Murder in the Manuscript Room Read online

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  To Carlos R. Spaulding

  Acknowledgments

  Once more, thanks to my agent, Alice Martell, my editor, Marcia Markland, and her cheerful, patient, and extraordinarily helpful assistant, Amanda “Nettie” Finn. Thanks, too, to the production team at Macmillan, who have designed and produced stunning books and book jackets for both of my 42nd Street Library books. Shailyn Tavella, Hector DeJean, and the rest of the folks in the publicity department at Minotaur Books have been unfailingly responsive and helpful no matter how frequent or far-fetched my requests for promotional support. Special thanks to the library marketing team at Macmillan, Talia Sherer and Anne Spieth, who introduced my hero, librarian Ray Ambler, to thousands of real librarians across the country.

  Speaking of real librarians, retired research librarian Thomas Mann read the book in its early stages and once more saved me from embarrassing myself. Any future embarrassment is on me. Maryglenn McCombs, a Nashville-based book publicist, has provided advice and encouragement, as well as promotional opportunities for me for years. Thanks once more to Roan Chapin, a great early reader, whose insightful comments made the book better than it might otherwise have been.

  To the independent mystery bookstores that support me and writers like me by hand selling our books and hosting author visits goes my eternal gratitude. Likewise, my gratitude to the nation’s libraries that are responsible for probably half, if not more, of my overall sales, as they are for many mystery writers. In addition, librarians are among the staunchest defenders of our rights as Americans to read and write what we wish. Without libraries, writers, readers, and communities in general would be very much poorer indeed. Finally, special thanks to the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the magnificent edifice at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue that provides a fictional home for my stories.

  The city of New York

  Has erected this building

  To be maintained forever

  As a free library

  For the use of the people

  —NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1983

  Richard Wright locked the door of the union office behind him. The office was in a loft building on 37th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the Garment District. Preoccupied, he felt, more than saw, the rough texture of the wooden flooring, the industrial-sized, no-frills elevator. The rattle and tapping of sewing machines from seven in the morning until three thirty in the afternoon from the stitching shop three floors below was silenced now.

  Not long before, his job had been backing a truck into the loading dock next to the building’s doorway. He thought it important when he was elected president of the local that the office be in the area where the members work. This way, they could feel the union belonged to them, and, if they wanted to, come in and look around, keep an eye on things. Not like the way it had been.

  A car waited for him in in the loading dock. He thought it pompous and unnecessary that he be treated like some kind of royalty. That was the old way. He’d promised transparency and access to the members who elected him. After the second attempt on his life since the election, the executive board demanded he have a driver and quasi-bodyguard. The kid they picked was useless, scared of his own shadow, sullen, high on coke when he wasn’t stoned on weed, but he was a member, so Wright wouldn’t blow the whistle and get him fired. If the kid didn’t straighten out and was sent back to driving truck he would get himself fired anyway. Too many of the truckers were driving high, another problem the union needed to work on—a drug program, getting guys clean and back to work, rather than firing them, losing them to the street.

  The kid didn’t turn around when Wright opened the back door; listening to music on his Walkman, he was in his usual fog. Wright was heading out to meet with a group of truckers at a nonunion textile jobbing house in Brooklyn. It was after rush hour so the trip didn’t take as long as it might. The meet was at a warehouse on the waterfront in Red Hook. The drivers interested in the union were scared, as they should be. A few workers by themselves were no match for the gangster overlords of the trucking companies.

  It was already dark, the streets deserted, most of the docks and warehouses in Red Hook long abandoned since the arrival of containerized shipping in the seventies. Wright was a courageous man but not a fool. The drivers chose the meeting place, not a place he would have chosen. They wanted to meet on the down low, and he understood this. His driver was armed and he carried a weapon himself, though, a pacifist at heart, he’d hesitate to use it.

  “Where you going?” Wright asked, as the car turned into an alley. No answer, and the car speeded up. He reached into his pocket for his gun, a relic from his days in the South, a present from the Deacons for Defense in Mississippi. It was too late. The car skidded to stop. The door beside him opened. He saw the midsection of a well-dressed man—white shirt, blue tie with a pattern in gold, the front panel and arm of a dark blue suit jacket. At the end of the man’s arm was a snub-nosed revolver that spat fire and bullets a half-dozen times.

  Chapter 1

  The day had gone badly for Raymond Ambler, a bitterly cold, gray, January day not long after New Year’s, the wind like a knife, slicing into the cavern cut by 42nd Street between the skyscrapers on either side. The wind stung his face and whipped under his trench coat as he walked the couple of blocks to the library from Grand Central, where he’d gotten off the subway from the courthouse downtown. Banks of piled-up snow, stained and filthy as only snow on a city street can get, hanging on from the storm the day after Christmas, lined the curb, the gutters at each street corner a half-foot deep in slush and muddy water.

