by Con Lehane
He had everything he needed for day-to-day life in the cabin. He didn’t know if he’d brought supplies with him or the supplies were in the cabin when he got there. “I’m okay here and content to see what happens.” He said this matter-of-factly. “If my memory comes back, I’ll return to the life I had. If I die before it comes back, so be it; I’ll die anonymously. I have enough bits and pieces of memory to suspect I don’t have a family and that no one will miss me.”
He chuckled, a strange sound, out of place, incongruous. “Perhaps I’ll leave a great fortune unattended.” Something twinkled in his eyes. You almost thought him kindly. “If the person you have in mind has a great fortune, we might explore that. Otherwise, I’d prefer you leave me to my odd life here for the time being.”
“Your diagnosis, dissociative fugue. Do you know when it started or do you know the date you were first diagnosed?”
“I don’t know when it started.” He stood and went to his bookshelf. “I have an appointment card here, so I might know when I was diagnosed.” He rustled through some papers. “September 14.” He examined the appointment card a couple of times before putting it back on the shelf.
“Do you have a car? I didn’t see one.”
“I do. It’s around back. I must have driven it here.” He spoke ruefully. “It’s not running now. I haven’t gotten it fixed.”
Ambler felt uneasy leaving. He judged that Wainwright, if it was Wainwright, was playing straight with him and hoped he’d stay where he was because there was a strong likelihood Ambler would be coming back. But there was a chance Wainwright might become unnerved by their encounter and hightail it out of there as soon as Ambler left. One of Ambler’s fictional private eyes could call the agency and have an operative sent out to keep an eye on the cabin. If he had proof that Wainwright was a legitimate murder suspect, he might persuade the local police to put a tail on him. He had neither of these resources, so he needed to do some checking in a hurry.
He returned to Amherst. His plan was to search Wainwright’s house but he wanted to do it under the cover of darkness. So he had a sandwich at a pleasant restaurant on North Pleasant Street, walked around the pretty town, visited the library, sat for a time in the town common facing the Lord Jeffery Inn, and stopped by the Emily Dickinson Museum, which he learned from a plaque in front was the house where she lived pretty much as a recluse.
In the late afternoon, he walked through the small tree-lined streets of large wooden-frame houses behind the main street of the town until he found the one belonging to Dillard Wainwright, which like the others was set back from the street by a large front yard. It wasn’t the largest house on the street and it wasn’t ornate.
Someone had kept the lawn under control. A large hedge along the sidewalk in front had grown fairly high, six feet, maybe more. The street was quiet. He would be taking a chance. But today was his chance-taking day. If he were discovered, he was prepared to say he’d been sent to pick up some things by Dillard Wainwright. As he checked out the house, he realized his plan to wait for darkness would be a mistake. It made more sense to go in now when he wouldn’t need to turn on any lights—and even if he did, they’d not be noticeable.
He walked from the front to the back of the house. This wasn’t a neighborhood that expected burglaries which might incline folks to be careless about locks and not worry about alarms. The back door of Wainwright’s house had small glass windows in the top half. If push came to shove, he could break a window and reach inside to open the door. Since Wainwright left in a hurry and in all likelihood no one else had been in the house, he hoped a door or window might have been left unlocked. The hedge provided cover and shrubs and bushes walled off the back and both sides of the yard. He tried a couple of the downstairs windows, which were locked.
In the back of the house, he tried the metal cover of a stairway leading down to a basement door. The metal door—like the cover of a storm cellar—was unlocked. The stairway was damp and filled with cobwebs. It was dark and the only flashlight he had was the one on his cell phone. This worked well enough for him to see that the small windowpane next to the doorknob on the door to the basement had been knocked out. He reached through, felt his way to the sliding bolt above the doorknob, slid that open, and turned the doorknob from the inside.
Once inside, he found his ways upstairs, did a quick survey—two bedrooms, one used as an office or library. The makeshift office had two solid walls of books, a neat desk, a few baskets half the size of a laundry basket holding papers and documents. A computer sat on the desk. It was unlikely he could open it without a password, so he was better off searching the baskets of papers and documents. He didn’t know what he was looking for: something to prove the man in the cabin was Wainwright? an elaborate murder plan written out in detail? a confession?
