Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  Levinson threw up his hands theatrically. “Who cares about legal advice? We’ll just chat. Who cares about procedure? Who cares about rules of evidence? Why don’t you whack him around a couple of times and get a confession? Or maybe he could go back and hang himself in his cell?”

  “Jesus, David,” McNulty said. “Get a grip.” He spoke to Ray. “I’m trusting you on this.” He turned Cosgrove. “City girls. Too young. Too pretty. They want too much, too early. What they wanted was cocaine. Blow jobs for cocaine. High school girls, groupies.” Cosgrove thought McNulty looked sheepish. “I don’t want to be crude about this. They wanted coke and they wanted to be cool. It was cool for them to fuck an older guy. Get him in bed, take him for a ride, watch his face when she told him she was fifteen. You wouldn’t know they were that young from looking at them. They thought they knew what they were doing. They were temptresses—gorgeous, wanton, lewd and lascivious, and in over their heads. They were getting taken for a ride; they thought they were driving. I’d find girls kneeling under the table in the back booths. Drunk, high, too young to be out by themselves, much less in a bar, much less …

  “That’s how it was when I met Sandi. She was more innocent than most of them, more sensitive, too smart for her own good. Shy and embarrassed the first time I carded her, she had an ID a blind guy could see was fake. I made her something with lots of fruit juice and hardly any rum. At closing time, she was still at the bar; too shy and too nervous to hook up with anyone. She’d come in late with a couple of girls older than her—or more experienced anyway. They had a whispering and giggling confab and her two friends took off with guys.

  “In those days, someone looking like Sandi with a skimpy skirt and a low-cut tank top wouldn’t last long on the street by herself at three in the morning. I told her to wait for me. When I came out from behind the bar, she latched onto me, put her arm through mine. She thought she’d picked me up.

  “She leaned against me—the girl with faraway eyes. I’m not a saint now and I wasn’t then. As young as she was, she’d grown into her body. As we walked, she’d turn and brush her breast across my arm, look into my eyes, giggle and pout. I asked her where she lived. She wouldn’t tell me. She wanted to go to my apartment. As tempting as she was, I didn’t want to take her home with me so we sat on a bench in the middle of Broadway and talked.”

  Sadness gathered in the bartender’s eyes. Cosgrove thought about his own daughter, around the age Sandra Dean was at the time McNulty was describing, and considered the possibility of Denise picking up a bartender. The city was tough on young girls in a hurry to grow up.

  “After that, she came to me with her troubles, which were many. Something went bad with a boyfriend, she’d find me in the bar. When she wanted, she’d come sleep on my couch. I told her she was too good for the barflies with nothing going for them but open-collar shirts, cologne, gold chains around their necks, and a line of bullshit. She was smart, so she couldn’t help but see before long how phony the bar scene was.

  “She went for a while with a guy who hit her. You wouldn’t know he was like that from looking at him, handsome, suit-and-tie slick, razor-cut hair, Wall Street–type. You wouldn’t know it from talking to him either. He could talk Yankees, Knicks, movies, music. A good tipper, charming guy, always smiling. Women went for him. He didn’t have to go after them.

  “She’d come to my apartment crying with a bruised cheek, puffed lip. She said he didn’t mean it. He was good to her. He was sorry.” McNulty met each of the three men’s gaze. “‘One time he does that; you’re gone.’ That’s what I told her. She didn’t like being told. Some women are that way; whatever their men do to them is their business. I told her if she didn’t drop him, I’d take care of him. She didn’t, so I had a couple of guys talk to him. He dropped her.” McNulty fixed his gaze on Cosgrove. “She went with men who were hard on her. Some women are like that. Don’t ask me why.

  “She wrote songs and poems. I told her she should become a writer. Her mother was a writer, she told me, and she didn’t want to be like her mother. Then, before she got too deep into the nightlife, something happened. Someone—her grandmother, I think—yanked her off the streets and sent her to boarding school. That was it. She was gone.

  “I missed her. I knew it was better for her what happened, that she got away. Around that time, I got tangled up with a crazy actress. She kept me occupied. That made it easier. After a while, I didn’t look for Sandi every time the barroom door opened.

  “I didn’t see her for years. And one night she shows up at the Library Tavern.” McNulty’s face twisted into a pained smile. “I never slept with her back in those days, even though in a way I might have been in love with her. Or that’s what I thought when I saw her that night perched on a barstool in the Library Tavern, smiling at me like she used to, like no time had passed.”

  “How did she know where to find you?” Ray asked before Cosgrove could get to it.

  McNulty spoke to the ceiling. “‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.’” He chuckled. “Maybe she knew where to find me. Maybe it was an accident, fate. She didn’t say. We went back to how we’d been when she was a kid. This time, it was her husband she talked about.”

  “Hitting her?” Ray jumped in.

  “No. Messing with her head, making her think she deserved to be treated like a piece of shit. Sandi was too sensitive; she was fragile; she couldn’t handle unpleasantness. I don’t know how to say it. Something was missing for her still. Whatever she was missing in those days when she was a kid, whatever she was looking for then, she hadn’t found it. The demons that had her then had her again.”

