by Con Lehane
She was apologetic. “I’m sorry Simon’s such a jerk. He’s sure your friend the bartender killed Sandi and that you’re trying to get him off by finding someone else to cast suspicion on.”
Ambler had to admit that what Simon thought wasn’t so far from the truth. He did want to find someone to cast suspicion on. He didn’t tell Andrea this.
A half hour later, he caught up with Adele and Johnny at their Friday night pizza hangout, a family-run Italian restaurant that had been on Third Avenue as long as he could remember, and was soon to be swept into the dustbin of history by voracious developers and greedy landlords. He ate two slices of cold, congealed pizza.
“We saved it for you,” Adele said with what he thought was smug satisfaction.
After the movie, he and Johnny walked Adele home through the clear and crisp New York autumn night. Ambler told her about his phone call with Andrea Eagan and that he’d need to ask Simon for the laptop himself. “He’ll probably say no.”
“I understand he’s upset,” Adele said after a moment. “I don’t like that he won’t allow for the possibility McNulty might be innocent.”
After Ambler and Johnny left Adele, Ambler started walking toward his apartment. Johnny stopped and asked if they should take a cab. “Are you tired?” Ambler asked. Johnny usually liked to walk. They seldom took cabs. He noticed what might be rebuke in the boy’s expression. “Is something wrong?”
“I thought we should get home quicker. We’re going to see my dad tomorrow. Did you forget?” There was a twitching around his mouth and his eyes were liquid.
Ambler had forgotten. How could he? The visit was arranged. They didn’t need reservations for the train. It wasn’t that. He wasn’t mentally ready. Usually, the week before a visit to his dad, Johnny was beside himself with anticipation and excitement. And he hadn’t been. But of course Ambler had hardly seen the boy the past week. Distracted, he hadn’t paid attention to him. That wasn’t right.
“It slipped my mind, Johnny. I’ve been preoccupied. We’re fine. There’s no problem. We’ll get a cab. We’ll need to get up early.”
Johnny was satisfied. Ambler stared glumly out the window at the city sliding by. It wasn’t only Johnny he neglected. He’d not thought about his son either, fulfilling John’s prophecy that once you’re locked up everyone soon forgets about you. He’d also forgotten to ask David Levinson about John’s appeal.
He felt like telling Johnny how awful he felt and how sorry he was, yet this would be self-serving, asking for forgiveness or understanding or pity he didn’t deserve. He’d neglected his son when John was a boy because he was so absorbed in his study, writing his dissertation—absorbed in himself really—that he didn’t have time for others, even his son, and now he was doing this same thing—which he swore he would never do—to his grandchild.
The visits to John had taken on an entirely new, and vibrant, life since Johnny became part of the visits. Ambler’s job now was pretty much to hold father’s and son’s coats as they went about their visit. He was fine with this. John, having reclaimed his son and with an attorney working on an appeal of his conviction, was hopeful for the first time. He wouldn’t be exonerated. He’d killed a man. But Ambler believed without a doubt, as John had told him, that the killing was an accident. He shot a man in a fight as they struggled for the man’s—his crazy housemate—gun. David Levinson thought he could win a new trial and get the charge reduced to involuntary manslaughter, instead of the first-degree manslaughter John was convicted of.
The trip the next morning to Shawangunk, the prison where John was housed, required a ninety-minute train ride along the Hudson and a half-hour cab ride from the railroad station plus at least another half hour, more often an hour, to get through the visitor processing at the prison. Almost as soon as Ambler and Johnny sat down with John at a table in the visiting room—not unlike a high school cafeteria—John asked, as Ambler feared he would, about his appeal. Ambler said weakly they were working on it but nothing new.
During their weekly phone call, Johnny had told his father about Sandra Dean’s murder and McNulty’s arrest. Even if John didn’t know McNulty, he’d heard enough about him over the years to know Ambler would have taken up his cause. John remembered also that Ambler met the attorney who was doing his appeal through McNulty. Fortunately, he was satisfied with Ambler’s answer that there wasn’t anything new.
