Blackstone and the New World isb-1

by Sally Spencer

  ‘The good captain thinks that he’s completely in the clear,’ the Limey said to Meade.

  ‘But that’s because he doesn’t know about all the files that Inspector O’Brien kept in his office at home,’ Meade said to the Limey.

  O’Shaugnessy felt another twinge of misgiving.

  ‘So just what was in these files of his?’ he asked, praying that Sergeant Meade wouldn’t suddenly start quoting certain bank account numbers or lists of property deeds.

  And Meade didn’t!

  All he did say was, ‘I’d prefer not to reveal that at the moment.’

  Which, as far as Captain Michael O’Shaugnessy was concerned, was a mistake.

  A big one!

  ‘You ever play poker, Alex?’ the captain asked.

  ‘I have been known to.’

  ‘An’ I’ll just bet that every time you do, you go home with a hole in your pocket. See, boy, the second you said you’d prefer not to reveal that, I knew you were bluffin’ — I knew that though you were pretendin’ you’d got a full house, you were holdin’ no more than a pair of deuces. At best! An’ you ain’t gonna bring down Bull O’Shaugnessy with a pair of deuces.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Meade agreed quietly. ‘Or perhaps I’ve got such a good hand that I don’t want to lay it on the table yet.’

  ‘And anyway, the poker analogy doesn’t really hold up,’ the Limey said calmly.

  ‘The what don’t hold up?’ O’Shaugnessy asked.

  ‘The poker analogy. If you’re playing poker, then the hand you have is the hand you have. It’s fixed — unless you’re foolish enough to try and deal off the bottom of the deck — and there’s nothing you can do about it. Bribery and corruption isn’t like that at all. Firstly, there are many more cards in the deck, and secondly, you can draw them at any time.’

  ‘Am I just being a dumb ole Irishman, or is this guy talking a load of horseshit?’ O’Shaugnessy asked Meade.

  The sergeant smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, he’s definitely not talking horseshit, sir, and if you didn’t understand it that’s probably because he didn’t explain it clearly enough.’ He turned to Blackstone. ‘Try again, Sam,’ he suggested.

  ‘If we lay out all the mistakes you’ve made on the table for you to see,’ the Limey said, ‘you’ll immediately start going round cleaning them up. And once you have cleaned them up, they won’t be mistakes any more. Which is the last thing we want — because without your mistakes, you’re no use to us.’

  ‘Let me be quite clear on this,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘You’re threatening me, ain’t you?’

  Meade turned to the Limey again. ‘Told you he’d be bound to catch on eventually,’ he said.

  They seemed so sure of themselves — so much at ease — O’Shaugnessy thought. So maybe they really did have something on him. But, hell, he was a precinct captain, and he was damned if he was going to be threatened by a detective sergeant and a Limey.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of listening to your crap!’ he said. ‘I want you out of my office. Now!’

  Those few words — delivered harshly by a captain renowned for his violence — should have been enough to have the two men scurrying away like a pair of frightened rabbits.

  Yet they weren’t! Meade stayed perfectly still and the Limey actually crossed his legs as if he was settling in for a long session.

  ‘Have I got to call in a few of my boys to help you out of the office?’ O’Shaugnessy demanded.

  ‘You could do that,’ the Limey said.

  But there was something in his voice which suggested that doing it would be a mistake, and almost against his own will, O’Shaugnessy heard himself saying, ‘You’ve got five seconds to come up with a reason why I shouldn’t.’

  But it was at least ten seconds before Blackstone spoke again, and when he did, he said, ‘A smart man would cover all his options. Are you a smart man, Captain O’Shaugnessy?’

  ‘Smart enough,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘Smarter than any goddamn Limey, that’s for sure.’

  But he didn’t quite believe it himself. And even if he was smarter than Blackstone, he still felt uncomfortable. There was a power about the Limey that went beyond mere brute force — a power which meant that even if you were beating the shit out of him, he would, somehow, still be in charge.

