Murder at the 42nd Street Library

by Con Lehane

  Benny stared straight ahead. He listened to Kay, not interrupting, not commenting. Ambler didn’t know how much he’d known about her past. From his dazed expression, you’d have to guess not much. They might still work things out. A lot of people have pasts they’d rather keep in the past. Better for Kay if some things had been left unsaid. But there it was.

  A few minutes later, standing in the hallway outside the crime fiction reading room, he watched them walk away, heads down, not speaking to each other. “A shill for my brother?” Max and Dominic Salerno brothers? He found Frank Robinson in the Milstein history and genealogy division room on the first floor. Frank had a sixth sense that pointed him in directions others couldn’t see, so he was often sought out by the amazing number of people searching for their roots.

  “It’s a follow-up, Frank. Adele did the research a couple of weeks ago. Something came up we didn’t think of.”

  Twenty minutes later, Frank Robinson called Ambler. “A great family tree—three generations of criminality, at least one felony conviction a generation, sometimes two or three. Dominic Salerno has a brother, Anthony, graduated from Fordham Prep, valedictorian, scholarship to Notre Dame. Didn’t graduate from Notre Dame. A Maximilian Wagner did.”

  * * *

  Ambler stared into the space in front of him. Of course, Emily! He’d half known it all along, sidetracked, blinded, because Dominic was a killer for hire and Emily a mother, because he couldn’t believe she’d kill her father. She’d practically told him, if not in words, by her reactions.

  He punched Mike Cosgrove’s number on his cell phone. He was uncomfortable calling him after all that had happened—with Denise and then Adele taking off with Johnny. Mike had a hard shell to begin with. It took years to develop any trust with him. Now, circumstances might have blown it all away.

  “I came up with the girl myself.” Mike’s tone was cooler, more formal, than it had been, not as stiff as it might be. “She had every reason to want revenge. And she wasn’t finished. That’s why she was killed. Friar Tuck in the next room could nail it down, but he won’t talk. My guess from the beginning was he saw the shooter. He wouldn’t come clean because she had too much on him.”

  “Harry didn’t kill Emily. He didn’t have any reason to. He was trying to help her. He told Adele—”

  “Oh?” Ambler could see Cosgrove’s eyebrows go up. “The fugitive? Is this the Adele we’re talking about? Don’t think I’m not going to lock her up when I find her.”

  “She’s keeping the boy safe, Mike. Emily killed the men who molested her. Max knew he was next. In all likelihood, years ago he had Dominic kill Laura Lee’s first husband. Max Wagner and Dominic Salerno are brothers.”

  “I didn’t see that one coming.” You didn’t often hear surprise in Mike’s voice. “Brothers, eh? I’ll look into it when I can get to it.”

  “It may not wait. Dominic might kill his brother because he killed Emily.”

  After a long pause, Mike said, “It’s not that I don’t respect your instincts on this. But what you have here is instinct, not proof. I have something else I’m trying out. Emily Yates killed the men who abused her, including her father. We both got that. And the priest, the ex-priest—”

  “Adele can tell you. It’s not true.”

  “Neither you nor Adele is high on my trust list right now. We have physical evidence on Larkin. And he’s the only one she actually accused of—”

  “What kind of physical evidence?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “It’s too soon for DNA.… Prints, right? You found his fingerprints. Harry was in Emily’s apartment. He was there a couple of times, once with me. Question Max Wagner.”

  “His brother Dominic is a gangster and you don’t like him, any other reason?”

  “Because he has a motive.”

  Cosgrove was silent for a moment. “Let’s say he does. Friar Tuck’s still the favorite. She tried to kill him.”

  “Harry isn’t going anywhere while you follow this up. And you might save Max’s life.”

  After another pause, “I’ll talk to him. That’s all. Any idea where he is?”

  “He should be at the library.” He gave Mike the address he had for Max and Laura Lee on the Upper West Side. “If he’s not here, he might be there.”

