Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (2 page)

“Your life will be different than hers,” Ambler said.

She straightened up from stuffing the last of the plastic containers of leftovers into the refrigerator and faced him. “How different, Raymond? How will it be different?” She sounded irritated, angry, but really she was sad. “Life is pretty miserable for most people, isn’t it? Sad, painful, lonely—” Her eyes sought his, a rebuke; then, in seconds, the sadness returned; her lip quivered. He hesitated before walking closer to her and placing his hand on her shoulder. Leaning into him, her voice small, she said, “I’m missing so much in my life.” In another few seconds, she broke away from him.

Adele was pretty, with blondish hair cut short, soft, full lips, and dimples so she looked impish when she smiled. Her prettiness seemed a kind of afterthought, as if she didn’t pay much attention to it; even so, he sensed she knew she was pretty. Her sadness made her seem fragile. He didn’t know what to say to comfort her. Like her voice, she seemed to have grown smaller. He wanted to take her in his arms. But he didn’t think she wanted that. She did want to talk, so he let her.

“She had a house. She made a living,” Adele said. Her mother had worked for the telephone company since she graduated high school. “And she had a child she raised by herself. A child was something, even if it was only me.” Adele’s voice held a good deal of regret. Things had gone wrong in her life. Her father left her mother and her early on. She’d had her own difficulties, an early romance that went badly. She didn’t explain and he didn’t ask. He sensed that what they spoke about made little difference. Talking kept her connected to someone. When he left, she’d be alone, alone in a different way than she’d ever been.

Later, on the long, jerky train ride back to Manhattan, mired in Adele’s sadness, as if it were contagious, he began to think about the murder at the library. The subway car, dingy and dimly lit, with only a few other passengers, tired and bedraggled as he was, had an ominous feel, reminding him he was in the city late at night and danger wasn’t far away—not as much danger as in years past, but reason to keep alert. He eyed his fellow passengers and checked the subway’s doors each time they opened.

Thinking about the murder depressed him. At the same time, an unsolved, or yet to be solved, homicide piqued his interest. He’d believed since he read Camus in college that taking someone’s life for any reason could not be justified. He saw no irony between this belief, a kind of pacifism, and his interest in homicide investigation. Camus’s characters battled pestilence without hope but without despair. “The task is impossible,” Camus said, “so let us begin.”

Chapter 2

The 42nd Street Library stretches along the west side of Fifth Avenue from 42nd to 40th Street. The landmark beaux arts structure houses the humanities and social sciences collections of the New York Public Library, the largest research collection of any public library in the nation after the Library of Congress.

The collections are available to journalists, historians, and other scholars, graduate students writing dissertations, authors working on books, individuals tracing a family tree, anyone who wants read a newspaper or magazine, and many others. But the books, journals, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers, baseball cards, comic books, don’t circulate. The 42nd Street Library is a research library, not a circulating library. Everything stays in the library. Under such an arrangement, it has served the research needs of millions for decades.

The Rose reading room, on the third floor, is two city blocks long with rows and rows of long oak tables and chairs. The tables stretch out on either side of a small foyer and a central desk where readers turn in their call slips and pick up materials that have been retrieved by pages from the seven levels of iron and steel shelving beneath the reading room. The Rose reading room is the largest of a number of reading rooms in the building. The Manuscripts and Archives Division reading room is at the north end of the main room, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature is also on the third floor, along with the Arents Tobacco Collection and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Throughout the building are other smaller reading rooms housing collections of various sorts, including Ambler’s tiny crime fiction collection on the second floor.

On the morning after the funeral, he got to the library early, using the 40th Street entrance, across from the black and gold American Radiator Building—once the proud home office of the eponymous manufacturing company now the Bryant Park Hotel. Two uniformed city cops stood next to the security booth with the library’s guard, reminding Ambler, if he needed reminding, that a murder had taken place.

After climbing the marble stairs to the second floor, he sat at his cluttered desk, not unaware of the irony that the bookshelves on the walls around him and on another tier of shelves on a catwalk-like mezzanine above him held many of the finest detective novels ever written. It would be an hour or more before the library opened. In the meantime, he needed to call up the collection of an obscure Dallas mystery writer, Sam Hawkins, who’d written a series of police procedurals in the 1940s featuring a Texas Ranger. A graduate student working on her dissertation e-mailed the library a week earlier requesting the files. He had no idea how she’d found Hawkins or discovered his papers at the library.

