Murder in the Manuscript Room

by Con Lehane

  “I don’t want to pry,” Ambler said.

  Adele shook her head. They waited with a crowd to cross 49th Street. She reached for his arms and turned him toward her, her face colored by the cold, her eyes shimmering. “I never knew what you wanted. You wouldn’t tell me.”

  The light changed, so they began to walk again, carried along by the crowd. He didn’t look at her. “I don’t know what to say.”

  They were quiet for a couple of blocks. So many things ran through his mind, yet he couldn’t find words for any of them.

  “We’re friends, Raymond.”

  He didn’t want to mention romantic love. It wasn’t fair; Adele was too young and vibrant to be stuck with a recluse like him. “It’s difficult for me to think of our being friends again in a way that isn’t as close…”

  He reached to take her arm as they walked, but let go when he felt her stiffen. They walked in silence until they reached Adele’s block where he expected her to turn. Instead, she kept walking uptown. They walked past the Plaza Hotel, crossing 59th Street, past the carriages and horses, into the park. He watched her out of the corner of his eye.

  Despite the cold, when they came to a bench, she sat, so he sat beside her. As if she read his thoughts, she said, “I can’t figure myself out Raymond. There’s no reason you should be able to.”

  He wanted to ask her about Gobi, but he didn’t. He was about to suggest she have dinner with him and Johnny, something they used to do a couple of times a week and lately hadn’t been doing.

  Before he could, she said, “I think I was wrong about Gobi.”

  His heart jumped, a gush of hope, and then a question. He wasn’t sure she meant what he thought she meant.

  “He’s not a scholar, or he’s not only a scholar.” She didn’t face him as she spoke, which was unusual; she almost always looked him in the eye. “He’s involved with something, some group that’s helping him.” She met Ambler’s gaze. “He had a gun … has a gun.” She described her clandestine meeting, the phone call, the cloak-and-dagger handoff of his bag, their conversation in the pizza café.

  “I was afraid of him.” She paused to regroup. “I don’t think he’d hurt me, yet there was danger around him, danger in being with him.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear this … my concerns about another man. I don’t know why I’m telling you.” She began to cry softly, so he touched her shoulder. This time she didn’t stiffen but softened under his touch.

  He could feel her trembling beneath his hand. “I liked him. I still like him. There’s something strong, almost brutal, about him, yet there’s wisdom and kindness, too.”

  He tried awkwardly to be comforting. “Sometimes people who suffer develop tolerance and wisdom. Other times, it goes the other way. Brutality begets more brutality.”

  Her shoulder stiffened again under his hand. “Gobi isn’t brutal.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.” She stood. “For him, it’s life and death. There’s no room for pettiness.”

  “Pettiness?” He stood also.

  “Jealousy. Nothing’s going to come of it, you know. We’re not lovers, if that’s what you’re worried about. Is that what you think, that I want to sleep with him?” Tears gushed from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Adele. I—”

  “I don’t want your pity. I’m going home. I don’t know why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Adele,” he said, as she walked away. She didn’t look back.

  Chapter 22

  Mike Cosgrove was about to do something he’d never imagined he could do. On the kitchen table in front of him were photographs of his daughter Denise making the sale of a plastic bag of marijuana to an informant wired for sound. Across the table from him, the evidence in front of them, Denise sat crying, terrified. His heart was shattered.

  She liked to go to the city with her friends. He wasn’t happy about it. But he let her go as long as she continued to do well in school. A guy she met in her travels—a cool guy, she said, not a dope dealer—told her she could buy pot from him, sell it to her friends, and that would pay for her own pot. It wasn’t really selling—

  Cosgrove interrupted her, bellowing, “You’re a dope dealer, you fucking idiot.” That’s when the tears started, a torrential downpour, crying harder than she ever had, even as a child when she gashed her head open roller-skating and blood streamed out of the cut. He watched her shuddering back as she bawled into her hands. A few minutes before, she’d been talking about babysitting Ray’s grandson and he’d told her she could kiss that good-bye, too.

