by Con Lehane
The yard of Jayne Galloway’s house looked untended, neglected. You’d think plants killed by the first hard frost might have been cut back or pulled out, that leaves from the massive maple trees near the road would have been raked and hauled away. The yard had a cluttered, abandoned feel.
“It looks like a haunted house,” Adele said as Ambler pulled into the driveway. She was right. The last time he’d visited the sun was shining. A sunny day would have made the house look brighter. He couldn’t remember what the yard had looked like that time. The large windows were still inviting but with the day overcast and gray, the house felt lifeless and brooding.
They went to the porch and rang the bell. Ambler remembered the parrot and waited for the screeching squawk. But none came. “Strange,” he said.
“What’s strange?”
“Nothing.” He pushed the doorbell again. It echoed against the emptiness within.
“I guess you should have called.” Adele moved her feet restlessly, a sign of her irritation.
“I did call, a bunch of times. She never answered. That’s why I drove out here. I think she’s inside. And I’m afraid something’s wrong. The parrot—”
“Parrot?”
“She had a parrot in the basement; not always in the basement. She told me she lets it ride on her shoulder and hang out with her. It makes a horrible racket when someone comes to the door.”
“And?”
“It didn’t.” Ambler walked toward a wooden bench with an ornate back that rested against the wall of the porch in front of a large window and began to slide the bench out of the way.
Adele watched him from where she stood by the door. “What are you doing?”
“Looking through the window. She’s sick and frail. She might need help.”
The dining room and the part of the living room he could see were empty and lifeless, as if he were looking into the front room of a summer cottage closed up for the winter.
Adele tried peering over his shoulder. “If she’s sick or not feeling well, she’d be in her bedroom, which I imagine is upstairs. She might be too sick to get out of bed, even if she did hear the doorbell. We should call someone.”
Ambler backed away from the window. He and Adele walked down the porch steps and stood on the walk. “Would you try to reach the local police? The name of the town is Glen Cove.”
“Someone’s home over there.” Adele nodded toward the house next door. “A woman watched us from a window as we came in the driveway. She might know if Mrs. Galloway is home.”
“Yes. Please.” Ambler headed toward the back of the house, Adele to the house next door.
A few moments later, Adele came back from speaking to the neighbor. She met Ambler on the driveway, as he came around the corner of the house, moving faster than she’d ever seen him move. “Call the police,” he said before he reached her. “She’s lying on the floor in the kitchen. I think she’s dead. I’m going to break in.”
“No.” Adele rushed toward him. “The neighbor gave me the key. She looks in on her sometimes. Mrs. Galloway was home the day before yesterday. The neighbor spoke with her. She hasn’t seen her since then.” Adele handed him the key. “It’s to the back door. I’ll call the police and an ambulance.”
A few minutes later, she went around to the back door to join Ambler.
He stood on a small porch outside the back door. “She’s dead.”
“She wasn’t murdered, was she?”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell how she died. There’s nothing—”
Adele interrupted him. “I’m sorry she’s dead. She was dying.…” Adele clutched at him. “You told me that. She had cancer.”
A few minutes later, a police car came across the bridge behind them and pulled up alongside the edge of the yard. Before the officer had gotten out of the car, an ambulance came over the bridge, lights flashing but no siren. Not far behind the ambulance came another police car. The police appeared to let the paramedics from the ambulance handle the scene. One of the cops took down contact information from Ambler and Adele. The other cop watched the paramedics, more of a spectator than participant.
“Do you think we should say something?” Adele whispered.
“I don’t know. We could tell them they should treat this like a crime scene. But what reason would I give them?” The police didn’t have any reason to think they were dealing with a crime. They had a procedure for an unattended death, which they’d follow, so that should be good enough. You’d think they’d ask why he and Adele discovered the body, why they were at Jayne Galloway’s house. That would probably come later. Someone else’s job to investigate. Ambler approached one of the officers and asked what would happen next.
