Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

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  To Mary and Jerry Brennan

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my editor, Nettie Finn, for shepherding this book from its clumsy beginnings to the shape it’s in now and to everyone else at Minotaur—cover designers, copyeditors, marketers, publicists, sales folks, and everyone else on the publishing team who bring a book to life. As usual, a special thanks to Talia Sherer and the Macmillan Library Marketing crew who’ve been especially supportive of my fictional librarians.

  Thanks also to Roan Chapin, a friend and early editor, who showed me the error of my ways in a number of places and helped Raymond Ambler see that things are not always as they seem to him. My thanks to Alice Martell, my literary agent, for her enduring and unfailing support especially when the way ahead is uncertain. I owe a debt of gratitude to Marcia Markland, the editor of the first two books in the 42nd Street Library Mystery series, for pointing me toward the 42nd Street Library in the first place.

  Of course, thanks to the nation’s librarians—and especially those at the New York Public Library, including Thomas Lannon of the Manuscript and Archives Division who has for years now been helping me understand the 42nd Street Library and the work life of a curator. The importance of libraries and librarians—as founts of knowledge and protectors of liberty—to our nation’s well-being is beyond measure. Thanks also to bookstores, book reviewers, bloggers, and others who keep the world of books vibrant.

  Finally, my thanks to Ragdale, an artists’ community in Lake Forest, Illinois, where I was fortunate to spend a month of uninterrupted time finishing a revision of Murder Off the Page.

  Data! Data! Data!

  I can’t make bricks

  without clay.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Chapter 1

  That woman was back again. Raymond Ambler delivered the file boxes to her as she sat waiting at the library table in the crime fiction reading room of the 42nd Street Library. She stood out for him for a couple of reasons, one of them because she’d broken his glasses a few nights earlier in the Library Tavern under somewhat peculiar circumstances. He took a moment to take off the glasses and look at them. They were reading glasses, prescribed for him for the first time the day before she broke them, the circular lenses in dark red frames, the two broken halves fused together now with black electrician’s tape.

  Ambler had stopped at the Library Tavern—the after-work watering hole for the staff at the 42nd Street Library presided over by everyone’s favorite bartender Brian McNulty—as he often did, although a bit later than usual on this Wednesday evening, and found his friend Adele Morgan sitting at the bar sipping a beer and watching intently a small drama unfold a few barstools away.

  A woman who looked to be of Adele’s age—a late thirtysomething—was surrounded by a half-dozen men, resembling nothing so much as a pack of wolves circling in on its prey. The woman apparently had a good deal to drink, as she spoke too loudly and appeared to be losing ground in an argument with the man sitting beside her. The men standing around them appeared to wait impatiently their turn to harangue her. Ambler settled onto his barstool and took out his new glasses to show Adele.

  At that moment, a voice rang out loud enough to be heard across the bar, “That’s an absurd thing to say.”

  “That poor woman,” Adele said to Ambler. “Look at how they’re treating her.”

  Ambler glanced over to see that the woman in question was besieged, the half-dozen men sniping at her at once. She sat back, a look of confusion bordering on panic replacing the intent expression she’d worn a minute before.

  Adele grasped Ambler’s arm. Her touch surprised him; it had been such a long time. He turned to her questioningly and saw such emotion in her face, as if she herself was besieged by those men, that he reached toward her with his free hand. “She was in the library today,” Adele said. The expression in her eyes said something else. She was afraid for the woman under attack, and she wanted Ambler to help her.

  Ambler stood. As he prepared to walk over to the woman hoping to rescue her, he caught McNulty’s eye to tip off the bartender, who missed nothing that happened in his bar, as to what he intended to do. McNulty made a small gesture with his head—a nod by McNulty worth a thousand words—that told Ambler to not worry; McNulty would handle the situation.

  Ambler sat back down and watched McNulty saunter over to that section of the bar. The bartender leaned toward the woman and said something. As soon as he did, she turned her full attention on him, and the men around her quieted. A moment later, when Ambler saw McNulty pick up the woman’s drink and nod toward him and Adele, he moved over, leaving an empty seat between him and Adele. The woman, a bit tipsy, tottered toward them, squinting slightly, wearing a crooked smile.

  She remembered Adele from the library and was inordinately happy to see her. Speaking to Adele, and glancing disdainfully toward the group of men behind her, she put one hand onto the bar to hoist herself onto the barstool. As she made her little jump onto the stool, Ambler heard an unmistakable crackling and saw his glasses flatten beneath her hand.

  Perched on the barstool after all that, she watched the broken glasses curiously.

  “Where did those come from?” Adele asked no one in particular.

  Ambler picked up the glasses, now split into two sections at the nose bridge. “They’re mine.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand to stop any further questions.

