by Con Lehane
“I know who you are, Mrs. Young. I should have told you. I know you’re a member of the library’s Board of Trustees.”
Her lips curled in a wry smile. “Is this a fortuitous accident, meeting me here, or have you been following me?”
“I recognized you when you came through the door. I knew you’d be here.”
“How did you know that?”
He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“I’ll get to the bottom of it.” She looked him full in the face for a moment while she sipped from her drink. “So you tracked me down. You’re a man on a mission. What’s the mission?”
He told her about the plan to close the reading room and integrate the crime fiction into the overall library collection.
She knew about the plan to make overall changes to the library but hadn’t known about the changes to the crime fiction collection, or even that there was a crime fiction collection. He debated telling her he knew she’d funded the Yates acquisition. Telling her would betray both Harry and Adele, so he hesitated. Finally, he said, “I’m going to level with you.”
She smiled mischievously. “Think twice. That might be dangerous.”
He did think twice. It was dangerous. He went ahead anyway. “What coincided with the murders we were talking about was the library’s acquisition of the Nelson Yates papers—”
Her change in expression gave her away. She knew what was coming. “Go on. Are you reluctant to tell me what you know?”
“Yes.”
Something ominous flickered through her eyes. “You’re not waiting for me to help you, are you?”
“I think I am.”
“Don’t falter now, Mr. Ambler. You’ve been brave, if foolhardy; see it through.”
So he did. “What prompted you to make the donation? Why the Yates collection?”
The guarded expression was firmly in place. “It’s none of your business why and unethical for you to even know about it.” Her tone was biting, her eyes as cold as marble. No matter what else they did, the rich knew how to pull rank when they needed to.
“I’m not going to tell anyone. I want your help.”
“I know who told you.”
“It wasn’t Harry. I found out by accident. You came to Nelson Yates’s memorial service. I was curious.”
“You’re investigating me?”
“No. No. Your secret is safe.”
Her eyes didn’t focus so well when she looked at him. “My secrets are safe. Do you think so?” She smiled, a pleasant and dreamy smile. “Now, sir. I must go. Please ask the bartender to arrange for a cab.”
When he thought about it later, he realized he’d made a mess of his dealings with Lisa Young. He didn’t find out anything that would help Cosgrove, and he didn’t win her support for the reading room. He told her more than he should have and probably cost the library a patron it couldn’t afford to lose—so much for putting your cards on the table. Undercover work wasn’t for him; he needed to become a better liar. McNulty told him telling the truth was overrated. The difficult part would be telling Adele what he’d done.
* * *
“It’s water over the dam, now,” Adele said the next morning. She thought about saying more; he could see it in her eyes, the anger—worse, the disappointment. “I’m going to light into Mike Cosgrove for putting you up to this, and I’m going to kill McNulty the next time I see him. He and his bartender cronies are a bunch of busybodies. And I really don’t want to be around when Harry finds out you told her you know about the donation.”
When Ambler got back to his desk, he found a message taped to his computer asking him to come to Harry’s office. He stared at it for a long moment. Well, it had to come sometime, but he didn’t think it would be this quickly. He braced for battle and wasn’t all that surprised to find Lisa Young sitting in the chair in front of Harry’s desk, where not long ago Nelson Yates sat after a similar summons from Harry—the conversation that began this trip down the rabbit hole.
“I believe you know Mrs. Young.” Harry smiled. “Pull up that chair and join us. We were talking about you.”
Ambler looked at the two faces smiling back at him. He didn’t know what was coming but chose to take it standing up.
“Mrs. Young is concerned about the closing of the crime fiction reading room. I thought it best if she spoke to you.”
Her eyes fastened onto Ambler’s, her expression mischievous; the shy, bold look from the night before was back. “I’m meeting with the library president in a few minutes and would like to take you to lunch after that, around two.”
He waited for the rest but nothing came. Puzzled, he kept his eyes glued to hers, until she winked. After she stood and shook hands with each of them, she left. Ambler made for the door right behind her.
Harry called him back. “Can we talk for a minute, Ray?” His tone was pleasant, with an ominous undertone.
Ambler halted.
“Sit down. This might take a few minutes.”
This time, Ambler sat. Since he had no idea what went on between Harry and Lisa Young, he hoped Harry would tell him.
“I’d like to know what you discussed with Mrs. Young.”
“I met her by accident.” He’d expected to go in and blurt out the whole truth because Harry would have already heard Lisa Young’s side. Now, her smiles and winks threw him off. “What did she tell you?”
“Never mind what she told me. What did you tell her?”
Clearly, Harry’s cheerfulness and goodwill had been for Lisa Young’s benefit.
“I wanted her to help keep the reading room open.”
“Did she say anything about the Yates collection?”
This was the question he dreaded, the moment of truth … or the moment of falsity. “About the Yates collection?”
“The papers.”
“The papers?”
“The Yates papers.” Harry was about to explode.
“Why are you yelling?”
He was being evasive. Harry had to know that, but he didn’t come in for the kill. He wasn’t built to browbeat, threaten, keep others in the dark, hide his motives, distrust everyone; the pain of doing so was in his eyes. “You don’t want that woman as an adversary, Ray. Be careful.”
