by Con Lehane
“I’m a person of wealth and privilege,” she said, as if she read his thoughts. “I’m not especially proud of it. I didn’t do anything to deserve it.” Ambler searched her face. Impassive, inscrutable, this wasn’t a confession. She was a self-assured woman. He didn’t understand what she was getting at.
“We’re given roles to play,” she said. “We don’t choose them. When I was young, I thought I could change who I was. Trying to do so drove me insane—I mean that literally—and ruined the lives of everyone around me, everyone I loved.” Her voice caught. She blinked a few times before looking down at her plate, poking at the elegantly presented shrimp with her fork. “I want you to hear this now from me, because later, when you know everything, you won’t want to understand, or you won’t care, or it won’t make any difference.”
“What do you want me to understand?” Ambler concentrated on his hamburger. For one thing, he was hungry and it tasted good; for another, he’d been brought up not to waste food; and finally, the woman across from him was going through such emotional pain that looking at her felt like a terrible invasion of her privacy.
When he faced her again, her expression was bleak. “I can’t keep you from digging into my past. It will be painful for me, and it won’t help you find the murderer of Nelson Yates.”
“How do you know?”
His question surprised her. It showed in her face. What had been entreaty became confusion. She wasn’t trying to put anything over on him. He’d presented a contingency she hadn’t considered. She stammered her answer. “I … I … How could it? Nothing in my past that I know—that I can think of—could have anything to do with Nelson Yates’s murder.”
Ambler felt sorry for her. “Did you know Nelson Yates?”
From the desperate look flashing across her eyes, he knew before she spoke that her answer would not suffice. She seemed to know that, too. “I think I already answered you,” she said brightly enough. “It’s no matter.” She took a dainty bite from the luncheon plate she’d previously been trying to maul and touched her napkin lightly to her lips. “I have a plan to preserve your reading room.” Mischief danced in her eyes again. “Do you own a tux?”
“A what?”
“A tuxedo.” She smiled. “I suppose not. A good black suit will do.”
Her change in attitude and manner, from the depths of despair to a bubbling enthusiasm, was bewildering. “Why?”
“I’m taking you to the library’s spring gala.”
* * *
“Did you catch up with the society lady yet?” McNulty asked as he delivered a stein of beer to Ambler and one to Adele.
“I did,” said Ambler. “I met her in the King Cole Bar. The next day, she took me to lunch.”
“She’s taking him to the library’s spring gala,” Adele said.
“She hasn’t told me why she donated the money for the Yates collection or if she knew Nelson Yates.”
“Why should she?” McNulty said. “People should be able to keep things to themselves.”
Adele cast a baleful glance at Ambler. “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”
McNulty was on his high horse. “There’s a lot happened in my life I’m not going to tell you or anyone else about.”
“Okay, McNulty. I got it.” Ambler said.
“She gave money to the library anonymously, right? There you go. If she wanted people to know, she’d have said so.”
“I think you’ve made your point,” Adele said.
McNulty walked away in a huff, interrupting two patrons who were arguing about the upcoming election to tell them all the candidates were thieves and ax murderers.
“Mike Cosgrove asked you to talk to her. That’s how this began, right?” Adele was angry but not unforgiving, as if whatever there was between them, friendship he guessed, would have to withstand some wrongs he might do. “I hope she never finds out that, on top of everything else, you were investigating her as a murder suspect.”
Ambler hung his head. “Not exactly. I’m not going to tell Cosgrove about this yet. He interviewed Mary Yates after the fracas at the memorial service and wouldn’t tell me what she said, so we’re even.”
Adele wrinkled her nose. “If you ask me, Mary Yates makes a better murder suspect than Mrs. Young.”
Ambler had been thinking that himself. “The way these things go, when you’re looking for a motive, if a murder isn’t for love or hate, it’s probably for money.” He told her what Kay Donnelly said about Mary Yates. “We know she had a motive. That’s about it. We won’t cross her off the list.”
