Blackstone and the New World (8 page)

‘Because he knows that if the cops go down, the chances are they’ll be taking him with them?’

‘Spot on! So this guy from Tammany contacts Paul Kelly and his Five Points Gang, and says he wants a job doing. And it’s done – just like that! And the real beauty of it – at least from their point of view – is that the killer is three removes from the dirty cops who Patrick O’Brien was actually investigating.’

‘If that
is
what happened, it makes our job almost impossible,’ Blackstone said darkly. ‘Because even if we do manage to track the killer down, it’s going to be very difficult to connect him to the people who ordered the murder, since it was all done by proxy.’

Blackstone’s words should have had a depressing effect on Meade, but instead, he looked almost relieved.

‘You’re finally starting to believe me, aren’t you, Sam?’ the sergeant asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You thought that I’d got a real bee in my bonnet about Tammany Hall and police corruption. You thought there was some other explanation for the murder. But now you’re beginning to see – even if you don’t want to – that I just might have been right all along.’

Yes, he was, Blackstone admitted to himself. Coming from London, he’d found it hard to accept that any one organization could have a stranglehold on a city the size of New York. Yet every step he took, he found himself tripping over another strand of Tammany Hall’s nefarious web. And the more that happened, the harder it became to dismiss Meade as just an inexperienced hothead.

‘You do realize that we’ll probably
never
solve this case, don’t you?’ he asked Meade.

‘We’ll solve it,’ Meade said. ‘I’m a smart guy . . .’

‘I wouldn’t dispute that.’

‘And you’re from New Scotland Yard, which makes you even smarter than I am. If we work together on this investigation, Sam, there’s simply no way that we can fail.’

Ah, the optimism of youth, Blackstone thought – and wished he still had a little of it left himself.

SEVEN

‘
T
he whole of the police department is rotten through and through, but the Detective Bureau is rotten in its own
special
way,’ Alex Meade said, as he and Blackstone walked along Mulberry Street towards police headquarters.

‘And what special way is that?’ Blackstone asked.

‘It pretends it isn’t corrupt at all. It
pretends
it’s not only as pure as the driven snow, but that it’s the best damn detective bureau in the whole world. And it’s got a lot of other people – people who should know better – completely buying into that particular story.’

‘By “people who should know better” I take it you mean people with some influence – people who
could have
the power to change things if they didn’t keep their heads buried in the sand,’ Blackstone suggested.

‘That’s exactly who I mean,’ Meade agreed. ‘US Congressman McClellan’s a good example of that. He’s an excellent legislator, and they say he’ll be mayor of this city one day. And do you know what this fine man called Thomas Byrnes, who was the first Chief of Detectives? He called him “master psychologist”!’

‘And I take it he wasn’t.’

‘One of the first things that Byrnes did after he was appointed was to have an especially thick carpet laid down on his office floor,’ Meade said. ‘And can you guess why he did that, Sam?’

‘To muffle the noise when he was beating up a suspect?’

‘Exactly. He’d have the suspect stand in front of him, manacled between two detectives, and if he didn’t like the answers he was getting, he’d proceed to pound the crap out of the man. Now that’s what I
call
psychology. But it was
after
he’d beaten the confession out of the suspect that he’d be
really
clever.’

‘How so?’

‘Say he’d got a guy in the cells who’d confessed to a bank robbery – and who might even have been guilty of it. He’d call a press conference and tell the reporters that the robber was still at large, but that the brilliant investigative team from the Bureau of Detectives was following up a number of clues. He could then confidently promise that an arrest would be made within a few hours. And guess what? Since he already had his man, he was always able to keep his promise – which made the reporters think he was a very smart cop indeed.’

‘That really
is
clever,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘Totally despicable, it’s true, but very clever.’

‘Were you involved in the Whitechapel hunt for Jack the Ripper, Sam?’ Meade asked.

Blackstone shook his head. ‘Not really. I’d only just joined the force at that time, so I was on the edges of the investigation, at best.’

