Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book)
Read Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) Online
Authors: Con Lehane
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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
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.
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 young, 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.
