Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  The next morning on their walk, Johnny showed off Lola’s good behavior, which went pretty well until she snatched half of a bagel from a tyke in a stroller. Later that morning, Johnny went to school, Lola went to doggy daycare, and Ambler went to work.

  After a mid-morning department staff meeting, Harry called Ambler aside to tell him Simon Dean would be at the library at noon. “We’ll meet in my office,” Harry said.

  “Good luck,” Ambler said. “He’s—”

  “The meeting is with Mr. Dean, me, and you.”

  “Oh dear,” said Ambler.

  Simon Dean was sitting in a wooden armchair in front of Harry’s desk when Ambler arrived for the meeting. He stood and held out his hand, smiling, not the aggrieved widower Ambler expected to confront, but a different person nonetheless than Ambler would have thought him to be before Andrea’s description the day before.

  Ambler shook hands and sat down in a matching armchair across from Dean.

  Dean’s expression was earnest. “I was wrong to say I knew for sure who killed my wife. Normally, I don’t jump to conclusions. I’m a methodical person. I was beside myself with grief.” He paused and closed his eyes, as if to compose himself. “I wanted to punish her killer … to punish someone. I know you have a right to think your friend is innocent.”

  Ambler didn’t know what Dean was up to, or if he was up to anything. Whichever it was, Simon Dean was in charge. It was his show, although he seemed to be waiting for a response from Ambler without having asked a question.

  Not getting one, Dean turned his attention to Harry. “I understand Mr. Ambler wants to prove his friend innocent of my wife’s murder. It’s understandable he’d want to do so, even if I think him misguided.” Dean pulled himself up straighter. “Obtaining documents from my wife’s mother’s house under false pretenses is something different. It was wrong. Everything that belonged to my wife’s mother, my mother-in-law, rightly belongs to my daughter.”

  He spoke to Harry as if he were the parent and Ambler a child who’d thrown his baseball through Simon Dean’s window or stomped through his petunia bed. “I don’t care about Mrs. Galloway’s belongings, papers or otherwise. I didn’t like her. She abandoned Sandra when she was a child. She took no interest in her granddaughter.” He turned to Ambler. “I’m protecting my daughter, doing for her what she’d do for herself if she could.” His tone softened. “I know you mean Carolyn no harm, that you wouldn’t purposefully make her unhappy, least of all now.”

  Ambler nodded, a reflex.

  “She wants anything connected to her mother, anything she can hold on to. She asked me to take her to her grandmother’s house because that was where her mother was as a little girl.”

  Simon was laying it on thick. Ambler assumed it was for Harry’s benefit. Sandra Dean hadn’t been a little girl at Jayne Galloway’s house on Long Island. Simon knew that.

  Ambler started to say there was nothing in Jayne Galloway’s journals about Sandra as a little girl. But he realized he didn’t know that for sure. And even if he did know, why wouldn’t the little girl want to, deserve to, find out for herself? He wanted to put his hands around Dean’s throat and choke him until he stopped talking about his daughter.

  Harry, by pretty obvious telepathy, let Ambler know he wasn’t going to be any help on this. Ambler didn’t want to argue with Dean but he wasn’t going to give him the journals either. Bringing in the little girl wasn’t fair, but it was effective. It was also clear that Dean, despite his agreeable manner, wasn’t going to be reasoned with.

  “I couldn’t be sorrier for your daughter,” Ambler said quietly. “She’s a sweet child. My grandson lost his mother, so I know how deeply that hurts and how slow it is to heal.” His eyes were locked onto Dean’s as he spoke, so he could see fury gathering behind the man’s earnest gaze.

  “You’re wrong that the journals or any part of Jayne Galloway’s papers belong to Carolyn. The collection legally and rightly belongs to the library. Mrs. Galloway made that decision. She donated her papers, specifically including journals in her possession at the time of her death, to the library. I’m not sure I could undo the bequest if I wanted to.”

