Murder in the Manuscript Room

by Con Lehane

  He almost laughed. She’d gotten on a roll and forgotten she was talking to a grown-up. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

  She offered him a sheepish shrug. “I’ll let my dad tell her. She thinks I’m an international drug czar.” She lowered her gaze for a moment and then looked up. The seriousness of everything etched into her face. “I’m in big trouble, though. I could get kicked out of school. I could…”

  “No running away this time, right? If things get too bad at home, you’ll let me know first.” She didn’t answer, so he waited. When she still didn’t answer, he reached across the table and lifted her chin. “We have a pact.”

  Her eyes were pools of sadness. “What if they send me … to reform school?” Her eyes reddened and her lip trembled. She was trying not to cry, so Ambler looked away.

  “We’re not going to let anyone send you away.” He felt a piercing flash of sadness as he pictured his son’s last agonized glance as he was led out of the courtroom to prison.

  * * *

  Johnny was subdued as they walked from his school to the subway. He might have been angry because Ambler was late, but usually he didn’t mind. Asking him what was bothering him wouldn’t do any good; he’d have to wait until the boy got around to telling him. This didn’t take so long.

  “A man came to grandma’s apartment yesterday and asked me a lot of questions.”

  Ambler stopped, so Johnny stopped, too. “What kind of questions?”

  “About what I did when I stayed with you, about Adele and Denise.”

  “Did he seem okay with your answers?” Ambler tried to keep his tone casual.

  “I didn’t tell him anything bad. I said everything was fine. He asked if you left me alone a lot and how often I was with Denise or Adele and not with you.”

  “It’s okay. Did your grandmother say anything?”

  “She gave me a booklet about a boarding school upstate. She said it would be fun going to school in the country. There’d be a lot to do. Football and baseball and horses and stuff.” He said this matter-of-factly, but Ambler could hear the worry behind the words and see it in his eyes.

  He put his arm around his grandson and began walking again. “She can’t send you to a boarding school unless I agree.”

  “You won’t let her, will you?” Johnny stopped and looked up at him, his eyes full of entreaty. “I’m not a lot of trouble, am I?”

  Ambler tousled the boy’s hair. He’d no more send him away than cut off his arm. “I’ll keep you around if you behave.”

  “I behave.” Johnny’s expression was earnest.

  While they waited for the subway, Johnny asked if they would see Adele.

  Things hadn’t gone so well the last time he spoke with her, so he hesitated. Yet he wanted to see her, too, so he called.

  * * *

  When she answered the call, there was an awkward silence as if she hadn’t expected to hear from him and didn’t know how to react. He felt a moment of embarrassment, his cheeks burning.

  She recovered quickly. “How nice.” There was ripple of laughter in her voice, and that lilting tone that was cute and flirtatious. She gave him a list of things to pick up at the corner market on Ninth Avenue and said she’d make dinner.

  Poking around in the store, grabbing this and that, with Johnny at his heels asking for chips and cookies and a candy bar, talking veal cutlets with the butcher, gathering the bags of groceries, and walking out of the warmly lit store into the bracing chill and darkness of the winter evening brought back memories of going to the neighborhood grocery store with his father. A feeling of tenderness came over him, for Johnny and for Adele and the rightness of the simplicity and domesticity of what they were doing, gathering up provisions and going home to have dinner, the three of them.

  Adele waited in the doorway as he and Johnny walked from the elevator. She searched his face with an expression he didn’t recognize. She bent down to hug Johnny, who was excited to see her but anxious to get to her TV. When she straightened, she and Ambler looked into one another’s eyes for a moment before she came forward and leaned against him while he tried as best he could to put his arms around her while hanging on to the grocery bags.

  In a moment, she pushed herself loose and took the bags, putting them on the counter and pulling things out. She gave Ambler an apron and put him to work peeling and chopping butternut squash, apples, and sweet potatoes. That task done, she gave him a metal hammer to pound the veal into thin strips. They didn’t speak during most of the preparations. For his part, Ambler didn’t know whether to go back to where they’d left off, which felt awkward, or talk about mundane, everyday things about work, which felt forced. Adele seemed content with the silence, so he kept quiet until she spoke.

