Murder in the Manuscript Room

by Con Lehane

  Before he could turn, he felt someone beside him. Sinking into a crouch, he prepared to turn. A voice stopped him. “Stay cool. It’s Paul Higgins, Mike Cosgrove’s—”

  “I know who you are.” Ambler kept his tai-chi crouch, turning slowly.

  Higgins wore a windbreaker with the collar up and a Yankee cap with the brim pulled low on his forehead. More than once, he glanced over his shoulder checking the street and sidewalk in both directions. He gestured with his hand, which was in his jacket pocket. “I need you take a ride with me.” He nodded in the direction Ambler had come from—toward the white van.

  Ambler hesitated. He met Higgins’s gaze. “Why would I do that?”

  Higgins half smiled and glanced at the pocket of his jacket.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I don’t have time to explain.” It was easy to believe him because he kept glancing over his shoulder. Though he was on edge, he was cocky. His body tense, he was on alert; but the expression in his eyes stayed calm; he seemed slightly amused. “At the risk of sounding trite, if you do what I tell you, you won’t get hurt.”

  Ambler shrugged and walked in front of Higgins to the van. Thoughts, possibilities ran through his mind: What if he ran? Would Higgins shoot? Would he miss? Why was he doing this? He had no reason to do what he was doing. Ambler considered explaining this to him. But of course that would be useless.

  Higgins opened the door on the passenger side and gestured for Ambler to get in. He had a moment while Higgins walked around to the driver’s side. But he’d already dismissed the idea of making a break for it, and he didn’t have any confidence that he could win a wrestling match over a gun with Higgins, so he watched him walk past the front of the van. Higgins kept an eye on Ambler, as well as the street and sidewalks around him, not jittery, quite at ease actually. He climbed into the driver’s seat, put a small pistol in his lap, and turned the ignition. With much creaking and groaning the truck pulled away from the curb, Higgins dividing his attention between the side mirrors, the street in front of him, and Ambler. He took Third Avenue uptown, went east on 42nd to First Avenue, north again to 57th Street, where he turned left and headed cross town, shifting his gaze between the mirrors, the traffic in front of him, and Ambler. When he reached Ninth Avenue, he headed downtown. At one intersection, Ambler looked out the side window, judging the time the truck was stopped at a traffic light and the distance from his seat to the street below.

  “Don’t unbuckle your seatbelt,” Higgins said calmly.

  Ambler took a deep breath and watched his captor.

  After a moment, Higgins said, “As you might guess, I’m making sure no one’s following me.… Probably a waste of time. They could have a GPS stuck to the bottom of the truck or follow signals from my cell phone.”

  Ambler noticed the dozen or so file boxes in the back of the van and began to put together a version of what might be taking place in Higgins’s, and now his, world.

  Higgins saw him looking at the boxes. “I’ll explain. For the moment, I need to concentrate.” Despite paying so much attention to what was behind, he moved through the city traffic with ease, switching lanes, speeding up, slowing down, keeping abreast of the cabs, making the timed lights.

  “Am I your prisoner?”

  Higgins gave him a sidelong glance that he couldn’t decipher.

  “Are those the papers you told me about?”

  Higgins glanced at the boxes. “I told someone I shouldn’t have I was donating them to the library.”

  “You’re giving us the collection?”

  “I talked with Mike.” He glanced at Ambler. “Mike and I were in Nam. People like us, our generation, we’re dying off.” Higgins talked on, weaving through traffic, turning corners, inching through waves of pedestrians crossing the street, heading uptown, crosstown, downtown again. What he took a long time to say, what Ambler understood him to say, was that he’d come to believe that history—if not the present—deserved the truth. “Everything’s there. I’m asking that until I’m dead, or enough almost dead for it not to make a difference, you won’t let anyone get at certain parts of it. That’s what you told me. That’s part of the deal, right?”

  “It might have been before you abducted me.”

  The van was a bare-boned contraption, standard shift, a gear box in the middle of the floor between them, an unadorned dashboard, levers to roll the windows up and down, sturdy seats that handled bumps and potholes like a wooden bench.