Chapter 15
“You need to ditch that library woman.”
“I like her. She’s a friend. I can’t remember the last time I had a girlfriend. That’s what normal women do. They have friends and hang out and talk about clothes, and have lunch and talk about what assholes men are.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “She has a crush on that library guy you had a run in with. He’s too dumb to notice.”
“I told you before. You get close to people; you let your guard down. Next thing, you tell ’em somethin’.” Dominic shook his head.
“It’s not like that. It’s a coincidence she works at the library. She moved into the neighborhood. She doesn’t know anybody. She don’t have any kids. She wants to have a kid, so she sort of took up with Johnny. She’s a do-gooder. So what?”
“I saw her on the street. She was watchin’ your apartment.”
“So what? She lives in the neighborhood. She was probably seeing if Johnny was out.”
“If she doesn’t know who you are already, she’s going to figure it out.”
Dominic picked up the leather shoulder bag next to the chair he was sitting in. He pulled a packet of the letters from the bag. “You got these now. Isn’t that enough? The library’s not going to have them. Max won’t get his hands on them.”
He reached for her hand. She let him hold it but left it limp and didn’t move closer to him. Instead she cocked a hip, a stance like a teenager who’s heard it all before.
“Why don’t we go away for a while? Let this blow over. You could find someplace for the runt. We could have some fun. I got money comin’.”
Her expression softened. “We tried that before, Dom. We can’t take more than a couple of days together. We neve
r could. And I won’t leave Johnny with anyone, for a short time or a long time.”
When Dominic left, Emily finished one beer and got another from the refrigerator. Johnny would be home from school soon, so she started to straighten things up a bit, wash the breakfast dishes, throw away the beer bottles from last night. She got a few things done, stopping when she found a vodka bottle that had a couple of drinks left in it. She got the orange juice from the fridge and sat down with the pile of letters Dominic had left on the table. She was half-drunk and reading the letters when she heard Johnny on the stairs. She stuffed the letters back into the bag and wiped her tears.
* * *
The Donnelly woman was so nervous she made Cosgrove jittery, like the Jesuit, a nervous wreck. In this line of work, you got used to giving people the jitters. Lots of people have something to hide and are afraid it will come out when the police get into their business. Even so, usually the folks who got nervous and jittery were not the ones to worry about. The sure-of-themselves, never-get-rattled folks who swindled widows and orphans, robbed poor boxes, or murdered their families could lie without a drop of sweat.
Ed Ford turned up something on James Donnelly. It looked like he had a thing for young girls. A couple of times at the college, there’d been complaints about inappropriate behavior with a student. No one pressed charges. The college had no record of any discipline or even a warning. They expunged the names of the students.
Cop logic said if Donnelly got caught twice he’d done it more times when he didn’t get caught. If someone took him out because of one of those liaisons, it would be hell to try to find out who. Go back through eighteen or twenty years of students to find someone who remembers one of the incidents? Ford talked with current students who thought him creepy, but nothing inappropriate, nothing concrete. Something wasn’t right with the guy. Still, it would be a lot less work if the ex-wife turned out to be the killer.
He could make a case for it under the hate-my-ex exclusion, if nothing else. The problem was how to connect her to Yates—he could as easily have pulled in a bum off the street as his suspect—nothing at all, until the skirmish at the funeral. A conversation with the widow the next day confirmed what he’d guessed. You never can tell about these bookworm types once they take off their glasses and let their hair down.
Kay Donnelly sat stiffly in a forbidding-looking wing chair in the sparsely furnished sitting room of the austere and lifeless woman’s residence where she was staying. She acted like she expected him to attach electrodes and administer electric shocks if she didn’t answer his questions the way he wanted. With those big brown eyes staring up at him, and this demure woman shrinking back from him, he felt like a thug.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said. “My lawyer said I could ask for him to be present.”
Cosgrove looked her directly in the eye. “You could. It’s up to you. We could go downtown, give him a call, and talk there. I want to ask about Nelson Yates. Do you need your lawyer to tell me about that?”
Her eyes blazed. “There’s nothing to talk about. Whatever you think happened is a figment of that deranged woman’s imagination.”
“You spent time with him not so long ago, she said, visited him at their apartment in New York.”
“A few years ago, Max wanted to do an article on Nelson. Nelson wouldn’t talk to him—some falling out in the past—so he sent me. I talked with him, interviewed him. It was an assignment. I can show you the notes from the interviews.”
“Why would Mrs. Yates think you were sleeping with her husband?”
“Because she’s paranoid and delusional—jealous. She married a philanderer. He was married when he took up with her. What did she think was going to happen?
“He made passes at me during the interview. I had to finesse my way out of a number of awkward situations, without making him angry enough to end the interview. On one of those passes, he trapped me on the couch. He had my dress up and had gotten his hand between my legs when his wife opened the door. I should have bashed him between the eyes. I didn’t. I giggled like a schoolgirl. She blew up, so I left them to fight it out.”
She looked up at Cosgrove. “I suppose I shouldn’t have told you this. My lawyer warned me you’d twist whatever I told you to make me seem guilty.”