  An operative from Campbell Security, Ed Ostrowski, had pulled him aside on Monday after a meeting at One Police Plaza with the Intelligence Division on the Leila Stone murder. They went for coffee at a café on Chambers Street, where Ostrowski placed a manila envelope on the table between them and told him what was in it.

  Ostrowski wasn’t anything like a friend—they knew each other from a few cases over the years before Ostrowski retired. Now, he came on like an old buddy helping out a pal. When a guy’s handed you evidence of your daughter’s crime, you’re not going to try to straighten him out on anything.

  Square head, thick neck, gray hair, ruddy complexion—as Polish as a plate of pierogi—Ostrowski came across as oily when he tried for sincerity. Wearing a thin smile and pained expression of feigned sympathy that made you think of constipation, he folded his pudgy, hands in front of him on the table. “Brad says give you these.”

  “How’d you get this?” Cosgrove waved the envelope.

  “You know what we do—protectin’ people. Might be we were shadowing someone and ran across this. You know how it works.”

  He didn’t like Ostrowski when he was on the force. He ran his precinct like a vigilante operation. It was in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn that included the drug-infested Red Hook Houses. He made it worse—wrongful death suits; excessive-force complaints; cowboy cops shaking down drug dealers. The brass pushed him into retirement before the neighborhood revolted.

  “What’s in it for Campbell?” He and Ostrowski eyed each other like stray mongrels. “Do you want to answer or do I talk to Campbell?”

  “Brad turned this over to me; he washed his hands.” Ostrowski was a nasty man, the nastiness near enough to the surface that it flowed from his pores like the stench of body odor. His face reddened. The guy wasn’t dumb. He recognized contempt. Cosgrove wasn’t doing anything to hide it.

  “You’re the hero cop, right? You think that means something? The brass don’t give a fuck about your citations. They think of me and you the same. I do it my way. You do it yours. Just do it. That’s all they give a fuck. Something goes wrong, they don’t know you, like they didn’t know me.”

  Ostrowski finished his diatribe and told him what Campbell wanted, something Cosgrove began to see the outlines of once he got over the shock of what Denise had done. No reason for the police to follow her. The amount of pot was too small. The surveillance was by Campbell’s operatives, who had no reason to follow Denise either. She was ancillary to a surveillance case Campbell Security was getting paid to conduct. They picked up something by accident. Now, Campbell was using it.

  Cosgrove knew how it worked all right. If he kept the envelope, he’d keep his daughter out of the system. If he didn’t, it would be hell for her. If he kept the envelope, Campbell would own him. Better than twenty years in, a few years from retirement, he’d be a dirty cop. He said he’d think about it. He and Ostrowski both knew the deal was done as soon as the messenger walked out the door of the coffee shop leaving the envelope behind.

  “It’s a crime, Denise.” he’d told her. “It could mean jail.”

  Eyes swollen and red, face blotched, lips trembling, she looked up at him as helplessly as she had as a baby. “If you send me to jail, I’ll kill myself.”

  He ran his hands through his hair. Right and wrong had always been easy for him. He’d known cops who’d run
up against Internal Affairs for trying to help a family member—guys on track for lieutenant busted back to patrol. A cop’s wife breaks up with him. The cop goes nuts—assault and battery, assault with a weapon. Time drags on. Evidence gets lost. In time, the case disappears. A traffic stop, cop is drunk. The guys take him home. No record of the stop. They call it selective enforcement. Not something everyone did, but it happened. You didn’t ask for the break; you got it. Some families it was a cousin in the jewelry business, so you got a deal on a ring or watch. Here your old man’s in the police business; you get a break on crime.

