Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  They ate Szechuan noodles, moo shu pork, and bok choy and talked about Johnny’s dad’s appeal, McNulty’s murder charge, and the lawyer handling both cases. Johnny was pleased to be part of the conversation and finally ready to talk about his grandmother. Ambler told him he had to keep going to his grandparents no matter how angry he was at her because that was the way the law and the family court worked. Adele told him they’d get things figured out somehow and, after a lot of grumbling, he agreed he’d go but he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t mad at her.

  “Mr. Young is supposed to take me to a Yankee playoff game this weekend. He has box seats.”

  “Great,” Adele said. “That should be fun.”

  “I’ve never gone anywhere with him by myself before.” He looked at Ambler. “I wish you could go.”

  “I wish I could, too.” Ambler said. He and Johnny went to a few games at the Stadium each year. But the closest he ever got to the playing field was the second deck. With a rush of sadness, he remembered he’d talked to Johnny about the Yankees the first time he’d ever met him, before he knew he was his grandson. He remembered taking his own son to Yankee Stadium, one of the few decent things he did as a father.

  “I won’t know what to say to him,” Johnny said.

  “Don’t worry,” Adele said. “I’ll tell you a secret. Adults believe it’s their responsibility to find something to talk to kids about. No adult expects a kid to know what to talk about.”

  “Is that true?” Johnny looked at Ambler.

  “Actually, I think it is true.” He glanced at Adele, who was quite at ease.

  * * *

  Back at the library the next morning, he was met by what was for him a rush of researchers to get settled in. One was a women’s studies professor from CUNY, researching academic mysteries written by women, reminding him, as if he needed reminding, of introducing Sandra Dean to the crime fiction collection. This reader he was familiar with. She’d been doing work in the crime fiction collection off and on for years. Like many of the library’s readers, she was the standoffish sort, so their interactions had been limited to a smile and a nod and a comment on the weather now and again.

  Ambler had spoken to her more recently about Jayne Galloway. She knew the writer’s work and was interested when he told her the library had acquired Galloway’s papers because some of Galloway’s mysteries had an academic setting. Ambler hadn’t read any of Galloway’s academic mysteries, which he thought about now, remembering that Galloway often used happenings in her own life as fodder for the fictional worlds she created. He wondered if one of her books with an academic setting might have a character based on Wainwright. It was a long shot and he wasn’t sure even if there was such a character this would tell him anything. But it was worth a try.

  When the reader came back from lunch, he asked her. She consulted an annotated bibliography of women’s academic mysteries she’d put together and found a stand-alone suspense novel by Jayne Galloway with an exclusive women’s college as the setting. The story was the investigation of the campus murder of a young woman. The sleuth, a young English professor, took on the role of amateur detective when it was discovered that the man she was in love with, a distinguished scholar, had been having an affair with the young murder victim. It was a well-worn plot. The professor was a suspect but too obvious a suspect to be the actual killer. What sparked Ambler’s interest, something that would strike a chord only with him, was that the distinguished professor was a Poe scholar.

  Ambler didn’t know enough about Wainwright’s characteristics, mannerisms, or affectations to know if the character in the novel was based on him. What Ambler did know was that Wainwright was a Poe scholar. Most intriguing was that the professor in the story had a hideaway cabin in the woods outside of a small town a few miles from the college.

  Ambler trotted down to the map division on the first floor, found the Massachusetts map, and located a dozen or more small towns around Pine Grove College. He wasn’t sure how you found out if someone owned property in a particular place, so he asked one of the librarians in the map division. She set him up with an online link to the Registry of Deeds in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, and the counties surrounding it. In something less than twenty minutes, he discovered Dillard Wainwright owned a house in Amherst where the college was located and another dwelling in the town of Greenfield, twenty miles outside of Amherst in Franklin County.

  Ambler stared at the screen in front of him, reading the details of the listing over and over as if it might tell him if Wainwright was in his cabin.

  “There’s no reason to think he’d be there,” Adele said when he caught up with her and told her what he’d found.

  “We don’t have any place else to look.” Ambler was already planning his trip.

  “You’re not going to go there?” Adele’s eyes opened wider. “Suppose he is there. And suppose he is the killer.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’ll kill you.”

  Ambler was excited. For now, all he wanted was to know if Wainwright was in his cabin. He’d decide what to do about it once he knew that. “He’s a college professor not a gunslinger,” he told Adele as he headed out the door.

  Ambler had considered the possible danger, but it wasn’t enough to dissuade him. He’d wondered about Wainwright since he first came across the man’s name in Sandra Dean’s journal. Ambler’s plan was he would concoct a story—he was gathering biographical information on Jayne Galloway—that had nothing to do with Sandra Dean or murder.

  Chapter 28

  It didn’t take long for Mike Cosgrove to go through the murder book on Ted Doyle. Crime scene and forensics stuff, interviews with hotel staff, longer interviews with the hotel security director and Moses, the bartender in the lobby lounge who knew McNulty, and the interview he did with Doyle’s widow when she came into the city to identify the body. When he read over the interview with the hotel bartender, something about the bartender’s answers bothered him. Moses said he remembered Sandra Dean, whom he knew as Shannon, talking to a man, maybe the victim. That was about all. Other times she’d been in the bar, she’d caused something of a commotion, talking too loud, butting into conversations, toying with men she came across. This time she wasn’t doing any of that, maybe not a big deal, yet it was something he didn’t pick up on the first time through.

