by Con Lehane
“Ask the organized crime guys.”
He didn’t like most of the possibilities for the kid. You could hope he’d missed the whole thing. Or he might have left when the bad things began to happen. In either case, why didn’t he come back? He didn’t get himself a hotel room. The best outcome would be that he went to someone.
Ray had visited Emily Yates before she was killed, so had Dominic Salerno, and so had Ray’s friend Adele. Adele and the bartender McNulty found the body. He could start with any one of them, and Adele’s apartment was only a couple of blocks away. He headed over. On the way, he got a call from Ford.
“They dropped the surveillance after I questioned him the other night. They’re still pissed off, and they don’t know where he is—or if they do, they won’t tell me.”
* * *
“This is a hell of a gathering.” Cosgrove stood in the doorway of Adele’s apartment. The four culprits stared at him from the interior of the apartment, as if he’d come to haul them away. He hadn’t slept, except for the few minutes on the floor of the runaway center, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He didn’t feel much like chitchat.
Adele told him about finding Johnny in her apartment and recounted what Johnny told them about the man who came to his mother’s apartment. Cosgrove asked the boy to describe him. The description was vague, as might be expected from a scared kid.
“Would you recognize him?”
Johnny shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m going to bring you down to the police station with me to look at some photographs, okay?”
Johnny looked from Adele to Ambler.
“Who do you want him to look at?” Ambler asked.
Cosgrove met Ambler’s gaze. “Let’s not prejudice this. I want him to look at some photos.”
“Can it wait?” Adele put her arm around Johnny. “Why don’t you go and arrest Dominic?”
“Sooner’s better than later. It’s not for sure Dominic’s the killer.” He looked from her to Ambler and back at her. “I have to take the kid with me anyway.”
Adele reacted like he’d pulled a gun on her. “What? Why? You can’t take him. Where would you take him?”
“Child protective services.”
The boy’s eyes went wild. If Adele hadn’t tightened her grip on him, he would have bolted. Talk about fear and loathing.
“That’s the procedure when we don’t have a relative.”
“He can stay with me. His mother sent him to me.”
Cosgrove rubbed a spot on his forehead between his eyes, feeling a headache coming on. He was a cop. He didn’t make the laws. He was supposed to follow them. That’s how it was. So, there you go, another problem with having friends. Cops shouldn’t have friends. They’d be better off without hearts.
“C’mon. I didn’t make the rules.” He was angry at the protocols, at himself, and at them. “I gotta contact child services. Maybe someone there, they’ll say it’s fine for the kid to stay with Adele.”
They stood, and the bartender, who’d been sitting off to the side watching the encounter like it was a boxing match, walked over to join them and whispered something to Ambler. Ray then whispered something to Adele. Cosgrove’s hackles went up. Whispering meant trouble.
“Okay,” Ambler said. “We’ll go downtown—all of us. You can show Johnny your photos. The child welfare people can meet us there.”
“I don’t know. They should come here and pick up the boy.”
“C’mon, Mike.”
He gave Ambler an exasperated look and headed for the door.
At the bottom of the stairs, in the vestibule between the inner and outer doors, Ambler called Cosgrove back, and they let McNulty, Adele, and Johnny precede them out the door to the street.
“What?” Cosgrove said.
“Really, Mike. Do you have to do this now?”
“The boy’s an eyewitness.” He opened the door.
Ambler put his hand on his arm and pulled him back. “Did anyone find a briefcase at the murder scene?”
Cosgrove turned to Ambler. “You know what’s in the briefcase?”
Ambler nodded. As he did, Cosgrove caught the glint in his eye and knew he’d been had. Yanking open the door, he rushed out to the sidewalk, looked up the street and then down the street. McNulty, Adele, and the kid were gone.
Chapter 27
The next morning, after only a couple of hours of sleep, Ambler went to the library to tell Harry the terrible news. He found a small fleet of police cars parked in a kind of mishmash constellation on Fifth Avenue. At the top of the marble steps, in front of the giant bronze doors, was the sort of chaotic scene you find during police action. A crowd gathered; uniformed officers pushed the crowd back while folks in the crowd pushed back against the officers, craning their necks, jostling for position. Ambler was stopped from going up the steps, so like everyone else he craned his neck to see what was happening.