  He’d never blown the whistle on another cop. Thank God, he’d never been put in that position. Some people shouldn’t be cops. Some things, if he’d seen them—cops dealing drugs, beating up suspects—if he knew for sure, he’d have gone to the rat squad. He’d always been clean. He didn’t make a big deal of it. Like most cops, he did his job and minded his own business, did the right thing. It gave him an edge, confidence whether he went up against bad guys, solid citizens, politicos, or department brass. He knew he did it right, so he stood his ground. He worked in the daylight. Now for the first time, here was something he needed the dark for. You do right until it’s too hard not to. For him, it’s his daughter. Who knows what it is for the next guy?

  Chapter 23

  Sunday morning, Ambler—who’d brooded through the night after his talk with Adele, staring at the streetlight reflections on the ceiling and listening to the quiet steady breathing of Johnny in the small bed beside his—returned to the library to pour through Paul Higgins’s files. When thoughts of Adele, sometimes only the echo of her voice, came, he forced himself back to work, the work now a distraction from his images of her. He searched the files the old-fashioned way—no “keyword,” no search term. He browsed through the boxes, skimming reports, transcripts, news articles, photos, waiting for a word or a name or a face to jump out at him.

  Higgins was an orderly guy; a sharp observer, good with details, straightforward. This made it easier to follow, through the files, what he was doing at a particular time, but it was still difficult. Higgins did a lot. At a given time, he had a dozen or more CIs reporting to him. Worse, a lot of what was in the reports was cryptic, shorthand or street slang or cop slang that Ambler didn’t follow.

  His heart beat faster when he found a folder of clippings from the African American press about Richard Wright, including a profile from the Amsterdam News when he was elected president of the United Truckers local. Wright was an impressive guy. An ex-Marine, he’d grown up in Harlem, served in Korea. Back from the war, he became a civil rights activist in the fifties. Later, he was a minister at one of the nondenominational churches scattered in storefronts along 125th Street. He was one of the Freedom Riders who rode interstate buses through the segregated South in 1961, and he worked in civil rights projects in the South through the midsixties.

  In the midseventies, he became an organizer for rank-and-file reformers in the truckers union when one of his parishioners asked for his help. Over the next decade, the union activists overcame organized crime resistance; the government stepped in with a monitor; Wright was elected president of the local. Then, he was murdered. There was a sheath of articles about the murder—the result of what the tabloids described as a battle between rival gangs over drug territory. Nothing in the files indicated Higgins or any of his informants were involved with Wright’s union. Still, it was curious Higgins would have material on Wright in his files.

  One thing he read in the profile that did interest him was that Wright had a son. His name was Martin and he would be in his forties now. Ambler sought out Benny Barone, a research librarian in the Millstein Genealogy Division, and asked if he could track the son and his mother down.

  Benny called an hour later. “The mother is deceased. You’ll like this. The son is a cop.

  * * *

  Martin Wright worked homicide out of the 73rd precinct in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Ambler called the next morning and made an appointment to meet him that afternoon in the precinct’s detective bureau. When he got there, he found a black man with a stocky build, a shiny dome, granny glasses, a thin mustache. Wright had an engaging smile, a kind of friendly openness. The smile threw Ambler off. He lacked the cynicism Ambler expected in cops, especially detectives who worked on homicides, especially in neighborhoods where violent death for young men was almost as common as high school graduation. Ambler told him he wanted to ask about his father’s death and told him what he’d learned so far.

  “I looked into it,” Wright had a deeply modulated, rhythmic voice like a preacher might have. “When my father was killed, I was too young to understand what happened. When I first joined the force, I talked to cops who remembered the case. You mentioned Paul Higgins. I might have spoken to him.” Wright seemed to search his memory as he spoke. “Nothing came up about an undercover operation.”

  Ambler wanted to ask about the drug allegations against Wright’s father but he couldn’t flat out ask if he thought his father was a drug dealer. “Were you satisfied with the investigation of his death?”

  “You think they didn’t get the right guy?”

