Blackstone and the New World isb-1

by Sally Spencer

  ‘No friends at all?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘There was one,’ Mary remembered. ‘A girl called Nancy — Nancy Greene — who she was in the orphanage with. This Nancy went into service at a big house on Fifth Avenue, and Jenny used to go and see her once a month.’

  ‘Do you have an exact address for the girl?’ Blackstone asked.

  Meade shot him a questioning look, as if to say, why would you want the girl’s address?

  And Blackstone replied with a look of his own, which said, it’s too complicated to explain now, but I’ll tell you all about it later.

  ‘Nancy’s address?’ Mary said. ‘Yes, I must have it somewhere. We would never have allowed Jenny to leave the house without knowing exactly where she was going.’

  ‘Well, if you give me the address, I’ll go and see her myself, and break the sad news to her,’ Blackstone promised. ‘And while I’m there, I’ll ask her to attend the funeral.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ Mary said. ‘And you will come to the funeral yourself, won’t you?’ she added imploringly.

  ‘Of course,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Meade said. ‘And I’d be grateful if you’d allow me to pay for it.’

  ‘Why?’ Mary asked. ‘You hardly knew the girl.’

  Meade shrugged awkwardly, as he always did when he found himself in this sort of situation.

  ‘It doesn’t matter that I didn’t really know her,’ he said. ‘I’d still like to pay for her funeral.’

  ‘The reason you’re making the offer is to save me bearing the expense myself, isn’t it?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Partly,’ Meade conceded.

  Mary took a deep breath. ‘I still have a little money left. Not much — but enough to see Jenny buried decently.’

  ‘But you have all your other expenses to consider,’ Meade protested. ‘Your children. .’

  ‘Jenny lived in this house,’ Mary said. ‘It would be hypocritical of me to say I regarded her as fully a part of the family — but I was fond of her, and I want to do the right thing. Do you understand that? I want to do the right thing!’

  ‘I understand,’ Meade said.

  ‘Did Jenny ever leave the house alone, apart from going to see Nancy?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t she go to church?’

  ‘Of course she did. Patrick insisted on that. He wasn’t one of those Catholics who believe that anyone outside the True Faith is damned. Rather, he believed that when Jenny prayed, she prayed to the same God as we do.’

  ‘But, surely, if she went to a different church, that meant she went out alone every Sunday,’ Blackstone said.

  Meade was growing more and more perplexed and even Mary was looking a little puzzled.

  ‘We always take. . we always took. . a cab to church,’ Mary said. ‘We’d drop Jenny off at her church on the way to ours, and pick her up on the return journey home.’

  ‘Can I ask you something else?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did your husband ever bring any of the work connected with his investigations home with him?’

  ‘What?’ Mary said, as if she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about — as if this latest tragedy had blanked out all memory of anything that had gone before it.

  ‘Did he bring home any files?’ Blackstone persisted. ‘Or notebooks? Or anything else that might be tied in with the cases he was working on?’

  Again, Meade gave Blackstone a quizzical look, and again Blackstone signalled that all would be explained later.

  ‘Yes, he did sometimes bring files home,’ Mary said. ‘But he always took them away again in the morning.’

  ‘So they were here overnight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did he keep them?’

  ‘He had an office. A room next to Jenny’s bedroom. Hardly a room at all in fact. More of a cupboard.’

  ‘And did he keep it locked?’

  Mary thought about it. ‘The door does lock,’ she said finally. ‘But I don’t think he ever locked it himself. Why should he have? This was his home.’ She frowned. ‘Why are you asking all these questions, Mr Blackstone?’

  ‘Because-’

  ‘Because, even though I seem to have forgotten it, you are still investigating my husband’s murder?’ Mary interrupted.

  ‘Yes,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘And I’m keeping you away from pursuing that investigation,’ Mary said, sounding angry — though only with herself. ‘I’m keeping you away from it because I’m a poor weak woman who can’t cope with even the smallest difficulty without having a man to lean on.’

