Murder at the 42nd Street Library Page 8

  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.”

  Her words outpaced her breath, so she paused. Leaning close to Ambler, she spoke just above a whisper. “Harry Larkin was the college chaplain.” She searched his face, worry creasing her own. “Now, two of those people are dead—three, counting the man Emily Yates was with. What does it mean, Raymond?”

  He didn’t know. “The temptation is to think that discovering people lied or didn’t tell us the whole truth about the past means more than it actually means—”

  Adele’s eyes sprung open, alarm giving way to incredulity. “Of course, it means something.”

  “You found out what folks tried to keep hidden. You’d like to think that tells us something about the murders. It might or it might not.”

  Adele sputtered. “You’re such a pompous ass. I’ve read Sherlock Holmes, too.”

  “Wait.” He couldn’t hold back a smile.

  Adele was having none of it. “‘You’ve been in fucking Afghanistan, I perceive’— Don’t give me that crap.” She stopped to take a breath and noticed his smile, so she smiled, too. “I’ll bet you this turns out to mean something … to mean a lot.”

  “It may,” said Ambler.

  * * *

  Mike Cosgrove stopped at the Woodside branch of the Queens Library on Skillman Avenue on his way home and picked up the three books by Nelson Yates on the shelf in the mystery section.

  The librarian who checked out the books—the library card he’d signed up for when his daughter was little was still good—knew about Nelson Yates’s death. “I really liked his books,” she said. “He wrote about real, everyday people. You felt sorry for everyone, even the murderer in the end.” She lowered her voice. “And now, he’s murdered, killed in broad daylight in the middle of Manhattan. Would you believe that?”

  Cosgrove shook his head.

  “Did you know about the shooting? Is that why you decided to read him?”

  “Something like that,” the detective said.

  Chapter 8

  Laura Lee McGlynn began her day with a two-mile run in Riverside Park, uptown to where the path wound away from the river near 109th Street, turning around under the stone bridge that held up the Henry Hudson Parkway, and trotting back to 90th Street. She picked up coffee and a bagel from The Bagel Basket on Amsterdam, took a shower, and dressed for the day, choosing a springlike, blue and white polka-dot dress from the closet. Flirtatious and demure with its full skirt and halter neck, it would appeal to the librarian, who could be either straight-laced or lecherous; she couldn’t tell which.

  She hailed a cab on Broadway. Max had told her the night before that Nelson had been murdered. How bizarre was that? Once her new friend Mr. Ambler figured out the connections, he was going to ask about Arthur’s death. She made a call from her cell phone while the cab was stuck in traffic in Columbus Circle.

  “Hi Gorgeous,” Dominic said. “Change your mind about the weekend in Vegas?”

  “Sorry, Gorgeous yourself. You know I’d love to go. The timing is bad, not enough notice to come up with a believable reason for the trip. I called you for a different reason. A lot has happened, including murder. I don’t suppose you know anything about that.”

  “Who was murdered?”

  She told him. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Why would it be me?”

  “I don’t suppose you’d tell me if it was. People will be digging around in the past. They’ve already started. More than that, Max is desperately trying to find your—and everyone else’s—former sweetheart. He’s thinking about a private detective.”

  A long silence at the other end of the line. “Bodies don’t stay buried. I told you that when we first met.”

  Laura Lee’s tone went jagged with irritation. “You have looks and muscles; I don’t expect you to have brains, too. This wouldn’t be such a problem if you hadn’t taken up with little Miss Emily when you should have turned around and gone about your business. I want to make sure neither Max, nor the police, nor an inquisitive librarian finds her. Do you know where she is?”

  “I’m not saying.”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “I can get your message to her. I told her I wouldn’t tell any of you where she was and I won’t.”

  “No message. Just make sure she doesn’t get found. What’s she doing these days? Is she a hooker?”

  Dominic’s voice became a growl. “You don’t have any reason to criticize her. She never asked you for anything, and she could have.”

  The cab crossed 42nd Street, heading toward the curb in front of the library. “I’ve got to go, honey. Sorry I insulted your sex kitten.”

  “I told you—”

  She snapped the phone closed.

  * * *

  Ambler met Laura Lee in the rotunda outside the Rose reading room after lunch. Knowing what Adele uncovered about her and Max’s connections to Donnelly and Nelson in the past, he had a lot to ask her.

  With her flouncy polka-dot dress and light blue trench coat, her big smile and sparkling white teeth, she brought the spring day with her into the library. Sitting down on a marble bench beneath a mural-like oil painting of Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down from the mountain, she patted a spot beside her.

  “Isn’t it shocking that Nelson was murdered?” He found her expression puzzling, not sad, but something else, like excitement.

  “Sad, indeed,” said Ambler. “You knew him quite well, I guess.”

  “Not well. Max did. They were close at one time.” It seemed like a candid answer, matching Adele’s research and what Nelson had told him. He didn’t know how to take her candor either. Had he expected her to lie?

  “You were his student?”

  “I was Max’s student. Max was Nelson’s colleague, his protégé. Nelson was an acclaimed writer … and charismatic. We were young and in awe of him.”