  When Ambler finished on the phone, he went to look for Max. He often worked in the Manuscripts and Archives reading room. The curator at the desk told him the Yates collection reader would come and go a few times a day, never staying long at one time. He tried the Berg reading room, also on the third floor, as well as both halls of the main reading room. Next, he checked the Frederick Lewis Allen Room on the second floor. On the first floor, he checked the periodical reading room. He was on the main staircase between the first and second floor when Laura Lee caught up with him. She grabbed his arm, a wild expression in her eyes, her face bloodless.

  “Have you seen Max?” Her question was simple. The way her eyes begged for an answer changed the question utterly.

  “No. Is something wrong?”

  “His brother—” She froze. She searched his face. It didn’t take her long. A flash of rage—or hate—narrowed her eyes. She understood he knew. Wasting no more time on him, she continued her dash up the stairs.

  Ambler returned to the crime fiction reading room and called Cosgrove’s cell phone to tell him Max and Dominic were in the library.

  “We’re not there yet,” Cosgrove said. “I got to clear up something before I can go after Dominic Salerno.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Internal stuff. It’s complicated. Stay away, like I told you. I’ll get after him as soon as I can.”

  “Could you get a warrant for Max Wagner?”

  “And what do I tell the judge to get a warrant—that you have a hunch he killed the girl? I’ve got to clear something. Damn it, Ray! Let me do my job.”

  When he disconnected, Ambler saw Benny and Kay in the hallway outside the crime fiction reading room and brought them in.

  “Laura Lee’s trying to stop Dominic before he kills Max,” Kay told him.

  “Where’s Max?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Call 911,” he told Benny. “Tell them a man with a gun is loose in the library.” He called Cosgrove and told him the situation had changed.

  “I’m on my way.”

  “We have to warn Max,” Kay said. Her face was a mask, the expression she wore when he first met her, the attitude she wore like a severely cut business suit.

  “It’s too late for that,” Ambler said, “and too dangerous. The police need to handle it now.”

  Benny put his arm around Kay. She slid out from under it. He stood back from her, seeming both surprised and embarrassed. “Why do you care, Kay?” His tone was sharp, irritated. “Let them work it out.”

  “You don’t understand.” Her eyes blinking rapidly gave her a look of uncertainty. “I’m not sure I understand myself.” Her glance went back and forth from Benny to Ambler. “I owe some loyalty to Max. Don’t I?”

  Ambler tried to sound sympathetic. He’d known Max a long time also. Like or dislike him, he didn’t want him murdered. If you could keep someone from being killed, you’d have to do that. “The police are on their way. Laura Lee is trying to warn him. If you know where he is, that’s one thing—but you don’t want to get in between him and Dominic.”

  Kay’s eyes locked on his, as she weighed what he said. For a few seconds, she seemed frozen in place and then she was out the door.

  “Where are you going?” Benny shouted after her.

  When she looked back at Benny, her eyes, wild, unhinged, she was already running, her heels echoing against the marble hallway. Benny ran after her.

  For a moment, Ambler watched the empty space in the doorway, not thinking but knowing what would happen, and what he would do now.

  Chapter 28

  Ambler hadn’t been in the stacks for months. Wending his way down the n
arrow, iron stairs from the third-floor reading room, he came to the top level, the seventh floor. The cast iron and Carnegie steel shelving stretched out before him for two city blocks, nearly a hundred miles of shelves.

  If Max holed up down here, he’d be safe. No one came down into the stacks except library staff. Benny would know how to get in. Laura Lee could probably charm her way in. Max couldn’t know for sure the police weren’t after him, though if he saw them taking Harry out of the library in handcuffs, he might think he had breathing room. Did he think Dominic would come after him?

  The Yates papers were part of the Manuscripts and Archives Division so they were stored under Bryant Park. The tunnel to those stacks was on the ground floor. Yates’s collection of first editions signed and inscribed by his writer friends, which Max had been going through, was shelved beneath the main reading room. He didn’t remember which level.

