Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  Green was a gregarious guy and must have felt he should entertain his visitor despite the grizzly nature of the visit. “This is the Post Road; we used to call it the Boston Post Road.” Green kept his eyes on the road. “U.S. 1, from Maine to Key West, Florida. It takes a little longer but I like to take it over the Thruway sometimes. It brings me back to when I was a kid.” He glanced at Cosgrove. “You suspect him? Do you know something I don’t know?”

  Cosgrove adjusted himself in his seat. He watched the road also, somewhat nervously; he wasn’t used to not being the driver. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten to where I suspect everyone until something proves otherwise. Most likely, there’s a simple explanation for why this woman was murdered. Most cases look simple after you figure them out.” He chuckled drily. “We got your murder and we got my murder. You figure yours out; you might figure mine out.”

  “But maybe not?”

  “Maybe not. I’m not going to tell you how to investigate your case.”

  They rode in silence until Green said, “You’d want to know about the marriage, right?”

  Cosgrove liked that Green, as laid back as he was, thought about the case, considering the angles, not satisfied with the most obvious answer … yet. “Yep. I’d want to get to know this woman whom, my guess is, her husband didn’t know very well.”

  On the drive back to the city, Cosgrove considered that he’d have to leave the investigation of Sandra Dean’s murder to the Stamford police. He didn’t have a choice. They’d concentrate on the missing bartender, which was what they should do. Interviewing the hotel guests at the crime scene would keep them busy for now, too. Green had asked Cosgrove for a photo of the bartender. Usually, the hotel made a copy of a guest’s driver’s license. McNulty didn’t have one. He didn’t drive. Cosgrove asked how he got away from the hotel after the murder. They were looking into that, too.

  Green was a competent investigator; you’d expect him to find out what he could about Sandra Dean, her husband, and their relationship. Most women, women doctors to boot, didn’t spend their time in hotel rooms under assumed names and didn’t go on the lam with a ne’er-do-well bartender. They didn’t wind up murdered either. He’d like to do the investigative work he suggested Green do, not so much because he suspected Simon Dean of anything but because he wanted to know more about Sandra Dean and what she was up to. Her murder wasn’t his case, so for now he’d rely on Green.

  For Cosgrove, in most homicide cases he wanted to know why. The killer might not know himself why he killed, but Cosgrove would know before he was finished. Motive was the first thing he looked for. In some cases, more than one person had motive, like when a boss who mistreated his workers gets whacked, you’ve got a whole shop full of suspects. So motive was important but you looked for a special kind of motive. You needed more than being angry or being mistreated to murder someone—at least most people did. It took something to do with the murderer himself or herself, a different kind of anger or hatred; not even of degree, it was more like another species of motive—something different about the murderer, something different about the victim, too, and whatever it was that went on between them. At the moment, he didn’t have a motive for either Sandra Dean’s killing or the first murder, Ted Doyle.

  Who knew what grudges the bartender might hold? When a woman was murdered, it wasn’t always the victim who brought out the murderous impulse. Often, she was on the receiving end of hatred the killer had developed for girls in middle school who mocked him or a mother who neglected him or didn’t protect him from an abusive father. He nurtured this hate until this woman comes along years later and treats this guy with the grudge the wrong way, and wham, something goes off in his head and he stabs her thirty times.

  Cosgrove’s thoughts drifted on the drive back to the city. The parkway he drove along, a dark ribbon cutting through the countryside that would eventually become the Henry Hudson Parkway and then the West Side Highway, brought weird things to mind. It was the time of year when you notice that the days had gotten shorter, there was a chill in the air, and leaves on the trees along the Parkway had had turned yellow or bronze or red, a form of dying itself.

  For whatever reason—the time of year, the dying leaves—he thought about the sick and cruel things people do that you think you can’t possibly understand. But then you do understand those people. Because weird and sick things have a cause, too; you find reasons why someone might do such a terrible thing when you look long enough, and the reasons too often had to do with the sick and weird things done to them, almost always in childhood, when they were young and innocent, too. Those killers so monstrous we don’t even want to try to understand them almost always have their roots in innocence.