  McNulty, who’d caught the mishap, handed Ambler a roll of electrician’s tape from a drawer behind the bar, so Ambler taped his reading glasses back together. As this took place, the woman who introduced herself as Shannon Darling, talked animatedly with Adele, not ignoring Ambler so much as being so pleased to see Adele that she wasn’t aware he was there.

  This state of things changed slightly when Adele told Shannon who Ambler was, and told Ambler that Shannon would be the latest reader to make use of the crime fiction collection. Adele had done the screening interview that afternoon while Ambler was away from the library.

  A few minutes later, Adele and Shannon headed to the ladies’ room—something women did in pairs quite often. Ambler didn’t recall ever asking another man to accompany him to the men’s room. He was about to ask McNulty, who was now standing in front of him on the other side of the bar, about this phenomenon, when McNulty’s expression as he watched Shannon Darling walk away stopped him. For a moment unguarded, it was almost reverent.

  “I’d like another drink,” Shannon said to McNulty when she and Adele returned.

  “You have one on the bar,” McNulty said. Their eyes met and held for a moment. “You probably don’t want any more after this one.”

  “I can go somewhere else.” Her tone was petulant.

  “You could.” McNulty spoke softly. “You asked me to tell you.”

  “I’m not arguing anymore. Those guys are jerks. One of them propositioned me.”

  “You say things…” He
shook his head.

  She turned from McNulty to look Ambler in the eye. “My husband doesn’t have sex with me. I think it’s been—” She paused, perhaps counting off some period of time—weeks, months, years? Was she asking him for an explanation? In a few minutes again, she’d forgotten about Ambler and Adele and was whispering with McNulty. But she was fading. When she wasn’t speaking, she bowed, her chin drifting toward the bar like a junkie nod.

  McNulty called to one of the servers. When the server came behind the bar, he told Ambler, “Gail here will watch the bar. I’m taking Shannon to her hotel. I won’t be long.” He left, walking beside Shannon, his arm under her elbow. She leaned against him, talking. Ambler imagined that the three or four men from the earlier group who remained at the bar watching the bartender and the tipsy woman leave didn’t expect to see the bartender back for a good while.

  Less than twenty minutes later, McNulty was back, contemptuous of the smirks and knowing glances of the men who’d watched him leave, coming behind the bar to stand in front of Ambler and Adele. “This one may do me in,” he said. “I told her she had to save me from myself … to stay the fuck out of here.”

  * * *

  Ambler had paid particular attention to Shannon Darling for a couple of days now since that evening. She’d told Adele in the Special Collections screening interview that she was writing a book on women mystery writers and would be in the city for a few days. Adele had approved her application but had misgivings about her because a few of the things she said in the interview seemed odd. “It was as if she made up her answers on the spot. When I asked about her academic affiliation, she didn’t know what I meant. I asked if she was a freelance writer. She didn’t know. I said independent scholar, and she jumped at the answer like she wished she’d thought of it.”

  Her appearance was curious also, Adele said. “She doesn’t dress like a researcher. The suit she wore was straight out of Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue. Not what most readers wear to the library.”

  After observing her, Ambler saw that Shannon Darling was indeed amateurish, not aware of the protocols of research, not knowing for instance the procedure for calling up research materials. You’d think this was her first time using a library special collection. Still, she had an appealing way about her. On the young side of middle age, with blonde hair, large brown eyes, little makeup, and a pretty mouth, she was attractive and pleasant to be around. Her direct gaze and an air of expectancy in the way she looked at him when he spoke to her surprised him. He found it difficult to look away from her. That openness lasted only a moment each time, until she registered that he had nothing interesting to tell her so turned back to her work.

  The file boxes he’d delivered on this morning were from the collection of Jayne Galloway, a mystery writer who’d recently donated her papers to the 42nd Street Library’s crime fiction collection. Ambler stood for a moment more or less looking over the woman’s shoulder as she opened the file box. “She’s a much underappreciated writer,” he said.

  The reader glanced up at him with that air of expectation and then quickly back to her work as if she realized he might not be talking to her.

  He’d tried before to engage Ms. Darling and gotten the same result. He thought of his comment as exchanging pleasantries, or would have except for the lack of pleasantries in return. Ambler had liked Jayne Galloway’s mysteries and was pleased to have acquired the collection and now to see a reader interested in her work. Shannon Darling’s brusque manner wasn’t unusual; readers were often so engrossed in their work they weren’t much for small talk.

  Yet she intrigued him, so when she took a break to check her cell phone, he spoke to her again. “As you can see, I’m not busy,” he said, getting up from his desk and walking over to where she sat at the long library table in the center of the room. “If you’d like, you can fill out the call slip for your next series of file boxes. I’ll call them up, so you won’t have to wait when you’re ready to use them.”

  Her expression was startled, as if she didn’t understand what he meant. She held his gaze and didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything either. They looked at each other without speaking for longer than seemed normal, yet she didn’t show any sign she was bothered by the silence or by the intensity of the exchange of glances.

