by Con Lehane
* * *
“I need you to do me a favor.” Adele smiled at McNulty as he set a white wine spritzer in front of her.
“I don’t do favors.” McNulty didn’t smile.
Adele felt her smile fade. “Oh.”
“You want something, tell me. Skip the platitudes.”
“You’re not making this any easier.”
“What could be easier than drinking your spritzer—more of a summer drink, by the way—and telling me what you want?”
She told him.
“I particularly don’t like favors that have within them, ‘If I don’t come back.’”
“Everything will be fine. I wouldn’t do this if I thought anything could happen. I need someone I can tell, who won’t tell anyone … just in case.”
McNulty was dismissive. “What you do is your business. What you tell Ray or don’t tell Ray is up to you.”
Her smile returned. “Oh, you’re a peach.”
McNulty raised his eyebrows. “I’m not a peach.” He let that sink in. “People assume it’s the man stepping out that I don’t say anything about. You’d be surprised how often the indiscretion is at the hands, or lips, or other body parts of the female party. She has that extra drink; the next morning she realizes she’d been nuzzling at the bar the night before with Clarence from accounting. What the hell she saw in him is beyond me. I could’ve told her right then she’d regret it the next day, even if she didn’t have a regular boyfriend who was out of town.… Him no prize either, if you ask me.”
“I’m not stepping out. It’s—” She couldn’t think of exactly what to call it. But she certainly wasn’t stepping out.
“You need to stop by here when you’re finished. Make sure this guy knows I know where you went and I’m waiting for you.”
“Okay.” her voice sounded small to her, uncertain.
* * *
Later that evening, Adele headed west on 53rd Street, walking on the north side close the curb. She carried Gobi’s bag in her left hand. Few cars passed. She didn’t like that the traffic came from behind, cringing when the sound of a motor closed in on her. She’d gone back and forth on whether to do this herself. In the past, she wouldn’t have done something like this without Raymond; she’d have loved the adventure and doing it together. She made fun of the women in Raymond’s detective books who go off by themselves into empty warehouses or creaking old mansions when they could easily bring someone with them. This was different. It would be too embarrassingly like bringing one boyfriend along on a date with another one. Gobi wasn’t a fugitive, even if he acted like one, and he had no reason to harm her.
She’d crossed Tenth Avenue and gotten most of the way to Eleventh when she heard a car motor getting louder as it came near and then quieting as it slowed alongside her. Gobi called her name. He sat in the passenger seat; the window was open. He smiled, but his face was drawn and the smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The car double-parked, leaving enough room for passing cars to get by. Gobi’s expression was so sad and pained her heart went out to him. For a moment, they looked at each other, as if neither knew what to say. She certainly didn’t; she watched his smiling sad face as he leaned on his hands in the car door window.
After a time, he said something to someone in the car with him, opened the door, and got out. He took the bag from her, handed it into the car. They were near Eleventh Avenue. He took her arm, leading her across 53rd Street to an Italian café on the corner.
“Who are you with?” she asked as he looked over the menu.
“I’m crazy about pizza since I’ve been in America. Do you mind?”
She couldn’t not smile. He had a kind of childlike eagerness, despite the weariness about him. “Fine.” She regarded him for a moment. “You’re the strangest man I’ve ever known. I don’t know why on earth I’m here with you.”
His eyelashes like curtains rose to reveal his gentle gaze. “I promised to myself I’d take the bag and tell you to go. It’s dangerous to be with me. Someone might be watching.”
“I’m sure someone is.” She told him about her encounter in front of Leila’s father’s house in Texas.
“America’s secret police?”
The idea of secret police shocked her. “It’s not secret police.… Not exactly, I mean. There’s Congress and the courts. The government can’t do anything it wants.”
He smiled like a wise old uncle at a precocious but innocent niece. When the server came back, he ordered the pizza and two Cokes for them without asking her.
She wasn’t sure if she liked that or not, or liked it in spite of herself. Again, she asked whom he was with. Again, he didn’t answer. Deep in her consciousness, fear began to form. She’d been mistaken. He wasn’t what he seemed to be, wasn’t what he said he was. A heavy silence hung between them.
“The marriage license I found proves a man who had seen Leila in the library was her ex-husband, a man she was afraid of, whom she’d been hiding from, who’d threatened her. This should convince the police that he’s the most likely killer, not you.”
Gobi leaned across the table, with that avuncular expression, an air of superiority, even if kind, she didn’t like. “I hope what you say will happen. I don’t want to face your legal system again.” He studied her face. “In the beginning, I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I couldn’t. Still, it’s not right to mislead someone who trusts you. You prevent them from knowing you by your lie.” He didn’t look superior at all; he was ashamed. “Nothing good comes of that.”
“Will you tell me the truth about what you’re doing?”
The server arrived with the Cokes. When she left, Gobi took a sip from his glass. “The men I’m with are from my country. Anything I tell you would jeopardize them.”
“Are they terrorists?” He wouldn’t answer truthfully if they were. She asked because she wanted him to know she’d considered that possibility, that he wasn’t pulling the wool over her eyes.