A wave of blue uniforms came through the revolving door and seemed to flow down the steps. Behind them, flanked by plainclothes detectives, his hands cuffed behind, nothing to shield his expression of mortification, came Harry Larkin.
“Harry!” Ambler shouted as the entourage moved close to him at the bottom of the stairs.
Harry turned his pale face toward Ambler, his expression like the frozen, pasty face you see on a corpse. Ed Ford, Cosgrove’s partner, steered him by the elbow. From him, Ambler got a quick glance and a flicker of irritation.
“Where are you taking him?”
Harry’s entourage ignored the question.
“Probably Central Booking,” a voice behind him said.
“Harry. Don’t talk to anyone about anything. I’m getting you a lawyer.”
Ed Ford flashed him another sour look. Harry’s expression didn’t change.
Remembering McNulty’s lawyer friend, Ambler headed for the Library Tavern.
“They arrested Harry?” McNulty said. “They might as well lock up the Blessed Mother.” He called his lawyer friend and after some difficulty getting through argued with him for a while. Eventually, he hung up.
“He’s talking about conflict of interest because he’s representing the other guy from the library. I won him over when I said Harry was a boss and might be a paying customer. He’ll try to spring him, but it’ll take a few hours, maybe longer.”
Ambler called Mike Cosgrove.
“Not now,” Cosgrove said.
“What’s the charge?”
“He hasn’t been charged.” Cosgrove sighed into the phone. “I know he’s your friend—”
“Why would you take him out in handcuffs?”
“Let me do my job, Ray? I can’t talk now.” Cosgrove paused and Ambler could hear him grumbling to himself. “They cuffed him because he resisted.… He ran.”
* * *
Kay Donnelly and Benny Barone were watching TV at the Liberty Inn on Tenth Avenue, appropriately enough in the Meatpacking District. Kay took the morning off, so they availed themselves of the two-hour rate, and were comfortable enough with one another to enjoy watching TV in bed, like a real couple, once they’d completed the mating ritual.
When Benny went to the bathroom, Kay switched to NY1, idly watching until a bulletin flashed on the screen and she learned that Emily Yates had been murdered.
“My God!” she screamed.
Benny ran from the bathroom and stared at the TV. “Another murder? Who’s she?”
Kay wrapped herself in the sheets. “Nelson’s daughter.”
“Oh, that’s right. Why? Why did someone kill her?”
She looked into Benny’s eyes but didn’t answer.
In the lobby, as she and Benny were leaving, Kay bumped into a handsome but dangerous-looking dark-haired man, who was vaguely familiar. When she turned to apologize, she stopped in her tracks. The man’s arm was looped through the arm of Laura Lee.
Kay stared. Laura Lee smiled sweetly. “Hello Kay.” She tightened her grip on the man’s ar
m and pulled him closer to her. “Nice to see you let your hair down.” She turned her smile on Benny.
Benny gawked at her.
“Emily Yates was murdered,” Kay said. She wanted to shock Laura Lee. She didn’t expect the reaction of the man with her. His expression hardened into the scariest she’d ever seen—the face she’d been terrified she’d one day see looming above her as she was about to be raped and murdered.
He yanked his arm loose and turned on Laura Lee. “You fucking son of a bitch. You’re a shill for my brother?”
“No! Dominic, no!” Laura Lee voice rose to a hysterical whine. She reached for his arm with both hands. He grabbed her wrists, held them in a grip that looked as tight as a vise until her face twisted with pain; then, he shoved her away so that she careened off the wall, leaving her there, cringing, rubbing her wrists, a wreck of her former cocky self. He pushed past Kay, stopped for seconds to glare at Benny, who’d taken a step forward as if he might intercept him, and pushed past him also. In seconds, he was gone.
As she watched Laura Lee run out to the street and flag down a cab, moments, if not seconds, after the man she’d been with had done the same thing, Kay turned to Benny. “I know that man,” she said. “I’ve seen him before … with Max.”
