by Con Lehane
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.
The house was dark, so he hoped Denise was home, and, as usual, he hoped Sarah was asleep. Ray hadn’t asked about her. A couple of years now he stopped bringing Sarah along to dinner with Ray. He didn’t take her to department social events anymore either. He’d lugged her out of too many of them. Cops’ wives got tipsy at parties, often plastered. For too many of them, becoming a drunk or getting a divorce were options one and two. Trouble with wives and trouble with kids. It could happen to any cop—there but for the grace of God.
The thing with Sarah was he should never have married her, and because he did, marrying her when he loved someone else, what she became was his fault. After two or three times at dinner with Ray when she got shitfaced, he didn’t bring her anymore. The first time he didn’t bring her Ray asked, and he never did again.
Ray’s ex-wife was a drunk, too. He didn’t talk about her either. What they did talk about was their kids. Years ago, Ray came to him when his son John hit the wall. He’d often regretted not helping more. At the time, he didn’t know the librarian well and didn’t know what to make of him and his son. The boy was raised by his mother. That got him some sympathy. But Ray, as desperate as he was, seemed distant, acting out of guilt maybe, not the love you’d expect from a parent. He learned later, when he knew Ray better, that he’d been wrong on this. Ray was distant and aloof. That was how he was. It didn’t mean he didn’t love his son. There was nothing he wouldn’t have done for the boy. He was crushed when he was sent to prison.
More recently, he talked to Ray when he worried himself sick about Denise. Thirteen years old, she came home drunk. He didn’t know what to do with her. Hadn’t she seen what happened to her mother? He was cursed, payback for the wrongs he’d done. Inside, Cosgrove found everyone home and asleep. What amazing peace that brought him.
* * *
Saturday morning, Harry barged into the tiny reading room, rousting Ambler from his work. “You’ve created a real firestorm.” His eyes were blazing. “The president’s office called me. He wants to answer an opinion article in the Times yesterday by some detective novelist blasting the library for closing the crime fiction reading room.”
“That was—”
“I don’t care who it was. The president is furious.” He lowered his voice. “I have to draft the rebuttal.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I have to. If the president asks me to do something, I do it. It’s my job.” Harry clasped his hands together in front of his formidable midsection. “You have to realize your reading room is only a small part, a tiny part, of a grander plan—hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. You need to tone things down.”
Ambler stared at him. “Jesus Christ, Harry, you told me I had to do something to try to keep the reading room open.”
“Not that! I wasn’t expecting a public fight, protests and such. We don’t want the whole city up in arms criticizing the library. I meant things like a well-reasoned letter to the president.”
Ambler stood. “I don’t care about the new library plan. It’s stupid, a corporate cabal. Bankers, Wall Street lawyers, real estate developers, what do they know about scholarship and research? They’ll turn the library into an amusement park—”
“I’m not going to stand for this, Ray.” Harry tried to come across as defiant, but he looked crestfallen. Poor Harry was more inclined to sit in the field and smell the flowers like Ferdinand than take on the corporate powers and the library president—or deal with murders in his library.
* * *
After his encounter with Harry, Ambler called Benny to ask him to arrange a meeting with Kay Donnelly.
“Why do you think I could do that?” Benny asked.
Ambler chuckled. Benny was the only one who thought his secret romance with Kay Donnelly was secret. “You risked your job to stand up for her. You’re joined together as murder suspects. I’m sure she’d listen to you if you told her she should talk to me.”
That evening, Ambler intercepted Kay as she was leaving the library. She stood impatiently in line while the guard checked bags at the Fifth Avenue door, her game face on, no smile, a forbidding expression.
“Benny said you wanted to talk to me. What?”
He walked with her down Fifth Avenue to 34th Street, where she’d catch the Crosstown Select Bus to her residence hall.
“Nelson said your ex-husband was writing a book. He’d contacted Nelson about his papers. Did you know that? Did Max know?”
