Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  “Such a lovely girl, too.…”

  They talked like that with Adele imagining herself in an airplane seat talking with a stranger. After a few minutes, she felt comfortable with it, as if this were actually happening, the person next to her was a woman she’d never seen before who happened to sit down next to her. As time passed, she worried she might end up spending all this time talking like this and not find out anything she could report back.

  “What should I tell Raymond?” she whispered.

  “Is that your young man?” McNulty stayed in character.

  “He’s not so young.” Adele didn’t know if she was in character or not.

  “Well, dear, ask him what his intentions are. How serious is he? Marriage or not?” When her matronly partner turned to her, she saw the old McNulty twinkle in his eyes. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  Adele blushed and opened her mouth to complain.

  McNulty shook his head. “I’m going to stand up in a minute. When I do, you stand up, too. We’re no longer strangers. Everyone who first saw me sit down next to you is gone by now. I’m your sainted aunt about to leave. You were waiting with me. You’ll hug me good-bye. If you could get some tears in your eyes as I walk away, that would be good—but probably too much to expect from an amateur. You have time for one or two quick questions.”

  “Is there a way Raymond can get in touch with you?”

  “I’ll get in touch with him. In a dire emergency, Pop. I know it’s a lot to ask of Ray, looking into this. It’s my problem. He doesn’t have—”

  Adele was disappointed McNulty thought only Raymond was helping him but kept this to herself. “We’re going to find out what happened. We know you couldn’t have…” her voice trailed off. “Do you know anything that could help us—him—find Sandra Dean’s killer? You know Shannon is Sandra Dean, right?”

  McNulty nodded. “I know she’s Sandra Dean. I don’t know who killed her. I’d like to say I do. But I might be wrong and can’t risk that now.” He met her gaze. “The first time, Sandi knew who the guy was who was killed. She also knew the killer.” He bent for the suitcases; when he looked up at Adele the pain in his eyes, those deep pools of sadness, brought tears to her eyes. “She said it wasn’t what I thought it was, wasn’t what it looked like, with the guy who was killed.”

  “Why did she talk in riddles? Why didn’t she tell you what she was doing, what was going on? You went away with her; you took care of her. Why wouldn’t she tell you? A man was murdered, for God’s sake.”

  “She was scrambling. She had to figure out how to go home to her daughter and her husband. If I knew, I might screw it up. She couldn’t risk that. Sandi was complicated. She had more going on than she could handle and foolishly thought she had to handle it herself. I think she did love me. That was complicated, too. She loved her daughter and her daughter was with her husband.”

  “You called her Sandi. Did you know her real name all along? Are you telling me everything?”

  McNulty’s expression was otherworldly. “The last thing I said to her, the last thing, ‘It would be better if you told me everything.’ She almost did.”

  Chapter 14

  Ambler listened with interest late that afternoon as Adele told him about her visit with McNulty. “He thought your phone would be tapped and you’d be followed, that’s why he called me.”

  “You have quite a talent for espionage.”

  “It wasn’t hard. McNulty arranged everything. He even had his laundry washed, folded, and delivered. Who does that? And he had all that money hidden in his apartment in cash.”

  When Adele went back to her desk for what was left of the day, Ambler thought over what she’d told him and kept coming back to the same thought. Sandra knew the man murdered in her hotel room and she knew the murderer. She was up to her neck in something and wouldn’t tell McNulty what it was. And she planned to return to her husband. It all meant something. But what? He should tell Mike what Adele told him but if he did, Mike would know she’d been in touch with McNulty, so he couldn’t.

  Ambler had been trying to reach Dillard Wainwright for a couple of days now with no luck, and he hadn’t reached Jayne Galloway either after her strange call the day Simon Dean came to the library, the day after her daughter was murdered. He’d already taken tomorrow off for Sandra Dean’s funeral and thought he might drive out to Long Island afterward to talk to Jayne Galloway.

