Blackstone and the New World isb-1

by Sally Spencer

  ‘You know what you’re implying, don’t you?’ Blackstone said carefully. ‘You’re implying that O’Brien was killed by a fellow officer.’

  ‘Yes, that is what I believe,’ Meade agreed. ‘And I’m not the only one.’

  ‘Who else believes it?’

  ‘Commissioner Comstock.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Of course. Why do you think he arranged for you to be part of this investigation? It’s because he knows he can trust you.’

  Especially after he listened in on my conversation with James Duffy, Blackstone thought.

  ‘And why did he pick me, a mere sergeant, to lead it?’ Meade continued. ‘For the same reason. And why are there only two of us involved in the investigation? Because with the whole of the New York Police Department at his disposal, we’re the only two people he knows with any certainty that he can have complete faith in.’

  SIX

  They were surrounded on all sides by things German. There were shops displaying German goods. There were bakeries with German names, which sold German bread and pastries. There were beer gardens which offered only German beer, and where the clients were entertained by brass bands playing only German music. Even the newspaper vendors — looking very Germanic themselves — had nothing to offer but newspapers written in German.

  ‘What did you say that the name of this area was?’ Blackstone asked Alex Meade.

  ‘It’s called Kleindeutschland,’ the sergeant replied. ‘That means “Little Germany”.’

  ‘And why would they ever have thought of calling it that?’ Blackstone said wryly.

  ‘Well, because. .’ Meade began earnestly. Then he stopped himself, and smiled. ‘I suppose that would be an example of the English sense of humour, would it?’

  ‘Yes — or what passes for one, anyway,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘How many Germans are there in New York?’

  ‘There are around three hundred thousand people who are German or of German extraction.’

  ‘And they all live in this area?’

  ‘They used to — but not any more. They’ve mostly moved north to Yorktown, and now the tenements that they formerly inhabited have been taken over by a new wave of immigrants — the Eastern European Jews. But even though they no longer live here, this is where the Germans still come to do most of their shopping and have a good time.’

  ‘Three hundred thousand,’ Blackstone mused. ‘That’s a hell of a lot of Germans.’

  ‘That’s nothing compared to the number of Irish in the city,’ Meade said dismissively. ‘There’s maybe one and half million people living on Manhattan Island, and eight hundred thousand of them were either born in Ireland themselves or have parents or grandparents who were.’

  ‘Big number,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Ain’t it, though,’ Meade agreed. He smiled again. ‘Shows just how much they must have liked being ruled over by you English.’

  True, Blackstone thought, and wondered if he’d ever see a solution to the Irish problem in his lifetime.

  Blackstone sensed Meade’s good humour suddenly evaporate, and looking ahead of him, he thought he understood the cause.

  They were approaching a saloon which called itself the Bayern Biergarten, and on the sidewalk outside it there was a rough circle of sawdust.

  ‘Is that where it happened?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘That’s where it happened,’ Meade confirmed mournfully. ‘It was on this very spot that a fine man died last night.’

  When they reached the circle of sawdust, they came to a halt, and Meade brushed some of the sawdust away with his shoe, revealing the red stain on the sidewalk.

  ‘They just covered it up. They couldn’t even be bothered to wash it away,’ Meade said angrily. ‘And that’s how they want this investigation to go.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘They think all they have to do is cover it up and wait for it to slowly fade away, so that in the end everybody will simply have forgotten about it,’ Meade said, his rage growing. ‘But I won’t forget. I can promise you that!’

  ‘What has the investigation been able to uncover so far?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Haven’t you even begun to understand what’s going on here yet?’ Meade demanded, with uncharacteristic rudeness. ‘There’s been no investigation. The owner of the biergarten called the police, and the police took Inspector O’Brien’s body to the morgue. And that’s it! That’s all that’s been done.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘I’m sure. There can’t be more than a handful of men on the force who care whether the murder’s solved or not — and there’s probably at least a handful who most definitely don’t want it solved.’

  It bothered Blackstone a great deal that Alex Meade’s mind seemed so closed on the matter.

  Because how could you investigate a case properly when you thought you already had the solution? How could you be sure you’d not missed any clues when there were only certain clues you were even looking for?

  ‘You can’t be certain that anyone from the police was involved,’ he cautioned the other man.

  ‘But I am,’ Meade said firmly. ‘There’s nobody in this city who would dare to kill a cop without someone tipping them the wink that it would be all right. And who else could tip them the wink but another cop?’

  They entered the beer hall.

  Blackstone looked around him. This wasn’t anything like an English boozer, he thought — not by any stretch of the imagination.

  The pubs at which he drank in London were made up of a number of rooms, and each of these rooms contained a number of small tables — little islands around which groups of mates could congregate. It was true that if the piano was playing, it would, for a while, become the centre of everyone’s attention, but mostly you stuck to your own island, and merely nodded to the residents of the others.