  “I’ve been by myself too much. I’m glad you’re here.” She broke an egg into a small, flat, metal pan, poured flour from a canister into another pan, and bread crumbs into a third. “Has anyone found Paul Higgins?”

  Ambler said no and told her about Martin Wright and Devon’s sister.

  She stopped what she was doing and stood still in front of the counter. He sensed she was thinking about what he told her, wondering what it had to do with Leila’s murder. If she asked, he wouldn’t be able to tell her.

  She went back to breading the cutlets. “Is Mike Cosgrove looking for him—for Paul Higgins? Has he given up on Gobi as a suspect?” She turned to face him, holding out her hands caked with bread crumbs.

  “He may have. The Intelligence Division hasn’t.”

  They ate dinner at the small table he’d sat at many times before. Johnny told them about a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. “We walked there lined up by twos like a bunch of dorks. Next thing, they’ll have us holding hands like nursery school kids.”

  “Did you like the museum?”

  “Most of it was lame, skeletons of dinosaurs and then skeletons of other old-time animals. Some of them were millions of years old. I guess that’s pretty cool. But I don’t know what we’re s’posed to get from it.” He glanced at each of them. “Me and some other guys got out front before they could line us up, so we walked back by ourselves. Mr. Gottfried was really pissed.”

  “He should be,” Ambler said. “Boys your age shouldn’t be on the streets by themselves.”

  Johnny rolled his eyes, the gesture reminding Ambler he was talking to a kid Adele found roaming the streets late at night when he was younger than he was now.

  “What was that all about?” Adele asked Ambler after Johnny told her about the man who’d questioned him at his grandmother’s and was back watching TV. They’d begun cleaning up in the kitchen. “Don’t you go back to family court with Johnny soon?”

  “Tomorrow morning. I suspect the man questioning Johnny was part of her plan to prove I don’t provide a wholesome environment for a kid to grow up in. She wants primary custody. The man questioning Johnny, I’d bet, was a private investigator.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re doing a wonderful job with him—and you love him. He goes to a great school. I don’t know what she could be thinking.”

  “I’m not rich. She pays for the school.”

  “Rich isn’t everything. It’s not the most important thing.”

  “He’d like it if he saw more of you. We both would.”

  Adele stopped as she wrapped a plate of leftovers for him to take home. “I’m busy, Raymond. I’m behind at work. I don’t have as much time as I used to.” She didn’t mention Gobi. But he might as well be sitting on the table in front of them. She came closer. “Johnny’s your responsibility, legally and in every way, not mine, so it’s hard for me sometimes.” Her voice wavered. “At one time, you led me to believe—” She abruptly turned from him and went to the small living room to sit with Johnny for a few minutes before he left.

  * * *

  The Manhattan Family Court is on Lafayette Street, a few blocks below Canal Street and a few blocks above City Hall, a modern-looking building that embod
ied an architectural style known as Brutalism, which seemed appropriate.

  The court provided Johnny with his own attorney, a blunt-speaking, unfriendly, elderly woman who didn’t seem to like either Johnny or him. Ambler liked his earnest, young attorney. She was proper and respectful to him and everyone else—sneaky smart, as McNulty would say, easy to underestimate because of her seriousness, her relative inexperience, and an expression of wonder she wore when someone else was speaking or some procedure took place, as if she’d never seen such a thing before. It was she who told Ambler they were in trouble.

  “What do we do?”

  “We ask the judge for some time so we can paint a picture of you that’s a 180 degrees different from the one the private investigators presented to the court.”

  The picture provided by the private investigators from Campbell Security was one of neglect: a photo of the boy wearing wet sneakers walking in a half foot of snow, another of him sitting in a booth in a bar on a school night with a gigantic ice-cream concoction in front of him, Johnny and two of his friends on the street by themselves during the school day one afternoon, Johnny standing with his babysitter while she and a group of teenagers smoked pot in a pocket park near Tudor City. The judge knew about Johnny’s life before he came into Ambler’s world, but she didn’t mention it. Ambler didn’t bring it up because he didn’t want to say anything negative about Johnny’s mother. Whatever she’d done or not done, she was the boy’s mother and she was dead. Johnny would someday need to sort through his memories of her and determine what she was to him. For now, Ambler wouldn’t speak badly of her.

