The Vaults (10 page)

Puskis quickly located DeGraffenreid’s case in the defendants’ index. The entry was unremarkable. An assistant DA had prosecuted, while DeGraffenreid’s attorney was a familiar name in trials involving criminals of this ilk. A senior judge, now deceased, had presided. The verdict was guilty of murder in the first degree. The courtroom notation, however, was unfamiliar:
NC.
He turned to the rear of the book, where the abbreviations were listed, but found no
NC
under the courtroom list. There was a
BC
(Banneker Wing, Room C), and Puskis considered the possibility that this was nothing more than a typographical error,
B
and
N
being adjacent on the typewriter keyboard. He decided he was willing to accept this explanation if his next inquiry produced unremarkable results.

Replacing
Criminal Court Verdicts—1927
, he then walked two rows down and found
Incarcerated Persons, City and State Correctional Facilities—1927
. A slimmer volume than the
Verdicts
records,
Incarcerated Persons
contained lists of all prisoners in jails and prisons, their institution, the terms of sentence, as well as their confinement and release dates, if they occurred during 1927. The search did not take long. He scanned the alphabetical list of prisoners, then the list of prisoners in each of the twenty-three facilities listed. DeGraffenreid’s name did not appear. Puskis placed the volume into his cart, then returned and collected
Criminal Court Verdicts—1927
.

Returning to his desk, he found that the courier had come and gone, taking the stack of files that Puskis had left for him and leaving a long list of new file requests. Puskis took the list and, before beginning his rounds, returned to the Stable to replace the two volumes. He had never been disturbed by anyone during his years in the Vaults, but understanding that these were becoming exceptional times, he did not want to be in possession of those books any longer than necessary.

“How you doing, Frankie?”

Frings shrugged. Reynolds, the cop in charge of the crime scene at Altabelli’s place, was an acquaintance of Frings’s. They used to drink at the same neighborhood bar uptown before Frings had become a celebrity and Reynolds had gone on the wagon.

“You still with Nora Aspen?”

Frings smiled, ready to shoot the shit. “Still am. Not sure why she keeps me around.”

Reynolds gave him a knowing look. The Theater District, usually so alive at night, was quiet this morning. The lights that attracted people to this or that theater were off, and where the usual throngs of tuxedos and furs milled around, waiting for the act 2 curtain, there were now merely a scattering of service people running errands, sweeping streets, stocking the bars with liquor. The streets here, impassable in the evening for all the theatergoers, were now impassable for the delivery trucks that stopped in the street, holding up traffic until their drop-offs were complete.

“You want to look around?” Reynolds asked.

Frings nodded.

“I’m going to have to walk with you. Word from the Chief says no one in the site without an escort.”

“Sure. We can talk.”

Some of the debris had already been cleared by the uniformed officers, about ten of whom were still sifting through fragments. Something was different about this site, Frings thought. Where Block’s building had been blown out into the street, this one seemed to be blown back into itself.

“This one,” Frings said. “The bomb was on the
outside
?” He was high. That was another problem with the migraines. He’d smoke a reefer to ease the headache, but then, when the headache was gone, he’d smoke because he liked being high. He had done that this morning, sitting on the fire escape outside Nora’s apartment with a juju as she showered. He’d tried to
act straight when she emerged and even thought he’d succeeded, though he couldn’t completely trust his perceptions. Which was part of the point. But it also undermined his confidence in his own reasoning, so he used Reynolds to validate his observations.

“That’s right. We think whoever it was put a bundle, maybe five sticks of dynamite in a bag, on the sidewalk and then lit a long fuse.”

“That square with the bomb at Block’s?”

Reynolds shrugged. “Well, that was dynamite, too. And, of course, there’s who they are, you know.” He looked to Frings, who nodded that, yes, he knew.

“Off the record, I think we’re pretty sure they’re connected.
On
the record, we’re exploring a connection. Got it?”

“Makes perfect sense.”

“At Block’s,” Reynolds went on, “the bundle was thrown through a window, already lit. Again, a long fuse.”

“So why not toss through Altabelli’s window, like Block’s?”

“Altabelli says he had bars across the windows. Says the Theater District can get a little dicey late at night.”

They walked to a jagged hole in the pavement where a flag was stuck into the rubble.

“The detonation point,” Reynolds said.

“What’re those?” Frings pointed to two chalked circles drawn just outside the detonation crater.

“Shit. Yeah. Two kids. Found what was left of them across the street, but they were literally blown out of their shoes. They must have been curious, you know, come to have a look, and then . . .” Reynolds left the obvious unsaid, a rueful look on his face.

“Jesus.” Frings repressed a shudder. He bent down and picked up a scorched brick. “What about Altabelli?”

“He’s fine. Working late, or so he says. One of the lads heard that they had to track him down at a cathouse on the edge of the Heights.”

Frings tossed the brick to the side. There was a smell of burned chemicals and scorched brick. His eyes had begun to water from it, and his throat burned with each breath of air. Reynolds seemed impervious.

Two kids dead. Two innocent kids dead, while Altabelli, off whoring, gets away scot-free. Except for the house, of course. But still . . .

Frings asked Reynolds, still looking at the hole in Altabelli’s apartment building, “Off the record, do you have any idea who this might be?”

Reynolds laughed. “I thought
you
knew. You wrote a goddamn column about it, didn’t you? The brass were steaming about
that
, I can tell you. They won’t like me beating my gums with you, neither, but they know we go way back. Anyone else, I don’t think you’re going to get too far. So, the unions? The anarchists? But who exactly, we don’t know. And the
why
, well, they don’t really need a why, do they?”

