by Con Lehane
He parked a couple of blocks from his house. Finding parking spots was harder than ever with the snow piled up. It had to melt soon but wasn’t in much of a hurry. He turned off the ignition but stayed in the car and punched in Ostrowski’s number.
“You find something?” Ostrowski asked.
Cosgrove told him about the mullah and asked if he was under surveillance.
“How would I know?”
“I don’t know how you’d know, Ed,” Cosgrove said wearily. “Maybe a little bird told you. If there isn’t a tail on him, maybe you want to put one on. If there is, you want to make sure who’s doing it knows to look for Tabrizi.”
“What did you find out?” There was eagerness in his voice.
Cosgrove told him about Tabrizi’s roommate and his encounter with the mullah in the coffee shop. He left Ray out of the story.
“We talked to the guy. He didn’t tell us that.” Ostrowski sounded aggrieved.
Cosgrove rolled his eyes, though there was no one to see. “It may be nothing. Up to you.”
“Right,” said Ostrowski. “I don’t report to you.”
“Nope. I report to you, and I just did.”
“What about your librarian friends … you keeping tabs on them?”
“You’re keeping tabs on her, Ed.”
“Okay, Mike.” He sounded friendly. Seemed like no matter who we are or what we we’re up to, we have this underlying belief that others, if we explain, will understand and be on our side. Cosgrove, for his part, had no such illusion. But he let Ostrowski end the call thinking himself understood. What the hell did he care?
“Okay, Ed,” he said and disconnected.
For a few moments, he sat in his car and thought about going home. He’d told Ray he’d talk to this cop in Brooklyn, the son of the murdered union leader Ray was interested in. He was tired, yet he was stalling, thinking about heading to Brooklyn. Maybe he felt guilty for putting Adele under surveillance. Or maybe he didn’t want to go home after all.
Life at home had become a standoff. Denise and her mother avoided one another. Denise stayed in her room or went out with her friends. After school, she stayed in Manhattan, working as a nanny for Ray’s grandson. That was the best thing that happened. The responsibility was good for her. She’d taken it on and now was working for Johnny’s grandmother, too. The sad thing was he didn’t see her much anymore either. Hardly ever home and she hid out in her room when she was home. He wasn’t much better, hiding from his wife as best he could, too.
He started the car and headed toward the Interboro Parkway and the bowels of Brooklyn. His father once told him that the priests used to preach from the pulpit that it was a sin to drive on the Interboro Parkway. Whether it was because of the terrible lighting, the death defying hairpin curves with no median divider, or the fact that the builders of the parkway uprooted a number of Catholic graves cutting through cemeteries, his father didn’t say.
He called ahead and arranged to meet Martin Wright at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Eastern Parkway, not far from the precinct. Despite the plainclothes, he recognized him sitting at the counter along the window facing the street. He had two containers of coffee and a couple of donuts in front of him, and slid one of the containers and a doughnut toward Cosgrove as he sat down. Cosgrove took the coffee and picked up a doughnut.
“I haven’t had one of these in years.” Cosgrove examined the doughnut.
“Neither have I,” Wright said.
They laughed. Wright had an easygoing manner, no chip on his shoulder. Still, he had to be a tough guy to work in this godforsaken neighborhood. He never took his eyes off the street even as he joked with Cosgrove
“I remember him,” Wright said when Cosgrove told him about Ambler and why he was there. “He reminded me of that cartoon guy who couldn’t see so well and went bumbling around bumping into things.”
Cosgrove laughed. “He does bumble around. Did he tell you he was a librarian, an expert on detective novels, and because of those detective novels he’s become a kind of amateur crime solver, especially murder?”
“To tell you the truth, the guy took me by surprise, asking about my dad’s murder.” He studied Cosgrove’s face. “You’re a cop. You want to talk to me; I don’t ask why. You here about the same thing?”
“Yes.”
“The other guy, he asked you to talk to me? Maybe I’d tell you something I wouldn’t tell him?”