“We wait for the medical examiner.”
“Will there be an investigation?”
The officer’s eyebrows went up. He scrutinized Ambler and his manner changed in the way a cop sometimes goes from calm to high alert because the person they’re engaged with tips them off that there’s more to what was happening than they thought. This cop walked over to the other one and they conferred quietly, their backs to Ambler and Adele, taking turns looking over their shoulders at them, while Adele and Ambler fidgeted.
The officer who’d spoken with Ambler went and talked for a moment to the EMTs and then came back to Ambler. “We’re going to leave everything as it is until the ME gets here. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait.”
“Do we have to?” Adele asked.
The officer glanced at Ambler and back at Adele. “Let’s not go there.”
They waited, Adele and Ambler leaning against the front fender of the rental car they arrived in, the police in their cars, where they did something with computers on their dashboards.
When the doctor from the medical examiner’s office arrived, she spoke to the police officers and they followed her into the house. Not long afterward, one of the officers came out and told Ambler and Adele they could leave. On the way back to the city, Adele drove and Ambler called Mike Cosgrove and told him the Nassau police should look for forensic evidence in Jayne Galloway’s house, even if the medical examiner ruled her death to be from natural causes.
“So he’s going to do it?” Adele asked when he finished talking to Mike.
“He has a friend—someone he used to work with—who’s now on the Nassau County homicide squad. He said he’d talk to him.”
“Will they look for a parrot buried in the yard?”
“I don’t know. I should have looked around myself instead of standing there doing nothing.”
“If someone murdered the poor woman, who do you think it was—certainly not McNulty?” Adele’s irritation was back.
“They might find fingerprints.…”
“They won’t be McNulty’s.”
Chapter 15
Mike Cosgrove didn’t like gyms. In particular he didn’t like the smell. He didn’t like locker rooms; the one at the precinct was bad enough. At least there, guys were coming and going from work. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have to be. No one needed to be in health club locker rooms; too much exposed flesh and too many muscles; plus the smell. It was as bad as the morgue.
He was at the health club to interview one of the men listed in Sandra Dean’s journal. The facility was on the Upper East Side in one of the new upscale high-rises that were changing the face of Lenox Hill and, for his money, ruining the neighborhood. The health club was on the first floor. Its glass doors opened into a reception area with wall-to-wall carpeting and spare modern furniture. A young blonde woman with very white teeth, a big smile, and a bubbly personality sat behind a desk facing the door. She was enormously glad to see him.
“I’m looking for Victor Morales. He’s expecting me.” Cosgrove returned her smile with some effort.
“I’ll be right back.” She sprang out of her chair and headed for the door behind her. “You sit right here and make yourself comfortable.”
The bubbly young woman was bac
k before he had a chance to sit down and gave him directions to an office down a hallway past the men’s locker room on one side, the women’s on the other side. He suspected the odor came from the men’s side, but he wasn’t sure. It could be both. Victor Morales looked up from where he sat behind his desk. The spare office had the same kind of tile walls as the hallway and, Cosgrove assumed, the locker rooms. The office door was open so he walked in. Morales, whose deeply tanned face was probably handsome, didn’t say anything, but his tight-lipped expression made clear that he wasn’t happy about the visit.
“You’re not under arrest,” Cosgrove began. “You aren’t really under suspicion. Your name came up in a murder investigation, in a notebook kept by the victim. You spent some time drinking with her and went with her to her hotel room.”
“Can I see the notebook?”
“No.”
“How do I know there is a notebook?”
Cosgrove sighed. “Do you remember a woman named Shannon Darling?”
Morales gripped the arms of his chair tightly enough that his knuckles went white. Here was a man with secrets. Cosgrove took an immediate dislike to him. You had to admit he was robust, good color in his face, his arms and shoulders muscular, his neck sloped. Not a show-off but you’d believe he’d appeal to a lot of women. His eyes were small and shifty and didn’t give away much. He might be a dumb jock or might have the intellect of a nuclear physicist.
