Murder at the 42nd Street Library

by Con Lehane

  When their eyes met, something plaintive in her expression tugged at him. He’d lived alone for years. He was grumpy, and old, too; yet for a moment, the idea that Adele might come home with him and stay formed a picture in his mind, causing an unfamiliar longing for something he couldn’t name.

  “God, Raymond. What’s wrong? You’re about to have apoplexy. I said I was kidding.”

  He took a long swallow from his beer mug, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

  “I might as well shack up with someone. I broke up with Peter, this time for good. I’m sure he’s relieved. The big, handsome hunk, women fall all over him. He’ll do fine.” She watched Ambler, smiling, for a long moment. “I think I found an apartment in the West Fifties.”

  “Already?” Ambler tried to take a drink from his glass, but it was empty. He signaled to McNulty for another. “You have something to tell me?” he said when the bartender arrived with the beer.

  McNulty leaned closer. “About the shooting.”

  “You know something about the shooting in the library?” Adele practically leaped at him.

  McNulty shook his head. “This guy was in last night. He’s doing something at the library, so he’s been stopping in—a writer, your kind of guy. He writes detective novels. His name’s Yates.”

  “Nelson Yates!” Adele’s eyes shot open.

  “He donated his papers to the library,” Ambler said.

  “A couple of guys at the bar were talking about the shooting. I happened to be standing near him. He wasn’t part of the conversation, drinking by himself. He said something I didn’t get, so I asked him what he said. ‘Chickens coming home to roost’ was what he said.”

  “Was he drunk?” Ambler asked.

  “He’d had a few. I asked him, ‘The guy in the library?’ He said, ‘Chickens coming home to roost.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  McNulty looked aggrieved. “It’s a saying. It means—

  “I know what it means. I meant what did he mean. What chickens? Whose chickens?”

  The bartender frowned. “The chickens, I believe, would be those of the deceased. Where they were coming from or why they arrived when they did, I couldn’t tell you.”

  Adele laughed.

  Ambler shot her an irritated glance and then turned it on McNulty. “Why’s he telling you this?” His tone was more challenging than he meant it to be.

  “People confide in their bartenders.” McNulty challenged right back.

  A little while later, after saying goodnight, clumsily, to Adele and putting her into a car service cab in front of the bar, Ambler walked across town the few blocks to his apartment. He’d lived on 36th Street between Second and Third avenues for more than twenty years, since the end of his marriage.

  Thanks to rent stabilization, his rent was manageable. Other apartments in the building had been gutted and renovated to justify higher rents. His, on the third floor of the four-story brownstone, was much the same as when he’d moved in. But now, with Adele on his mind, he looked at it in a different way. A floor-through, the living room overlooking 36th Street, the bedroom in the back overlooking the asphalt and cement backyard of an apartment building that faced 37th Street. A hallway ran between the living room and the back of the apartment, a bathroom off the hallway, the kitchen at the end of the hallway next to the bedroom. By Manhattan standards, it was large and, yes, might easily be comfortable for two people.

  Over the years since the end of his marriage to Liz, a few women had spent varying numbers of nights in the apartment with him, but no one moved in. His relationships, not that there were many, seemed to run their course in somewhere between a couple of weeks and six months, with long periods of solitariness between them. He didn’t so much choose to be alone as recognize solitude as a kind of destiny.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Sunday, Ambler glanced up from his computer screen to see Benny Barone open the door of the crime fiction reading room and look back over his shoulder before closing the door behind him.

  “What’s up?” Ambler asked.

  Small and wiry, olive-complexioned, with jittery, somewhat squirrel-like, movements, Benny looked shifty, even when he wasn’t tiptoeing into the room looking over his shoulder like he was on the lam. “Something weird’s going on, man.”

  “Oh?”

  “The dude I’m working with—” A knock on the entryway to the reading room froze Benny in mid-sentence.

  The knock was followed by a tall, crew-cut, gray-haired man wearing a tweed jacket. He went immediately to Ambler. “I want him replaced.” The man, whose head was shaped like a Rottweiler’s and whose hair was the color and consistency of metal shavings, nodded toward Benny. His dark eyes were blazing.

