by Con Lehane
“What do you know about Shannon, Brian?” Adele asked. “Do you know we think that’s not her real name?”
He held up his hand, cutting her off. “I know who she is.” Something had changed in McNulty. Never jovial, often dour, he’d never been hail-fellow-well-met, yet there’d been something about him, a chuckle behind the grumble, a twinkle behind the jaded glance. Not now. He’d developed the calculating manner of the insecure, the hesitant movement of the hunted, ready to run or duck for cover at any moment. “In some ways, I misunderstood. Maybe I was misled.”
To Ambler, McNulty was answering another question entirely from the one Adele asked him.
“I might do it differently if I had it to do over. I thought she wanted something different than she wanted. She let me think that. You’d have to see that as deceit. She let me think … well, she let me because she needed something from me. She may not have meant to mislead me. She was desperate. Probably she’d gotten used to being that way so it came naturally. She wouldn’t realize that’s what she was doing. I thought one thing, realized it wasn’t what she thought at all. By then, I was caught up in it, caught up in her. Now who knows what will happen?”
In the silence, McNulty stewed in his thoughts. Ambler let him stew. After a moment, McNulty shook his head. “She makes things up. I don’t know if she’s brilliant or crazy. She didn’t kill the man in her hotel room. She knows who did.”
“She’s protecting the murderer. You’re protecting her. Why?” Amber didn’t like McNulty’s thinking.
McNulty looked at him steadily. “I’m asking you to find the killer.”
“If she’s who I think she is, she’s married.” Ambler told McNulty he’d found Simon Dean.
McNulty wasn’t surprised. He knew. “Did you tell the police?”
“Not yet. She has a little girl, a daughter.” Ambler didn’t intend what he said as an accusation. The words had a power of their own.
“She’s not going to leave the kid.”
Ambler’s impatience got the best of him. What in hell was McNulty doing? This woman he was with was a menace.
“Brian,” Adele spoke for him, “you’re not making sense. Have you thought ahead? Where do you go with Shannon or whoever she is? Even if everything works out. Someone is arrested for the murder—and it isn’t her—where do you go? Do you want to take her away from her husband, from her little girl?”
Ambler hoped for a response he knew wasn’t coming. Sheepish and apologetic weren’t qualities you found in McNulty. This was a guy who took care of problems himself without asking for help. He might do favors. He might accept a favor. He didn’t ask for one. It didn’t take much to get his back up. “I thought you’d look into this,” he said to Ambler. “You don’t want to do that, give me back those copies.”
Ambler turned to Adele for help.
“We do want to help—you,” she said. “She’s using you. She might be tricking you.”
McNulty’s eyes closed for a moment. When he opened them, some part of his old self was back. “I don’t know from one minute to the next what’s going to happen. I may not be alive five minutes after I walk out that door.” The twinkle was back. He pursed his lip. “I won’t put you on the spot, Ray.” He reached for the pages he’d given to Ambler. “I’ll look into some of this myself. I should’ve done that in the first place. It’s not right to get you tangled up in it.”
Ambler released the small stack of papers. McNulty wouldn’t ask any more of him. You could see his embarrassment. For a few more seconds, they sat not talking. As McNulty stood to leave, Ambler fought back the urge to ask him to wait, to try to find another way to look at things. McNulty might have wanted to say something also, as did Adele. In the end, no one said anything, and he was gone.
Ambler and Adele sat together in silence for a while longer. Ambler got them both another beer, and the mugs sat in front of them untouched.
“He looked so alone,” Adele said, watching the space in the doorway where they’d last seen McNulty.
Already, Ambler regretted turning McNulty down. So what if he checked up on a few men McNulty told him about who for whatever reason were listed in Shannon’s journal?
“Are you going to tell Mike Cosgrove what you found out about Shannon? About her husband?” Adele’s tone was somber.
“I want to think about all of this before I do. There’s no hurry. Her husband doesn’t know where she is.”
Ambler and Johnny had dinner that night at Adele’s apartment. Johnny watched TV while Ambler and Adele talked.
“You’re moping because you didn’t help McNulty look for those men, aren’t you?” Adele didn’t wait for an answer. “He shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing. Even he knows that. So he shouldn’t ask us—well, shouldn’t ask you—to help.”
She was trying to make him feel better. She’d thought they should help McNulty and she knew Ambler was wrong to turn him down. He saw it in her face at the time, yet she didn’t disagree when he said no. She didn’t criticize him. She’d let him figure out he’d been wrong, and she wouldn’t tell him then she knew all along he was wrong. “McNulty needed help. I let him down. He wouldn’t have let me down. He wouldn’t let you down.”
Adele nodded, sadness in her dark eyes. “Everything is terrible, isn’t it?”
They ate pasta and talked with Johnny about school and—of more interest to him—his training sessions with Lola, his finally named dog who at the moment was gnawing on one of Adele’s chair legs.
“Could you get her to stop doing that?” Ambler said.
“Doing what?”
“Chewing on the chair.”
“Watch,” Johnny leaned over toward the dog. “Lola! Place. Go to your place.”
The dog, responding to the tone of his voice, tilted her head to look at him.
