Frank. You get the story, you tell me when it can run. I just make sure that it is okay. Good?”
“Okay.”
Panos opened his desk drawer and tossed a flask to Frings. “Dip the bill, Frank. You look terrible.”
Frings unscrewed the lid and took a pull. It tasted like gasoline and felt like molten lead in his stomach.
“Christ, Panos. What is this?”
Panos took the flask from Frings and had a drink himself, making a funny face and then smiling. “This man who lives in the alley by my house makes this in a still.”
“This is from a hobo’s still?”
Panos shrugged. “With what goes into your body, Frank . . .”
Frings shuddered a little from the lingering effects of the moonshine. “Okay. Have you ever heard of the Navajo Project?”
Panos frowned.
“Go back seven or eight years to the last couple of years of the war between the Whites and the Bristols. This is before Henry’s time. The mayor wanted to do something dramatic to stop all the gang hits. The prisons were filling up with cons on murder raps. The City had to take care of more and more widows and fatherless kids. The situation couldn’t last. So they instituted a secret program called the Navajo Project. What this was, was a system where certain people convicted of gang murders weren’t sent to prison. Instead, they were sent to these farms out of the City where they grow crops to support themselves—and here’s the real point of the program—to support the widows and orphans of the men they had murdered.”
Panos was nodding his head slowly, his eyes closed, concentrating on what Frings was saying.
“Go forward a couple of years to the Birthday Party Massacre. Red Henry has just become mayor. Some Whites think they find a way around the whole program. They just kill the entire family. No one to support, so if there’s a conviction, the killer goes to prison, which the Bristols and Whites pretty much run anyway. But they didn’t understand Red Henry, and you know the shit that he rained down on them. So that ends any new Navajo Project cases. But there’s still the people they’ve already farmed out.
“So about five years ago, maybe a little bit less, Henry gets this idea that the Navajo Project could work a little more to his advantage. He can make it more profitable by getting more money out of the convicts and spending less on the families of the deceased. So he does two things. One, he puts the widows in a sanitarium and the kids in orphanages. Two, he gets the convicts to grow a crop that will bring in more cash—marijuana.”
Frings expected a crack from Panos about reefer, but didn’t get one.
Frings continued, “Henry has his guy Smith run the program. Apparently Smith put some of the Navajo Project cons in charge of running the day-to-day and keeping the other ginks in line. Some of Smith’s boys go out to the sticks, make a pickup, and bring the reefer to the East Side for sale to the colored folks and whatever whites venture in there to buy.”
“Such as yourself,” Panos suggested.
“Of course. So now, with all this cash flooding in, they can use some of it to bankroll the sanitarium and orphanage and spread the rest out amongst themselves.”
“Who else besides Henry?”
“Who do you think? The usual: Block, Altabelli, Bernal.”
“This has something to do with the bombings, too, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, though here I’m guessing. The kid I met who is sort of the leader of these kids with the bombs is named Casper Prosnicki. His father was killed by Reif DeGraffenreid, who was a Navajo Project convict until he was murdered a few days back, out on his dope farm. I’ve got it on good authority that someone told those kids about the project and they think this is how they can get their story out and also get some payback.”
“You have proof? You know I can’t run this without a lot of proof. A lot.”
“I’ve got proof. But I’ll have more than that.”
Panos smiled. “Oh, shit, Frank. What are you thinking in that brain of yours?”
“I told you there were extenuating circumstances.”
Panos nodded and leaned back in his chair. Sweat stains had blossomed under his arms.
“They’ve got my girl.”
“Not the beautiful Nora Aspen?” Panos said, shocked.
Frings nodded. “They left a note. Said to drop this investigation or they’d hurt her.”
“But you continue.”
“Where would it end, Panos? If I cave, when do they let her go? When are