The writer died in combat in Korea, leaving no heirs to claim his effects. His papers ended up in Ambler’s crime fiction collection because he’d entrusted them along with his books and other worldly possessions to his agent when he went off to war. The agent later donated them to the library and the collection gathered dust in the archive stacks until Ambler found it and added it to the crime fiction collection.

He was filling out the call slips for the boxes when the door banged open and Adele burst into the room. “Have you heard?”

He looked at her blankly.

“The murdered man is Kay Donnelly’s ex-husband.”

“Who?”

“She’s a reader working on the Nelson Yates collection.”

He recalled an earnest young woman, probably in her thirties, whom you wouldn’t pay much attention to until some liveliness in her eyes suggested her understated manner might be a cover for a more adventurous spirit. “I wouldn’t have thought her the type to have an ex-husband.”

Adele wrinkled her nose. “I’m surprised you paid so much attention to her. What type of woman does have an ex-husband, by the way? Different I suppose than the type like me who’s never had a husband.”

Ambler knew he’d said something wrong. He wasn’t sure what.

“Actually, Kay is the only one of that crew using the Yates collection who’s halfway civil. The head guy’s a pompous ass, and his wife’s a glamour puss who thinks she shits Baby Ruths.”

Ambler lowered the papers he’d been sorting through, to scrutinize Adele as if he weren’t quite sure what he’d heard.

“Sorry.” She tossed her head like a pony and headed for the door. “An old Brooklyn expression.”

As the morning wore on, everyone who worked in the library, it seemed, stopped by his desk, assuming—for no sensible reason—that he knew more than they did about the murder. He told them he had no idea what happened but that in most murders the victim knows the killer, so they shouldn’t suspect a killer with a vendetta against the library was on the loose and would pick them off one by one. He doubted he convinced anyone. For most of the day, the snaps and clicks of office door locks echoed along the marble hallways.

The afternoon sunny and mild after the chilly drizzle of the day before, he took his lunch to the terrace behind the library overlooking Bryant Park, where he often sat before work or after lunch in nice weather. A panhandler stumbling past reminded him of the morning he first came to work at the library. On that morning in the mid eighties, you couldn’t take three steps into Bryant Park before being accosted by a herd of winos looking for handouts or a parade of skinny, nervous kids whispering, “smoke.” A murder wouldn’t have been out of place in those days.

A freshly sodded lawn, wrought iron tables and café chairs, sculpted ivy beds, a small, cheerful merry-go-round, and fashionable Manhattanites sipping lattes from the kiosk near Sixth Avenue replaced the scraggly bushes, plastic garbage bags, beer cans, pint wine bottles, used rubbers, and sleeping winos one would have found in the park in those days. Little did he know when it began that the restoration of the park in the early nineties was a harbinger of the sanitizing and homogenizing that would turn Times Square—and soon the rest of Manhattan—into the Mall of America.

Looking up from his ham and brie sandwich—whatever happened to Swiss—he saw a truculent looking man in a well-worn trench coat, open like a sail, striding in his direction and recognized Mike Cosgrove of the NYPD homicide squad.

“Got a minute?” Cosgrove said. The detective’s twenty-plus years of dead bodies and senseless killings were carved into his face, his dark eyes blazed out of deep sockets like polished black stones, his hair, now steel gray, was still in the marine crew cut he’d worn in Vietnam. He’d given up smoking some years back, substituting toothpicks, one of which danced across his lips.

“Good to see you, too, Mike.” Ambler smiled. Despite their differences in almost all ways possible, he liked Mike Cosgrove. Besides being the only NYPD homicide detective who didn’t go ballistic when he tried out his ideas on crime detection on cases he worked on, Mike was observant, and thoughtful—and not always so sure he was right. He pondered things. He had imagination.

They’d met a few years before when Ambler began an investigation on a whim after reading about the death of a man in Kips Bay. He was intrigued by a photo of the widow in the
Daily News
because of something peculiar in the expression of the man standing behind her. Her husband, the man who was killed, a financier, was run over by a cab on Park Avenue South on a rainy night.

