Benjamin Black - The Lemur

He took a taxi uptown, gazing out unseeingly at the damp blocks as they fleeted past. He was hungry, for in the bar he had taken nothing but two martinis, the famous New York liquid lunch. He thought of stopping off at the Bleeding Horse but decided he could not face the crowds and the venal leer of the maitre d’.

Although he would never have admitted it, Glass was afraid of his father-in-law. His fear was of the low-key, fuzzy, four-o‘clock-in-the-morning variety, always there, like the dread of death, a pilot light glowing steadily inside him. Big Bill had notoriously strong opinions on the sanctity of the marriage vow. He had managed to have his own first, brief, starry union annulled by the Vatican on technical grounds, while his second wife, the hard-riding Miz Claire, had come a conveniently fatal cropper; and although Nancy Harrison had left him twenty years ago, he still considered himself married to her. What would Big Bill do if he heard of his son-in-law’s latest peccadillo? There had been scrapes in the past that Glass had managed to smooth over, with his wife’s tight-lipped acquiescence, but Alison O’Keeffe, he was somehow certain, would be a different matter. What was to be done?

When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver-what is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?

“For God’s sake,” Louise said, “where have you been?” He mumbled something about lunch, and immediately, like retribution, an acid after-waft of gin burned his throat. “Someone has been phoning for you-he called twice, at least.”

“Who?”

“A Captain Ambrose.” Glass frowned in bafflement toward the transparent office wall and the deep canyons beyond. Why would someone in the army be calling him? Then he realized: it must be a policeman. Dear Christ.

“What did he want?”

“It seems someone has been killed.”

Far uptown a speck-sized helicopter was hovering like a mosquito above a building site on the roof of a skyscraper, with a cable or something dangling from it, taut and straight, like a proboscis.

“Killed?” he said faintly.

“Yes. Murdered. What on earth have you been up to?”

T he police station, if that was what to call it-headquarters? precinct house?-looked just as it would have in the movies. John Glass was led through a big, low-ceilinged, noisy room lined with desks and cramped cubicles, where many shirtsleeved people, some in uniform and some not, walked determinedly about, carrying documents and paper coffee cups and shouting at each other. Glass idly entertained the fancy that, if it were viewed from above, all this apparently random toing and froing would resolve into a series of patterns, forming and re-forming, as in a Busby Berkeley musical. Everyone seemed to be either bored or in a temper. The women, washed-out blondes, mostly, were heavy eyed and slow-moving, as if they had not slept last night, which perhaps they had not, since to Glass it appeared that every other working woman in New York City was a single mother, either divorced or abandoned. The big room had a somehow familiar aspect, which was more than just the memory of countless crime films, and after a minute or two it came to him: it looked exactly like a newspaper office.

Captain Ambrose had the face of an El Greco martyr, with deep brown, suffering eyes and a nose like a finely honed stone ax head. He was tall and cadaverous, and his light-olive skin was smooth and seemingly hairless. Glass thought he might be an Indian, Navajo, maybe, or Hopi. His accent was pure New York, though, broadvoweled and nasal. He wore a dark brown suit the same shade as his eyes, a white shirt and nondescript tie, and big black leather shoes with quarter-inch rims. There was nothing in the room that did not need to be there. The desk at which he sat showed him to be a fanatical tidier, with documents all sorted and squared, pens ranked by size and color, and every pencil freshly sharpened. On the wall were two framed photographs, of the president, and the late Pope John Paul II.

“Take a seat, Mr. Glass,” the policeman said. “Thanks for coming in.”

A heavy-haunched woman with black roots showing in her butterblond hair entered without knocking and laid a sheaf of papers on the desk. “Think us two thirsty fellows could get a cup of coffee, Rhoda?” Captain Ambrose asked.

The woman glared at him. “Machine is busted,” she said. “Walensky punched it again.” She went out, and the glass panel in the door rattled behind her.

“How did you get my number?” Glass asked.

The policeman reached for the papers Rhoda had brought and held them upright and tapped them on the desk to align their edges. “It was in the call log on Riley’s cell phone,” he said. “When did you speak to him?”

“This morning. At ten forty-seven.”

The captain lifted an eyebrow.

“I happened to be looking at the clock.”

“Ah. Right. That every witness should be so accurate.”

Witness. The word sent something like a small electric charge along Glass’s spine. It seemed to him that everything in the headachey, noise-assaulted, vertiginous six months he had lived in New York had been leading to just this moment, when he would be sitting here in this policeman’s office, dry mouthed and faintly nauseous, with a tingle in his backbone and his veins fizzing. What was happening was at once ordinary and outlandish, inevitable and contingent, as in a dream. “What happened?” he asked. “I mean, how did you…?”

The captain was leaning forward at the desk with his long, narrow dark hands clasped before him, which intensified the sainted look. “His girlfriend called us. She’d been out of town, came back and found the body, still warm.” Glass had not reckoned on Dylan Riley having a girlfriend. What kind of girl could she possibly be? The captain went on: “We’re not getting much out of her at the moment, naturally. She didn’t do it. We checked: she was in a Boeing somewhere over Pennsylvania when it happened. She says stuff was taken, two, maybe three computers.”

“Then there must have been more than one person.”

“Oh?”

“To be able to carry so much.”

A faintly pitying light came into the policeman’s eye. “Computers are compact and light these days, Mr. Glass. That’s why they’re called laptops.” He uncoiled himself from his chair, pushing down on the desk with the steepled fingers of one hand. He really was a very tall man. “Listen, I’ve got to get that cup of coffee. You want to come? There’s a place across the street.”

They moved in chill sunlight through the late-afternoon crowds. The captain loped along at a forward stoop, his arms slightly bowed and his head turned a little to the side, like an Indian scout, one of his ancestors, perhaps, leaning down intently to listen for the sound of the cavalry’s distant hoofbeats. They were in the coffee shop before Glass thought of lighting up. A cigarette would have calmed him, but not much.

The place was crowded and while they were waiting for a table the policeman, jingling coins in a pocket of his trousers, talked in relaxed tones about the circumstances of Dylan Riley’s death. Other customers, also waiting, stood within earshot, but paid no heed; apparently murder was a conversational commonplace, in the environs of Police Headquarters. “A very smooth job,” the captain said. “Small-caliber bullet through the left eye. A Beretta, we think, maybe. Then the place was neatened up, with the victim on his bed and all, ready for the meat wagon. He was shot at his desk, though.”

“How do you know that?”