  The Bayern Biergarten operated on an entirely different philosophy. It was a vast cavern of a place. It had been filled with long wooden tables, and at each table there were at least a couple of dozen men in leather shorts and Tyrolean hats, drinking frothy beer from heavy stone mugs and shouting good-naturedly to their friends across the room.

  ‘They’re mostly Bavarians — South German Catholics — in here,’ Meade said. ‘The Prussians, who come from the north of Germany, are Protestant, and have their own beer gardens.’

  The bar ran the whole length of one wall, and as they approached it, Meade reached into his pocket for his detective’s shield.

  The bartender, a broad man in his thirties, followed their progress with interest, but no signs of concern.

  Meade showed the man his identification and said, ‘We’re investigating the shooting that happened last night.’

  The barman nodded. ‘But why did you take so long?’ he asked, in a heavy accent.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Meade said.

  The bartender shrugged. ‘In Chermany, we would already have the killer behind bars by now.’

  ‘Were you here in the biergarten when it happened?’ Meade asked, ignoring the criticism.

  ‘I was, but I was working, and so I did not see anything.’

  Meade gave Blackstone a look which said, ain’t that just the way of the world? Whenever there’s a shooting — or any other serious incident — nobody’s ever seen anything.

  The sergeant took his notebook out of his pocket. ‘I’ll need the names of anyone else who you remember seeing here at the time.’

  ‘Of course,’ the barman agreed, but instead of beginning to recite a list of names, he reached for a sheet of paper which was lying on one of the shelves behind him, and laid it down on the bar in front of Meade.

  The piece of paper had two long columns of words written on it, and the barman pointed his finger at the first column.

  ‘These are the names of the people who were here,’ he said.

  It was a very long list.

  ‘This is everyone who w
as here?’ Meade asked, incredulously.

  ‘Naturally,’ the barman replied, as if it were inconceivable to him that anyone who had been there at the time wouldn’t be on the list. ‘And these,’ he continued, pointing to the second column, ‘are their addresses.’

  ‘What do the stars that you’ve put against some of the names mean?’ Meade asked.

  ‘Ah, those are the men who think that they might have something useful to tell you,’ the barman explained.

  Meade did his best to suppress a gasp of astonishment, and didn’t quite make it.

  ‘Are any of these people here now?’ he asked.

  The barman looked around. ‘Several of them.’

  ‘I’ll need a room,’ Meade said. ‘Somewhere quiet, in which I can talk to them.’

  ‘Of course,’ the barman said. ‘You may use the manager’s office. It has been waiting for you since this morning.’

  Meade abandoned any attempt to appear unimpressed.

  ‘You’ve been very efficient,’ he said admiringly.

  ‘Naturally,’ the barman agreed. ‘I am Cherman.’

  ‘So you saw Inspector O’Brien just before he was killed, Mr Schultz?’ Meade asked the fat German who was sitting at the opposite side of the table in the cramped manager’s office.

  ‘Yes, I saw him,’ Schultz agreed. ‘I was waiting for a friend to arrive, so I was watching the door. I noticed O’Brien because he was so different to the other customers.’

  ‘Different in what way?’

  Schultz smiled. ‘In what way do you think? This is a German biergarten. I know most of the people who drink here, and if I do not, I know someone else who knows them. It is like one big club and we are not used to strangers. It is not that we have anything against them — it is simply that we have nothing to say to them, and they have nothing to say to us.’

  ‘I understand,’ Meade said.

  ‘The only non-Germans who ever enter this building are policemen. And they only come to pick up their. . their. .’

  Schultz stopped speaking, and seemed to have developed a sudden fascination for the table top.

  ‘And they only come in to pick up their bribes?’ Meade supplied.

  ‘I know nothing of the reason for their visits,’ Schultz lied. He raised his head again, but would still not look Meade in the eye. ‘But to return to Herr O’Brien,’ he continued hastily, ‘I found myself wondering what he was doing here.’

  ‘And what was he doing here?’ Meade asked.

  ‘He went to the bar and bought himself a beer. Then he stood looking at the door, as I had done.’

  ‘You think he was waiting for somebody?’

  ‘He may have been.’

  ‘And how did he seem?’

  ‘Seem?’

  ‘What was the expression on his face? What sort of mood did he appear to be in?’

  ‘Ah, so! He seemed excited. Or perhaps nervous. I do not know which one it was.’

  ‘And what happened next?’

  ‘He sipped his beer very slowly — not in the German way at all — and he kept looking at the door and checking his pocket watch. But no one came to join him, and in the end, looking very disappointed, he left. And it was just after he had stepped outside that I heard the shots.

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘Two, I think. Or it may have been three.’

  ‘But you didn’t see anything?’

  ‘There is frosted glass on the door to the street. Besides, I was not really looking.’

  Meade thanked Schultz for his time, and when the German had left, he turned to Blackstone and said, ‘The way I see it is that O’Brien was planning to meet someone who could give him information connected with his investigation.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Blackstone said cautiously.