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” His quick glance was a reprimand. They were silent until the pizza arrived. Gobi picked up a slice.
She waited for him to look at her again. “I’m not going to be a patsy. I helped you—” Tears gathered behind her eyes and that made her angrier. She pushed herself away from the table to stand.
He reached for her hand. “Please don’t. You helped me without judging; that was kind and honorable.”
She wasn’t sure what he was saying. She heard the words and knew their meaning, understood the sentiment; but the context, that she didn’t get. Was he praising her for seeing past his role as a terrorist to their shared humanity? Was what he said charming, heavily accented double-talk?
She sat back down. “I’m asking you questions and you’re not answering them, which is the same as lying. Why do you have a gun?”
He took a bite from the slice of pizza he held, his expression the irritated embarrassment of someone caught in a lie. “That isn’t important.”
“It’s important to me.” She tried to find an opening through those dark, troubled eyes.
“We prepare for contingencies.”
“What kind of contingency requires a gun … killing someone?”
“Killing myself is one.”
She froze. Whatever stance she thought she was taking crumbled. The seriousness of the present pressed on her. Whatever he was involved in was too much for her. She didn’t want anything to do with killing or dying. She wanted to take care of Johnny. She wanted peace. Gobi was a haunted man; for him, danger, or even death, lurked around the corner.
“I’ve made a mistake.” She folded her hands in front of her. She’d neither touched the pizza nor the Coke. “Whatever your fight is, it’s not mine. I can’t help you anymore. I shouldn’t have helped you at all. I never should have given you your gun. I need my head examined.”
His expression resembled a smirk, but it wasn’t; it was embarras
sment. “No one will be hurt because you helped me. Like almost everyone in your country, you’re blind to what the world really looks like.”
She glared at him. “Stop lecturing me. I’m not an idiot. I know there’s a lot wrong in the world. Even so, I’m not going to kill or die to fix it, like you. I don’t believe in any movement or ideology or religion enough to kill for it. You do. That makes us different.”
He picked up another slice of pizza, moving deliberately. “We’re not so different. I want peace, to love, to have children, to read the texts of ancient Islam. Where I live, children dress in rags, go to bed hungry, die before their time. How do I seek only my own peace?”
She looked into his dark eyes. “I don’t know Gobi. I don’t know what I’d do.”
They looked at each other in silence.
Her cell phone rang. It was Raymond and she smiled. He’d probably gone to the Library Tavern to pout when she wouldn’t have dinner with him, and McNulty, reneging on his bartender’s code of silence, told him where she was. She knew what his reaction would be, pictured him fidgeting on the barstool, shaking his cell phone to make it call faster. When he was agitated, he looked like that, jumpy, unable to sit still, beside himself, as her mother used to say.
She clicked the phone on. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine, Raymond,” she said before he had time to speak.
“Where are you?”
“At a café near the river, where the car dealerships are. If you wait, I’ll join you shortly.”
“How do you know where I am?” She pictured his bewildered expression. When he was agitated like this, he ran his hands through his hair repeatedly until it stuck up all over the place and he looked like a mad scientist.
“Tell McNulty I’m disappointed in him.” Raymond’s silence told her she was right. “See you soon.”
Across from her in the booth, Gobi was halfway through the second-to-last slice of pizza. She took a sip of her wine.
“You told someone you were coming to meet me.” He stood and took a small packet of bills from his pocket.
She stood also and touched his hand. “I’ll get the check. You’ll need your money.” He looked at her hand touching his. Remembering, she pulled it back.
He smiled and reached out to take her hand. “My feelings are a surprise to me.” He looked at her hand in his. Feeling his intensity, she wished she could read his thoughts. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.”
“I’m afraid for you, Gobi.” She looked down at their hands also. “Or I’m afraid of you. I’m not sure which.” The wave of emotion from him was almost overpowering. He might take her in his arms and kiss her or he might put his hands around her throat and strangle her. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what she’d do either. She might succumb whatever he did.
The moment passed. He let go of her hand. “I will think of you, Adele. In the future, if you are someday lonely, you will know someone thinks of you.” And then he was gone.
* * *
When she slid onto the barstool beside Raymond, her feelings were so jumbled she didn’t know if she could hold up her end of a conversation. In the cab on the way over, she’d felt a kind of giddiness from the release of the dreadful tension she’d felt while she was with Gobi, the sense that any second the world might crash down around them—tension he must feel all the time. She wondered if his life would ever be normal again; or would he from now on be a fugitive, or a prisoner, depending on his luck?
McNulty approached her, squinting, examining her face. “What you need,” he said, “is a stiff drink.” He poured cognac into a snifter and placed it in front of her with a glass of water alongside.
She took the snifter in both hands. “Do I look like I need a drink that badly?”
“Drink it,” said McNulty.
She didn’t want to talk about where she’d been or what had happened. Somehow she knew neither Raymond nor McNulty would ask her to, and they didn’t. At first, absorbed in her own worries, she failed to notice Raymond’s glum expression or that he, who always drank beer, had a brandy snifter in front of him, too.