“I haven’t come across anything about Mary Yates in the collection, which is surprising. There should be letters, probably other things, unless she took them out.”
“See what you can find on Mrs. Young, while you’re at it.”
“I doubt she’d turn up in the Yates collection, but I’ll look. I can check the Social Register, too. She’s probably been on the philanthropy circuit since she was a debutante. I wonder if Mary Yates was a debutante.”
Chapter 16
On Thursday evening after work, Adele drank a beer by herself at the Library Tavern waiting for Raymond, who didn’t show up. She didn’t stay for a second one and told McNulty to tell Raymond she went home. McNulty noticed the man who left behind her because McNulty considered it part of his trade to notice everyone who went in or out of his bar.
He didn’t like the guy. He’d never been in before, ordered a rum and Coke, which he didn’t seem to want, as he left much of it behind, and left a ten for a nine-dollar-and-change tab. He went the same direction as Adele and walked at the same pace. That didn’t mean he was following her. There was still daylight and they were in Midtown Manhattan. It was something he noted without analyzing; something he’d remember if he saw the guy again.
Adele walked up Madison and across 42nd Street through Times Square. It was rush hour, the sidewalks crowded, everyone hurrying. As she crossed Broadway, on the island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, she felt a man beside her. He didn’t touch her and he looked straight ahead.
“I’m going to walk beside you and tell you something. Don’t look at me and don’t say anything. If you make a scene, I’ll disappear and not be so nice the next time.”
Instinctively, Adele turned toward him. As if he expected her reaction, he turned away. “I said not to look.”
“What do you want?”
The light changed and they joined the crush crossing Seventh Avenue. Just past the corner there was an entrance to the Times Square subway station. She thought about ducking into it but decided not to. The man beside her seemed calm and sure of himself—and vaguely familiar.
“You’re bothering a friend of mine and her kid. She wants you to stop.”
Now she knew why he sounded familiar. He was the guy Raymond fought with the night they were with Johnny. She began to turn toward him again but caught herself. For some reason, knowing who he was made her braver, maybe because Raymond had bested him. “Why does she want that? Why wouldn’t she tell me herself?”
He kept a steady pace next to her. “She told me to tell you to keep away from her and her kid. She’s afraid to tell you. I’m not. I’m telling you to keep away from them.”
“Or what?” This time Adele did turn. But he was gone, losing himself in the crowd in seconds.
She walked the rest of the block before she began to shiver. As her mind stripped away the traffic noise, she heard his words again, and the tone of his voice. It was Dominic’s tone, so empty of feeling, so cold, that caused her to shiver. It was as if a robot had warned her—a message with such inevitability to it.
* * *
“He scared me. That’s what he wanted to do—scare me—and he did. Can you go threaten him for threatening me?”
Ambler smiled. “Tai chi doesn’t provide for much in the way of threatening.”
“What’s it good for?”
“A long story. You can leave her alone if that’s her wish, a
nd why wouldn’t you?” He held up his hand to stop Adele’s response. “Or you can check with her to make sure it’s what she wants.”
“Exactly. Will you come with me?”
* * *
The following evening, Ambler and Adele climbed two flights of stairs and stood in front of Emily’s apartment. She opened the door and stared at them, the smoke from a cigarette curling up from her hand. Finally, she said, “Yes. Can I help you?” Her eyes lingered a moment on Ambler.
“Emily, this is my friend Raymond Ambler. We’d like to talk to you.”
Emily kept her eyes on Ambler, not friendly, not exactly bold but not modest either. She swung the door back and forth in a small arc.
“It will only take a minute.”
She turned to Adele. “Is it about Johnny?”
“No,” Adele said. “Is something the matter with Johnny?”
“Nothin’s wrong with him. What do you want?”
Ambler watched the two women. They were about the same height and build, about the same age. Yet Emily seemed older. Adele radiated a kind of pleasant energy, a spark of life that made you glad to be with her, to watch her go about her work. Emily was harder. She dragged on her cigarette, jittery, tense, but sure of herself in a way Adele wasn’t, as if Adele might be an underling, a younger sister.