  ‘And the reason he chose to hold the meeting here was because he knew that both he and his informant were very unlikely to meet anyone they knew in the biergarten.’

  The facts, as far as they had any facts at all, would easily support Meade’s theory, Blackstone thought. But then they would just as easily support any one of half a dozen other theories.

  ‘It’s possible that O’Brien was meeting an informant,’ he said, ‘but it’s also possible that-’

  ‘But the sons-of-bitches who he was investigating somehow managed to find out about the meeting. So they dealt with his contact first — which explains why he never turned up — and then they set up an ambush for when Patrick O’Brien left the biergarten.’

  ‘It seems a very public place to have decided to kill him,’ Blackstone said dubiously.

  ‘It was late at night. There wouldn’t have been many people out on the street,’ Meade argued.

  ‘But there was still a chance that there would have been some,’ Blackstone countered. ‘Look, say you were a professional assassin, how would you go about your work?’

  ‘Since I’m not a professional assassin, Sam, I have no idea,’ Meade said stubbornly.

  You really don’t want to explore this possibility, do you? Blackstone thought. But it has to be explored, nevertheless.

  ‘I’ll tell you how it works,’ he said. ‘The killer waits for the right opportunity — for the moment when there is no one in sight but himself and his target. His chance may come down a dark alley. It could be in a park. It could even be in the target’s home. But he will wait for that opportunity because he knows it will come eventually — even in a big bustling city like New York. The one thing that the professional assassin will not do is expose himself to any unnecessary risks. And that’s exactly what the killer did in this case.’

  ‘So if it’s not a professional killing, what is your explanation?’ Meade demanded, slightly aggressively.

  ‘I don’t have one,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘Well, there you are, then,’ Meade said, as if he had conclusively won the argument. ‘We go with what we have.’

  But it didn’t work that way, Blackstone thought.

  Three more witnesses confirmed that O’Brien had entered the bar alone — and left alone — and two of them were willing to agree that the inspector had looked either excited or nervous.

  But it was with the fifth witness that they really hit pay dirt.

  His name was Schiller, and he was a baker.

  ‘I start work very early in the morning,’ he said, ‘and that is why it is my unhappy lot to go home to my bed while all my friends are still here, enjoying their drinking.’

  ‘So when exactly did you leave?’ Meade asked.

  ‘I followed the dead man to the door. I was just behind him when he was shot.’

  ‘You seem very calm about the whole thing,’ Meade said, with a hint of suspicion entering his voice.

  ‘I am sorry?’

  ‘You saw a man shot to death in front of you. Most people would still be pretty shaken up by that, even a day later.’

  Schiller shrugged. ‘When I was a young man, I was in the Bavarian Army. In ’66, we fought a war to defend south Germany from Prussian aggression.’ He shrugged again. ‘But the Prussians won, and only five years later I fought for them, against the French.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Meade asked.

  ‘I have seen hundreds of men — good men — die in a single day. Last night, only one man died. It was not so much.’

  Blackstone nodded, knowing exactly how the man felt.

  ‘What happened once you were out on the pavement, Mr Schiller?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘The pavement? What is that?’

  ‘The sidewalk.’

  ‘O’Brien. . that was his name, was it not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘O’Brien looked up and down the street.’

  ‘As if he was still expecting that his contact would turn up?’ Meade asked.

  The German shook his head. ‘It was more as a soldier would look when he was behind enemy lines — he was checking for danger.’

  ‘So he must have seen his murderer coming t
owards him?’

  ‘Yes, he saw him.’

  ‘But he didn’t draw his revolver?’

  ‘No. I think he was going to, but then he saw that the person running towards him was only a junge — a boy.’

  ‘A boy!’ Meade exclaimed. ‘A damned boy!’

  Blackstone gave his new partner a questioning look. He had no idea why the sergeant should have suddenly become excited, though it was unquestionable that he had.

  ‘What did this boy look like?’ Meade asked.

  ‘I did not see his face,’ Schiller replied. ‘It was quite dark. Besides, he was wearing a large cap, pulled down over his ears, and had a cloth of some kind covering the lower half of his face.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘The boy stopped running, and took a gun out of his pocket. He fired three times and O’Brien fell to the ground,’ Schiller said, almost clinically. ‘Then the boy turned, and ran off down the street.’

  ‘Was he making what, when we were in the army, we would have called an “orderly retreat”?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘No,’ Schiller said. ‘He was running blindly. He was very young, and cannot have killed many men. I think perhaps this was his first.’

  ‘The killer was a member of a gang,’ Meade said firmly once Schiller the baker had gone. ‘It’s most likely that he belongs to the Five Points Gang, though he could have been one of the Eastman crew.’

  ‘What makes you so sure that he was a member of a gang?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘His age. This killing has all the signs of being an initiation rite — which gives us the answer to the question you were posing earlier!’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘You wondered why the killer shot Patrick O’Brien right outside a beer hall, when it would have been safer to wait until he got the inspector somewhere more secluded, didn’t you?’