  Fuming after four hours of haranguing by a trio of five-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorneys against him and his representative, an Orthodox Jewish family lawyer from Borough Park, the ink on her Brooklyn Law School diploma barely dry. The custody battle was over a grandson he never knew he had until they’d come together under tragic circumstances when the boy was eight.

  He’d had to take the morning off from work, so his coworker and friend, Adele Morgan, was helping as best she could assemble an exhibit Ambler was curating at the 42nd Street Library. The exhibit, celebrating the library’s collection of American mystery novels, had taken two years of planning. A Century-and-a-Half of Murder and Mystery in New York City was scheduled to open in a few weeks. The preparation was behind schedule because of the Christmas blizzard and now more delays because of family court dates, meetings with attorneys, and mediation sessions. His grandson Johnny’s grandmother, a wealthy socialite, was trying to undermine Ambler’s relationship with the boy so she could alter the terms of the custody agreement. So far, because Johnny wanted to live with Ambler, she’d been unsuccessful. But she was relentless.

  As he climbed the steps between the two marble lions standing guard in front of the library, he saw a man in
front of him at the top of the steps and recognized the broad shoulders, the bulky shape, the close-cropped gray hair. He hadn’t seen Mike Cosgrove, a NYPD homicide detective, since Mike had persuaded a young—everyone was young these days—Manhattan assistant district attorney not to bring murder charges against him over a year ago.

  Despite the frigid weather, groups of tourists, bound up in colorful and fashionable down jackets and coats, many of them young, slim, dark-haired, and Asian, took photos on the library steps, or passed one another in a steady, if disheveled, parade up and down the steps. He caught up with Mike inside the cavernous, ornate foyer, Astor Hall. When Cosgrove turned around, Ambler realized someone was with him.

  “Ray. I was just coming to see you.…” Cosgrove put his hand on the shoulder of the man beside him. “Paul Higgins.” He reached for Ambler’s shoulder with his other hand. “Paul, this is the man you want, Ray Ambler.” Seeming pleased with himself, he stood between them with a hand on each man’s shoulder like a referee between two welterweights.

  Ambler shook the man’s hand and met his gaze. It was steady and probing, at the same time ingratiating, eager; you’d have to say genuine. A thatch of red hair rusting to gray, a scar on his forehead, his nose broken more than once, shoulders slightly stooped, he moved stiffly, as if in chronic pain from long-ago injuries, a guy you might think of as an old warhorse, or a former athlete, football more than tennis.

  “Paul,” the man said, “Paul Higgins,” pumping Ambler’s arm vigorously. “I’ve been anxious to meet you.”

  “Oh?” Ambler took a mental step back from Higgins’s enthusiasm.

  “Paul’s a writer,” Cosgrove said.

  “You probably haven’t heard of me.” Higgins said, “I’m kind of an amateur.” The admission didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

  Given a minute to sort through the zillion book titles and authors in his memory, Ambler did recognize the name. A retired cop, maybe FBI, Higgins had written a couple of all-American-vigilante-hero versus evil-to-the-core criminal thrillers that made an initial splash and quickly faded. He was being modest, not as obscure as he implied, not far off on the “amateur” appraisal.

  “Of course,” Ambler said. “Dark Night of Terror, right?”

  “Night of Black Terror,” Higgins said. “I’m amazed you know of it.” He knew better, it seemed, than to ask if he’d read it.

  The point of meeting Ambler, Higgins got to quickly enough, was he wanted to donate his papers to the New York Public Library’s crime fiction collection. Because he had some concerns, Cosgrove suggested he meet Ambler.

  Ambler wasn’t interested—he didn’t think Higgins as a writer had much in the way of lasting value—until something Cosgrove said rang a bell.

  “Paul worked NYPD intelligence for over thirty years, Ray. He’s got stuff no one would believe.”

  “Oh?” said Ambler.

  * * *

  What struck him was a coincidence. A week before, his son John had called him from the upstate prison where he was serving time. A lifer there told John he was a friend of his father and wanted to talk to him. The prisoner, Devon Thomas, in fact had been Ambler’s friend—a very good friend—from sixth grade until Devon dropped out of high school at sixteen to run with the Black Peoples Party, the last time Ambler had seen him, except in a Daily News photo wearing handcuffs.

  On his monthly visit to his son the previous Saturday, he looked up his friend. Devon told him he was in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

  “My kid brother did the murder.” His hard stare faltered. “Trey was a snitch. I took the rap because I knew someone would kill him in here.”

  “And now?”

  “He died a couple of weeks ago.”

  A skeptical person might doubt Devon’s story—that he’d spent his adult life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit out of loyalty to his brother. Ambler believed him. He’d met Devon in sixth grade at a new school for Ambler. The first day, he was surrounded in a hallway by a half-dozen would-be hoodlums taunting him for some imagined or fabricated slight, when he felt an arm around his shoulder. It was Devon, who amiably brushed aside the thugs and walked him into the classroom.

