Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

‘I’ll pull that bitch in for questioning if it’s the last thing I do,’ Meade said angrily, as they walked away from the brothel.

He was whistling in the dark, Blackstone thought.

‘You’ll never get a judge to sign the warrant,’ he said aloud.

‘I will if I pick the right judge — and offer to pay him the right bribe.’

‘I’m not sure there is such a thing as the right judge,’ Blackstone said, hating the thought of putting the rock back on top of Meade’s spring of optimism, but knowing that it had to be done.

‘You don’t know this city like I do,’ Meade said stubbornly. ‘As I’ve told you often enough before, money talks.’

‘Of course it does,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But we both know that all men aren’t really equal, and neither is all money. There’s some money which has greater powers of persuasion than the rest.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Meade demanded.

‘What’s the first question that the judge you try to bribe is going to ask his clerk?’

Meade thought about it. And as he did, his expression grew gloomier and gloomier.

‘He’s going to ask whether or not Mrs de Courcey pays her bribes on time,’ he said finally.

‘Exactly. And if she does — and I’m sure she does — what’s his next move going to be?’

‘He’ll turn down the bribe. It’ll really cut him up to do it, but he’ll do it anyway.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the web of corruption works on a perverted kind of trust, and if Mrs de Courcey’s bribes didn’t get her the protection she expected, the other madams would start asking themselves whether it was worth them paying their bribes.’

‘And if that happened, the whole system would collapse,’ Blackstone said. ‘And nobody involved in it wants that.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Meade said. ‘You’re always so damned right.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to go down to the Lower East Side. Do you want to join me?’

‘All right,’ Blackstone said. ‘But why, in particular, do you want to go there now?’

‘Because it’s a festering boil on the ass of New York City — and that makes it the perfect location for getting disgustingly drunk in.’

He was lying flat out, on a cast-iron bed with a rather lumpy mattress — that much he had already established — but other than that, Sam Blackstone had no real idea of where he was.

Slowly it started to come back to him. He was in New York City. He was in a hotel — the Mayfair Hotel on Canal Street.

Locating himself should have made him happier, but it didn’t. He was feeling rougher than he could remember feeling for a long, long time. A smithy seemed to have been established inside his head while he’d been sleeping, and the blacksmith was already hard at work, hammering out innumerable horseshoes and using his brain as the anvil. Even worse than that, a tannery had been set up inside his mouth, so that now he seemed to be in imminent danger of being poisoned by his own breath.

His back ached. His legs ached. Whenever he looked towards the light streaming in from the window, he noted that his vision was blurred — but he didn’t do much of that, because the light made his pupils burn.

He lay on the bed, trying to retake control of his body, and thinking about the previous night.

He and Meade had probably visited at least ten or twelve saloons on the Lower East Side, and had a minimum of two drinks in each one. In Kleindeutschland, they had supped foaming steins of beer. In one of the less salubrious saloons on 5th Street they had drunk a whiskey which would have made embalming fluid taste good. They had been accosted by scores of prostitutes of all colours. They had been invited into several opium dens. That he had ever found his way back to his hotel when this excess was over had been little short of a miracle.

And why had they done it? he asked himself, as the blacksmith in his head eased off for a second.

They had done it because — though neither of them was prepared to openly admit it — they both knew that their investigation was dead, and they were attending its wake.

The trail that the investigation had been following had ended — decisively — with Mrs de Courcey, and they would never be able to pick it up again. The killer — or killers — had got away with murdering an outstanding police officer. And Mrs O’Brien, struggling to bring up three children alone, would be left with the bitter knowledge that she would never find justice for her husband.

The smithy in his head appeared to have closed for the day, and even the tannery was not quite as active as it had formerly been. Blackstone slowly swung his legs off the bed, and placed his feet gingerly on the floor. When nothing disastrous happened, he stood up, and was pleased to find that he did not immediately fall over again.

He would live, he told himself — though he was still not entirely sure whether that was good or bad.

‘Detective Sergeant Meade hasn’t reported for duty yet,’ said the desk sergeant at Mulberry Street, in an uncharacteristically cheery voice which made Blackstone really hate him. ‘It seems that he’s come down with a case of food poisoning.’

Blackstone nodded — carefully. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘If it is food poisoning that he’s suffering from, then he probably caught it from the same bottle that you did,’ the sergeant said, after looking at Blackstone more closely.

And then he chuckled.

‘What a wonderful sense of humour you Americans do seem to have,’ Blackstone said sourly.

The sergeant didn’t seem to notice the barb. ‘Would you like to see the girl now?’ he asked. ‘Or don’t you feel up to it yet?’

‘What girl?’

‘The one who came in over an hour ago, and said that she wanted to speak to you.’

‘To speak to me ? Or to speak to Sergeant Meade ?’

‘She said she wanted to see the Limey.’

Who could she be? Blackstone wondered.

Jenny the little housemaid?

There was no logical reason he could think why it should be her. But then there was no logical reason why she should have made an appearance in his dream, either!

‘Did she look like a domestic servant?’ he asked.

‘No,’ the desk sergeant replied. ‘She looked like a whore.’

Not Jenny then, but Trixie, Blackstone thought, and was surprised to find that he felt strangely disappointed.

‘Like I said, she’s been waitin’ for over an hour,’ the desk sergeant told Blackstone. ‘Do you want to see her? Or should I tell her to get her ass the hell out of here?’

‘I’ll see her,’ Blackstone said. ‘Where is she?’

‘In the interview room, third door on the left,’ the desk sergeant replied, jerking his thumb in roughly the right direction.

Trixie was wearing even more powder and rouge than she had been the day before, but Blackstone suspected there was good reason for that.

‘I’ve come to return this,’ she said, sliding the ten-dollar bill quickly across the table.

‘Why?’

‘Because. . because I lied.’

‘Lied about what?’

‘I lied about that policeman coming into the club on Tuesday. He never did.’

‘Then why did you say he did?’

‘Because I wanted the reward.’

‘And now you don’t want it?’ Blackstone asked.

Trixie shrugged. ‘I still want it,’ she admitted, ‘but my conscience won’t let me keep it.’

Or somebody wouldn’t let her keep it, Blackstone thought.

‘So Inspector O’Brien was never in the brothel?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I said.’