  “And of course you don’t want to.” Dean’s tone was measured. He kept his gaze on Ambler but he was talking to Harry, expecting Harry to overrule Ambler, something Harry might do. “Are those journals for your investigation? Do you think something in them will help free your friend the bartender? That’s ridiculous. What could they possibly mean to you?”

  Ambler was taken aback. Did Dean read his mind, follow his thinking somehow? He did want the journals for his investigation, but he wasn’t going to tell Simon that. “The journals are part of the library’s collection. They’re not mine to give back.”

  Dean turned from Ambler to Harry. “I guess I should take my request to the library’s Board of Trustees. They might have sympathy for a child who’s lost her mother.”

  This struck a nerve with Harry who made no effort to hide his concern, unlike Ambler who—picturing Lisa Young and what she might do when she heard Simon’s story—did make an effort to cover his reaction.

  “No need to do that,” Harry said. “The board would send your request to me and we’d be right back where we started. Ray and I understand your request. I’m not sure how we can resolve our differences. But resolve them we will.”

  Ambler didn’t have much faith differences would be resolved. But he’d hand the reins to Harry for the time being. Everyone stood. Ambler shook hands awkwardly with Simon Dean, meeting the man’s gaze with difficulty. Dean showed his own reluctance by looking away almost immediately as their eyes met.

  Chapter 25

  Adele met Raymond in the crime fiction reading room Tuesday evening, to continue their effort to discover in Jayne Galloway’s journals and notebooks why Sandra Dean called Dillard Wainwright a fraud. Raymond told her about his meeting with Simon Dean the previous day.

  “I can understand that.” It wasn’t what Raymond wanted to hear, but she felt badly for Dean and for his daughter Carolyn. “The poor little girl doesn’t have her mother anymore.” Adele felt tears forming behind her eyes. She’d cry; she couldn’t help it, despite her tears unsettling Raymond. He didn’t know what to do when she cried, so he sometimes pretended it wasn’t happening until she stopped on her own. Other times, he rushed to her like she was a child who needed a hug. And maybe she was.

  This was one of the pretend-it-wasn’t-happening times, so she wiped her eyes and began reading one of the journals. In this one, Jayne Galloway wrote about the husband she would soon leave. After reading for a while, Adele stuck a marker in the notebook and closed it. “I was right about her first husband, Sandra’s father. He was a prick … if you’ll excuse the term.”

  Adele knew Raymond felt awkward. He was a prude in some ways, not a prude maybe, but old fashioned in an almost endearing way—not totally endearing because his uneasiness with her rough-around-the-edges, Brooklyn-girl manners, while gentlemanly, had remnants of male supremacy, an expectation of female gentility, the price a woman paid for her place on the pedestal.

  Sandra’s father, Martin Galloway, distinguished attorney that he might have been, was a controlling, dominating son of a bitch. Adele recognized the behavior from her own father, who’d died when she was a teen. The Mr. Galloway described in Jayne Galloway’s journals didn’t push his wife around or threaten her with abuse. His life away from her was more important than the life lived with her. She was something to him—the mother of his daughter, a homemaker, an element of his conventional respectability. Otherwise, he wasn’t interested. Her writing was her little hobby. The child was her responsibility. She ran the house. His life was out in the world, long hours at the office, travel for court cases, testimonials, conferences, dinner at his club. That sort of thing.

  “She left him because he wasn’t there in the first place,” Adele told Raymond but he didn’t understand. When you came right down to it, he had some of thos
e lolling-about-in-a-world-of-his-own characteristics himself.

  “You would think she’d take her daughter,” he said.

  “You’d think that, wouldn’t you? A lot of mothers wouldn’t leave without their child. A lot of mothers stayed in not-so-fulfilling relationships, not to say abusive ones, because they wouldn’t leave their kids. How well did that turn out?” Adele went back to the journal.

  “You’re looking for something about Dillard Wainwright being a fraud, right?” Raymond reminded her.