  Chapter 9

  At some point Ambler must have gone to sleep because he woke up what seemed like minutes later to get Johnny to school and to go to work. It took him a moment to get his bearings and remember Mike’s phone call and that Sandra Dean was murdered last night and why he was so confused. Most mornings, he took Johnny to his school on the subway. This morning, he called a car service, calling the driver he often used, an Irish guy he’d known for years through McNulty. The guy whose name was Finnegan said he was in the neighborhood and would be by in ten minutes.

  When Ambler went downstairs for the cab, a large manila envelope was leaning against the wall beneath the mailboxes waiting for him. He thought of asking the cab driver about it but decided not to. Finnegan—if he had a first name, Ambler had never heard it—was unusually reticent himself; for the first time in memory, he didn’t talk about his pal McNulty and the glories of the old days.

  Ambler’s day at work was a string of meetings. When he wasn’t at a meeting he was orienting readers to the Manuscript and Archives collection as well as two new readers to the crime fiction collection. When he finally got home, he tucked the envelope McNulty sent him in the back of his desk before he took Lola for her walk. Most of the time, he and Johnny walked the dog together when Johnny got home from school but walking her alone gave him time to think. For this outing, he needed to figure out whether or not to tell Johnny his Uncle McNulty was a suspect in a murder.

  Violence had played too large a role in the kid’s life already. Johnny should be living in a house in the suburbs where he could take the school bus, ride his bike, and play soccer with his friends. Too much happened too fast in the city. This evening, Ambler walked Lola along Third Avenue among a parade of baby buggies and strollers amid homebound office workers. Lola liked the tykes, especially when they held some food she could lick out of their hands. She’d made friends among the mothers and the nannies, too, so she’d stop every couple of blocks for a mother or a nanny to pat her head. This afternoon, even after a couple of extra blocks, Ambler hadn’t come up with a way to tell Johnny his honorary uncle was a murder suspect.

  When Johnny got home, he was excited about an after-school soccer program he wanted to join. Ambler said he’d look into it, which meant a conversation with Johnny’s grandmother. Not something he looked forward to. He hung around Johnny as he did his homework in the bedroom they shared, hoping for inspiration. Johnny knew something was up. After fifteen minutes of Ambler looking around nervously—first over Johnny’s shoulder, then toward the bookcase, and then out the bedroom window at the brick wall of the building next door—Johnny stopped what he was doing to watch him and wait.

  “McNulty is in trouble,” Ambler said. “It’s worse than before.” Johnny listened somberly as Ambler told him pretty much everything he knew.

  “He’s in a lot of trouble.” Johnny spoke in a hushed tone. “Will he get arrested?”

  “They have to find him. If they do, they’ll arrest him.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet. I hope we can find something that shows he didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Are you helping him hide out?”

  Ambler said no.

  “We’ll help him get away if we need to, right?”r />
  “I hope it doesn’t come to that.” What did the parenting manual say on this one?

  “I’ll help him.”

  “We’ll all help. We’ll do everything we can to get him out of this mess.”

  Johnny stopped asking questions. Ambler would have liked to know what the boy was thinking, but didn’t want to ask because he half hoped his grandson would put this in the back of his mind and think about something normal instead.

  “Looks like you’ve got a lot of homework,” Ambler said, attempting to change the subject.

  “Yeah.” Johnny’s eyes were big and wide. “Can we get a message to McNulty?”

  “No.”

  “He knows we’re on his side, right? Maybe you could send him an email or post something on Facebook, so he knows he can count on us.”

  “He knows.”

  When Johnny went to bed, Ambler took out the packet McNulty had sent him that held the pages photocopied from Sandra Dean’s journal. Her handwriting was neat, easily readable, pretty to look at, script or cursive, he forgot which was which. Since the journal wasn’t meant to be read by anyone else, she wrote in a kind of shorthand, despite the careful penmanship.

