Murder in the Manuscript Room

by Con Lehane

  Chapter 27

  Ambler was furious with Adele for not letting him come to Brooklyn to get her. She was too stubborn for her own good. He kept himself under control because Denise and Johnny were doing homework right behind him. If he’d been alone, he might have started throwing his dishes against the wall. Adele was the only one who could do that to him. So she didn’t want his help. Good. Let her get out of the mess herself. She got herself into it. Enough was enough. She could do whatever the hell she wanted.

  He was surprised the kids couldn’t see him smoldering. He stared out the kitchen window at a blank wall. As angry as he was, he still couldn’t get rid of the feeling he was bound to her in some way. She needed him. Whatever she said or thought at the moment, she needed him. That’s how it was. He punched in her number.

  “Hello?” Her voice was small.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m still here.” He pictured her huddled in a booth, leaning against a wall, her knees up protecting her.

  “I’m coming to get you. Denise is here and can stay with Johnny.”

  Her voice picked up some energy. “It’s okay. A car service cab is on the way.” With a small laugh, she said, “The two Italian guys behind the pizza counter have taken a shine to me. They called the cab and will make sure I get in it.” The laugh died; her voice was small again. “I’m glad you called back. I’m sorry for what I said. I’m scared.” After a long pause, “Can I come there?”

  Though she surprised him, he didn’t miss a beat. “Sure. Johnny will be really happy to see you. Have you eaten?”

  “Pizza. But I haven’t really eaten. I’ll get another one and bring it for you and Johnny and Denise. Pizza from Brooklyn is the best.”

  Johnny had been listening. “Adele’s coming?” He fought back a smile.

  Ambler tousled his hair. “Yep. We need to straighten up.” He turned to Denise. “You’re welcome to stay. For pizza … from Brooklyn.” He’d persuaded Mike to let Denise continue being a nanny for Johnny after school, despite her arrest. So she’d taken to staying late, hiding out from her parents, when she could.

  She laughed. “You sound like my dad. Does it make a difference the pizza comes from Brooklyn?”

  “Adele says it does.”

  Denise laughed again. She stopped and peered into his eyes. “Why are you so happy?”

  He caught himself. “What? I’m the same as I always am.… Do you want to stay for pizza?”

  “No you’re not. You’ve got a silly smile. You’re so happy. You’re happy Adele is coming.” She laughed and kind of danced in place.

  He tried pulling his cloak of adult authority around him. “Of course, it’s nice that she’s coming over. Johnny—”

  “Oh no, you don’t.” Denise laughed like a teasing child. “You’re happy, a special kind of happy, she’s coming over. You like her don’t you?” She scrunched up her face. “I mean like her, don’t you?”

  He tried to brush her away. “Don’t be silly.… Are you staying for pizza or not?”

  She pouted. “I have to take a cab anyway. I might as well.” She laughed again after her short spell of pouting. “I bet you’d rather I wasn’t here, or Johnny either. I bet you wish it was just you and Adele.”

  His face flushed, so he turned from her and walked over to where Johnny sat at the dining room table. “Finish your homework before Adele gets here with the pizza.”

  “I already finished,” Johnny answered in kind.

  When Adele arrived, they heated up the pizza and Adele gave them a toned-down version of her adventure. Johnny and Denise were wide eyed.

  “You jumped out of the car?” Denise gawked at her.

  “The man you visited in prison had you kidnapped?” Johnny said. “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Adele said.

  After they finished the pizza, Ambler walked downstairs and to the corner with Denise. She grumbled about the escort but kissed him on the cheek before getting into the cab. “I bet you and Adele can’t wait until Johnny goes to bed. I saw how you looked at her.” The tinkling sound of her laughter lingered as the cab pulled away.

  When Johnny did finally go to bed, Ambler sat with Adele on his couch.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She nodded, holding her glass of wine with both hands around the bowl. He wanted to put his arm around her but hesitated. They sat in silence. He took sips of his wine now and again. She didn’t.

  “I feel like I was in a dream, that what happened was happening to someone else.”

  “You don’t want to call the police because of your friend Gobi.”

  “He’s your friend, too,” she said sharply.

  “No. He isn’t. I hardly know him.”

  She began to say something but stopped. When she spoke, the challenge was gone. “I’m afraid I don’t know him either.”

  “You should call the police.”

  “I know. I will.” She looked into his eyes. “I can’t believe Gobi sent those men after me. He’s not like that.” She sensed Ambler’s irritation and reached out to touch his arm. “Don’t be angry. Thank you for helping me.”

  There was something fragile about her, fragile in a beautiful way like a delicately carved ivory statuette is fragile. So strong and independent in so many ways, yet so sensitive, maybe more sensitive than anyone he’d ever known, she seemed to him too beautiful for the world, so he was afraid for her. At moments like this, when he ached to touch her, when he could hardly keep his hands off her, he felt he needed to protect her from him, too. He stood and walked away from her.

  She agreed that he should call Mike Cosgrove. Cosgrove, it turned out, was in Manhattan, finishing up preparation for a court case with an investigator from the DA’s office. When Ambler told him what happened to Adele, he said he’d be over.