  “Devon told me his brother was involved but wasn’t the killer.”

  “Did he know who was?” Wright’s gaze was piercing.

  “He said ‘they.’ He didn’t say who ‘they’ were.”

  “Who do you think they were?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Wright’s amiable manner didn’t change, yet his questioning was probing and direct. “You wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be asking these questions if you didn’t have some idea about who they were.”

  Ambler took a moment to gather his thoughts and Wright didn’t press him. “Can I ask you something?”

  He expected an argument but the amiable cop said, “Sure.”

  “Did you know about your father’s union work?”

  Wright scrutinized Ambler’s face. “You think it was that? I’ve heard that. Union guys I talked with told me that was why he was killed. I didn’t believe or not believe. Nothing to follow. No way to know.” He paused and stood. Standing, he had a presence, broad shoulders, thick chest, fit. He pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. “I have an appointment. I’ll walk out with you. There’s a car service stand across the street.”

  Outside, Ambler hunched into his jacket. He’d come out by train and walked quite a distance to the precinct house, past littered vacant lots, asphalt playgrounds, forbidding high-rise projects, boarded-up apartment buildings, steel-gated liquor stores and markets. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk but felt the stares of the young and not so young men loitering on the stoops or in front of the liquor store as he walked by. He didn’t belong there. This was why Wright walked out with him and put him in a cab. He didn’t say anything, perhaps thinking he saved Ambler some embarrassment.

  “My father wasn’t corrupt. He wasn’t corruptible. You’d know that if you’d known him. He had high standards for me, for himself. I got all As in school. I never got in trouble. He lived what he preached in church. No one who knew him believed he did what they said he did.”

  “If that’s the case … if he was set up, the people who framed him—”

  Wright stopped. “You’re surprised I’m a cop, right? I’m not my father.” Wright’s easygoing manner didn’t change, except he might have stood straighter. “After my dad’s death, a police foundation helped my family, especially me, sent me to private school and college, paid for it. I wanted to give something back. Help people, like my dad did. This is my way.”

  He stood, smiling easily and made a small gesture with his arm, a kind of salute, to the weary city blocks around him. The gesture and the smile suggested a comfort with himself and his place in the world. He opened the back door of a ten-year-old Buick, with at least one dent for each year of age.

  As Ambler climbed into the cab, Wright touched his arm. “I’m thinking the Lord helped you track me dow
n. I thought I might one day clear my father’s name.”

  * * *

  Denise Cosgrove had called Ambler the night before and asked him to meet her after school. She went to Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side, not far from Johnny’s school. He’d be up there anyway to meet Johnny, so he said okay.

  He met her at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, not far from the school. She wore jeans and a North Face jacket. Her face was flushed from the cold; too much mascara and eyeliner masked her cuteness and made her look tawdry. Yet, she was surprisingly cheerful as she wrestled off her overstuffed backpack and threw it ahead of her into the booth opposite him.

  “I’m so so sorry about what happened, Mr. Ambler. It was so stupid. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Johnny.” She spoke a mile a minute. “I really really wouldn’t. It was all sooo—I don’t know what … Oh never mind!”

  “Are you hungry?”

  She frowned. “I don’t have any—”

  “I’ll give you an advance on your next pay—”

  Her face brightened. Everything about her was so close to the surface. “I’m not fired?!” It was a statement and a question.

  “You made a mistake. You’ve been so good—Johnny would never forgive me.”

  Her squeal interrupted him. She bumped and stumbled out of her side of the booth and clumsily dove into the booth on his side to wrap her arms around his neck and bop her head against his, an action he guessed was meant to be a hug. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I was so afraid.… I’d miss Johnny so much.” She settled back into her seat. The waitress came by to refill his coffee and Denise ordered a hamburger and French fries.

  “Your mom might not be okay with—”

  “I know. She’s having a cow. She’s such a fucking—” Her face froze; her hand went to her mouth.