  It wasn’t as if there were hundreds of entries either. Maybe only a half dozen. On a first reading it wasn’t clear what her intention in keeping a journal was. What was clear was that she was writing about assignations with men, strangers she’d met in hotel cocktail lounges. No lurid details, no hint of titillation, most of the late-night liaisons she described were consequences of drinking too much; she regretted them by the time she made her journal entry.

  She wrote her recollection of what happened soon after it happened. She didn’t always remember everything—there were sometimes blank spots in the evening. In one instance, she was scared when a man wouldn’t leave her hotel room when she wanted him to go. He was too drunk. So she left, walking the streets until she felt it was safe to go back and not find him in her room.

  It appeared the men she picked up had in common that they were married and older than her. Ambler didn’t understand why she did what she did. Neither did she. She was depressed. She wondered if she might be insane. It would be clear to anyone who read her journal entries that she often misjudged the intentions of the men she encountered and put herself in dangerous situations. Yet it was clear also that she either didn’t know or didn’t care about the danger she described.

  She referred to the men by initials, but a note at the end of the entries matched the initials with names. Ambler was sleepy, so it took a moment for him to realize when he came across it that one of the names was Dillard Wainwright. When he did recognize the name, he went back through the pages to see what she’d written about DW and didn’t find anything. Had she removed those pages or decided not to write about him after all? It could be she wrote about him elsewhere in the journal, in a section Ambler didn’t have. She’d written nothing about her husband either. But McNulty had given him only a few pages of the journal.

  * * *

  The following morning, Ambler made another copy of the journal entries. He called Mike and told him what he had and asked him to meet him at a coffee shop near Johnny’s school. When Ambler got there, Mike was in a booth on his second cup of coffee. Ambler handed him the journal pages and told him how he got them. Mike looked over the pages while Ambler got his coffee from the counter.

  “There’s something to look into here,” Mike said when Ambler sat down across from him. “Where’s the rest of the journal?”

  Ambler said he didn’t know.

  “You want me to pass this along to the Criminal Investigation guys in Connecticut? They’ve got a warrant for the bartender.”

  “I was hoping you’d take it on.”

  Mike shifted in his seat and took an interest in his coffee cup for a long moment before engaging Ambler again. “McNulty gives you this and disappears again. There was a lot of confusion in that hotel in Connecticut after the shooting. When the cops got there, one of the guests and the hotel security guard had a guy pinned on the floor—a software developer from Minneapolis.

  “Lots of people milled around the hallways after the shots were fired. Since McNulty was registered in the room, the investigators concluded he’d left while everyone milled around in the hallway. This makes McNulty a suspect—the suspect. A falling out among thieves isn’t an unusual thing.”

  Ambler knew what Mike was getting at. “You think McNulty and the murdered woman were running a scam. She’d take the guy to a hotel room. McNulty would show up when she had him in a compromised position and they’d shake him down. That’s what you think happened in the hotel in New York?”

  “It’s been done.”

  “Not something McNulty would do. And if the victim is who I think she is, she’d have no reason to try that kind of hustle.”

  Cosgrove took a sip of coffee and put the cup down. “You know something you’ve forgotten to tell me?”

  Ambler told him about Simon Dean. “His wife is missing and I’m virtually sure she’s Shannon Darling. He wouldn’t admit it. There are other things that connect her.”

  Mike held his gaze a long time. “It’s nice you’ve gotten around to telling me. I talked to Mr. Dean yesterday about his wife’s murder. How long have you known?”

  Ambler started to say something. Mike stopped him. “I know. You needed to check on a couple of things before you passed the information along.” Mike sat back in his chair. He had a way of spreading out and taking up more room, becoming more of a presence, when he wanted your attention. “You’ve given me a half-dozen suspects to keep busy with.” He paused significantly. “Did McNulty tell you where he was going?”