  It was a nice story. Cosgrove wasn’t sure he believed it. Bartenders were good storytellers. “So we’re back to the first question. Why didn’t you tell anyone she was an old friend?”

  The bartender’s eyes burned into Cosgrove’s. “No one asked.”

  The lawyer intervened. “Perhaps Brian’s learned something from me after all. One doesn’t volunteer information to the police, nor answer questions that aren’t asked.”

  Cosgrove’s back went up. Lawyers did that to him. He didn’t get how they did what they did. Gum up the works. Get everything tangled up so you don’t know who knows what. Ray put an oar in this time.

  “We’re trying to help, David.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Cosgrove. “How do you get anywhere pussyfooting around like this. ‘I object.’ ‘The question isn’t relevant.’ Who needs this lawyer crap? It’s like bringing your mother on a date.” He turned his glare from the lawyer to McNulty. “What else didn’t you tell us?”

  “How’s he supposed to answer that?” Levinson asked.

  It was a reasonable objection. Cosgrove was too steamed to acknowledge that it was, so he ignored it. “Why did you bring up her husband?” Cosgrove wasn’t sure where he was going with this either.

  McNulty registered surprise. “She talked about him. She didn’t know why he did what he did, why he treated her the way he did. It made me mad. Sandi was too easy to hurt. It wasn’t right to pick on her. It was like smacking a kid, hitting someone smaller than you.”

  “Did she talk to you about the men she met in bars?”

  Sadness in McNulty’s eyes again when he looked at Cosgrove to answer. “Not much. She set out to do one thing, talking to someone. Something she didn’t intend would happen. She didn’t understand herself that way. She didn’t know why she’d pick up some guy. That’s a lot of why she felt bad about herself. Like I said, demons.”

  Cosgrove told McNulty she’d asked someone to get her a gun. “Was she afraid of any of those men?”

  “She didn’t tell me she was. But I thought she was afraid of someone.”

  “Her husband?” Ray went off on another track. Cosgrove was going to object but let it go. You’d understand why Ray would land on Dean, not many suspects left. Cosgrove was willing to see where he was going with this.

 
“Not so she needed a gun, I don’t think.”

  It occurred to Cosgrove that she might have wanted to shoot her husband. After some of what he’d heard from the guy, he wouldn’t blame her. It was also possible she was afraid of McNulty, which was something the bartender wouldn’t bring up.

  “I’m interested in the murder of the man in the hotel room in the city,” Cosgrove said.

  “I don’t know anything about it. It happened after I left.”

  “Why’d you leave? Was she expecting someone else?”

  McNulty blinked a couple of times and looked at Levinson. “We had a falling out. Actually, she did the falling out. I got thrown out.”

  “She asked you to leave?” Cosgrove let his voice soften.

  McNulty grimaced. “She was like that. Something would set her off. You’d say something. Something would click in her head. She’d disappear into the foggy ruins of time. A couple of minutes later she’d come back, having decided while she was gone you were her worst enemy. Nothing you could do to change her mind. I knew enough by then to take a hike.”

  “Why’d you go with her after the murder then?”

  “First, I didn’t know until later it was after a murder. She came and got me. She had a car in the hotel parking garage and picked me up at my apartment. I get in the car, she said, ‘Don’t ask, just help me.’”

  “Can anyone verify where you were at the time Ted Doyle, the man in the hotel, was murdered?”

  “Can you teach the cat to talk?”

  “The cat?” Cosgrove cast a confused glance at Ambler before he remembered. “Right. Cat. You were home. No one saw you?”

  “The cat.”

  “You took off with her. Later you learned she was running from a murder. Did she tell you about it?”

  “She told me she couldn’t tell me about it, except that it wasn’t what I thought.”

  “Where were you when she was killed?”

  “We’d decided—she’d decided—she was going home. Whatever truce she was trying to work out with her husband, she’d worked it out. My understanding was she would be there long enough to get things like money, some clothes and such, get her office straightened out, and round up the kid. We hadn’t firmed up what would happen after that.

  “I went to the city to talk to Ray and Adele. I was worried about the guy killed in her hotel room, that they’d try to hang it on her … or me. By then, I thought one of her former—one of the men in that journal had come back into her life and she was scared.”

  Cosgrove gave Ray a look that might have turned him to dust. “What did you do after you spoke to Ray here?”

  “I spent the night at my father’s in Brooklyn.”

  Cosgrove digested this. “That’s your alibi? I imagine your father would back you up.”

  “Of course he would. He’s my father.”

  “He wouldn’t lie to back you up, would he?”

  McNulty laughed. “Pop? If I lied, he’d swear to it.”

  The lawyer and Ray laughed, too. Cosgrove felt the veins in his neck popping. “Anyone else see you?”

  “The cat. He’s crashing at Pop’s. And a cab driver friend of mine.”

  “Not someone who’d lie for you?”

  McNulty gave him a look. “I don’t have friends who wouldn’t lie for me.”

  “The envelope—” Ray started to say, and stopped. McNulty smiled when he did.

