Murder in the Manuscript Room

by Con Lehane

  Harry shifted in his seat, his gaze darting about the bar, anywhere but at Ambler. Eventually, he settled down and asked Ambler how he knew Leila was a government plant. Ambler hadn’t known for sure until Harry confirmed it.

  “She was sent to me. The director’s office sent a memo. Someone from HR brought her to my office.”

  “Weren’t you curious?”

  “I was. It was a blessing. We’ve sent a half-a-dozen or more requests to HR to fill positions. With the hiring freezes, you make the requests and forget about them. I thought she might be the niece of someone on the board, or connected to someone in the mayor’s office, or something like that. I wasn’t going to say we couldn’t use her.” He faced Ambler over the lip of his rocks glass. “There you have it, not much of a conspiracy.”

  Ambler told Harry about the restricted files that had been tampered with. “I told Mike Cosgrove. He’ll want to look at them. I’m going to tell him the police need a court order to open the box.”

  Harry examined his scotch. This time McNulty who’d been watching him came over and watched the glass of scotch with him. “It’s going to evaporate before you get to drink it if you don’t pick up the pace.”

  “I’m not much of drinker,” Harry said. He turned to Ambler. “I don’t agree with you on this, Ray. We never actually accepted the files. We don’t have a deed of gift. And we’re talking about national security issues.”

  A direct descendant of Ignatius of Loyola, Harry could turn the simplest idea into a convoluted argument, justifying whatever he agreed or disagreed with.

  “What national security?” said McNulty who’d hung around on his side of the bar to listen.

  “Leila Stone’s murder,” Ambler said.

  McNulty’s eyebrows went up. “I’m surprised they didn’t figure you for that one. Did they know she was keeping Adele away from you?”

  “What’s this?” Harry jerked upright.

  Ambler’s cheeks burned. “Nothing. I tagged Leila as an informant from the beginning. Adele befriended her. It caused some tension.” He turned to the bartender. “Go away, McNulty.”

  The argument went back and forth, until an incensed Harry slugged down the rest of his scotch.

  “Another?” inquired McNulty politely.

  “Yes.” Harry pushed his glass toward the bartender. “Please.”

  Ambler laughed. After a moment, so did Harry. “I feel like St. Augustine,” he said. “The barbarians are at the gates.”

  In the end, Harry agreed to talk to the library’s attorneys about access to Higgins’s files, and Ambler went outside to phone Denise to see how she and Johnny were doing.

  “He told me you said we could order pizza when he finished his homework.”

  “I did. I should be there in an hour. How are things for you at home?”

  “Awful, as usual. Can you adopt me? I’ll be Johnny’s big sister and you won’t have to pay me for babysitting.”

  Poor Denise. She was a good kid. He didn’t know why her parents were so hard on her. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Really?” There was hope in her voice before reality set in. “What I should do is have Johnny’s rich grandmother adopt me.”

  “Hang in there a while longer, sweetie. Things will get better.”

  “That’s what you always say,” this with a pout in her voice. “Oh I forgot. I’m so sorry. I should have told you this first. I’m so dumb. Someone called. I think it was your son but I wasn’t sure what to do, so I didn’t accept the charges. He had to hang up.”

  Chapter 10

  Ambler hurried home in case his son John might call again. When he got there, he put Denise in a cab to go home, despite her insistence she would be fine taking the subway. After the tussle over the cab, irritated by her obstinacy, he felt more sympathy for her parents. When he got back upstairs, Johnny came out of the bedroom he shared with Ambler and poked around his books and book bag on the dining room table, clearly wanting something but reluctant to bring it up.

  After a few moments, he said. “My dad called. He’s going to call back.” Johnny wouldn’t have been able to talk to his father. He would have had to accept the charges for the call, and he wouldn’t know to do that. John would have hung up anyway; he wasn’t ready to talk to his son. It was difficult for the poor kid. He wanted so much to know his father.