She faced him. Her eyes met his. She wasn’t evasive. She was scared. “It’s difficult for me to talk about Max. You need to ask him what he knows and doesn’t know about James.” They walked in silence for a moment. After some time, she said, “I’m in a difficult position. I need Max. My academic career depends on his support—”
Ambler nodded. “I understand. Perhaps you could tell me about your ex-husband.”
She searched his face for a moment. “I don’t know about his life in recent years. He was angry over our divorce at first—not because he missed me or loved me. He simply couldn’t accept that I’d dare to leave him. He had a superior, whiny way of bossing me around.” She paused to regroup her thoughts. “James thought he was smarter than everyone else. Maybe he was. The last I knew he was teaching at a women’s college: an inexhaustible supply of privileged, oversexed brats looking up to him as the sensitive poetic interpreter of life and literature. That’s what he wanted from life.
“I was a romantic. I fell in love too easily, was impressed by men I thought more accomplished and smarter than I was. In my imagination, I made James into the dashing, suffering, poetic genius I wanted a man to be. We drank wine and he’d recite poetry. He wrote poems. I thought then they were for me. Later, I realized the poems were always about him. It was idiotic of me to marry him. He married me because I wouldn’t sleep with him if he didn’t.” After a short time, she realized he didn’t really want to be married or have kids. He was the center of his own universe. Everything and everyone else played a supporting role.
“He sounds like Max.”
“He was like Max. They competed … for everything.” Her expression, embarrassed and defiant, was suggestive on the one hand and daring him to ask what “everything” included on the other. He chose not to ask.
“There are things about Max you’re not willing to tell me.”
“That’s right.”
Ambler waited.
She sighed. “Max is hard to understand and harder to like. For reasons of his own, he’s supported me in my career. It’s more difficult than you might think for a woman at elite universities, even now. I owe him a lot.”
“To protect him at all cost?”
She shook her head. “Max is ambitious, ruthless, and unforgiving of anyone who crosses him. He’s not a murderer.”
“You know that for sure? You were with him?”
She shook her head and looked away, splashes of red erupting on her cheeks. “Are you finished?” Her expression was stern, unsmiling. “Benny said I can trust you to keep what I’ve said to yourself.”
“I will, Mrs. Donnelly. Let me know when you’re ready to talk about Max.”
“Call me Kay.” She got into another line of people, this time to get on the bus.
* * *
Adele knew Harry was in trouble. Looking into the pasts of people you know and trust and even love can be a shattering experience. What she discovered about Harry, she didn’t want to tell anyone. She didn’t want it to be true and tr
ied to put him out of her thoughts. What was the term? He was “collateral damage.” It was Emily she was interested in. Each day now, she stole some time to pore through the Yates collection—more than a hundred boxes of papers, photos, journals, notebooks, letters, index cards, bar napkins with handwriting on them, Christmas cards, God knows what else—looking for whatever she could find on his daughter.
Raymond wasn’t so interested in Emily. He cared about the murders. Of course, he would. As much as he presented himself as a simple librarian living quietly among his books and papers, he thought of himself as a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes—or lately, Lew Archer.
She’d found newspaper accounts of Arthur Woods’s death. He and Emily Yates were in an area local lore called a lover’s leap. The girl was in shock, hysterical, when she flagged down a car. She didn’t remember what happened. Her parents rescued her. Lawyers and psychiatrists got involved. She was tucked away in a psychiatric hospital. She ran away from there. She kept running away. Could it be because Arthur Woods was murdered and she knew who the killer was? That would be a reason to run away and stay hidden.
The precocious child of famous writers, Emily grew up in a world of culture and books, college towns and university campuses, while Adele, the daughter of a cigarette-smoking, meat-and-potatoes cooking single mom navigated between row-house stoops, candy stores, cement sidewalks, and asphalt parks. Yet Adele’s life had gone more or less the way lives are supposed to go—except for that not having a family thing—and Emily’s went awry before she was anywhere near grown up.
