Murder at the 42nd Street Library

by Con Lehane

  He stopped to look at her and realized she was exhausted. The burst of energy from dinner was gone. She yawned. Her eyelids drooped. Her face became a child’s again, a child about to drift off to sleep. He hailed a cab.

  “Where are we going?” She hesitated next to the cab door he held open for her.

  “To my apartment. You can rest until I reach Adele.”

  Her face lit up, not gleeful, but close, as if she’d gotten something she secretly wished for. “Are you sure I won’t be too much trouble?” she asked politely, stepping into the cab.

  * * *

  Searching through her pockets as she ran down 52nd Street toward Ninth Avenue and the bright lights, Adele realized she’d left her phone in Emily’s apartment. She wanted desperately to call Raymond. She’d thought he’d follow her up to Emily’s apartment and didn’t understand why he hadn’t. She’d gotten away because Emily insisted. That wouldn’t keep Dominic from coming after her again when Emily wasn’t there to hold him back.

  She looked for a pay phone, something she hadn’t done in years. Apparently, no one else had either. They seemed to have disappeared, like typewriters. She headed toward her apartment, not that far away—she could call Raymond from there—until a realization stopped her. She searched her pockets with a growing sense of dread. Her phone and her keys were in the same little bag she’d dropped on Emily’s couch when she tried to slip out the phone while Dominic was in the kitchen with Emily. And the photos of her mother were on that phone, the last photos she’d taken, last summer at Gravesend before her mother got sick. She should have downloaded them before and she hadn’t. Now they were lost.

  She reached into her jeans back pocket. Thank God, her credit card was there. She flagged down a cab. She could try Raymond’s apartment. It was unlikely, but he might have gone home. A better possibility was the Library Tavern. Maybe he went there to wait for her. If he wasn’t there, McNulty would help her.

  * * *

  Ambler watched Denise falling asleep on his couch. She’d taken a shower and he’d given her a pair of pajamas to wear. For a few minutes, she pretended she wasn’t tired, but her eyes closed as she talked, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Now, she lay curled up on the couch, swallowed up by the pajamas, a sheet, and a blanket, her features relaxed, eye shadow and liner and lipstick scrubbed off in the shower. Her pink, scrubbed face was peaceful and pretty, in repose.

  Sitting in an easy chair across from her thinking about children growing into adults, he remembered his son John, a small boy growing into a bigger boy, and one day a stranger, neither man nor boy but a creature, ungainly and uncertain, in between. The most shocking changes weren’t physical. It was that this person you once carried in your arms and bounced on your knee, whose dependence for so long was absolute, had grown into someone independent of you.

  The phone rang.

  “Where have you been?” he said when he heard Adele’s voice. “Are you all right?”

  “Where have you been?!” she shot back. “I need you to come with me right now.”

  He explained why he couldn’t.

  “You’re in your apartment with a runaway thirteen-year-old girl. Are you crazy? Have you called her father?”

  “I told her I wouldn’t until she said it was okay. I was waiting for you. I tried to call. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “No reason, really … except maybe I was being murdered!!” She told him about Dominic at Emily’s apartment. “I think he wanted to do away with me. She wouldn’t let him. I swear looking into his eyes was like staring at death.”

  “You got out of there, right? You’re safe.”

  “Yes. But I have to go back. My mother’s photos are on my phone, Raymond. I have to get it.”

  “You don’t have to get it now. You can get the phone later when this is over.”

  “What if they’re not there? What if the phone gets lost or broken? They’ll be gone forever.”

  Ambler tried calming her. She grieved for her mother. She was impulsive to begin with and now she was irrational, at least about her mother. She wasn’t to be dissuaded.

  “I need to go. If you care so much, you’ll come with me.”

  “I can’t. I have Denise here.”

  “Send her home and come and help me.” She sounded panicked.

  He felt panic rising in him also. He looked at Denise. “You come over here and stay with her. I’ll go get Emily and your phone.”

  “No. I have to go. Let me talk to the girl.”

