Murder at the 42nd Street Library Read online

  “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?

  * * *

  “Raymond, come here.” Adele beckoned from the doorway of the Berg Collection reading room as he headed back to his office after lunch. “Nelson Yates is in Harry’s office. He’s mad as a hornet about Max Wagner for some reason. Harry sent me to get you.”

  “Why me?” He had to wonder for a moment if his subconscious, not satisfied with leading him to the Flatiron Building, had conjured up the real-life Nelson Yates.

  Adele shrugged.

  Harry jumped up when Ambler came through the door. “Here he is now.”

  The man sitting in front of the desk was thin, emaciated, much older looking than the evening they’d spent drinking and talking not so many years ago. His long legs crossed at the knees, he bent forward in such a way as to seem permanently curled. His eyes were sunken far back in his thin face, so he looked weary—defeated and weary.

  “Hello, Nelson.” Ambler held out his hand. Because of the blank look he got in return, he wasn’t sure the writer remembered him. “It’s good to see you again.”

  Yates shook his hand listlessly.

  “Mr. Yates is concerned that Professor Wagner has been given access to the collection before it’s been cataloged. I’ve explained the precautions we take. Perhaps you might reassure—”

  “I don’t need another explanation,” Yates said, not raising his voice.

  Harry puffed up, as he did when he was put out. “I explained to Mr. Yates that the collection was sold to the library without restrictions.”

  “Harry’s right, Nelson. In the deed of transfer, you give the library the right to make decisions about how the collection is used,” Ambler said.

  Yates held up his hand to stop Harry, who was about to say something. “I could have given my papers to Max Wagner and Whitehall University. They offered me more money than you did.”

  “He’s a respected scholar—” Harry said.

  Yates shot him a withering glance.

  “He has a letter of introduction from you,” Ambler said.

  “Mary, my wife, tricked me.”

  “If you’re suggesting fraudulent—”

  Yates waved Harry off. “I’m not bringing my wife into this. I thought the letter of introduction was for Jim Donnelly.”

  Ambler shot a meaningful glance at Harry before turning to Yates. “You gave my friend McNulty the bartender the impression Donnelly’s murder wasn’t a surprise to you. ‘Chickens coming home to roost?’”

  Yates hesitated, puzzled. “Did I say that?” His eyes clouded and he seemed lost in thought. When he came back to the present, he stared at the space in front of him. Looking at him, you’d think he was unsure of himself, until his eyes caught yours and he spoke with authority as he did here. “What I said was a comment … musing … a thought that found voice. Something came out of Jim Donnelly’s past. It could happen to anyone.” He looked at Ambler and then at Harry. “It might well happen to me or either of you.”

  “Was there a problem between him and Max Wagner?”

  Despite his general lethargy, the expression in Yates’s eyes was shrewd. “They were rivals.” Yates appraised you in a way that seemed to be seeing something about you that you’d rather he didn’t, your secrets, especially the ones you were embarrassed by. “Why do you ask? Do you think Max killed him?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “It wouldn’t make for a very good plot.” He laughed, a chuckle followed by a hacking cough. When he finished coughing, he reached into his pocket. “Can I smoke?”

  Harry made a move like he was going to tackle him. “No! No! It’s a library.”

  Yates put his cigarette pack back in his pocket. “I used to smoke here, years ago, in the Allen Room. Smoke and drink. Back when writers wrote on typewriters.” He winked at Ambler. “We were expected to do that sort of thing.”

  Ambler persisted. “Was there bad blood between Max and James Donnelly?”

  Yates shook his head. “I hadn’t seen either of them in years. Jim Donnelly wrote me some time back. He wanted to write a literary biography, something very different from the crap Max writes. He asked for some of my writing, my notebooks, asked to read my letters. I thought the whole idea sounded pretentious.”

  He chuckled, followed by another fit of coughing. “When I signed the letter my wife tricked me into signing for Max Wagner, I thought it was Jim trying again. I was going to let him look through the collection.”

  The three men sat in silence until Ambler spoke. “He wouldn’t take it lying down, you know. Taking something from Max is like taking a bone from a pit bull.”

  “I know what he’s like.” The writer’s tone changed, as if he sensed something from Ambler that he hadn’t heard from Harry. “Your boss says you’re a friend of his.”

  “We were in graduate school together. Not friends.”

  Yates smiled with his eyes to let Ambler know he got it. “He was my protégé. I welcomed him into my family, treated him like a son. If you know Wagner, you know he’d swindle his mother out of her widow’s pension.”

  “I think he did,” Ambler said.

  The older man chuckled. “He betrayed me.”

  “But your wife—”

  “She doesn’t know. It was before her time.”

  “If you make that kind of charge against Max—”

  “I won’t. Don’t let him get at my papers and keep me out of it.”

  “Without a reason?” Harry said.

  “I gave you a reason.”

  “I don’t see how I could do it.” Worry deepened the lines in Harry’s face. “Even at your request, I don’t know how I would. Without a formal request from you, how would I explain? It would be impossible.”

