Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (16 page)

“Kay Donnelly is one direction. I’d be more interested in Max Wagner.”

“You always seem to be.” Cosgrove stood, waving to McNulty for the check.

“I’ll get the check,” Ambler said.

*   *   *

Ambler was waiting in the hallway outside the Wertheim Study, around 7:45 on the evening he spoke to Cosgrove. Kay Donnelly came along lugging a heavy book bag. She stared at him like he’d popped out of a box.

“Sorry to bother you, Kay.”

“I know what this is about, and I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t have to. Someone’s waiting for me.”

“Benny? He’s waiting for us at a bar down the street.”

“He can keep waiting. I’m going home.” Her angry tone was contradicted by the expression in her eyes, which suggested innocence and vulnerability you wouldn’t expect in a woman her age. He felt an urge to put his arms around her and hug her.

He spoke softly. “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?”

She stiffened. “Why should you care what I go through?”

“To be honest, I want to find out who killed your ex-husband and Nelson Yates. Finding out might help you. It might not.”

She shifted her heavy bag from one shoulder to the other. By her stance and a kind of smirk, she made clear she was too busy to deal with such a silly idea. “Why should it help me or not help me?” There was a kind of wildness in her expression, not panic but something seeking release, a desire to let go.

“You want to trust me. I can see it in your eyes. What have you got to lose?”

“A lot. As I told you before, my career.” Her gaze shifted to look beyond him and the color drained from her face.

He turned to see Laura Lee walking toward them. The scowl on her face changed quickly to her brilliant smile.

“Well, well, my favorite librarian. What do we have here, a tryst? You both look so guilty.” Her eyes locked on Ambler’s, flirtatious and challenging at once. Beside him, he could feel Kay Donnelly’s embarrassment and rage.

“I’ve invited Kay to have a drink with me. You’re welcome to join us.”

“Oh no, three’s a crowd.”

“It’s not like that, Laura Lee.” There was a kind of tired impatience in Kay Donnelly’s tone.

“No. No. I’d be in the way. Besides when I talk to Raymond, I want him all to myself.” She turned up her smile for Ambler and flashed it toward Kay. “Be careful what you say to him, dear.”

Kay scowled back but didn’t say anything.

On the short walk to the Library Tavern, Kay said, “I wish that hadn’t happened.” She seemed less on guard with him, having come to some decision during the standoff with Laura Lee. “I’d rather she hadn’t seen me talking to you. That back there was a warning shot.”

Benny was waiting for them in a booth. There was something cute in their greeting, talking to each other with their eyes, trying not to let on how electric the moment was. She sat next to him and they squeezed closer to one another than they needed to.

“I’m curious about Mary Yates,” Ambler said.

She swung her hand in front of her face, as if she were swatting him away. “I bet you are. That performance at the memorial service? She’s crazy. Living with Nelson will do that to you. He drove all of his wives crazy with jealousy.”

“She was jealous of you?”

She glanced at Benny. “She had no reason to be.”

Ambler caught the tension between her and Benny and saw the danger in pursuing the question. “I really wanted to ask what the story is with her and Max.”

Kay nodded, a slight movement of her eyes thanking him. “I told you it’s difficult for me to talk about Max. As for Mary, he sought her out, befriended her. You’d be surprised how charming he can be when he wants something. He wanted to do the book, the biography. He knew Nelson wouldn’t like it. He also knew Nelson was beginning to have memory problems and was difficult for Mary to deal with, so Max became the sympathetic ear. To put it bluntly, he wormed his way into her confidence, so he could get Nelson’s papers.” She laughed. “He flipped when Nelson gave the papers to you.”

“Was there anything romantic between them?”

She shook her head. “She wanted Nelson’s money when he died, which she thought would be soon, or at least he’d be declared incompetent soon. Max had money through his university library’s endowment for Nelson’s papers—more money than your library offered. Their relationship was mercenary.”

“Nelson said James Donnelly wanted his papers, too. They’d been in contact. Did you know that? Did Max know?”

She glanced uneasily at Benny before looking at Ambler again. “You need to ask Max.”