  ‘A dumb man would argue that even if we have strong evidence against him — and you’re right, we may not have strong evidence, it could all be a bluff — it still wouldn’t matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘The dumb man would argue that given the level of corruption in this city, we’d only have a very slim chance of bringing him down even with top-class evidence.’ He paused. ‘How big a chance would you say we have, Alex? Twenty per cent?’

  ‘More like twenty-five per cent,’ Meade said.

  ‘So the dumb man would throw us out of his office, just as you’ve been threatening to do,’ Blackstone continued. ‘The smart man, on the other hand, would say to himself, “Is it worth running the risk, even if that risk may only be twenty-five or thirty per cent, when, if I do these people a little favour, I can have a zero per cent risk?”.’

  O’Shaugnessy felt a sense of relief he hadn’t even known he needed to feel. So all these guys wanted was a bribe. They were firmly back in his world — a world in which he was a captain, and they were nothing. And maybe he would pay them the bribe, not because he had to, but because it was reassuring to know that, deep down, everybody was the same.

  ‘How much do you want?’ he asked. ‘And remember, boys, don’t be too greedy.’

  ‘You haven’t been listening, Captain,’ the Limey said coldly. ‘We don’t want money — we want a favour.’

  ‘What kind of little favour?’

  ‘Do you play chess, Captain?’ the Limey asked.

  What was it with this guy? O’Shaugnessy wondered. First it was analogies and now it was chess.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t played,’ the Limey said. ‘It is quite a stretching game.’

  ‘I’ve played,’ O’Shaugnessy said, because he’d be damned before he admit to this Limey bastard that there was anything he couldn’t do.

  ‘Then you’ll know that on a chess board, you have sixteen pieces under your control, but that they’re not all of the same value.’

  ‘Sure,’ O’Shaugnessy said, unconvincingly.

  ‘The names we give to the major pieces are bishops, rooks and knights, but we might as well call them sergeants, politicians and judges — and their main job is to protect the king at all costs.’

  ‘That would be you, Captain O’Shaugnessy,’ Meade said.

  ‘I knew that,’ O’Shaugnessy growled.

  ‘And as well as the major pieces, there are the minor ones,’ the Limey continued. ‘The pawns. The little people. There may be knights and bishops left on the board when the game ends, but the pawns have usually all gone, because that’s their role in life — to be sacrificed when necessary.’

  ‘What the hell is this Limey talkin’ about?’ O’Shaugnessy asked Meade.

  ‘It will all be clear in a moment,’ Meade promised.

  ‘And in this case,’ Blackstone continued, ‘the pawn we want you to sacrifice goes by the name of Mrs de Courcey.’

  ‘You want me to arrest her?’ O’Shaugnessy asked.

  ‘No, nothing like that. All we want you to do is to starve her out for a few days.’

  ‘Starve her out? How?’

  ‘Stop selling her booze, cigarettes and food, and make sure no one else does, either.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Not quite. We’d like you to post a couple of patrolmen outside the brothel, to prevent her clients from going in.’

  ‘She pays me good money to look after her,’ O’Shaugnessy said.

  ‘She’s a pawn,’ Blackstone said dismissively. ‘You’re not there to serve her interests — she’s there to serve yours.’

  ‘An’ what are all the other madams who pay me goin’ to think, if I treat her like that
?’

  ‘They’ll think that you’ve decided to make an example of her,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘What d’ya mean? Make an example of her?’

  ‘When I was in the army, I used to have to watch men being flogged,’ Blackstone said. He stood up, and raised his hands above his head. ‘The soldier was tied up like this, and the shirt was ripped from his back.’ He lowered his arms again. ‘Then the flogging would begin.’ He swung his right arm, as if slashing a whip through the air. ‘The whip would bite into the flesh, and blood would begin to pour out of the gashes.’

  O’Shaugnessy and Meade looked on, mesmerized. They could almost see it happening — could almost hear the whip as it whistled through the air, and the dull thud it made when it landed on the naked flesh.

