Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (13 page)

Raymond wasn’t so interested in Emily. He cared about the murders. Of course, he would. As much as he presented himself as a simple librarian living quietly among his books and papers, he thought of himself as a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes—or lately, Lew Archer.

She’d found newspaper accounts of Arthur Woods’s death. He and Emily Yates were in an area local lore called a lover’s leap. The girl was in shock, hysterical, when she flagged down a car. She didn’t remember what happened. Her parents rescued her. Lawyers and psychiatrists got involved. She was tucked away in a psychiatric hospital. She ran away from there. She kept running away. Could it be because Arthur Woods was murdered and she knew who the killer was? That would be a reason to run away and stay hidden.

The precocious child of famous writers, Emily grew up in a world of culture and books, college towns and university campuses, while Adele, the daughter of a cigarette-smoking, meat-and-potatoes cooking single mom navigated between row-house stoops, candy stores, cement sidewalks, and asphalt parks. Yet Adele’s life had gone more or less the way lives are supposed to go—except for that not having a family thing—and Emily’s went awry before she was anywhere near grown up.

Nelson Yates suffered a nervous breakdown after his daughter ran away. They’d been very close when she was young. The photos of them together—not many of them because Nelson didn’t like to be photographed—seemed to contain much happiness and love. He took her on book tours with him, traveled to Europe with her. She was his favorite companion. Her mother was in and out of hospitals suffering from depression when Emily was a child. For long periods of time, Nelson and Emily only had each other.

After a while, Adele felt she knew more about the Yates family than she wanted to. She felt like a voyeur, yet it wasn’t so much her doing. Yates and Emily’s mother, Lisa Dolloway, paraded their life out in public—the romantic part as well as the fighting and bickering. It was kind of embarrassing to read about it. People should keep some things to themselves. All that intensity and passion in the end turned to poison anyway. Their marriage fell apart after Emily ran away. It was sad. It wouldn’t be so great to have such passion in your life. How exhausting it must be. At the same time, she wondered if she might not be jealous. It was awful also to live a life without passion.

Lisa Dolloway disappeared after her marriage ended. Unlike Emily, she wasn’t hiding from anyone, had no reason to hide her identity, yet Adele couldn’t find any trace of her once she left Nelson. You’d think she’d be easy to find, yet it was as if she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

When Raymond told her about Nelson’s funeral, she wondered if Lisa Dolloway would attend. She did love him once, and it seemed he never got over her. It wasn’t to be a funeral exactly. The body had been cremated. His publisher and his wife were holding a memorial service on April 29. They chose the date because it was the week the Mystery Writers of America held its annual Edgar Allan Poe banquet and many of his fellow writers would be in town.

“Homicide cops like to go to the victims’ funerals,” Raymond told her. “Most everyone who might know something about the murder comes together and, for some reason, the ritual makes them want to talk about what happened. Often, the killer shows up.”

“Maybe,” said Adele. “I doubt anyone will throw himself on the casket and confess. Have you been reading Perry Mason? Are you going?”

“I’d want to pay my respects.”

Chapter 11

The next day was the third Sunday of the month, so Ambler, after his tai chi practice, walked up Third Avenue and across 42nd Street to Grand Central where he boarded a Hudson Line train for the hour-and-a-half-long ride to Beacon. The train car he rode in was old and worn, rickety almost. At that hour of the morning on Sunday, going north, up the Hudson, away from the city, most of the riders were on a mission similar to his. Black and Latina women, many of them with kids, some older, more matronly; many of them he’d seen often enough to nod hello to and receive a small indication of recognition.

He took a cab from the station at Beacon to the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, waited through the interminable processing in the anteroom, signed in as a visitor to John Lennon Parker—his mother’s last name, though Ambler’s name was on the boy’s birth certificate.

When John came into the visiting room, his gaze sweeping the area, his face expressionless, he reminded Ambler of the boy’s mother. He resembled Liz in many ways, a man’s version of her haunting beauty, slight of build, an almost fearful gentleness about him. He didn’t strike you as someone who should be in a prison, certainly not someone in prison for murder.