The incident made the tabloids because of the size of the insurance policy he carried—five million dollars—and the fact that the policy contained a double indemnity clause. The coincidence was so glaring he began to look into the accident. He discovered the victim died of a broken neck—not unheard of in a pedestrian fatality but not that usual either. When he phoned the NYPD detective in charge of the case, he met Mike Cosgrove. They compared notes. Later, Cosgrove found the widow and the lawyer vacationing in Cancún. The rest was history.

Cosgrove’s expression didn’t change. He nodded in the direction of the library. “In there, when I ask a question, everyone says talk to you. They think you’re in charge of the investigation.”

Ambler laughed.

Cosgrove gestured with his head, this time toward the park.

“Everyone’s nervous,” Ambler said as they walked down the steps and onto the gravel walk that bordered the central lawn.

“They should be.” Cosgrove’s hard-eyed stare took in the tourists strolling through the park and the office workers hurrying along the sidewalk on 40th Street alongside the park. A blaring horn from a delivery truck stuck in traffic interrupted the steady hum of the city. “So, what happened?”

Ambler shook his head. “All I know is rumors.”

“We’ll get to the rumors. What do you know about the victim?”

“Almost nothing. I’m told he was the ex-husband of a reader in the library.”

“A reader?”

“That’s what we call our patrons. Kay Donnelly. She’s doing research.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“Is she a suspect?”

Cosgrove raised his eyebrows. “Is she your suspect? An ex-husband fits for a victim who brought it on himself.”

Ambler shook his head. “That’s not exactly my theory.”

“What’s she like?”

“From the little I’ve seen of her, she’s intense, driven, aloof, like a lot of women who’ve worked their way up in the halls of academe. She’s an assistant—or as they say in those circles a junior colleague—of Maximilian Wagner, who’s writing a biography of Nelson Yates, a writer whose papers the library recently acquired.”

“The victim, James Donnelly, was a writer.”

Ambler shook his head. “I don’t recognize the name.”

“What about Maximilian Wagner, the guy you mentioned?”

Ambler stopped walking. He had a lot to say about Max Wagner, not anything to do with the murder though. “He calls himself a literary biographer. Actually, he’s a scandal-mongering sensationalist posing as a scholar.”

“Am I picking up distaste?”

Ambler smiled. “There you go with those powers of detection.”

“This Nelson Yates is one of yours, a mystery writer?”

Ambler nodded. “Maybe the best of his generation.”

“You know him?”

He’d like to say he did. A few years ago, he’d interviewed Yates at a library forum. They’d had dinner and drinks afterward, and talked well into the evening. After that, he’d emailed the writer a couple of times when one of his books came out, and Yates responded with thanks and a suggestion they get together again one day for a drink. You wouldn’t call them friends. Yet Harry said that during the negotiations for his papers Yates asked if Ambler was still in charge of the crime fiction collection.

“We’ve met,” he told Cosgrove. “Had dinner and a couple of drinks together. Having a drink with a hero … like you slugging down shots and beers with Dirty Harry.”

Cosgrove chuckled.

Another reason he liked Cosgrove, not what you’d expect; he got the irony of things.

“How about Larkin, the ex-priest, the director of whatever it is—”

“Special Collections.”

“Collections. Who’d want to kill him?”

Ambler stopped. Harry? Kill Harry? “No one. He’s a saint.”

Cosgrove grunted. “Saints get killed, too. That’s how some of ’em got their positions. Whoever killed Donnelly took a couple of shots at the Jesuit.”

Ambler considered this. Harry didn’t mention it. “Maybe because he was a witness.”

“Maybe. Was there some trouble with the deal for that Yates collection? Do people fight over that kind of stuff?”

Cosgrove was good, no denying it. If it was something connected to his case, he caught it. If he didn’t hear it or see it, he smelled it in the air. There was competition for the Yates papers. The acquisition was unusual—an anonymous donor provided the funding, everything done quietly, not exactly secretly, but without fanfare. Since Yates would be part of the crime fiction collection, Ambler should have been involved in the acquisition. But he wasn’t. At one point, there was a problem—meetings behind closed doors, Harry hurrying out of the library unexpectedly two or three times. No one told Ambler anything. Harry made clear he shouldn’t ask. Then, it was over. The library had the collection. He told Cosgrove what he knew.