  Near the end of the day, after another failed attempt to reach Wainwright, he called the English department office at Pine Grove College. The administrative person who answered the phone gasped when he told her he was trying to reach Dillard Wainwright. After a stunned silence, she asked him to hold on. In a few minutes, a cultivated woman’s voice with a faint British accent asked to whom she was speaking. He told her.

  “Amelia Hamilton here. I’m the chair of the English department.” She paused for longer than seemed ordinary. “Might I ask why you are inquiring about Professor Wainwright?”

  “That’s not so easy to answer,” Ambler said. “I’d rather tell him.”

  “This is awkward.” Professor Hamilton’s voice wavered. “I’m not sure what to say. That is … I’m not sure what I can say.”

  “If you don’t want to tell me how to contact him, I’ll give you my number. You can ask him—”

  “That’s not it, not it at all. I can’t put you in contact with him.… I can’t give him your number. Or I could but I can’t.… Oh dear … I’m afraid we don’t know where he is.”

  “I see,” said Ambler. “He’s no longer with the college—”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that either.… I think I must put you in touch with the police. You see, he’s gone missing.”

  Ambler called the number she gave him and spoke with a captain, the head of the detective bureau, who told him he’d passed the case along to the state police missing persons bureau. Ambler asked if he could tell him anything about the disappearance.

  “Not really,” the captain said. “We talked to his neighbors and a bunch of professors at the college. No one knew anything about him. Some of the professors didn’t know he was gone.”

  Wainwright was reported missing by some students when he didn’t show up for his classes for a week straight, one of the classes, oddly enough, a seminar on Edgar Allan Poe and dark romanticism. After another week went by, Professor Hamilton went to Wainwright’s small house within walking distance of the college and found mail and newspapers piled up on the porch around his front door. She talked things over with the dean and the college vice president, and was told to contact the police.

  Ambler doubted he’d find out much more from the state police, and he was right. He was referred to the public information office, which gave him the information he might have read in a newspaper if there’d been anything in the newspapers about Wainwright’s disappearance.

  “He might as well have disappeared into thin air for all I found out,” Ambler told Adele after work when they had dinner at Szechuan Gourmet near the library. Her visit with McNulty, despite not providing any helpful information, had cheered her up.

  “This Wainwright person upped and disappeared?” Adele deftly pushed rice from a small bowl into her mouth with her chopsticks.

  “People disappear. But not from a tenured teaching position.”

  They ate in silence until she asked, “Why do we care about him? I don’t get what he has to do with Sandra’s murder.”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe he killed her.”

  Adele stopped eating and stared at him. “Why would he?”

  “No reason I know of. Sandra Dean was reading the letters he wrote to her mother when she was in the library. I wanted to ask him if he knew why. Now, I want to know why he’s disappeared.

  “There’s an outside chance he’d be at Sandra Dean’s wake. I’m also hoping to see Jayne Galloway there. If I don’t, I’m going to her home in Long Island. I expect she’ll tell me more this time than last time.
Perhaps she knows why her daughter was so interested in those letters, after all.”

  “Are you sure you want to go to that viewing? I’d think you wouldn’t want to run across Simon Dean again. He thinks you’re McNulty’s accomplice.”

  “He was upset.”

  Adele waved her chopsticks like a sword. “He was enraged.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I should go with you.”

  “What would that do?”

  “I’d protect you.”

  “I’m also going to drive out to Long Island and talk with Jayne Galloway if she’s not at the wake.”

  “I should go with you there, too.”

  “To protect me from her?”

  “She might talk more easily to me. Women are like that about some things.”

  The next morning, after arranging for Denise to pick Johnny up after school and take him to his grandmother’s, Ambler rented a car and picked Adele up at her apartment.

  The funeral home in Greenwich was on the town’s main street, situated among a row of expensive looking boutique-type stores, a kind of old-fashioned downtown of one and two story storefront buildings on a sloping street with diagonal parking. The facade of the funeral home had a churchlike appearance, gray stone with cathedral windows and heavy blond wooden doors.