“Can I ask you what the argument was about?”

Kay looked confused. “What argument?”

“Benny overheard an argument Max had with your ex-husband shortly before he was killed.”

“What are you talking about?” She whipped around to face Benny. “What did you tell him?”

Benny shrank from her.

“Donnelly confronted you and Max about something,” Ambler said. He turned to Benny who looked puzzled. “Benny?”

“They were in the hallway outside the Wertheim Study. You—”

Her face was a study in frustration. “God, Benny, why would you talk about something you know nothing about?”

“All I said—” He stared at her, the communing spirits ducking for cover.

Ambler watched Kay Donnelly curiously.

She snatched her hand from Benny’s, clambered out of the booth, and dashed out of the bar. A moment later, Benny followed her.

*   *   *

Adele often walked home after work since moving into the city. After years of the long, tiring train ride to Sheepshead Bay, it was such a pleasure, especially in early spring when the evenings were long. Sometimes she walked across 42nd Street to Ninth Avenue and uptown on Ninth. Lately, she’d walk over to Tenth Avenue and come back to Ninth on 49th Street, hanging out for a bit by Johnny’s apartment in case he or his mother happened to come out.

Other nights she might walk up Fifth and pick a street to walk across—47th Street, through the diamond district—or 44th past the Algonquin Hotel, or 46th Street, through Restaurant Row. She’d pick a street and find something different, often older, well-cared-for apartment buildings she wished she could afford to live in. The walks gave her time to think, to get the day’s work out of her mind and adjust to the time she wasn’t working.

She ate at home and mostly read at night. There wasn’t time to read everything during working hours, so she often carried a few catalogs and advanced reading copies from publishers. Bringing work home didn’t bother her. She didn’t like to go out much and hadn’t dated since she broke up with her boyfriend after her mother’s death. It wasn’t that she was lonely—she liked being alone. And it wasn’t that she missed Peter—she didn’t. They never had much in common. She’d stayed with him out of habit and because no one else came along.

After her mother’s funeral, she thought something would happen with Raymond. At the time, she was sure of it. Being with him felt right. She’d thought that before, though, that everything felt right, that something would happen with Raymond, and it didn’t. She knew he wanted to. She’d catch him looking at her sometimes, his expression unguarded. She could see longing there and sadness. Whatever went wrong for him in the past went wrong really badly. He was like someone afraid of the water or afraid of dogs—his was a phobia about being close.

These days, too, she thought about the shoeshine boy Johnny. Since she’d come across him, she felt something entirely different than she’d ever felt before—this idea that she might be needed, desperately needed, by someone. She’d always wanted a child. Now, in the midst of the murders at the library, her mother’s death, the end of a long relationship, and Raymond’s indifference, she’d found something in life she cared passionately about. She wanted to make sure Johnny was cared for. She had no idea how to do that. But she knew he needed her—not to replace his mother but maybe to help her. It was obvious her life and her son were too much for her to handle.

On this evening as she walked up Tenth Avenue and back across 49th Street in the gathering darkness, she realized her life was changing. She knew now that something was missing in her life—someone, really—a person who needed her and whom she needed. Since the evening she’d spent with Raymond and Johnny, when he’d gotten along so well with the boy and then stood his ground against a guy not much better than a street thug, protecting them both, she’d thought of Raymond Ambler, mild-mannered librarian, as her white knight. As foolish as it made her feel, she was now head over heels in love with him and biding her time—waiting for the right moment, the right place, the right lipstick, the right dress—until she made her move.

*   *   *

Mom was in one of her strange moods. When he was younger, she got like that sometimes but the times were far apart. Now, it was more often. What would happen is she’d stop drinking. First, she’d bang around the house, cleaning up everything, throwing stuff out; one time she painted the living room; another time, she came home with two guys carrying a rug and they ripped out the old one and put in a new one. When she wasn’t cleaning or fixing things, she’d yell at him about everything, and when she wasn’t yelling, she’d sit and stare out the window—all day long, she’d stare out the window. She’d be there sitting by the window, a blank look on her face, when he went to bed, and she’d be there when he woke up in the morning. Except for yelling at him to pick up his clothes or to take a big basket of clothes to the Laundromat, she wouldn’t talk to him at all. She wouldn’t cook and she didn’t eat.

