I don't like to leave things hanging and I thought it might make it a little less hard to retire if I got
    this thing settled.
        -Andy Rosenzweig, A Cold Case

In this short but surprisingly affecting book, Philip Gourevitch examines just one "cold case", a twenty seven year old double murder that has bothered Andy Rosenzweig since it occurred.  In 1970, after an argument in a bar, Frank Koehler met the two men he'd been in the earlier confrontation with and left them, Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn, dead on the floor of McGinn's apartment.  Koehler then disappeared.  Rosenzweig was just a patrolman then, but Glennon had attended his wedding, so the failure of police to ever capture Koehler was galling.  In 1997, with his retirement just around the corner, Rosenzweig was on his way to the doctor's office and passed by the restaurant where the original argument had occurred, recalling, for the first time in a while, that Koehler had still never been brought in, Rosenzweig, by now the chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney, determined to finally close this case in his waning days on the job.

This is an unusual kind of crime story.  There's no mystery : we know who the culprit is in the first few pages.  All the violence and most of the action takes place early on too.  There's a little bit of courtroom drama, but it's mostly kept off stage.  Instead, the book is mostly a profile of a few fascinating characters.  Rosenzweig dominates the book's first half, a nearly perfect cop--honest, hardworking, and dedicated to the ideal of justice.  It is his personal obsession with seeing that Koehler pays for the murder of Glennon that drives the story.  He's kind of the positive version of Javert in Les Miserables.

In the second half, with Koehler at last arrested and facing trial, it is the criminal who dominates.  Frank Koehler, who had already done time for a murder he committed as a teenager, comes across as a cold-blooded killer, who, even now, in his 70s, contemplated shooting it out with the officers who came to arrest him in Penn Station or, before that, killing a cop a day until they agreed to stop pursuing him.  In what Gourevitch says law enforcement officials consider a textbook depiction of the criminal mind, Koehler gives a videotaped confession in which he expresses no contrition about the original crime and seems to think he deserves credit for the killings he contemplated but didn't commit.

But then, once he's imprisoned, Koehler shows a surprisingly spiritual side to his nature.  Though Gourevitch, thankfully, never lets him off the hook for his violent past, he does show Koehler to be a more complex man than we might wish to believe.  One particular facet of his personality that should give us all pause is that he appears to have modeled his behavior on that of characters in old gangster movies, like James Cagney.  It makes you wonder what kids who learn their values from today's pop culture will be like.

This latter part of the book introduces another interesting character, defense attorney Murray Richman.  Amusingly free of any scruples about the work he does, representing admitted criminals, Richman provides some comic relief to the story and serves as kind of a moral bridge between the two main characters, straddling the line between the Law and the bad guys.

Much of this first appeared in The New Yorker, for which Gourevitch is a staff writer, and it has the feel of a stretched out magazine piece, even if a superior one.  I wouldn't have minded hearing more about all three of these men, but I suppose it's better to leave us wanting more than overstuffed.

(Reviewed:28-Aug-01)

Grade: (A-) Orrin C. Judd

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