by Con Lehane
Cosgrove concentrated on Muhammed. “You know Gobi Tabrizi?”
“No.” Muhammed’s gaze was steady.
“Do you mind my asking what you and Ray here were talking about?”
The man turned to Ray, as if the question was directed at him.
“Muhammed is a leader in the community. I asked him to keep an eye out for Gobi.”
“You’re looking for him? That’s my job.” Before Ray could answer, Cosgrove turned on the other man. “Gobi Tabrizi is a person of interest in a murder case. I’m sure you’d want to cooperate with the police on something like this.”
“Of course.”
“And you have nothing to tell me?”
“Nothing.” The man smiled slightly.
Cosgrove handed him his card. “If something comes to your attention, I’d appreciate you letting me know.”
“Gobi Tabrizi, he’s wanted by the police?”
“He’s a person of interest. I’d like to talk to him.”
“If you talk with him, will you arrest him?”
“You care a lot about someone you don’t know.”
Muhammed nodded. “I didn’t say I don’t know about him. Mr. Ambler explained his situation to me. He didn’t say he worked with you.”
“I don’t work with him,” Ray said.
“You don’t?” He had Ray in a pickle, so it might be nice to make him squirm. “I thought, last night, we were looking for him together, you and I and Adele.” Cosgrove caught himself. Nothing would be served by alienating the mullah from Ray. He’d tell him more than he’d tell the police. He turned to Muhammed. “I didn’t know Ray was here. I was interviewing Tabrizi’s roommate who told me about this place.”
Cosgrove left Ray and the mullah looking at him blankly. He walked down the block and waited between Fourth and Fifth Avenues on the street that led to the subway. Ray left the coffee shop a short time later. He caught up with him near Fourth Avenue. “How about a lift back to the city?”
* * *
Ambler wasn’t surprised Cosgrove had waited for him. “I suppose you’re looking for an explanation.” They walked together along the quiet street past brick row houses set a few feet back from the sidewalk on each side, the curbs lined with parked cars; every few feet undernourished trees clung to patches of bare dirt next to the curb.
“More from your friend Adele than you. Did you know she’d been to this guy’s apartment?”
“Tabrizi’s?” Ambler, protective of Adele, swallowed his surprise. “I thought she told you.”
“She didn’t.”
When they reached Cosgrove’s car, he opened the passenger side door.
Ambler smiled. “I don’t have to sit in the backseat wearing handcuffs?”
Cosgrove didn’t smile. “Not this time.” When they were buckled in, before he started the car, he said, “We were on the same side. What happened?” His face was almost hidden in the semi-darkness of the car, only an outline from the faint glow of the pale streetlight. He looked tired.
“You tell me. I thought Paul Higgins was a suspect. Now, all the guns are trained on Gobi Tabrizi. You’ve fallen in line. Why? A whole sheath of new evidence come to light?”
Cosgrove turned a few corners and took the ramp in heavy traffic onto the BQE headed for the Battery Tunnel. Plenty of time to talk; with the traffic, it would take an hour to get through the tunnel.
“I do what the people who pay me tell me to do. You don’t like what the intelligence guys do. I don’t like being pushed around by them either. But you know the twin towers used to be downtown ain’t there anymore. As shitty as it is, this is my city. Where we just were, there are people planning to take it down.” Cosgrove showed no impatience with the traffic, moving, stopping, moving again. The stop and go irritated Ambler. Or maybe it was Cosgrove irritating him.
Ambler chose his words carefully. “That man I was talking to, he’s an enemy?”
“I didn’t say that.” Cosgrove kept his eyes on the road. “For damn sure, he knows a lot going on in that community he keeps to himself.”
“He’s harboring terrorists?”