  ‘Sometimes the man being flogged would be guilty of a serious infraction of military discipline,’ Blackstone continued. ‘But sometimes the flogging was hardly merited at all — sometimes the man would have committed only the most trivial of offences.’ He paused for a moment and lowered his whip hand to his side. ‘Tell me, Alex, what do you imagine the men who were forced to watch this spectacle thought as they saw a man who’d done virtually nothing wrong being flogged to within an inch of his life?’

  ‘That it wasn’t fair?’ Meade guessed.

  Blackstone laughed. ‘You poor simple child,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have got that answer from you, would I, Captain?’

  ‘No,’ O’Shaugnessy agreed, ‘you sure as hell wouldn’t.’

  ‘We were actually thinking two different things,’ Blackstone said. ‘The first was, “Thank God it’s him who’s getting the lash. and not me!” And the second was, “If he gets the skin ripped off his back for doing something like that, imagine what would happen to me if I really did something wrong!” Are you getting the point, Captain?’

  Yeah,’ O’Shaugnessy said pensively. ‘I think I am.’

  ‘It’s called military discipline in the case of the floggings,’ Blackstone continued. ‘But it doesn’t have to involve a whip, and it doesn’t only apply to the army. Whores can be disciplined just as easily as soldiers can.’

  ‘Go on,’ O’Shaugnessy said.

  ‘The other madams won’t be outraged if you starve Mrs de Courcey — they’ll be scared. They’ll be falling over themselves not to offend you in any way, and the next time you decide to raise the amount of money that you expect from them, they’ll pay up without a murmur.’

  It was a smart idea, O’Shaugnessy decided — and wondered why he hadn’t already thought of himself. But he certainly wasn’t going to admit how smart it was to the Limey.

  ‘So what’s it to be?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Are you prepared to gamble that we can’t bring you down, however hard we try — or are you willing to take out a little painless insurance?’

  ‘I don’t mind tellin’ you, boys, that it will be very bad for business if I do what you ask,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘An’ the thing is, I don’t even know why you want me to do it.’

  ‘It might help us to find whoever killed Inspector O’Brien,’ Alex Meade told him.

  ‘Well, like I told you earlier, the man should never have rocked the boat,’ O’Shaugnessy said reflectively, ‘but when all’s said and done, he was a cop — an’ an Irishman — an’ if this will help your investigation, I suppose I could go along with it. How many days do you want this starvin’ out to last?’

  ‘Five days should be about enough,’ Blackstone said, calculating that if it worked at all, it would work in three.

  ‘I’ll give you three days,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘’cos even three days is gonna seriously hurt my business interests.’

  ‘We appreciate the sacrifice that you’re making,’ Blackstone said. ‘If there were more police officers like you around, Captain O’Shaugnessy, New York City would be a much better place.’

  ‘Is this Limey son-of-a-bitch takin’ the mickey outta me?’ O’Shaugnessy asked Meade.

  ‘Now why would he want to do that, sir, when you’ve been so helpful?’ the sergeant replied, deadpan.

  ‘We did it!’ Meade said jubilantly. He raised his beer glass high into the air. ‘Here’s to us!’

  ‘Here’s to us,’ Blackstone agreed, clinking his own glass against the sergeant’s.

  ‘But it was touch and go,’ Meade said.

  ‘It was,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Do you have any idea at all what the captain thought might actually be in Inspector O’Brien’s non-existent files?’

  ‘No, I don’t have a clue,’ Meade admitted airily. ‘It could have been anything — he could be getting a cut from a burglary ring, or he might have a nice little embezzlement scheme running. But I was always sure it had to be something, because, however much money they’re making, men like O’Shaugnessy just can’t resist squeezing that extra drop of juice out of the system.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘That flogging stunt you pulled was a master stroke,’ Meade said. He grinned. ‘No pun intended.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to say so,’ Blackstone told him. ‘But with such an obvious thug as the captain, it wasn’t too hard to guess that that kind of thing would appeal to him.’

  ‘And will it work out as you promised him it would?’ Meade asked. ‘Will it bring the madams into line?’

  ‘This is your city, as you’re constantly reminding me,’ Blackstone replied. ‘What do you think?

