on his interlaced fingers resting on his knees.
“What’re you thinking, Floyd?”
“This scenario you’re telling me about. It reminds me of a story I heard here from one of the rummies. A fella who does some work for me sometimes and I give him free drinks. Anyway, John—that’s the rummy—comes back one day from doing some work out in the sticks. He does that, picks up with construction gangs, and they bring them to this place or that. So he says he’s out in the country—some town, I don’t think he even said what town it was—working on a crew that’s putting up this church in a lot right next to this garage. He says they take a break around noon for lunch, and they’re all sitting under this old oak tree for the shade ’cause it’s so damn hot. And this oak tree is actually on the garage’s property. So he’s eating his lunch when this truck pulls up to get gas, and he tells me that he wouldn’t believe it if he hadn’t seen it, but out steps ‘Blood Whiskers’ McAdam. Still has those big red whiskers, though he says they’re going a little gray, and those little peepers he’s got. Anyway, John knows Whiskers because I used to send him downtown to pay my subscription fee to ol’ Whiskers so that my bottles show up when they’re supposed to. So he says that Whiskers sees him and knows that John knows who he is, and John says he gets all red in that scary way that Whiskers has, and John gets ready to take a beating. Then, he says, Whiskers just gets back in his car and drives away. And that’s that.”
Frings recognized Blood Whiskers from the list that Puskis had given him. “And Whiskers had been convicted for murder.”
“Correct. I remember it, too, because there were a lot of happy people thinking he was going away for good or maybe even taking the juice. And then no one sees him for a few years, until John sees him out in the sticks, driving some old farmer’s truck.”
“You’re sure that your buddy wasn’t mistaken? Maybe it was someone else?”
“You ever meet Whiskers?”
“No.”
“Well, he’s not the kind of guy you get confused with anybody else. He is a uniquely scary individual. A bad gee if I’ve ever seen one.”
“I think I need to get together with your friend John.”
“Sorry, Frankie, you’re going to have to wait to meet him in heaven.”
“He’s dead?”
“Died of pneumonia a couple of years back.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Excerpt from Van Vossen, A History of Recent Crime in the City (draft):
We will take a brief diversion to examine a personage who has been mentioned in either a central or peripheral role frequently in this narrative to date—Sam “Blood Whiskers” McAdam, known as Whiskers. A more violent predator this City has never seen, nor likely, God willing, ever will.
McAdam disavows any knowledge of his parents, and, indeed, many of his victims have questioned whether such a man as McAdam could actually spring from human loins. The speculation of experts on matters such as these suggests that he was the child of a prostitute named Ada Toddle. The father could have been nearly any of the men who worked the river wharfs and visited the professional ladies who plied their trade there. Limited time spent in an attempt to identify anyone named McAdam working on the wharfs during the appropriate period—approx. 1885–87—has been unsuccessful.
Regardless, Whiskers McAdam was one of the legion of street urchins who haunted the Hollows and upper Capitol Heights before the Turn of the Century. His first City incarceration occurred at the age of eleven, though the file from this incident—the robbery and beating of a man by a gang of six young boys—indicates that he was well-known to the police even at this tender age. His first murder is thought to be the stabbing death of a procurer named St. Jean when McAdam was thirteen. There began an unmatched campaign of violence that led to McAdam’s control, personally and without thugs, of twenty square blocks in Little Lisbon and the western Capitol Heights. We have previously attended to the deaths of many of the figures that McAdam removed on his way up the ranks: Cerone, Coehlo, Kaladze, Bauer, and others. A greater number were maimed or simply intimidated by McAdam’s violent and unpredictable nature.
The nickname Blood Whiskers is commonly thought to refer to his pronounced, red whiskers. This may account for the duration of this moniker,