  “She’s asleep on my couch.”

  “It doesn’t look good anyway, Raymond. What are you doing alone in your apartment with a young girl?” Her tone was nasty and suggestive.

  He ran his hands through his hair. “Let me think for a minute, Adele.”

  “No. I’m going to go.”

  “Don’t go alone.”

  “I’ll ask McNulty.”

  “Please wait for me.”

  “No.”

  * * *

  Sometime later—he wasn’t sure how long—his phone rang. It was Benny.

  “Your friend, the cop, the girl’s father, is here. He knows she was here. He passed out but won’t go to the hospital.”

  “Did you tell him Denise is safe?”

  “I did. Not good enough.”

  “Tell him Denise is with me.”

  “No. She told me she doesn’t want to go home. Sometimes, home is the worst place for a kid. You don’t know why she left. If the kids can’t trust us, they can’t trust anyone, so then what happens to them?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Let me talk to him.”

  “If you tell him without asking her, you’re violating her trust. You shouldn’t have taken the responsibility if you were going to do that.”

  “Okay. I’ll ask her.”

  * * *

  Mike Cosgrove worked to get his body under control. He didn’t treat it very well, rich food, too much wine, not enough exercise. But it never let him down like this. And he wasn’t going to let it give out on him now. He heard Benny talking on the phone, and he was sure he was talking about Denise. The last thing he heard sent a chill through him. It sounded like, “Okay, Ray.”

  Of course, it made sense. Ray was protecting Benny. He’d protect Ray. He couldn’t believe Ray would help Denise hide out. They hadn’t seen each other in years. Right? Of course it was right. All this crap with sex and teenage girls was driving him nuts. He sat up.

  An EMS technician stood over him, pushed him back down to a prone position. He was hooked to an IV line and had already refused to go to the hospital.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Let me get up.”

  “Sure, you’re okay … taking a little nap on the floor.” The EMS tech was a short, stocky black guy with a West Indian lilt to his voice but a no-nonsense tone.

  “I’m okay now.”

  “You lie there until I tell you. I need this IV to finish. Your blood pressure too low.”

  “Then I can get up?” He felt foolish asking permission.

  “We’ll see, man.”

  When the IV was disconnected, Cosgrove waited a few minutes for his head to clear. He dialed Ray’s number.

  * * *

  “What’s up?” he said when Ray answered. “You’ve been calling.”

  “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  Cosgrove took a deep breath.

  “We’ve found Emily Yates.” Ambler told the detective about Adele discovering Emily Smith’s true identity, about Dominic, and about James Donnelly’s briefcase in Emily Yates’s apartment. “She had an explanation for why it’s there. I’m not sure I believe her—”

  Cosgrove cut him off. “You’ve been holding back a lot. You better hope it doesn’t come back to bite you.”

  Something was off with Cosgrove’s voice. It was strained, tight, under pressure, holding in a barely controlled rage. Ambler was beside himself with discomfort. He knew the strain Mike felt. He was a father, too, and remembered the agonized, he
lpless sorrow and rage he felt when his son began running away. He could save Mike a lot of heartache. But he needed to wake Denise and tell her before he told Mike.

  “Look. Give me a minute. I’ll call you right back. I have to do something.”

  Cosgrove tried to control his tone of voice, but Ambler could hear the rage seeping through. “Your guy is Dominic Salerno.”

  “And?”

  “You’re right he’s mobbed up. You’re wrong in making him for the murders—Donnelly and Nelson Yates. He was somewhere else. He’s accounted for.”

  “That changes things,” Ray said. “Emily might be telling the truth about the briefcase. Or, if she isn’t—”

  “Do you have anything else to tell me?” Cosgrove interrupted.

  “No. I need to call you back.” He hung up.

  Chapter 25

  “I close when I want,” McNulty said. “It’s busy, I stay open. It’s slow, I close.”

