by Con Lehane
Winded, the man tried a few more punches to no avail, finally charging at Ambler, arms open, shoulder down, to tackle him. Ambler avoided the charge. This time, he turned farther than he had previously, pushing the man as he turned and sending him sprawling into a parked car.
Leaning against the car, bent at the waist, taking deep breaths, the man appraised Ambler. Adele stood to the side, the boy in front of her, her arms draped over him protectively. Ambler, breathing heavily himself, watched the man next to the car.
“A standoff,” the man said, not an exact description of their situation. He had the hardened, chiseled face of someone both brutal and afraid—a kind of reckless cockiness in his expression that would be appealing to women attracted to bad boys but might hide the intrinsic fear of a bully. Despite this edginess, the fight-or-flee instinct so close to the surface, he took their altercation lightly, as if he were amused by it.
“You’re pretty good.” His smile was fake, his interest sincere. “What is that, some kind of karate?” Not waiting for an answer, he said. “It’s cool but it don’t make you a tough guy. You could get whacked. That fancy footwork don’t help with that.” He let this sink in before repeating himself. “Don’t think you’re a tough guy.” He straightened up and dusted himself off, smoothing his jacket.
“I don’t,” said Ambler. “I didn’t want you to manhandle the boy.”
“You’re strangers. How do I know what you’re up to? You don’t have no business with the kid. I could have you arrested.”
Ambler spoke quietly to Johnny. “Would you go up and get your mother? I’d rather explain things to her.”
The boy froze, rooted to the sidewalk, his eyes wild, his glance swinging from the man to Ambler. Finally, he leaned his head back and looked up helplessly at Adele.
“What do you want to happen, Johnny?” Her voice was gentle.
The man took a step toward them, holding his hands open in front of him in a placating gesture. “Look. Maybe there’s a misunderstanding. My name’s Dominic. I’m a friend of Johnny’s mother. He knows I wouldn’t hurt him, right Johnny?”
When the boy didn’t answer, anger flashed in the man’s eyes. “Don’t fuck around, Johnny. You know goddamn well—”
“Can I go upstairs?” he asked.
Ambler’s heart ached. This was the kid’s home. This was his life. He couldn’t protect the boy. Probably, he’d made things worse for the kid.
“The boy was shining shoes. We bought him an ice cream.” In a sense, the guy was right. He and Adele were strangers. City kids like Johnny shouldn’t talk to strangers, much less go somewhere with them. This was the orthodoxy, the lowest common denominator, the Daily News take on it. Yet despite the orthodoxy, the kid would do better with him and Adele than he would with this guy and his mother. “We were bringing him home. I’m sure his mother was worried that he’s out this late. It wasn’t his fault. I’d like a chance to explain to her, so—”
Dominic interrupted. “Let the kid go upstairs. She won’t bother him. That’s his problem; she don’t bother him about anything. He does whatever the hell he wants.” He paused. “I was leavin’ anyway, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not going to kick his ass.” He laughed. “Go ahead, Johnny.” The boy started to walk toward his apartment building.
“It’s his scam, you know,” the man said. “Standin’ on the street with his shoeshine box lookin’ pathetic.” He laughed. “I taught the fuckin’ kid to shine shoes. I practically made him a millionaire.” He tousled the boy’s head as he walked past. “You goddamn con artist.”
Johnny turned his sad eyes on Adele and Ambler and trudged toward his building. Ambler realized he hadn’t had the shoeshine.
Chapter 9
“I don’t get it,” said Emily. “I just took you there. I’m not taking you to Midtown again. You got your own goddamn library right here on Tenth Avenue.”
“Because they’re nice. They’d show me around. You don’t need to go.”
Emily had to squint one eye closed to see her son clearly. “I said no and don’t you dare try going down there by yourself.”
What Johnny saw was his mother in her usual morning condition, hungover, irritated, half-awake, flapping about the messy apartment in flip-flops, in her underwear and a T-shirt, her hair ratty and disheveled, last night’s makeup smeared and ground into her face.