“Johnny’s a great kid, Ms. Smith,” Ambler said.
Emily peered at his face as if she recognized something in it. “You have a kid?”
“A boy,” Ambler said. “He’s a man now.”
“What’s his name?”
“John.”
“You might as well come in.” She backed and turned, holding the door for them. “I didn’t mean to leave you standing in the hallway.”
The living room they entered had an ancient stuffed couch, and mismatched armchairs on either side of a dented wooden coffee table, but the room was clean. When she offered them a beer, Adele looked confused. Ambler said sure. Johnny chose that moment to appear, coming up beside his mom, beaming. Her expression softened when she looked at him. She tousled his hair. When she looked back at Ambler and Adele, the softness in her expression came also.
On a side table against a wall across from the couch was a small—though large for that apartment—cage, housing what looked like two guinea pigs. Adele noticed them first. “Are they yours?” she asked Johnny, who beamed in response.
He crossed the room and extricated one of the furry creatures and handed it to a startled Adele. Ambler laughed. Johnny grabbed the other animal and handed it to Ambler, who held it while it wiggled from its nose to its tail.
Emily came from the kitchen carrying two cans of Miller Lite, handed one to Ambler, who was sitting on the couch next to Adele, and took a sip from the other one. She took little notice of the guinea pigs, until the one Adele was holding worked his way loose and scampered up her chest toward her face. At which point Adele screamed.
“Johnny,” his mother shouted, in a kind of weary, motherly tone. “Get that pig off of her.”
The boy complied, picking up the animal and sitting down between Adele and Ambler with his pet on his lap. He offered to take Ambler’s also. But Ambler said he’d keep his.
“You didn’t come here to pet guinea pigs, did you?” Emily took another slug of beer. “What?” She pulled a cigarette out a pack and lit it.
Adele leaned toward her. “It’s about your friend Dominic.” She waited for a reaction.
“What’d he do?” She sounded exasperated, a here-we-go-again response, not surprised Dominic did something that would require explanation or apology. Adele told her what happened.
Emily rolled her eyes. “That’s Dominic. He thinks he can muscle his way out of anything.” Her expression softened. “Did he scare you?” She bent forward and reached to pat the top of Adele’s hand. “Don’t worry about him. His bark is worse than his bite. I’ll straighten him out. He doesn’t need to protect me—the jerk.”
They talked for a bit about Johnny. Adele was right about Emily’s background. You could tell from her vocabulary, her pride in Johnny doing well in school, the way she talked about herself as a young reader, that she’d had a cultured upbringing, maybe not privileged but he’d bet her parents were educated. He wondered where she’d gone off the tracks. Adele pressed her about where she grew up, about her parents, probably because of her suspicion she might be Nelson Yates’s daughter, but didn’t get anywhere. The only thing she wanted to talk about was her singing.
“I came to the city to be a singer when I was too young,” she said. “The East Village beat all that naïveté out of me pretty quick. But I took lessons. I’ve done okay, not great or anything close but okay. I still get gigs.”
“My son used to play music in the East Village,” Ambler said. “He was a guitar player.”
“Is he cute? Does he have eyes like yours?”
Ambler had to think. “Yes and he has dark, curly hair. I guess he’s handsome.”
Emily rolled her eyes. “A cute guitar player in the East Village in the eighties. I probably slept with him.” She said this in a matter-of-fact way, like she might say they played in the same band or took the same bus. Ambler wasn’t sure how to respond, so he didn’t.
There was a bookshelf with a CD player and a stack of CDs, and some books—a few hardcover, a lot of paperbacks, bestsellers, romance, mostly women writers; no mysteries; nothing by Nelson Yates, if Adele was curious about that. He noticed a briefcase next to one of the bookshelves; it was open and contained what looked like notebooks, envelopes, and other papers. The briefcase was soft leather and worn, with the initials JXD embossed on it. It was a man’s briefcase and didn’t seem like something that would belong to Dominic. He wondered if another man had left it. He wondered how many men there had been in her life.