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “Restrict part of the collection? It can be part of a deal, unless your spy-on-your-fellow-citizens friends get a court order. There’s a lot of that going around.”

  Higgins shook his head. “They wouldn’t. It’d be opening a can of worms.”

  “Aren’t we trying to lose whoever’s following us because they want those documents?”

  Higgins shook his head. “Nothing official. This chase is someone’s freelance project.”

  “Who?”

  Higgins turned to Ambler. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Ambler froze. Higgins laughed. “Trust me, you don’t want to know. Is there somewhere we can drop this stuff tonight?”

  “Tonight? I don’t know.” On one of their passes across 42nd Street, Ambler noticed the library lit up like New Year’s Eve, as it was often in the evening for one society function or another. As long as all the systems were running, security and maintenance were on hand. The guards might let them drop off some files. It was worth a try. He told Higgins his thinking.

  “With luck, security is a retired cop.” Higgins said.

  They were both right. A library police supervisor, retired from New York’s finest, was at the 40th Street service entrance shooting the bull with the guard on duty. After some ex-cop reminiscing with Higgins, he gestured to the guard to open the garage door and Higgins backed the van up to the loading dock. The guard called maintenance to help deliver the boxes to the crime fiction reading room on the second floor.

  Higgins left after that, not offering Ambler a ride home, which Ambler didn’t want anyway. It may have crossed his mind that he might not see Higgins again, but if the thought was there, it never became fully formed.

  Chapter 4

  Wednesday morning, Harry Larkin, Ambler’s boss, the director of Archives and Manuscripts, sat with his fingers tented under his chin and listened without interrupting, though his eyes lit up every so often with what Ambler assumed were unasked questions. Harry was a former priest, an ex-Jesuit, and sometimes seemed to revert to his former role of confessor and spiritual adviser.

  “You were taken at gunpoint and chased through the city streets by a rogue secret agent of some sort?” Harry’s cherubic face and granny glasses gave the impression he was bemused, which probably wasn’t the case.

  “Not quite that dramatic, Harry. I wasn’t really threatened, and we might have been tailed; that’s all.”

  “It’s an unusual method of making a donation.” Harry lowered his head to peer at Ambler over the top of his granny glasses. “He’ll include a stipend for maintaining the collection?”

  “So he says.”

  “What about a deed of gift?”

  “Under the circumstances, we didn’t get to it. I’ll ask him to come in and sign it.”

  “We need to go through channels, Ray. One can’t drop off a collection in the middle of the night. It might have been stolen.”

  “He’s donating the collection, not selling it.”

  “You’ll need the deed of gift if we decide to accept. You know I don’t like restrictions on collections. And I’d like to meet this gentleman.”

  * * *

  “What was that about?” Adele caught up with Ambler as he left Harry’s office and followed him to the reading room.

  He told her.

  “You rode around Manhattan in a van with a renegade cop who kidnapped you from your apartment. Are you crazy?”

  “Sometimes, I think I am. I didn’t have m
uch choice.”

  “There’s something wrong here.” She closed the door to the reading room behind her and turned her no-nonsense expression on Ambler. “A person can’t hold you at gunpoint. That’s illegal. It’s wrong. You should have called the police. His donated collection be damned.” Adele’s bluntness might be at odds with her gentleness, yet the opposites came together in an appealing way in her. She was being protective of him again.

  “I don’t think the gun was for me; I think it was for whoever was following him.”

  “Even so, he’s a bully.” She noticed the stack of file boxes beneath the metal stairs that led to the room’s tiny mezzanine and shifted her attention. “Is that the collection?”

  “Harry didn’t want to do anything with it until we have the deed of gift.”

  “Are you going to go through it?” Adele’s eyes lit up with something between naughtiness and evil, like the little girl playmate who goaded you into doing something you’d get in trouble for.

  * * *

  “I might take a look.” He tried to shift his attention to some files on his desk.