“Did I?”
“No. Not yet. I assume you will … or I think you might.” Her expression was an entreaty, her voice small. “I hope you won’t.” She shook her head. “I’m so easy to take advantage of.”
Cosgrove hesitated. Was that an invitation? He told himself it wasn’t. She looked down at her hands in her lap as she spoke and seemed to be talking to herself. So what did it mean? He was falling for this innocence act like a novice. What the hell was happening to him? Twenty years on the job, and he’s turning into Tinker Bell. He took a moment to look at his notebook. “You didn’t like Nelson Yates.”
She looked up, speaking softly, no inflection. “He was a good writer. Personally, he was a fraud. I found him disgusting. But I didn’t hate him. A giant ego, an insatiable appetite for sex, even as an old man, no wonder Mary hated him. He abused her.”
“Abused her?”
“Not physically, psychologically. He acted like she was stupid, like she’d been inflicted on him and he had to put up with her. He demeaned and embarrassed her.”
“As he did you?”
“He didn’t embarrass me. I embarrassed myself.” She raised her gaze to look into his eyes. He didn’t like what he saw in hers, defeat; she’d rolled over, belly up, was at his mercy.
He had other questions but decided to wait. He could bear down on her. She was exposed, vulnerable, shame weakening her defenses. He didn’t have enough on her to do that. She might give something up. On the other hand, she might not have anything left to give, and he’d leave her there a wreck for no good reason. She’d brought Mary Yates into sharper focus. Maybe it was guile, raising suspicion about the woman’s jealousy. Maybe. You couldn’t tell. He’d have to look into it.
* * *
“So…” Lisa Young took Ambler to the Algonquin for lunch. She seemed at home in the elegant dining room, the maître d’ welcoming her without being familiar, calling her by her married name, leading them to a table. Ambler suspected the elegant dining room, the trappings of luxury were meant to intimidate him.
“If you think I’m wondering what you’re up to, you’re right,” he said when they were seated.
“I’m a woman of contradictions. As you find out more about me—as I’m sure you intend to—you’ll see what I mean.”
“I will?”
The waiter appeared. She ordered a romaine salad with poached shrimp, Ambler a twenty-two-dollar cheeseburger. When the waiter left with their order, she sat back and smiled. “So you’re not only a curator of things detective, but an actual detective, a counterpart of your fictional heroes.”
Ambler sipped from his water glass; it was stemware with a slice of lemon floating in it. “I want to know who killed Nelson Yates, if that’s what you mean.”
Her face brightened. “You think I know who killed him?”
“Did you know him?”
She folded her hands beneath her chin and leaned on them. “Do you think I know who killed Nelson Yates because I made a donation to the library?”
“Why did you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Do you have something to hide?”
“I don’t need anything to hide to tell you something is none of your business.” She wasn’t angry. She was cheerful, beaming. When she lowered her hands to the table in front of her, the fingers she folded around one another were long and elegant. “Suppose we talk about you? What do you get out of snooping?”
It was a good question. What did he get out of it? He didn’t believe justice necessarily prevailed in a criminal case or anywhere else in life. He didn’t care for investigative work; much of it was routine, the outcome depending on luck more often than
not. What interested him was why: the level of desperation that makes someone murder and the missteps and misfortunes that make someone else a killer’s victim, the twists and turns of life’s paths that bring them together, this was what interested him. In unraveling all that, outing the murderer, so to speak, was almost a byproduct.
“When I first solved a crime, it was because I saw through something. I saw a murder where most others thought they’d seen an accident. Proving the truth of that was a kind of arrogance,” he told her. “Later, I thought if I could solve a crime, understand why a murder happened, I might stop another murder.” What he couldn’t do was find the words to tell her he did what he did in some part to atone for what his son had done, and what he had done to his son.
She folded her manicured fingers under her chin and leaned on her hands, watching him as if he were about to do something entertaining. “And what do you find? Why do people kill?”
Despite her expression, which might be skeptical, he wanted her to understand. “Sometimes, it’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time; other times, a split-second choice, an impulsive act followed by a lifetime of regret. There are calculated, cold murders—for benefit, financial or otherwise; murders from hatred or rage, for slights real or imagined; some people murder because it’s their job. Others, I guess, are the sad ones, from pain … of betrayal, unrequited love, or love that’s too intense to bear.”
Her expression became wistful as she listened. She seemed to acknowledge his seriousness and lowered her gaze. “I wonder if someone might commit a crime as bad or worse than murder and the punishment would be simply having to live with it.”
He watched the waiter deliver his hamburger—large enough to feed a family of four—and found himself growing angry at this regal dining room with its white tablecloths, wood paneling, wall paintings, and oriental rugs, men in tailored pinstriped suits clinking silverware against china plates and sipping from crystal goblets, people with a sense of entitlement.
“I’m a person of wealth and privilege,” she said, as if she read his thoughts. “I’m not especially proud of it. I didn’t do anything to deserve it.” Ambler searched her face. Impassive, inscrutable, this wasn’t a confession. She was a self-assured woman. He didn’t understand what she was getting at.