The first time, when he was real little, she took him to the country and they watched an old man and a woman who wasn’t so old but seemed like she was his wife. They sat in a car outside a small house in the woods. When the man and woman who lived there went somewhere, they followed them in Dominic’s car. This took up a whole day. No one talked. He and Dominic went for walks in the woods while his mom watched the house. Dominic didn’t like that so much. He complained about bugs, got mud on his shoes, and ripped his pants on some bushes that had thorns. Dominic never talked to him anyway, so spending time with him wasn’t like he imagined going hiking or fishing or something should be. Dominic was a guy your mother knew and who put up with you, not anything like a dad would be.

When they got home that time, she sat and stared out the window most of the next day; then, she took everything out of the closets and threw some things away and put everything else back into the closets again. That night she went out to the bars and met a guy. She started drinking and everything was back to normal.

There were other times. They’d go somewhere and watch someone. Once it was in a ritzy part of the city and there were so many people going in and out of buildings or walking down the street or sitting in a sidewalk café he didn’t know who she was watching—or much care. That one didn’t take so long.

A couple of times, they went to a place with buildings and lawns and older kids walking around wearing backpacks. He thought they were probably college kids. Both times, they went without Dominic. She went to the office of a man with a beard who wore a tie and jacket and who was solemn and serious. He had someone—a different girl each time—take him for a soda at a place with tables and chairs, like a school cafeteria only better, where the older kids with backpacks hung out. His mom never told him where they were or why, and he didn’t ask.

Each time, he’d know a trip was coming up because she stopped drinking and went into one of those moods, like she was in a trance. Each time, she’d come out of it, start drinking, and go back to normal. When the moods started up again not long ago, he expected another trip. This time, no trip; everything else was the same, but no trip—and she was angrier than she’d been in the past and when she wasn’t angry, she was like a zombie.

The good thing was that Miss Adele came by the apartment last Saturday and talked his mom into all three of them going to the zoo. He’d never been and it was much better than he expected. They rode on a train through a jungle in the Bronx. You could look out the window and see elephants, tigers, rhinos. They visited the lions and saw the new baby cubs. It was one of the best times he ever had, and his mother seemed different. She was on him a lot, telling him to stop running and to keep quiet. She got mad at him and Miss Adele joking around. But something was going on with her. She was quiet and thinking a lot.

*   *   *

“Harry told me Max Wagner was okay with my lunch-hour talk on Nelson,” Ambler told Adele, when she pulled up a chair next to his at the glistening oak library table in the center of the crime collection reading room. “He must have concluded no one would pay any attention to an obscure librarian.”

“Not so obscure. He doesn’t know you have a following.” Adele turned her chair to face him. “I told you I took Johnny and his mother to the zoo. He was thrilled. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became a veterinarian when he grows up. He knew all about the animals. He knew the names of the lion cubs.”

Adele was totally smitten, so much so it was worrisome. She might be headed for a lot of heartache. He knew too well what became of the children of unreliable mothers. His son’s wrecked life was ample warning of what happened to kids left to their own devices when they were too young to handle it.

“What was his mother like?”

Adele stopped gushing. “It was strange. She didn’t say anything bad. She kept trying to calm Johnny down, dampen his enthusiasm. It was sad watching him rein himself in. He was so exuberant.” Adele turned a soulful and questioning gaze to Ambler. “Why wouldn’t she let him have fun, be a kid?”

Ambler shrugged. “Did you find out if it was her you saw the day of Nelson Yates’s memorial service?”

“She said it wasn’t her. She’d never been to Columbia and never heard of Nelson Yates. Yet I would have sworn—” A strange, almost secretive, look came across her face. She leaned closer. “I’ve been thinking about something. It’s impossible; I know. The thing is I can’t stop thinking it.”

“What?”

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“No.”