Free Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) by Con Lehane

good for me to see her.”
    “A lot of good that would do. The little slut was fucking my husband. You think she’d talk to me?”
    “She knew you were going to leave him.”
    “How’d she know that, pillow talk with you?” Laura Lee’s laugh was contemptuous. “Both of you fucking a fourteen-year-old—”
    Max expression was aggrieved. “That was before you … before—”
    Laura Lee rolled her eyes. “Stop whining. It drives me crazy.”
    They were eating dinner, delivered from a local Italian restaurant, sitting across from each other at the small dining table in the short-term apartment on West 85th Street Wagner had rented for the three months he planned to spend with Yates’s papers.
    “By the way, your librarian friend wants me to persuade you to forget that incident with Kay’s new boyfriend.”
    He fought back a rush of anger before he said something stupid. Laura Lee was trying to goad him into saying something about Kay. What did he care what Kay did? He shouldn’t have let it get to him, yet she was hanging all over that punk right in front of him. Thinking about them, he got angry all over again. “Why should I?”
    “So you don’t look like jealous idiot,” she said, not looking at him. “He also asked about you and Donnelly.”
    He stopped eating. “Why? What did he want?”
    “I’ll find out when I talk to him again.” When she looked at Max now, her smile was mocking.
    He put down his knife and fork. “He’s no fool, you know.”
    “Neither am I.”
    Wagner cleaned up the dishes after dinner, throwing out the leftovers. He finished the wine by himself, while Laura Lee went to bed to read, staring out the window at the wall of the building next door. He didn’t like Ambler questioning her. She thought she’d outwit him as she did everyone, underestimating him. It would do no good telling her that or not to talk to Ambler. She’d do the exact opposite.
    *   *   *
    “‘Chickens coming home to roost’ … what the hell does that mean?” Mike Cosgrove thundered. Ambler heard street noises, the sounds of the city, horns, the diesel whine of buses starting up from the curb, the thump and clang of trucks on the potholed street, behind his voice on the phone. The detective was irritated by the traffic.
    “Well, it actually doesn’t have much to do with chickens—”
    “I know what it means! What am I supposed to make of it?”
    “You asked me to call if I came across anything. Nelson Yates characterized James Donnelly’s murder as ‘chickens coming home to roost.’ He said Donnelly and Max were rivals and didn’t like one another. You’ve got that and the argument between Donnelly and Max Wagner. Seems like it might add up to something. You take it from there.”
    Cosgrove absorbed the new information without comment, so Ambler couldn’t tell if he’d questioned Max about the argument yet.
    “One more thing.” He told the detective about Yates’s missing daughter. “I’m wondering if you’d run a check on her. Someone in the library was supposed to but he got sidetracked.”
    “What’s the girl got to do with this?”
    “Nelson asked me to try to find her.”
    “It’s not my territory.” Cosgrove didn’t let himself get sidetracked during a murder investigation. Usually, he disappeared from everyday life, barely ate or slept, fixated on the case like a bloodhound, keeping his nose to the trail while it was still warm.
    “No. It’s a favor.”
    “We’ll see.…” Cosgrove paused but didn’t hang up. After a minute, he said, “Let me ask you something. The room where the murder took place, who can get into it?”
    “Not the general public, not tourists. It has a key card entry. Readers need to be approved to get the access card.”
    “Staff?”
    “Some staff. Not everyone. Why?”
    “I want to narrow the pool of suspects.”
    “To those with access to the second-floor archives reading room?”
    “It’s not a hundred percent. Someone could