hell out of here,” Panos roared, rounding the desk to get to Frings.
“We’ll see you again,” Smith said, and the Terrier kicked Frings hard in the ribs. “Maybe then you’ll spill.”
Panos insisted on accompanying Frings to the hospital. A surgeon saw them almost immediately and put four stitches into Frings’s lip to stanch the bleeding, then left to track down some painkillers.
“It hurts?” Panos asked. Sympathy was an unusual side of Panos, and Frings found it a little unnerving.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Panos. But I appreciate your coming here with me.”
Panos made a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Panos, I saw something in the early edition today. It was a story on the skirt they pulled from the river. It had her name, but no address or anything else. Just a name.”
Panos scrunched up his face with suspicion. “What’s this about?”
“I’ll tell you after you answer the question.”
“You’re talking about that Parsnippy woman?”
“Prosnicki.”
“Right. There was no address. Nothing in the police report and we couldn’t track anything down. She wasn’t a bum.”
“What do you mean?”
“She lived somewhere. She wasn’t living in the streets.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw photos of her body. She was soft. She didn’t have the hardness they get when they are in the streets. She ate well, Frank. Or at least she ate enough. And another weird thing, she was wearing a strange dress. Like a sack.”
“A sack?”
The doctor returned with a bottle of pills that Frings was to take for pain. Frings popped two, and the surgeon, horrified, admonished him to take them one at a time.
“Will it leave a scar on that pretty face he has?” Panos asked.
The surgeon looked startled and said that there would be a mark, but it wouldn’t be very noticeable if the healing went well. Panos looked relieved.
As they walked down the hospital corridor, Panos pointed to a woman in a hospital gown making her way down the hall on crutches. “Like that. That Parsnippy woman’s dress looked like that.”
By the time Frings was back at his desk, the painkillers had taken effect, his lip didn’t hurt, and he was in a pleasant daze. He found the envelope containing the pictures of Bernal. No message on his desk. The person who had taken the photos had not called.
Ed came by with a newspaper that he tossed onto Frings’s desk without a word. It took Frings a second to remember what this was about, and when he muttered, “Thanks,” the stitches pulling at his lip when he spoke, Ed had moved on into the newsroom’s labyrinth of desks.
Frings flipped through the paper until he found the article he was looking for under the headline “Madman Found Murdered.” The story was short and much as he remembered. Police in a rural hamlet called Centerville turned up the body of Trevor “Vampire” Reid in a shack on the edge of town after the neighbors complained of wild dogs howling and scratching at the door. The article made dark reference to “mutilations” and to his long criminal record in the City. It fit into the popular newspaper genre of “comeuppance,” and no question was raised as to why Reid was not in prison at the time. Not illuminating, but nice to have his memory confirmed.
Frings dug in his desk for a fresh sheet of paper that he fed into his Smith-Corona. He pulled out his notebook and typed out the list of twenty names that Puskis had dictated earlier. Ed was making the rounds again, and to his evident dismay, Frings waved him over.
“Go back down to Lonergan and take him this list,” Frings said. “I want anything from, say, the last five years on any of these ginks. Anything. Got it?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Walking toward the Hollows, Poole realized that in the commotion over Enrique’s coerced visit to City Hall, he hadn’t called Frings about the photos. He found a phone box on an uncrowded corner, connected with the Gazette, and asked for Frings.
“Frings.” The voice was slurred, as if someone were holding his lips.
“You get my package?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve seen what’s inside?”
“Yes.”
“I guarantee they are the real McCoy. You need to see the negatives?”
“No. No, it’s fine. I just need to talk to you about them. Not over the phone.”
This triggered alarm bells. “There’s nothing to talk about. You print them or I send copies to the News or the Trib.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Poole frowned. This was bullshit. “Why not?”
“Listen, we need to meet. You name the place and time. I’ll come first, whatever.”
Poole