  Yates stood to leave, turning to Ambler. “Maybe you can think of something.”

  “Maybe.” Ambler was thinking of Benny’s plan to push Wagner in front of a bus. He and Harry watched Nelson walk slowly through the door.

  * * *

  During the following week, life in the library slowly returned to normal. Ambler spent what free time he had learning more about the murder victim, James Donnelly. Meanwhile, Adele signed a lease for a small one-bedroom in an elevator building in the West Fifties, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. Hell’s Kitchen, once notorious, had gentrified but retained small pieces of its history and character—rent-stabilized apartment buildings on the cross streets and a smattering of storefronts along Ninth Avenue whose tenants had long-term leases—useful stores, like hardware, dry cleaners, and bakeries that hadn’t yet been turned into trendy restaurants.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she asked Ambler. She’d persuaded the landlord to let her fix up the apartment before moving in, so she’d invited Ambler over to help paint her kitchen on Thursday, their day off together. “If you lean over and look out this window,” she bent over the kitchen sink and craned her neck, “you can see the river.”

  Ambler was ha
ppy for her but couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for her new place. It was cramped and dark, not much different from a zillion other apartments in Manhattan.

  “Have you found out anything interesting about the murder victim?” she asked, after they got the drop cloth down and the painting supplies set up.

  “He taught English and creative writing at a small liberal arts college—what used to be a women’s college—in Westchester. He’s published a couple of literary biographies; unlike the ones Max Wagner writes, his are scholarly, not celebrity bios. He and Kay Donnelly divorced a long time ago. That’s all I’ve come up with. I haven’t tried the genealogy files in the Milstein Division yet. I’ve been reading his books.”

  “Do you think they’ll tell you why he was murdered?”

  Ambler shrugged. “They’ll tell me something. Mike Cosgrove sent detectives up to the college. Maybe they’ll find he was in the white slave trade or ran a drug smuggling operation.”

  Adele scrutinized his face. “Was that a joke?”

  He nodded and began pouring paint into a roller pan.

  “I’m beginning to think your friend Max Wagner killed the guy out of pure meanness. He’s a real pill. What’s with him?”

  “Max is self-centered. He doesn’t care anything about other people.”

  “Except for that bimbo he’s married to; he follows her like a lap dog.”

  “She isn’t a bimbo.”

  Adele stopped painting and turned to stare at him.

  He was surprised himself by what he’d said. He had no reason to defend Laura Lee McGlynn. “Her looks might be deceiving,” he mumbled.

  Adele turned back to her wall. They worked together in silence, Ambler lulled by the mindless activity of rolling paint onto the wall, while Adele shoved a stepladder about the room cutting the paint into the corners and near the ceiling with a brush. She pretended not to look at him but he could see her watching him out of the corner of her eye. She wore old, ripped jeans and a faded T-shirt that fit tightly across her chest. Her hair was wrapped in a bandana. Her face glowed—you might say she had rosy cheeks—from the exertion, he guessed, but also, despite her momentary petulance, from a kind of happiness he hadn’t seen in her before.

  Fortunately, she couldn’t stay angry or silent for very long. “I wish Harry hadn’t given Professor Big Shot access to the collection before we processed it. I don’t know why he’s so deferential to that ass. Now, he’s letting him into the stacks. No one ever gets to work in the stacks.… You’re dripping.”

  Ambler caught the drips with the roller and went back to painting the wall in front of him. Harry’s kowtowing to Max Wagner bothered him, too. “Nelson deserves a biographer who tells the truth, someone better than Max.”

  Adele’s expression softened. “The truth isn’t so easy, Raymond. Harry thinks you’re conspiring with Nelson Yates. Maybe that’s why he’s teamed up with Wagner.”

  They worked in silence again, until Ambler saw there were tears in Adele’s eyes. He touched her shoulder and she turned to him.

  “My mother’s dead, Raymond. As we were burying her, someone was murdered in the library. It’s so awful.” He reached for her other shoulder to hold her. But before he could comfort her, she walked away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, stifling her tears. “I miss my mother.”

  The afternoon wore on until darkness seeped into the room where they painted. When Adele flipped on the light switch, the bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling, reflecting off the fresh paint, created a stark brightness. She stood with her hands on her hips, a spot of paint on her nose and a streak along her cheek. Ambler watched with interest as she lifted the bottom of her T-shirt as far up as her bra to see if she’d gotten paint on her torso.

  He helped her wash out brushes and rollers and close up the paint cans. To get away from the fumes, they went to a small wine bar on Ninth Avenue for flatbread pizza, salad, and charcuterie, and shared a bottle of wine.

  “I told you Nelson’s wife didn’t want him to give the collection to us.” Adele put down her wineglass. “She’d been negotiating herself with a university. Whitehall.”

  “Where Max Wagner teaches.”

  Adele nodded. “Mary Yates is young, forties at most, Nelson’s in his eighties; she’s his third or fourth wife. I didn’t like her. Nelson insisted the collection go to the NYPL, and he got his way. It’s touchy, though. He’s not … how do I say this? It’s not that he’s not all there. He goes in and out.”

