by Con Lehane
By the time she got off the train at 57th Street, she’d decided she wouldn’t do anything for the moment. She’d gathered some things of Gobi’s. She’d put those things in a closet and hang onto them until she talked to him again when she got back from Texas.
Chapter 15
“What you look like,” said McNulty, “is a guy crying in his beer. I usually let the guy go right ahead without butting in. Your case is different.”
“Why is that?” Ambler realized he actually had been staring into his glass of beer, so he looked up at the bartender, surprised by the sadness he found looking back at him.
“Sometimes it feels like a guy needs to talk,” the bartender said.
“It’s been a bad couple of days since I saw you last.” Ambler told him about visiting his son in prison to talk about Devon’s murder.
McNulty poured them both shots of Irish whiskey. “May he find peace,” he said, and slugged down his shot.
Ambler drank his shot as well. “It’s not easy.” He stopped, not sure how to say what he wanted to say. “Devon watched out for me when I was a kid. He was smarter than I was about the streets … and that’s what you needed to be smart about when you were a kid. He called us partners, Butch and Sundance from the movie, never hinted he was smarter or tougher; always we were partners.”
McNulty nodded once or twice. He was easy to talk to. It’s what made him a good bartender, what brought him the loyal regulars.
Ambler told him what Devon had told him about his brother and the murder of Richard Wright.
McNulty emptied the remains of a coffee cup into the sink, rinsed the cup out, and after a glance over his shoulder, filled it from the beer tap. “The poor bastard. His brother was a rat?” Unasked, he took Ambler’s beer mug and refilled it. He wiped the bar in front of Ambler before replacing the coaster and putting the mug on it. “This guy murdered in prison, now that he’s dead, you think you owe him to find out what happened anyway. And you think the ex-cop who donated his papers and is now on the lam knows more than he let on.”
“Two people are dead. As far as I know, they never met, never had anything to do with one another. What they have in common is undercover work. Devon’s brother was a confidential informant years ago who, Devon said, took the rap for a murder he didn’t commit, until Devon took the rap for him. Leila Stone was a confidential informant monitoring Gobi Tabrizi, and perhaps others in the library. Tabrizi, the man arrested for the murder, had more reason to kill her than anyone else we know about. Adele thinks he’s innocent. I’m not so sure.”
“That Arab guy was in here with you and her? Rugged. Dark. Handsome. The kind of guy women go for?”
Ambler felt himself flush, heat in his cheeks. He looked down at the beer so he wouldn’t look at McNulty.
“Hoping,” McNulty said.
Ambler laughed. “She was spying on him for a reason.”
“So the Arab killed the woman for spying on him. Then, he would have had your friend in prison murdered … for what reason?”
“The prisoner who killed Devon is a Muslim. If Gobi did have a reason to have Devon killed, it wouldn’t be difficult … through a network—”
They were silent for a few moments. McNulty took a slug of beer. “This union guy who was murdered back in the day, the truckers union? Pop would know about that. Not much happened with unions in the city in his day he didn’t know about.”
Ambler placed a credit card on the bar to pay his tab.
“Where you going?” McNulty asked.
“Back to the library. I have an exhibit to put together and I keep getting distracted. The Paul Higgins collection started all this trouble. It arrives at the library; Leila is murdered. I ask Higgins about Devon. Devon is murdered.” He signed his credit card slip. “Ask your father. The murdered man’s name was Richard Wright.”
* * *
Ambler stayed until midnight sifting through the boxes of papers and memorabilia Paul Higgins thought worth handing on to posterity. Strangely, at least strangely to Ambler, Higgins held on to things he’d accumulated as a child: report cards, citations that went with trophies for playing PAL baseball. Higgins played PAL baseball in the Bronx, not so many years before he and Devon played in Brooklyn. Whatever few citations and awards Ambler won were long gone. He wondered what Devon might have left behind. He had no idea what, or even whom, Devon left behind.
Higgins kept his discharge papers from the Marines, including a letter of commendation from a commanding officer and an insignia that read U.S. Marines Military Police with the Semper Fi logo in the middle. The most interesting discovery was a packet of letters from his younger sister, Maureen, a dozen or so letters she’d written to him when he was in Vietnam.
The letters were chatty, about her teenage friends and enemies, complaints about their father and mother and the unfairness of life. Ambler sifted through them, skimming for a word or phrase that might jump out. The return address on the last few letters was from M. O’Brien in Woodside, New York, signed Love, Sis. What did it tell him? Higgins’s sister married a guy named O’Brien and lived in Woodside, which was then an Irish neighborhood and still was to some degree. She might still live there some forty years later. Some people stayed in the same house their entire adult lives.
Sometimes, the simplest things are the most useful. He got a phone book off his shelf. It was a couple of years old, but he found a Michael O’Brien on 56th Street in Queens. The next afternoon, Ambler left work early, caught the Flushing Line 7 train beneath the library and climbed down from the elevated station at 61st Street and Roosevelt Avenue a half hour later. He stood for a moment at a busy intersection in front of down-to-earth diner named Stop Inn to get his bearings and then headed for 56th Street. The block the O’Briens’ might still live on was lined with brick attached houses and brick steps leading to the front doors.