  Ambler knew some of the history behind Devon’s arrest and conviction because it was major news in the tabloids at the time. In the early eighties, a group of truck drivers took on a corrupt union in the garment trucking industry. One of the leaders of the insurgents, Richard Wright, was murdered shortly after he was elected president of the local union in a government monitored election. Devon Thomas killed him, the newspapers said, in a feud between rival gangs over drug territory.

  “No way I’d kill him,” Devon said. “I loved him like a father. Trey was a rat, a snitch. I didn’t know. Never thought it. Never suspected, until he got scared and told me. Told me his handler told him to off Richard.

  “When he told me, I wanted to kill Trey myself. You became a snitch because you were paid or you did it to keep yourself out of prison. His handler from the NYPD told Trey he’d get off. Then, something went wrong and the handler told Trey he’d have to plead to manslaughter. They’d get him out in three years.

  “Trey told me he whacked Richard and was going up for it. I couldn’t let him do it. I took the rap. I thought I’d get the same deal they told Trey, manslaughter, a three-year bid. Hah! I got life.”

  Devon’s hair, still kinky, had turned gray, tight curls now, where years before it was a giant Afro; his eyes were clear, still hard, still something friendly in them, too, a flash of kindness behind the hard; his skin darker than Ambler remembered, his features as much European as African, a slender nose, thin lips. He’d developed a prison body, muscular, athletic. As he talked, he’d reach out now and again, putting his hand on Ambler’s forearm to make sure he had his attention, to reinforce the connection. He did this now.

  “Trey got the AIDS. I got compassion leave to visit him in the hospice. He was out of his head a lot. Right before he died, he told me he didn’t kill Richard. They killed him.”

  “Who’s they?”

  Devon shook his head. “I don’t know. I got some ideas. I been going back over what happened back then. I’m using the prison library. But it’s slow. I thought you might see what you can find in that library of yours about what happened back then. I read about you. That’s what you do, right? You find out what really happened when someone was killed.”

  “Not exactly. You can tell the truth now, right? Your brother’s dead. You didn’t commit the murder.”

  Devon’s eyes locked on Ambler’s. “Who’d believe me?”

  Ambler nodded.

  “I know you, Ray. We were bros.” Devon laughed. It began as a kind of giggle, catching on like an uncertain motor until it became a chuckle, and then a full-out laugh. The sound of it rolled back the years to the endless summers he and Devon, baseball gloves and bats over their shoulders, rambled through Flatbush seeking out pick-up games in school yards and vacant lots, the nights they played stickball under the streetlights between the parked cars on East 19th Street off Beverley Road.

  * * *

  It was a long shot that Higgins knew anything about the murder Devon was in prison for. Still, it was worth asking. “Tell me about the collection,” Ambler said. “What’s in the papers? Is it about your undercover work?”

  “I kept a lot of things.” Higgins’s tight-lipped expression made clear he’d play his cards close to the vest. “Newspaper clippings, photos, tapes of conversations, transcripts, interviews I did with assets I handled, copies of reports I filed—”

  “Why would you do that, keep your own files?”

  “At first, it was for protection, to have my own record in case something came up.” He sized up Ambler. “Later, I saw it as material for stories I might write.” As he said this, he dropped his gaze, looking at the marble floor as he spoke, suddenly shy. “I have this idea that what I have here is history no one knows about, and won’t know about unless they find it here.”
/>   Ambler paid closer attention.

  “The thing is I’m not going to get anyone in trouble. I can’t do that. Some of what went on, people wouldn’t understand; maybe they will later, years from now. Those weren’t church picnics we infiltrated.”

  Ambler raised his eyebrows. “I imagine you infiltrated those, too.”

  Cosgrove chuckled. Higgins glanced sharply at Ambler. Menacing without making an effort at it, he was a hard, tough guy who didn’t need to prove it.

  “You might restrict parts of the collection until the statute of limitations runs out or—”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.” Higgins’s tone was matter-of-fact.

  Ambler snuck a glance at Cosgrove, who seemed to take the revelation in stride. Higgins’s wide-eyed expression was a burlesque of a boy trying to look angelic.

  Ambler nodded in the direction of the stairway. “Let’s go up to my office.”

  Halfway up the massive staircase, they ran into Adele Morgan and her friend Leila Stone, a research assistant in Manuscripts and Archives Division, on the way down. Adele stopped to say hello to Mike Cosgrove. Leila stopped for a second, glanced at them, and hurried on, so Adele, with an exasperated shrug, followed. The three men watched the two women descend the stairs.

  “Looks like we scared them off,” Cosgrove said.

  Ambler led Cosgrove and Higgins to the small reading room on the second floor that housed the library’s crime fiction collection. Bookcases lined the walls on one level; a narrow stairway like a fire escape led to a mezzanine level with wrought iron railings and more bookcase-lined walls.

  Higgins took in his surroundings with a kind of awe, as if he might take off his hat, if he wore one, and tiptoe to his seat; his reverence for the collection softened Ambler’s attitude toward him. They sat at an oak library table in the middle of the room.