  The phone rang and it was John calling back. Ambler asked Johnny to read in the bedroom while he was on the phone.

  There were no pleasantries to exchange. “Devon’s dead.”

  Ambler’s heart sank. He couldn’t speak, too many images and memories went through his mind. He said, “Devon,” the only thing he could think of to say.

  “Too bad. Good dude.”

  “What happened?”

  “A fight in the yard. He was stabbed. Word is a longtime grudge going back to the streets. When something like this happens, word goes through this place like the flu. The word gets started; soon everyone knows. Almost always, what they know is wrong.” He paused. “You know these calls are bugged, right?”

  Ambler said he did.

  “When you coming up? This week?”

  “I could.” John never asked about him visiting, so his asking now seemed to be about Devon’s murder. “I don’t suppose you want me to bring Johnny.”

  After a long pause, speaking slowly, John said, “I thought about that. I think about it every day. I don’t want to see him yet. I’ve begun writing a letter—”

  “That’s great. He’ll—”

  “Don’t tell him. I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t want him to think it’s coming, be waiting for it, and then I don’t come through. Okay? Don’t tell him yet.”

  * * *

  When Johnny came out of the bedroom, he puttered around for a moment and then asked, “Who’s Devon?”

  It wasn’t right the kid had to deal with violent death again, twice in the same week. He was still trying to understand his mother’s death, her life and death difficult for anyone, let alone a child, her child, to comprehend.

  “Devon was a friend of mine when I was your age. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He went to jail, possibly for something he didn’t do.”

  “Like my dad?”

  “Your dad went to jail for something he didn’t mean to do. Neither man is bad. For each of them, something went terribly wrong.”

  He couldn’t tell how Johnny was taking this. It was a lot to swallow, not the way life was supposed to happen. He decided to keep talking until Johnny was satisfied, rather than send him off to bed to work through it on his own. So they talked. Ambler told him about his father’s youth, not a great tale itself. His father and mother separating, his father leaving him alone with an incompetent mother far too often. He didn’t want to spare himself in talking about the past but he didn’t want to scare Johnny either, start him thinking that Ambler would desert him, too.

  If he had it to do over again, he would have kept John with him. Back then, almost thirty years ago, he thought kids naturally stayed with their mothers. He was also self-absorbed, too engrossed in his own work to pay enough attention to anyone else. John wasn’t a troubled kid. He did okay in school, kept off the streets. Music was his refuge.

  What he’d told Johnny from the beginning, when Johnny first learned who his father was—and where he was—was that his father had killed a man accidentally, not meaning to, in a fight the other man started. Ambler believed this is what happened, though the court had not believed John’s story.

  John was a musician, playing in the rock and roll equivalents of honky-tonks. He’d been a drinker, a pot smoker, living the nightlife, not a gangbanger or drug dealer, not in the criminal life. He killed a man he shared an apartment with in a fight fueled by alcohol and drugs—wrestling for a gun the other man pulled on him. That was John’s story. Though the police, the prosecutor, and the judge didn’t believe him, Ambler did. He was stunned when his son was found guilty of murder rather than involuntary manslaught
er. The look of hate John directed at him when the judge announced the verdict had burned a hole through his heart.

  The look was because the advice he’d given him at a moment of crisis was wrong. That night, he’d opened his door to a wild-eyed, terrified young man. John was bruised, bleeding from the corner of his mouth, blood dried on his forehead from a cut above his eyebrow. His shirt—a white dress shirt—was ripped down the front, the buttons popped. Ambler thought he’d been mugged. John said he’d been in a fight. He needed money to get away. When Ambler tried to calm him, the boy hissed. “You don’t understand, you fucking asshole! I killed somebody.”

  Ambler went limp. The room spun; his brain worked like an echo chamber. John’s voice came from far away. Fighting back his own rising panic, Ambler got the story of what happened. He considered helping him run away but realized long before John did that he didn’t have anywhere to run to. Even if he’d wanted to help John run, he didn’t have enough money for him to get very far. Liz had less. After sitting with the terrified boy until dawn, Ambler came to believe that the only thing John could do was turn himself in.