* * *
“You don’t have to talk to me until your lawyer gets here.” Cosgrove pulled up a straight-backed chair across from Harry Larkin and sat down. The ex-priest, sitting up straight in his own chair, stared at the blank wall behind Cosgrove. “I don’t want any crap about you not getting your rights. You can remain silent. What you say can be held against you. Someone told you all that, right?”
Harry pulled his chair closer to the metal table between them, rested his elbows on the table, and buried his face in his hands. Cosgrove wondered if he might be crying. People did that when the life they’ve built on a lie begins to crumble. From the outside, all you see is a little bit of erosion or some rotting at the base. From the inside, they see the whole thing coming down, not visible yet, but already started.
“We’re being recorded. You got that. On the video, everyone will see I’m telling you you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want and if you do talk what you say can be used against you. Your name’s Harry Larkin, right?”
Harry sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. In his expression, no anger, no hate. He was a soft guy, no chip on his shoulder, no grudge against the world. Not so unusual for soft guys to murder someone. When they did, usually they didn’t fight you. The murder was the end for them. What happened afterward, they didn’t care.
“From the beginning, I didn’t believe you on what happened in the office.” Cosgrove kept his tone conversational.
Larkin looked at him blankly.
“You had to see the shooter. So why not say so? I didn’t get it right away. Now, I do. If you told on her, she’d tell on you. Maybe she’d think you keeping quiet evened the score.” Cosgrove stood and pushed his chair back. “We know about the pedophile charge.” He paced the room, not looking at Harry.
“That wasn’t true. There was no charge.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Cosgrove saw Larkin following him with his eyes, so he turned to face him. “I suppose you were never in Emily Yates’s apartment either.”
“I was.”
“Fingerprints,” Cosgrove said weakly. Not what he expected. Instead of him catching the look of surprise on Larkin’s face, it went the other way. Something about the ex-priest made it easy to believe him—the you-can’t-cheat-an-honest-man aura. You couldn’t sweat a guy like this. He knew that, but he wouldn’t have enough to hold him if Ray lawyered him up like he said he would, so he might as well try.
He told Harry the scenario he’d come up with: a sex scandal, a cover-up, shipped to a new parish, like with the rest of the pedophile priests. Emily Yates turns up after all these years. She could expose him. Maybe the statute of limitations had run out; even so, there was the embarrassment; maybe a civil suit; living the rest of his life marked as a pervert. Kill himself if he’s exposed. Kill her, he doesn’t get exposed.
That might not be 100 percent right. But the elements were right: sex, revenge, the past refusing to stay in the past. He was close. “Why not confess? Get it off your chest.”
Harry remained silent, inscrutable.
“The seal of confession keep you from admitting to a murder, too?”
Harry’s elbows rested on the table, his chin in the palms of his hand so his fingers were splayed out against his cheeks, thoughtful, cherublike. “Emily’s death confirms that innocence doesn’t protect you from the consequences of the evil that others do.”
Cosgrove slowed his pacing. Like a hunter come upon his prey, he tried to blend in with the surroundings, barely taking a breath, doing nothing to alter the landscape, to make it as if he weren’t there, that the prey was safe in his natural environment. Larkin was talking. He needed to keep talking until it all came out.
“Emily was sexually abused when she was young. Perhaps you didn’t know it began with her father.”
“Only since her murder,” Cosgrove said.
“She knew I knew what he’d been doing to her. She knew it was wrong. She didn’t know how to stop it. She turned to me for help, yet I couldn’t reveal what I’d learned in the confessional. I told her to tell the authorities, someone at her school.” He paused. Even if his voice was steady, he squinted his eyes closed every few seconds, as if something was hurting him. “Her parents were Catholic—not what you’d expect from their behavior—mystical, no rules. Emily thought if she divulged her sins in the confessional … What she didn’t consider was that others confessed to me.”
His silence this time was longer. The temptation to urge him on was hard to resist. Cosgrove clenched his teeth and waited.
