The Vaults Read online

  “Sir?”

  Henry remained silent.

  “It was Altabelli’s apartment.” Altabelli ran a meat-processing factory. Along with Block and Bernal and a few others, he was part of Henry’s inner circle.

  “Was he there?”

  “Sir, yes, he was. But he’s okay. He was in the john, I guess, and now he’s at the hospital, but they said it was only a precaution.”

  Henry’s skin prickled with heat. “Call the Chief. Tell him my office in an hour.” He hung up the phone.

  “What was that?” Siobhan asked, without looking up from her book. Henry ignored her and walked into his bedroom, where he had a better view of Altabelli’s neighborhood. Sure enough, a spire of smoke was rising up over the Theater District. He watched the smoke for several minutes, its undulations focusing his thoughts somehow, as he considered just how furious his response would need to be to maintain order in the City.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  At this very hour of the night, in an airless sitting room illuminated by the flickering light of an oil lamp, Joos Van Vossen flipped through page after page of his tight, meticulous script. Something he had come across needed attention; a detail that had eaten at him throughout the afternoon and evening, its implication unclear. Only as he prepared to retire for the night did the context finally come to him, and now he found the pertinent passage, several hundred pages back.

  Typical of a certain type of criminal known colloquially as a “block boss” is Reif DeGraffenreid, who held sway over four blocks on Delft Avenue between Trafalgar and Wellington streets. As with others of his particular type, he collected protection money, kept book, and served as an intermediary for residents who had some concern to take before the gang bosses. The block boss would pay the gangs, either the Bristol Gang or the White Gang or sometimes both, a percentage of his takings and would make himself scarce when they sent their hard men in to do some of the heavy business.

  DeGraffenreid’s career was unspectacular when compared to those of his fellow block bosses, though the standard they set was, of course, high. He was purportedly the lover of Janey May Overstreet—known as Queenie—who owned the Bull Ring Saloon, a favorite among hoodlums and roustabouts. This claim is subject to some suspicion as the sum total of her reported assignations and the jealousies they would have inspired surely would have raised the City’s homicide rate noticeably. Nevertheless, this rumor puts in perspective his reputation as a peer of such notables as Jimmy McQuaid in lower Capitol Heights, Hamish Berry (who, in fact, was himself briefly married to Queenie Overstreet), and Johnny Acton, and, in deed, though not style, of Trevor “Vampire” Reid.

  As was the case with all block bosses, DeGraffenreid was compelled to tread a careful line during the escalating violence between the Bristol Gang and the White Gang. Initially, as was the case with so many others, he endeavored to ingratiate himself to both sides by performing small tasks unlikely to upset either one too much, such as his alleged arson of the restaurant owned by the Hungarian named Praeger—who had endeavored to run a book without paying either gang its “vig.”

  In the end, he fell in with the Bristols, ended the flow of cash from his blocks to the Whites, and performed menial services. His call to greater action, and the eventual end of his criminal career, came when he was ordered to murder the husband of a cousin, Ellis Prosnicki, who was suspected of being a police informant.

  DeGraffenreid shot Prosnicki in an alley off Delft Avenue and was arrested within forty-eight hours on the evidence of several eyewitnesses after they were assured by Bristol thugs that they would not be subject to retribution. DeGraffenreid was convicted and thus ends his story for our purposes.

  Dipping his pen into a well of green ink, Van Vossen took out a fresh sheet of paper. The case of Ross Carmargue, he wrote, who was running prostitutes on DeGraffenreid’s blocks, confirmed that Prosnicki had received money from the police in exchange for information. However, Prosnicki’s informing did not, ironically, extend to the books being run out of several Bristol-associated restaurants, the transgression of which he actually stood accused.

  Finishing this, Van Vossen marked the appropriate sentence with a footnote and put away his work for the night.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Puskis returned to work to find three full pages of file requests. In a deviation from his normal routine, he spent several minutes reordering the slips so that he could make a single, efficient trip to fulfill the requests; he wanted some time between completing this round and the next that would surely come in the midmorning. The second bombing would increase the force’s work exponentially.

  As he began his circuit, pushing the squeaking cart before him, he thought about the sensation of fear that he had experienced the previous night. Fear. In his twenty-seven years at the Vaults, he had not once felt fear. Anxiety, pressure, fatigue—all disagreeable states, to be sure—had visited him at one time or another. But never fear. Even now, with the experience so recent, he found he could not summon up the actual feeling, could not remember precisely what it had felt like. This may have been why the blood-etched warning to desist had little effect on him. If anything, it only served to drive him forward.

  Having collected the files, Puskis returned to his desk to reorder them in the sequence in which they had been requested. This done, he placed the lot in a box labeled OUTGOING and returned to the shelf holding C4583R series, subseries A132, where he had earlier that morning returned the two DeGraffenreid files. Removing the DeGraffenreid file that contained the picture of the real DeGraffenreid, he placed it into the wire cart and headed to the southeast corner of the Vaults, where institutional records were kept.

  Unlike the files—which were full of loose sheets of paper and were constantly added to—the institutional records were hardbound tomes that served as official records of criminal-justice activity in the City. Puskis pulled a heavy, black-leather-bound edition from its shelf. The spine read, in gold inlay, Criminal Court Verdicts—1927.

  The janitors treated the leather bindings of these books on a rotating basis to ward off any cracking or deterioration, so that the entire southeast corner smelled of leather and protective oils. Abramowitz had called this area the Stable. Puskis himself had never been in a stable, but assumed that Abramowitz had been correct in his association.

  The first half of Criminal Court Verdicts—1927 was composed of indexes that organized the verdicts by last name of the defendant, last name of the judge, charge against the defendant, City district in which the crime took place, and so forth. The second half of the book was a chronological list of the verdicts, including the charge(s), names of prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendant, judge, courtroom, and any additional minutiae that could be of possible interest. The only pieces of information missing from the listings were the names of jurors, who were kept anonymous for their own protection.

  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 alphabe
tical 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.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “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.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  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 re
trieved 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?