What he did find in one of the baskets, which might have been what he was looking for, was a file of printed emails. Wainwright had printed out his email exchange with Sandra Dean. He’d also printed out an exchange of emails with Jayne Galloway, all were from around the same time, early September. The first email from Jayne Galloway was an answer to an email Wainwright must have sent to her complaining about her daughter’s threat to expose him as a fraud.
Galloway’s answer was short but friendlier than Ambler would have expected, as though she and Wainwright were old friends catching up after enough time had passed to let bygones be bygones. She told him gently she had no influence over her daughter. She also wrote: “Sandra’s been reading through the journals and diaries I donated to the 42nd Street Library—I’m as surprised as you are—and she found the entry you wrote me about where I revealed that I gave you a short story to submit to a literary journal under your name. She’s going to send it to your dean and there’s nothing I can do to stop her.” Galloway didn’t remember writing that she’d given him a story of hers to submit under his name, but it would be silly for her to try to deny something she’d written in her own journal. “I don’t think the consequences will be as dire as you believe, Dillard.”
In another email she told him she had cancer and was dying and was trying to make amends with her daughter before it was too late. The message was sad, filled with regret; a lot of sorrow and guilt, not the best way to feel about yourself at the end of your life. Wainwright’s effort at sympathy was perfunctory. He was too worried about his own situation to be concerned about Jayne Galloway’s so much more tragic circumstances.
The final email in the folder made Ambler’s hair stand on end. The date was September 3, four days before Ted Doyle was murdered and nine or ten days before Sandra Dean’s murder. The email from Jayne Galloway read:
Don’t threaten me! And don’t you dare threaten Sandra! I can’t stop her from turning over what she found to your dean. You’re being hysterical. Your life isn’t ruined. If worst comes to worst, offer to retire. They’ll let you slip away quietly to avoid a scandal. You should have retired years ago anyway. Don’t go off the deep end over this.
Ambler’s hands holding the letter shook. Wainwright could have easily gotten to the city and found Sandra Dean. But why would he have murdered Ted Doyle? One answer was it could have been a botched attempt to kill Sandra. Doyle got in the way trying to protect Sandra and took the bullet. And Sandra escaped. But why was Ted Doyle there? How did Wainwright find her again in Connecticut? Through Jayne Galloway? The Nassau police dusted Galloway’s house for fingerprints. His prints might turn up. There was no sign of Wainwright’s memory disorder in the emails and a lot of questions that needed answering. Ambler’s mind raced.
He felt the familiar rush of excitement that came when the facts to support his thinking began to fall into place. At the same time and in a strange way, he felt a small wave of disappointment. This muddled reaction lasted for a few more minutes while he sifted through the rest of the papers and documents in the basket.
Then, he froze when he picked up a brochure announcing a symposium of the Poe Studies Association in San Fran
cisco with Dillard Wainwright as keynote speaker. The scholar at the podium in the photo was a dead ringer—minus the scruffy beard—for the man Ambler spoke with that afternoon in a cabin in the woods outside Greenfield, Massachusetts. What stopped Ambler’s heart was not the photo that proved he’d found Dillard Wainwright. It was the dates of the conference. The date of Wainwright’s talk was too familiar. He looked at the calendar on his iPhone and ran Sandra Dean’s name through Google to make sure.
Dillard Wainwright spoke at a conference on the other side of the country on September 12, the night Sandra Dean was murdered. There was one remaining possibility. Ambler called the Poe Association office at San Diego State University and was told that Professor Wainwright did indeed give the address. They were puzzled, however, that they hadn’t been able to reach him since then, and he hadn’t returned the form for his honorarium.
Ambler didn’t go back to Wainwright’s cabin. He thought he might but decided not to, partly because he’d miss his plane. But also because Wainwright had no idea he was a murder suspect so it wouldn’t mean much to him that he was no longer a suspect and whatever shock or anxiety set off the man’s amnesia—possibly Sandra Dean’s threat to expose him as a fraud and ruin his academic career—might still be hanging over his head. Ambler didn’t tell the college the whereabouts of their missing professor either since he’d told Wainwright he wouldn’t. He’d done enough meddling in Wainwright’s life. He could leave the guy alone, at least for a while.