  “You’ll need character witnesses,” the young lawyer said. “A minister?” She raised her gaze from her the papers on the table in front of her.

  “Nope.”

  “Priest? Rabbi?”

  He shook his head.

  She regarded him with some sympathy and more disapproval.

  “My supervisor at the library is an ex-priest.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know if that helps or hurts.”

  “A friend who’s a police detective?”

  She brightened. “A high-ranking officer?”

  “Not so high ranking, he’s a sergeant.”

  “Someone with standing in the community?”

  “I don’t suppose a bartender would do?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He thought of McNulty’s friend, David Levinson. “A lawyer? An attorney?”

  She brightened. “Maybe. Who?”

  “His name is David Levinson. He’s—”

  “Oh, dear … Not the radical David Levinson?”

  Ambler smiled wanly.

  “The judges hate him.”

  Ambler had a thought, not something he was ready to talk about, so he told the attorney he’d come up with a character witness. His thought was Johnny’s grandmother Lisa Young. The opening of A Century-and-a-Half of Murder and Mystery in New York City was that night. Some of the library trustees would be there, including her.

  She was his adversary, yet he hadn’t seen her or talked to her since the custody battle began. Everything on her side was done by her attorneys. Long before, when he first met her, before her daughter’s death or either of them knew they had a grandchild, they’d seemed to have a kind of sympathy for each other. Perhaps if he spoke to her tonight.…

  Chapter 24

  “What you can do,” Ostrowski said, “is work with us. Brad says you do a good job. Tell the truth, I’m surprised he’d want you along.”

  Cosgrove was driving Ed Ostrowski from Queens where they both lived to Brad Campbell’s office in lower Manhattan. He’d been summoned to a strategy meeting now that he was back on the reservation and told to pick up Ostrowski in Rego Park.

  “You’re looking for the Arab? You ready to book him?”

  “Why’d he disappear?”

  “You would, too, if you were being railroaded.”

  Ostrowski glowered at him from the passenger seat, holding his hard stare as minutes ticked away. “I don’t know what’s with you, Cosgrove. This ain’t cops and robbers. These Muslim guys don’t play by no rules.”

  Cosgrove kept his eyes on the road.

  “You weren’t in combat, were you? Didn’t see your buddies killed when they stopped to talk to a kid. Shot by the kid’s old man hiding a gun behind the kid. That’s how these gooks fight. You a fucking Boy Scout … you wanna fight fair? Who believes that shit?”

  Cosgrove reached down and turned on the radio. He had his own memories of the war, not something he wanted to talk to Ostrowski about.

  * * *

  The few people at the meeting in Campbell’s office—Campbell, Ostrowski, and two men Cosgrove didn’t know—shared the assumption of Gobi Tabrizi’s guilt. Cosgrove thought about questioning it. Then again, what was the point?

  “He never went back to his apartment,” one of the men said. “You’d figure—”

  Campbell interrupted. “No. You don’t figure. You know.” He directed a scornful glance at the man who’d spoken, a well-dressed, dark-haired, swarthy man, who took the rebuke without change of expression. “Someone should have picked him up when he left the corrections center.”

  On Campbell’s desk was a foot-high pile of intelligence reports on Muslim groups in the city. Campbell said one of the groups was protecting Gobi Tabrizi and they had enough intelligence on all of the groups so they’d find him. They knew more about this stuff than he did, Cosgrove would allow. So if they were going to find the guy, why did they need him? He kept his mouth shut and watched and waited until Campbell asked him, “What would you do?”

  Cosgrove glanced around the room. Everyone was better dressed than he was—expensive suits, no mismatched sport coats and slacks, like a meeting of lawyers or bankers, except for him. He met Campbell’s gaze. “I’d make sure I had the right guy.”