Adele and Emily chatted away. Their effort was forced but they tried hard, especially Adele. Yet it was clear to him, if it wasn’t to them, they had little in common. A few times, Emily looked over at him. Her eyes met his and lingered. She was pretty with a kind of vulnerability in her expression that appealed to him, as she must know it would to most men.
“Dominic’s been more or less the only constant man in Johnny’s life,” Emily said. She talked easily about things another person might keep to herself; at the same time, not revealing anything about herself she didn’t want to. “He’s like a friend of the family.”
“He’s not Johnny’s father?”
Emily shook her head. “His father’s in jail.” Seeing Adele’s look of concern, she said, “He wasn’t a bad guy, really, just a bad-luck sort of guy. He was good to me about the kid, if we needed something, before he went away.”
A noise at the door startled everyone. The two women froze. Ambler handed the guinea pig to Johnny and stood.
Emily’s eyes flashed at Ambler. “It’s Dominic. I’ll take care of it.”
Ambler and Adele watched her walk to the door.
“Don’t worry,” Johnny said cheerfully. “Mom can handle Dominic.” He put the guinea pigs back in their cage.
The door was behind a half wall, so Ambler couldn’t see what was happening or decipher what was being said, except for the last thing Dominic said before the door slammed. “It’s your funeral.”
Emily came back from the hallway and went to the kitchen, coming back this time with three cans of beer, the extra one for Adele. She lit another cigarette.
“Why’s he so protective of you?” Ambler asked.
“That’s how he is.” Emily took a long drink from her beer.
“Why is he worried about Adele?”
Emily was uneasy, not looking at Ambler or Adele. “Who knows? He’s not used to me having friends. He’ll leave her alone. I told him.” She turned to the boy, who was sitting on the couch, leaning against Ambler’s arm. “Johnny,” she nodded her head toward the back of the apartment. “Go watch TV in my bedroom.”
His mouth scrunched up and he let out a small moan. He was gearing up to
complain, when Ambler put his arm around him and gently helped him stand. He looked at Adele and his mother before shuffling off. Watching him, they shared a moment that seemed in some way to connect them. The common bond was unspoken, yet it was there.
“It’s my fault,” Emily said. “In the beginning, Dominic got the wrong idea. We didn’t know what you were up to with the kid, you know? With Johnny’s father in jail and all, and things not going so well for me all the time, I thought … you know … I thought something, someone, might think he wasn’t cared for right.”
Her voice dropped. “When I met you, I saw you were okay. You aren’t a busybody. You’re not looking down on anyone.” She drank from her beer again. “Dominic hasn’t caught on yet.” Her gaze went from Adele to Ambler and back to lock onto Adele. “Johnny doesn’t really have anybody besides me.”
Ambler began to say something but stopped when he felt the intensity from Adele next to him. She was focused on Emily. “Are his grandparents alive?”
Emily, sensing Adele’s intensity, too, shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “They’re not involved. It’s complicated. His father, we weren’t married or anything. It was a casual thing with him. I wasn’t even gonna tell him I was pregnant. He found out it was him and wanted to help, that’s all. He helped now and again with money for the first couple of years. Then he got in trouble and went to jail. We weren’t ever together after Johnny was born. So it wasn’t a grandparent thing for him. I don’t even know who they are.”
“What about your parents?”
She looked at Ambler. “I haven’t had anything to so with my parents for a long time. They’re crazy, and they’re not together anyway. I never wanted them to know about Johnny.” Her eyes began to tear. “It’s sad for the poor kid. It’s not his fault. The poor little bastard doesn’t have anybody.” She sobbed softly.
“I’m so sorry,” Adele said. She watched for a moment and then went to her, sitting on the arm of the easy chair, putting her arm around Emily’s shoulder. After a moment, Emily leaned toward her and cried against Adele’s chest.