  “You’ll come with me?” Adele had that look of pleading innocence. You could put up with it from a pretty woman if there was a chance you’d sleep with her. The thing was he wasn’t going to sleep with Adele. So why he thought he needed to put on a Sir Galahad or Sir Lancelot or Sir whoever-the-fuck-it-was act, was something he’d go over with his shrink—or more likely with Marcelo over a martini at the Oyster Bar.

  No one buzzed them in at the apartment Adele took him to. They stood in the vestibule inside the street-level door while she rang the bell a second and then a third time. “I’m scared,” she said. She didn’t have to tell him. The fear was etched into her face.

  He went back to the street. It was too late to start pushing doorbells and too late to hang around expecting to follow someone who opens the door. There should be a super because there was a pipe for steam heat at the end of the hallway; steam required a boiler, which required a stationary engineer. No super was listed on the register they were looking at. These walk-ups a lot of time ran in packs—one super for three or four of them. He went toward Tenth Avenue checking a few doorways; then came back toward Ninth Avenue checking a couple more. In the third doorway, he found a bell for a super. Pushing it would produce one pissed-off guy, who probably wouldn’t speak English, but— He pushed the bell and held it, waited a few seconds, pushed it again and held it longer.

  The panel of bells and mailboxes, like the others on the block, didn’t have an intercom system. Most of the time, supers lived on the first floor, if not in the basement with their boilers. He was about to push the bell for a third time when a strip of light appeared under a door at the back of the first-floor hallway. A minute later, a grizzled old gent, short and stocky, wearing a Knick shirt and boxer shorts came shuffling along the hallway toward him.

  After a lot of muttering and what was undoubtedly cursing in Spanish, the super went for his keys and a pair of pants. They found Adele standing in front of the door to Emily’s building.

  “I told him she was sick, might be passed out. You’re her sister. She called you. I’m your husband.” He watched the super go through his stack of keys at an agonizingly slow pace, trying one after the other in the lock of the downstairs door. “I don’t know why I bothered making up a story. He didn’t understand half of it. But there you go.” McNulty gritted his teeth watching the guy’s stumbling efforts with the keys. “You’d think he’d know how to get into his own fucking building.”

  With the door finally open, they followed him up the stairs. On the way up, he said a couple of things back over his shoulder that McNulty didn’t catch. Years of working with Salvadoran and Dominican kitchen workers and bar-backs taught him the secret was to nod and either smile or grimace depending on the other guy’s expression. This one called for grimacing. At Emily’s door, the super knocked a couple of times and began the ritual of the keys again. This time, the results came more quickly.

  The lights were on in most of the rooms of the apartment, except toward the back where it was dark. Adele called Emily’s name and then again louder. Silence was the answer. She took a few steps in. The entryway to the apartment had a half wall that blocked the view of the interior of the apartment. She peered around the wall and screamed, frozen where she stood. When the screams became a whimper, she put her fist to her mouth and ran into the apartment. McNulty followed a couple of steps behind, turning the corner in time to see Adele fall to her knees in front of the couch where a woman lay.

  Her position was unnatural; her neck extended in a way that seemed impossible, her head lolling off the cushion inches above the floor, her face toward them; her expression was peaceful; her eyes open and red where they should be white. No marks on her head or neck. A pillow lay beside her.

  Adele lifted the woman’s head so that it rested on the arm of the couch and stroked her hair, softly speaking her name, Emily. McNulty stood over her. The super came far enough into the room to see the body on the couch and no farther.

  Adele sat up and screeched, “Johnny.” Jumping to her feet, she ran to the back of the apartment. In a few seconds, she came out of the darkness ran into the kitchen, and then back to where McNulty stood watching her. She grabbed the front of his jacket with both hands.

  “He’s not here.” She wailed into his face.

  He looked into unseeing eyes. “You gotta stop. Calm down, Adele! Where’s your phone?”

  She stood face-to-face with him for a moment as her eyes began to focus. “It’s here,” she said. “It’s here somewhere.… I left it here.” She began tearing around the apartment. McNulty ran behind her trying to grab her. Finally, he half-tackled her and held her pressed against the kitchen wall.