  ‘You’re not weak,’ Blackstone told her. ‘And this is no small difficulty you have to deal with.’

  ‘Patrick would be ashamed of me,’ Mary said bitterly.

  ‘I’m sure he would un-’

  ‘And rightly so. I’ll find Nancy’s address for you, Mr Blackstone, and then you must both return to your investigation.’

  ‘We can’t just leave you alone like this,’ Meade said.

  ‘I won’t be alone. I have very good neighbours who will help me if I ask them to.’

  ‘You said they were rather old and-’ Meade began.

  ‘But even if I hadn’t,’ Mary interrupted him, ‘it is not your job, Alex, to cosset me — it is your job to find my husband’s killer.’

  The barman in Murphy’s Saloon had suggested that they order shots of whiskey to accompany their beers, but they had already been forced to drink some whiskey at Mary O’Brien’s house — and even without that, after their previous evening of excess, they had decided that their livers deserved a break.

  As Blackstone sipped at his beer, he made a concerted effort to assess his own mental state.

  He was sure that the defeatism of the previous evening — the defeatism he had woken up with that morning — had been quite vanquished.

  But what had replaced it? What was it that was now driving him so hard that he felt he was once again charging on all cylinders?

  It was anger, he decided — pure, unadulterated anger!

  ‘Do you want to tell me now why you were asking Mary about the times when Jenny left the house?’ Alex Meade asked, after they’d been sitting in silence for some time.

  ‘All right,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘And while you’re about it, would you mind explaining why you were so interested in whether or not Patrick took work connected with his investigations home with him?’

  ‘The two things are closely connected,’ Blackstone said. ‘Some investigations run along dead straight lines, but this one is circular — and Jenny’s a big part of one of the arcs.’

  ‘Well, thank you for explaining that to me,’ Meade said. ‘Everything is so much clearer now.’

  Blackstone dipped his finger in his beer, and drew two arcs on the table. ‘These are two parts of the same circle,’ he said.

  ‘That’s obvious enough,’ Meade agreed.

  ‘The one on the left is what O’Brien did on the last day of his life, and the one on the right is the reason that Jenny killed herself. Neither of them mean much on their own, but if we can find some way to join them up, they’ll make a sense which is so obvious that we’ll be surprised we didn’t see it right away.’

  ‘Tell me about Jenny’s arc,’ Meade said, starting to get interested.

  ‘Certainly,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘The last thing she said to me before she died was that she had betrayed O’Brien and got him killed. But what she didn’t say was how she’d betrayed him, or who she’d betrayed him to. And now I think I have the answers to both those questions.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I wanted to know just how much freedom Jenny actually had. Now, we know she went to church on Sundays, but the O’Briens dropped her off at the door and picked her up at the door, so that’s really no kind of freedom at all.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Meade said.

  ‘But she was much freer
when she saw this girl Nancy, so if she betrayed O’Brien to anyone, it had to be to her.’

  ‘But Nancy, according to Mary O’Brien, is just an orphan girl — like Jenny herself.’

  ‘What is it that makes all of us important, if only for the briefest of moments?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s who we’re connected to, and what we can extract from that connection. Caesar’s wife had power because she was Caesar’s wife. The attitude of the desk sergeant in Mulberry Street changed towards me when it began to occur to him that maybe I’d got Commissioner Comstock’s ear.’

  ‘But what’s all that got to do with Jenny?’ Meade wondered.

  ‘Jenny wasn’t just a maid, she was the maid of a crusading New York police inspector, and. .’

  ‘And Nancy, whatever her official position is in society, could also be connected to someone important,’ Meade said excitedly.

  ‘Exactly,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Nancy may be working in the house of another policeman. .’

  ‘That’s highly unlikely, Sam, given that the house in question is on Fifth Avenue.’

  ‘Or the house of a politician. Or she may even have a lover with a criminal background.’

  ‘And whoever this person is — let’s call him Mr X — he wanted to know what Patrick O’Brien was getting up to?’

