Con Lehane - Murder in the Manuscript Room

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To Carlos R. Spaulding

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 nations 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 Librarys 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 buildings 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. Hed 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 wasnt stoned on weed, but he was a member, so Wright wouldnt blow the whistle and get him fired. If the kid didnt 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 ona drug program, getting guys clean and back to work, rather than firing them, losing them to the street.

The kid didnt 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 didnt 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, hed 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 manwhite shirt, blue tie with a pattern in gold, the front panel and arm of a dark blue suit jacket. At the end of the mans arm was a snub-nosed revolver that spat fire and bullets a half-dozen times.

The day had gone badly for Raymond Ambler, a bitterly cold, gray, January day not long after New Years, 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 hed 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 theyd come together under tragic circumstances when the boy was eight.

Hed 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 librarys 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 Johnnys grandmother, a wealthy socialite, was trying to undermine Amblers relationship with the boy so she could alter the terms of the custody agreement. So far, because Johnny wanted to live with Ambler, shed been unsuccessful. But she was relentless.