by Con Lehane
“Everything okay? Adele said you’d be out doing errands. You should have had lunch with us.”
“I was delayed. I’m off to do them now.’ She looked at him curiously. “That’s nice of you to think about me for lunch.” Her smile surprised him.
He hoped she’d bring up her troubles with her ex-husband. But she didn’t, and his sense of decorum didn’t allow him to mention something so private. As he watched her walk away, he wondered what it would take to figure her out.
* * *
When Ambler came back from the microform reading room on the first floor late that afternoon, he found Gobi Tabrizi waiting for him.
“In the restaurant, I thought you were about to say something about Miss Stone.”
“Miss Stone? Leila?”
“Yes.”
“Adele knows Leila better than I do.”
“Miss Morgan told me something about you, that you…” He searched for the right words, “that you are an advocate for freedom of speech.”
They walked into the crime fiction reading room together. “Librarians are free speech advocates. It goes with the job. It’s what we do.” He gestured at the walls of books surrounding them.
Gobi bowed, a kind of acknowledgment and mark of respect. “Miss Morgan said when you were a college student you created an exposé of spying on the part of your government.” He waited for confirmation.
“She exaggerates. Do you think you’re being spied on by my government?”
Tabrizi looked at the chair in front of the desk and then sat down. He chose his words carefully. He didn’t have to be so careful but he didn’t know that. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“I don’t know if you’re being spied on.”
“But you think perhaps. You suspect—”
“Suspicion isn’t enough.”
Irritation flushed Tabrizi’s face, darkened his eyes. “I believe you understand more than you let on. You have your reasons for—”
“Mistrusting Leila?… We’d like to think, in the library, we practice what we preach. If I knew someone interfered with your research, I’d do something about it.”
“And you think?”
“I don’t know.” Ambler said.
Tabrizi stood. “Mr. Ambler—”
“Call me Ray.”
“Mr. Ambler, I try to understand you are reluctant to accuse your coworker. Yet one is responsible to act when one knows something is wrong, even when it requires courage. You are in the unfortunate position of seeing a wrong others don’t see.”
Their eyes met. Some understanding passed between them. What Ambler saw in the other man’s eyes was not so much an accusation, though it felt like one, but a requirement, not an entreaty, but a demand, like he might sometimes see in the eyes of a panhandler when he accidentally made eye contact on the street and quickly looked away.
Chapter 8
“What’s going on?” Ambler stopped alongside Benny Barone, one of the younger librarians he’d become friends with, who waited with a cluster of other library employees near the 42nd Street entrance. NYPD police cruisers lined the curb. Others, lights flashing, were strung out along the curb on Fifth Avenue. Because it was Saturday, the normal workday crowds weren’t rushing along the sidewalks. Instead, clumps of tourists had gathered, gawking and talking. Since most of them were foreign tourists, it sounded like the Tower of Babel.
Benny grabbed his arm. “The police are inside with dogs. Maybe they’re searching for a bomb.”
“They’re cadaver dogs.”
Ambler turned to see who’d spoken. A young man with long brown hair sticking out from under a watch cap and a wispy goatee, dressed more for the Alps than 42nd Street, smiled, an open, friendly expression you don’t often see on the sidewalks of New York.
“I remember dogs like them from Iraq. One’s a black lab.” He smiled again. “They’re looking for bodies.” His smile evaporated into a sad, troubled expression. “Gotta go.” He heaved his backpack higher on his shoulder and headed toward the subway entrance.
Not long afterward, someone unlocked the door to the library, bracing it so it remained open. Police came out, a few at a time, including two uniformed cops with dogs on leashes, one a German shepherd, the other a black lab. Slowly, one by one, the flashing lights died out and cruisers slid into the morning traffic, some making U-turns with chirping sirens on 42nd Street. Conspicuous among the remaining police presence was the bulky white NYPD crime scene van—and conspicuous among the remaining officers of the law, wearing a blue NYPD windbreaker, was Mike Cosgrove.