  As he made his way down the narrow stairway to the next lower level, he heard the unmistakable echoing report of a gunshot. Before the thought fully registered, another shot rang out. At the moment of the first shot, he felt a rush of adrenaline, a strange, physical sensation of something rushing through him—instinct, developed over millennia, took over.

  He paused in his steps down the stairs, his hand on the thin iron tubular railing. After the pause, he took another step and paused again. After each step, he paused, and after each pause, he stepped again. He could die if he kept going. Never before had he thought dying was imminent. Of course, he’d thought about dying but abstractly. Now he could be dead in a matter of minutes. A man with a gun was down in the stacks and he was walking toward him, thinking he had to do this, that it had become his duty to stop the shooting, so he kept going down the stairs and when he passed the sixth floor and was on his way down to the fifth level, he hollered, “Dominic!”

  “Ray!” It was Benny. “He’s got a gun. Go back up. He’s already shot—”

  Ambler dropped down the last few steps to the fifth level. The rows of shelves were close together, the concrete ceiling low, the aisles in all directions narrow, so it wouldn’t be so hard to dodge someone. He didn’t have a plan but crouched and maneuvered between the rows of shelving. He might distract Dominic and give Benny and Kay a chance to get out. Dodging between the rows of shelves, he might keep Dominic at bay until Cosgrove got there. He had the advantage of knowing help was coming. With that knowledge came hope and confidence. This moment might be why he’d practiced tai chi for twenty years. Yet, when push came to shove, he didn’t know if the tai chi moves he’d practiced for years would work if he had to disarm someone with a real gun and an intent to use it.

  Another shot rang out, amazingly loud again, the bullet pinging and clanging off the iron and steel of the bookshelves, probably embedding itself in a book. He wondered if one day he might hold up a bullet-pierced book at one of his lectures and recount the true-crime adventure that ended in a shootout in the stacks. More likely, someone other than him would hold up the bullet-pierced book and tell the audience how the 42nd Street Library lost its first crime fiction curator.

  It made no sense for him to be in the stacks dodging someone with a gun, but here he was, something inevitable in his moving forward. Shadows flickered among the rows of shelves, so he wasn’t the only one crouching and creeping among the stacks. He worked his way toward the farthest wall, where he expected to find someone who’d been shot, most likely Max. When he saw a body on the floor in the distance, he rushed toward it because it was moving. Turning into an aisle, he realized he was watching Laura Lee, scrabbling along the roughened floor like a crab.

  He heard a sound behind him and turned to see Dominic behind a pillar. Laura Lee crawled, barely moving, pulling herself with her hands and arms, dragging her legs, leaving a swath of blood on the floor behind her. Her breath made a gurgling sound. Something clicked behind him again, so he crouched and ran past Laura Lee and around the next iron pillar.

  The place was vaultlike, rows of iron pillars and tiers of steel shelving stretching out into the distance like an interminable cellblock. He ducked behind a second row of shelving, putting another aisle between Dominic and him. When he peered through a space between a row of books and the shelf above them, expecting to see Dominic creeping along the next aisle searching for him, he saw him kneeling on the floor next to Laura Lee.

  Bent over her, he spoke softly, in the sorrowful tone reserved for the time when you’re no longer being heard. “Why?” Ambler heard. “Why, Laura Lee?”

  When Dominic stood again, a gun in his right hand, down by his waist, his expression was different than Ambler had seen before. The cold, robotlike mask that showed no feeling was replaced by sadness that might even hold a strange brand of wisdom, the face of a man with a distasteful task in front of him; not one he’d chosen but something he’d have to complete.

  Dominic spoke softly as if whomever he addressed was not far away. “She’s dead, Max. That’s what you got out of this.” Lifting his head as if to speak to a larger audience farther away, he said, “Whoever else is down here, don’t get in my way. Lie down on the floor and stay put. This is me and Max. Nobody else.” Even louder, he hollered, “She’s dead, Max. You got that? Dead instead of you. You could’ve stood up like a man.”