Something else Ambler didn’t tell John was that he hadn’t figured out yet how to pay the attorney. With all of that, the visit with John was so guilt-inducing that Ambler called David Levinson from the railroad station platform as he and Johnny waited for the train back to the city. Levinson said he wanted to hire an investigator to search for the girlfriend of the man John had shot. In looking over the records of the case, he came across something in the DA’s files—the name of a second potential witness, a friend of this girlfriend—that wasn’t in the files of the legal aid attorney who represented John.
“I have a call in to your son’s 18-B attorney; he’s still on the job, the poor bastard.”
“Did his attorney make a mistake?”
“It’s not a mistake. Those panel guys need to take on impossible workloads to make a living. I used to be one. Even the good ones don’t have the resources or the time—”
Ambler got the idea. “I should have hired a private attorney like you for John’s original trial.”
For once, Levinson was slow to respond. “Since it went to trial, it would have cost you at least twenty to thirty grand. If it didn’t go to trial, ten grand at least, and he would have still gone to prison … maybe not for so long.”
Ambler went cold. “How much are we talking about for the appeal?”
Levinson chuckled. “The meter’s running. Usually, I get five grand up front. Let’s see what I can do. With McNulty’s case on the cuff, I’ll have to go back to driving a cab part-time to make ends meet, as it is.”
Ambler tried to laugh but couldn’t. He’d been rocked to his toes by the realization that if he’d come up with the money for a private attorney for John’s original trial—though the Lord knows where he would have gotten the money—his son wouldn’t be rotting away in prison. And it struck him deep in his heart that John was street smart enough to have known that all along. This time, he was going to come up with the money to pay for the appeal … somehow.
* * *
McNulty’s arraignment was in Stamford Monday morning. David Levinson rented a car to drive up for the appearance, and Ambler took the morning off and went with him. It was something he felt he should do, though he did it with reluctance. The last time he’d been in a courtroom he listened to the sentence imposed on his son and watched him being led away. The fear, bewilderment, and anger in his son’s eyes that day seared a hole in his heart. He still saw John’s haggard face on nights he lay sleepless staring at his ceiling.
Levinson was on his cell phone the entire trip up to Connecticut, explaining court and arraignment proceedings to the mother of one of his clients. He went over the same thing a half-dozen times with amazing patience. Ambler was glad Levinson was occupied so he didn’t have to talk to him.
The courtroom proceedings were sparsely attended. He half expected to see Simon Dean, but he wasn’t there. Ambler sat in an aisle seat in the middle row of the gallery. Levinson went to the front where he introduced himself to the judge and shook hands with some attorneys standing around and then sat down at a table. McNulty came in through a side door handcuffed with a guard at his elbow. He was bent at the waist, almost a bow, whether this was caused by the pull of the handcuffs or McNulty’s state of mind, Ambler didn’t know. Levinson got up from the table and stood beside McNulty. He put his hand on his shoulder and said something into his ear. Ambler couldn’t hear what Levinson said or much of what anyone said, except for the judge who had a microphone in front of him.
Levinson made a presentation the judge didn’t show much interest in. A young woman in a blue business suit said so
mething to the judge also. The judge asked McNulty a question. McNulty said, “Not guilty.” He said this loudly enough to startle the few people sitting in the gallery, including Ambler. Levinson said something else. The judge said something. Even with the microphone, Ambler only recognized the word “remanded.” There was a kind of silence, everything in suspended animation, until the guard led McNulty out. He shuffled out, the same way he shuffled in, his head bowed. Ambler wasn’t sure if McNulty saw him or not.
For the first part of the ride back to the city, he and Levinson were deep in their own thoughts. Ambler watched the fall foliage alongside the parkway slide by and let his mind wander from McNulty to Ted Doyle to Sandra to Jayne Galloway.
Levinson broke his silence as they settled into a traffic tie-up on the Henry Hudson Parkway. “This isn’t my favorite subject,” he said.
Ambler waited.