Cosgrove knew he should make an effort to get the guy to relax; he’d do it but his heart wasn’t in it. “Maybe you’re married…” He held up his hand as Morales began his denial. “I don’t care if you are. You might have known she was married. She was forthcoming about things with men she met. You might not have.” He appraised Morales. “You’re a good-looking guy. I’m sure you meet a lot of women. Nothing we talk about here gets out to anyone else. I’m not the sex police. The woman was murdered. Sometimes, we find out something about the victim’s past, it helps us find the killer. That’s it. I have no reason to think you killed her, no reason to think you ever saw her again after that time. All I’m asking is for you to tell me about her.”
“She gave me a blow job. That was it.”
His answer and especially the way he said it made Cosgrove sad. The guy might have been saying he bummed a cigarette. Cosgrove didn’t know Sandra Dean, yet she didn’t deserve the callous way this guy thought of her. They’d had this intimate time together. The least he could do is appreciate it, appreciate her.
“You didn’t talk? She didn’t tell you anything about herself? You didn’t tell her about yourself?”
“It was a physical attraction. We talked I guess. She talked a lot, about a lot of things. After a while, I lost track of what she was saying.”
“You stopped paying attention?”
“Yeah, I guess. She wanted to talk. I wanted to get laid. I settled for a blow job.”
After the interview, Cosgrove sat for a long while in his car. He was trying to understand Sandra Dean. Why wasn’t a prosperous life in the suburbs, a professional career, a husband, and a daughter enough for her? What did she get out of her sexual escapades?… What she got, he answered himself, was murdered.
He’d seen it before, this courting danger. A lot of guys who become cops court danger—for the adrenaline rush, the type-A guys who want the action. What he was thinking was different—courting danger not for the excitement but for the risk: tempting fate, daring the danger, risking being hurt from some need to suffer, some sort of penance … for what?
He started his car. He was thinking too much. What was that about him? Why not take the simple answer? The guy he just interviewed, Morales, didn’t need to know about the woman he was with, didn’t wonder what she was looking for, what kind of emptiness she was trying to fill. She could have been an inflatable doll so long as he got off. Cosgrove wasn’t so attractive to women. He wondered what he’d be like if he were. He hoped not like Morales.
He’d told Ray he’d call his former partner Frank Zimmer in Nassau County about the woman who died on Long Island. It was a coincidence, a glaring one, that Ray would find the body of the mother of a murder victim a few days after the murder. But coincidences happen, people die on their own, especially if they’re sick and already dying. He’d ask Frank but he didn’t see an investigation going very far.
Frank had taken the leap to the suburbs years ago—higher pay, better working conditions, safer—why the hell was Cosgrove still in the city? When he called Frank, he didn’t know what to expect. Sometimes, a detective gets leeway to follow hunches, use intuition, snoop around, follow a lead no one else thinks important. Other times you have a supervisor on your ass, second-guessing everything you did. Cosgrove was lucky to have a good boss. Turned out Frank was lucky, too.
“Sure. I can take a look,” he said. “I’ll send in the crime scene unit. Someone will ask me why somewhere along the line, but I don’t need permission. The captain believes me when I tell him things might not be what they seem. What am I looking for?”
“A parrot.”
There was a pause. “You’re messing with me, right?”
Cosgrove went over the situation. “Her daughter was murdered. Now, she’s found dead. It could be a coincidence. It most likely is.”
Frank had been around long enough to understand the feeling you get, not being satisfied even though you have a suspect or what looks like an explanation, something about it not feeling right. Frank would catch the drift. What he wouldn’t catch would be that the uneasy feeling belonged to Ray Ambler, a librarian, and not to Cosgrove. This wasn’t something he would try to explain.
Frank said he’d have the place dusted and anything that might be evidence bagged. He wasn’t sure how far he’d get with digging up the yard in the hope of finding a dead parrot.
