledging what Harry said, she let go of the tension that had her standing rigid in the doorway. “What do you want?” She aimed the question at Ambler, the sharp edge missing from her voice.

  “To ask about your father. I imagine it’s not something you want to talk about.”

  Her gaze was level. “Why do you care?”

  “I care that he was murdered.”

  “Again, why do you care?” Her dark eyes filled with emotion, some powerful passion smoldering behind them. Her nervousness returned, but not a fearful kind, more a fierce energy she didn’t know what to do with.

  “Do you care?”

  She averted her gaze and then met his again. “No.”

  “You went to his memorial service.”

  “He was my father—” She turned away from him. “I need a cigarette.” She walked away from the door toward a pack lying on a table in front of the couch. Ambler followed. Harry followed him.

  She lit the cigarette, taking quick, long drags, exhaling, pushing the smoke out. “It’s complicated. He was dead. It was over.…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Do you know who might have killed your father?”

  She made a face, the face a sullen teen makes when she doesn’t like what she’s being told to do but knows she’ll have to do it anyway, not the sort of reaction you’d expect from a woman who’d been on her own as long as Emily. It was as if in talking about her father, in her mind she’d gone back to refight the battles of her teen years.

  “Do you remember Max Wagner?”

  Something moved in her eyes—doubt, curiosity, fear; he couldn’t tell. “He was a friend of my father’s.”

  “James Donnelly?”

  She hesitated. “The same. Why are you asking me these questions? What do you want?” Again something changed in her expression—clouds forming, darkness.

  What did he want? He’d told Nelson he’d look for his daughter. He found her. What now? He’d gotten off on the wrong foot, scaring her. Starting with Lisa Young, he’d been doing a good job of blowing people’s cover to no particular purpose.

  “I’m sorry to spring this on you. You might know something that would help us find out who killed your father. I’d like to talk, to ask you some questions. It doesn’t have to be now.”

  She looked tired, weary. “If I had something to tell you, I would’ve told you. I don’t want anything to do with my father, dead or alive.”

  “He’d asked me to find you. He mentioned some letters—”

  Her expression was sullen, provocative, and unpleasant, again the face of an angry, hurt, rebellious teenager, not what you’d expect on a grown woman, but it fit Emily. “You found me. I doubt he cares anymore.”

  “The letters?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what he was talking about.”

  “If you—”

  “I’m really tired of this. Stop!” Emily screeched, putting her hands over her ears like a
little girl might do.

  “Please, Ray,” Harry said.

  Chapter 18

  “Sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Donnelly—”

  “Somehow, I find that hard to believe. Officer?… I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Detective Cosgrove is my official title.” He considered her for a moment—her flashes of pretty when she smiled, her scholarly demeanor when she became austere and forbidding, a mask. She’d smiled for a moment when she made the “hard to believe” crack. Funny how you looked at women. She had a pretty mouth, nice lips. He thought she’d be nice to kiss. “People call me Mike.”

  She turned from him, demurely, as if embarrassed by the familiarity. “My lawyer—”

  He held up his hands. “I know. He said not to talk to me … and didn’t like that you talked to me the last time. This—”

  “I didn’t tell him about the last time.”

  Cosgrove hesitated. Something about her expression, the look in her eye, coquettish, a tiny smile, surprised him. The tables turned. She watched with amusement while he regained his footing.

  “This is about your ex-husband, not about you.”

  The mask was back.

  He told her about the complaints by young women against Donnelly at the college where he taught.

  “James had a fondness for younger women. Is that what you’re asking?”

  “How young?”

  She hesitated. “What do you mean? These were college girls, right?”

  “Did you know this about him when you were married to him?”

  She snorted. “I was a young girl when I married him.”

  “I’m talking about very young.” His eyes met hers.

  “How young?”

  “You tell me.”

  She averted her eyes for a beat or two before meeting his gaze again. Her expression was all business, no attempt to charm him. “If you want me to answer your questions, tell me what you’re getting at.”

  “Does what I’m getting at change what you know to be true?”

  She closed her eyes and held them closed. When she opened them, she said, “It would establish that we’re speaking to one another as equals. I don’t like being tested, as if you’re trying to catch me lying.”

  She had him again. It was either guilelessness or she was a good actor. “I’m a cop investigating a murder. I’m allowed to withhold information and trick people to get to the truth. I can tell you what page it says this on in the homicide investigator’s manual.” She seemed astonished by what he said. “That was a joke. Like the guy said, ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’”

  “I’m not a man.”

  “I know.” His eyes moved from her face along her body to her legs and back to her face. He didn’t mean to do it and was sorry he gave himself away like that. She looked down at the texture of the couch she sat on. One hand smoothed her skirt, tugging at the hem. The other hand went to her hair, kind of fluffing it up in the back. A clock ticked somewhere in the silence.

  “Here’s what I know.” He told her James Donnelly had been asked to resign as coach of a girl’s high school soccer team during the time he was teaching at Hudson Highlands University. He waited for her response. When none came, he asked, “You know what the usual reason is for that, right?”

  She nodded. “That whole time we were at Hudson U was unreal. It was a commune of the brainwashed, headed by a flakey guru.”

  “Nelson Yates was the guru?”

  She glanced at him quickly and quickly away. “You’re good at dredging up the pieces of my past I’m ashamed of … mortified, actually.” At first, he thought she was angry, furious. Then, her expression changed, or how he saw it changed, so that he thought she would cry. “I need a minute to get myself together.”