  He was again surprised by her candor. “Something happened between him and Max—”

  “You’d have to ask Max.” Her eyes met Ambler’s and held, with a kind of smug superiority that suggested she knew more than he did and pitied him his innocence. She smiled at him. “You liked Nelson, didn’t you?”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “He’s gone. Free of his tormented life—” For a moment, she looked puzzled.

  Ambler caught the reaction. “Tormented life?”

  “You know. Given what was happening with his mind, his memory. Max will write his biography. He’ll be immortalized.” She looked hopeful, the expression of the student she used to be, not sure the answer she gave was the right one.

  “He didn’t want Max to write his biography.”

  Laura Lee paused for a beat or two. “Nelson was senile. Who knows what he was thinking from one moment to the next?”

  “Do you know what c
ame between them?”

  She shook her head. “Max never talked about it?”

  “No.”

  “You never asked?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I wasn’t interested.”

  Ambler turned away from her to watch the clusters of tourists chattering together and taking pictures in the rotunda. Something about the tourists with cameras struck a chord. When he turned to face her again, she was dismissive.

  “Max is seething over the fight with your impulsive friend, so I’ve hesitated to bring it up.” She paused to meet his gaze and smile beguilingly. “With everything that’s happened, I don’t know what to think. I understand the police want to question your friend. Kay has hired a lawyer.” She took on a melodramatic look of surprise. “Max may have been right after all.” Innuendo dripped from her pretty lips. She caught the look of irritation he couldn’t smother and laughed easily. “There. There. Raymond.”

  “Ray,” Ambler said. He didn’t like her calling him Raymond. Adele called him that; no one else did.

  “Raymond suits you. Things will sort themselves out, Raymond.”

  This wasn’t a good time to bring it up, but she irritated him. “I’d like to ask you about your first husband.”

  For the first time, she was flustered. “My first husband died.” Her eyes had a kind of wildness in them. Like every other expression, it was becoming on her. “This is painful to talk about—” Her expression crumbled. “Why would you ask me?”

  “As a matter of fact, I asked because I was interested in Emily Yates.”

  Antsy, no longer so self-possessed, she said, “That’s bizarre. I guess you’ve discovered she was with him when he died. She shouldn’t have been—I won’t go into the sordid details.”

  “How did he die?”

  “It was accidental—scandalous, stupid, but accidental. High on pot, showing off for a teenage tramp, he flipped himself over a wall.”

  “Did you know Emily Yates?”

  “Why would you ask about her? She disappeared years ago. What does she or Arthur’s death have to do with Nelson’s death?” Her expression hardened. “I don’t like being cross-examined.” She assumed the cold, haughty attitude attractive, charming women switch to when they don’t want to be bothered. “Are you playing detective, Mr. Ambler? Too much time with your mystery novels?”

  * * *

  “She has a point,” McNulty the bartender told Ambler after hearing about his conversation with Laura Lee. “The guy was losing his grip.”

  “She said I spent too much time with detective novels. Maybe she’s right. A man hints that he knows about a murder and then is murdered before he can tell me what he knows. It’s straight out of Agatha Christie.”

  “She wasn’t so bad,” McNulty said. “Maybe you should look to her books for advice.”

  “Maybe.” He thought about Ross Macdonald and how the sins of the past shape the present. If chickens came home to roost for Donnelly, it was likely some came home to roost for Yates also. Laura Lee was wrong. He wasn’t spending too much time with his mystery collection; he wasn’t spending enough time with it.

  * * *

  At lunch at Szechuan Gourmet on 39th Street, Adele told Ambler she’d found a good deal of press coverage of Arthur Woods’s death and Emily Yates’s disappearance. “There were straight news stories and gossipy, scandal sheet stories about Nelson and his wife, Lisa Dolloway, Emily’s mother, a poet. You should read her poems; eroticism. They made me blush. The press blamed Nelson and her and their privileged, bohemian lifestyle for what happened to Emily.”

  “I’m sure it will all be in Max Wagner’s book. He’s probably using the same databases you’re using.”

  “You’d think if he was going to vilify Nelson Yates, Yates would have killed him, rather than the other way around.”

  “Who said Max killed Nelson?”

  “Isn’t that what you think?”

  Ambler fiddled with his chopsticks. “We know what we know. What’s more important at the moment is what we don’t know, and that’s quite a bit. Do I need to enumerate?”

  “We don’t know for sure who killed Nelson and James Donnelly or why.”

  “Right. We don’t even know if the same person committed both murders—”

  “It has to be.”

  Ambler shook his head. “What we know for a fact is they’ve both been murdered. We know how, where, and when. We don’t know who or why.”

  After lunch, on the way back to the library, Adele told him about the shoeshine boy, Johnny Smith.

  “His name sounds made up.”

  “I thought so, too. But I can’t see the boy lying to me. He has no reason to. He wants to be friends.”

  Ambler let Adele talk. She was smart enough to know the city was full of sad stories and neglected children—far too many to take under your wing. The city hardened you to things like that—neglected children, homeless mothers, suffering humanity. “A happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence,” Chekov wrote. There was a time when he cried over lost kittens and dying birds, when he took in strays. Do all kids feel that kind of empathy with suffering—the neglected and abused ones?