  Truthfully, she had gotten sidetracked, so she got herself back on track, zipping through the entries except when Wainwright’s name popped up. When he did pop up, he didn’t come across as much of an improvement over the guy Jayne had left. Adele was tempted to slow down by a section that described Jayne’s anguish over being separated from her daughter. Adele fought off the urge to keep reading those pages by promising herself she’d go back and read all of it when she found what she was looking for on Wainwright, if she ever did.

  The longer she kept at the journals the less sure she was she’d find anything about Wainwright being a fraud. Where Galloway wrote about Wainwright, she wrote glowingly. Nonetheless, he came across as self-absorbed and insecure. The writer’s block he suffered became as much a concern for Galloway as it must have been for him. Galloway had never experienced the phenomenon; she’d published four books by that time. She didn’t understand his problem but tried to sympathize.

  Wainwright’s struggle with writer’s block was already wearing on Adele. Galloway was more sympathetic. Still, she wrote she didn’t know how to tell Wainwright that the voice in a story he showed her was so pompous it became a parody of itself. When she did tell him simply that the story didn’t work for her, he became despondent. If he didn’t get something published by that fall, he would be turned down for tenure.

  By this time, Adele’s eyes were getting droopy. As a mystery writer, Jayne Galloway might keep her readers on the edge of their seats, but her journals were as dry as dust, at least the parts of them having do with Wainwright. And then there it was. The word jumped out of the journal and bopped her in the eye—“fraud.” She reached across the table and clutched Raymond’s arm. His eyes had glazed over, too, from the journals, so he jumped when she grabbed him. “I found it.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper.

  What Adele found, what Sandra had found—there was a faint pencil mark at the top of the page—was an ethical dilemma for Jayne Galloway: Wainwright wanted to submit a story that Galloway wrote to a literary journal under his name. She’d argued with herself—not with him—deciding in the end that it wasn’t a big deal. “It’s fraud,” she wrote. “But it’s not stealing money or fudging an experiment. It’s a short story in a small magazine that hardly anyone but the editor will ever read.” Dillard would get tenure, which was a big deal. Getting the publishing credit and tenure would free him from his writer’s block, so he could go on to be the writer he was destined to be.

  “A woman in love can rationalize anything,” Adele said to Ambler. “Though it really doesn’t seem like a big deal.” She watched Ambler’s expression crumble and realized the mistake she made. “I forgot,” she said.

  He looked at her blankly. His Ph.D. dissertation had been rejected by his university because he was falsely accused of plagiarism. Someone—he was sure it was the FBI in retribution for his exposing their dirty tricks—doctored his dissertation. Adele knew that. “It’s not the same thing. You were set up.” She reached for him and looked into his eyes. “I know you.”

  He smiled. “So you’re not rationalizing.”

  She wouldn’t have cared if she was rationalizing. She let go of his hand and lowered her gaze. “Well, there you have it. Sandra discovered Wainwright got tenure under false pretenses.”

  “Not to be taken lightly,” Ambler said. “The college would revoke his tenure. The dishonesty would throw into question all of his scholarly work. Then there’s the scandal and the embarrassment.”

  Raymond knew the fallout from bitter experience. He never spoke about the plagiarism accusation against him and its consequences—a master’s degree, not a Ph.D., a job in the library instead of an academic career—so Adele didn’t either. “Sandra was going to tell the world and Wainwright needed to stop her.”

  “If she was going to expose him, she could have done it. Why tell him about it first?”

  “Why?” Adele had a glimmering. “Blackmail?”

  Raymond shook his head. “What could she want from him?”

  The question didn’t ask for an answer. She answered anyway. “To torture him before she exposed his false credentials. He disappeared from his college right after she accused him. Right after he killed her.” Another thought caught up with her. “He killed Jayne Galloway, too. Sandra discovered his fraud in her mother’s journals, so he went to get the journals from Galloway. When she wouldn’t turn them over, he killed her.”

  “Why did he kill Ted Doyle?”

  “Who?”

  “The man murdered in Sandra Dean’s hotel room.”

  “Oh.” She’d forgotten about that. “So Wainwright isn’t the killer after all? He had no reason at all to kill Mr. Doyle.”