  ‘Yes. But how would he find out about that? And, more importantly, how could Jenny help him?’

  ‘Patrick brought files home and kept them in his unlocked office, next to Jenny’s bedroom!’

  ‘And Jenny either copied them, or memorized them, and passed the information on to her friend Nancy.’

  ‘Who herself then quickly passed on that information on to Mr X,’ Meade said.

  ‘I imagine Jenny was doing it as a favour for a friend, or to earn a few dollars,’ Blackstone said. ‘She knew what she was doing was wrong, but she didn’t think that it was terribly wrong. And why would she? Once she’d passed the information on, nothing world-shaking ever happened. Life went on much as before. And if Inspector O’Brien was ever puzzled over how the people he was investigating seem to know so much about that actual investigation, he never said anything about it to Jenny.’

  ‘But then she passed on something which showed Mr X just how much danger Patrick’s investigation was actually putting him in,’ Meade said.

  ‘In fact, he was in so much danger that he decided the only way out of the situation was to have O’Brien killed,’ Blackstone added.

  ‘And Jenny must have finally understood the chain of events — must have realized that it was the information that she’d passed on which had caused his death?’

  ‘“He’s dead because of me”,’ Blackstone said, bleakly quoting the dying girl’s words. ‘“He’s dead because I betrayed him. It wasn’t a bullet that killed him. It was me”.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ Meade said. ‘Absolutely brilliant! You must be pleased as punch with yourself, Sam.’

  And under normal circumstances he would have been. But Blackstone knew these were not normal circumstances — and now there was no room in him for any emotion but anger.

  He remembered leaving the orphanage himself, and how big, confusing — and frightening — the outside world had seemed to him. But then the army had taken him under its wing, and he had slowly learned how to handle freedom and accept responsibility.

  Jenny had been taken under a wing as well — under the well-meaning wing of the O’Brien family. But it hadn’t been anything like as big and all-encompassing as the army’s wing, and others had been able to slip under it too. And once they had done that, they had exploited her.

  Jenny was blameless, in both O’Brien’s death and her own. It was the man who had used her who was responsible for both.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Meade said worriedly.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Blackstone replied, unconvincingly.

  He looked down at the table. His two arcs had dried into sticky smudges, so he drew them afresh.

  ‘To add to the left-hand arc — to be able to join it to the right one — we need to know the address that Mrs de Courcey gave to O’Brien,’ he said.

  ‘True, but the woman refuses to even admit that Patrick had been to the brothel,’ Meade pointed out, ‘and yesterday you said-’

  ‘What I said yesterday is neither here nor there,’ Blackstone told him. ‘Yesterday I hadn’t watched Jenny die, and I was too willing to give up easily. But I’m not willing any longer. The bitch will talk. I’ll make her talk!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You believe that everything that happens in New York City is lubricated by money, don’t you?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Meade agreed.

  ‘So let’s see how Mrs de Courcey feels when the money starts to dry up,’ Blackstone suggested.

  EIGHTEEN

  Precinct Captain Michael O’Shaugnessy liked to think of himself as a plain straightforward man who would always rather use his fists than his brain, and, having clubbed his way up through the ranks, he had long ago lost count of the number of heads he had broken.

  Now he was sitting pretty, with a country estate and an ever-expanding bank account, but he was not one of those men who repudiated the past which had made him the man he was, and whenever he heard one of the officers serving under him refer to him as ‘Bull’, he took it as a compliment.

  In general terms, he could best be described as a man who travelled life’s highway in a state of brutish happiness. But he was not feeling happy that morning. In fact, he found the two men sitting opposite him, on the other side of his desk, distinctly unsettling.

  They unsettled him because he was not meeting them through any choice of his own, but because he had been ordered to meet them by that damned Commissioner Comstock. And since he hadn’t been able to contact any of the other three commissioners — who worked maybe one day a week between them — he had felt compelled to obey the order.