Levinson kept his eyes on the road. “McNulty’s case will take a lot of time. That’s time with no income. I need billable hours to keep my practice going. I understand you may not be able to come up with a retainer as quickly as you’d like. I have to do it this way. If I’m not getting paid for your son’s case, I have to put his case on the back burner to work billable hours.”
“I understand.” This didn’t mean Ambler knew how to get the money. He’d already tapped his pension for legal expenses for Johnny’s adoption and a custody battle with Lisa Young; he didn’t think he could go to the well again.
He caught Levinson sneaking a glance at him. “Look. I’ll keep working on it,” the lawyer said. “It won’t move as fast. I’d like to hire an investigator.…”
“I know. I need to arrange some things.”
Chapter 20
The next-to-last man on Cosgrove’s list, Alan Hoffman, proved difficult for Mike Cosgrove to find. The last man on the list, Dillard Wainwright, the guy Ray was interested in, was worse. He was in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Disappearing from a job and a life meant something, especially when the guy’s name pops up in a homicide investigation.
Cosgrove was running checks on Peter Esposito and planned to interview him again the next time Esposito came to the city. He wanted to check the Commodore Hotel records, but at the moment, he didn’t have enough evidence for a warrant, and the hotel had a policy of not releasing its guest records without a warrant. The desk clerk he spoke with knew Esposito as did one of the bartenders and a waitress. None of them remembered if he stayed in the hotel the night of Ted Doyle’s murder.
Most of the Dean woman’s assignations had been at the Commodore, so he tried the hotel again this time looking for Alan Hoffman, stopping off late in the evening when the night auditor would be on the desk. The head of security for the hotel was an ex-cop, full of himself, protecting the hotel as if he were the palace guard. The night auditor was a regular guy who saw the hotel’s promotional bullshit about its “beautiful people” clientele for what it was.
What happened, as sometimes happens, was that Cosgrove was right for the wrong reason. The auditor knew Alan Hoffman and told Cosgrove he never registered at the hotel because he was local and a regular at the hotel bar. The bartender knew him, too. Alan Hoffman was a cop, a detective, who at one time stopped in regularly but hadn’t been in for a long time.
“Do you remember him meeting a woman here one night, a pretty blonde, not a kid, not yet middle aged?”
“Al wasn’t the kind of guy who was looking for that,” the bartender, whose name tag read Moses, said. “He came in by himself, had a couple of pops, maybe talked with someone on the next barstool. A lot of times he talked to me. What he talked about was baseball, coaching kids playing baseball in Riverdale, or taking his boy to Yankee games.”
The bartender went to refresh the drinks of a couple at the far end of the bar. When he came back to Cosgrove, he said. “I’m wrong. You mean the blonde woman who got killed? He did meet her.” Moses was a big, light-skinned, black guy, athletic looking, still in good shape. Cosgrove thought he might have played football. He was soft spoken when you’d expect him to bluster from his size and how he carried himself.
“A year ago, maybe longer, Al ran into her here at the bar. She’d been drinking. They talked till closing. He took her under his wing and walked her out. I figured he was being a gentleman, making sure she got back to her room with no trouble. I’d done that, too, once, walked her out of here so she got back to her room okay. She invited me in. I didn’t take her up on it. Drunk women are trouble.” The bartender met Cosgrove’s gaze.
“She was proper, well-spoken, until she had a few drinks, even then she was well-spoken but out of control. She’d blurt things out, be in your face.” He chuckled. “But you had to like her. Once in a while, when she’d start an argument, she surprised herself, like a kid does something and the grown-ups laugh and he looks bewildered because he doesn’t know what he’s done.”
The next afternoon, Cosgrove found Alan Hoffman working in the 90th Precinct community affairs youth division in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
“I work with the kids in the projects, the Williamsburg Houses,” Hoffman said after Cosgrove introduced himself.
Cosgrove had decided to drop in at the precinct rather than call ahead. When he told Hoffman why he was there, the color drained from the man’s face. His voice shook. “Can we go outside?… Take a walk?” It was a supplication spoken in a whisper.