“You could look in the trees,” Cosgrove told him. “It might be alive.”
Despite the workday being too long already, Cosgrove had scheduled another interview with a man from Sandra Dean’s journal for that evening. Peter Esposito, the man he was about to interview, was cooperative when he reached him on the phone at his office in Denver. He said he’d be in New York later that week. Tonight was the evening he’d be free and they could meet at the bar of the Commodore Hotel where he was staying.
The lounge on the lobby level, an escalator ride above the street, was quiet, only one couple at the bar. Esposito sat by himself at a table against the picture window overlooking 42nd Street. Esposito’s take on Sandra Dean, whom he knew as Shannon Darling, was the full opposite of that of Morales, the last guy Cosgrove spoke with, and in its own way just as mystifying.
“She was remarkable. Fascinating. I was bewitched by her. I think I fell in love with her.” Esposito came across as sincere, a lost soul who’d been touched at some point with profound sadness. Since he was willing to talk, more than willing, Cosgrove let him.
“She’d had a lot to drink and what she drank went to her head. Still she was charming and articulate and smart. Brilliant. She had a direct way of engaging you, and was almost childlike in trusting that you were as guileless as she was. I don’t remember everything we talked about. Her mother had deserted her when she was a child, she told me, and she was trying to understand who she was by learning about her mother and the man her mother deserted her for.”
The server interrupted them and Esposito ordered another drink—scotch on the rocks—and tried to persuade Cosgrove to join him. It was tempting—and in another situation he might have a drink, but for this one he needed to pay close attention. Something was different here. Peter Esposito was obsessed with the murdered woman. Cosgrove ordered a scotch to maintain the spell they were under. But he didn’t plan to drink it.
Esposito took a deep breath, shook the ice cubes in his glass and drained the last of his first drink, watching anxiously toward the service bar for the next one. “I felt a connection to her, as if I’d been looking for her or someone like her for years and finally found her.” H
e paused. “I’m married. It’s a difficult situation.” He laughed, not bitterly. “That’s the story a thousand guys tell in a thousand bars every night. You’ve heard it before, I’m sure: ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ I don’t need to justify myself. Nothing in my feelings for Shannon was sordid.”
Cosgrove knew the “difficult situation” story from his own wrecked marriage. Good thing he wasn’t drinking or he’d be here with Esposito for the rest of the night crying in their beer … or in this case scotch.
“She was in a loveless marriage like mine.” Esposito took a peek at Cosgrove. “That’s not right. Something was wrong with her husband and sex. She was sad, confused. She cried. So I thought she did love her husband and he didn’t love her.” The drinks arrived. Esposito took the glass from the server’s hand before she had a chance to set it onto the table. He took a large gulp.
“I thought she was saying she loved her husband and wanted to stay with him but wanted to have sex. I couldn’t leave my marriage—I have kids; there are other complications, too—and I wanted to have sex, too, with someone I cared about. I thought we hit on something. There we were, two lonely people and we made a connection, a sincere connection.”
He laughed. “I’m going to say ‘It wasn’t what you think’ and know how foolish that sounds. But it wasn’t what you’d expect of a man and woman coming together in a hotel bar, a one-night stand, something tawdry. She was beautiful and sensitive. I wanted to be with her. It didn’t have to be sex that night. I wanted to know her better, to know her for a long time. We talked for a long time and then the bar was closing. I was afraid I’d never see her again.
“She didn’t want to leave me either, I guess. She invited me to her room. The room had a couch and we sat together on it and talked more.” Esposito took a long drink from his glass and began looking for the server again. “I wanted to stay with her, even if only to sleep beside her. She said no. I didn’t argue. I said I wanted to see her again. She said she didn’t know and then she said maybe. I believed she was attracted to me. I knew she felt what I did. She didn’t know how to handle it, how to fit me into her life. Even though she wanted to, it was too much for her. But I knew we could do it. I was sure we could do it.”
