The Vaults (26 page)

Nora shuddered and rolled over onto her side, staring at the wall. She began to think about how to escape.

That morning Frings came across a headline reading, “Woman Pulled from River Identified,” buried on page 11, with other minor news items printed below the obits. The woman had been found lying on the rocks at the river’s edge by indigents who were there to fish. The body had been identified, the article said, as that of Lena Prosnicki. No other information was given about her, not even an address, which was standard in these types of articles. The last name he recognized, to his concern, was the same as that of the boy he had talked to the previous night. He would have to look into it when he arrived at work.

Frings had been a little surprised not to find Nora, or at least a note, that morning. She might be at a number of places, at girlfriends of hers from her life before stardom. She might also be with a man. He had never known her to be unfaithful to him, but with their current unease with each other and the reality that she could have nearly any man at her whim, it seemed within the realm of possibility. Frings was not a jealous man, though, and his only anxiety in this regard was for losing her as a part of his life. And he wasn’t even sure how he felt about that.

She would be back, he knew, when he returned late that night from his meeting with Bernal.

Eddie, the assistant, was waiting for him at the door to the newsroom, more highly strung than usual. His hair was wildly askew.

“There are some people here from the mayor’s office to talk to you. They’re in Panos’s office waiting.”

Frings wasn’t surprised by the visit, given his column in that morning’s paper. But he began to sweat from his back and under his arms.

“Panos there?”

“Yep. They wanted to talk to you alone, but Panos wouldn’t have it.”

“Look. Do me a favor while I’m in there. Go down to the library and ask
Lonergan to dig out any article we have on Vampire Reid getting murdered a few years back. Can you do that for me?”

Ed nodded, and Frings headed for Panos and his visitors.

Panos’s office was silent when Frings walked in. Panos was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, eating an orange, the juice flowing down his chin. Two men in suits watched this spectacle with disgust. One was Smith. The other was a smaller man with a face like a terrier’s.

Panos pulled his feet from the desk and sat up. “Frankie,” he said with exaggerated cheer. “We have some people here to talk to us. Your names are what again? Smith and Rider?”

“Rivers,” said the Terrier sourly.

Nobody offered hands to shake.

Frings took a seat while Panos took another huge bite of orange.

“What can I help you fellas with?” Frings asked, all innocence.

Smith held up that morning’s
Gazette
. “In this article, you claim you spoke with the bombers.” Frings had filed the story just under the deadline for the final edition.

“That’s right. Last night, in fact.”

Smith leaned forward in his chair, his face red with rage. “I’m not playing, Frings. Who the hell are they? Where did you meet them? This is a matter vital to the safety of the citizens of this City.”

“It’s a matter of safety for your boss and his rich chums. If you’d read the story, you’d have that figured.”

“I’m trying to be patient. Who are they, Frings?”

“You know I’m not going to tell you that. I rat out my sources every time you came knocking, no one’s ever going to talk to me. I won’t be able to work. The chief’ll back me up on that one, too. Right, chief?”

Panos, who had started on a second orange and had his mouth full, muttered something unintelligible and nodded.

“This is not the time to be cute, Frings. You and that fat shit boss of yours think this is some kind of goddamn joke. You tell me who they are now, or you’re going to get hurt.”

Frings laughed. “Take a walk. You know you’re not going to get anything here.”

The Terrier was up and out of his chair and had a knife at the side of Frings’s face. The blade depressed, but did not cut, the skin. Their eyes met. Frings saw the man’s eagerness to inflict pain.

Panos stood.

“You want to try again?” Smith asked.

Frings said, “What, you’re going to have this maniac cut me right here in this office?” He moved his lips as little as possible as he spoke, not wanting to cut his face on the knife.

Smith nodded, and with his knife, the Terrier lifted the inside of Frings’s top lip, and with a subtle flick he sliced through it. Warm blood poured from the wound into Frings’s mouth and down his chin.

“Goddamn it,” Frings said, clutching his mouth and falling from his chair onto his knees, blood flowing through the gaps in his fingers at an alarming rate.

“Get the goddamn hell out of here,” Panos roared, rounding the desk to get to Frings.

“We’ll see you again,” Smith said, and the Terrier kicked Frings hard in the ribs. “Maybe then you’ll spill.”

Panos insisted on accompanying Frings to the hospital. A surgeon saw them almost immediately and put four stitches into Frings’s lip to stanch the bleeding, then left to track down some painkillers.

“It hurts?” Panos asked. Sympathy was an unusual side of Panos, and Frings found it a little unnerving.

“I’m not going to lie to you, Panos. But I appreciate your coming here with me.”

Panos made a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Panos, I saw something in the early edition today. It was a story on the skirt they pulled from the river. It had her name, but no address or anything else. Just a name.”

Panos scrunched up his face with suspicion. “What’s this about?”

“I’ll tell you after you answer the question.”

“You’re talking about that Parsnippy woman?”

“Prosnicki.”

“Right. There was no address. Nothing in the police report and we couldn’t track anything down. She wasn’t a bum.”

“What do you mean?”

“She lived somewhere. She wasn’t living in the streets.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw photos of her body. She was soft. She didn’t have the hardness they get when they are in the streets. She ate well, Frank. Or at least she ate
enough. And another weird thing, she was wearing a strange dress. Like a sack.”

“A sack?”

The doctor returned with a bottle of pills that Frings was to take for pain. Frings popped two, and the surgeon, horrified, admonished him to take them one at a time.

“Will it leave a scar on that pretty face he has?” Panos asked.