A woman’s voice with an echoing memory of the Bronx answered his knock with a question.
“A friend of Paul’s,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
“Ambler. Ray Ambler.”
“How do you know my brother?”
While her tone wasn’t combative, it did have a no-nonsense edge. He didn’t know if he should lie. How would she know who her brother’s friends were? It was easy to get trapped with lies, so he thought better of it. “We’re working on a project together.” This probably wouldn’t be enough for her; at least it was an answer.
The words were hardly out of his mouth before she asked, “Are you a cop?”
He answered without thinking. “No. I’m a librarian.”
The woman answered with a hoarse chortle. “A librarian figures. Paulie spent half his life in the library when we were kids.” She unbolted the door.
Maureen Higgins had the rough edges and tough veneer of a lifelong working class city woman, and made no apologies for it. In the doorway before ushering him in, she appraised Ambler, seeming to judge that he was more or less harmless.
“Sit down,” she said. “Would you like a beer?”
He thought about it for a moment before saying yes. She brought him a can of Budweiser and didn’t ask if he’d like a glass. For herself, she brought a can of Diet Pepsi. When he looked at it, she nodded toward the beer can. “I can’t stand the stuff. It ruined my mother’s life.” She paused to take a sip of her Pepsi. “No problem for you to drink it. Don’t get me wrong. Unless you’re going to go home and beat your wife.”
In the small living room, everything was in place, nothing modern, the furniture comfortable looking, not worn or frayed, but from another era, more photos than books on the bookcases, on the centerpiece wall unit the few books edged out by ceramic knickknacks, mostly owls of various shapes, sizes, and colors.
“You’ve lived here quite a while, I imagine,” he said.
“More than forty years.” Her eyes were misty but with sadness not regret. “Long enough to raise a family and bury a husband.” She paused, maybe chasing down mem
ories, maybe chasing them away. “So Paulie disappears and everyone comes to me looking for him.”
Ambler felt a jolt of something that told him what would come next. “Someone else was here asking about your brother?”
“The police. Twice. One was a nice guy, a detective, journeyman cop; you could tell.”
“Cosgrove?”
“Right. He said to call him Mike.”
“The other one?”
“I didn’t like him. Stuck up. Condescending, is that what you call it? Thinks he’s better than you.”
“Tall? Thin? Expensively dressed? Perhaps smoked cigarettes?”
“That’s him.” Her eyes bored into his. “You sure you ain’t a cop? How do you know these guys, and my brother?”
Ambler took a sip of beer. “I guess you don’t know where Paul is.”
“He’s hard to keep track of. Always was.” Something in her tone, a glint in her eyes, hinted she knew more than she was saying. “Neither of the detectives said why they were looking for him. Like you, they were friends.” A slight smile and her penetrating gaze made her words an indictment. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “Seems to me if you were all such good friends, he would’ve told you where he was going.”
Ambler liked Maureen O’Brien, nee Higgins, and he believed she knew where her brother was. He made an educated guess. “Things were tough when you were young and Paul looked after you, protected you, right?”
“If you know my brother, you know that’s him. Stood up to the bullies, took care of the little ones. Our home life wasn’t great. The old man worked at a printing plant. He came home, filthy, ink-stained, ate dinner, sat in an easy chair in the living room, and drank cans of Ballantine Ale until he was in stupor. On Friday nights, he brought home a bottle of whiskey to drink with the Ballantine Ale. On those nights, he slapped my mother around, until Paulie got big enough to stop him.”
Ambler nodded, as if in approval.
“I got married and moved here to Queens when Paul was in Vietnam. The old man died not long after that and Paul got a hardship discharge to take care of my mother. When he came home, he joined the cops. My husband Michael was a cop, too. But he and Paul never got along. No fight or anything, just different people. For Michael, NYPD was a job, same as if he punched a clock in a factory. For Paulie, it was something else. Gung-ho, I guess you’d call it. He got on Michael’s nerves.” She stopped talking and looked at Ambler expectantly.
He told her why he was looking for her brother.
“So you’re not a cop. You’re the mystery novel expert on the case?” She laughed, holding up her hand to stop his protestation. “Go on with you.” She stood and beckoned for him to follow to the next room, the dining room, one entire wall of which was a bookshelf, packed with books. “Mysteries,” she said. “I’ve a bit of a collection myself; I read two or three a week now since I retired, at least on the weeks I don’t have the grandkids.”
She made tea and served it with ham sandwiches on white bread, along with a raisin bread she called Irish bread. “You think Paulie killed that woman?”
“I don’t know.” Ambler munched on his sandwich.
“He’s killed men as a cop, in the war more than once.” She was thoughtful, looking at a sandwich on the plate in front of her, not eating. “The war made him a hard person. He came back different—”
“Angry.”
“Not angry so much as hard, untouchable, unfeeling. He was never a softie, even as a kid. After he came back, nothing moved him. Things would get other people sad he didn’t feel, or if he felt, he didn’t show it. I guess that made you tough as a cop, not feeling sorry for anyone. Anyone he went up against got what they had coming. My husband didn’t take pleasure in other people’s misfortune.” She picked up her sandwich, examined it closely, put it down. “My brother had to wear the white hat. He wouldn’t be a bad guy for anything. I don’t see him murdering someone.”
