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?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Sweet guys.”
The captain chuckled, and pushed aside his cup and stood up. Together they went toward the door. Glass brought out his wallet but the policeman lifted a hand. “We don’t pay here,” he said with stony emphasis. “Graft. Don’t you know about New York cops?” Then he grinned. “Joke. I keep a tab open.”
In the street Glass paused to light a cigarette, and the captain stood with his hands in his pockets and watched him, shaking his head. “You should quit,” he said. “Believe me, it makes a difference. Even in the sack-you got more breath.”
They waited at the lights and then crossed.
“Mr. Mulholland know about you and Dylan Riley?” the policeman asked.
“There wasn’t much to know.”
They were at the door of the station. Glass was unsure if he was free to go; maybe the real questioning had not started yet. He had so far only met the good cop, surely the bad one would be along any minute. The captain stopped, and turned to him. “You know you were the last person Dylan Riley called? That makes you the last one to talk to him alive.”
“You mean, the second-last.”
Captain Ambrose grinned again. “Yeah. Right.”
6
ALL HANDS!
John Glass disliked the sprawling apartment where he and his wife lived, more or less. More or less, in that Louise lived there, while he merely joined her in the evenings, stayed overnight, and left in the mornings. That, at least, was how he thought of it. To an observer-and the wealthy and fashionable Mrs. Glass was always under scrutiny-the Glasses would have seemed a typical Upper East Side couple. Louise made sure that it should stay that way. She was careful to preserve appearances not least for fear of her father and what he would do if she allowed a scandal to develop. William Mulholland’s bitter disapproval of divorce was well known, and he had been heard to accuse his daughter, no more than half jokingly, of being a bigamist. Big Bill had not much liked Rubin Sinclair, Louise’s first husband, but, as she later told Glass one Champagnelit night when they were first together, he had liked it even less when she announced, no doubt with a quaver of terror in her voice, that the marriage had gone hopelessly awry and that she was filing for divorce. Her father had not argued with her, Louise said, in some wonderment, had not shouted or threatened. The mildness of his response had been more frightening to her than any show of rage. “You took a vow, Lou,” he had said gravely. “You took a vow, and now you’re breaking it.”
After the divorce came through Louise had fled with her ten-year-old son to Ireland, to her father’s big old Georgian house in Connemara, to tend her soul’s wounds and figure out how to rebuild her life. In Ireland she had met John Glass-for the first time, as she had thought, for she had forgotten that long-ago windblown afternoon at the nearby Huston place-and something about him, a detached, dreamy something, had seemed the perfect balm for her bruised spirit. John Glass was everything that Rubin Sinclair was not. Or so she had thought. For his part, John Glass was certain, despite all he knew of Fate and her caprices, that the fact of this exquisite creature’s having drifted a second time into his orbit was a circumstance to be seized upon without delay. He proposed on the date that, three months previously, her divorce came through. “Oh, God,” Louise said, a laughing wail, “what will my father say!”