  Cosgrove was ready to turn Ray to dust again. It was as if Ray and McNulty spoke in a foreign language to get around him. He tried McNulty again. “You said there were phone calls—more than one—Sandra Dean made the night before she was murdered. She called her husband and told him she wanted to come home. Who else did she call?”

  “I don’t know. She told me about the calls to her husband. I overheard a couple. She didn’t tell me about any others.”

  “Could she have called anyone else?”

  “Sure. She didn’t check in with me on who she was calling.”

  “You were okay she was leaving you to return to her husband?”

  “She went home for her kid. She didn’t love her husband. He didn’t love her. He controlled her. She wasn’t going to let him do that anymore. That started before all this happened. He’d lost control of her and he knew it.”

  Something was coming to Cosgrove. He’d worried ever since the first body fell because a murderer was on the loose. Someone who’d killed once was someone who could kill again. You had to believe it was easier—and often necessary—after the first one. The danger escalated when you were closing in, when you were all but certain you knew the killer. The killer became more dangerous, like a cornered animal, because he knew before you did that you’d figured him out.

  Cosgrove realized the other three men in the interview room were staring at him. How long had this been going on? He brought himself back to the present and McNulty. “Simon Dean was who told me you knew Sandra Dean when she was young. How did he know you knew her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He knew you were with her in the hotel where she was murdered. Did she tell him on the phone call you overheard?”

  “She told him where she was. She didn’t say she was with me. Not that I heard.”

  “She told him where she was exactly?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Did she or didn’t she tell him precisely where she was? She had a car. She didn’t need him to pick her up.”

  “I’m not sure if she told him the name of the hotel if that’s what you mean.”

  “How did he know you were with her?” Cosgrove didn’t mean to ask McNulty. He was asking himself.

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  “I told Dean that Sandra and McNulty might be together,” Ray said.

  Cosgrove turned to his friend. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  Ray nodded toward McNulty. “You better tell him about you and Sandra stopping off to visit her mother.”

  McNulty jerked himself up straight. “And have him accuse me of killing an old lady? No way.”

  Levinson jumped to his feet. “What old lady?”

  Ray calmed everyone down and explained the time sequence that made it unlikely, if not impossible, for McNulty and Sandra to have murdered Jayne Galloway. Soon afterward, Ray, the lawyer, and Cosgrove left for the city and McNulty returned to his jail cell.

  Chapter 31

  Back at the library after the visit to McNulty, Ambler felt a sense of relief. For the first time, McNulty offered an alibi for the night Sandra Dean was murdered. It wasn’t airtight since it relied on his father and a cab driver friend as witnesses. Still it was something, and Ambler and Adele could vouch for him being in the city on the evening of Sandra Dean’s murder, again not perfect because it was quite a bit earlier than the time of the murder. Still every little bit helped, especially if the police didn’t have strong evidence to put McNulty at the scene of the murder.

  The alibi was one thing that came up. Something McNulty said about Simon Dean struck a chord with Mike was another. Ambler didn’t know what it was, and Mike wasn’t going to tell him about a vague suspicion he might have; he’d check it out first.

  Ambler had doubts about Dean also; the doubts had been growing since Andrea described him as controlling and domineering. The same way McNulty said Sandra described him. Neither of them said he was threatening, yet a man who needed to dominate his wife or child wanted something different than love. So it was worth passing on to Mike what Andrea said about her brother. If nothing else, it reinforced what McNulty said about him. So Ambler called Mike and gave him Andrea’s assessment of her brother. Mike listened without interrupting and said, “He’s a queer duck.”

  Ambler suspected he wouldn’t get an answer but asked anyway. “When we were talking to McNulty, you asked him some pointed questions about Simon Dean, what were you getting at?”

  Mike took his time but he did answer. “Some inconsistencies in what he told me about the phone calls with h
is wife between the time of the Doyle murder and his wife’s murder. When I talked to him with the Stamford police right after her murder, he didn’t tell us about any calls with his wife or that he knew McNulty or knew McNulty and Sandra Dean were together. The next time I interviewed him, he mentioned all of those things. I didn’t know how he could know McNulty was with his wife. You answered that for me.”

  “Right. I told him. But he might have already known. It’s pretty clear he was concealing things. Why would he do that?”

  Mike laughed. “You have brass balls criticizing someone for concealing information. We’ll see what happens when we turn the screws on Mr. Dean.”

  “Have you been hiding?” Adele asked from the crime fiction room doorway as he hung up his phone. She held two containers of coffee. “I hope you broke McNulty out of jail.”

  Ambler told her about the visit to the jail and that McNulty had known Sandra years before she turned up at the Library Tavern. He also told her that the shadow of suspicion had now fallen on Simon Dean.

  “McNulty knowing Sandra explains some things,” she said. “A couple of times, he spoke of her like she was someone he knew, rather than someone he recently met. He was so protective of her.” Adele was also interested in Simon Dean as a suspect. “I wish McNulty had given us Sandra’s entire journal. I’m sure she would have written about her husband.”

  “There might have been something he didn’t want us to see.”

  “Or there were things he thought we didn’t need to see and he wanted to protect her privacy. He had her journal the first time he asked you to investigate the men she’d been seeing. I wonder—”