“She blamed me and, of course, herself, angry at me because I didn’t help. She got the idea that if she accused me of what was being done to her by someone else, I’d reveal what I knew to save myself.”
He was through talking. He might be lying. Cosgrove didn’t think so. It didn’t matter. Emily Yates was dead without recanting. Whatever denials he made would be baying at the moon.
“She never forgave you.” Cosgrove said. “She tried to kill you. She was the shooter in your office. Took out her revenge on Donnelly for what he did to her, and later her father for what he did, and tried to get you, too.”
Larkin looked at him blankly.
“You knew she’d try again, so you got to her first.”
* * *
“What happened?” Ambler asked.
Kay and Benny began talking at once, standing in front of the library table in the crime fiction reading room.
“Slow down. You were where when you saw Laura Lee and this man?”
They looked at each other and then at the floor. “A hotel downtown, the Liberty Inn.” Benny mumbled, his eyes downcast. “That’s not important. It’s what he said when Kay told him the woman had been murdered. He acted like she’d murdered her—”
“No.” Kay interrupted him. “He said she was a shell—or something like that—for his brother.”
“A shill?” Ambler asked. “She called him Dominic? Can you describe him?”
They combined forces to come up with a description that might fit Dominic Salerno but would also cover half the men his age on and around Arthur Avenue, many of them also named Dominic.
“Do you know what he meant by a shill for his brother?”
Kay turned from Ambler to face Benny and looked at him for a long time. “I’m sorry you have to hear all this, Benny.” She turned to face Ambler. “I remember where I saw him. Upstate. During the time we were at Hudson Highlands. He came to meet Max twice. It was strange. They met at a rest area, a scenic overlook on Route 9-W. Max had told me his father was a gangster and so was his brother. He’d broken away, changed his name, and had nothing to do with them. I thought it was bragging, part of the bad-boy image he cultivated. Whe
n I saw him with this man, Dominic, I didn’t think it was bragging anymore. When Arthur Woods died right after that and Max dropped me and picked up with Laura Lee—”
Benny’s expression clouded. “You were with Max Wagner?” He cocked his head, like a dog listening to something he couldn’t quite make out, maybe his master’s voice from far away, waiting for her to clear things up.
Kay kept her eyes trained on Ambler. “They got out of their cars to talk. I thought it peculiar … and sinister.”
Ambler needed to sort things out. Dominic Salerno knew Max years before. He was in Hudson Highlands when Laura Lee’s first husband, fell, jumped, or was pushed off a cliff. Dominic spent the morning at an hourly rate hotel with Laura Lee—and when he found out Emily had been murdered suspected Max of the murder. It was a lot to digest. “Was Max having sex with Emily at Hudson Highlands?”
Kay’s expression hardened. “Yes. Everyone was, including my husband and her father.”
Benny stared at her. She kept her eyes averted.
Ambler had trouble keeping his voice under control. “You knew this?”
“Not until after Emily ran away.” She paused, squeezed her eyes closed, and seemed to steel herself. “Nelson and Max did something with Emily. I finally got out of Max that they’d taken pubescent, erotic photos. After she ran away, Nelson went nuts. He didn’t know Max and James and Arthur were having sex with her, and I guess Max told him.”
The puzzle was coming together for Ambler. He needed one more connection for everything to add up. “Did Max ever see Emily again after she ran away?”
Kay took a deep breath. “I’m sure Max didn’t because he was looking for her. But James did. He found her a couple of years ago but none of us knew that until the day before he was killed. He tricked her into giving him letters her father wrote to her trying to get her to forgive him for what happended to her when she was young … what he’d done to her. After a while, Emily caught on to what James was up to and told him she wanted the letters back.”
“Did he give them to her?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Kay nodded. “That’s what the argument Benny overheard was about. James had the letters. He showed them to Max. He wanted to make a deal, coauthor the biography. Max said no.” She smiled weakly. “Max was never very good at sharing. He wanted to interview Emily for the book. He wanted her quotes. The letters weren’t enough for him. When James was killed, and then Nelson, Max began falling apart. He thought the murders were retribution. He convinced himself that Emily was the murderer … and he was next.”