Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  Because of the unfolding crisis, Ambler called Denise and asked her to stay at his apartment with Johnny. He spoke to Johnny, who’d made up with Denise and agreed to return to his grandmother’s the next day. He gave Denise his credit card number and told her to order whatever she and Johnny wanted for dinner. It was a treat for Denise. She didn’t have to put up with her mother complaining about her father, got paid for doing her homework, and could eat something special for dinner on Ambler’s dime.

  “I should take up babysitting,” Adele said.

  “You’re basically Johnny’s mother,” Ambler said.

  “Oh?” She looked at him like she didn’t remember who he was. “How interesting.”

  Ambler, as was often the case, didn’t know what her look meant.

  He’d already noticed Sandra Dean had an appealing voice in her journal entries, and here it was again, bright, lively, a fresh use of language and sparkling images. She’d inherited her mother’s talent. McNulty was right, she could have been a writer. One side of her was tragic, sad, depressed, doomed. Now he saw another side where she was smart, interesting, fun. She saw more deeply into situations or people than you’d expect, and made observations that surprised you.

  When Adele called his name, jarred out of his thoughts, he felt like he was coming in out of a storm.

  “I called you three times. I thought you fell asleep. Were you in a trance?”

  He shook his head to clear it. “I guess so.”

  “I found something. It’s confusing and you need to read between the lines. I think Jayne Galloway saw Sandra recently. Whatever happened when they met, she learned Simon had forbidden Sandra to see or talk to her. Galloway asks herself, or maybe she asks Sandra, why a husband would want to keep his wife from her mother. I’m guessing that’s when she hired the private detective again to investigate Simon’s blurry past.” She handed him the journal she’d been reading in. “Can I look at that one while you look at this?”

  Ambler hesitated, as if he felt embarrassed to have been so touched by what he’d read and didn’t want Adele to know. The feeling was unexpected. His reaction surprised Adele also.

  “Is there something there you don’t want me to see? I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  “It’s not that.” He handed the journal to her. “I found Sandra’s writing charming.” He said this he realized as a kind of inoculation against Adele judging it differently.

  “I guess she was charming.” Adele began reading.

  Ambler picked up Jayne Galloway’s journal and turned to the section Adele had pointed out. It began: “Why would a husband keep his wife from her mother? Why does a husband keep his wife from having friends? Simon doesn’t think he’s met his match. But he has. I know why a man keeps a woman behind blank walls.”

  A frustrated Mike called him that night. Johnny was watching TV and Ambler was cleaning up the kitchen after he ate Denise’s and Johnny’s leftover Chinese food for his dinner.

  “I finally got some information from those assholes at Continental Security. Doyle was hired in late August by Jayne Galloway to do a background check on Simon Dean. Doyle, as you know, had done work for Galloway before, finding her daughter. What he found this time is Simon Dean, when he was in his late teens, was in a seminary in Pennsylvania studying to be a priest. During that time he impregnated a sixteen-year-old girl who then committed suicide.”

  Ambler started to ask a question.

  Cosgrove headed him off. “I know what you’re thinking. Doyle’s report referenced a police report on the death.”

  “Murders can look like suicides,” Ambler said.

  “Really?” Talk about dripping with sarcasm. “Even in the burg where this happened, unattended deaths are suspicious until proven otherwise.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “This death happened almost twenty years ago in a small city where they don’t have many unattended deaths suspicious or otherwise. I spoke to a captain, who, it turned out, was involved in the investigation. And there was an investigation.

  “The parents of the victim didn’t believe their daughter committed suicide. They swore Simon Dean killed her. The investigation was thorough and the cops there did everything pretty much right. The captain I spoke with knows what he’s talking about. He said she killed herself. He also said Dean was psychologically abusive to her and drove her to suicide. He basically handed her the gun.

  “The girl was innocent. She ran away from home to be with him. He got her a furnished room in the town near the seminary, and then he drove her friends away, turned her against her parents. When she was a complete wreck—though God knows why still in love with him—he left her. He was nice enough to leave a gun behind in her room, so she put a bullet in her head.