  Cosgrove pulled down a photo of Peter Esposito from the website of the company Esposito worked for, and he had a photo of Simon Dean, that, too, from a company website. Dean was actually a vice president of the architectural company he worked for. No one so far had asked if either of these men was in the hotel the night of Ted Doyle’s murder. Maybe nothing would come of any of this. If nothing else, Ray would know he did a thorough job despite his suspicions about McNulty’s guilt.

  Ted Doyle’s widow had told him her husband was in the city on business. The security company said he wasn’t on a job. Not a big deal but another discrepancy to check out. Cosgrove met Mrs. Doyle, this time at her home, a modest ranch house on a quiet street of similar modest homes and well-kept yards, in Massapequa, a small town in Nassau County that had grown into a colony where working and retired cops from the city and Long Island lived.

  Cosgrove knew a few guys who lived there himself. The murder victim, Ted Doyle, retired from the NYPD after his twenty-two years had been working for Continental Security Consultants for about half as long. He was in his early sixties when he was killed. The widow was small and gray—thin gray hair and a grayish hue to her complexion; her eyes were a kind of blue faded to gray. He thought she looked sad, though depressed was more likely.

  “I appreciate your speaking with me again. I know it’s difficult,” Cosgrove said.

  “Ted would have wanted me to.” She stood in the doorway, holding the door. “Come in.”

  The worst part of this was talking about “the other woman.” He didn’t know an easy way to do it, so he tried a roundabout approach and asked about her husband’s time on the force.


  What she told him was about what he expected. As with most cops, nothing about his time on the job was remarkable. He stood on corners, drove a patrol car. When he made detective, he worked grand larceny. He looked into a lot of burglaries, wrote a ton of paper, and kept his nose clean. Because he’d been a detective, when he was hired at the security company after his retirement, they assigned him to investigations—domestic cases, missing persons, surveillance in a divorce case, and such. He also did some work for attorneys who hired the agency for investigations in criminal cases.

  “He was old school,” the widow said. “The company let him stay that way. He didn’t want to learn about all that computer stuff they do.” Her face began to crumble, her lip tremble. “Then, when he died they turned nasty. He was on a job when he went into the city and was killed. I should have gotten a special compensation package because he was killed on the job, in the line of duty. But they’re not giving it to me. They say he was off-duty when he was killed.”

  “I don’t suppose you know anything about the case he was on.” For some reason, she’d led him into the kitchen, rather than the living room, and he now sat somewhat uncomfortably on a wooden chair at the kitchen table.

  “He never told me anything specific about his work, never anyone’s name. You’re not supposed to. If something was confidential, he kept it confidential. He was loyal to the security company; he never criticized or complained. Now look. They’re stealing his compensation package.” Her eyes reddened. Cosgrove had already upset her and he hadn’t even gotten to the “other woman” questions. Still, that’s why he was there, so he asked.

  “It might have happened,” she said. “Nothing’s impossible.” She’d thought about this, he could tell, wrestled with it, laid awake at night reliving it. “Men are men. I know cops. My father was a cop and my brother. Too much drinking, too many badge bunnies. Ted wasn’t like that. We raised three boys. He coached them in baseball and basketball when they were young. When they were older, in high school, if he wasn’t working he went to their games. We had a good life. He liked being home. If you look in the garage, you’ll see his woodworking shop. We took vacations together. We liked each other’s company.”

  Still, Ted Doyle may have lived a life on the wild side when his wife wasn’t looking. Some guys got away with it, pulled the wool over their wives’ eyes, brought them flowers and told them lies. Mrs. Doyle knew of no bars Ted frequented. As far as she knew, he’d drink a beer or two but didn’t go to bars as a regular thing. He was a stick-in-the-mud.

  When Cosgrove got back to the city, he checked around, made a few calls, and spoke to a couple of guys who knew Ted Doyle. The cops he spoke with said the same thing: easygoing, straight as an arrow, by the book. The clichés told him they didn’t know Doyle very well, which was how it was with some cops. They did their job, kept to themselves, went home after work.

  Continental Security Consultants in Glen Cove, Long Island, was less than forthcoming, as he’d expected they might be. None of the first three people he spoke to on the phone would own up to the fact that Ted Doyle had worked there, much less talk about him. Cosgrove finally got to a director of something or other, also retired from NYPD. The guy knew of Cosgrove from a case Cosgrove worked that left a sour taste in the mouth of NYPD Intelligence, which didn’t help any.

  “Our client list is confidential,” the director of something or other told him. “I don’t see how talking to someone here about one of our consultants would help you.”

  In the old days, they were private eyes, shamuses, gumshoes; now they were consultants. He hoped the pay was better. “Suppose you let me decide that.” Cosgrove said.