‘Byrnes gave a press conference in which he told the world how, if he’d been in charge, they’d have caught the man right away. He said he’d have gone to work in a
common sense
way, instead of following mere theories, which was what Scotland Yard seemed to be doing.’

‘And just what
was
this “common sense way” of his?’ Blackstone asked.

‘He said that rather than just wait for the Ripper to seek out new victims, he would have manufactured them for him. Yes, he really did use that word,’ Meade continued, with disgust. ‘
Manufactured!
’

‘But what does it mean?’ Blackstone asked.

‘It means that he would have taken fifty female habitués . . .’

‘By which he meant prostitutes?’

‘That
is
what he meant. But remember, he was talking to reporters from
family
newspapers, and you can’t go using words like “prostitute” in that kind of journal.’

‘Although you can go into graphic detail when you’re describing the terrible things that happened to the poor women,’ Blackstone said.

‘Well, exactly. At any rate, Byrnes said he would have taken fifty female habitués of Whitechapel and “covered the ground” with them.’

‘Taken them to deserted streets and dumped them?’ Blackstone suggested.

‘Couldn’t have phrased it better myself,’ Meade replied. ‘Once the women had been abandoned, Byrnes went on, he would have infiltrated the area with his men, and waited for the Ripper to strike. “Even if one of the women fell victim, I should get the murderer,” he told the reporters – which is a nice
family newspaper
way of saying that if she got her throat cut and her stomach sliced open, he would have been able to make an arrest.’

‘He sounds like a nice man,’ Blackstone said.

‘A real prince,’ Meade replied. ‘I could tell you much more about him, but you’re probably better hearing it from Sergeant Saddler.’

‘Who’s Sergeant Saddler?’

‘He’s Inspector Patrick O’Brien’s partner, and he’s the next man on our list of people to talk to.’

The desk sergeant looked up at Blackstone with a certain degree of wariness in his eyes, and at Meade with little less than contempt.

It was a neat trick to be able to do both things at the same time, Blackstone thought.

‘Have you seen Detective Sergeant Saddler today?’ Meade asked.

The desk sergeant shook his head.

‘Do you know if he’s out on a case?’ Meade enquired.

The sergeant shook his head a second time.

Blackstone leant forward, with both his hands resting on the desk. ‘Do you know a cure for grazed knuckles?’ he asked politely.

The desk sergeant glanced down at his hands. ‘Your knuckles
ain’t
grazed,’ he pointed out.

‘No, at the moment, they’re not,’ Blackstone said. ‘But they might be soon, about thirty seconds from now.’

The desk sergeant quickly pushed his chair backwards. ‘Is that a threat?’ he asked, worriedly.

‘Why should I threaten you, of all people?’ Blackstone wondered. ‘After all, ever since this morning we’ve been like old pals, haven’t we?’

‘Look, I don’t know where Saddler is,’ the desk sergeant said. ‘I’d tell you if I did. But just ’cos I ain’t seen him don’t mean he ain’t come in, so why don’t you look in his office?’

‘Thank you very much, Sergeant,’ Blackstone said. ‘You really have been most helpful.’

The office that Inspector O’Brien and Sergeant Saddler had shared was at the opposite end of the basement from the cells.

‘Is the whole of the Detective Bureau down here?’ Blackstone asked Meade, as they walked down the steps.

‘Nope, just Patrick’s room,’ Meade replied. ‘The rest of the Bureau wanted to keep him as far away from them as possible, and he always said that was all to the good – because when they began to feel comfortable in his presence, he’d
really
start to worry.’

They had reached the door. Meade knocked, and, when there was no answer after a few seconds, he knocked again.

‘I don’t think he’s in there,’ Blackstone said.

‘I don’t think he is, either,’ Meade agreed.

He reached down, and grasped the doorknob. When it turned, he quickly released it again.

‘Is there something wrong?’ Blackstone asked, and realized that he himself must think there was, since he was whispering.

‘Saddler would never leave the door unlocked,’ Meade hissed back.

‘Do you think there’s
someone else
in there?’