  Ambler didn’t like Maximilian Wagner, the truculent reader who stood in front of him. “Benny’s a good researcher, Max. I wouldn’t know who to replace him with. Besides, that’s Harry’s job.”

  “That’s a no?” He squared his shoulders. His thick chest heaved. “You’re assigned to work with me on this kind of thing.”

  “I don’t think so, Max.”

  Wagner’s stance, legs apart, feet firmly planted, and demeanor, combative, were more that of a fight promoter than the literary biographer he’d made his name as, especially when he was angry, as he was now. He sputtered. “You haven’t changed much have you?”

  “What’d he mean by that?” Benny asked when Wagner turned on his heel and left.

  “Once, in the dim, murky past, we were friends—“friends” probably isn’t the right word. We knew one another.”

  “At Columbia?”

  “At Columbia.”

  Benny waited. Ambler knew he wanted to ask what happened to Ambler at Columbia—something he never talked about—but knew better than to ask.

  “I wouldn’t mind being replaced,” Benny said. “I don’t like the guy.”

  “I understand. Max doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. That’s his advantage over civilized people.”

  “What I came to tell you…” Benny lowered his voice. “Did you know he had an argument with the guy who was killed?”

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t hear the whole thing. The guy who got killed used to be married to Kay, Wagner’s assistant.”

  “A love triangle?”

  Benny’s eyebrows shot up. “Love?… Kay? No. God, I hope not. She’s—” He stopped. “No. It was something scholarly—plagiarism. I’m not sure. The guy was mad at Kay, too. He accused them both.”

  “Of what?”

  He wrinkled his brow, seeming perplexed. “Something to do with the Yates biography, not a love thing.”

  “Did you tell the police about it?”

  “I told Harry. That’s why I wanted to ask you. You’re friends with that detective, right? Harry said I shouldn’t get involved.”

  “Too bad. I don’t know why he’d say that. You need to tell the police.” He dialed Cosgrove’s number on his cell phone and handed the phone to Benny.

  * * *

  A while later, Ambler again looked up from his work—writing finding aids for a backlog of crime fiction collections that hadn’t been processed—to see Kay Donnelly standing at the reading room door. Her face showed the strain she was under. Quite a bit younger than Wagner, her boss, probably in her mid-thirties, she was, as he’d told Cosgrove, tightly wound. Yet something in her bruised expression was appealing, a depth of understanding or possibly sympathy in her eyes, the kind of understanding that’s a product of having understood some pain of your own.

  “Hi,” he said cheerfully. He didn’t want to bring up the murder but thought it disingenuous to say nothing. He gestured toward a chair. “Sit down, Professor Donnelly. Kay, isn’t it? May I call you Kay? I’m sorry about your ex-husband’s death.”

  She frowned, making it clear she didn’t want to sit down, didn’t want to be called Kay, and didn’t want to talk about her ex-husband’s murder. Flashing a smile as sincere a
s a banker’s handshake, she said, “Dr. Wagner doesn’t understand how the Yates collection is organized. He wants you to arrange for me to go into the stacks, so I can see the entire collection.”

  Ambler scowled. Harry made him liaison between Wagner and the library staff, despite his objection, based on logic available only to Harry.

  Kay Donnelly’s rigidity—what they used to call “uptightness”—irritated him. “Sorry. Readers don’t have access to the stacks, not even renowned scholars like Max.”

  “I’m sure exceptions have been made—” Her face was a mask.

  “If they have, I didn’t make them. We haven’t processed the collection. No one could make sense of it. Max knows that.”

  He could see anger seeping around the edges of the mask. “What should I tell Dr. Wagner … that you won’t help?”

  She phrased the question carefully, a sneaky rebuke she couldn’t be challenged on. He wasn’t much into character analysis, but her style was that of an angry, aggrieved person who ducked out of the bushes, took her shot, and ducked back in, rather than go toe-to-toe with someone. He couldn’t blame her if she spent a lot of time around Max Wagner.