“I was wrong,” he told Adele on the phone before his plane took off. He said simply that he’d found Wainwright and that Wainwright couldn’t have committed the murders. He’d tell her the rest of the story when he saw her. She said it wouldn’t be too late for him to pick up Johnny and she’d wait dinner for him if he wanted to come over when he got back to the city.
He switched his phone to airplane mode and put it away for the flight. Usually, when something like this happened—his number one suspect exonerated by circumstances of time and place—he crawled off by himself like an old dog to lick his wounds. This time was different. He looked forward to being with Johnny and Adele. He wouldn’t think yet about where he went wrong or what he missed or where he’d start over from. All of that could rest for a while in the back of his mind. He began reading from the book of poems he picked up at the Emily Dickinson Museum store.
I shall know why, when time is over,
And I have ceased to wonder why;
He fell asleep shortly after the plane left the runway and woke up when the captain announced their descent into Newark airport.
Chapter 30
Shortly after Mike Cosgrove got to work, he got a phone call.
“What I thought I had blew up in my face,” Ray told him.
“Happens to me all the time.” Cosgrove took a guess at what had happened. “You found that missing professor?”
“Wainwright. For one thing, he has a weird form of amnesia. The kicker is he was in California at the time of Sandra Dean’s murder.”
“He could have hired someone.”
“You can look into that if you want. I don’t see any reason to.”
Ray sounded discouraged. But he was right. Not much reason to think murder for hire. Nothing professional about the hits. “Maybe you saved me some time,” Cosgrove said. This wasn’t true, and Ray knew it.
“I didn’t know I was going to find him.” This was Ray trying for an apology for following a lead without letting Cosgrove in on it. “I wasn’t sure I’d found him even when I found him.” He told him about Wainwright and the cabin in the woods.
“He wasn’t my suspect anyway,” Cosgrove said. It was a cheap shot and he was sorry he took it. “Look, Ray. Let’s see what happens in Connecticut and with this other thing I’m looking into.” He told him what he could about Peter Esposito. “I’m going to meet with an ADA this afternoon to see if I can get a search warrant for the hotel records.”
“Do you have something that points to Esposito that you haven’t told me?”
“Nothing concrete. I’m following my hunches.” He paused not sure if he should keep going, but he did, “As a favor to you.”
“A favor to me? You’ve seen enough to hang this on McNulty, but you’ll do me a favor by following a hunch. Thanks a lot. Do you have any other other hunches? What about Simon Dean? Do you have any hunches about him?”
“That’s enough, Ray.” Cosgrove kept his tone even. “You had Wainwright figured for it. That fell through. Now, you don’t have anyone, so you get pissed off at me.” His voice rose despite his effort to keep it level. “Tell me something that raises doubt the bartender isn’t our guy. You got nothing. Zilch. Nada.” He’d had enough of this. “I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up.
Cosgrove stared out into the squad room. Dozens of cops and criminals, victims and witnesses milled around the cluttered desks or sat in straight-backed chairs alongside one of the detective’s desks, twenty people talking at the same time, none of it registered.
The worst thing when you arrested someone, got them convicted, watched them get led away to their sentence, the worst thing was not being sure. They said they didn’t do it. A lot of them said that; you knew they were guilty as sin. Sometimes, the guy said, “No, man. You’re wrong. It wasn’t me.” You looked him in the eye. He looked you in the eye. You saw something. For a moment you thought maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he didn’t do it. That was the worst.
He called David Levinson, McNulty’s lawyer, and told him he wanted to talk to McNulty. “I know it’s unusual.”
The lawyer wasn’t enthusiastic. “Suppose you ask me what you want to ask him.”
“You wouldn’t know the answers.”
“Try me.”
Cosgrove thought about that. What he was doing wasn’t right. By rights, the Stamford cops should be in on any interview he did with the bartender, as well as McNulty’s lawyer, and probably someone from the DA’s office. How the hell were you supposed to get anything done with forty-five people looking over your shoulder? He was going out on a limb for Ray and the jerk didn’t get it. “What if Ray talks to him and I listen in?”
