Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (22 page)

She looked astonished. Those inquiring green eyes got bigger and bigger, but she looked pleased.

They found a self-proclaimed Irish pub around the corner on Ninth Avenue. It bright red facade looked like the front of a firehouse, an Irish flag on one side, an American flag on the other side. In back was a section of an alley that passed for an outdoor patio, a beer garden with wrought iron tables, protected from the outside world by a stockade fence. Cosgrove remembered when if you wanted to be out back of a joint on Ninth Avenue you needed a ten-foot fence with razor wire on top.

“You have interesting methods of investigation, Detective Cosgrove.” Her tone was teasing, her eyes smiling. “I’ve never seen a detective take a suspect to dinner on
Law & Order
.”

“I don’t watch cop shows. At the moment, you’re no more or less a suspect than anyone else.” He drank from his pint and set it down. “You were about to answer my question about your ex-husband and a high school girl.”

“So I was.” She paused. “Everything is so different now. I can’t imagine the person I was then.” Her expression was sad, pained. “There was a high school—a precocious high school girl. We all knew her. Everyone who knew Nelson knew her. She was his daughter.”

*   *   *

Later, Cosgrove would think about the world Kay Donnelly described. It was like the stories he’d read as a kid in his mother’s Somerset Maugham book, where the colonists lived in their own world insulated from the life around them that the colonized people lived. Her description of Emily at fourteen, pretty, precocious, encouraged by her parents to socialize with the adults—and sleeping with at least two of them—got him to thinking about teenage girls like his daughter. The world came at them—young pretty girls—too fast. They woke up one morning and discovered they had something men desperately wanted.

Kay came clean about her and Nelson Yates. She’d slept with him, despite what she’d said earlier, during that time at the college when she was young. Most of the girls who were part of their literary circle slept with him.

“Nelson was an evangelist for free love. When he was younger, he’d been a follower of Wilhelm Reich—orgone energy and all that—and he still believed in it. Nothing crass or vulgar, Nelson was charismatic.” She paused, searching for words. “It sounds ridiculous now. The aura he created was amazingly seductive.” She looked away modestly. “That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

When she looked at him again, she seemed sad, contrite. “I don’t think he wanted his daughter when she was that young to become part of his free-love movement, but it was inevitable she would. She was gorgeous and impressionable and had no restraints. Men salivated over her, including my husband.”

*   *   *

Ambler found Adele at the reference desk when he returned to the library. He told her he and Harry had spoken to Emily Yates.

She gave instructions to a middle-aged man with a gray beard who was interested in Antarctica and turned her smile on Ambler. “See. You didn’t believe me.”

“I did believe you, or I wouldn’t have followed Harry. What’s hard to believe is she’s been in the city within walking distance of the library where her father was murdered and kept her identity secret.”

“She’d kept who she was secret for years,” Adele said. “Why would his dying change anything? I hope you didn’t bring that up when you talked to her. It was bad enough following Harry and sneaking up on her.”

Ambler shifted his gaze, looking anywhere except at Adele. “Well, I did actually.” He finally met her gaze. “I probably shouldn’t have. It’s likely if we knew why she ran away from home—”

Adele rolled her eyes. “You need to take a break from Ross Macdonald. Why Emily? What about his son, the one Nelson thought he saw in the park that day? Why don’t you bother him?”

“He was traveling with the ballet in Europe when his father was murdered. He flew back for the memorial service, and returned to Paris right after it.”

Adele prepared to tackle another reader who was charging toward her from one of the computers across from the reference desk. “I hope you haven’t ruined things with Emily.”

*   *   *

When Adele wasn’t digging through the Yates collection, she was at the Social Register office on Park Avenue South searching through the archives. Who knew there were so many yacht clubs, polo clubs, fencing associations in Manhattan? Each name in the register had a string of abbreviations following it. When she found herself getting bored, she’d guess what an abbreviation might stand for and then look it up, wasting time, like when she was in library school.

She found out that Raymond’s new friend Lisa Young’s husband had relatives who fought in the Revolutionary War—on the side of the British. Lisa Young was born into the Hathaway family, which traced its roots in America back to the 1600s and made the family fortune raising tobacco in Virginia with the help of slaves.