“It’s not just him or this neighborhood. You’re outsiders, a different culture, so you’re close-knit. You depend on one another. Everybody’s somebody’s cousin or knows somebody’s cousin. The cops are intruders to you; that’s who we are. These people, the Arabs, it’s more pronounced. Where they come from, governments are dangerous to them, so they don’t trust governments, including ours. Look, if this mullah is in touch with Tabrizi, we’ll find out.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“You’ll put him under surveillance?”
“I’m not going into that. You understand, I hope, we need to know what’s going on out here.”
“So you didn’t need to talk to Muhammed.”
“Let’s put it this way. We’re protecting you. We’re protecting them, too, the ones that aren’t out to do something criminal.”
Ambler watched Cosgrove, who didn’t take his eyes off the road. “You buy into protecting rogue cops?”
Cosgrove stiffened. His knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “What you’re talking about with intelligence—if that’s what you’re getting at—is guys bending the rules for the good of the community, to protect the city.”
He and Mike disagreed on this. They’d disagreed before. You might say they argued. They did so without anger. Mike made a case for finding and questioning Gobi. Yet Ambler sensed, even if Mike believed what he said, his heart wasn’t in the argument he was making.
He tried again. “If your friends in intelligence don’t want a full investigation of Lelia Stone’s murder because it would blow the cover off a covert operation, so they hang a murder on an innocent man simply because he’s an Arab, you’ll go along with that?”
Cosgrove stared straight ahead. After a moment Ambler did also, staring into a sea of brake lights, flashing brighter every few seconds against the deepening darkness as the cars in front slowed, growing dimmer as the cars crept forward again.
After a long silence, Mike spoke so softly he could barely hear him. “I hope it wouldn’t get to that.” A tremor in his voice alerted Ambler. “I hope I’d put a stop to it if it came to that.” The expression on Mike’s face when he turned toward him was ghastly, as if he’d at that moment heard news so terrible it couldn’t be absorbed, like the death of a child.
Through many more stops and gos, Mike told him how a New York City homicide detective became a twenty-first century Doctor Faustus. Once he started, the story poured out. The pain was there in the tone of his voice, but the story he told was straightforward. He didn’t describe the difficulty in making the choices he made or try to justify his decision or blame Denise, Campbell, his wife, or the Fates.
“Does Denise know?” Ambler asked.
“She doesn’t know.” Mike laughed, like a sigh of relief. “I’m letting her squirm. She feels bad … not bad enough yet.” The change in his expression was remarkable, the clouds parted and the sun came out. “You’re the only one who knows … outside of my new partners. When the time comes, I’ll tell Denise she’s not going to jail. I won’t tell her about the bargain with the devil.” He banged both hands against the steering wheel and faced Ambler. “There you go. You got something on me now, just like them.”
They drove in silence that was not uncomfortable until Cosgrove squeezed his bulky Ford into the tunnel and they began moving at a reasonable speed.
“Is Campbell protecting Paul Higgins?”
Cosgrove took some time to answer. “You’d think he would. Higgins was his guy. That might be a reason to hang the murder on the Arab.” After another pause, he said, “Until I can find my way out of this trap, I’m not looking for Paul.”
Ambler waited a moment before he spoke. “Any reason you can’t tell me what you found so far?”
Cosgrove again didn’t answer right away. After a moment, he said, “I don’t see why no
t.” He told Ambler about his talk, such as it was, with Paul Higgins’s uncle in Boston. “The uncle said Paul didn’t kill the Stone woman. What would he say? He either told the truth or lied. I have no way of knowing. My contact in Boston tells me Paul left town.”
“Does he know where he went?”
“My bet would be back here, the Bronx where he grew up, or Queens, where he has family. For some reason, if you’re a guy hiding out, you know you shouldn’t, yet you tend to go back to places you’re familiar with. He doesn’t think we’re looking for him, so he might not be so hard to find.”
As they were approaching the 23rd Street exit on the FDR, Ambler said, “Drop me at the Library Tavern. I want to go over all this with McNulty. He thinks about crime differently than most people. More or less, he thinks like the bad guy; often he’s on the bad guy’s side. He may have been the bad guy at times.”