Meade drew his .32 revolver from its holster. ‘I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.’

He grasped the revolver in both hands, and signalled with his eyes that the inspector should turn the knob again and push the door slightly.

For a moment Blackstone hesitated, and even thought of counselling caution. But, when all was said and done, Meade was a man – and men made their own decisions.

Blackstone grasped the knob, turned it, and gave it a slight shove.

Meade kicked the door wide open and rushed into the room, his hands swinging his weapon in a wide arc, in search of a target.

But there was no one in the office who
needed
shooting. In fact, there was no one in the office at all.

Blackstone stepped over the threshold behind Meade. The office furniture consisted of two desks and a filing cabinet, he quickly noted. There was a plain calendar on the wall with all the previous days in the month firmly crossed off. In the corner of the room, there was a large blackboard – resting on an easel – which had been wiped clean of chalk. It was all very practical and very utilitarian – the working space of a serious-minded crusader like O’Brien.

There was
one
jarring note, however – a framed poster from the Grand Theatre, Broadway, which proclaimed that Henry Mortimer and Mary Brookes would be appearing in a new production of Macbeth. The picture below the legend showed the two of them, Macbeth-Mortimer and Lady Macbeth-Brookes, gazing nobly and tragically into the near distance.

‘Was O’Brien a theatregoer?’ Blackstone wondered.

But Meade had his mind on other – more pressing – matters. He had gone straight to the filing cabinet and opened the top drawer – and now he was staring mournfully into it.

‘Empty!’ he cried. ‘Completely empty.’

He slid open the second – lower – drawer, and found the same.

He tried the drawers in both desks, and when he got the same result, he sat down into what had probably been Inspector O’Brien’s chair and buried his head in his hands.

‘How could I have been so damn
stupid
?’ he moaned. ‘I should have known that this would happen. I should have come here the moment that I heard about Patrick’s death.’

‘Perhaps his sergeant has removed the files for safe-keeping,’ Blackstone suggested.

Meade shook his head despairingly. ‘If Sergeant Saddler had done it himself, he’d only have removed the files that really mattered. But these thieving bastards didn’t know which of the files mattered and which of them didn’t – and that’s why they took
everything
.’

He was right, Blackstone thought. Like burglars – which was, in fact, exactly what they were – they hadn’t dared waste time sifting through the documents, so they had simply taken the lot.

‘So now we have no way of finding out what case Patrick was working on when he was killed,’ Meade said. ‘And since we don’t know that, a second thing we don’t know is who had the strongest motive to have him murdered by the Five Points Gang.’ He paused. ‘You do believe I’m right, now, don’t you, Sam? You do believe that it was a policeman who ordered his execution?’

Blackstone nodded. He didn’t
want
to think that any policeman would have a comrade murdered, but the further they got into the investigation, the more likely it seemed that that was the only possible explanation.

‘Sergeant Saddler will know what cases Inspector O’Brien was working on,’ he said, in an effort to cheer Meade up. ‘If he’s anything like me, all the files will be in his head.’

‘Yes, they will, won’t they?’ Meade agreed bleakly. ‘And you can’t take files out of a head like you can take them out of a filing cabinet, can you? When they’re in a man’s head, the only thing you can do is
kill
him.’

‘You think he’s dead?’

‘I don’t know. But isn’t it likely that he is? They didn’t hesitate to kill an inspector. Why would they even think twice about doing the same thing to his sergeant?’

Why indeed? Blackstone agreed silently.

‘Wait a minute!’ Meade said. ‘There’s one other person who may have known about the case Patrick was working on. And they won’t have dared to kill her, however desperate they were to shut her up – because even sons-of-bitches like them have some standards – even they would baulk at killing a lady.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Have you ever discussed any of your cases with a woman, Sam?’ Meade asked.

‘Yes, I have,’ Blackstone said, as the memories – most of them painful – came flooding back to him.

He’d discussed his cases with all three women who’d become an important part of his life – Hannah, Agnes and Ellie Carr – and each time it had been a mistake.