  “Because it was ruled a suicide, the file was sealed. Simon Dean has no record as an abuser or anything else. The age of consent in Pennsylvania is sixteen. He was never charged with anything related to her death, though a lot of people hated him. When the priests found out what he’d been up to, they eased him out of the seminary. He came back to Connecticut, more or less erased from the seminary history books. I’m not sure even his parents knew what happened there.”

  “The private eye verified all this?” Ambler’s thoughts raced ahead.

  “He spoke to the suicide victim’s parents, people who knew her. He spoke to Captain Robinson who investigated the case. He didn’t see the file that was sealed. Robinson can unseal it if we ever bring a charge against Simon Dean—”

  “What do you mean ‘if we ever?’”

  “We don’t have enough to charge him.”

  “Sandra Dean didn’t commit suicide. She was murdered.” Ambler paused to line up his thoughts. “We thought she picked up Ted Doyle in the hotel bar as she’d done before with other men. What happened was she met him at the hotel because he was bringing her a report that told her that her psychologically abusive husband had driven a young girl to suicide.”

  “How did Simon Dean know, Ray? How did he know about Ted Doyle and his investigation? How did he know Ted Doyle was meeting his wife in the city? How did he know where his wife was in the city? No one’s put him in the city at the time of the murder. I showed his photo to the hotel bartender. He couldn’t identify him.”

  “Someone might have seen Simon at the hotel that night. Has anyone asked about that? Dean could have found out about the private eye from Jayne Galloway. That’s why he killed her. He knew she’d tell me about the private eye’s report and his background.”

  “Where’s your evidence, Ray? I can—”

  “Wait a minute. What about Sandra’s murder?” He stopped for a moment and ran back through his memory. “What do you have on him for that?”

  Mike’s voice was weary. “What I told you. Some things he told me maybe don’t add up. Maybe if I question him again, he’ll slip up. Lies are tough to keep straight. Otherwise, I don’t have enough evidence.”

  “If you—”

  “If nothing.”

  “You don’t—”

  Mike’s tone was sharp. “You’re good at a lot of things, Ray. Number one, you don’t twist what you know to make it fit what you want it to mean.” Mike coughed into the phone. Ambler knew to keep quiet. “Another thing is you don’t get in my way. That’s unusual for an amateur. And you are an amateur; as good as you are, you’re an amateur. For some reason, this time you’re not helping.”

  Ambler absorbed what he heard. Mike handled himself as he always did, not forgetting he was a cop. He, Ambler, wasn’t himself this time; he was too eager to close the case before he had the evidence—the data—that proved Simon Dean the killer. This made him careless, and untrustworthy.

  Chapter 33

  The next day was Saturday. It was a day off for Ambler and Adele, both of whom had used up vacation days already since McNulty disappeared. He dropped Johnny at his grandmother’s, avoiding any discussion with her or Johnny about the recent difficulties. The boy had eno
ugh on his mind. On Sunday, he was going to Yankee Stadium with his imperious Wall Street–lawyer grandfather to sit in the law firm’s box seats alongside the Yankee dugout for Game 2 of the Division Series against the Tigers.

  Once Johnny was under the protection of the doorman at his grandmother’s Central Park West apartment building, Ambler headed to the library despite his day off. When he arrived, the first thing he did was dig through boxes of loose papers from the Galloway papers a second time until this time he did find the second report on Simon Dean from Ted Doyle of Continental Security Consultants. It was pretty much what Mike had told him. He also found a letter from Doyle that was more helpful than the report. The letter must have been in response to a question from Jayne Galloway; that letter wasn’t included. Ted Doyle wrote that he would be willing to deliver the report to Sandra Dean himself. Jayne, it appeared, worried her daughter might not believe what happened with Simon if the report came from her. Ambler made a copy of the report and the letter.