  She had switched from wine to coffee and was even more subdued by the time Cosgrove arrived. She’d barely begun telling him about the two men accosting her on the street when he interrupted her.

  “He gave you an address?”

  Adele’s eyes widened. She reached for her jacket and began rummaging through the pockets. “He gave me a piece of paper with an address on it. It was four hundred something 74th Street or 79th Street. I recognized it was Bay Ridge. I don’t know what I did with the note he gave me. He could have taken it back when I was knocked out.”

  “You were knocked out?” Ambler shouted. “You didn’t—”

  She held up her hand, once more in control of herself and the situation. She found the note and handed it to Cosgrove.

  He looked at it. “This is too good to be true. You know what that means, right? Give me a couple of minutes.” He headed for the door and made a call from the stairway outside Ambler’s apartment. In a few minutes, he was back, wearing a wry, cynical smile.

  “Well?” Ambler asked.

  “No such address.”

  “Why would they give me the wrong address? They wanted me to go there.”

  “You weren’t going anywhere without them. The note was so you’d drop your guard.”

  “Well, it worked.” Adele sighed.

  Ambler got Cosgrove a beer. Together, they listened to Adele’s story. Cosgrove seemed perplexed as he listened.

  “You’d think they’d be smarter than that,” he said when she finished. “Bad guys do dumb things. Still, these guys would know better than to leave you alone in the backseat of the car. They would’ve known what they gave you would wear off. It’s almost like they wanted you to get away—” He paused, thinking something he didn’t say. “They didn’t come after you when you ran?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  He pressed her for anything else she could remember and soon enough gave up. “We gotta look somewhere,” he said as he was leaving, “might as well be Bay Ridge.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Adele found a letter in her mailbox when she got home from work and called Raymond when she finishe
d reading it.

  “The strangest thing,” she said. “A letter from Gobi.…”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t say anything about the two men who abducted me. I don’t think he knew about it. The letter was mailed before it happened.”

  “Why did he write the letter?”

  She hesitated. “To tell me why he’s hiding—”

  Raymond interrupted. “Why?”

  She didn’t like his tone. It was accusatory, like Mike Cosgrove grilling a suspect. “It’s complicated. He’s returning to his home soon.”

  “Again, why is he hiding?”

  “He doesn’t want to be arrested again. I told him about Leila’s ex-husband. He thinks they’ll accuse him anyway.”

  “We don’t know who killed Leila.”

  She knew he’d say that. He half hoped Gobi was guilty. She wasn’t sure herself anymore. There was something else she should tell Raymond and she held back. She hadn’t been able to think straight since she was snatched off the street, hardly sleeping, nightmares when she did sleep, afraid of everything. In a weird way, she’d been in a waking dream since she met Gobi. “I don’t want to tell you everything that’s in the letter. It’s private.”

  “I didn’t ask you to—”

  It saddened her that she kept things from Raymond, knowing it must hurt his feelings, though she understood he and Gobi were rivals—rivals for her affections … it sounded silly. “I’m going to go,” she said. She clicked off her phone and sat down to read the letter again.

  My Dear Adele,

  Tomorrow, next week, soon, I leave America for home. Already, an exile, I will be an exile from your country, also. To be honest, I have liked America, and many I have met here have been honorable and welcoming and, like you, kind.

  I owe you an explanation. When I was released from prison, I was met by a man I didn’t know but who knew people, Palestinians, I’d known in Syria. He was part of a group—an underground organization in America. Their cause is not Palestine. They are from a sect of Islam that believes in a life and death struggle with the West, with the infidels. They accept martyrdom as part of their religion. They, in their holiest belief, would make me a martyr, too. As you might understand, I do not wish to be a martyr. I have found others who can help me to be in hiding and to leave your country under the cover of darkness.

  You were kind to me. I lived too long among people for whom suffering is so much present that they do not have the room in their hearts for such sympathy as you have shown me. If it is Allah’s will, I shall journey home to live among the people of the desert. Perhaps someday, when I stand in my own country, I will invite you to visit. Until then, my good friend Adele, good-bye.

  He was beyond her help now. Too much about life was sad. You had to forget the suffering. You had to put out of your mind the misery of others to keep on with your own life. She’d been sitting a long time and had to shake herself out of the gloom she was sinking into. If she didn’t take hold of herself, she’d spend the evening staring at the wall, thinking horrible thoughts. She needed to get up and do something.

  Chapter 28

  Johnny’s grandmother was taking him to see The Lion King, so Ambler stayed late at the library and stopped to see McNulty on his way home.

  “A lot of bartenders I knew in the old days were from Bay Ridge,” McNulty said in answer to a question Ambler asked. “Not so many Irish anymore. Arabs. I suppose that’s why you’re interested.”

  “Our friend Mr. Tabrizi may have fallen in with bad company.” Ambler told him what happened with Adele. He hadn’t seen Gobi since he was arrested. If he was still in New York, as well hidden as he thought he might be, there was a good chance the police—who’d infiltrated every Muslim group in the city since September 11—would find him before he had a chance to leave. There was also the matter of the men who’d kidnapped Adele. Ambler wanted to know if Gobi knew who they were.