Cosgrove nodded. “We caught a homicide at the library, maybe a month ago. Not long after that, Ray’s friend—Ray’s the guy you talked to—his friend, the guy in prison for your dad’s murder, was murdered himself. Looks like a prison killing. Ray doesn’t think so, thinks it was a contract killing. He sees a connection to your father’s murder.”
Wright watched the street, once or twice glancing at Cosgrove. He didn’t say anything.
Cosgrove knew his thinking anyway. “So there you go.”
“What’s your take?”
Cosgrove finished his doughnut that now sat like a soggy lump of clay in his stomach. “I told Ray I’d talk to you. Anything’s possible.” Cosgrove searched the other man’s face in profile. You wouldn’t know what he thought from looking at him. If he’d misjudged Wright, it could cause him a lot of trouble. Not that he wasn’t far enough out on a limb already. “Sometimes in the past, Ray put things together that homicide guys, including me, missed. That doesn’t mean I buy what he’s thinking on this. I’m running down a couple of things on the library homicide. I haven’t come across anything to link that one to the prison murder or your father’s murder. The fact is it’s an open case, so I’ll look at anything. I’ll tell him what you tell me.”
Wright was silent, his eyes trained on the street. Cosgrove followed his gaze and saw that it wasn’t without purpose. A streetwise kid, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, was walking in the street next to the parked cars, looking in the driver’s side window as he walked. Wright sensed Cosgrove’s attention. He made a gesture for Cosgrove to stay put and moved swiftly off his seat and through the door and out into the street, collaring the kid before he had a chance to look up.
For a few minutes, Wright and the kid had an animated conversation, the kid holding up his end. You’d think he’d be terrified of a big cop who had barreled down on him and grabbed him by the collar. But the kid wasn’t; his expression stayed sullen; he never once looked at Wright.
When Wright came back in, he and Cosgrove exchanged glances but didn’t talk about what happened. That the kid was black and Wright was black and he was white flashed through Cosgrove’s thoughts. Did Wright see the kid differently than he would, or was a perp a perp? For one thing, he wouldn’t have done what Wright did, stopped the kid before he did what both he and Wright knew he would do. Cosgrove would have watched until the kid broke a window and collared him then if he could. That was a difference. Wright was protective, saving the kid from himself, at least for the moment.
“There’s a couple of things I didn’t tell your friend. He didn’t say it this way, but I got that he thought a CI killed my father and the department covered it up.”
Cosgrove waited. They both knew this was possible. What you did was trust the judgment of the handler. If a handler did that, let a CI walk on something as serious as murder, you believed he had a reason. You weren’t there. You didn’t know, so you take it he did the right thing.
“There’s a register where you log in information about your CI. You know about those?”
Cosgrove nodded.
“A few years ago, I checked. A guy named Higgins—your friend asked about him—had an informant in an investigation about racketeering in the garment trucking industry. Organized crime controlled the trucks and ran the union—until my father got elected president.”
Wright paused. “Want another cup of coffee? This is a kind of long story. It’s long because I don’t know what it means.”
Cosgrove stood. He looked out the window. It was beginning to snow. “Another
coffee’s good. I got it.”
While he waited at the counter for the coffee refills, the snow began to fall heavily and accumulate on the sidewalk, on some of the parked cars, and in the vacant lot across the street. In Queens where he lived, there was open space between the blocks of row houses, you had lawns sometimes, and there were trees, and sometimes shrubs, so the snow falling had some connection to snow falling in fields or barnyards, something peaceful and serene. Here, the snow seemed angry, out to do harm. It would make lives already difficult more difficult—no place to park if you were lucky enough to have a car, longer waits for the bus if it came at all, trouble walking to the store and lugging the stuff home because your wheeled cart wouldn’t work in the snow. The only bright spot was the snow and cold tended to keep the punks off the street and crime down.
