Free The Vaults by Toby Ball Page B

Carmargue,
he wrote,
who was running prostitutes on DeGraffenreid’s blocks, confirmed that Prosnicki had received money from the police in exchange for information. However, Prosnicki’s informing did not, ironically, extend to the books being run out of several Bristol-associated restaurants, the transgression of which he actually stood accused.
    Finishing this, Van Vossen marked the appropriate sentence with a footnote and put away his work for the night.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

    Puskis returned to work to find three full pages of file requests. In a deviation from his normal routine, he spent several minutes reordering the slips so that he could make a single, efficient trip to fulfill the requests; he wanted some time between completing this round and the next that would surely come in the midmorning. The second bombing would increase the force’s work exponentially.
    As he began his circuit, pushing the squeaking cart before him, he thought about the sensation of fear that he had experienced the previous night. Fear. In his twenty-seven years at the Vaults, he had not once felt fear. Anxiety, pressure, fatigue—all disagreeable states, to be sure—had visited him at one time or another. But never fear. Even now, with the experience so recent, he found he could not summon up the actual feeling, could not remember precisely what it had felt like. This may have been why the blood-etched warning to desist had little effect on him. If anything, it only served to drive him forward.
    Having collected the files, Puskis returned to his desk to reorder them in the sequence in which they had been requested. This done, he placed the lot in a box labeled OUTGOING and returned to the shelf holding C4583R series, subseries A132, where he had earlier that morning returned the two DeGraffenreid files. Removing the DeGraffenreid file that contained the picture of the real DeGraffenreid, he placed it into the wire cart and headed to the southeast corner of the Vaults, where institutional records were kept.
    Unlike the files—which were full of loose sheets of paper and were constantly added to—the institutional records were hardbound tomes that served as official records of criminal-justice activity in the City. Puskis pulled a heavy, black-leather-bound edition from its shelf. The spine read, in gold inlay,
Criminal Court Verdicts—1927
.
    The janitors treated the leather bindings of these books on a rotating basis to ward off any cracking or deterioration, so that the entire southeastcorner smelled of leather and protective oils. Abramowitz had called this area the Stable. Puskis himself had never been in a stable, but assumed that Abramowitz had been correct in his association.
    The first half of
Criminal Court Verdicts—1927
was composed of indexes that organized the verdicts by last name of the defendant, last name of the judge, charge against the defendant, City district in which the crime took place, and so forth. The second half of the book was a chronological list of the verdicts, including the charge(s), names of prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendant, judge, courtroom, and any additional minutiae that could be of possible interest. The only pieces of information missing from the listings were the names of jurors, who were kept anonymous for their own protection.
    Puskis quickly located DeGraffenreid’s case in the defendants’ index. The entry was unremarkable. An assistant DA had prosecuted, while DeGraffenreid’s attorney was a familiar name in trials involving criminals of this ilk. A senior judge, now deceased, had presided. The verdict was guilty of murder in the first degree. The courtroom notation, however, was unfamiliar:
NC.
He turned to the rear of the book, where the abbreviations were listed, but found no
NC
under the courtroom list. There was a
BC
(Banneker Wing, Room C), and Puskis considered the possibility that this was nothing more than a typographical error,
B
and
N
being adjacent on the typewriter