  McNulty took a moment to glance over his shoulder, as if someone might overhear. “Pop might know someone. He’s friends with a lot of Palestinians since he helped put together the Israeli-Palestinian Brooklynites for Peace, which, as I remember, is based in Bay Ridge.”

  “The what?”

  “Pop’s been involved with this stuff since the Six-Day War.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  McNulty raised his eyebrows. “When do I kid? The Israeli-Palestinian thing is actually doing better lately than in the old days. I’ll talk to Pop.”

  Early the next afternoon, he called and gave Ambler the name of a contact. He was to go that evening to a coffee shop on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, and he was to go alone.

  * * *

  The imam, who approached Ambler when he entered the coffee shop in Bay Ridge that evening, introduced himself as Muhammed. He was stocky, stood barely over five feet tall; he wore a collarless long white shirt that reminded Ambler of a cassock, and loose-fitting cotton pants that looked like pajamas. He gestured to a booth near the front of the shop where he’d been sitting with a glass cup of tea in front of him. His voice was soft and, though he spoke with an accent, his words were clear, his diction precise.

  “Because you are a friend of Kevin McNulty, I extend you every courtesy.”

  Ambler told him about Gobi’s arrest for Leila’s murder and his later release. “I think he’ll be rearrested and charged with murder.”

  “I see. Public opinion, we must assume, weighs heavily against him because he is Muslim and studied Islam at your library.”

  Ambler was surprised that he took offense. “His actions since his release give some validity to the suspicions.”

  “And you seek this man because you believe him innocent or because you want to learn from him if he is innocent…” He raised his eyes from his glass cup to meet Ambler’s gaze, “or guilty?”

  Muhammed had the presence those in authority acquire. Some wear it better than others. He wore it well, a judiciousness in manner that required, if not deference, at least a sense that attention should be paid to what he said, his judgments respected. He carried this aura with an air of humility.

  “I don’t know if Gobi is innocent. I’d like to talk to him before the police get to him again.”

  The imam nodded. “The man you are looking for wasn’t involved in political activity during his time in the United States. He is a student, a scholar. His protectors do not trust that justice will prevail for him in the legal system, so they will keep him from it. He is involved in no illegal activities—”

  “There’s reason to believe he has been.” Ambler told the imam about Adele’s abduction.

  The imam shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “She wouldn’t make this up.”

  “I don’t know everything that happens. I don’t speak for all Arabs, certainly not all Muslims. I don’t say this didn’t happen. The men he was with when first released from jail, I can’t speak for them.”

  “Can you put me in touch with Tabrizi?”

  “Why?”

  “I hope he can tell me something that makes it impossible for him to have killed Leila. I’d like to know also about the men he was with when he was released.”

  * * *

  Mike Cosgrove decided the young man he’d been questioning for a half hour was an innocent. He didn’t know Tabrizi well, nor much about the world around him. He’d lived at home and done what he was told until he’d enrolled in Brooklyn College and moved into this apartment that he’d shared with Tabrizi for six months or so.

  “Look,” Cosgrove said. Exasperation made his voice harsh and his words clipped, so he was scaring the kid. “You’re not in trouble. You’re a citizen. You’re supposed to help the police. If your roommate didn’t do anything wrong, he’s not in trouble either. All I want is to talk to him. He had to have someone here in the States he visited, talked to, an uncle, a cousin, someone.”

  The kid shook his head. “I don’t know of anyone. He kept to himself.”

  “Do y
ou mind showing me his room?”

  The kid stood. “You can look. The lady took his computer and a lot of his papers.”

  Cosgrove froze. “The lady?”

  Color drained from the kid’s face. “She said he sent her—”

  “Relax. Tell me what she looked like, what she said. I told you. You’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong. Take it easy and tell me.” He didn’t really need the description. Adele Morgan was in this thing up to her eyeballs. No wonder someone snatched her off the street if she had Tabrizi’s computer and documents.

  The kid told him about a couple of hookah bars and a coffee shop on Fifth Avenue that Tabrizi would sometimes go to, so he decided to stop by one or two places before he went back to the city to have a talk with Adele.

  He parked on a side street a couple of blocks from the coffee shop and approached it cautiously, keeping close to the building so he could take a look through the storefront window before anyone got a good look at him. The man facing him, sitting at the booth closest to the window, was dressed in what looked like a white cassock and wore a white skull cap, a Muslim cleric of some sort. The back of the man sitting across from him looked familiar. Given that he’d been thinking about Adele, it wasn’t so strange the guy reminded him of Ray Ambler. Ray had a way of being on the same wavelength he was on during an investigation, so it might be.

  He didn’t have a hat to pull down over his eyes. But he could pretty much be upon Ray, if it was him, before he’d be noticed. If it was him, you’d think he’d know to sit facing the street in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Cosgrove was in the door and halfway to the booth when the older man said something. Ray turned and saw him.

  “Hi Mike.” Ambler stood and introduced the man he was with as Muhammed something.

  “I’m looking for Gobi Tabrizi. Either of you know where he is?”

  Muhammed seemed confused and waited for Ray to straighten things out.

  “I’m looking for him, too,” Ray said. “No dice here.”