“I’m telling you Johnny. You go there; that’s it. I’m calling child services. You’re an uncontrollable child. They’ll take you away.” The more she talked, the angrier she got. He’d heard the threat enough times for it to have lost most of its terror. Even he knew he wasn’t the uncontrollable one. Littering the living room, besides half-empty Chinese take-out boxes, sandwich wrappers, and food-encrusted dishes, were two empty vodka fifths, beer bottles; on the floor near the couch, the shoes and socks of the man still asleep in the bedroom. She’d be the one in trouble, he knew, if anyone from child services came.
The time his teacher asked him was everything okay at home because he’d come to school so many days wearing the same clothes, he told her his mom was sick, but his aunt had come and would stay until his mom got better, so everything would be okay. He knew if he told the teacher the problem was his mom got her hands on a bunch of cocaine and wouldn’t be home much until it was gone, the teacher would call child services and he would be taken away. He didn’t want that, not to be taken away by strangers, not for children’s services to get him.
“You hear me, Johnny. Stay away from there. Stay away from those librarian people. They’ll cause us trouble. Believe me.” Her voice was calmer, and her eyes glistened with something like tears. When she quieted like this, the times when the drinking wore off, when she wasn’t hungover, or wasted in the aftermath of a coke bender, she looked at him the way no one else ever did.
When she looked at him like that, he understood he could trust her more than anyone else in the world. Not the teachers nor the social workers, nor anyone else cared as much about him as she did. No matter how he hated what she did; no matter the pains in his stomach or aches in his chest when she stumbled up the stairs with some new guy pawing at her; no matter how nasty she was to him or that she forgot to make him breakfast or wasn’t home at dinner time; no matter how deeply he hated her for the pain he felt without understanding; no matter that he knew she was wrong and that his life wasn’t as it was supposed to be; even if he knew she cheated him out of the things a child is supposed to have, he knew she loved him differently than anyone else would or could, and because of that he needed her desperately and was terrified something would happen to her, yet knew instinctively that something would happen to her, that something bad would happen to her. He knew with the certainty of instinct that his mother was on an inexorable path of self-destruction.
She went to the kitchen, found her purse, and rummaged through it. When she finished, she knelt down in front of him. “Things will be better soon, Johnny. I had a really bad week. But things are getting better. Sam’s going to find me places to sing. That’s what he does. He’s a promoter. Here.” She handed him a five-dollar bill. “Get breakfast at the Greek’s on the way to school.”
“I don’t need money. I got money.” He didn’t know how to say the rest of what he felt, so he looked into her eyes, hoping she would see it in his.
She nodded. “You’re a good boy.… Tell you what,” she said, standing. “I’ll pick you up after school and take you to the library.”
“The one downtown?” His eyes brightened.
Her face twisted with anger. “Not the goddamn one downtown. I told you not there. Forget about downtown. Stay away from those people. They don’t want you there. They don’t care about you. You’re an oddity to them, a kid to feel sorry for. We don’t need them feeling sorry for us. You don’t need other people taking care of you.… I take care of you!” she screamed.
He could feel tears forming in his eyes, and he hated that. His mother wailed and cried all the time. He di
dn’t want to be like her. He didn’t ever want to be like her. She calmed herself right away. Because of his tears, he knew. He was mortified.
“I’m sorry I yelled, Johnny. I didn’t mean to. You know how I feel about people who think they’re better than us. You’re not a poor little kid. You don’t need them. You come from an important family.”
She’d said that before, whatever it meant. As far as he knew, he had no family but her. The only other constant in his life besides her was Dominic. Unlike the man in the bedroom who might be around for a day or a week and disappear forever, Dominic would show up for a week, and disappear again for months or years. But he’d always come back. He had since Johnny was little. But, even when he was little, it was as if he wasn’t there. Every now and then, his mom and Dominic would go somewhere, usually the Italian place on Ninth Avenue for dinner, and his mom would make Dominic take him along. Sometimes she left Dominic to watch him, but all they did was watch TV. The only one thing Dominic had done was get him the shoeshine kit and teach him to shine shoes. He’d done that himself as a kid was what Dominic told him.
