The pretty little speech had been aimed solely at impressing Meade, Blackstone thought. And it had worked, because the sergeant looked as if he were now struggling against the impulse to jump to his feet, stand to attention, and salute an invisible flag.
It was interesting, too — though hardly surprising — to note that Freddie had not revealed to his employer that his fake identity had been tumbled by the copper from London.
‘What Imre should have said to you is that members of New York Police Department — and their guests — are welcome in this house at any time of day,’ the madam said earnestly, but then, with just a hint of lasciviousness entering her voice, she added, ‘or night.’
Despite his best intentions, Meade’s face had coloured slightly — and the madam had intended that, too.
‘We need to know what was on that piece of paper you gave to Inspector O’Brien,’ Meade said in a rush.
Mrs de Courcey arched an eyebrow. ‘To whom?’
‘To Inspector O’Brien,’ Meade repeated. ‘He was the policeman who visited you on Tuesday.’
The eyebrow remained arched. ‘May I ask what it is that leads you to believe that?’
‘We have information.’
‘And who informed you?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
Mrs de Courcey sighed. ‘One of the many drawbacks to being a successful business woman in this city is that one does tend to acquire enemies,’ she said regretfully. ‘There are even some people, you know, who are so jealous of my good fortune that they will do anything — including telling outrageous lies — in an effort to bring me down.’
‘We don’t think it is a lie,’ Meade said.
‘And I am telling you, with my hand on my heart — ’ Mrs de Courcey paused to slowly rub her ample bosom — ‘that the gentleman in question was never here.’
Meade was even less in command here than he’d been when he was dealing with Senator Plunkitt, Blackstone thought. The woman had stirred up his patriotism, then embarrassed him with sexual innuendo, and the result was that now he was being far too soft on her.
‘You need to get one thing straight,’ the Englishman said harshly. ‘We’re here looking for Inspector O’Brien’s killer. That’s all we’re concerned with, so we have no interest at all in nailing a woman who, however elegantly she speaks, is no more than the madam of a whorehouse.’
Mrs de Courcey looked outraged. ‘I. . I’ve never. .’ she began.
‘Shut up and listen,’ Blackstone ordered her. ‘You have two choices. The first is to tell us what you told Inspector O’Brien, and we’ll leave it at that. The second is to refuse to tell us, but that would be a mistake, because when we find out what it was ourselves — and we will find out — we’ll be coming after you.’
By a truly valiant effort, Mrs de Courcey had recovered most of her composure and now she turned to Meade, smiled, and said, ‘We Americans pride ourselves on being direct, and we tend to see the English as reserved. Yet so often, it’s quite the reverse, don’t you think?’
But the spell she had cast over Meade had been broken.
‘Doesn’t matter how he chose to say it,’ the sergeant told the madam. ‘What’s important is that what he said was quite true. You do only have two choices.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Mrs de Courcey, who had not quite given up the battle for Meade’s soul. ‘Although,’ she added softly, ‘you’re quite right that those would be my choices if things had happened as you say they did. But, you see, they simply did not. This Inspector O’Reilly of yours-’
‘It’s O’Brien, as you know very well,’ Blackstone snapped.
‘This Inspector O’Brien of yours never came here, so I could not possibly have given him an addr-’
Then Mrs de Courcey fell silent.
‘An address?’ Blackstone asked, pouncing on the word. ‘Who said anything about it being an address you’d given him?’
The woman still said nothing.
‘You’d like to take back the words if you could, wouldn’t you?’ Blackstone taunted. ‘But it’s too late now.’
‘What else could it have been that I was supposed to have written?’ Mrs de Courcey demanded, and her voice was suddenly coarser. ‘A love poem from the whore to the cop? Instructions on how to cure the clap? It has to be an address — only I didn’t write nothin’!’
‘We could arrest you, you know?’ Meade said.
‘Grow up, sonny!’ Mrs de Courcey said contemptuously. ‘But do it somewhere else — ’cos I want you out of my knocking shop right now!’
‘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.’
SIXTEEN
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 twel
ve 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.’
‘So how was it that you were able to describe the ring he was wearing so accurately?’
For a moment, Trixie was lost for an answer. Then she said, ‘I didn’t say I hadn’t seen him — I only said I hadn’t seen him in the club.’
‘Then where did you see him?’
‘Out on the street.’
‘On the street?’