Cosgrove sighed. “I could use an oracle myself.”
Neither spoke again until Mike dropped him off in front of the Library Tavern.
Chapter 29
“You’ve been in Bay Ridge, I perceive,” McNulty said when he put Ambler’s stein of beer in front of him.
“How could you know that?”
“I didn’t know that. It was a Sherlock Holmes joke.”
“I see,” said Ambler somewhat ruffled. “I guess your dad told you I was going out there.” He sipped his beer. “I told Mike Cosgrove you draw different inferences than other people from what you see and hear about crimes.”
McNulty put both hands on the bar and leaned toward Ambler, a customary pose of his. “In this line of work, especially here in Fun City—more in the old days than these days—one made inferences, as you call them, about criminal behavior because it was all around you. Figuring out who might have done what was a way to make sure you didn’t do wrong to the kind of person who would do a crime on you.”
“I see.” He told McNulty about talking to Muhammed the imam in Bay Ridge, and Paul Higgins possibly having left Boston for Queens.
“That’s a whole different world, the Arabs in Bay Ridge. Years ago, there were great Arab restaurants along Atlantic Avenue. I lived in Brooklyn Heights—at the time, a normal person could afford to live there—and tended bar at a place called Capulets on Montague Street. The restaurants on Atlantic Avenue were cheap, the food very good. Some of the cooks and waiters came to Capulets after work. We were friends—café-life friends, went to the ball game, the track—I moved and lost track of everyone, like you do in this business. Those newer Arab guys in Bay Ridge, I hear, don’t drink.”
This was a point of emphasis for McNulty, holding more meaning for him than it would for most people.
“What do you know about Queens?”
“Where?”
“Woodside.”
“Woodside, Sunnyside, used to be Irish. The Irish have moved on to Maspeth.”
“Higgins is Irish.”
“Not off the boat.”
“His father was.”
“As was my mother.”
“Is that important?”
“It used to be a section of the Bronx, Bainbridge, was Irish. Not anymore. Some years back, amidst unfortunate circumstances, I made a foray into that neighborhood. It’s surprising what a man could find out nosing about with the pedigree of a mother from Cavan.”
“Are you saying you might find out something about Paul Higgins if you went to Queens?”
“I might take a look.” McNulty squinted. “What do I tell him if I run across him? I’m not going to turn him over to the cops.”
“The cops aren’t looking for him at the moment.”
McNulty took some time to digest this, drawing a beer for himself into his coffee cup and taking a long swallow. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
* * *
“I’m not getting anywhere,” Ambler told Adele. They were sharing double-cooked pork belly and shredded beef, at Szechuan Gourmet, more or less around the corner from the library on 39th Street. He’d told her about his conversation in Bay Ridge with the imam and that Paul Higgins might be in Queens.
“We should search those restricted files.”
“The police—”
She stabbed at the pork belly with her chopstick. “What could they do to us? We’re library staff. So we begin sorting and cataloging. We’re doing our jobs. If we find something interesting, well…” She laughed. Lately, she hadn’t done that so often.
Back at the library, she led him, not actually by the hand, though it felt that way, down into the stacks, to an area near the carpentry shop where the wood workers repaired the library’s oak desks and tables and chairs. The file boxes holding the Paul Higgins collection were in a steel cage like section of the stacks without bookshelves that looked more like the dusty cement floor of a long-abandoned jail cell. Across the tops of the boxes, the police had stuck bright red labels: EVIDENCE! Warning!! Police Seal! Do Not Remove!
“We’ll be hard pressed to say we didn’t notice the seals.”
“We’ll think of something.” Adele headed straight for the boxes, picked one up and carried it to one of two forlorn, dust-covered desks across from the cage holding the file boxes. She found a switch and turned on a panel of overhead fluorescent lights.