“What are you after?”
“I don’t want to go into that now.”
Cosgrove called Ray and told him what he wanted to do.
“I know you’re trying to help,” Ray said. “Sorry about before.”
“You talk to the lawyer. It’s better if we can do it without him. Otherwise, he’s got to keep his mouth shut.”
Cosgrove took comp time. If he wasn’t on the clock, it wasn’t official so maybe he didn’t need to follow protocol. He rode up to Stamford with Ray and the lawyer. The lawyer yacked for pretty much the entire trip, laying out the reasons no decent attorney would let his client talk to a cop without the attorney present. Levinson followed this with stories of clients who’d done stupid things, like talking to the cops without him, and gotten themselves in trouble. From there, he went on about how he helped out the cop union, but they didn’t listen to him either. Levinson was one of those guys who talked whether anyone listened or not. By the time he’d gotten to all he’d done for the PBA, Cosgrove had stopped listening. Either Levinson didn’t notice or didn’t care. As far as Cosgrove could tell, Ray stopped listening long before he did.
McNulty approached them cautiously. They had a private interview room because it was an attorney visit. McNulty looked from the attorney to Ray and then his gaze settled on Cosgrove who saw a hint of fear. “What’s this?” McNulty asked. “The hanging party? Where’s the priest?”
Cosgrove began to think this wasn’t going to work out. McNulty would clam up and the trip would be wasted. Ray should take the lead. He was the guy’s friend. “No one’s out to get you,” Cosgrove said. “We got something we need you to clear up, something I came across and asked Ray. He didn’t know so we’re asking you.”
McNulty turned to Levinson, the lawyer. “Am I supposed to answer?”
“I don’t know w
hat they’re going to ask.” Levinson was calm, light on his feet, ready to bob and weave.
Ray cleared his throat and everyone turned to face him, as if he were about to read their rich uncle’s will. “Simon Dean told Mike you knew Sandra when she was a teenager. I didn’t know if you did or not. You never mentioned it.”
“Lots of things I didn’t mention about Sandi.” McNulty closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked at the ceiling.
Cosgrove watched for the lie. In the fluorescent light, McNulty’s skin was a ghastly yellow, bags under his eyes.
“I knew her. That was years ago. I knew lots of people.” He met Cosgrove’s gaze, even though he might have been talking to Ray. “I was young, too.” He nodded a couple of times, like a bow. “Not as young as her.”
Levinson waved his hand. “Let’s hold up here. I don’t like where this is going. You asked a question. He answered it.” Levinson turned to McNulty. “That’s enough, Brian. Nothing you say is going to help you. There’s a time and a place for questions. That’s the courtroom.”
“Explaining himself, if that’s what he wants to do, might help him.” Cosgrove watched McNulty. “I came here as a favor to Ray. By rights, I should have the state’s attorney with me, not just you with him.” He nodded toward Levinson. Cosgrove wasn’t sure where he was going with this. Ray bailed him out.
“Mike’s not here officially.” Ray was talking to Levinson. “He’s here on his own time because he wants to get it right. We need something. We don’t have anything.”
“That guy Sandi was emailing, her mother’s friend?” It was McNulty.
Ray answered. “Nothing. He was in California. No question about it.”
“The list of men I gave you?”
“Mike found and questioned everyone she wrote about in the journal.”
“And?” McNulty’s expression was doleful.
“I’m not finished.” Cosgrove met McNulty’s gaze, the bartender’s eyes pools of despair. “Nothing to hang your hat on, a couple of unanswered questions from one guy.” He caught a glimpse of Levinson out of the corner of his eye. The lawyer didn’t look ready to jump in. “It would be good if you could tell us more about Sandi—Sandra Dean.” Cosgrove kept an eye on the lawyer. “I’m not trying to catch you on anything.” He raised the flat of his hand toward the lawyer, as if he were back in the old days directing traffic, though he spoke to McNulty. “Whatever you want to tell us.”