Sally Spencer: Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street

‘That about covers it, don’t you think?’ Blackstone asked.

‘And just who is this man behind my father’s desk supposed to have been?’ George asked.

‘Arthur Rudge, of course,’ Blackstone said.

‘But Rudge is-’ George began.

But when Blackstone held up his hand for silence, he obeyed.

‘Once you’d come up with your bunker idea, you had the problem of who to put in it — because there did have to be somebody there,’ Blackstone said. ‘And you had a second problem — who would actually run the company now your father was gone. The solution to the second problem was obvious — Arthur Rudge would do it. He was more than just the head bookkeeper — he was at least half of your father’s business brain. You admitted that yourselves — or, at least Harold did.’

‘ If Father’s enemies were brave enough to murder someone as important to the company as Rudge-’ Harold says.

‘ He wasn’t important to the company!’ George interrupts. ‘Hell, we’ve managed well enough without him, haven’t we? ’

‘ We’ve certainly managed,’ Harold agrees cautiously. ‘But it wasn’t that easy at first. We made mistakes which cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars — mistakes which we’d never have made if we’d had Rudge to advise us. ’

‘There’s that clever trick again,’ Blackstone told Meade. ‘Just as they talked about Big Bill as if he was alive, when in fact he was dead, they talked about Rudge as if he was dead, when the truth was that he was very much alive.’

‘Rudge died in a fire in his apartment,’ George said. ‘Read the police report. They found his body in his bedroom.’

‘They found a body in the bedroom,’ Blackstone corrected him. ‘Or rather, since the fire had been so fierce, they found the dead man’s bones. And those bones, according to Dr Carr, who’s recently read the report, belonged to a much bigger man than Rudge.’ He paused again. ‘That, of course, would explain the two men with the armoire.’

‘What two men with the armoire?’ George asked.

‘On the day of the fire, two men arrived at Rudge’s apartment while he was still at work, carrying the armoire. Twenty minutes after he’d got back, they left again, taking the armoire with them. And what was in that armoire? When they arrived, it was your dead father. When they left, it was Rudge.’

‘Rudge did die in that fire in his apartment,’ George said stubbornly. ‘Your doctor’s wrong about the bones.’

‘I don’t imagine he was entirely happy with the idea of living underground, but you probably gave him no choice in the matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘However, you had to do something to make his life bearable, and that’s why you allowed him a visitor once a month — a visitor who Fanshawe brought from the Blue Light Club, and who Rudge asked to call him “Daddy”.’

‘ Rudge’s parties were a positive disgrace ,’ Mrs Fairbrother, the neighbour, says . ‘ There were only women invited — sometimes half a dozen, sometimes even more. You’ll have noticed I said “women” and not “ladies”? That’s because that’s exactly what they were. Harlots! Painted Jezebels. ’

They’d certainly been painted in the photographs that Mrs Fairbrother had shown him, Blackstone thought. And tall, too — tall enough to be men!

‘It was because of Rudge’s “lady” friends that the guards had to die, wasn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I imagine your original plan was just to drug them — that would certainly have been easy enough. But then you learned — perhaps through Fanshawe — that Joseph Turner knew all about the Blue Light Club on the Lower East Side.’

‘Turner had never met your father, so he didn’t know that Big Bill’s taste would never have run to “fairies”,’ Meade said. ‘But there was always the danger that he’d talk to someone else about it, and that that someone would draw the correct conclusion — which was that if the man in the bunker liked fairies, then that man could never have been William Holt.’

‘So Turner had to die,’ Blackstone continued. ‘There was simply no alternative. And by incorporating his murder into the kidnapping, you not only gave the killer a perfectly understandable motive for that murder, but you made the kidnapping seem much more real, too.’

A fatuous smile — half-relief, half-triumph — suddenly appeared on George’s face. ‘I’ve just found a big hole in your theory,’ he said.

‘Have you?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Indeed I have. According to you, we covered up our father’s death to safeguard the value of our shares. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet we were prepared to fake a kidnapping, which was bound to have a similar effect. How do you explain that?’

‘You’ve had seven years to re-jig the company so that you could protect yourselves from a fall in share prices,’ Meade said. ‘You told us yourselves that you signed an agreement with another company the very day your “father” was “kidnapped”.’

‘But you’d have had to fake it even if it ruined you,’ Blackstone added. ‘You had no other choice — because your father was about to be subpoenaed by the grand jury, and there wasn’t any way of explaining why he couldn’t appear without implicating yourselves in his murder.’

George’s smile had already faded away into nothingness, but he made one last attempt to fight back.

‘If Rudge didn’t die in the fire, but lived here instead, where is he now?’ he asked.

‘He died in the woods outside this house, four days ago — just as you intended him to — and now he’s in the Coney Island mortuary,’ Meade said.

George looked thunderstruck.

‘You didn’t know we’d found the body, did you?’ Blackstone asked. ‘But your brother did. He realized quite a while ago that that was the only possible way we could know so much.’

They had returned to the parlour, but now, instead of occupying a sofa each, the two brothers had decided to sit side by side.

‘Your path has certainly been littered with bodies,’ Blackstone said, looking down at them. ‘Let me see if I can remember them all. There was Fanshawe and Rudge, Turner and Cody-’

‘Mad Bob and Jake the Snake,’ Meade interrupted.

‘Yes, it’s quite true that you hired a second set of killers to rub out your first set,’ Blackstone said to the brothers, ‘but we’ll never be able to prove that, and anyway, rubbing out Bob and the Snake was almost a public service — so you get a free pass on those two.’

‘How very kind of you,’ Harold said.

‘And now we come to the big one — the one that started everything,’ Blackstone continued. ‘I mean, of course, your father’s murder. Would you care to tell us about it?’

Harold smiled sardonically. ‘No, if you’re so smart, you tell us ,’ he said.

‘All right, I will,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘I can’t tell you exactly when he was killed, but it must have been some time between when Knox shot him and the evidence against Knox went missing.’

‘ You didn’t expect any trouble from the powerful Holt family over the fact that the evidence had disappeared?’ Blackstone asks Captain O’Shaugnessy.

‘ Hell, no! They knew the way things work in this city. If they wanted the case to go to court, all they had to do was pay the sergeant a bigger bribe than Knox had, and the evidence would turn up again. ’

‘ But the Holts never did pay a bribe? ’

‘ That’s right. And that was a real surprise to me, because Big Bill was known to be one of the most vengeful men in New York City .’