  ‘I think it would work if he only tried it once,’ Meade said. ‘But he won’t stick to once, will he?’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘He’ll decide that he’s on to a good thing, and he’ll push it to the limits.’

  ‘Until the madams decide they can’t take the strain any longer, and they club together and buy themselves a politician. And then Captain O’Shaugnessy can kiss his career goodbye. So we’ve not only got what we went in there to get, we’ve started a process which will eventually bring O’Shaugnessy down. Now that’s what I call a good day’s work.’

  It was a good day’s work, Blackstone agreed. They had worked very well together as a team and had got the result they wanted, and now they were entitled to a few moments of euphoria.

  But as he drained his beer, so the feeling of well-being drained away, too, and by the time the glass was empty, his anger over Jenny’s death had taken control of him again.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Meade asked.

  ‘We split up,’ Blackstone said. ‘I don’t trust O’Shaugnessy as far as I could throw him. .’

  ‘Now there’s a surprise.’

  ‘So I want you outside Mrs de Courcey’s brothel, round the clock, just to make sure he’s sticking to his side of the bargain.’

  Meade grinned again. ‘How come I always manage to land the good jobs?’

  ‘I suppose you’re just lucky,’ Blackstone replied.

  ‘And while I’m involved in the very complicated task of standing there and doing absolutely nothing, what will you be doing, Sam?’

  Blackstone reached into his jacket pocket, took out the piece of paper that Mary O’Brien had given him earlier, and read the address that she’d written down on it.

  ‘What will I be doing?’ he said grimly. ‘I’ll be paying a visit on the girl who’s at least partly responsible for poor Jenny’s death.’

  NINETEEN

  The van Horne family residence was on Fifth Avenue, not far from St Patrick’s Cathedral. It had been closely modelled on the style of chateaux which could be found in the Loire Valley, but the architect — perhaps in an attempt to make it look more authentically French — had added so many Gallic refinements that it had become a parody which a real French aristocrat would have found truly laughable.

  And the English aristocracy would have looked down their noses at it, too, Blackstone thought as he examined the building from across the street — but then the English aristocracy look down their noses at almost anything.

  He crossed the road, and was faced with t
he choice of going up the steps to the front door, or down the steps to the servants’ entrance. In England, he had long ago decided it was easier to use the servants’ entrance, since that kept the inbreeds who lived upstairs happy, while bothering him not at all. But this was America, he thought whimsically, the land of the free, and — not wishing to insult anyone’s democratic sensibilities — he chose the front door without a second’s hesitation.

  His ring was answered by the butler, a tall man with sandy hair and deep green eyes, and the look on his face was a clear message — as Blackstone had always suspected it would be — that democracy was all very well in its place, but could only be stretched so far.

  ‘Yes?’ the butler said quizzically.

  ‘I’m Inspector Blackstone of New Scotland Yard,’ Blackstone said, in his most official voice.

  ‘Are you indeed?’ the butler replied, in his most official voice. ‘And I am Boone, though you may call me Mr Boone.’

  So it was like that, was it? Blackstone thought.

  ‘I have been seconded to the New York Police Department,’ he said, ‘and I wish to question the servants in this house in connection with a case I’m currently investigating.’

  The butler’s eyes flashed with what could possibly be amusement. ‘Is that right?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you have the authority to admit me or will you need the permission of the master of the house?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Oh, I have the authority all right,’ Boone said. ‘But even so, it might be more proper if you were to speak with the mistress first.’ A thin smile flickered across his lips so swiftly that Blackstone was not entirely sure it had even been there. ‘It also might be more entertaining,’ the butler added.

  When Boone announced Blackstone’s arrival in the upstairs salon, the mistress of the house, Mrs van Horne, was already waiting to receive him. She was a large woman, a fact which even her expensive and skilfully cut tea-gown could not disguise, and her attempt to sweep gracefully across the thickly carpeted floor put the inspector in mind of an elephant in a tutu. Not that she continued to sweep for long — as her eyes fell on his second-hand suit, she stopped in her tracks and quickly turned away, in search of something more salubrious to look at.