  “We don’t know.”

  Raymond was like that. As soon as it looked like they’d gotten somewhere, he pointed out they hadn’t. Now, she wasn’t sure what they did know, except that the missing Dillard Wainwright was a fraud and Sandra knew it. And that had to mean something.

  After a few moments, Raymond said. “I discovered from Wainwright’s emails that he’d been in touch with Jayne Galloway. He knew she was sick and tried to persuade Sandra to visit her.”

  “So her more recent journals might have something about Wainwright, too.”

  “Sandra was in touch with her mother at least twice, the first time led to her searching her mother’s papers in the library. For some reason, she used the name Shannon Darling and not her own name. She visited her mother again after Ted Doyle was murdered in her hotel room. Jayne Galloway lied when she told me she hadn’t seen her daughter and didn’t recognize the photo I showed her. She’d seen Sandra a day or so before. She knew her daughter was hiding. She probably knew who killed Ted Doyle and that Sandra and McNulty were fugitives. That’s what she knew that I know about. She knew something else that I don’t know about and that’s why she wanted to talk to me.”

  “And now?”

  “We look through the journals and hope we find that something.”

  Chapter 26

  Mike Cosgrove took another trip to Connecticut, driving the parkways to Greenwich this time. There was so much greenery just a few miles outside the city you might be in the country. Though not so green now in the fall with the leaves on the trees turning. Even the north Bronx, Riverdale, was country-like with its canopies of trees and rock formations. You wondered why people packed themselves together in the city, on top of one another in apartment buildings.

  Plenty of trees and bushes when you got off the parkway in Greenwich, too—you probably should call them shrubs in a neighborhood of mansions like this. The houses set back from the road behind stone walls—sometimes tall walls you couldn’t see over, sometimes short ones—were straight out of the House & Garden magazine his wife used to get a long time ago. The stone walls he turned in between to reach Simon Dean’s house were short ones.

  A small girl, whom he at first thought was a small boy because she wore a baseball uniform, opened the door. He realized it was Carolyn the victim’s daughter, who was as cute as a button.

  “Whom should I say is calling?” she asked when he asked to see her father.

  He smiled. Denise was mannerly like that when she was that age. He felt a pang of memory. How determined Denise was to do things correctly. A wave of sorrow followed as he thought about this little girl’s dead mother, remembering the fear that hit him every so often that if one time he made a wrong move, he’d leave Denise without a father.

  Her distracted-looking
father was in the hallway, not far behind her, so she didn’t have to announce the caller. Dean wore that familiar expression of curiosity and worry folks took on when a police detective waited at the door to see them. Cosgrove had called Dan Green, the Stamford detective, to tell him he was in town to talk to Dean again. Green asked if anything new had come up. Cosgrove told him no and his reason for talking with Dean, or part of the reason anyway, was the Doyle homicide.

  “Sorry to bother you again.” Cosgrove held out his hand to Dean. Shaking hands was something he didn’t usually do, but it seemed the right thing here. “As I might have told you the last time, I’m investigating a murder that took place in a hotel room in New York City a few days before your wife’s murder. If you remember, I told you the hotel room was registered to your wife under a different name.”

  You couldn’t blame Dean for taking a minute to catch up with the conversation. He’d expect the visit to be about his wife’s murder. “Why would I know anything about that?”

  Still in the doorway, Cosgrove glanced over Dean’s shoulder. He wasn’t looking for anything. The gesture sometimes got the person you were interviewing to invite you in. Standing in the doorway asking your questions suggested a short interview. Cosgrove hadn’t driven all the way up from the city to have a short interview.

  At first, Dean didn’t bite, just stood in front of him looking puzzled.

  “This is difficult; I know.” Cosgrove held the man’s gaze. “You were hoping for news on your wife’s murder. And I’m bringing you a different complication to worry about. You’re saying to yourself, ‘What’s this have to do with my wife’s murder?’” Sensing Dean’s attention to what he was saying, his guard down for a moment, Cosgrove asked, “Do you mind if I come in for a moment?”