  “You can’t touch anything. You gotta stay still.”

  “My phone’s gone. Johnny’s gone. My wallet. My keys.”

  McNulty held her against the wall with one arm, and hollered and gestured to the super, asking for a phone. Luckily, he had one. McNulty dialed 911.

  When he finished with the 911 dispatcher, he asked Adele if she knew Ambler’s phone number. She gave it to him and he called.

  “McNulty?” Ambler said when he finally caught on to who was calling.

  “Bad news, Ray. This girl is dead.”

  “What girl?”

  “I think her name is Emily.” He told Ambler where they were and what they’d found. “The cops are on their way.”

  “The boy? What about the boy, Johnny?”

  “He seems to be missing.”

  “Missing? Is Adele there?”

  “She’s not in very good shape.” He still held her against the wall; she breathed in short gasps like a trapped animal but grabbed for the phone, so he handed it to her.

  She talked for a minute or two, telling Ray the same things he’d already told him.

  “Raymond said we should search the stairwells,” Adele said. “Johnny might be hiding somewhere.”

  “Would he go to someone’s apartment? I’ll check the stairwells. You wait for the cops. Tell them. It’s better if they go knocking on doors than if we do.”

  Ambler had been about to wake Denise when McNutty called.Hanging up the phone, he sat for a long time despairing. He pictured Emily, how fearful and vulnerable she was, the desperation that seemed a permanent part of her, as if she’d seen death and had her own appointment in Samarra. He was a fool—a damn fool. He knew she’d be killed, as he knew her father would be.

  He paced the small living room, unable to shake loose the picture of doomed Emily, cold and dead, as she seemed to know she would be. He should have stopped it. He shouldn’t have left her alone. He didn’t care what she did. He shouldn’t have let her die. He’d set out to stop a murder before it happened, and he couldn’t do it. Instead of following his instinct, he analyzed this and theorized that. Adele told him Emily Smith was Emily Yates. He knew in his gut she was right. If he’d only—. He let out a sarcastic laugh, mocking himself. Stopping in front of his bookcase, he took down his worn copy of Martin Innes’s Investigating Murder. He looked at it for a moment, and then f
lung it, slamming it hard against the far wall.

  The bang of the book against the wall, like a loud backfire, woke Denise. She sat up, startled, her eyes wide with fear. Wrapped in blankets and pajamas three sizes too large for her, a patch of her dark hair sticking straight up on top of her head, she looked childish and fragile and vulnerable.

  He went and sat on the couch beside her. “Sorry,” he said. “I was mad. I threw a book.”

  “Mad at me?” Her voice was small.

  “Not at you,” he said gently. “At me.”

  She yawned, reaching up to loop her arm around his neck, pulling his face down against hers. “Thank you so much,” she whispered and lay back down, asleep before he pulled the blanket back over her. He’d wake her soon enough.

  * * *

  The detective who’d been talking to Raymond and Dominic on the street a couple of hours earlier barged in a few minutes later, as did what seemed like a hundred other people who did whatever official people do when someone is dead—murdered. Tons of equipment that seemed unnecessary and intrusive—lights, cameras, people with leather bags like doctors once carried, people with big metal cases—too much of everything and too many people bumping into one another, pushing someone else out of the way; the scene was eerie, grotesque, sad, and depressing, as if the person who died was a specimen, part of an experiment.

  The detective—Ford—said how hard this must be for her, and he was sorry but he needed to ask her some questions. Once the grilling began, she didn’t believe he was sorry at all. He didn’t care about who was dead. He didn’t miss Emily. He wasn’t shocked and sad he wouldn’t see her anymore. He wanted to catch whoever killed her. That’s what he wanted. It was a challenge. Something he needed to do, like climb a mountain. He was calm and calculating and unfeeling, like a machine, and eager to get going on his quest. She didn’t like him.

  “I told you everything that happened,” she said, when he began asking questions about what she’d already told him. “I want to go look for Johnny.”

  “The patrols will be looking for him. Can you tell me about the boy’s relationship with his mother?”