A Cold Case

In his first book, Philip Gourevitch investigated 800,000 murders. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families -- a best-seller, a prize-winner -- was a vivid report on the genocidal crimes of the Rwandan government. In his second book, he investigates only two killings, but with the same expert eye. Its title, A Cold Case, calls to mind In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's sensational 1965 account of a murder in Holcomb, Kan. While that masterpiece invariably influenced Gourevitch, he's on to something other than Capote's sprawling American gothicism. A Cold Case is a sliver of humanistic noir. Imagine a Law & Order episode written by Graham Greene and directed by the photographer Weegee.

The perp is Frankie Koehler, a career criminal born in Hell's Kitchen in 1929. His father, a burglar, spent much of Frankie's youth in prison, so the boy's chief role model was James Cagney. ''Koehler watched his gangster movies as if they were documentaries,'' Gourevitch writes. ''At the age of nine, he embraced Cagney's strutting, smart-mouthed persona as his ideal -- 'the thing I always wanted to be.' '' At age 15, he shot a friend and got sent to the Elmira Reformatory on a five-year hitch. Soon after his release, he was busted for armed robbery and did another 11 and a half years. He reentered low life in 1962 but steered clear of the law until Feb. 18, 1970. That night, Frankie resolved an etiquette dispute -- over the propriety of his making it with the wife of a jailed pal -- by killing his antagonists. Then he disappeared.

The cop is Andy Rosenzweig, a cabbie's son from Bronx Park East. Where Koehler was inspired by Cagney, Rosenzweig took his cues from Gary Cooper. ''[I]f you really want to understand what he's all about, you should be aware that sometimes, when the drink is in him, he is given to singing the theme song from the movie High Noon,'' Gourevitch reports. Rosenzweig identifies with Cooper's Sheriff Will Kane, ''an existential hero...with a peculiar twist; for, as he understands it, he does what he does not because he chooses to but because he feels he has no choice.'' A twist of fate, or maybe of chance -- Gourevitch has a nicely shadowed tone on cosmological matters -- has it that one of Frankie's victims was Andy's friend. One day in 1997, Rosenzweig, then chief of investigations for the Manhattan DA, remembered the murder and discovered that detectives had closed the case, assuming that Koehler was dead. So he reopened it.

It gives nothing away to write that Rosenzweig gets his man; the book's joys are not those of suspense and narrative tension but of character and narrative shape -- the zigzagging through the lives of people you could say were out of Damon Runyon if they didn't inhabit our earth. The most entertaining of these is Murray Richman, the lawyer known to gangsters and gangsta rappers as Don't Worry Murray. It is his pleasure to defend Koehler: '' 'Murder's my favorite. I love murder. Always one less witness to worry about.' ''

But is A Cold Case worth your 22 bucks? The book is lean. A dozen photos grace its 182 pages. Thirteen of those pages are blank. Four others contain only quotations, and those quotes come in several shades of irrelevance. More damaging: For every two digressions that illuminate a character, there's one with the spongy texture of padding. While the tale about the cop -- a friend of Rosenzweig's -- who preferred shooting himself in the head to ratting out corrupt colleagues could be a riveting book in itself, here, merely an anecdote, it's a non sequitur.

Such asides aside, the details dazzle. The fact that Koehler met his armed robbery accomplice at a Times Square movie house showing Gun Crazy (tag line: ''Thrill Crazy, Kill Crazy'') is perfect neon serendipity. It thrills because it is a fact, because of the garish glow it casts on the story of a cop and a hood, each driven by screen fiction, heading toward each other in the daylight of reality. Like they say, you can't make this stuff up.