  “Try Harry.”

  After she left, he sat for a few moments wondering if he’d been chatting with a murderer. Cosgrove didn’t say so, but according to the homicide book of Hoyle—she’d be at the top of the list of suspects.

  * * *

  “You’re Mrs.—” As he was leaving for the day, Ambler thought he recognized the woman standing near the top of the main staircase in the second floor hallway.

  “Not Mrs.—I’m Laura Lee McGlynn.” She was pretty—glamorous, really—fashionably dressed in a beige blouse, black slacks, and dark green high-heeled shoes, a flash of color he didn’t expect. She spoke with a pronounced southern accent. Dark, almost black hair framed her face and bangs brushed her forehead, her lips were red, her teeth sparkling white; her eyes danced as she held out her hand. “Doesn’t Laura Lee sound better than some old Mrs. Somebody?” She laughed.

  Laura Lee McGlynn came across as someone who made her living being attractive, an actress, a TV newswoman, a trophy wife. Yet her easy laughter gave her a certain charm, a kind of down-to-earth aura about her, along with the glamour.

  Ambler was chatting with her, smiling more than he ordinarily did, and feeling a bit foolish because of it, when Max Wagner came chugging toward them along the second floor hallway. He kissed the woman’s cheek, which she turned toward him, her expression for the briefest of moments like a child enduring an obligatory kiss from a fussy aunt.

  “I see you’ve met my wife,” Wagner said in a tone that suggested Ambler had gotten away with something.

  “Just this minute.”

  “Max has no manners,” Laura Lee said. “He only believes in—what’s the term—“exchange value,” I think. Social interaction has merit only if it benefits him.”

  Max watched his wife as she spoke before turning to face Ambler, meeting his gaze with a hard stare. A kind of systemic anger, low-level rage, simmered beneath his air of disdain, so you thought it just as well he was indifferent to you because if he wasn’t he’d probably sink his teeth into your throat.

  Ambler met the stare with his own steady gaze. He wasn’t afraid of Max, and didn’t care much what he did or thought, except to wonder where the anger came from, the anger and the drive—the kind of drive that would run you down or ruin you to get what he wanted, and the anger that must fuel it. Laura Lee had her husband’s number all right. She also wore an engagement ring next to her wedding ring that had a diamond as big as a doorknob—exchange value for her? he wondered.

  Max shifted his gaze to her. “I haven’t told you Ray and I are old friends from grad school. He had quite a career.”

  “Oh?” said Laura Lee, smiling at Ambler.

  The smile asked for an explanation that he didn’t want to provide. “Max can tell you what happened. My academic career was derailed. How and why depends on who you ask.”

  “Ray was quite the man on campus: a college baseball player expected to go professional, a major political figure among the campus radicals, an up-and-coming American literature scholar. Now, here he is a librarian.” He didn’t need the smirk to make his point but threw it in anyway. That was Max. Overkill. One push too many. Never able to quit while he was ahead.

  Ambler kept his expression placid. “Honest work, Max. Where would you be without librarians?” He turned to Laura Lee. “Max has a knack for fanciful biographies, doesn’t he?”

  He was tempted to ask about the argument with the murder victim but thought better of it. Like a lawyer with a hostile witness, he wanted to know the answer before he asked the question.

  * * *

  Laura Lee slipped out from under Max’s arm as they waited in a line for the security guard at the door to check their bags. She wanted to shove him. For Max, putting his arm around her wasn’t a simple gesture but a rite of ownership, showing off. He should know better than that. She wasn’t something he’d won. She resisted the temptation to berate him where they stood, embarrassing him down to his toes, since he looked contrite enough now with his hands stuffed into his pockets like a truculent schoolboy.

  Jim Donnelly’s murder had freaked him out. She didn’t get it, and he wouldn’t explain. It was as if he knew who the murderer was, or if she didn’t know better—or at least think she knew better—he’d killed Donnelly himself. Now he was going on about Ambler the librarian. Max wasn’t normally afraid of anyone, one of the reasons she liked him. Yet the librarian made him uneasy.