“The funny thing,” Martin Wright said when Cosgrove handed him a coffee. “My dad was kind of undercover himself. Some of the truckers belonged to his church and asked him for help. He was a civil rights activist going back to the sixties. He was friends with Martin Luther King.” He paused again to scrutinize Cosgrove’s face. “That’s who I’m named after, Martin Luther King, Jr.
“He got a job as a trucker to help guys from the job—men who came to his church—get rid of the gangsters and clean up the union.” Wright paused. He and Cosgrove watched the snow falling, heavier, no longer drifting down but driven, like rain or sleet.
“They worked on it for years. Then, a state senator Dad knew from the civil rights days held hearings. The government came in to oversee the election for the union leadership. Dad won.” Wright discovered this history from newspaper accounts, most of it from African American and labor publications and obscure left-wing publications he found. “My dad was a hero to the left—to the Commies. Nothing associating him with drugs came up until he was murdered.”
Cosgrove took a moment before he spoke. “So you have a take on this, too.”
Wright stood and reached for his coat. “I’m telling you how it was. He fought the gangsters. They could have had him killed. They took over the union again after his death. I don’t believe my father had anything to do with drugs. I have questions.”
“No one knows anything about the undercover operation?”
“No one I’ve talked to. The CI signed a form. It’s in the file with the guy’s photo and a background report. What should be there are reports from the CI and reports on him the handler filed. None of that is there.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. The union went to hell after my dad was murdered. The guy who took over got caught taking bribes from the trucking companies. The left-wing papers called my dad’s death an assassination. They said he discovered the government infiltrated the truckers union all over the country and was going to expose them, so they stopped him.”
“You believe that?”
Wright shrugged. “Those stories I read didn’t have anything to back them up, just the charges. I don’t believe what they wrote or not believe it. I know my dad never had anything to do with selling drugs.”
“One more thing,” Cosgrove said as he dropped Wright off at the precinct. “Ray said some foundation paid for your college. Not something set up by the union, it was a police foundation?”
Wright nodded. “Tell your friend I’ll talk to him.”
“Maybe the three of us will have a beer.”
Wright waved, sunk into his trench coat and headed toward the precinct door, not before scanning the street and sidewalks around him.
Cosgrove headed toward the Interboro—now the Jackie Robinson Parkway; he kept forgetting. Snow fell all across Brooklyn and Queens. The traffic crawled.
Chapter 32
Ambler was groggy from lack of sleep when Cosgrove called first thing in the morning. Despite his epiphany about why Higgins wanted to look through the files, he’d stayed at the library long past midnight. What held his interest was a report of hearings a state senator held on organized crime in garment industry trucking. It was likely the exposure of the mob in those hearings led to the government-run union election in which Wright was elected president of the local.
From what Ambler could gather, the loss of control of the union when Wright became president was a temporary setback for the mob. They continued to control the trucking companies and were back in power in the union soon after Wright’s murder. That the mob might have killed Wright to regain power was a grim possibility. Not long ago, Ambler read that a couple of garbage haulers who’d cooperated with an anticrime task force on Long Island were found murdered for doing their civic duty.
After Mike told him about his conversation with Richard Wright’s son in Brownsville, Ambler felt Operation Red Light, the investigation Higgins was told to expunge from his files, was key to understanding Wright’s murder.
Cosgrove wasn’t so sure. “Let’s say you’re right. Something blew up in the investigation. A CI about to be exposed panicked and killed Richard Wright. His handler, say it was Paul Higgins, protected him. They needed the CI for another investigation, or exposing him would put an officer in danger; any number of reasons the handler might protect his informant. It’s not in the rule book, but it happens. That’s number one.
“Number two, hanging the Richard Wright murder rap on Higgins, making him complicit for what his CI did, doesn’t put him in the library killing his ex-wife. Show me something her murder has to do with the Wright killing in 1983, or with your friend killed in prison. Higgins wanted to kill his ex-wife, he could do it anywhere, why the library?”