“Go to your place!” Johnny said louder.
The dog continued to watch him, tilting her head.
“Lola!” he shouted, rising from his chair.
Adele said softly, “She doesn’t know where her place is in my apartment.”
“Right,” said Johnny, bending down to pat Lola on her head.
Adele appraised the dog. “Do you think she’s going to stop growing soon?”
Ambler smiled weakly. “She’ll have to or we’ll need to rent a stall for her somewhere.”
Late that night, after Johnny had gone to sleep, Ambler’s cell phone rang. In the stillness of the night, the ring sounded ominous.
He grabbed the phone. “Yes?”
“Ray?”
“Mike?”
“I got bad news.” Mike wasn’t one to hem and haw, yet he did this time. “Your friend, the bartender … There’s been a murder. He’s a suspect.”
Ambler took a moment to absorb what he heard. “I know about the murder. I didn’t know he’d become a suspect. Why McNulty?”
“That’s not it.… The victim is a woman. At a hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, around midnight tonight. I got a call because I’d put out a BOLO on the bartender. He was registered under his own name, with a Mrs. McNulty.”
“You think it’s Shannon. You think McNulty killed her?”
“Is he married?”
“He has an ex-wife and a son.”
“I’m driving up to Connecticut in the morning. I won’t bring you into it unless I have to. I trust you don’t know anything you haven’t told me.” Accusation hung in the silence.
After talking to Mike, Ambler was numb. He didn’t tell Mike he’d spoken to McNulty a few hours before. He didn’t tell Mike about his talk with Simon Dean either. Nor did he tell Mike about a list of names McNulty tried to give him. Tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, he’d tell Mike what he knew. There was no reason not to. Mike might have some information for him, too. Nothing the police kept under wraps. Mike wouldn’t invite Ambler or anyone else into police business—as he hadn’t told Ambler about the BOLO, that he had a Be On (the) Lookout bulletin for McNulty. Still, he might let on
how the Connecticut police saw the case.
Ambler had been in situations similar to the one he was in now where you don’t know enough to do anything. If you started off to do something, one direction was as good as another and you were more likely to start off on the wrong track than the right one. In such situations you needed to let the world take a couple of turns and then take another look to see what you knew, if you knew anything.
Sometime later—Ambler didn’t know how long—he was still staring at his computer when the phone rang. This time, he didn’t need an ominous ring tone to tell him it was trouble. As he suspected, it was McNulty.
“Something’s come up. You’ll know soon enough. I don’t have time to—”
“I already know most of it. Shannon’s real name is Sandra Dean. And she’s dead.”
“Whatever you wanna ask, I don’t have an answer. Yes. Sandra Dean is dead, murdered. This is a world with no justice and no mercy, not for her.” McNulty’s breathing was labored. “I’m not sure I care about who killed her … or anything else. It’s such a goddamn shame. She was about to…” His voice cracked and he stopped. Ambler stayed quiet, listening to McNulty’s choked breathing. After a moment, McNulty cleared his throat, a sound resembling a growl. “I should have been with her. I should have known.…”
“Where were you? What should you have known?” Ambler knew McNulty wouldn’t answer.
McNulty spoke softly. Ambler could barely hear him. “The pages I copied from the journal? Someone’s gonna drop them off for you. It’s all I got. Give it to the cops if you want. I’m gonna get lost again. I’ll keep tabs on you.” He disconnected.
Ambler called Adele as soon as he finished the call with McNulty. She sobbed into the phone when he told her the woman she knew as Shannon Darling was dead and McNulty was suspected of killing her. Ambler didn’t know if she cried for Shannon or McNulty. Maybe for both of them. It didn’t matter. Tears formed behind his eyes, too.
“McNulty didn’t kill her. What are we going to do?” Adele spoke haltingly between sobs. “Wait.” The crying stopped. Her voice cleared. “He couldn’t have done it. He was with us. We can vouch for him.”
Ambler had thought of that. He didn’t like disappointing Adele, yet false hope wasn’t useful either. “He was with us around six thirty. She was killed around midnight. Stamford’s an hour away on the train. He could have been back in Stamford by nine or ten easily.”
“Oh.” He could hear her disappointment. “Are you sure it was Shannon?”
An immense weight pressed on him. “I wish it wasn’t. Shannon is—or was—Sandra Dean and she’s dead, leaving a husband and a little girl behind.”
“Poor Shannon.… Sandra. I guess we should at least use her real name.”
* * *
It was long after the phone calls that Ambler fell asleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about Sandra Dean. His taped-together eyeglasses were on the side table next to his chair. He picked them up and pictured Shannon, first at the Library Tavern, later as she examined his crushed glasses with a slightly bewildered expression, and later still at the library table in the crime fiction reading room surrounded by file folders, when her expression as she concentrated resembled worry as much as intensity. He remembered Adele’s foreboding that Shannon was doomed. He’d been afraid for Shannon, too, that she would be too easily harmed.
Immensely sadder was to picture Carolyn, her ladylike manners in introducing herself, the excitement when she talked about her mother, the determination in her blue eyes under her baseball cap as she talked about her hitting. He couldn’t imagine the grief the child would now endure.