Ambler, feeling terrible unease as he did each time he came to the prison, sat uncomfortably at a chrome and Formica table that reminded him of a school lunchroom. His son sat down opposite him. Ambler’s heart ached so he could scarcely breathe. Conversation was strained as usual, with the boy showing a smug, cynical expression, as his father labored to converse. His expression said to Ambler, as he was sure the boy meant it to, it’s your fault I’m here. Whatever guilt you feel, you deserve. Over the years he’d been coming to see John in prison, little had changed. During one of his early visits, he’d made the mistake of criticizing Liz. Whatever her faults, John would hear none of it from Ambler. The boy’s anger at his father—hatred, possibly—wasn’t unexpected. It was better than indifference. He’d left the boy and his mother, left the boy when he was too young to defend himself with a mother incapable of making her own way through the world, much less of raising a child.

“I put a few dollars in your account,” Ambler said.

John nodded. He lit a cigarette.

“Any problems? Anything I can do?”

“Nothing I can’t handle, Pop.” He said this flippantly to remind Ambler he had dues to pay. He knew that; yet he was hopeful. If his son really didn’t want him there, he could take him off the visitor list. Instead, the boy worked out his anger on his father, and why shouldn’t he?

After Ambler’s attempts at conversation, punctuated by John’s nonresponses and long periods of silence, the boy spoke without looking at his father. “I got something maybe you can take care of.”

Ambler nodded.

“Look in on Mom. I’m not sure what’s going on with her.”

Ambler hesitated. “I haven’t seen or spoken to your mother since the trial, John. I don’t know where she is. I don’t think she’d want to see me.”

John’s brow wrinkled; his expression softened, so that he resembled himself as a boy, the slim wisp of a boy, with dark hair that belied his blue eyes, an unconvincing tough-guy sneer, and a shy, in-spite-of-himself smile. “I don’t know where she is, either. She hasn’t been up. My letters come back.”

Ambler stayed another two hours. This time, he’d remembered to bring pocketfuls of change for the vending machines. As the visit wore on, John’s hostility wore down as well. He whispered a couple of times to Ambler, once pointing out one of the more notorious inmates—a cop killer from the Bronx who’d taken on half the city’s police force in a standoff. The boy told Ambler brief anecdotes about other inmates, fights in the yard, a lockdown in the cellblock. Twice, he nodded to fellow inmates—both white guys you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw coming your way—and told Ambler how things worked in the prison.

“Gus and Wills got my back; I got theirs. That’s how it is in here—only one or two guys you can trust.”

Ambler cringed. John wasn’t tough—far from it. He’d been a drinker, a pot smoker, a musician living the nightlife, not a gangbanger or drug dealer, not in the criminal life. He’d killed a man he shared an apartment with in a fight fueled by alcohol and cocaine—with the gun the other man pulled on him. That was John’s story. Though the police, the prosecutor, and the judge didn’t believe him, Ambler did. He was stunned when John was found guilty of murder rather than involuntary manslaughter. The look of hate John directed at him when the judge announced the verdict burned a hole through his heart.

On the way back to the city on the train after the visit, thoughts of John kept Ambler’s eyes moist with tears. Most of the folks he’d ridden up with were on the train going back, everyone worn out from the day, somber, hardly anyone speaking or looking at anyone else; even the kids were subdued. Many eyes, like his, glistened with tears.

*   *   *

He’d told John he’d look for his mother, so, the nighttime being the right time, even on a Sunday night, to look for Liz, he set out for the lower depths of Manhattan. What was it Lenny Bruce said? “There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster”—even worse, an aging flower child. Since he’d met her—a fifteen-year-old runaway—Liz had been a denizen of the East Village and its environs. The first night they spent together was in a Lower East Side tenement apartment with a sloping wooden floor and a bathtub in the kitchen. He’d find her if he walked the streets of lower Manhattan long enough. John knew that, too. Throughout his teen years, the boy had dragged his mother out of bars and shooting galleries, getting her home, making sure she ate, getting her to the hospital when she couldn’t take any more.

This night, Ambler found his former wife in a narrow, noisy, crowded bar on Ludlow Street, a block below Houston Street, the music loud and out of the past, maybe Led Zeppelin, psychedelic posters on the walls, leather-vested, tattooed bartenders, the customers drinking frantically or already drunk, the drunks either angry or despondent, glaring at Ambler as he came in, as if he were the source of their misfortune. He’d been told he’d find Liz in this dive by a woman he met at a slightly more upscale gin mill in the East Village—at least you didn’t smell the urinals from the doorway—who, for God knows what reason, remembered him with Liz thirty years before. The woman—three sheets to the wind herself—shook her head and told him Liz was down on her luck and the bar where he’d find her one step above skid row. “It’s the kind of joint where you don’t want to sit on the chairs, if you know what I mean.”