  Intent on listening, Ambler didn’t realize Dominic had moved toward him while he spoke. When it was too late, he heard him—and saw the muzzle of his gun, a few feet away pointed at him through a shelf of books.

  “Stay right where you are, librarian.” Dominic came around the section of shelving holding his gun on Ambler. “Who else is down here?” Before Ambler could answer, he said, “Tell them to get down on the ground.”

  “Benny,” Ambler called. “You and Kay stay where you are. Lie down on the floor.”

  A moment of silence and then, “What about Max?” Kay Donnelly’s voice shook.

  Dominic flashed a look of exasperation at Ambler. “The guy’s a prick. You know him. Now, everyone wants to take a bullet for him. I don’t get it.” He took a breath and shouted. “What about Max is I’m going to kill him.”

  Ambler waited, not knowing what he waited for.

  “He’s got a gun, too, you know.” Dominic’s eyes were bright with heightened alertness. He seemed to ask for understanding … for forgiveness. No. Not forgiveness. He asked for permission, for Ambler to agree that killing Max was the right thing to do. Max murdered Emily and he had a gun, so you could concede a sort of law-west-of-the-Pecos logic to Dominic’s thinking.

  Risking his life to save Max from a deserved fate wouldn’t benefit humanity in any way he could imagine, yet he’d have to do what he could to save him. What that would be, he had no idea. Somewhere in his memory was a tai chi move designed to disarm an opponent with a weapon. Getting into the bow posture might help him remember how to do it, so he bent his knees and shifted his weight to see if anything came to him.

  Dominic would have to be close enough to him for him to reach the gun, which at the moment wasn’t the case. Next he’d have to grab the gun and spin to the side so the gun wasn’t pointed at him. Then twist his arm until the gun dropped. It was easy enough in the exercises, with a compliant teacher, likely to be different in real life, with a professional killer.

  Dominic noticed his change of stance. He took a step back and raised the gun. “It’s time for you get on the ground, librarian.” He pointed the gun at the floor to emphasize his point.

  “Do you want—” Ambler was trying to stall, when, out of the corner of his eye, through a gap in the bookshelves, he saw movement. His reaction, because it was instinctive, was unguarded.

  Dominic followed his gaze. “What was it?”

  “What?” Trying to distract Dominic wasn’t going to work. He tried anyway. “Do you want me to get down on the ground?”

  “What’d you see?” Dominic shifted his stance, trying to get a better look through the shelves and keep an eye on Ambler at the same time. He was bending this way and that, stoo
ping one second, standing taller the next, trying to see through the shelves, when a mournful cry, a sobbing wail of hopelessness and despair, shattered the silence of the tomblike stacks. A few seconds behind the wail, a single shot rang out close enough to be deafening.

  Dominic moved toward the sound, as if he had started toward the wail and was hurtled forward by the shot, his reaction unthinking, instinctive. Distracted, he allowed his arm, the arm holding the gun, to brush against Ambler. Ambler would think later that he too reacted unthinkingly, that Dominic’s arm with the gun brushing against him triggered a reaction that required no thought—that allowed for no thought.

  He grabbed Dominic’s wrist above the gun and twisted, at the same time turning on his waist and twisting Dominic’s arm in a circle and pulling him in the direction he was already going. He had his hand on the gun, on top of Dominic’s. It went off. He let go of the gun and spun on his right foot, completing a circle, and used the force of the spin to kick with his left leg, knocking Dominic’s legs out from under him. As Ambler spun onto the floor and Dominic fell, the gun went off again.

  And then stillness. For a second, he thought he was shot. When he realized he wasn’t, he looked at Dominic, lying still. Ambler didn’t move, letting the enormity of what had happened sink in. He began shaking. Somewhere, something made a sound. Next he heard a scream. Soon, the sounds of activity increased. He hadn’t moved from the spot on the floor in the narrow aisle he’d ended up in. He began to feel pain in his shin where it had met Dominic’s shin in his last kick, pain in his shoulder and in his hip. He should move, stand up, but he didn’t.