Frings frowned slightly, not willing to affirm the statement. They usually had their reasons, he thought, though these were never acknowledged by the police, or the City, or the newspapers, for that matter. Whether it was a true lack of understanding or willful ignorance, Frings could not say—though he had his suspicions.

Back at the barricades, a uniformed officer was shouting for Reynolds. After admonishing Frings not to poke around while he was gone, Reynolds hurried over to the wooden barriers. Frings watched them talk calmly enough, the urgency nonetheless plainly evident in their postures. Reynolds turned to him and beckoned with a wave of his arm. Frings hurried over, holding his hat on his head with one hand.

“Problem?”

Up close, Frings could see the stress lines between Reynolds’s thick eyebrows.

“Yeah, you could say that. Seems to be some trouble across town at the strike. It sounds like the ASU moved in, and there’s some street fighting. We’re being called in.”

The ASU was the Anti-Subversion Unit of the police department. While it technically reported to the Chief, it was a badly kept secret that it took orders directly from Red Henry, which was a constant source of tension within the force. Frings thought Reynolds didn’t seem enthusiastic about going to the ASU’s rescue. Then again, it might be the reefer.

“I’m coming with you,” Frings said.

“Suit yourself.”

It was an hour before Puskis returned to his desk with the two books. The procedure was simple. He opened the two books to the alphabetical index; the one on the left listed defendants convicted in court, and the one on the right listed inmates in correctional facilities. Having found that DeGraffenreid, who should by rights have been in prison, wasn’t, Puskis now wanted to see if anyone else shared this apparent good fortune. There were several.

He wrote their names down, eight in all—all convicted of murder, and none with records of incarceration. The names seemed familiar, but that was not surprising since everyone’s file would have passed through his hands at least once. It was unusual for Puskis to come across names that did
not
trigger some sort of recognition, however vague.

He carried the books back to the Stable and replaced them, then took out their counterparts for the following year, 1928. Back at his desk he made the same comparison as before and found twelve names. The last one he found was that of Otto Samuelson, who, convicted on July 18, had apparently never been incarcerated. He wrote down these twelve names, then returned to the Stable again, exchanging the 1928 volumes for the 1929 volumes.

The 1929 volumes, he discovered back at his desk, contained no cases of unincarcerated murderers. Still, to be sure that July 18, 1928, was the last of these incidences, he retrieved the 1930 volumes, but they too were in order. The next step would be to trace back to the first instance that he could find, but Puskis decided first to determine what it was, in reality, he was investigating. It was more than a clerical error, certainly, but that did not help him define the issue. In any case, he now had a list of twenty names, one of which—DeGraffenreid—he had already cross-referenced. Puskis took his cart and began to collect the other nineteen files.

The organizing principles for the files stored in the Vaults had been decided more than a half century previous and were the source of tremendous
debate. Two methods of organizing information were common at the time. The first was chronological—simply storing the information according to the order in which it was received. The second was by name—generally alphabetized by last name and then first name. Either of these was, in principle, perfectly efficient for the retrieval of any particular file. The controversy sprang from the desire on the part of certain key decision makers—primarily Thorpe and Krause—to make the organization of the files information in and of itself. To put it another way,
the way
the files were stored would provide information for the people using them.

This involved a classifying system. The most basic category, it was generally agreed, would be the offense. Murders, for instance, would be grouped together, as would rapes, assaults, kidnappings, and so forth. These groups were themselves categorized by the nature of the crime (violent crime, property crime, etc.). Then came issues of conviction and acquittal. It hardly made sense, for example, to group innocent men accused of murder with actual murderers. So categories were further divided.

What other information might be useful? Taking murder again as an example, how was that murder committed? Using a handgun, or knife, or baseball bat? What was the motivation behind the crime? Jealousy, or money, or revenge? In what part of the City did the crime take place? What time of day? Was it a solitary crime or one in a series of offenses? And, as later became crucial, was it a crime related to the activities of a broader criminal organization, and if so, which one?

By categorizing the files in this manner, it was reasoned, individuals with similar criminal habits would be filed with each other. This would allow for easy analysis of similar crimes and an even greater ability to create lists of possible suspects based purely on modus operandi: Describe the crime, find the proper file category, and you produced not only a list, but the actual files themselves. The system was almost magical in its precision and utility, so long as someone thoroughly understood all of its mechanisms, exceptions, and nuances. Given the number of crimes and individual criminals in the City over the past seventy years or so, the system had grown so complicated that even a man with an advanced aptitude, such as Puskis, took literally years to understand it fully. The product of constant revision and addition according to the individual whims of the successive Archivists, it required at once a mathematical and an intuitive sense, along with an empathic understanding of the specific psychology of the previous
Archivists. One had to think as his predecessors had to determine what their decisions would have been.

All this time and care and bother, and it had been invested for just such a moment as this.

Before collecting the files, Puskis consulted the
Master Index,
an annually produced volume listing, by last name of the perpetrator, the numbers for all the files generated in a given year. As intended, by merely listing the classification numbers of the files, he would be collecting provided information. To begin with, they were all C4000 series, the
C
designating a violent crime and the 4 designating murder. Further, they were all designated in the 500 category of the C4000 series, meaning that they were offenses that had the additional factor of organized crime. From this commonality the files diverged, but this information alone served as a valuable beginning point. Organized-crime-related murders up until July of 1928. Puskis was too distracted by his investigative process to notice the significance of that date.