  Adele wanted to check for a record of child neglect or abuse, family problems, police calls, anything where the authorities got involved.

  “I don’t think you’ll get very far. Official files on child neglect aren’t public, nothing to do with children is. I guess if there’s an arrest of an adult, there’s a record of that.”

  “Could your friend Mike Cosgrove ask someone to do an informal check?”

  Ambler hoisted his shoulder bag and agreed to ask without believing it would do any good.

  “Why the bag of books?”

  “I’ve been rereading Ross Macdonald. I’m up to The Zebra-Striped Hearse. He’s looking for a missing girl.”

  “If you can tear yourself away, I want you to come for dinner tonight. But you need to go home first and get a pair of shoes.”

  * * *

  Ambler called Adele before leaving his apartment that evening. “Can I bring anything?”

  “Only a pair of shoes that needs polishing.”

  He laughed. But brought the shoes, along with a bottle of Chianti, since Adele was making spaghetti and meatballs.

  After dinner, she suggested a walk. “Bring your shoes.”

  “How could I not?” He looked at his feet.

  She looked, too. “I thought you brought another pair.”

  They found Johnny Smith in front of his building, waiting.

  “We have another pair of shoes tonight, Johnny,” Adele said.

  The boy couldn’t disguise his glee, though he looked ready to burst with embarrassment. Hard to believe his mother would let him be out on the street at night, shoeshine or no shoeshine. Except Ambler remembered with profound regret the times Liz was drunk or high and his own son wandered the alphabet streets of the East Village at all hours.

  “Let’s go where it’s warmer,” Ambler said, and took them to the ice-cream store on Ninth Avenue.

  “You like baseball?” Amber asked the kid.

  The boy, who wore a Yankee cap, nodded.

  “You know who Mariano Rivera is?”

  The boy’s expression was pleased, smug, like a kid at school when he knows the answer. “He’s the best closer.”

  “How about Albert Rodriguez?”

  The boy stopped slurping his milkshake. “Alex.” He spoke distinctly.

  “You don’t know Albert Rodriguez?”

  “Alex,” the boy said. “It’s Alex Rodriguez.”

  “Albert!”

  “Alex. It’s A-Rod. Alex Rodriguez.”

  Ambler laughed. “How about Delwood Jeter?”

  “It’s Derek!!” the boy shouted happily.

  “Derwood?”

  “Derek,” said the boy, laughing. “Derek Jeter.”

  Adele watched them. “How did you do that?” She was sta
rry-eyed.

  For a few more minutes, Ambler and the boy talked about the Yankees and the new season, the Red Sox, and the closing of Yankee Stadium. The boy’s face glowed.

  “You’ve never been to Yankee Stadium?”

  The boy shook his head. If he felt sorry for himself, he gave no sign of it. It was as if he felt no right to it, no more reason for him to go there than to go to Paris or the moon. He wasn’t a kid a dad took to the ballpark, so he had no expectation of it. As neglectful a father as Ambler had been, at least he took his son to the ballpark. John loved baseball. He’d learned to keep score when he was even younger than this fellow here.

  “Where do you work?” Johnny asked Ambler.

  “At the library.”

  “On Tenth Avenue?”

  “No. The big library downtown on 42nd Street. Have you ever been there?”

  “I’ve been there,” he said brightly. “My mom took me.”

  On the walk back, the boy remembered he hadn’t shined Ambler’s shoes. “I’ll do it now,” he said, stopping and putting his kit on the sidewalk.

  “When we get to your building,” Ambler said.

  Johnny reluctantly picked up his kit. His posture gave Ambler the sense that he wanted to argue yet restrained himself—a yes sir, no sir kid. Was he brought up with good manners or was he dominated, afraid to disagree? Something in the boy’s subdued manner suggested the latter.

  The answer wasn’t long coming. A few doors from Johnny’s apartment building, Ambler felt more than saw the boy stiffen beside him. Coming toward them was a man, maybe in his thirties or early forties, good-sized, in good shape, wearing what looked to Ambler like designer jeans and a sleek black leather jacket, the kind of outfit tough guys, if not wise guys, wear. He walked with a swagger and his expression was calm but hard.

  “What are you doin’?” he said to Johnny, ignoring Ambler and Adele. “Your mother’s lookin’ for you.” The man raised his arm, so the boy cringed. “Get your ass upstairs.” He reached to grab the boy’s arm, but Ambler’s arm shot out and brushed the man’s hand away.

  Startled, the guy stared at Ambler for a few seconds and then swung, making a fist, stepping forward, and swinging from the hip. Ambler sank into a bent-knee posture, raised his arm, warding off the punch and rolling his hips, all in one motion, so that the punch slid by his face. The man stumbled but righted himself. Putting up his hands, he assumed a boxer’s stance, something between a sneer and a smile on his face. He jabbed at Ambler a couple of times to no effect, charged at him swinging both fists, one after the other, again without landing a punch. Ambler swayed from side to side, turning at the waist, shifting his weight, as each of the punches came at him. The man faked a punch, and then kicked viciously toward Ambler’s groin. Ambler swiveled, bent, and brushed it away.