  He then dug into Jayne Galloway’s more recent journals, where he hoped to discover how Simon Dean learned of Ted Doyle’s investigation. Poking around at the edge of his consciousness was this idea that he should talk to Andrea. She might be able to get Sandra’s laptop again and look through her emails for anything Simon might have discovered that would have told him about Ted Doyle’s report. The problem was Mike wanted him to stay away from her. Mike could be right, too, that at some point—a murder charge, for instance—family loyalty might outweigh Andrea’s anger over her brother’s treatment of Sandra.

  Shortly before noon, Adele bounded into the reading room. She was antsy and thought they needed to do something. “He threatened to harm his daughter if the police came for him. What kind of man is that? Shouldn’t that be enough to go arrest him?”

  Ambler knew it would be difficult to calm her down. “Mike can’t go to Connecticut and arrest someone even if he wanted to. He’d have to get a warrant and have the local police make the arrest. They might not understand about Carolyn.”

  “We could go there.”

  “And do what?”

  “Get Carolyn away from him.”

  “Kidnap her?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “We’d rescue her.”

  “What we need to do is find something in these journals that gives Mike enough evidence to get a warrant for Simon.”

  Adele scrunched up her face into a scowl. “And what would that be … a note perhaps: To Whom It May Concern, Simon Dean is a murderer. If you look in his backyard you’ll find buried bodies and in the garage a pile of guns and some video tapes of him committing the crimes?”

  “No bricks without clay.”

  “Easy for you…” Her nostrils flared. “How can you be so uncaring? Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you scared for Carolyn?” Her voice quavered. Her eyes reddened.

  Adele’s fury unnerved him but didn’t stop him. “You can’t pretend you know something that you don’t know. I want to do the same thing. We can’t.”

  “We know that man killed Sandra!” The expression in Adele’s eyes was wild.

  Ambler spoke softly. “We don’t know that for sure. I wish we did.”

  “We should hang him up by his thumbs and beat a confession out of him.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do mean it.”

  Adele snatched one of Sandra’s journals off the table and began going through it. It was a while before she spoke; when she did he could barely hear her. “I’m frustrated, Raymond. I know we need to be sure before accusing someone. Yet I am sure. Can’t you believe your heart when it tells you something is true even if you don’t have all the … data?”

  “If you believe Poirot, intuition comes from some kind of facts buried in your subconscious. Some piece of information, something we absorbed without realizing it, might tell us why you’re so sure Simon Dean is the killer.”

  Adele stared over the top of the notebook she held in front of her. “When I think back, I didn’t trust from the beginning Simon Dean insisting McNulty was the murderer. How could he be so sure?” Her gaze met Ambler’s. “He wouldn’t be. The killer could have been any of the men she’d been with. Why did he insist it was McNulty? I bet it was because he already knew they’d run off together. He killed her and planned to have McNulty blamed for it. That was his revenge.”

  Ambler tried to recall his state of mind when Simon Dean confronted him and Adele. He’d taught himself to be hyperalert, aware of everything down to the smallest detail, the most insignificant nuance when he thought about a murder. He should have been suspicious at that time also, at least questioned what he was hearing. Yet he didn’t do that. Dean had come to the library a day after identifying his wife’s body. Ambler should have questioned why? Was there a possible reason beyond the one stated? He should have considered Dean a suspect then, however remote the possibility. Dean was the cuckolded husband. Of course, he was a suspect.

  “He was distraught.” Adele said. Once more, she knew what he was thinking. Ambler might as well have his thoughts flashing on his forehead. “And so were you. It’s unnerving that a man whose wife has been murdered accuses you of hiding information about the murderer.” She chuckled, a little chirp. “In your Ross Macdonald books, people come and ask Lew Archer to investigate. They come to tell you not to.”

