A COLD CASE.

A COLD CASE by Philip Gourevitch Farrar Straus & Giroux, $22.00

FRANKIE KOEHLER IS THE hoodlum you watched on Saturday afternoons when you had a black-and-white TV. He was the lanky white guy in a wool suit who was always staging a heist or plugging a tough-talking nobody before speeding away in a dark sedan. He did it because he never got no respect, see? And no copper was ever going to get him, see?

Except the coppers usually got him, unless some dirty-dealing thug got him first.

Check out the real Koehler. He spent nearly half the 1940s behind bars for a teenage murder, then nearly the entire 1950s for armed robbery. Freed in 1962, he stole freight, ran rackets, and lived the good life. He said "woid" for word and "noive" for nerve and, one angry night in 1970, opened fire on two of his buddies. He left them dead in a Manhattan apartment ... and got away.

Enter Andy Rosenzweig, 27 years later. Meticulous, thoughtful, and wistfully close to retirement, the chief of investigations in the district attorney's office was headed uptown on First Avenue one day when something reminded him of the old killing. Jeez, no one had ever caught Frankie? He returned to his office and made a call. With that, the real-life chase is on and Philip Gourevitch has himself a fine cops-and-robbers story.

A Cold Case explores the intersecting lives of a cop and a crook seasoned in another era. Rosenzweig, who dodged iniquity, in the New York Police Department in the 1960s, calls Koehler "a period piece, the ultimate West Side bad guy." The investigator figures retirement will feel better if he tracks a killer whom detectives long ago gave up for dead, either out of laziness or pressure to boost closure rates.

Portrayed as a moral man, frustrated by the institution but committed to the cause, Rosenzweig proves modern in his notions of foot patrols and the drawbacks of policing a community from behind a squad car's rolled-up windows. He shows his competitive edge when he repeatedly takes his wife to a diner near the house of Koehler's brother--because, he says, you never know who you'll see through the window while you're eating.

One of Gourevitch's great discoveries as he sketches the pursuer and the pursued is Rosenzweig's love since adolescence of High Noon. In the film, Gary Cooper is a nearly retired sheriff who sets out to save an unforgiving town from an outlaw gang. Meanwhile, as Koehler grew up reckless and poor in Hell's Kitchen, his hero was Jimmy Cagney, the prototypical movie gangster whose personality shadows Koehler deep into his own life of crime and years on the run.

It was serendipity that cost Koehler his freedom at age 68. Without Rosenzweig's itchy curiosity about the killings of Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn, Koehler almost certainly would have died undiscovered. Rosenzweig's quest rippled outward. The chase and capture of Frankie Koehler unexpectedly rocked the lives of intimates who had long since made their peace, however uneasily, with the events of 1970.

Then comes the issue of responsibility. In this period after the court-ordered killing of Timothy McVeigh, amid debate about the means and purposes of punishment, Gourevitch writes of a jailhouse conversation with Koehler about being held accountable. The prospect of Koehler dying behind bars did not seem unfair to Gourevitch, and he asked Koehler whether he saw justice in the long-delayed reckoning.

"Justice? Justice for injustice?" Koehler asked. "Is there a justice for taking a life? What would be just?" Behind bars, Koehler flails about, writing a letter to Gourevitch about a hapless suicide attempt and concluding, "What my fate should be, I must say, I don't know." Gourevitch does not seem to know either, and chooses not to explore much further.

This is not an ambitious book. Gourevitch, a writer for The New Yorker, teases an engaging yarn from a simple set of details and a choice group of characters who never stray far from stereotype. The grizzled, two-bit tough; the dogged, old-school detective and his energetic young proteges; the long-suffering wife and the speak-no-evil girlfriend; the theatrical mob lawyer. The movie should be swell.

As the narrative dips into Rosenzweig's late-career musings and Koehler's post-arrest rationalizations, the narrator himself walks softly, doing little to disturb the evidence or the evidence-givers. Rosenzweig talks, Koehler talks, defense lawyer Murray Richman talks. It is a smooth, sparingly written story, but if Gourevitch had only dug deeper, everyone--including the accomplished author--might have had more to say.

PETER SLEVlN is a reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post.