She took a big swallow of her cognac and asked him what was wrong. He mumbled something. It was always difficult for him to talk about what bothered him. He was so easy to talk to when something bothered her, yet when he was troubled she had to drag it out of him—he was old school enough to think it unmanly to tell someone he was hurting. She finally got out of him that his lawyer called to tell him Denise’s arrest had been reported to the family court judge.
“The judge wants me in court on Monday.”
“Smoking pot with a group of other kids doesn’t seem such a big deal,” Adele said.
“The report the judge has is from a private investigator. There might be other things. They’ve been following Johnny and me and everyone connected to us.”
“Somebody’s following everybody,” Adele said.
Raymond lifted his gaze from the snifter he’d been staring at. He had amazingly expressive cobalt blue eyes, like his grandson’s. When he was troubled, they became even more intensely blue. “I wish I knew what was in the report.”
Chapter 21
The next day, Saturday, Ambler called Mike Cosgrove from the library to ask about Denise’s arrest. He didn’t want to come right out with it, so he hemmed and hawed and asked about Mike’s trip to Boston looking for Paul Higgins.
Mike said he came up empty. But he was philosophical. “Over the years, I’ve gone on a lot of chases like that. Trips that produce nothing tangible far outnumber the trips that produce something you can put your finger on. But because a New York City homicide cop, on his own time, spoke to Paul Higgins’s uncle in that last-stop-before-the-graveyard gin mill, something will turn out differently than it otherwise would have.”
Ambler told him about Devon Thomas’s sister. “She said her brother idolized Richard Wright and would never have killed him. She believes he was set up.”
Cosgrove cleared his throat. Ambler waited for the skepticism he knew was coming. “Something bad happens … your son, your brother kills someone. You don’t want to believe it. You can’t believe it; your heart won’t let you. So you look for other explanations. There’s a mistake. Someone’s lying.” Mike spoke softly, and you could hear the undertone of sympathy. He cleared his throat again. “I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, hasn’t happened.… I know you’ve been through that with your son. And I know what the feds did to you. I never doubted you were set up by whoever doctored your papers.”
“The FBI doctored my dissertation, so it looked like I plagiarized part of it. Payback for my releasing their files. All fair in love and war.… Water under the bridge.” Ambler fought off a rush of anger. “So we know entrapment, false evidence, such things happen.”
“Digging up bones,” said Cosgrove. “Sorry.” Silence hung between them until Mike said, “Right now, I gotta look at an estranged husband killing his ex-wife—a retired cop to boot. Someone I thought well of. To track that down, I need to come to an understanding with the folks in intelligence who have their own suspect, your friend the Muslim. I don’t have room in my head for whatever you’re adding to the list with your prison murder and the other murder the prison victim did or didn’t commit a long time ago. Even if you’re right about those two—and nothing I’ve seen or heard comes close to saying you are—how could you connect them to the Stone murder in the library?”
“There’s a thread I’m following. Still loose ends. If I find something that tells me there’s no connection, I’ll stop.” Another awkward silence, Ambler had trouble putting this next thing together. “Uh, Mike, I need to ask you … I don’t want to pry.…”Uh, Johnny was with Denise—”
“I know. I know. The fucking kid. I’m really sorry about that.” His voice caught for a second. “To drag the boy into it, that’s unforgivable. I’m really—It’s my fault. I’ve been easy on Denise, too easy.”
“No. No.” Ambler didn’t want to make things w
orse for Denise. “Except for this, she’s been great with Johnny. It’s just that I’m in this custody battle—”
“Something’s come up. I’m not sure what happened. I need to talk to her. I’ll get back to you when I know the score.”
* * *
After talking to Mike, Ambler went back to work but was distracted, thinking too much about Adele’s clandestine rendezvous with Gobi Tabrizi the night before. She didn’t want to talk about it, so he hadn’t asked. Yet he knew that, at least on some level, her interest in Tabrizi was romantic. He wouldn’t admit to himself he was jealous, that his heart ached. Thinking about her with regret and resentment wasn’t good for either of them. They’d been friends. Then the possibility of this love thing came along and complicated everything. He wished it wasn’t so, that he was concerned for her as for a friend, that he didn’t long for her.
At first, he was going to stay late. He had a lot to do to get ready for the exhibit. Yet as it got closer to 6:00, he changed his mind. He packed up his work and went and waited near the bottom of the main stairs and caught up with Adele at the guard stand at the Fifth Avenue door. Since they’d known one another, he and Adele had gone on walks together. Often, finding themselves leaving the library together after work, they’d start walking side by side. Most of the time, they headed uptown, more or less toward Adele’s neighborhood.
This evening seemed as natural as the others. She wasn’t surprised when he caught up with her; it was as if she expected him. They walked up Fifth Avenue, the sidewalk less crowded than usual because it was the weekend. Saturday, even a chilly one like this, brought shoppers and tourists, rather than crowds rushing home from work, and a slower pace. The evening grew chilly as the sun went down; a hint of dampness hung in the air.