‘That’s right, I was out shopping, one day last week, when he stopped me and said he wanted to know about the club. It was when he was showing me his shield that I noticed the ring.’
It was more than obvious to Blackstone that the girl was lying.
Inspector O’Brien had stopped her in the street and asked her about the brothel!
O’Brien had shown no curiosity about the place at all until after he’d had his conversation with Senator Plunkitt. And even then, he’d known so little about the establishment — and this according to what Trixie herself had said the day before — that he hadn’t been able to ask for the madam by name, and had felt distinctly uncomfortable even being there.
But though Blackstone knew that Trixie was lying — and though she knew that he knew she was lying — they both also knew that it would be almost impossible for him to ever prove it.
‘Shall I tell you what I think happened?’ Blackstone suggested.
Trixie shrugged again. ‘Tell me if you want to. I don’t mind — one way or the other.’
‘I think that after we left last night, your madam started to ask herself where we could have got our information from. And being a smart woman, it didn’t take her too long to work out that it could only have come from one of three people — you, Imre or the other girl.’
‘Lucy.’
‘Lucy. But she trusts Imre, so it had to be one of you two girls who’d been talking. Did Imre beat both of you up to get a confession or were you the only one who got the pounding?’
‘Nobody got beaten up.’
‘So if I was to scrape all that paint off your face, I wouldn’t find any bruising?’
‘You might find a couple of bruises,’ Trixie admitted. ‘But that’s only because I walked into a door.’
‘If you stick to your original story — the true one — we’ll protect you,’ Blackstone promised.
‘Like you did last night?’ Trixie asked bitterly.
She had a point, Blackstone thought.
‘We made a mistake by showing your madam that we knew too much of what had gone on,’ Blackstone said — although the mistake had been all Meade’s, because he himself would have never have been anything like as explicit. ‘I’m sorry for that, but it won’t happen again. We’ll put you in a hotel, somewhere they won’t be able to get at you.’
But his heart was only half in it, because he knew even if she did stick to her original story, it would do very little to help the investigation now.
‘And how would I earn a living if you were hiding me away?’ Trixie asked.
‘We’d give you some money.’
‘But nothing like as much as I earn by doing what I do now,’ Trixie pointed out.
‘Probably not,’ Blackstone agreed.
‘Do you know why I asked to see you instead of the boy who gave me the money?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘It was because you were older — and maybe wiser — and I thought you’d understand the position I’m in.’
I do, Blackstone thought sadly. I understand it only too well.
But still, he heard himself say, ‘The position you’re in?’
‘I don’t exactly like being a whore,’ Trixie said seriously, ‘but it’s the only job that’s open to a girl like me where you can make a decent living.
And I want to get on in the business. By the time I’m Madam’s age, I want to own a place like hers. And I won’t get that by taking money off the police — I’ll get it because I’ll be earning enough to give the police money.’
‘Listen, Trixie, things will change — things will get better,’ Blackstone said. ‘The world won’t always be as corrupt as it is now.’
But again, his heart was not in it, because he knew there had been corruption — and prostitution — for over five thousand years before he’d been born, and he was sure they’d still be around five thousand years after he died.
‘Take the money back, Trixie,’ he urged, sliding the ten-dollar bill back across the table.
‘No,’ the girl said firmly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because if they find out that I’ve still got it, they’ll think I didn’t do what they told me to.’
The door swung open, and the desk sergeant entered the room.
‘Sergeant Meade’s called again,’ he said.
‘Is he feeling any better?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Wouldn’t know about that. He didn’t say. But what he did say was that you should get yourself over to the New York Hospital, which is on 15th Street, as quick as you can.’
‘As quick as I can?’ Blackstone repeated.
‘Yeah,’ the desk sergeant agreed. ‘He seems to think that somebody you want to talk to is dying.’
The building was five storeys high and had a sloping slate roof. There were small mock-turrets at each end of the roof and a larger one over the principal entrance. It could easily have been part of a prestigious university, or perhaps the home office of a successful insurance company. But it was neither of these things. It was, instead, the New York Hospital, and when Blackstone finally burst through the front door, he had been running so hard that it felt as if his lungs were on fire.
‘Meade!’ he gasped at the nurse behind the reception desk. ‘Detective Sergeant Meade. He sent me a message to come here.’
The nurse — who had seen so many dramas from behind her desk that they now scarcely seemed like dramas at all — merely nodded.
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