  The guy was condescending, his tone formal. You’d think you were talking to a guy who’d found out you used to sleep with his wife. “There really isn’t anything I can help you with. I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “Was he in the city working on a job?”

  “He wasn’t on the job when he was murdered.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Answering that question would be a breach of confidentiality. Our consultants write reports. Ted kept his up-to-date.”

  Cosgrove didn’t know if he could subpoena the reports. He didn’t know if the guy was bullshitting him about breaching confidentiality. He didn’t think a security agency had any special protections. “Let me tell you what I’m thinking and you can tell me if I’m close.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Doyle might have been working on a case that involved dangerous people, the kind of case that might get an investigator killed.”

  “Almost any case can turn dangerous. Our consultants are licensed to carry a concealed weapon. He wasn’t armed. I can tell you this because you know it already. He could have been carrying if he thought he was in danger. As I said, he wasn’t on the job when he was killed. If he had been, we’d treat this differently.”

  The guy had more to say about what men did on their own time and how easy it was to get mixed up with the wrong woman. Cosgrove wasn’t interested. “You say he wasn’t on the job the night he was killed. Was he on a job, doing surveillance, doing anything in the city that day?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me where he was working without violating your principles?”

  After a pause, the director of something or other said, “He had a couple of cases on the island. Nothing in the city.”

  “A case on Long Island might have taken him into the city.”

  “It might have. We have no reason to believe it did.”

  Cosgrove had no reason not to believe what the Continental Security guy told him. He had no reason to disbelieve Mrs. Doyle either, except her husband might have lied to her so he could pick up a loose woman. He may have been doing things like that for years without her knowledge, yet nothing pointed to that. That the security agency denied Ted Doyle’s compensation package rankled Cosgrove. He wouldn’t put it past this smooth corporate entity to lie about an employee being on the clock to protect itself from a big payout. But he wasn’t about to ask the company shill on the phone about it. He wasn’t going to call Mrs. Doyle or her late husband liars either. He’d find the answer before letting go.

  His next stop that evening was at the hotel to talk to Moses, the bartender who’d been behind the bar the night Ted Doyle was murdered. This was the guy who pointed him toward the cop Al Hoffman, who’d had a fling with the woman he knew as Shannon Darling and who sometime later asked him to get her a gun.

  Moses remembered Cosgrove. “Did you find Al Hoffman?” he asked when Cosgrove sidled up to the bar.

  Cosgrove told him he had and asked if he remembered the night of Ted Doyle’s murder.

  “I went through that with another detective right after it happened. I told him everything I remembered. He took notes. Don’t you guys talk to one another?”

  “I read his notes.” Everybody and his brother watched cop shows on TV and think they know police procedure better than you do. “Sometimes we get new information that brings up new questions. Sometimes a witness like you remembers something you didn’t think of last time.” He’d made this speech as often as he’d given someone Miranda rights. “I won’t take much of your time.” He glanced along the empty bar to make a point.

  The bartender went back to cutting limes. “Shoot.”

  Cosgrove rolled his eyes. Were all New York bartenders smart-asses? “You’d seen this woman, the victim, a number of times, meeting different men here. Was anything different about the night she met the man who was murdered?”

  Moses stopped cutting and placed the knife he was using on the cutting board. He met Cosgrove’s gaze. “She’d been with McNulty earlier. Next thing, she was talking to this other guy.”

  “Had you ever seen this other guy before, the man who was murdered?”

  “I might have. If I saw him, I don’t remember. I don’t remember everybody. Your question about different,” he picked up his paring knife and waved it at Cosgrove before atta
cking the lime again. “It was.” He concentrated on cutting the lime for the moment. “She hadn’t been at the bar long, nursing a scotch and water. He came in, took the stool beside her, ordered a beer. They talked for a couple of minutes, not long enough for a second beer, and then they left together.”

  This gave Cosgrove something to think about. He ordered a beer himself and sat down on the barstool he’d been standing behind. The bartender continued prepping the fruit for the evening. “That’s how the hookers do it so they’re not soliciting in the bar. The meet-up’s been arranged. That’s how it works with those matchmaking computer dates, too. It’s been arranged.”

  “What did you think of her?”

  Moses adjusted his stance, standing slightly taller, suggesting to Cosgrove that he appreciated being asked for his judgment. “Sometimes, she was trouble. I told you the last time you were here I walked her to her room one night she’d had too much. I didn’t take her up on her offer. After that, for all she cared, I could have been a vending machine. A woman goes from man to man at the bar, she’s trouble.

  “When she came with McNulty, she was different, relaxed like they were old friends. Other times, by herself, she was nervous, looking over her shoulder like she might get caught. Wrapped up in something going on in her head. I see lots of people lost in their thoughts, deep in a funk. Sad, maybe. Depressed. I leave them alone. Bartenders have a saying: Beware the solitary drinker.”

  Cosgrove took out the photo of Simon Dean and showed it to him. Moses shook his head. He didn’t recognize Dean. The barman’s reaction to the next photo was different.

  “Sure. That’s Mr. Esposito.” Moses kept hold of the photo and looked at again. “What do you want to know about him?”

  “He’s a regular?”

  “Whenever he’s in town. He’s been coming in for years.”