Nelson Yates suffered a nervous breakdown after his daughter ran away. They’d been very close when she was young. The photos of them together—not many of them because Nelson didn’t like to be photographed—seemed to contain much happiness and love. He took her on book tours with him, traveled to Europe with her. She was his favorite companion. Her mother was in and out of hospitals suffering from depression when Emily was a child. For long periods of time, Nelson and Emily only had each other.
After a while, Adele felt she knew more about the Yates family than she wanted to. She felt like a voyeur, yet it wasn’t so much her doing. Yates and Emily’s mother, Lisa Dolloway, paraded their life out in public—the romantic part as well as the fighting and bickering. It was kind of embarrassing to read about it. People should keep some things to themselves. All that intensity and passion in the end turned to poison anyway. Their marriage fell apart after Emily ran away. It was sad. It wouldn’t be so great to have such passion in your life. How exhausting it must be. At the same time, she wondered if she might not be jealous. It was awful also to live a life without passion.
Lisa Dolloway disappeared after her marriage ended. Unlike Emily, she wasn’t hiding from anyone, had no reason to hide her identity, yet Adele couldn’t find any trace of her once she left Nelson. You’d think she’d be easy to find, yet it was as if she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
When Raymond told her about Nelson’s funeral, she wondered if Lisa Dolloway would attend. She did love him once, and it seemed he never got over her. It wasn’t to be a funeral exactly. The body had been cremated. His publisher and his wife were holding a memorial service on April 29. They chose the date because it was the week the Mystery Writers of America held its annual Edgar Allan Poe banquet and many of his fellow writers would be in town.
“Homicide cops like to go to the victims’ funerals,” Raymond told her. “Most everyone who might know something about the murder comes together and, for some reason, the ritual makes them want to talk about what happened. Often, the killer shows up.”
“Maybe,” said Adele. “I doubt anyone will throw himself on the casket and confess. Have you been reading Perry Mason? Are you going?”
“I’d want to pay my respects.”
Chapter 11
The next day was the third Sunday of the month, so Ambler, after his tai chi practice, walked up Third Avenue and across 42nd Street to Grand Central where he boarded a Hudson Line train for the hour-and-a-half-long ride to Beacon. The train car he rode in was old and worn, rickety almost. At that hour of the morning on Sunday, going north, up the Hudson, away from the city, most of the riders were on a mission similar to his. Black and Latina women, many of them with kids, some older, more matronly; many of them he’d seen often enough to nod hello to and receive a small indication of recognition.
He took a cab from the station at Beacon to the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, waited through the interminable processing in the anteroom, signed in as a visitor to John Lennon Parker—his mother’s last name, though Ambler’s name was on the boy’s birth certificate.
When John came into the visiting room, his gaze sweeping the area, his face expressionless, he reminded Ambler of the boy’s mother. He resembled Liz in many ways, a man’s version of her haunting beauty, slight of build, an almost fearful gentleness about him. He didn’t strike you as someone who should be in a prison, certainly not someone in prison for murder.
Ambler, feeling terrible unease as he did each time he came to the prison, sat uncomfortably at a chrome and Formica table that reminded him of a school lunchroom. His son sat down opposite him. Ambler’s heart ached so he could scarcely breathe. Conversation was strained as usual, with the boy showing a smug, cynical expression, as his father labored to converse. His expression said to Ambler, as he was sure the boy meant it to, it’s your fault I’m here. Whatever guilt you feel, you deserve. Over the years he’d been coming to see John in prison, little had changed. During one of his early visits, he’d made the mistake of criticizing Liz. Whatever her faults, John would hear none of it from Ambler. The boy’s anger at his father—hatred, possibly—wasn’t unexpected. It was better than indifference. He’d left the boy and his mother, left the boy when he was too young to defend himself with a mother incapable of making her own way through the world, much less of raising a child.
“I put a few dollars in your account,” Ambler said.
John nodded. He lit a cigarette.