  “That would be nice,” she said simply enough without looking away this time. “I’m not used to how things are done here.”

  He nodded. “I see. Is this your first book?”

  She eyed him curiously, and again there was a long and what might be uncomfortable silence but wasn’t. “Yes, my first book.” Her expression softened, and he saw something gentle in her eyes, an unusual sensitivity. “I’m new at this. I guess you can see that.”

  “I’m glad you’re interested in Jayne Galloway. You’re the first person to use her collection. It’s new to the library.” He sounded to himself like a kid proud of a new toy.

  Shannon shifted her gaze to the file in front of her, dismissive, not bothering to answer his question if she even heard it. Her action was abrupt if not rude, yet nothing suggested she was aware of that. One thing finished, she moved on to the next.

  * * *

  “Poor McNulty,” Ambler said to Adele, a couple of mornings after their adventure in the Library Tavern. “He was smitten with Shannon Darling. She’s such a different person when she’s in the library, efficient, almost too business-like. I wonder if she even remembers him.” They drank coffee while sitting on the terrace overlooking Bryant Park behind the library.

  “He might be better off if she didn’t,” Adele said.

  Ambler understood McNulty’s plight, having himself been smitten, in his case by Adele some time back. Bewitched might be a better description. Yet because Adele was so much younger than he was, he felt too awkward to follow his romantic inclination, despite suspecting at times she might want him to. He watched her now as she daintily nibbled on a croissant and balanced a container of cappuccino on her pretty knee.

  There was enough of a breeze to flutter her hair, which was blonde and light and feathery. She sat erectly with her face tilted slightly forward taking in the morning air as if she were on the prow of a ship instead of a terrace overlooking Bryant Park. The way she embraced life like that was one of the things that had gotten him smitten in the first place. She had her dark moments but mostly she had a brightness about her, an embrace of life that made him happy to be with her or even to watch her from across a room, or across a rickety wrought-iron bistro table as he did now.

  She and Ambler had worked together in Special Collections, where Ambler was the curator of the crime fiction collection, for a couple of years now. In recent years, they’d become close, even closer since he’d taken over raising his grandson Johnny. She’d become a special person in his life and in his grandson’s life, as unclear as he was as to what that specialness entailed.

  “Something about Shannon disturbs me,” Adele said. “It’s the way she is with men when she’s drinking. She has no defenses. Men see that and see her as someone to take advantage of. The other night in the bar, she was arguing one minute, crying the next, talking recklessly about anything that came into her head. She confided in total strangers, saying things about herself that you’d think she’d be embarrassed to say.

  “To one man who wore a wedding ring, who I guess hit on her, she said, ‘You’re married. I’m not going to go to bed with you.’” Adele turned to watch one of their fellow New Yorkers crossing the terrace, coffee container in one hand, large red leather bag over one shoulder, smaller straw bag in her other hand.

  Ambler followed Adele’s gaze. “Why do women carry so much more than men?”

  Adele ignored him. “I’m embarrassed to repeat some of the things she said.”

  “I didn’t know you’d seen her in the bar again.” Ambler continued watching the young woman who crossed in front of them. Dressed in business attire, except for running shoes, she walked quickly, though she did
n’t seem harried or even in a hurry, more like determined, a no-nonsense, get-things-done pace—the attitude you saw in the city nowadays more often than not. New York had always moved faster than a small town in Kansas. This ruthless, go-get-’em, don’t-stand-in-my-way attitude was different; it slipped into the city in the eighties with the hedge funds, corporate real estate developers, and foreign investors and had spread like the flu since then.

  “God, Raymond! You’re off in your own head again.” Adele glared at him. “You’re not listening.” She made a face. “Out of nowhere, Shannon—I’d bet Shannon Darling is a made-up name; it’s like a stage name for a stripper. Out of nowhere, she said to the man next to her, ‘I don’t have sex anymore.’”

  “She said something like that to me.”

  Adele’s eyebrows spiked. “Oh? Did you help her out?”

  Ambler blinked a couple of times. Adele moved on.

  “When the man she was talking to left…” Adele lowered her voice. “At one point, I thought she would go with him. Anyway, when he left, she latched onto McNulty.”

  “As I said, he seems quite taken with her.”

  “She’s pretty and charming and beguiling with that faint southern accent, little-girl, eyelash-batting appeal. What do you expect?”

  He didn’t have an answer.

  Adele observed this, pursed her lips, and nodded. “Men.”

  That evening, for the first time in a long while, Ambler and Adele stopped off at the Library Tavern together. She’d come and gotten him when the library was closing, so while Ambler was cautiously excited, he didn’t know what it meant. He sometimes unwittingly offended Adele. And he had done it again not so long ago. When she was hurt, she went into a shell; she didn’t fight back. When she was in her shell, as much as he cared about her, he couldn’t reach her. A wall of formality went up between them. Thankfully, her coldness toward Ambler didn’t apply to Johnny.