Sally Spencer: Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street

There was no doubt that Rudge had been very badly burned. Large sections of his hypodermis had been destroyed, sometimes down to the bone — but at least the bones themselves hadn’t been turned to ash.

What exactly was she looking for? she asked herself, as she pored over the report.

Something that would help pull Sam out of the shit, she answered.

And while she had no idea what that something might be, she hoped she would recognize it when she saw it.

If Rudge had been murdered, as Blackstone suspected, then he must either have been knocked unconscious before the fire was started, or else tied up so that he could not escape from it. If the latter had occurred, then any evidence of it would have been burned away. But if it was the former, it would have been noted in the section of the report dealing with the skull.

The young doctor had found no signs of any damage to Rudge’s cranium. The only injury he commented on at all was a slight chipping of the right scapula — but that could have happened long before Rudge met his death.

‘This isn’t going to help, Sam,’ she sighed.

And you were an optimistic fool to ever think it would, she added silently.

It was as she was reading about the pelvis that she began to feel a slight, familiar tingle, and by the time she had reached the description of the fibula, it had become a positive itch.

If she’d listened correctly to what Sam had had to say about Rudge, then she was definitely on to something, she told herself.

But what if she’d misheard or misunderstood, which was always possible?

There was only one way to find out for sure — and that was to ring Sam.

But when she placed the call through to the Mulberry Street police headquarters, the switchboard operator told her that the inspector’s line was engaged.

Except for the times when Blackstone interrupted her with a question, Mrs Turner talked solidly for another five minutes. She did not always keep to the point. Sometimes she spoke with the voice which imitated an evangelic preacher’s. At others she would suddenly transform herself into the poor lonely widow she actually was. But sandwiched between the righteous fire of indignation and the tragic expression of loss there were words which — to an investigator — were pure gold.

When Blackstone hung up the phone, there was a smile on his face. He could never remember a case in which one piece of information had made so much difference — in which one single fact could change the whole way he looked at the investigation and provided him with the answers he had been so desperately searching for.

He thought about Inspector Flynn and his theory.

Flynn had said that the kidnapping had been faked — and he had been quite right.

Flynn had said that the reason it had needed to be faked was that William Holt was about to be subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury — and he had been quite right about that, too.

There was just one thing that Flynn had been wrong about. But it was a huge thing — a gigantic thing!

The office door opened, and Alex Meade entered. His shoulders were slumped and he looked utterly defeated.

‘A body’s been discovered in the woods near Ocean Heights,’ he said miserably. ‘The Coney Island police haven’t identified it yet, but there’s no doubt that when they do, they’ll find that it’s Big Bill Holt.’

‘It’s not Holt,’ Blackstone said.

‘How can you possibly say that?’

‘Because I know who it actually is.’

‘Have you lost your mind?’ Meade wondered aloud.

‘Not at all,’ Blackstone said airily. ‘It’s never been clearer. And that’s because I’ve just been talking to Mrs Turner, and she’s told me all about the whores who visited the Ocean Heights bunker.’

‘So what?’ Meade asked.

‘So they were the wrong kind of whores,’ Blackstone replied.

Meade and Blackstone stood at the corner of Canal Street, and watched a slow stream of men enter the Blue Light Club.

‘Jesus Christ, it’s only just after eleven o’clock in the morning,’ Meade said with disgust. ‘How could anybody think about even normal sex at eleven o’clock in the morning?’

Blackstone grinned. Alex, he suspected, was still a virgin, intent on keeping himself pure in the hope that Miss Clarissa Bonneville’s mother would eventually overlook the fact that he had chosen to become a policeman and allow him to marry her daughter.

‘Now that you’ve seen the place for yourself, does what I’ve been telling you make sense?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ Meade said reluctantly. ‘Maybe more than maybe, but I’ll still be happier when I’ve heard it straight from the whore’s mouth.’ He smiled self-consciously. ‘No pun intended,’ he apologized.

One of the patrolmen whose regular beat was Canal Street sidled up to them. ‘The boys are ready,’ he said.

Meade nodded. ‘Good.’

‘The thing is, they all want to know if we really have to do it,’ the patrolman said.

‘Have to do it?’ Meade repeated.

‘See, this finocchio club hands over its brown envelope regular as clockwork every week,’ the patrolman explained, ‘so the boys figure it has the same right to privacy as everybody else who pays a bribe.’

A look of deep contempt filled Meade’s face for just a moment, and then, though it obviously took him some effort, was replaced by a bland, uncritical expression.

‘Tell “the boys” they’ve no need to worry,’ he said. ‘We’re not here to close the place down, or even arrest anybody. All we want to do is scare a couple of people into cooperating with us. You’ve no problem with that, have you?’

‘No problem at all,’ the patrolman agreed.

Meade watched him walk away. ‘One day. .’ he said, in a half-growl, ‘one day, when I’m the Commissioner of Police for New York, I’ll clean up this whole rotten city.’

And he probably would, Blackstone thought.

‘What does finocchio mean?’ he asked.

‘It means “fairy”,’ Meade said. ‘It’s an Italian word for what — in the Lower East Side at least — is mainly an Italian vice.’

The arrival of four uniformed policemen, blowing their whistles and waving their nightsticks, sent a wave of panic through the clients at the Blue Light Club.

‘I just walked in off the street. I swear to you, officers, I had no idea what was going on in here!’ babbled one portly middle-aged man, as he struggled to button up his pants.

‘Look, you gotta let me go,’ pleaded another man. ‘I’m not a bad guy. I’m a deacon at St Mary’s.’

‘Everybody shut the hell up — or I’ll start making arrests right here and now!’ Meade bawled from the doorway.

Gradually the noise subsided.

‘I’m not here to judge you,’ Meade continued, ‘but if that was my intention, I’d have to say that you’re the biggest collection of sick bastards I’ve ever come across, and you should all be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves.’

‘I am,’ a stick-thin man in a flashy suit moaned. ‘I am — and I promise I’ll never do it again.’

‘The customers can go,’ Meade said. ‘The people who work here — if that’s what you want to call it — will stay.’

There was no real difficulty in telling the two groups apart. The customers — who shuffled through the door with their eyes fixed on the ground — were mostly in their thirties and forties, and wearing their business suits. The workers were much younger — in their teens and twenties — and though some of them were wearing men’s clothing, they all had painted faces and heavily blackened eyebrows.