He did a double take on Ambler and Benny and walked over. “What’re you two doing here?”
“We work here. You don’t … or at least we hope you don’t.” Ambler said.
“Someone called 911, said we’d find a body in the 42nd Street Library, didn’t say where, how long it’d been there, who it was. It’s a big building, lots of places to hide a body.” Cosgrove darted a significant glance at Ambler. “We found her stuffed into a book shelf in your office.”
Ambler wasn’t sure if this was a joke. Cosgrove’s expression didn’t change. But then it wouldn’t.
“The crime fiction reading room? A body? It wasn’t there—” Of course it wasn’t there when he left. What the hell was he thinking?
“A body among the murder mystery books. What do you think of that?” Cosgrove’s expression was doleful. “You’d think I’d run into you two in a murder case maybe once in a lifetime and that only if I had bad karma.”
“Who’s the victim?”
He put his hands into the pockets on either side of his trench coat, pulling out a notebook from his left side. “You’d know her as Leila Stone.”
“Leila? Dead?…” It took a moment for this to sink in. And then something else. “What do you mean we’d know her as?”
Cosgrove’s face was gray, bags under his eyes. He seemed to sag under the weight of his trench coat. “Leila Stone. She’s dead. How well did you know her?”
“Not so well.”
“Well enough for her body to be in your office.”
“I have no idea why.”
The detective turned to face the door. A tall thin man in an expensive-looking black overcoat came out. He was talking to a higher-up uniformed officer, gold shield on his hat, while he held a cell phone down from his ear. Before the uniform finished speaking, he put the phone back to his ear.
The man in uniform gestured to Cosgrove, so he walked over to the two men, who took turns talking at him. Cosgrove listened, shoulders hunched. After a bit, he grew animated, his arms stretched out above his shoulders, a stance of exasperation you might have when your dog broke loose from its leash and ran down the street. He turned from the two men, coming back toward Ambler, his jaw jutted out, eyes blazing. Ambler thought better of stopping him as he walked past.
The morning was mild so most of the library staff milled around Bryant Park drinking coffee while they waited for the doors to open. Readers and tourists congregated on the steps of the Fifth Avenue entrance. When the library did open, Ambler couldn’t get to his office because the crime scene technicians had it taped off. He went to look for Adele in the Manuscripts and Archives reading room and found it closed off also. Looking through the small window in the door, he saw Gobi Tabrizi sitting at a table ringed by three men, two of them bulky, in ill-fitting sports jackets, detectives straight from central casting; the third was the same tall, thin man he seen talking to one of Cosgrove’s bosses when the police came out of the library. He’d taken off his expensive overcoat and wore what looked like a custom-tailored suit. Because he seemed out of place, Ambler wondered who he was.
* * *
Mike Cosgrove stood in ornate Astor Hall near the library’s main entrance, not knowing what to do next. Once again there’d been a murder in the library that had something to do with Ray Ambler. Ray said he didn’t know the victim very well—the same thing, if he remembered right, Ray said about the last
murder victim, and look how that turned out. He wouldn’t put Ray on his list of suspects—if he ever got a chance to make such a list—yet his pal had to know more about this than he’d said so far if the body was dumped in his office.
From the beginning, he knew this case was different. First, the brass show up and then intelligence, and right behind intelligence, Brad Campbell Security, in the person of Brad Campbell himself. Already, they were making decisions, keeping their own counsel, stepping all over his case—if it was his case. For them, Ray was a suspect since the victim’s body was in his office.
They already knew he and Ray were friends, so he’d have to explain that. Then he’d be hard-pressed to explain why he sometimes talked things over with Ray during a homicide investigation. How long had he known Ray? Ten years maybe. How many cases had Ray stuck his nose in? A half dozen, probably more. Since that first one, where Ray saw something was wrong from a photo he saw in a newspaper, they’d sometimes locked horns but often saw the same things in a case, things no one else saw. He liked to think he’d led Ray into becoming something of an amateur detective, while Ray introduced him to the wide world of crime fiction.