She met Ambler’s gaze and held it a long time. She knew what he was after. “Uncle Dan in Boston, my father’s kid brother, he’s a retired cop, too, a lot like Paulie, a good few years older.” The expression in her eyes was sorrowful. “He didn’t ask me not to tell anyone where he was. I don’t know he went there. I’m not worried. You’ll find him and find out he didn’t kill her.”
On the train ride back to Manhattan, Ambler called Mike Cosgrove and told him Paul Higgins might be in Boston. He also told him Brad Campbell had been in Queens questioning Paul’s sister.
Chapter 16
Leila’s real name was Susan Brown, Adele learned from Mike Cosgrove before she left for Granbury, Texas, the small town south of Dallas where Leila’s—now Susan’s—funeral would be held. In the cab to LaGuardia, she wondered why she was doing this. Last night, she smuggled papers and a gun out of Gobi Tabrizi’s apartment. Today, she headed to Texas to the funeral of a murder victim, where she might run into the murderer himself. Raymond had done this kind of thing for years. For her, even a couple of short years ago she could not have imagined doing anything like this.
The drive to Granbury from the Dallas/Fort Worth airport took an hour and a-half, through some of the flattest land she’d ever seen. She went straight to the funeral parlor and found there wouldn’t be a viewing, only the funeral the next day. The funeral director told her where she might find Susan Brown’s father.
The small, one-story house she stopped in front of was the length and breadth of a house trailer, set back from the road on a lot of weeds and clumps of untended grass. The man who opened the door to her was wizened if anyone ever was, with a tiny mop of wispy gray hair, a long, thin face, and a few discolored teeth, a walking symbol of a hardscrabble life. The saddest thing was the dull expression in his eyes, barely registering her presence when he opened the door and looked at her.
“I was a friend of your daughter, Susan. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He nodded.
She waited for him to say something. When he didn’t, she asked if she could come in. He moved slowly out of the way, so she could pass, closed the door behind her, and followed her to a tiny living room with a linoleum floor, a stuffed chair, and a couch. As soon as they were seated, she began to tell him about Leila in New York but stopped because he didn’t seem interested. When she asked about his daughter’s life in Texas, he didn’t have much to say. It was as if he didn’t know her well or perhaps he wasn’t used to speaking. Some men were like that. They didn’t say much. He sat there waiting, waiting for her to leave probably. Still, she kept trying.
“Susan’s mother? She’s not here?”
“In Dallas.”
Oh, so what did that mean? Shopping? Moved out years ago or yesterday? “Leila—I mean Susan—did she tell you much about her work in New York?”
“I don’t know what she did.”
Adele tried to smile. “Would her mother know more about her? Will she be back soon?”
He shook his head. “She left a long time ago. I raised Susan.”
“By yourself? That must have been difficult. Does she have brothers or sisters?”
“No. I raised her till she graduated high school. She left for Dallas. I don’t know what she did after that.”
“You didn’t stay in touch?”
“No.”
“Did you go to her wedding?”
“Wasn’t invited.”
“Do you know her husband’s name? Her married name?”
He shook his head.
Adele was stumped. Had she come this whole way for nothing? She wasn’t going to find out anything at all about Leila’s past? That wasn’t possible. She’d get something out of this old fart if she had to shake it out of him. She wasn’t leaving until he told her something useful or dragged her out the door.
“Do you remember when she left Dallas for New York?”
He didn’t.
“She must have told you something. She never wrote to you? You don’t know anything about your daughter’s life over the last fif
teen years? Not a Christmas card?” Something finally struck a chord. Some life came into the expression in his eyes. She watched him wrestle with his memory. “You didn’t save any letters or cards she might have sent over the years?”
With some difficulty, he hoisted himself out of the chair he’d sunk into. “Some years back she left off some boxes of her things for me to keep for her. She said she’d be back for them. I put them away in her old bedroom.”
“Are the boxes still there?” Adele tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.
“I s’pose so.” He walked toward the back of the house. She wasn’t invited but followed anyway.
The bedroom was tiny, hardly a room at all, a quarter the size of Adele’s tiny bedroom in New York. The floor was also linoleum, the walls green, faded almost to white, a tiny window was too high to see anything out of but a leafless tree limb and a piece of the sky. A child’s bed was pushed against one wall. On it were three moving boxes.
“Have you opened the boxes?”
The old man had stepped into the room and stood next to the wall opposite the bed. He looked at the boxes on the bed as if he’d never seen them before. “Nope. Never looked at them since the delivery guy dropped them off.”
“You don’t remember when?” Adele stood in the doorway. “Could it have been when she was leaving Dallas for New York? Could she have left her husband, dropped off these things, and gone to New York to get away from her husband?” Adele asked the questions as if she were asking Leila’s father. Really she was asking herself, thinking out loud. This time he answered.
“Might be. A man came looking for her not long after she left the boxes.”
“Her husband? Her ex-husband?”
“Didn’t say. Told him she was gone.”