She kissed him in the doorway as he was leaving and hugged him for a long time. He didn’t like feeling her almost naked body against him and hated the sour smell of her mouth and the sweaty stink of her body. She let go of him finally, saying, “I’ll pick you up after school.” He nodded, but he knew she wouldn’t.
* * *
“Two dead authors,” said Cosgrove. “Maybe it’s literary criticism.”
Ambler rolled his eyes. Cosgrove was treating him to dinner at a small French restaurant on Lexington Avenue in the Thirties that he wanted to try. A self-taught epicure, Cosgrove liked to explore the city’s off-the-beaten-track brasseries and bistros.
“We’ve done a lot of background, a lot of interviews. Nothing connects the victims to each other in the last twenty years.” Cosgrove eyed him carefully. “The stuff you gave me was good. Once upon a time, Yates was the teacher. Donnelly, your friend Wagner, and the two women, Wagner’s wife and Donnelly’s ex-wife, Kay, were either teachers or students. But it was one year; despite all the upheaval—death, divorce, runaway kid—that was it. They parted company.”
“And Arthur Woods?”
Cosgrove nodded. “I’ve wondered about that, too. The guy went over a cliff. The autopsy found THC. The thinking was he was horsing around and fell. Until I come up with something better, I’ll say that one isn’t connected. What do you think of a vendetta against the library?”
“Neither of the victims worked at the library.”
“It’s still a black eye, puts everyone on edge, makes it an unsafe place to be.” He paused and stared into Ambler’s eyes for a long moment. “By the way, you didn’t mention your boss—the saint—was part of that long-ago college scene. Maybe you didn’t know?”
Ambler averted his gaze. “I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“He told you?”
Ambler didn’t like how this was going. He examined a painting on the far wall trying to avoid Cosgrove’s hard stare. “He probably didn’t think it was relevant either.” He knew how lame he sounded, but he pushed through. “There’s a point to your buying me dinner,” he said. “I hoped you’d come to see you were barking up the wrong tree with Benny Barone.”
Cosgrove shook his head. “You know better than that. I never said Barone was a suspect, and I’m not saying now he isn’t.”
Ambler put down his fork and placed his napkin on top of his plate. “I hope you have an expense account for this.”
“Yeh, right.” Cosgrove poured the last of the wine into both of their glasses. “In homicide, we entertain a lot—expense-account lunches with suspects, a corporate box at the Garden for when we take out hit men and serial killers.” Folding his napkin, he put it on the table in front of him. “The duck was cooked perfectly, crisp but not dry, the sauce a touch sweet for my money. How was your sole?”
“Good,” said Ambler, who had no way of judging.
Cosgrove searched Ambler’s face for a moment. “So what’s the connection between Donnelly and Yates? You think it’s something that happened back then that’s working itself out now, right? That’s one of your patented theories.”
Ambler didn’t hesitate. “It’s a possibility. Max Wagner’s a connection—not only in the past. Max and Donnelly may have been writing competing biographies of Nelson Yates. I told you about the argument they had, or Benny did, possibly about plagiarism. That’s an accusation not lightly made in academic circles.”
Cosgrove eyed Ambler with his practiced police interrogator stare. “No offense, professor. It doesn’t seem to me anyone cares enough about this literary crap to kill someone over it.”
Ambler took a deep breath. Even so, his tone was sharp. “Not a professor. I’m a librarian. You asked. Take it for what it’s worth.”
Cosgrove shifted his gaze. Ambler regretted his reaction, which surprised and embarrassed his friend; no reason for Cosgrove to know the professor comment was insulting. Lots of water under the bridge. After a moment, Cosgrove said. “Let me try again. Back to the library, Larkin’s a strange duck—”
“Why?” Something in Cosgrove’s tone put him on alert.