The surgeon looked startled and said that there would be a mark, but it wouldn’t be very noticeable if the healing went well. Panos looked relieved.

As they walked down the hospital corridor, Panos pointed to a woman in a hospital gown making her way down the hall on crutches. “Like that. That Parsnippy woman’s dress looked like that.”

By the time Frings was back at his desk, the painkillers had taken effect, his lip didn’t hurt, and he was in a pleasant daze. He found the envelope containing the pictures of Bernal. No message on his desk. The person who had taken the photos had not called.

Ed came by with a newspaper that he tossed onto Frings’s desk without a word. It took Frings a second to remember what this was about, and when he muttered, “Thanks,” the stitches pulling at his lip when he spoke, Ed had moved on into the newsroom’s labyrinth of desks.

Frings flipped through the paper until he found the article he was looking for under the headline “Madman Found Murdered.” The story was short and much as he remembered. Police in a rural hamlet called Centerville turned up the body of Trevor “Vampire” Reid in a shack on the edge of town after the neighbors complained of wild dogs howling and scratching at the door. The article made dark reference to “mutilations” and to his long criminal record in the City. It fit into the popular newspaper genre of “comeuppance,” and no question was raised as to why Reid was not in prison at the time. Not illuminating, but nice to have his memory confirmed.

Frings dug in his desk for a fresh sheet of paper that he fed into his Smith-Corona. He pulled out his notebook and typed out the list of twenty names that Puskis had dictated earlier. Ed was making the rounds again, and to his evident dismay, Frings waved him over.

“Go back down to Lonergan and take him this list,” Frings said. “I want anything from, say, the last five years on any of these ginks. Anything. Got it?”

Walking toward the Hollows, Poole realized that in the commotion over Enrique’s coerced visit to City Hall, he hadn’t called Frings about the photos. He found a phone box on an uncrowded corner, connected with the
Gazette,
and asked for Frings.

“Frings.” The voice was slurred, as if someone were holding his lips.

“You get my package?”

“Sure.”

“You’ve seen what’s inside?”

“Yes.”

“I guarantee they are the real McCoy. You need to see the negatives?”

“No. No, it’s fine. I just need to talk to you about them. Not over the phone.”

This triggered alarm bells. “There’s nothing to talk about. You print them or I send copies to the
News
or the
Trib
.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Poole frowned. This was bullshit. “Why not?”

“Listen, we need to meet. You name the place and time. I’ll come first, whatever.”

Poole thought about this.

Frings spoke again. “Look, I want to burn this guy as bad as you do, right? Just hear me out. I think this could work better for both of us.”

“Okay,” Poole relented. “You know the Hound and Fox?”

“Sure.”

“Six this evening. I’ll show up sometime afterwards.”

“I’ll buy.”

“Save your cash.” Poole hung up.

Finding a kid on the streets was an almost hopeless task. Poole needed to narrow the range of possibilities. He found himself walking toward the block where his prostitute friend Alice and four other young pros lived in a
run-down squat. Once the homes of laborers, these town houses had gone from modesty to squalor in the past decade.

A thin girl with a delicate face and skin the color of tea answered the door.

“I’m here to see Alice.”

“Alice is off duty,” she said, appraising him. “How about me?”

“That’s not it. I’m a friend of hers.”

“Sure you are. Like I told you. Shop closed.”

“How about this. Go tell Alice that Ethan Poole is here and that he just needs to ask her a couple of quick questions. If she doesn’t want to come out and talk to me, I’ll screw. Okay?”

The girl weighed this, then shut the door. Poole waited on the stoop, unsure if she was fetching Alice or simply ignoring him. Eventually the door opened again and it was Alice, looking as if she’d just rolled out of bed.

They sat together on a couch in the living room with the other girl, Mem, in a chair opposite them.

“I’m looking for a kid named Casper Prosnicki.”

“Don’t know him,” Alice said, and looked at Mem, who shrugged.

“I need to find him. He used to be at a place called St. Mark’s. The boys there say he’s on the streets somewhere.”

“St. Mark’s is a bad place,” Mem said with a tone that spoke of experience. “He’s better off anywhere than there.”

“If he left St. Mark’s, is there anywhere in particular that you think he might go?”

Mem shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Alice asked, “How old is he?”

“Fourteen or so, I think.”

“Because sometimes kids that age, they like to stay together in groups. Makes them feel a little safer from the adults. When I was on the streets, there were a few places that you knew you could go to find other kids your age. You figured if you were around them, there was less chance that some adult was going to get his hands on you.”

“That’s true,” Mem agreed. “There were places. Let’s see. If you were at St. Mark’s, you would probably go somewhere pretty close.”

“Maybe the warehouses,” Alice said. Mem nodded.

“The warehouses?” Poole asked.

Mem was excited now. “That’s right. Back where the old tracks are. There’s blocks of these warehouses. There’s nothing in them now but people. Groups of people. There’s a lot of those warehouses, but he might just be in one of them.”

As he was getting up to leave, Alice said, “We were just about to smoke our last reefer. Want in?”

Poole shook his head. He’d never smoked reefer and didn’t plan to.

“Okay.” Alice shrugged.

“You know,” said Mem, “hold on to that. I’m going to take a ride and roust some more, so we don’t run out.”

Alice seemed satisfied with this, and Mem followed Poole out the door.

“You need a cab?” Poole asked.

Mem smiled and nodded. Poole stood at the curb and eventually flagged one down. Mem hopped in the back and Poole leaned through the shotgun window to talk to the hack, dropping a five on the passenger seat.