  The sidewalk in front and the funeral home itself were crowded; a line of mourners snaked from the doorway into a hallway and then into an ornate room with rows of chairs, all of them occupied. The line moved slowly between the wall and the rows of chairs, past the casket and an array of floral wreaths, up to Simon Dean who stood not far from the casket. His daughter, Carolyn, stood next to him and next to her, a woman in a black dress who bore a slight resemblance to both Simon and Carolyn.

  Ambler didn’t know what to expect from Simon Dean, so he steeled himself after he’d knelt down in front of the coffin. A pair of rosary beads was wrapped around Sandra’s hands. He’d knelt because Adele did, stayed kneeling as long as she did, and stood when she stood. She held his hand as they approached Simon Dean, who met Ambler’s gaze and held out his hand, his face drawn and his expression blank. Ambler grasped his hand and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Dean nodded. “Thank you for coming.” Ambler wasn’t sure the man even recognized him.

  Adele shook Simon’s hand also. They moved on, shaking hands with Carolyn who smiled slightly at Ambler and the woman next to Carolyn who whispered she was Simon’s sister. Adele whispered that she and Ambler were friends of Dr. Dean’s from the city. She’d started to say Shannon but caught herself. There were no empty seats in the viewing room and not much space to stand near the walls or in the vestibule, so Ambler and Adele went outside.

  “What do we do now?” Ambler asked, relying on Adele because she’d been raised a Catholic and knew the religious trappings of a Catholic wake.

  “If we want to be proper, we wait. A priest will come by and say some prayers. After that, we pay our respects once more, and then we can leave.”

  Ambler told Adele he’d meet her in a half hour. He asked directions at the drugstore across the street and found his way to the public library. It was a large modern, open, and airy building with a high glass ceiling, a kind of atrium. He sat down at a computer and looked up Dillard Wainwright, discovering two of his books in the library’s collection, one of which he found in the open stacks. He sat down in a comfortable stuffed armchair near a window and began to read.

  The Wainwright book was a collection of short stories from more than a decade earlier, the kind of stories with lyrical descriptions in which not much happens. The story he read was about a man in middle age, a college professor, who hasn’t been afforded the recognition he deserved, and his conflicts with two women he’s romantically involved with. The point of the story, Ambler gathered, was that the man’s life was tragic, despite nothing especially bad happening to him. More useful to Ambler was a photo of Wainwright on the inside flap of the book jacket.

  When he returned to the funeral home, Adele was chatting with Simon’s sister and Carolyn on the sidewalk in front. He stood next to Adele and listened to the sister, whose name was Andrea, talk about how well-loved and admired the woman she called Sandi was. Carolyn huddled against her aunt. She looked up at Ambler a couple of times, her eyes open very wide. She didn’t smile. He did and hoped she remembered him. He thought he should say something to her, yet he couldn’t come up with any words that could say how sad he felt for her.

  When the priest arrived, Ambler took up a position in the vestibule where he could scan the room and get a good look at everyone who’d come to pay their respects. After that, he and Adele stood near the door because of the crowd and listened to the priest drone on.

  “I think we should leave. We don’t need to say good-bye.” Ambler said.

  Adele agreed.

  As they walked to the car, Adele said, “Did you hear Andrea call Sandra Sandi? McNulty called her Sandi.”

  “It’s a diminutive of Sandra, right?”

  “Yes, that someone close to her would use.” Adele was lost in thought for a moment. “Or who’d known Sandra a long time.”

  “So you think Simon’s sister was a close friend of Sandra’s?”

  “Yes and I could tell she really loves Carolyn. They had a connection almost like a mother and child.”

  “If she was a good friend of Sandra’s, it would be good to talk to her,” Ambler said when they were back in the car. “Maybe you could do that.”

  Adele eyed him dangerously. “Women’s work, eh?”

  Again, Ambler had done something wrong, and once again didn’t quite understand what it was. After a long silence during which he thought of and dismissed a half-dozen answers to Adele’s question about women’s work, she broke the silence.