  The expression in Campbell’s eyes hardened. “We have the right guy. What do you do when he skips?”

  “You guys didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. Why ask me?”

  Ostrowski tried to drill a hole in Cosgrove’s head with his glare. The other two men watched with mild interest. Campbell’s face was expressionless.

  “You want me to do something, tell me. You clear this with Halloran? Who I don’t see here is anyone from NYPD, homicide or intelligence.”

  “You’re from homicide,” Campbell said mildly. “Two detectives from the Intelligence Division have the case. We’re helping out. They’re in charge. This,” he gestured to include Cosgrove, the two men sitting on the couch, and Ostrowski who sat in a matching armchair to the one Cosgrove sat in, “is to bring you up to speed. They got better things to do.”

  “I ask you again, what do you want from me?”

  “Find the Arab,” said Campbell.

  “What do I do when I find him?”

  “Tell me.”

  Cosgrove shook his head. He knew he’d sold his soul to protect his daughter. “You did me a favor. I’m willing to pay it back. But you gotta ask for something I can do. For twenty years I’ve investigated homicides. I know how to do it. If that’s not what you want, let me go somewhere else.”

  “That’s what we’re asking,” Ostrowski shouted, rising from his chair.

  Campbell held up his hand like a traffic cop. Ostrowski sat back down like an obedient attack dog. “The Arab’s a suspect. I’m asking you to bring in a suspect. You don’t have to know if he’s guilty. Bring him in for questioning.”

  “I don’t bring in suspects to private citizens.”

  “Who were you planning to bring Paul Higgins to?” A slight flicker in Campbell’s eyes told an entire story.

  If he was supposed to be shocked, too bad. “I wanted to ask him about his ex-wife.”

  A flash of annoyance across Campbell’s face gave that round to Cosgrove.

  “This is the deal.” Campbell gave him the names of the intelligence detectives in charge of the case and said he could bring hi
s suspects to them if he preferred. “No more freelancing. You got that. That’s the return on the favor.”

  Cosgrove nodded.

  Chapter 25

  “I think my attorneys advised me not to speak with you,” Lisa Young said when Ambler approached her.

  She’d blended in perfectly with the well-dressed crowd mingling amidst the marble pillars and glass display cases in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall. As openings went, this one was low key. Though the library’s president had stopped by for a few brief words, the brevity and content of his remarks made it clear the man wasn’t much of a mystery fan.

  “I suppose I should ask them.” She laughed. “But I’m not going to. This business about my grandson has never been personal.”

  They spoke cordially for a few minutes, until Ambler told her he wanted to talk about their differences over Johnny outside of court. She didn’t respond right away. He remembered her well enough to know she couldn’t be talked into anything. When she did speak again, she invited him to her apartment. “No time like the present,” she said.

  He didn’t want to go to her apartment. But he could because Denise was at his place with Johnny, and Adele hadn’t come to the reception. He didn’t know why she hadn’t come but it saddened him. The reception was winding down anyway, so reluctantly he agreed to meet Lisa Young at her apartment when he finished at the library.

  The building she lived in on Central Park West was distinguished enough to have a name—The Beresford. It faced the park on one side and the Museum of Natural History on another side. A doorman announced him. An elevator took him to an upper floor landing with two doors. A few seconds after he pushed the doorbell at one of the doors, a maid in a black uniform with a white starched apron ushered him into a lavishly appointed foyer and then led him to a room off the foyer, something between an office and a library with oriental rugs, floral-patterned couches, ornate armchairs, bookcase-lined walls, a library table, and a large dark wood desk.

  He sat stiffly on a tapestry-covered continental armchair and waited. He was about to get up to examine the bookshelves when the door opened and Lisa Young entered. She’d changed clothes and now wore a pale blue pantsuit with a colorful silk scarf around her neck. Whatever she wore, she maintained a well-bred elegance, tall, slender, and graceful. She was attractive, in the way rich women often were, sleek and well-maintained, pleasant to look at rather than glamorous.