Hoffman led the way though they walked side by side. Cosgrove, not wanting to interrupt the other man’s wrestling match with his conscience, kept quiet as they walked to a park a couple of blocks from the precinct where there was a fenced-in baseball diamond. It reminded Cosgrove of what the bartender at the hotel told him. They leaned against the black wire fence, side by side, watching a man hit grounders to a boy about Ray’s grandson’s age who wore a Mets cap and fielded the ground balls smoothly.
“I transferred out here because of that. One night. One time.” Hoffman’s voice was strained and he didn’t look at Cosgrove. “I’ve been married fifteen years.” When he did glance at Cosgrove, he seemed to ask for help. “I was going to walk her to the elevator. She asked me to walk her to her room. I had my hand under her elbow, kind of steering her. She wore high heel shoes and was kind of wobbly. The whole time she talked. She was afraid in New York, she told me, and didn’t like being by herself in the city. A couple of times as we walked, she said I was sweet. When she said that, she’d stop and turn toward me and look into my eyes. Hers were dark and pretty and sad. When we go to her room, she told me she had a couple of little bottles of scotch from an airplane and invited me for a drink. The next thing I knew we were in her room and she was in my arms.
“When we’d finished, she cried. I held her and she cried and told me she was ashamed of herself. ‘I’m not like that,’ she said. She had a husband and a daughter. ‘The person who did that isn’t me.’ She turned on me. ‘Did you put something in my drink?’
“She scared me. She didn’t want to believe she’d seduced me. I was afraid of what she might say, of what she might do. I’d lose my wife. I’d lose my kids. I couldn’t stand that. I was mad at myself, too. What was I doing in bed half drunk with a crazy woman screaming I doctored her drink?” He stared at the baseball field.
Cosgrove had been quiet since he’d introduced himself back at the precinct. After a moment, he realized Hoffman was crying. Tears trickled down his face. He put his hand near his eyes to kind of shade them, so Cosgrove walked away from him. There was a dog run next to the ball field near where they’d been standing, so he went and watched the dogs play; the big dogs played with the little dogs, purebred fluffy dogs that looked like powder puffs and scruffy mid-sized mutts and mongrels, growling and play fighting, all of them cheerful and proud of themselves. He watched the dogs until he felt Hoffman beside him.
“I should have stepped up when I saw she’d been murdered. I felt terribly sorry for her.” He watched the sky for a couple of minutes. Cosgrove look
ed up, too, and wondered what the other man saw. “She made trouble for herself. I tried to tell her…”
More was coming. Cosgrove had heard enough confessions to know when one was coming. The guy starts off with what you knew, confirming things you’d found out or figured out. When you were ready to wrap things up, something in a tone of voice or a word or two you weren’t expecting, and you knew to keep quiet, leave things alone. If you disappeared and let the guy talk, you might find yourself solving a couple of cases you didn’t know you were investigating. He didn’t know what was coming from Hoffman but something was.
“She called me. I was surprised she remembered me. She wanted me to buy a handgun for her. I told her I couldn’t do that. She didn’t tell me why she wanted the gun. I assumed she was afraid. She didn’t tell me what she was afraid of. I told her if she wasn’t doing anything illegal she could get a permit and buy her own gun.”
“When was this?”
“Not so long ago, a month or two.”
Hoffman didn’t have much more to say. He’d told her having a gun wouldn’t protect her. That was movie stuff to think it would. She should call the police if she felt threatened or call a private investigator if she didn’t want to go to the police. She said she didn’t want to do anything her husband would find out about.
“Did you hear from her again?”
This time, Hoffman hung his head and stared at the ground for some time. “Despite what I told you, and what I told you is true … I love my family. Despite that, I was drawn to her. Something about her. I wanted to take care of her. She’d cry when we talked on the phone and I’d fall apart. I’d remember her nestled against me. When she cried, I wanted to hold her. I thought something bad might happen to her if I didn’t take care of her. I wanted to see her again. She wouldn’t. She said she was working on things with her husband.”