Usually, when there’s a murder, the uniforms seal the scene to keep it from getting contaminated. They identify witnesses, note any peculiarities. They call CSI. They call homicide. Everyone knows what to do. No one gets in anyone else’s way. This one should have been fairly easy, at least orderly, with a kind of closed society of suspects in the library. So what happens is he’s told not to do anything. Hang tight. They’ll let him know when to get started. Sure, take some time to contaminate the scene and let the witnesses scatter and the trail grow cold; then, he can get started.
He could go get a cup of coffee, go back to the precinct and catch up on paper work, let this one go and catch the next one. Or he could hang around, see what develops. He decided to stop by Ray’s office, despite the headache it might cause him later.
“I swear to God.” He closed the door behind him. “It’s not like I haven’t investigated a couple of hundred murders in my time. They’ve turned this fucking department into a funny farm. You don’t know who’s running things.”
Ray looked up from his computer. Cosgrove caught himself; he was talking to a civilian. He looked at the chair Ray gestured toward. “I don’t want to sit,” he said, shoving the chair sideways and then sitting in it. “A homicide investigation should be run by homicide. You’d think that wouldn’t you?” He glared at Ambler.
Ambler shrugged.
“This department—”
“I saw your comrades in arms talking to a reader in Manuscripts and Archives. What’s that about?”
Cosgrove shook his head. “Can’t tell you.” Actually, he couldn’t tell him. He didn’t know.
“Who are they?”
Cosgrove rolled his eyes, spread his arms, turned his hands palms up. “I’m not in charge.” He stood, shoving the chair he’d been sitting in backward. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Maybe you can tell me something. Who’s the guy they’re questioning?”
“A reader, he’s doing research in our Islamic manuscripts collection.”
“That might explain it.”
“Explain what?”
“Why the Intelligence Division jumped all over this. Why I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass instead of investigating a homicide.”
* * *
The afternoon felt even stranger after Cosgrove left. Ambler couldn’t shake the creepy feeling someone was watching him, as if Leila’s body—or her ghost—haunted the reading room. It was guilt. He hadn’t given her a chance, didn’t get to know her, judged her harshly and too soon. He should have done better by her. Now she was dead. He remembered her smile of the day before when he asked her about lunch. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. It was he didn’t trust her. That didn’t mean he wished her dead. Her death wasn’t his fault. He didn’t have anything to do with it. So why was her body in his reading room? Deep in thought, he didn’t hear Adele come in, so he jumped when she spoke to him.
“Why didn’t you call?” Her voice was strained, cracked, her eyes red, cheeks tear-stained. He came around the desk and stood close to her. She came into his arms and pressed her face to his chest. Her sobbing was rhythmic against him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“How horrible to die like that. The terror of knowing it was coming had to be even worse. It’s my fault—” She pushed herself back from him, lifted her face, red and blotched.
“It’s not your fault. How could it be?”
“I didn’t call the police. I should have called.”
He brushed at her hair. The action seemed to bother rather than comfort her, so he pulled his hand back. “It might not be what you think. She probably had a restraining order against her ex-husband anyway. Have you spoken to the police?”
“I tried. A uniformed officer wrote down my name and said they’d contact me. I told him I wanted to talk to Mike Cosgrove. The guy nodded and said they’d get back to me. They wouldn’t let me into the reading room where a bunch of them ganged up on poor Gobi. They were hollering at him; I heard them. Browbeating him! I’m surprised they didn’t shoot him. I’m sure they think he’s a terrorist.”
* * *
Later, after the library closed, as Ambler waited at the Library Tavern for Adele, he told McNulty about the murder.
“The library is cursed.”
“You don’t believe in curses. You’re a Communist.”