  “What were you looking for when you were standing in the doorway surveying the funeral home?”

  He told her he’d found a photo of Dillard Wainwright. “It was from a long time ago but still.”

  “You thought he might be at the funeral? That was a wild-goose chase. Jayne Galloway wasn’t there either.”

  Ambler shrugged. “I’m not sorry I went. Maybe Carolyn will remember the respect shown to her mother.”

  “The poor kid.” Adele sniffled. “It makes me think of Johnny when his mother…”

  Ambler cleared his throat. “I thought about Johnny, too.” Johnny lost his mother some time back. However much Ambler and Adele loved the boy, something would always be missing, a hole in his heart that would never be filled, as it would never be filled for Carolyn. At least, Carolyn had her father. Johnny with his father in prison was in a way an orphan, his father in prison as hard to understand for a child as the death of his mother.

  He and Adele were quiet for most of the drive. His thoughts were somber. Adele appeared melancholy also. She wore a black dress that looked pretty on her, prettier as the drive went on. Ambler wondered for a moment if they might stay overnight on Long Island. Despite the gloom around them, being together in the car away from the city, away from their regular lives, felt pleasant and intimate.

  He’d thought in the past about inviting Adele to go away for a weekend. They’d been on the verge of romance in the past, very close, but something got in the way. They’d kissed passionately one night but then didn’t kiss again, so he no longer knew what there was between them. And now? Was she coming with him to see Jayne Galloway because she wanted to be alone with him? Was she thinking, too, they might find a romantic inn out on the island and spend the night? Should he ask if they should look for a hotel? He wondered what she’d wear, how she’d look.

  “Raymond, are you there?” Adele’s voice held a kind of tenderness. “I swear you drift away like a daydreaming child.”

  Her voice shook him out of his reverie. He considered how he might say something suggestive, about how she looked, how he felt about her, about spending the night together. But he couldn’t think of the right words, so he kept quiet.


  The traffic and super aggressive drivers on the Long Island Expressway required careful attention since he wasn’t an experienced driver. Whatever thoughts he had about a romantic journey disappeared, as Adele had become tense and irritated for some reason. Her moods were beyond him.

  Once they left the expressway, they hit upon blacktopped state roads that wound through more rustic areas. The North Shore had a kind of verdant, idyllic feel to it, so that as they got closer to Jayne Galloway’s neighborhood, Ambler felt a kind of peace and gentle pleasure. He turned to face Adele who stared out the windshield in front of her. “I’m glad you came along.”

  His speaking out of the silence startled her. “Oh? I was thinking I probably shouldn’t have come. I’m afraid it’s going to be unpleasant.” She faced him also. “I was thinking we’re doing this wrong. If McNulty didn’t kill Shannon or the man in her hotel room—and unlike you, I’m sure he didn’t kill anybody, that he wouldn’t in a million years do that—if he didn’t do it, let the police arrest him. They can’t prove he did something he didn’t do. That wacky lawyer friend of his, what’s his name, should be able to get him off. The guy makes a living getting guilty people off.”

  “David Levinson. Even good lawyers need to know what happened. They need facts to make a case.”

  “Bricks.” Adele said. “They need bricks to make a case.”

  “Clay. Clay to make bricks.”

  Ambler watched Adele who was gazing out the car window. Stately groves of trees and flowing fields of autumn grass drifted past the car. “It’s so peaceful here,” she said dreamily. “Imagine what it would be like living in a big house with all that land around you.” She waved at a passing field and then bounced around to face him. “Did you ever think about living in a place like this? You and Johnny…” Her voice trailed away.

  “And you?” The words popped out of his mouth.

  “I wasn’t thinking about me.” She turned to look out the window again.

  Ambler spent the rest of the ride wondering what she’d meant … and what he’d meant. Did she misunderstand him? Did she think he’d offered an invitation and turned it down? And did he mean an invitation or was it simply a question? How could he know what she meant if he didn’t know what he meant?