information on his sentence or where he is being held. I was told you were the person to talk to.”
Frings let Puskis think about this and stared at the rugs hanging on the walls. A smell was in the air. Something that Puskis had cooked in the last few days—spices and meat and maybe rice.
Finally Puskis spoke. “I don’t have an answer for you, though that is information in itself.”
Frings looked up, confused.
Puskis continued. “There are twenty men who were convicted of murder during the years 1927 and 1928 and were not incarcerated.”
“What happened to them?”
Puskis shook his head with a look of profound distress. “I don’t know. Like you, I did research. I have access to the City’s official records. There is no question that it is a complete accounting of the affairs of the City’s legal system. Yet there is no record that any of these men are serving time.”
Frings’s breathing became shallow, his pulse fast. “Do you know the names of these men?”
Puskis recited the twenty names while Frings wrote them down in his pad. The man’s recall was amazing.
When he had finished the list, Puskis said, “At least one of the men is now deceased.”
Frings nodded for him to continue.
“Reif DeGraffenreid. I went to see him. He had been decapitated shortly before my arrival.”
Jesus. “Where did you find this DeGraffenreid?”
Puskis related the story of his journey to DeGraffenreid’s and his discovery of the corpse. His speech came in torrents, both hesitant and fast, like water under great pressure being forced through a small hole.
When the story was done, Frings asked, “How did you know where to find DeGraffenreid?”
“I received . . . it seems so obvious in hindsight . . . I received an anonymous phone call.”
“Do you think it was from DeGraffenreid?”
“No.”
“It was a setup? Trying to scare you off?”
“That would appear to be the case. Yes.”
Now it was Frings who paused. He was slightly high and had to assess what he had just learned. He had a number of questions and hoped that Puskis had already thought to look into them.
“When you did your research, was there anything about these men that seemed strange or that they had in common?”
Puskis scratched his temple. “Beyond what we just discussed?” He thought. “They were all gang murders. They were all part of the, uh, the gang war that was active at the time between the White Gang and the Bristols.”
Frings nodded and wrote, as much to keep Puskis talking as for his memory. “What else? Was there anything else?”
“There was a small thing.”
“Okay.”
“When I first discovered the DeGraffenreid file, it had a sentence notation of ‘life,’ followed by the acronym PN. PN is not an approved acronym and I was puzzled, but assumed that it was a typographical error because PB is an approved acronym and the B and N are adjacent on the typewriter. But as I continued to research these cases, I found that all of these men had received the same sentence notation: ‘life,’ followed by PN. It is clearly more than a coincidence, but I do not know what it means.”
When he was finished taking notes, Frings looked up at Puskis, who was visibly energized by this unloading of information.
Frings asked, “What do you think happened to these men?”
“My first assumption, as you might expect, was that they were executed. Perhaps in an, an extrajudicial manner.”
“But then you found DeGraffenreid alive. Or he had been alive.”
“Correct. He was indeed alive up until the time of my visit. He was living in the country.”
“So, your thoughts?” Frings prompted.
Puskis shrugged sadly. “I am not used to conjecture on the basis of such limited facts. Perhaps they were sent off to exile.”
“But why these particular men, Mr. Puskis? Why them?”
“I don’t know.”
They looked at each other for a minute, Frings sensing some kind of weird bond between them, wanting to give Puskis something in this exchange. Something that would cement this bond, make it possible for him to come back to Puskis later if he needed. Frings recognized a name from the list of twenty. He had information.
“One of the men on the list, Vampire Reid.”
Puskis lifted his thin eyebrows in query.
“Well, you said one of the men on your list is deceased. It’s actually two, at least. They found Reid a few years back out in the sticks somewhere. I remember it because they cut him up pretty good, like someone really had a thing for him.”
Puskis took this in with a grim expression.
“Just