So many things didn’t make sense. His head buzzed with questions he couldn’t answer. Why did Sandra Dean use an assumed name? What was she trying to find in her mother’s papers in the library? Why was Ted Doyle murdered in her hotel room and who killed him? Who were the men in her journal and why did she write about them? Why did Sandra Dean’s mother and husband both deny recognizing a photo of Shannon Darling?
Chapter 8
Mike Cosgrove drove his own car to Connecticut the morning after the murder of Sandra Dean, leaving from his apartment in Queens, making it over the Throgs Neck Bridge into the Bronx before the morning rush hour traffic picked up. He wanted to meet the Stamford homicide detectives—who worked out of the Stamford Criminal Investigations Bureau—in person. He hoped to talk to the cops who were first on the murder scene and read their notes on the case. With luck he might get to do an interview with the victim’s husband, who might be able to tell him something about the man murdered in his wife’s hotel room a few days before her murder. The Stamford cops would interview the husband because when a wife gets murdered, especially a wayward wife, you want to rule out the husband early on—or not.
The two cops from the Stamford Criminal Investigations Bureau he met with were standoffish, not so willing to share information. Cops in smaller jurisdictions sometimes got like that when you met with them; they had to prove to the big-city cop they knew what they were doing and didn’t need any help from him. They knew the city had more killings most weekends than they did in a year. Did they think this was something a big-city cop was happy about?
They loosened up when he told them he was looking for help with his unsolved murder. Their suspect, Brian McNulty, he told them, linked the two murders, and Dr. Sandra Dean, most likely, was the woman in whose hotel room the murder he was investigating took place. So they said they’d put their evidence technician in touch with the NYPD Crime Scene Unit and pass along whatever forensic stuff they had—blood, prints, DNA.
They weren’t sure about him interviewing Simon Dean, with whom they’d had an initial interview and were about to interview again. After a muffled conversation, during which they took turns looking over their shoulders at him, the two detectives trudged off to get a decision from the captain, who said Cosgrove could go along.
The guy he went with, whose name was Green, asked the right questions, so Cosgrove kept quiet and listened. Sometimes, listening was more productive than doing the questioning.
Simon Dean’s answers were short and to the point. He didn’t embellish. He didn’t volunteer. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t exhibit any of the known characteristics of a liar. He answered he didn’t know to a lot of questions. From those, you got the feeling he didn’t know what his wife had been up to. Green asked him where he was on the night of his wife’s murder. Dean didn’t take offense at the question. He said he was home. His daughter was at his sister’s for the night, so he was alone. He couldn’t think of any way to verify what he said. Not much of an alibi. But he didn’t really need one. A lot of folks sit at home alone at night.
Dean’s answers to the couple of questions Cosgrove asked him were about what the detective expected. He had no idea his wife was in New York City on September 7, the day Ted Doyle was murdered. He had no idea why she’d be staying at the Commodore Hotel under a fake name, and had never heard of the murder victim.
“Do you know the name Brian McNulty?”
Dean, who sat uncomfortably in an armchair in his living room for the interview, had been looking down at his hands that were folded in his lap. He looked up now, meeting Cosgrove’s gaze with red-rimmed sad eyes. “He’s the man who was with my wife. He killed her.”
“He’s a suspect, yes. Do you know how your wife knows him, why she was with him?”
Dean shook his head and looked down at his hands again.
“When you feel up to it, we’d like you to make a list of your wife’s close friends.”
For whatever reason, Dean didn’t like the question. “Why? She doesn’t have a lot of close friends; my sister is her closest friend.”
“Friends,” Cosgrove said. “They don’t have to be close. She might have told a friend things she didn’t tell you. Did your wife have any enemies, disputes with anyone?”
Dean raised his head again, fixing his gaze first on Cosgrove and then on the other detective. “You don
’t believe the man she was with killed her?”
“We’re looking for him. He’s a suspect,” Green, the Stamford cop, said.
Cosgrove said, “We’re sorry to put you through this, Mr. Dean.” He meant what he said, sure that Dean saw him as a cold-hearted bastard. “We have to do a thorough investigation, even if what happened seems obvious to you. It’s better for everyone in the long run if we touch all the bases.”
“It doesn’t help my wife.” Dean spoke dully, again looking at his hands.
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” Cosgrove said.
Dean nodded.
Green said they’d be in touch and they’d keep him informed as the case proceeded.
“I’d appreciate that.” Dean stood to walk them to the door.
“We’re hoping it won’t take long,” Green said. “Contact us anytime for anything at all.”
Cosgrove handed Dean his card. “You probably don’t want this. If you think of anything you forgot to tell me—”
“About what?” Dean locked his gaze on Cosgrove.
“Anything that might help us.”
Dean put Cosgrove’s card in his pocket.
“What did you think of him?” Green asked as he drove Cosgrove back to the Stamford police station.
“His wife’s been murdered. That’s bad enough. If we believe him, he had no idea what she’d been up to, why she was in New York using a fake name, why a man was murdered in her hotel room, why she was with this bartender. You figure having to swallow all that he ought to be a basket case.”