  “Stay away from him.”

  “Why?”

  “He’ll ask questions. He’s smart. Before you know it, you’ll tell him your life story. He’ll start into that, digging around, tearing it apart. You’ll look up and see he’s pieced things together. Knows a lot more than you intended to tell him. I’ve seen him operate.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Max. What do you think I’ll tell him? He’s going to ask me about something that happened thirty years ago?”

  Max’s face was a map of troubles. His nerves were eating at him. “He’ll look into Jim Donnelly’s murder. You can bet on it. No matter what he says. That’s what he does when a murder interests him even when it doesn’t happen in his backyard. He’ll discover we know Donnelly and want to know more.”

  Laura Lee grabbed Max’s arm, turning him to face her. “What do you know about that murder that you’re not telling me?”

  He gave her that beady-eyed stare that meant he was keeping something from her. “Nothing. I don’t know anything about it. Let’s hope it was a random act that has nothing to do with us.”

  “Why would it have something to do with us?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. “I said don’t talk to Ray Ambler. He doesn’t like me. He’ll try to connect us to the murder.”

  “What do you mean us?”

  They stopped talking while the bored guard made a cursory search of Max’s book bag. Suddenly, the guard stiffened and then pulled a book out of the bag. He looked inside the cover and then held it up. “You can’t take this out of the library.”

  Max looked around guiltily. His voice low, barely above a whisper, he said, “I’m a researcher. It’s from the collection I’m working on—”

  The guard raised his voice. “You can’t take a book out of the library.”

  The line grew longer and people were murmuring to one another. Laura Lee was furious. “Give him the goddamn book, you idiot!”

  “Take it,” Max said.

  “I’m not going to take it,” the guard said. “Put it back where you got it.”

  Max slunk out of line and headed back to the Allen Room, where he kept his research materials.

  “I’m going home,” Laura Lee said as she walked out through the half-open revolving door. She didn’t know if Max heard her or not.

  Chapter 4

  As Ambler left for lunch the next afternoon, h
e found Benny Barone sitting on the front steps of the library, eating a hot dog from the cart across the street, watching the traffic stream down Fifth Avenue. In the distance, beyond the Empire State Building, fluffy white clouds pushed by a gentle breeze skittered across a blue sky. The warm sun hinted at summer, a perfect spring day, except not for Benny, who looked miserable. Ambler stopped when he noticed his stormy expression.

  “If I see that guy on the street, I’m going to push him in front of a bus,” Benny said.

  Ambler sat down. Wagner wasn’t someone you wanted to run afoul of. Junior faculty, department heads, even deans who crossed him wound up doing the academic equivalent of selling pencils from a cup on the street. He watched the ebb and flow of pedestrians crossing Fifth Avenue in waves each time the signal lights changed. Benny was a city kid whose Bensonhurst roots ran deep—raised among those who protected their neighborhoods, solved their problems, and settled their disputes pretty much on their own.

  “Max Wagner’s not worth getting in trouble over, Benny.”

  Benny shook his head. “Fuck him.”

  “Better to drop it.”

  “What he does ain’t right, Ray.” Benny glared into Ambler’s eyes for emphasis. “He doesn’t know how to treat people, even his own staff.”

  Ambler caught on. Benny was talking about Kay Donnelly, whom Max Wagner treated like a scullery maid. Benny saw behind her curt manner, severe expression, and frumpy outfits to a desirable woman lurking beneath. He’d seen them walking together in the hallway, oblivious to everyone around them, like two high-school kids with a crush on each other. Too bad she was trouble. Bad enough she worked for Wagner; having a murdered ex-husband was entirely too much trouble for a wise man to take on.

  Ambler took in Benny’s pointed and shiny black leather shoes, stiffly creased black dress pants, open-collar, starched and ironed Italian dress shirt, soft leather jacket. Not the way most librarians dressed. He was who he was. Presented with a bully and a damsel in distress, his choice wasn’t a wise one. Yet such choices had been made for centuries. Who was Ambler to change human nature?