  “It was self-defense,” he told the boy, “involuntary manslaughter. You have no record. It will be all right.”

  John argued; he insisted; he begged. In the end, he followed his father’s advice.

  The trial was a horror. The young man presented to the judge by the prosecutor was no one Ambler recognized. Witnesses spoke against him. The dead roommate’s girlfriend testified that she and the man he killed were terrified of John. There was an arrest John hadn’t told his father about. No matter, Ambler was devastated by the harsh sentence—eight to 25 years. John blamed him for the outcome. Every time their eyes met, even now, Ambler saw the accusation.

  When he finished, Johnny was sleepy but for unfathomable reasons, as kids’ reasons often are, wanted to know more about Ambler’s ex-wife, Liz, not something Ambler wanted to get into.

  “She’s my grandmother, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she? When will I see her?”

  Ambler didn’t know. One night she called. Not so drunk, she said she was ready to talk to Johnny. A minute later she changed her mind and hung up. That was the last he heard of her. She wasn’t at the phone number she’d called from. As was her custom, she’d left no forwarding address.

  The phone rang, so he sent Johnny off again. As soon as he heard Mike’s voice, he knew something was wrong.

  “Look, Ray. If it’s going to be late like this, would you please call a car service for Denise? I’ll give you one we use. I’m happy to pay for it. I don’t want her taking the subway this late.”

  Ambler was flabbergasted. “I put her in a cab, Mike. Stood next to it until it pulled away from the curb.” As he said this, he had a twinge of regret, thinking he should take the blame, take some pressure off Denise. On second thought, he was right to tell Mike. He wasn’t going to let her take chances with her safety, though in truth taking the subway to Woodside wasn’t dangerous. Cops like Mike, who dealt with the worst humanity had to offer, got a distorted view of the world, saw evil and danger everywhere, and tended to be overprotective of their kids.

  Mike’s sigh came through the phone like the wayward wind. “This kid, I swear.”

  Ambler told him about the call from John and that Devon was dead. “You might remember I asked Paul Higgins about Devon when we first met.”

  Cosgrove mumbled something.

  “Well, I did ask about Devon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have you talked to Higgins yet?”

  “Not yet. This murder has something to do with Paul?”

  “I don’t know. Devon’s brother Trey was a confidential informant—”

  Cosgrove didn’t wait to hear the rest. “How did the guy in prison die?”

  “Stabbed, a fight in the yard.”

  “So? What are you getting at?”

  “Leila Stone was doing undercover work in the library. She was murdered in the crime fiction reading room. That’s where Paul Higgins’s papers are.”

  “This has something to do with the prison murder?”

  “It might. Higgins supervised informants. One of the file boxes that was sealed was opened.”

  There was a silence before Cosgrove spoke. “And resealed, right? Tough for her to reseal it when she’s dead. So someone was with her. I’ll go along with that. From there, you make connections I don’t follow.”

  “I asked Paul Higgins if he knew of Devon Thomas. He denied knowing anything about him.”

  Cosgrove grumbled and cleared his throat a couple of times, something he did when he grew impatient. “I’m sorry for your loss, Ray. I mean that, whatever the circumstances. If Paul has some thoughts on this, I’ll let you know. I’m not counting on it.… I thought you were staying out of this investigation.”

  “I am. Or I was. I’m asking. I’m not investigating.”

  “You are, too. Remember, I’m not running this show. Everyone’s not as tolerant of busybodies as I am.”

  “Now I’m a busybody.”

  Cosgrove’s tone softened. “You always were, but you’re an engaging sort, so I let it go.”

  Ambler sat for a long time after he hung up, thinking about Paul Higgins and police informers and the murder of Devon Thomas on the heels of the murder of Leila Stone.