Ambler, who’d managed to make a cup of coffee while they talked, sipped it and began to wake up. “That’s the point. Why the library? Leila was killed in the library because it couldn’t be anywhere else. It could only be the library. Why?”
He could picture Cosgrove’s irritated grimace. “Something was in the library.”
“Something was in Paul Higgins’s file. It’s not there anymore.”
“Maybe. You don’t know.”
“You’re right; I don’t … yet.” He told Cosgrove that McNulty found Higgins in Queens and Higgins wanted to see his files. “The restricted ones. He’ll know what’s missing.”
Cosgrove didn’t ask where Higgins was or anything about him. “That doesn’t mean you’ll know.”
“Higgins is in this up to his neck but I can’t prove anything.”
Cosgrove hesitated. “Higgins’s CI’s photo is in the CI log that Martin Wright found.”
“I bet I know who it is.”
Cosgrove didn’t say anything.
“If it’s not Trey Thomas, I’ll buy you dinner.”
* * *
When he finished talking with Cosgrove, Ambler went to the library to meet Paul Higgins. He found him in the Astor Hall lobby inside the Fifth Avenue door.
“The file boxes are in the stacks. I can’t bring you down there. You’ll have to tell me what you want, and I’ll bring them to you in the crime fiction reading room.”
“I told you, the ones that were sealed.”
“The boxes are taped shut as evidence. It would be better if I brought you file folders rather than the boxes with police evidence tapes.”
Higgins took a step back. His expression hardened. “Evidence of what?”
Ambler raised his eyebrows. “You’d know better than I would. Why are you hiding?”
“Who says I’m hiding?”
On the way up the stairs to the crime fiction reading room, Ambler said, “The police impounded your files because they’d been broken into. As far as I know, no one from the police looked at them.”
Higgins seemed distracted, more concerned about who was around him than what Ambler said. Once they were in the crime fiction reading room and the door closed, he seemed to relax, not before he’d examined every nook and cranny and corner of the room. “No cameras?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ambler said. “I never thought to look.”
Higgins sat down behind Ambl
er’s desk. “The files are in order by date. I need everything from the spring of 1981 through all of 1983. It won’t be that much. Then, I need to be left alone to look at them.”
“Maybe if you told me what you were looking for, you wouldn’t have to—”
Higgins picked up a catalog that was lying on Ambler’s desk, leaned back in the chair and put his feet up on the desk. “I didn’t come here to chat, Mr. Librarian. Suppose you get those files for me and then disappear for a couple of hours.”
“This is my office.”
Higgins put down the catalog and looked Ambler in the eye. His gaze was both penetrating and vaguely threatening. “I know you’re a curious guy and you think you’re going to find out who killed Susan. I’m fine with you thinking you can do that and not get yourself killed in the process. For myself, I have something to take care of that you don’t know about and that I’m not going to tell you about. Please get me the files.” He turned his attention back to the catalog.
When Ambler returned with an arm load of accordion file folders, he said, “I imagine the files you’re looking for are those from Operation Red Light.”
Higgins removed his feet from the desk and got his legs under him. Something like a curtain came down over his eyes as he examined Ambler’s face with a kind of shrewdness through the slits his lowered eyelids created. He folded his hands in front of his chin. “Did it ever occur to you that not knowing isn’t the worst thing, that knowing too much sometimes is?”
“Is that a threat?”
“Do you think I killed Susan?”
“She was afraid of you; terrified when you discovered her here in the library the day we first met.”
“Someone told you that. She didn’t. She wasn’t afraid of me. She—”
“You told me you didn’t know Devon Thomas—”
“I didn’t.”
“You knew his brother Trey.”
Higgins dropped his gaze.
“What if I ask about Operation Red Light?”
Higgins had a lot of confidence. You might say he was cocky in a way Ambler didn’t expect. “You could ask. I wouldn’t answer. I wanted my files sealed for a reason.”