Cosgrove snorted. “Because he acts like that, like you just did. Like he’s covering something up.”
Ambler remembered something. “Tourists. Tourists have cameras. Someone—”
Cosgrove nodded. “We thought of that. A group of Japanese college students, most of them had cameras. There’s diplomacy involved. We’re working through the State Department.” His manner softened. “I know you don’t like what I’m asking. Think of it this way. We need to do more than catch the killer. We need to eliminate as a suspect anyone who had access to the room and might have had a reason to kill either of them. If we don’t have an ironclad case, if we miss something, once we do have the killer, a good defense lawyer will ask why we didn’t investigate Jack the Ripper or Marty the Mugger or Kate the Killer, all with motive and opportunity to kill the victim. And if we didn’t investigate him or her, how do we know the aforementioned Jack or Marty or Kate isn’t the murderer, rather than the accused?”
What Cosgrove said was true but not the whole story. Ambler waited.
Cosgrove took out his notebook. They went back and forth about Harry for another twenty minutes. Harry was hiding something; they both knew that. Where they differed was on what it meant, and whether he had a right to keep things to himself.
“If he knew who the killer was, he’d tell you.”
Cosgrove raised his eyebrows, opened his eyes wider, his expression suggesting patience. “I’ve put off bringing him in for a lot of reasons, one of them isn’t that I don’t think he has anything more to tell us.”
Chapter 10
After a couple of espressos and when enough time had passed for the wine to wear off, Cosgrove began the drive home to Queens. At that time of night, through the Midtown Tunnel, he’d be home in twenty minutes, with luck. As always, the case was foremost in his mind. This one could get away if he didn’t get a break soon. Too little evidence, no witnesses, everyone holding his cards close to the vest. Not that it was the first case where everyone had something to hide and lied. Scholars and librarians, a murder in the hood, a body in the library, the response was the same. No one gave up anything easily.
Ray was protecting his boss, understandable enough, also protecting the Italian kid who was getting it on with the ex-wife of the first victim. If he were honest with himself, despite the suspicions he laid out for Ray, he didn’t have a suspect. The first murder looked like vengeance—another “Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.” The ex-wife, with the Italian kid to pull the trigger, was a good bet, certainly not the only one. The victim could have done any number of people wrong. The shooter was efficient. The shock of brains and blood spurting out of the guy’s head, spattering the floor and walls, would’ve caused most people to jerk the gun, put the next bullet in the ceiling, the wall,
the floor. You had to be pretty cold to stay on target. A pro would stay on target—and maybe someone filled with hate. He didn’t see that in the kid Benny. But you never know.
He wasn’t mad at Ray for stonewalling him. Ray wasn’t a cop. What he knew about crime and investigation—and for someone not a cop, he knew a lot—he didn’t know crime the way a cop did. Ray felt sorry for everyone. When he saw the fear and the lying and the regret once the suspect was nailed, he felt sorry for the person. A cop couldn’t do his job if you felt sorry for all the poor miserable bastards you had to lock up. You called them scum and garbage and assholes and you thought about what they did and who they did it to, rather than what went wrong in their miserable lives to make them what they were.
Cosgrove didn’t like the train of thought he was on. The black hats and white hats were taking on shades of gray. He was thinking about the Yates book he’d been reading. It wasn’t that you had illusions about the killer. It was that at the end you didn’t have a sense of someone or something triumphing, certainly not good over evil. He was almost finished with the book now—he’d finish it tonight—and realized the anxious, hopeful feeling that welled up as he turned into his street was the anticipation of getting back to the book.
He found a parking space not far from the house and walked the short distance, not conscious of how alert he was to his surroundings. After dinner with a friend, on a quiet street in Queens’s safest neighborhood, territory as familiar as his living room, he was like a rabbit in the field, senses heightened, ears alert to any sound, eyes sweeping the street in front of him, behind him, between parked cars, amongst the shrubbery, in the shadows of trees. He wasn’t afraid, yet he believed with his entire being that danger was around him.