  “No. You’re making this sound like—”

  Mike held up his hand. “Like the bartender gave you what you need to set up an alternate version of what happened?”

  Ambler felt he’d been tricked. Mike turned what made sense into something that appeared fabricated. Anything Ambler said would make it worse, so he kept quiet.

  “It doesn’t look good for your pal, Ray. If I had a hypothesis, it would be close to what I said. Maybe not the shakedown, but something like it with the same result. I have to think McNulty or the Dean woman killed Doyle in her hotel room for whatever reason; they then had a falling out and he killed her.”

  “McNulty says otherwise.”

  “I imagine he would.” Cosgrove rubbed his eyes, a habitual gesture as if to rub the pain of a headache away. “This victim, she’s a doctor with a family in the suburbs. Those journal notes say she went for a walk on the wild side and paid the price. Usually it’s a man, wife and family in the suburbs, turns up dead in the backroom of a strip club. No reason it can’t be a woman who has her dark side, too.

  “Let’s say the bartender got too attached to her; she did him wrong, stepped out on him, as I gather from what I just read was her wont; he snapped and killed her.” Mike held up his hand. “I know you don’t like it. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s possible. She did her husband wrong, why wouldn’t she stray on McNulty?” He held up his hand again to stop whatever Ambler was about to say. “The question I don’t have an answer for is why did he or she—or they—kill the man in her hotel room.”

  Ambler spoke too loudly, letting go his pent-up eagerness to speak, to get things straight. “You could make the argument you just made for McNulty for all of the men in the journal he gave me. You could make an argument for her husband, since he’s the man most wronged.”

  Cosgrove raised his eyebrows. “Oh, was the husband there with them?” He held out his hands palms up in a pacifying gesture. “I’m not ready to take my argument to the bank. I’ll do the interviews.” He picked up the pages of journal entries. “It won’t be pretty. I doubt any of these guys will want to talk about their night in a hotel room with a woman not their wife who’s now a murder victim. Lots of ‘I’ll have to call my lawyer,’ or ‘Can we talk about this privately, not at my office and not at my
home?’” He met Ambler’s gaze and held it. “While I’m doing that, suppose you find McNulty for me. Ask him if we can have a chat.”

  Chapter 10

  After his talk with Mike, Ambler dragged himself to work with a lot on his mind. Mike would follow up the list of names he gave him because he said he would. He might think McNulty was guilty. He certainly considered him a suspect. But Ambler knew Mike well enough to know he’d keep an open mind. He’d take seriously any ideas Ambler presented to him. The problem was Ambler didn’t have a lot to give him. The list of names. A shot in the dark.

  Ambler usually kept an open mind himself, something harder to do this time because McNulty was involved. He’d believe the bartender innocent, even though he didn’t have anything concrete to prove he was. The good thing so far was nothing had proved him guilty.

  “Well, what’s going on?” Adele had stopped by the crime fiction reading room to find Ambler staring at a Swann auction catalog; he’d been on the same page for ten minutes. They hadn’t spoken since he’d called her two nights before to tell her of the murder. Yesterday had been hectic at work and he hadn’t seen her. She’d called last night. It was late and he didn’t have the energy to call her back.

  She watched him for a moment. “You didn’t call me back last night.”

  He almost always returned Adele’s calls and wasn’t sure why he hadn’t this time. “Too much is happening too fast. And in another way, nothing’s changed at all. I have the photocopy of part of the journal McNulty tried to give me the other day.”

  Adele looked confused. “How?”

  “It was in the lobby of my building the morning after Sandra Dean’s murder.”

  “How could that be?”

  “My guess is a cab driver named Finnegan dropped it off. How that worked, how McNulty got the envelope to him, I have no idea. Finnegan’s an old IRA guy. He wouldn’t tell me he saw McNulty if I tortured him. I gave a copy to Mike.”