Benjamin Black - The Lemur

Again the captain flashed that mild, pitying look. “Stains on the chair,” he said. “Like the medical textbooks tell us: no death without defecation. ”

A gum-chewing waitress in a gingham apron showed them to a table in a corner; the tabletop was sticky to the touch. Glass really, really wanted a cigarette.

“You’re Irish, right?” the captain said. “How long you been here?”

“Since November.”

The ginghamed waitress brought their coffee.

“You planning on staying?”

“It seems so. My wife is American.” The policeman nodded, and Glass saw that he knew a great deal more about him than the fact of his American wife. “My father-in-law has commissioned me to write his biography.” It sounded entirely implausible. “That’s William Mulholland.”

Captain Ambrose nodded again, watching his hand as it spooned sugar into his cup. Glass felt he was back in a dream, trying to exonerate himself for some nameless thing he had not done, desperately offering up scraps of evidence to an omniscient but preoccupied and wholly unimpressible interrogator.

“I went to the Jesuits,” the policeman said. Glass stared, helplessly, imagining himself a goldfish in a clouded bowl. What new tack was this? “Saint Peter’s, in Jersey City. You know Jersey City? No, I guess not. You educated by the priests?”

“Mine was a diocesan college, in Ireland. Also called Saint Peter’s, as it happens. Since in disgrace.”

“Pedophiles? Right. We had them, too. No one cared, in those days. And we never talked, I mean us kids-who would have listened?” He shook his head sadly. “Tough times.”

“And not so long ago, either.”

“That’s right.” He stirred his coffee slowly, slowly. Glass was trying to think which character in Alice in Wonderland the captain reminded him of. Was there a sloth? Or maybe the Caterpillar? And then at last the question came: “Tell me, Mr. Glass, what was the connection with Dylan Riley?”

Glass heard himself swallow. “The connection?”

“Yeah, his connection with you, yours with him.” He was still frowning into his cup, as if an answer might at any moment present itself there, etched in the froth. “Why was he phoning you?”

“As I said, I’m writing a biography of Mr. Mulholland.”

“A biography. Right.”

“And Dylan Riley, he’s-he was-a researcher. I had hired him-was thinking of hiring him-to work with me, on the book.”

“Right,” the policeman said again. “I figured that must be it.”

After that there was a lengthy pause.

In his lifetime John Glass had known many occasions of fear. Once, on a plane flying into Lebanon under Israeli rocket fire, he had very nearly shat himself. It had been a humbling moment, never to be forgotten, or forgiven. What he felt now was not fear, exactly. His mouth was still dry, but he had a sensation deep in his gut that was as much excitement as anxiety. He was, in a strange way, he realized, thrilled: thrilled to be mixed up in a murder, thrilled to be here being questioned by this peculiar lawman, thrilled that, somehow, after all these months, he could be said to have really arrived at last in New York, this place that was so vividly, so violently, so murderously alive. He recalled a phrase from Emerson about death, and our thinking of it: There at least is reality that will not dodge us.

He drank the bitter black coffee. “Where did he live,” he asked, “Dylan Riley?”

“SoHo, near the river. He had a warehouse on Vandam, filled with all this surveillance stuff. Remember Gene Hackman in The Conversation? I suspect our boy was a keen moviegoer.”

“They say he was very good at what he did.”

“That right? Who’s they?”

Glass retracted instantly, like a touched snail. “Some people I know-journalists. That’s how I got his name.”

The captain had taken out a gunmetal cigarette lighter and was turning it idly in his fingers. A fellow smoker! Glass experienced a rush of brotherly warmth for this long, emaciated, saintly-seeming figure. Ambrose saw him looking hungrily at the lighter and grinned. “Gave them up six months ago-about the time you moved here to our fair and wondrous city.” He shifted sideways on his chair to allow his long legs more space. The espresso machine behind the bar began to hiss like an industrial boiler and he had to raise his voice to be heard. “My problem is, Mr. Glass, somebody shot this Dylan Riley, which means somebody had a reason to shoot him, and I don’t know what that reason might be. He was a researcher, you say, but from the look of the inside of that warehouse of his he was a lot more than that, or aspired to be.” He picked up his empty cup and peered into it regretfully, as if there would never be another drink of coffee to be had. His eyes were hooded. “Secrets, Mr. Glass,” he said. “Dangerous things.”

Another silence followed. The policeman kept his eyes downcast and seemed to be pondering the woes of the world.

“I don’t think,” Glass said, measuring his words, “that I can help you, Captain. I didn’t know Dylan Riley, not in any real sense.”

Those olive-dark lids shot up and the eyes fixed him, wet-brown and shining. “But you met him.” It was not a question.

“Yes, I-he-that is, he came to my office, to discuss the possibility of his working with me on the book. Nothing was agreed.”

The policeman was still watching him. “What kind of research would you have wanted him to do, if ‘something’ had been ‘agreed’?”

Glass’s nerves were thrumming for the want of a cigarette. “Just… general. Dates, places, people Mr. Mulholland met, where, when. That kind of thing.”

The captain flipped open the lid of the lighter but did not ignite the flame. Glass caught a faint whiff of gas from the pinprick nozzle, or imagined that he did, and his craving nerves stretched another notch.

“Mr. Mulholland,” the captain said, “is a pretty interesting man. That’s to say, he’s led a pretty interesting life. Must be some things in his past you won’t be able to write about.”

“There are things in all our pasts that wouldn’t bear the light of day.”

The policeman gave a low, deprecating laugh. “But that’s not the same thing, is it. What I mean is, Mr. Mulholland is likely to have secrets that wouldn’t be allowed to see the light of day. Given his line of work before he set up Mulholland Cable.”

“Then I’m wasting my time.”

That seemed to require no comment, and again a silence fell between the two men, uneasy, and faintly rancorous. Glass was calculating the number of lies he had told the policeman so far today. Or not lies, perhaps, in the strict sense, the sense the Jesuits of Saint Peter’s in Jersey City would have insisted on, but shifted emphases, strategic withholdings. What was the phrase? Sins of omission? That was it. Yet it was no task of his to incriminate himself. He paused on that thought. Incriminate himself in what? He had not shot Dylan Riley. All he was doing was trying to cover up the possibility, the distinct possibility, that what the Lemur had unearthed was the fact of Glass’s affair with Alison O’Keeffe, and that he had been out to blackmail Glass by threatening to reveal the affair to his wife and her father. What man, what husband, no matter how far estranged from his wife, would not want to suppress such a revelation and preserve the arrangement that had been suiting everyone for so long? And then, deny the thought though he might, there was that million dollars…

“I read that thing you wrote,” the captain said, “that thing in one of the magazines, about the Menendez brothers.” Glass stared, and the captain rolled his scarecrow’s shoulders in a parody of prideful shyness. “Shucks, yeah, I read, don’t even move my lips.” He stirred his coffee again. “It was a good piece. Lyle and Erik. Sweet guys. You meet them?”