Once she got the last name, things began to move. Lisa Hathaway was introduced to society at the International Debutante Ball in 1976. She was prominent in the New York Junior League. Her photo turned up in the
Times
in the society pages and in an article about Virginia horse country in
Town & Country.
Then, nothing! Nothing after 1976 until a marriage notice to Mr. David Young appeared in the
Times
in 1992.

So what next? She didn’t have any luck finding the names of the attendees at the 1976 debutante ball. There were archives somewhere; no one she talked to knew where or how one got access to them or if they’d include a list of debutante ball attendees. She thought she might do better with the Junior League. Fortunately, the League didn’t take the term “Junior” literally. After a few phone calls, she tracked down a woman who’d known Lisa Hathaway. The woman turned out to be chatty, was fond of her memories, and liked gossip. They chatted about this and that, the woman assuming Adele a kindred spirit, until the chatty woman dropped the bombshell.

“She ran off with a writer, dear, a man old enough to be her father. The scandal of the year—I can tell you.”

Adele thanked the woman. “I knew it,” she said. She ran to find Raymond.

*   *   *

Mike Cosgrove knew Ray Ambler was holding back something. It riled him but he understood that he would. All of these librarians and researchers had skeletons rattling around in their closets. He’d gotten better cooperation from car thieves and whiskey hijackers than this crew of seekers of truth. Once again, he was stalled in traffic, getting onto the Queensboro Bridge. He should have known better. Left the car at the precinct and taken the express bus. Then again, right there, idling a couple of cars in front of him was an express bus. He’d be sitting in traffic anyway. Besides, he thought better by himself in the car. Traffic began to move, at a crawl, but steadily.

Tomorrow was pretty well set. He’d talk to the woman whose husband the Yates girl was with when he was killed. Ford had gone upstate to look through whatever the police from that time had come up with. Kay Donnelly hinted that the professor who was writing the book about Yates, the guy Ray didn’t like—Wagner, Max Wagner—had fooled around with the Yates girl, as James Donnelly had. Grown men, intelligent men, college teachers. You’d think there’d be some virtue in that, that these guys would take the high road, and here they were fucking a fourteen-year-old, something they could go to jail for.

The first time for him it was with a fourteen-year-old girl actually. Of course, he wasn’t a grown man; he was seventeen and she was in love with him, and he with her. Probably, at seventeen, he shouldn’t have been with a girl that young—a friend’s sister. In just about all ways though, except years, Anne was older and wiser than he was. More to feel guilty about was that he was still in love with her and she with him—both of them married to someone else.

*   *   *

“Adele, you’re sure?”

“Well, not a hundred percent. I’d say only ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent. Who else could it be, Raymond?” She’d pulled him away from an interview with a new reader.

“Any number of people. John Updike. Bernard Malamud. Ross Macdonald. Nelson Yates isn’t the only writer someone could have run away with.”

“Ross Macdonald?”

He shrugged.

Adele grabbed Ambler’s arm, turning him toward her. “You can’t be serious. This is too much coincidence even for you.” The expression on her face was magical, color in her cheeks, her eyes glittering with excitement. “I’ll tell you something else. I found a letter from Mary Yates to Lisa Dolloway, a thank-you note after a visit. So she knew her.” Adele became pensive, thinking something through before she spoke. “Or Harry. He would have known all along.”

“That’s just it. Why would he say anything now?” Ambler looked back into the reading room. “I’ve got to finish here.”

“Should I wait for you?”

“You can, or you can go ahead yourself. You’ve gotten this far without me.”

Adele looked confused for a second. “You mean … Oh my God! I’ll come back at five-thirty.”

*   *   *

Laura Lee hung up the phone and sat thinking. The goddamn detective wanted to talk to her again, and Max afterward. Talk to each of them alone. That’s what the police did to get one suspect to turn on the other one by telling lies to the first one. Anyone who watched television knew that.

It was probably nothing. Max’s freaking out was the problem. In his panicked state, he’d surely give the cops reason to think he was guilty of something. Ever since he decided Emily killed Jim Donnelly and was out to get him, he was going nuts. Still, he wasn’t nuts enough to tell the detective what he was thinking. He knew what would happen if they arrested her and she told them what she knew.