“Any problems? Anything I can do?”
“Nothing I can’t handle, Pop.” He said this flippantly to remind Ambler he had dues to pay. He knew that; yet he was hopeful. If his son really didn’t want him there, he could take him off the visitor list. Instead, the boy worked out his anger on his father, and why shouldn’t he?
After Ambler’s attempts at conversation, punctuated by John’s nonresponses and long periods of silence, the boy spoke without looking at his father. “I got something maybe you can take care of.”
Ambler nodded.
“Look in on Mom. I’m not sure what’s going on with her.”
Ambler hesitated. “I haven’t seen or spoken to your mother since the trial, John. I don’t know where she is. I don’t think she’d want to see me.”
John’s brow wrinkled; his expression softened, so that he resembled himself as a boy, the slim wisp of a boy, with dark hair that belied his blue eyes, an unconvincing tough-guy sneer, and a shy, in-spite-of-himself smile. “I don’t know where she is, either. She hasn’t been up. My letters come back.”
Ambler stayed another two hours. This time, he’d remembered to bring pocketfuls of change for the vending machines. As the visit wore on, John’s hostility wore down as well. He whispered a couple of times to Ambler, once pointing out one of the more notorious inmates—a cop killer from the Bronx who’d taken on half the city’s police force in a standoff. The boy told Ambler brief anecdotes about other inmates, fights in the yard, a lockdown in the cellblock. Twice, he nodded to fellow inmates—both white guys you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw coming your way—and told Ambler how things worked in the prison.
“Gus and Wills got my back; I got theirs. That’s how it is in here—only one or two guys you can trust.”
Ambler cringed. John wasn’t tough—far from it. He’d been a drinker, a pot smoker, a musician living the nightlife, not a gangbanger or drug dealer, not in the criminal life. He’d killed a man he share
d an apartment with in a fight fueled by alcohol and cocaine—with the gun the other man pulled on him. That was John’s story. Though the police, the prosecutor, and the judge didn’t believe him, Ambler did. He was stunned when John was found guilty of murder rather than involuntary manslaughter. The look of hate John directed at him when the judge announced the verdict burned a hole through his heart.
On the way back to the city on the train after the visit, thoughts of John kept Ambler’s eyes moist with tears. Most of the folks he’d ridden up with were on the train going back, everyone worn out from the day, somber, hardly anyone speaking or looking at anyone else; even the kids were subdued. Many eyes, like his, glistened with tears.
* * *
He’d told John he’d look for his mother, so, the nighttime being the right time, even on a Sunday night, to look for Liz, he set out for the lower depths of Manhattan. What was it Lenny Bruce said? “There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster”—even worse, an aging flower child. Since he’d met her—a fifteen-year-old runaway—Liz had been a denizen of the East Village and its environs. The first night they spent together was in a Lower East Side tenement apartment with a sloping wooden floor and a bathtub in the kitchen. He’d find her if he walked the streets of lower Manhattan long enough. John knew that, too. Throughout his teen years, the boy had dragged his mother out of bars and shooting galleries, getting her home, making sure she ate, getting her to the hospital when she couldn’t take any more.
This night, Ambler found his former wife in a narrow, noisy, crowded bar on Ludlow Street, a block below Houston Street, the music loud and out of the past, maybe Led Zeppelin, psychedelic posters on the walls, leather-vested, tattooed bartenders, the customers drinking frantically or already drunk, the drunks either angry or despondent, glaring at Ambler as he came in, as if he were the source of their misfortune. He’d been told he’d find Liz in this dive by a woman he met at a slightly more upscale gin mill in the East Village—at least you didn’t smell the urinals from the doorway—who, for God knows what reason, remembered him with Liz thirty years before. The woman—three sheets to the wind herself—shook her head and told him Liz was down on her luck and the bar where he’d find her one step above skid row. “It’s the kind of joint where you don’t want to sit on the chairs, if you know what I mean.”