Liz was drunk—angry and despondent both.

“John is worried about you.”

She focused her bleary eyes on Ambler. “Poor son of a bitch. Ain’t he got enough to worry about?”

Searching for Liz through old haunts in the East Village brought back memories, so he’d almost come to expect that when he found her she’d be the Liz he’d loved so long ago. On an East Village street, he passed a thin girl with black hair, big eyes, red lips, and alabaster skin, a dead ringer for Liz when she was young. So taken was Ambler by the resemblance, he stopped and stared and almost spoke to the girl.

Liz wasn’t ready to talk about John, but with prodding and the price of a couple of drinks he got her to focus by talking about his latest visit—John had put on some weight, most of it muscle. She nodded, her eyes still locked on his. Seeing into the past? Seeing into the future, for all he knew. When he stopped talking, and she sat with her head slightly bent, staring into the space in front of her, he caught a glimpse of her faded beauty. Her prettiness had always been plaintive. Nothing about her said good-time girl. Instead, she sucked your heart right out of you with vulnerability and sadness. What struck Ambler was that it was still there, the plaintive beauty.

“Tell John I’m okay, that I’m doin’ good.” When she turned to face Ambler there were tears in her eyes. “Or tell him the truth. I don’t want him to see me like this. I never did.”

“He doesn’t blame you.”

“He don’t have to,” said Liz, clinging to her glass of amber liquid like it was a life preserver.

*   *   *

Mike Cosgrove began his workweek reading the medical examiner’s report on James Donnelly for the third time. Nothing in it led anywhere. The man had two bullet wounds to the head. The angle of the first one suggested he’d turned his head before he was shot so the bullet entered under his chin, its trajectory upward, through his mouth into his brain. He turned to his left and was shot on that side. The ME said the gun was in the shooter’s left hand. If the same held true for Yates—he was shot on the left side of his head—it would reinforce the connection between the murders, and they’d know the shooter was left-handed.

Everything pointed to the murders being connected, except something concrete—not a single piece of concrete anything. The only witness to the first murder was Friar Tuck, the library director. If he could describe the assailant, they’d have something to show the girls in the park who witnessed the Yates murder but who were too traumatized by it to recall anything. If he had a picture or even a composite to show them, it might jar something loose. He didn’t trust the friar, despite Ambler’s thoughts on the subject. He’d been waiting to reinterview him until they finished running a check on him. But he was thinking he might not wait any longer.

Although he wouldn’t say so, Ray had latched on to the case, not surprising since everything happened right under his nose. But there was the problem of him protecting his friends, holding back information he thought the police wouldn’t understand. Before you know it, you’ve altered the landscape, like driving a bulldozer through the crime scene. He couldn’t tell him to butt out. There you go. That’s the problem with cops having friends. You make allowances for them, and soon you’re not doing your job right. The way priests take vows; that’s how it should be with cops. You wanna join the force, you take a vow of friendlessness.

He called across the squad room to his partner and told him he was headed to the library to reinterview Harry Larkin. Ford’s job was to put together the days in the life of James Donnelly.

He called ahead to make an appointment, so Larkin was waiting for him in his office, a nervous wreck, his paw clammy when they shook hands, sweat beading on his forehead, his eyelashes fluttering a mile a minute. Cosgrove had suspects break down and confess who didn’t look as anxiety-ridden as this guy did. What the hell was he worried about? He couldn’t have shot Donnelly, gotten behind the desk, and shot at himself.

“Mr. Larkin, I know this is a disruption to your work, and I apologize for that. I don’t want you to think I’m questioning you again because I didn’t believe you the first time around. That’s not the case. In reinterviewing people, even if we ask the same questions, we sometimes find the answers are different. People mention something they didn’t think of the first time, or they remember something differently, or they provide fuller answers when the pressure isn’t so intense, and in the case of a murder, that pressure can be pretty heavy. So we understand each other?”