was Whiskers. Poole had known him before Whiskers had finally been sent away. He cringed at the thought of Whiskers around children. What had he been doing?
“Did he want you to hurt those men?”
The boy made that affirmative grunt again. “He brings the bombs. He showed us how to make them work.”
“He brought you the stuff for the bombs and showed you how to make them and told you who to use them on?”
Whiskers was using children to get his revenge on Red Henry and the whole cabal. Poole took off his hat, rubbed his bandaged left hand through his hair, and replaced the hat at the angle he liked.
“Are the rest of the bombs at the warehouse?”
“Nah.”
“They’re not?”
“The man came by today and took them. He came today.”
Jesus Christ. Whiskers had come by to retrieve his bombs, which meant that he had either given up on the kids or was in some kind of hurry. To do what? The obvious answer raised a number of troubling questions—first among them, should Poole do anything about it? Let actions take their course and it could be a great favor to Carla.
He was still digesting this information when he heard the scrape of footsteps on the granite steps outside.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Frings headed straight to the bar. He’d timed his arrival pretty well, he thought. The armory was humming with the City’s elite and beautiful. He’d managed to arrive during the interval between the first wave of the punctual and the second wave of the fashionably late. In an hour the place would be teeming. Now it was merely crowded.
He got a scotch on the rocks and worked his way to some breathing room at the edge of the crowd. His relative anonymity without Nora was almost nostalgic. With Nora, Frings would have been making small talk with wives and friends and hangers-on while Nora went through her act of harmless flirtation with the men and girl-to-girl intimacy with the women. He was grateful for the lack of attention at the moment, though it made him think of Nora and how crucial his upcoming confrontation with Red Henry would be.
Tannen, with the News, appeared out of the crowd with two pints of beer. A small man in an oversize suit, he’d carefully trimmed his mustache so that it was merely a line tracing his upper lip.
“Howdy, Frank,” he said, proffering one of the beers.
Frings placed his empty whiskey glass on a ledge and accepted the beer, nodding in thanks.
“Congrats on finding the bombers,” Tannen said. “You scooped us on that one.”
The Gazette scooped the News on just about everything, Frings thought. That was the price the News paid for being the unofficial official newspaper of Red Henry. Lots of access, little news.
“Good fortune,” Frings said.
“Don’t be so modest, Frank. We make our good fortune, you know that as well as I do. And you, Frank, make the best fortune of anybody. I always tell people, ‘I don’t know how he does it.’ But you do it, Frank. Again and again you do it. What’s the secret?”
Frings scanned the crowd as Tannen talked, hoping that he would take the hint and leave. “There’s no secret. You just plug away and sometimes something turns up.”
Tannen laughed. “That’s right. Plug away. Something turns up. From what I hear, sometimes you don’t even have to plug away before something turns up. Sometimes you walk into your office and someone has sent you a letter and promises to let you in on all the secrets. How does one make that kind of luck, Frank? Surely it just doesn’t happen.”
Frings returned his attention to Tannen. “Sometimes, people make decisions based on what they’ve seen of you. Sometimes, if you work hard to establish a reputation, people trust you and want you to tell their story. Is that what you’re asking me?”
“I see,” Tannen said, and Frings suddenly realized the extent of the little man’s intoxication. “But that couldn’t happen with me, I suppose. That couldn’t happen with Erroll Tannen at the News because I’ve got the mayor’s cock in my hand and I’m giving it the back-and-forth. Nobody’s going to trust that kind of story to me.”
Frings shrugged. “You do things your way, I do things mine. I’m not making any judgments.”
“Like hell you’re not,” Tannen said loudly, attracting some attention now. “People are getting pretty sick of this self-righteous crap you’re throwing around, Frank. Your time in the limelight is nearing its end.”
“Thanks for the beer,” Frings said, and