Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

Blackstone decided to say nothing himself. He knew that there are times when a man needs to be left alone to think, and he was perfectly content to wait until the sergeant’s brain had sorted through all the information that Sergeant Saddler had given them.

Finally, as they approached the Third Avenue ‘El’, Meade came to a sudden, decisive halt.

‘Senator Plunkitt!’ he exclaimed, as if he was revealing a great universal truth which, until that moment, had been deeply hidden.

‘What about him?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Who would ever have thought that we could possibly have gotten so lucky so soon in the investigation, Sam?’

‘Have we been lucky?’ Blackstone asked. ‘I didn’t know that.’ He smiled. ‘But maybe if you told me who Senator Plunkitt is , I’d have more of an idea what you were talking about.’

‘Senator Plunkitt is a political fixer without an equal in the whole of New York City,’ Meade replied. ‘He’s the man that all the other politicians — all the other election stealers — watch carefully, in order to learn how it should really be done. He’s an Irishman. .’

‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Blackstone asked drily.

‘The man wasn’t even born in this country, and yet, by the time he was twenty-eight years old was already a state assembly man, a New York City alderman, a police magistrate and a county supervisor.’

‘It is quite impressive to have been all those things by such a young age,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘You’re not listening to me, Sam,’ Meade told him. ‘He hadn’t been all those things at such a young age.’

‘I thought you just said. .’

‘He was all those things. At one and the same time! And he was drawing salaries from all of those positions. And how was that possible?’

‘ You tell me .’

‘It was possible because he could fix elections like nobody else could, and so he had the full backing of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall for whatever he wanted to do. And this, Sam, is the very man who Inspector O’Brien wanted to see just a few days before he was gunned down.’

‘From what Sergeant Saddler overheard O’Brien say to Plunkitt on the phone, it doesn’t sound as the inspector was after Senator Plunkitt himself,’ Blackstone cautioned.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Meade agreed. ‘But it does sound as if Patrick thought that Plunkitt had certain information which would be useful to his investigation, don’t you think?’

‘Possibly.’

‘And why wouldn’t Plunkitt have that information? He’s been in city politics for nearly forty years now. If anyone in New York knows where all the bodies are buried, it’s him.’

‘That does seem likely.’

‘Which means that we need to have a talk to him ourselves, every bit as much as Patrick did.’

‘That’s possibly true,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But why should he want to talk to us ?’

‘For the exact same reason that he agreed to talk to Patrick O’Brien,’ Meade said, as if it was obvious to him, and he was surprised it wasn’t equally obvious to his companion.

‘Maybe it would be better if you spelled it out a little more simply for me,’ Blackstone suggested.

‘Plunkitt knows that he’s bound to fall one day — even the mighty Boss Tweed himself was eventually arrested and died in jail. And when Plunkitt does fall, he’s going to need the support of people who, if they’re not exactly on his side, are at least willing to give him the odd break. Besides, we’ve got even more leverage than Patrick had.’

‘Have we?’

‘Of course we have. Patrick went to see the senator, and now Patrick’s dead.’ Meade’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s a pretty suspicious sequence of events, don’t you think?’

‘It’s not a sequence at all — it’s just two events,’ Blackstone pointed out. ‘Besides, I’m sure there are a lot of people who’ve been to see Plunkitt in the last few days who didn’t end up dead.’

‘Yes, there are bound to be,’ Meade agreed, brushing the argument aside with a wave of his hand, as if it were of no consequence at all. ‘But how many of those people who’ve been to see him were New York police inspectors who had based their entire careers on investigating municipal corruption?’

‘At a rough guess, I’d say only one.’

‘ Of course it’s only one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that Plunkitt had anything to do with Patrick’s death himself, but Plunkitt is bound to worry that we’ll try to link him to it, isn’t he? And that alone should be enough to make him want to cooperate with us, at least to the extent that he’ll tell us what it was that he told Patrick.’

There were times when Alex Meade could sound wise beyond his years, Blackstone thought. But there were also times — and this was one of them — when quite the reverse was true; when — like a small child — he seemed to believe that he could achieve anything he wanted to, simply because he wanted to.

And it was precisely because he was in the second kind of mood at that moment that Meade was able to paint such a rosy picture of a future meeting with Senator Plunkitt.

Certainly, Plunkitt had agreed to see O’Brien, but O’Brien had been an inspector who already had a formidable reputation, rather than an inexperienced young sergeant with an English detective, (who was still learning the rules of the game), in tow.

And even if the meeting did take place, Blackstone was far from convinced that Meade could use O’Brien’s death to put pressure on the Irish-born senator — because any man who had played Tammany’s game so successfully, for nearly forty years, was highly unlikely to be that easily intimidated.

‘So what should we do now?’ Meade asked, his enthusiasm still bubbling over. ‘I suggest we go straight down to the Lower East Side, and trace the route Inspector O’Brien took last night.’

‘Trace the route?’ repeated Blackstone, who was suddenly feeling incredibly weary.

‘That’s right.’

‘And how, exactly, do you propose to trace it?’

‘We’ll go around all the saloons and brothels, and ask the people there if they saw Inspector O’Brien last night. Then, by putting all the sightings together, we should be able to plot out. .’

‘How many saloons and brothels are there on the Lower East Side?’ Blackstone asked.

Meade shrugged. ‘I’ve never actually thought about it before, but I suppose there must be thousands of them.’

‘And if we really put our backs into it, how many of them do you think we should be able to get round tonight?’

‘Two or three dozen,’ Meade said, starting to sound a little less sure of himself.

‘And do you think that most of the people we talk to in those two or three dozen places are going to be forthcoming?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘If they did see Inspector O’Brien last night, are they likely to admit that they did?’

‘They might admit it,’ Meade said, though he was not even convincing himself.

‘Or are they more likely to lie, in order to avoid being dragged into the middle of a police murder investigation?’ Blackstone asked.

‘They’re more likely to lie,’ Meade admitted. ‘At least, they’ll lie at first. But the more we question them, the more they’ll begin to realize that it would be better for them if they started telling the truth.’

‘And how long do you think it would take us to question one of these people?’

‘Two or three hours.’

‘So what you’re talking about is questioning three or four people, from each of two or three dozen saloons and brothels, for up to two or three hours per person,’ Blackstone said. ‘Have I got that right, Alex?’