  “Funny.” Ambler was impatient. He realized it was with himself not with Adele. That was the second blunder he’d made. “Then, there was the wild-goose chase with Dillard Wainwright. Concentrating on Wainwright, I ignored too many things I’d observed. Making an observation doesn’t mean anything if you don’t connect it to other observations that add up to something. I observed things about Simon Dean but didn’t connect them. Dean was enraged that Andrea let me take Jayne Galloway’s journals. He wouldn’t let me see Sandra’s laptop. He came to the library determined to get back Jayne Galloway’s journals.”

  Adele interrupted him. “Also how smug and arrogant he was. Guys that handsome think they can do anything. They get away with murder—” Her eyes opened wider and her hand flew to her mouth.

  Ambler didn’t react. “Suppose you’re Simon Dean. Of course, you’re going to be the first suspect. So you make sure someone else becomes the chief suspect. And you make sure no one can find any evidence against you.”

  “Like the private detective’s report.” Adele walked to the door of the reading room. “Dean knows it’s here in her papers or she wrote something about it in her journals, so he has to keep all that away from you. He wasn’t able to do that, so he knows we’ll find it. That means he knows we’ll find him out. And that means the police will come for him. And that means we have to go get that little girl.”

  Ambler knew what she was going to say.

  “You have to show the report to Andrea. You think highly of her, right? She’s devoted to her niece. She’s helped you before. How could she not protect the girl?”

  Ambler could think of a lot of reasons. “She might not believe us. She thought her brother was being stubborn and stupid, so she helped me. That’s a far cry from believing her brother is a murderer and would kill his own daughter.”

  “We have to convince her, that’s all. You can tell her the truth or make something up. Tell her you won a trip to Disneyland and want to take Carolyn.” Adele held up her hand to stop him before he could speak again. “Wait. We don’t have to convince her. The report from the private detective will convince her. Show it to her and tell her what it means.”

  Ambler was weakening. “Mike said we had to stay away from her. We could screw up everything he’s doing.”

  “We could. But we’re not going to. We’re going to get that little girl out of the way and leave everything else to him.”

  He knew he wasn’t going to change Adele’s mind. “We have to talk to Mike before we do anything.” Ambler was adamant; he’d go to the mat on this one. “Too many things could go
wrong. We can’t cross him up. One of us not knowing what the other one is doing is a disaster waiting to happen.”

  “He’ll stop us.”

  Ambler knew he was right about this. “The fact is he can’t stop us. If I want to call Andrea, I can. There’s nothing illegal about it.”

  Adele came around slowly. She was impulsive but not reckless. Still, she had an independent streak. She trusted her own judgment. If she made up her mind to do something, you might as well get out of her way. Here, she relented.

  Ambler called Mike and told him what they wanted to do and why. As he expected, Mike wasn’t pleased. He was as stubborn as Adele. Ambler was in the middle—like the guy breaking up a fight—getting pummeled from both sides. When Adele sensed Mike was resisting, she performed a choreography of her eyes and mouth, with an occasional sigh, and a now-and-again huff that told Ambler he better not give in.

  Finally, Mike had enough. “I can’t stop you.” He used the tone mothers use when they tell you, “Go ahead, ruin your life.” Mike cleared his throat. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather the kid is out of there when I talk to Simon Dean tomorrow. Everything’s calm now. No one’s overreacting. That doesn’t mean things will be calm five minutes from now.”

  Mike was going to Greenwich in the morning to reinterview Simon Dean and had made an appointment to talk with a lieutenant in the detective division of the Greenwich Police Department.

  “It’s a courtesy, to let him know I’m there,” he said. “I like to let interested parties know what’s going on. No Lone Ranger stuff for me.” Mike paused significantly. “Didn’t used to be for you either. Sometimes, going in is easy. Not so for getting out. I hope you have a plan if this goes wrong. I think they call it an exit strategy.” He lowered his voice. “Miss Morgan isn’t behind this, by any chance?”

  Ambler didn’t answer. Miss Morgan was tapping her foot and glowering at him.

  When he finished with Mike, Ambler made the call to Andrea. He told her he couldn’t explain now but needed to talk to her and would like to come out to Connecticut this evening.