  Adele didn’t let him get away. She had an eerie way of knowing when he left something out, an extra level of sensitivity where he was concerned, so that he felt sometimes she knew what he was thinking. “What would you look for?” She wrinkled her brow. “What did you tell me was in the files? You told me something…”

  “My friend Devon, in prison—”

  “Right. I remember. You think this Higgins person put your friend in jail for a murder he didn’t commit.”

  “That’s a big leap. I don’t think that. I don’t know what’s in the file until I look.”

  “You do, too, think that, or you wouldn’t go to all this trouble.” Mischief sparkled in her eyes again. “You could look in the restricted box and seal it up again.” Her smile was impish. She knew he wouldn’t. For some reason, Higgins believed that, too.

  “Nope. For all I know, the box is booby-trapped. I wouldn’t put it past Higgins.”

  “You wouldn’t open the box anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re too upstanding.” She half smiled and at the same time seemed sad. Her eyes met his and held.

  “You make me sound like a Goody Two-shoes.”

  “You are.” She smiled.

  When she looked at him like that, with caring that seemed like admiration, he felt like a fraud. She didn’t know him as well as she thought. He couldn’t come close to being someone she should admire.

  Chapter 5

  The Arab seated at the table in the Manuscripts and Archives reading room had dark hair and darker eyes, a rugged, lined face, a wrinkled brow. Though still a young man, he had the gravitas of someone older. He spent hours at a time bent over the ornate ancient Islamic tomes he called up from the bowels of the library. Because of what Leila said at dinner the night before, Adele watched him with heightened interest. He glowed with seriousness and intensity. Nothing about him should scare you but something about him was chilling. You had a sense he wouldn’t be afraid of anything. Not surprising Leila wanted to know about him. He was intriguing, mysterious—and handsome.

  Adele was sitting behind the information desk lost in thought watching him when he looked up from his work and his eyes met hers. Nothing angry, nothing threatening, yet he was intimidating. He stood up and walked toward her. She watched him, mesmerized.

  “Were you looking through my notes?” he asked in the level, accented, precise tone of someone for whom English isn’t a first language.

  “Of course not.” Her voice rose, her tone shrill. She hated that, yet she’d been unjustly accused.

  His expression didn’t change. “The other woman, dark hair, serious, at the desk this morning before I went for lunch. You were here when I returned. Someone else was here besides you both?”

  “Leila? No one else. No one looked at your notes. I would have seen them.”

  His eyes opened wider, eyebrows raised, challenging. “I know.”

  He did know. Maybe she’d known, too, as soon as he asked. She hated being a bureaucrat, stonewalling. “I’ll speak with the librarian who was here this morning. Perhaps she saw something. I’m sure there’s an explanation.” Her ears rang with the false earnestness in her voice.

  Was that a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth? “Your fellow-worker, she’s interested in ancient Arabic? Perhaps we can speak with her?”

  This wasn’t a good idea. To stall for time, Adele introduced herself. “And you are?” She held out her hand.

  He hesitated and put his hand to his chest. She paused, irritated. The gesture seemed hostile, pulling his hand back, but his expression was tolerant, sympathetic. She drew back her hand. “Gobi Tabrizi.” He bowed slightly.

  “I can’t leave the desk until my replacement arrives. I’ll find Leila then.” Sincerity returned to her voice. “I hope nothing is missing.”

  He raised his head, his eyes opening wider. “Disturbed. Not missing.”

  She felt a moment of dismay, dread. “I’m so sorry. Leila wouldn’t—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Flustered, she bent to her computer. The reader went back to his work.

  Silence settled into the reading room. Adele, reluctant to meet his gaze again, kept her head down for nearly an hour. When one of the junior archivists arrived, she went to look for Leila, not sure how well this would work out. What in hell was wrong with Leila anyway? Halfway through the main reading room, she felt the Arab reader behind her. She started to walk faster, but the idea of outrunning him was foolish so she waited for him in the catalog room.

  “I’m not sure your coming with me is a good idea.”