  Cosgrove thought quickly. If his partner had been with him, he couldn’t do it. If anyone else were around, he wouldn’t do it. If he weren’t already a couple of hours into overtime for the fifth straight day, he wouldn’t do it. He’d give her more power over him than he should if he did do it, and she was smart enough to know that. This was not one he’d be telling the boys about over a beer at Hanratty’s.

  He made his decision in a split second. “How about I buy you a drink?” Raising his eyebrows, he waited for her answer.

  She looked astonished. Those inquiring green eyes got bigger and bigger, but she looked pleased.

  They found a self-proclaimed Irish pub around the corner on Ninth Avenue. It bright red facade looked like the front of a firehouse, an Irish flag on one side, an American flag on the other side. In back was a section of an alley that passed for an outdoor patio, a beer garden with wrought iron tables, protected from the outside world by a stockade fence. Cosgrove remembered when if you wanted to be out back of a joint on Ninth Avenue you needed a ten-foot fence with razor wire on top.

  “You have interesting methods of investigation, Detective Cosgrove.” Her tone was teasing, her eyes smiling. “I’ve never seen a detective take a suspect to dinner on Law & Order.”

  “I don’t watch cop shows. At the moment, you’re no more or less a suspect than anyone else.” He drank from his pint and set it down. “You were about to answer my question about your ex-husband and a high school girl.”

  “So I was.” She paused. “Everything is so different now. I can’t imagine the person I was then.” Her expression was sad, pained. “There was a high school—a precocious high school girl. We all knew her. Everyone who knew Nelson knew her. She was his daughter.”

  * * *

  Later, Cosgrove would think about the world Kay Donnelly described. It was like the stories he’d read as a kid in his mother’s Somerset Maugham book, where the colonists lived in their own world insulated from the life around them that the colonized people lived. Her description of Emily at fourteen, pretty, precocious, encouraged by her parents to socialize with the adults—and sleeping with at least two of them—got him to thinking about teenage girls like his daughter. The world came at them—young pretty girls—too fast. They woke up one morning and discovered they had something men desperately wanted.

  Kay came clean about her and Nelson Yates. She’d slept with him, despite what she’d said earlier, during that time at the college when she was young. Most of the girls who were part of their literary circle slept with him.

  “Nelson was an evangelist for free love. When he was younger, he’d been a follower of Wilhelm Reich—orgone energy and all that—and he still believed in it. Nothing crass or vulgar, Nelson was charismatic.” She paused, searching for words. “It sounds ridiculous now. The aura he created was amazingly seductive.” She looked away modestly. “That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

  When she looked at him again, she seemed sad, contrite. “I don’t think he wanted his daughter when she was that young to become part of his free-love movement, but it was inevitable she would. She was gorgeous and impressionable and had no restraints. Men salivated over her, including my husband.”

  * * *

  Ambler found Adele at the reference desk when he returned to the library. He told her he and Harry had spoken to Emily Yates.

  She gave instructions to a middle-aged man with a gray beard who was interested in Antarctica and turned her smile on Ambler. “See. You didn’t believe me.”

  “I did believe you, or I wouldn’t have followed Harry. What’s hard to believe is she’s been in the city within walking distance of the library where her father was murdered and kept her identity secret.”

  “She’d kept who she was secret for years,” Adele said. “Why would his dying change anything? I hope you didn’t bring that up when you talked to her. It was bad enough following Harry and sneaking up on her.”

  Ambler shifted his gaze, looking anywhere except at Adele. “Well, I did actually.” He finally met her gaze. “I probably shouldn’t have. It’s likely if we knew why she ran away from home—”

  Adele rolled her eyes. “You need to take a break from Ross Macdonald. Why
Emily? What about his son, the one Nelson thought he saw in the park that day? Why don’t you bother him?”

  “He was traveling with the ballet in Europe when his father was murdered. He flew back for the memorial service, and returned to Paris right after it.”

  Adele prepared to tackle another reader who was charging toward her from one of the computers across from the reference desk. “I hope you haven’t ruined things with Emily.”

  * * *

  When Adele wasn’t digging through the Yates collection, she was at the Social Register office on Park Avenue South searching through the archives. Who knew there were so many yacht clubs, polo clubs, fencing associations in Manhattan? Each name in the register had a string of abbreviations following it. When she found herself getting bored, she’d guess what an abbreviation might stand for and then look it up, wasting time, like when she was in library school.

  She found out that Raymond’s new friend Lisa Young’s husband had relatives who fought in the Revolutionary War—on the side of the British. Lisa Young was born into the Hathaway family, which traced its roots in America back to the 1600s and made the family fortune raising tobacco in Virginia with the help of slaves.

  Once she got the last name, things began to move. Lisa Hathaway was introduced to society at the International Debutante Ball in 1976. She was prominent in the New York Junior League. Her photo turned up in the Times in the society pages and in an article about Virginia horse country in Town & Country. Then, nothing! Nothing after 1976 until a marriage notice to Mr. David Young appeared in the Times in 1992.

  So what next? She didn’t have any luck finding the names of the attendees at the 1976 debutante ball. There were archives somewhere; no one she talked to knew where or how one got access to them or if they’d include a list of debutante ball attendees. She thought she might do better with the Junior League. Fortunately, the League didn’t take the term “Junior” literally. After a few phone calls, she tracked down a woman who’d known Lisa Hathaway. The woman turned out to be chatty, was fond of her memories, and liked gossip. They chatted about this and that, the woman assuming Adele a kindred spirit, until the chatty woman dropped the bombshell.