They’d done this hundreds of times, gone through for the first time a box of papers and photographs hastily gathered together by someone, sometimes by the author; other times, the executor or closest living relative of the deceased author. The deceased having made no provision for the passing along of their work, you never knew what you’d find in the file. It wasn’t up to the cataloger to decide the worth of what was in the collection, only to catalog it as best they could, so some interested party—scholar or biographer—could dig through it some years later.
“How do we know where to start? We don’t know what we’re looking for.”
“The early eighties, a truckers union and a man named Richard Wright. I’d like to find out if the police infiltrated the union.”
“You can’t do any better than that?”
He stopped sifting through the papers on the desk in front of him. “It was your idea to search these files.”
“You didn’t object.”
Pretty much since they’d known each other, she’d thought of herself as in the driver’s seat in terms of what went on between them. Now, it was his doing that they were searching through files that were not only restricted by the person who donated them, but had been impounded by the police. “Looped in the loops of her hair,” he said to himself.
They worked in silence for how long he didn’t know. Time disappeared when you didn’t have much of a connection to daylight. Outside, when he took a break and went to the deli for coffee, early winter darkness was descending on a gray, damp, chilly, late afternoon. For reasons he didn’t understand, late winter afternoons, when the gray of evening became the darkness of night, made him lonely and because of the loneliness, sad.
When he returned with containers of coffee, Adele told him she’d found something. “The term ‘Project Red Light’ came up three or four times beginning in March 1982. I didn’t pay attention the first time, so I don’t remember what it referred to. This time, it’s in notes Mr. Higgins kept for himself, like progress notes a doctor might make.” She read Ambler the note: “‘Almost two years of work gone. Project Red Light gets written out of history.’ What do you suppose that means?”
“I imagine, what it says. Things disappear from history. Most things aren’t written down. What happened is passed along by word of mouth, like family histories; if no one passes it along, it ends.” Ambler paused to let a thought catch up with him. “You know, I’ve been an idiot.”
Adele smiled, her eyes sparkling. “It’s good you’ve come to terms with it.”
He hadn’t seen her smile like that in such a long time he wanted to kiss her. Besotted, he studied her face. When her expression became quizzical, he caught himself. “One of Higgins’s books
has a title something like that. Operation Something or other. He told me once his books are loosely based on the cases he worked on. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“I guess. You’re the crime fiction curator. Do we have his books?”
Ambler went back upstairs to browse through the online catalog and found two books by Higgins with the word Operation in the title. They were on the shelves at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the library across the street. He went over and checked them out.
“I’ll read them tonight,” he told Adele when he returned to the stacks.
“Do you want to read one and I’ll read the other?”
“You don’t have to.”
She took one of the books and examined the cover. “It would be fun. Is Johnny with you tonight?”
Ambler nodded.
“We could get take-out and read while he does his homework.”
Ambler beamed. “Johnny will be happy.”
They poured through the files for an hour or so longer. Every now and again, Ambler looked up from the binders he searched through to look at the back of Adele’s head as she bent over the files she read through. Her hair was thin, wispy, blonde tending toward brown, her neck long and graceful. Intent on her work, she probably didn’t notice he watched her, yet he wondered if she might feel his connection to her.
They walked to Ambler’s apartment together. Since her reprieve, Denise met Johnny after school on the three or four days he spent with Ambler. On most afternoons, Johnny stayed for after-school activities, as did Denise, so they arrived at the apartment shortly before Ambler got home from work. Since he and Lisa Young were on better terms and Denise was on her good behavior, she now took Johnny to his grandmother’s after school on the days he went there. Ambler had become more conscious of security himself since Lisa Young brought up the possibility of kidnapping.
When he and Adele arrived at his apartment, Denise was ready to leave. Before she did, she managed to get behind Adele once or twice to wrap her arms around herself, make kissy faces, and smirk. As soon as she left, he had a few minutes worth of battle with Johnny to keep the TV off during dinner and until homework was done.