If the police talking to Max wasn’t problem enough, the pain-in-the-ass librarian who thought he was Sherlock Holmes was nosing around like he actually knew something. Harry was afraid of what the librarian might find out and scared Max into being afraid of him, too.

Max was supposed to be so smart—Columbia and all. And here he was scared of this Casper Milquetoast librarian. Though, when she thought about it, something about the librarian—the way he was quietly sure of himself; easygoing; no need to impress anyone—was appealing … quite appealing. She wondered if she could handle him. She’d come across few men she couldn’t handle. He might be different. The odds were he wasn’t.

As she expected, Max fell apart when she told him he had an appointment with the police. He reached for the Beefeater bottle. “It’s no big deal, Max.”

“No big deal? He wants to meet us separately?”

She laughed. “It’s okay, honey. A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”

He looked at her hollow-eyed and slopped some gin into the glass. “Against me? Against me for what?”

“Jesus, calm down. It was a joke.” After all this time, he didn’t trust her. He was at least smart enough for that.

“This is on top of everything else. The world’s going crazy.… I swear to God that was Lisa Dolloway I saw with Ray Ambler.”

“It couldn’t have been.”

*   *   *

Mary Yates greeted Ambler and Adele in the doorway of the brownstone where they’d dropped off Nelson Yates what seemed such a long time ago. She held the door partially closed. She didn’t recognize them.

“We knew Nelson from the 42nd Street Library—” Adele began.

Ambler watched the fury rise in the woman’s face, color in her cheeks, eyes rounding into a glare. Adele wasn’t watching her closely enough and didn’t see it coming.

“My God, you’re the ones!” she screamed. “You’d come here now after what you’ve done?! After you all but murdered him?!” Her voice increased in pitch and volume with every word.

Adele froze.

For Ambler, this was the third time he’d been in the woman’s presence, and the third time she’d been raging against the world, always aggrieved.

“We’re sorry Mrs. Yates—”

“He was an alcoholic and you let him drink.”

Ambler watched the fury rise in Adele’s face—the same fire in the cheeks, blazing eyes. “He wasn’t a child. We didn’t lead him to anything.” She bit off the words.

Mary Yates turned from Adele’s fury to glare at Ambler. After a moment, she said. “You couldn’t understand what it was like to live with that man.” The rage was gone. “You’re wrong,” she said, turning back to Adele. “He was a child—a vengeful, violent child, who couldn’t be trusted by himself.” Her voice trailed off into almost a whisper. “I guess you couldn’t have known that.” She didn’t invite them in, but seemed less likely to slam the door in their faces. Ambler was content to stay where they were. “What do you want?”

“Frankly, we want to be clear about your wishes for your husband’s collection,” Adele said. Ambler listened as curiously as Mary Yates did. “Maximilian Wagner is using the collection by virtue of a letter signed by your husband before he died.” Adele asked if her wishes for the collection and for Max to write the biography had changed as a result of Nelson’s death. “We thought you might want to suspend work on the papers until the circumstances around Nelson’s death were cleared up.”

She seemed to buy what Adele was saying. It even sounded good to Ambler, who knew better. He wondered how she was going to get around to asking about Lisa Dolloway.

“Did you know Nelson’s daughter Emily?” Adele asked.

“No. I asked once and he told me never to mention her name again, so I didn’t. He didn’t have any contact with her.”

“His ex-wife, Lisa Dolloway?”

Mary Yates shook her head. “Slightly. I met her twice. Nelson had a great deal of past life. After the first few discoveries, I decided I was better off not knowing about it.”

“Do you know anything of what happened to her?”

She shook her head.

“Is it possible she died?” Ambler asked.

She turned to him with a strange expression. “She’s very much alive, or was a few days ago. She attended Nelson’s memorial service.”

“I knew it!” Adele said, louder than she intended. She turned red. “Could you describe her?”

“She’s tall, thin, gray hair. I don’t remember what she was wearing—something expensive. I caught a quick glimpse.”