“I’m half Irish. My mother. That half believes in curses.”
“What would make the library cursed? Who would curse it?”
“The ghosts from those murderous happenings a couple of years ago. And now, the ghost of the poor girl found in your office.”
“On a bookshelf.”
“There you go.”
“Her murder doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
McNulty’s response, if there was to be one, was interrupted by the arrival of Adele, with Gobi Tabrizi in tow.
“So good to see you.” Tabrizi shook Ambler’s hand vigorously, his expression an unguarded entreaty. “Ginger ale, please,” he told McNulty. The bartender nodded, his face registering his concern. You could see he thought the man needed a drink.
Ambler hesitated to bring up the police interrogation. He didn’t have to. Tabrizi opened the spigot and out poured the story.
“They took my research materials. They questioned me about everything I did in the United States, going back to the day I arrived. Every place I’ve visited. Every person I know. They told me not to leave the city.”
“You need a lawyer,” Ambler said.
“He hasn’t done anything,” Adele said. “As soon as the idiot police come to their senses, they’ll realize Leila’s ex-husband killed her.”
With Adele grieving for her friend and Tabrizi a nervous wreck, the conversation was disjointed.
“In Syria,” Tabrizi said, “the police would come and your friends would disappear. Just like that. A car pulls up. Assad’s police grab your friend, put him in the car.” He paused. “Once you’ve seen friends disappear, you believe it can happen any minute to you, too.” He looked helplessly at Ambler. “But not here.”
McNulty had a lawyer friend who came from similar a subversive background to McNulty’s and was known for his work on politically charged civil liberties cases. Given that Tabrizi was under suspicion and a Muslim, Ambler asked McNulty if he would call him.
Instead, McNulty gave Gobi the phone number and told him to tell the lawyer he was sent by McNulty.
* * *
Ambler walked Adele home that evening after Gobi left them. He didn’t have much to say to her but thought she shouldn’t be alone. As they walked, she talked about Leila but didn’t seem to require that he do anything other than listen.
“She had a difficult life,” Adele said. “She didn’t talk ab
out herself, but you could see she wanted to. She had this expression in her eyes, a kind of yearning, as if she were missing something in her life and had given up on finding it, except every now and then a glimmer of hope got through. She told me she’d thought since she was a little girl she’d be a mother, not to one child but be the mother to a bunch of kids like the pioneer families. That life never happened for her. She was young enough to hope it might still, if her life hadn’t been snuffed out like that.”
Adele’s capacity for sympathy was large. Yet, she might be talking about herself, her own dashed dreams. Maybe she, too, dreamed of a large brood of kids. Adele would be a wonderful mother. She was already to Johnny. Dashed dreams were in some way the lot of almost everyone, dreams for yourself, dreams for your children.
“Leila must have a family,” he said. “I suppose the police can find her relatives. Where was she from?”
“Texas, she told me, but I don’t know where. She didn’t talk about her family, only her goddamn ex-husband who killed her.”
The ex-husband was a good possibility, but it wasn’t for certain. Not a good idea to tell this to Adele in the state she was in. Rational thought only took you so far. You needed to be irrational sometimes to handle what life threw at you.
“I wish Mike would call me back,” he said.
As if wishes came true, his phone rang. But it wasn’t Mike; it was Johnny calling from his grandmother’s.
“What happened at the library?” The boy’s voice was strained and accusatory. “Someone was killed at the library. Weren’t they? Who got murdered?… Where’s Adele?” His voice shook.
“A woman who worked at the library was killed, Johnny. Adele’s fine. She’s right here with me.” He should have called the boy and told him. He should have known a murder that close would bring back terrible memories of what happened to his mother. He could hear Johnny’s rapid and uneven breathing over the phone. He was between tears and panic. His grandmother would be no help. Empathy and caring weren’t her strong points. Her emotional connection to Johnny was like what one would have with a goldfish.