The Lemur by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online

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