  * * *

  The next morning when he got to work, Ambler found Adele at the library table in his reading room with a file box in front of her. His first thought was she’d opened Higgins’s restricted files. A quick glance told him she hadn’t. If she caught his moment of doubt, she didn’t let on.

  “What are you doing?” he asked calmly enough, as he hung his jacket on the coatrack.

  “I’m browsing through some of the boxes that aren’t restricted. I hope this doesn’t violate anyone’s rights.” The words were biting, but something in her eyes seemed playful.

  He walked behind her to look over her shoulder.

  She bounced around in her chair, her expression eager, a welcome change. “It’s boring. Boring reports about boring meetings.” She held up a handful of report forms. “They identify the informants as CI-1 and CI-17, and so on.”

  “Confidential informant. I want to tell you something.” He sat down beside her and told her about Devon’s murder.

  “I’m sorry, Raymond.” She grasped his forearm, leaning closer to him. Her soulful eyes searched his face. “The other night after Leila’s death, when you walked me home, I told you I wanted to be alone. As soon as you were gone, I wanted you to come back.”

  “You could’ve—”

  She slightly increased the pressure on his arm. “I’m too stubborn. I was mad at you.” Her voice warbled, a lilt to it; a current beneath the words reached out to him, or perhaps he reached out to the current. He stood. And she stood. They faced each other for a moment. He began to open his arms but paused, waiting for her to tell him in some way what to do next. After a moment, she turned and sat down again.

  “John had something to tell me he didn’t want to say over the phone, so I’m taking tomorrow off to visit him.”

  “I’m taking a couple of days off later in the week, too. I’m going to Texas to Leila’s funeral.”

  Ambler was surprised Adele felt close enough to Leila to want to do that, and wished he’d told her his suspicions before. Now, he had to. He touched her hand, so she’d look up at him. “You’re not going to like this, and you may not believe me, and you’ll get mad all over again. But I can’t let you go on without telling you.” He told her that he was sure Leila was a police informant who’d infiltrated the library.

  Her reaction was a blank stare. “She was spying on us? You don’t know that for sure, do you?” She sounded childlike in her denial.

  “Before Paul Higgins retired from the policed department, he worked with confidential informants. If I’m right that Leila was an informant that might explain why she was in this room when she was mur
dered. She knew Paul Higgins and wanted something from his files.”

  “There might be another reason.”

  “I can’t think of one. Someone came here with her or followed her here and killed her. Since the restricted file box was tampered with, you’d have to believe the killer was looking for something in those files.”

  Adele stood to leave. “I don’t believe you. You could be wrong. You’re not a hundred percent certain.” She turned to face him but couldn’t meet his gaze.

  * * *

  When she was gone, Ambler began to put the papers and calendars and reports she’d been sifting through back into the file boxes she’d taken them out of, intending to straighten things up and get back to work on the upcoming crime-fiction exhibit. Instead, Higgins’s files caught his attention.

  The boxes contained newspaper clippings, transcripts of phone calls, notebooks, reports from informers written by Higgins, reports from Higgins himself, and trial transcripts he guessed were for cases Higgins had worked. There were also photos and cassette tapes that could be recordings of conversations taped by a CI wearing a wire.

  He began cataloging the un-embargoed files. He might find something about Leila or about Devon. At the least, the files would tell him something about Paul Higgins. Because he was taking notes for the finding aid as he went along, the job went slowly. He read only enough to identify each document as a CI report or a police report. Still, it took time, so it was early afternoon when he thought to break for lunch. As he was putting on his jacket, Mike Cosgrove appeared in his doorway.

  “I’ve come for that box of papers that was broken into,” he said.

  “Did you bring a release from Higgins?”

  “No.” He puffed up and became blustery the way he did when he wasn’t sure of the ground he was on. “I can’t find him.”

  “What’s that mean?” Ambler moved over to stand between Cosgrove and the files.

  Cosgrove sighed and sat down. “He’s gone. Skipped.”

  “Skipped?” Ambler’s cell phone rang, so he answered it.

  “They’ve booked him.” David Levinson said.