  He folded his fingers together in front of his chest. That slight smile was back, in his eyes and one corner of his mouth. “Shall I speak with her myself?”

  Adele couldn’t find an answer. She’d thought she was in charge of who saw whom; now it seemed he was. They found Leila in her cubicle in the labyrinth of workspaces behind the main reference desk. Her face when she glanced up might have been carved from ice.

  “Leila, Mr. Tabrizi’s research seems to have been ‘tampered’ with.” She thought better of the word. “Disturbed, that is. Do you know what might have happened?” With her cooing voice and syrupy tone, she felt like a snake oil salesman.

  Leila locked her icy stare onto the Arab reader and shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “His documents are written in Arabic. I’m sure there’s an explanation.” Of course, she wasn’t sure at all there was.

  “Are you suggesting I did something with his research?”

  Adele didn’t know if Leila was addressing her or the man she was looking at.

  “Do you suggest the documents were not disturbed?” The man’s voice was controlled.

  Leila’s demeanor grew frostier if that were possible. “You and she,” she gestured with her head toward Adele without taking her eyes off Tabrizi, “think I did something with your research. I told you I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t accuse you Leila.” Adele felt her voice shake. “I asked what you knew about—”

  The expression in Leila’s eyes was as impenetrable as marble. “You’re squirming, Adele. A reader makes an accusation. You turn on your colleague.”

  “I didn’t hear an accusation.” The smile on Gobi Tabrizi’s lips was wider than it had been—but no longer in his eyes.

  Leila’s expression changed, ice to fire. Rage burned in her cheeks, flared her nostrils, smoldered in her eyes.

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation.” Adele said again. Common ground seemed of no interest to Leila or Gobi Tabrizi.

  “I hope you find it.” Leila turned to her computer.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Tabrizi.” Adele looked into his dark eyes, still tolerant, sympathetic. “Can we go back and look through the documents you were using, perhaps—”

  “Of course.” He turned to leave.

  When he did, Leila loo
ked at Adele and shook her head. Her expression now almost friendly, she rolled her eyes.

  * * *

  “One of them is lying,” Adele said. She was having a beer with Raymond at the Library Tavern after work.

  Ambler nodded.

  “Harry was upset at me more than at Leila when I told him what happened.” She watched McNulty making drinks at the service bar. He held the cocktail shaker near the side of his head parallel to his ear, shaking it vigorously. “Harry acts like she’s someone else’s responsibility.”

  Ambler thought Harry might be right, but kept it to himself. He’d asked him about Leila when questions she’d asked about one of the researchers bothered him. Harry didn’t want to talk about her. She didn’t like to talk about herself either. You weren’t inclined to ask her anything because she had a forbidding quality that told you to keep your distance. He considered telling Adele then what he suspected, as he considered telling her now. He didn’t then or now because telling her would turn his suspicion into an accusation.

  “He’s Muslim,” Ambler said when Adele told him he wouldn’t shake hands with her. “I think it’s not proper for a man to touch a woman.”

  “Oh my God!” Adele said in a tone resembling a wail. “I feel so dumb.” She shot a sidelong glance at Ambler. “Don’t look smug.” She took a sip from her beer mug. “We don’t know she did anything. No one saw her. She said she didn’t. And what’s the big deal if she looked at the documents he’s working on?”

  “Why would she? And why would she deny doing it?”

  “I don’t know.” Adele leaned back in her chair. “So, Mr. Smarty Pants, how will you prove Leila did anything? No witnesses. No evidence. What do you do?”

  “Sometimes you don’t know,” Ambler said.

  Chapter 6

  The snow began falling as Ambler walked across 42nd Street late Thursday afternoon, tiny flurrying flakes from a leaden sky. He’d spent most of the day scrolling through newspaper databases looking for articles on the murder Devon Thomas was imprisoned for. He found a series of stories on state senate hearings and a subsequent investigation that led to a labor department supervised election in which the man who was later murdered, Richard Wright, was elected union president. He’d find more in the Amsterdam News archives at the Schomburg Center library in Harlem if he could find the time to get up there.