  They unsettled him because one of them was Detective Sergeant Alexander Meade, a far-too educated man whose father had very good political connections, and who was well known to regard straight-down-the-middle honesty as something of a virtue.

  And they unsettled him because the other man — the Limey cop in the shabby suit — had a determination and intensity about him which would have unsettled anybody.

  ‘I’m a busy man,’ said O’Shaugnessy, who firmly believed that, when in doubt, you should always take the offensive. ‘So say what you gotta say, an’ then leave me to do my work.’

  Meade nodded. ‘Of course, sir,’ he replied, deferentially. ‘And may I just say that we really appreciate the fact, as busy as you are, you’ve still managed to find the time to-’

  ‘You’ve already wasted thirty seconds,’ O’Shaugnessy told him. ‘Get to the goddam point!’

  Meade swallowed. ‘As you probably already know, sir, we — that is, Inspector Blackstone and I — have been asked by Commissioner Comstock to investigate Inspector O’Brien’s murder and-’

  ‘Listen, kid, I’m sorry O’Brien got killed,’ O’Shaugnessy interrupted. ‘An’ I’m sorry for his wife and children, too. But any man who goes around disturbin’ existing practices is just askin’ for trouble.’

  ‘And deserves what he gets?’ the Limey asked, with a voice you could have cut diamonds with.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose you could say that,’ Captain O’Shaugnessy agreed, because he was sure as hell not going to be intimidated — or made to feel he’d been put in the wrong — by an Englishman.

  ‘Did you know that a large part of the investigation that Inspector O’Brien was conducting just before he died was focused almost exclusively on you — and the bribery you’re involved in, sir?’ Meade asked.

  So what? O’Shaugnessy asked himself.

  Why should that bother him, when there wasn’t a captain in the whole of New York City who made a secret of the fact that he accepted payments for the services he performed?

 
How could it be a secret, even if he wanted it to be, when there were so many people involved in the process — the saloon keepers and brothel owners who paid the bribes; the patrolmen who collected the bribes; the sergeants who peeled off their percentage before passing the bribes up to the captain; the inspectors, superintendents, judges and politicians at the end of the chain, all of whom, unlike hard-working precinct captains, did virtually nothing to earn their share. .

  The inspectors, superintendents, judges and politicians!

  O’Shaugnessy felt his heart beating just a little faster, because it could be argued, if you were of a mind to, that some of their share — which they didn’t earn, but certainly expected — had never actually reached them, and was now residing in the bank account with the name O’Shaugnessy on it.

  If that snooping son of a bitch, Inspector Patrick O’Brien, had found out about that, and if the information ever did actually reach those people higher up the chain. .

  But then Captain O’Shaugnessy realized it was never going to happen, because after O’Brien’s death, certain actions had been taken which made it impossible for it to happen.

  And it was this realization which immediately turned what could have been a stressful meeting into an opportunity to have some good bullying fun at the expense of the hoity-toity sergeant and the skinny Limey.

  ‘So you’re sayin’ Inspector O’Brien had some files on me, are you?’ O’Shaugnessy asked.

  ‘A great many files,’ Meade said.

  ‘In fact, there’s a whole drawer-full of them,’ the Limey added with conviction.

  ‘An’ have you got them now?’ O’Shaugnessy asked.

  ‘We have.’

  O’Shaugnessy smiled. ‘Do you know, boys, I simply don’t believe you.’

  Meade turned to Blackstone. ‘Captain O’Shaugnessy must have heard the rumour that all the files which were in Inspector O’Brien’s office have disappeared,’ he said lightly.

  ‘Perhaps he even went so far as to help them to disappear himself,’ the Limey suggested.

  O’Shaughnessy’s grin widened. ‘An’ let’s just say you’re right in suspectin’ that I had somethin’ to do with their disappearance,’ he told the Limey. ‘Let’s go even further, an’ say I had a big fire in that stove over there in the corner — even though it is midsummer, an’ almost hot enough to roast a pig on the sidewalk — how are you goin’ to prove that what I burned was Inspector O’Brien’s files?’