  “Of where?”

  “Don’t be a jerk, Raymond. He forgets, loses track of what he’s saying, forgets who he’s talking to.”

  “Alzheimer’s?”

  “Some kind of dementia that comes with old age.”

  “You’re afraid she’ll have him declared incompetent?”

  Adele cut a piece of salami into quarters. “Harry was careful about notaries and witnesses when we did the deed of transfer, so I think we’re okay. And he has that woman from the Board of Trustees on his side—”

  Ambler paused, the wineglass halfway to his mouth. “What woman?”

  Adele pierced a small piece of the salami with her fork. “I shouldn’t tell you this. A society woman donated the funds to purchase the Nelson Yates collection. This woman’s pretty important, New York Upper Crust and all that. I think that caused Nelson’s wife and Max Wagner to back off.”

  “Who is she?”

  Adele shook her head. “I can’t tell you. But you’d know her if you saw her. Her husband’s a lawyer with one of those white glove law firms, a philanthropist. You see her picture in the Times at those black tie charity balls.”

  “I doubt it. I didn’t know you kept up with high society.”

  “I read about British royalty, too.” She smiled.

  Ambler nodded, thought of nothing to say, and took a sip of wine. After a moment, he said, “I wonder why she did that.”

  “What?”

  “Financed the acquisition.”

  “Funny. I didn’t think about why she would. Rich people make donations. I let it go at that.” Adele’s eyes were round with worry, her eyelids drooping with tiredness, and for the moment, she seemed small and scared, so that Ambler felt protective of her. He looked at his glass and decided it was the wine.

  * * *

  The night after Raymond helped her paint her kitchen, Adele left her apartment, walking west on 52nd Street. She wanted to see if the shoeshine boy was out on Ninth Avenue again. She’d seen him the first night she was in the neighborhood visiting her new apartment, on the street at night a lot later than he should be at his age, shining the expensive loafers worn by a young guy in a business suit, who, hair mussed, tie askew, leaned against the wall of the gay bar he’d come out of. She’d taken notice of the boy because she’d seen him in the library a few days before. He was studying the Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal collection in the display case in the Children’s Center with this absolutely rapturous look on his face. He had remarkably clear, cobalt blue eyes, almost the same color as Raymond’s. When he sensed her watching him, he looked up with a half-bewildered, tentative smile. She almost laughed but caught herself when she saw the boy’s embarrassed look. He seemed to be alone then, and here he was alone again, cute as a button—a street waif straight out of Dickens.

  The next time, a few days later, she came upon him trudging up Ninth Avenue in front of her, shouldering his shoeshine kit, bent over as if it were filled with rocks, her heart went out to him. Thin, wearing a threadbare jacket and worn, dirty, untied high-tops, he walked like an old man. When she caught up with him, she had to stop herself from offering to help carry the shoeshine box. And when he crossed the street to head west on one of the cross streets, she followed, watching, until he turned to enter a building, one of the remaining four-story walk-up railroad flats, like her own but not yet renovated.

  She thought about herself and those like her moving in and probably displacing families with kids like him. He reminded her of the children she’d
worked with when she was in high school, teaching underprivileged kids to read. Actually, she’d been teaching poor kids to read since elementary school—her mother-hen complex. Her friends used to tell her she’d grow up to be the old woman who lived in a shoe. But she wasn’t the old woman who lived in a shoe. She didn’t have so many children she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have any children at all. She didn’t have anyone now since her mother died. She was alone and she wondered if this boy was an orphan, too.

  He was a fixture in the neighborhood. She’d see him often, one afternoon on Tenth Avenue, wearing the uniform of the neighborhood Catholic school, another time in the evening headed down Ninth Avenue carrying a bag of groceries from the fruit market at 57th Street. He was always alone—even coming from school he wasn’t part of the groups of noisy, scrambling kids who burst out onto the sidewalk when school let out—and she never saw him smile, except for that moment in the library.

  For this evening, she put on a pair of old leather boots, one of the few of her mother’s possessions she’d kept—the pair she used to borrow when she was young and the boots were new—and went to search out the shoeshine boy. It took more than an hour, marching down one side of Ninth Avenue as far as 42nd Street and back up the other side almost to Columbus Circle. She went by a bar where guys were outside smoking enough times to be propositioned. She was afraid if she went by it again someone would grab her and drag her inside, assuming she was playing hard to get. Finally, she saw the boy, standing in front of a different bar as though screwing up his courage to enter.

  She approached him, smiling. “How much to shine these boots?”

  He wrinkled his eyebrows examining the boots and then her face. His eyes were squinted closed and he spoke in a shy mumble. She had to ask him to repeat what he’d said.

  “Whatever you want to pay.”

  “Oh,” said Adele. “I have no idea what it should cost. I’ve never had a shoeshine.”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders, sinking into his jacket. He was tongue-tied, painfully shy. How did he find any customers?

  “How does five dollars sound?”