Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street (32 page)

‘That about covers it, don't you think?' Blackstone asked.

‘And just who is this man behind my father's desk supposed to have been?' George asked.

‘Arthur Rudge, of course,' Blackstone said.

‘But Rudge is—' George began.

But when Blackstone held up his hand for silence, he obeyed.

‘Once you'd come up with your bunker idea, you had the problem of who to put in it – because there did have to be
somebody
there,' Blackstone said. ‘And you had a second problem – who would actually
run
the company now your father was gone. The solution to the second problem was obvious – Arthur Rudge would do it. He was more than just the head bookkeeper – he was at least half of your father's business brain. You admitted that yourselves – or, at least Harold did.'

‘
If Father's enemies were brave enough to murder someone as important to the company as Rudge—' Harold says.

‘
He wasn't important to the company!' George interrupts. ‘Hell, we've managed well enough without him, haven't we?
'

‘
We've certainly managed,' Harold agrees cautiously. ‘But it wasn't that easy at first. We made mistakes which cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars – mistakes which we'd never have made if we'd had Rudge to advise us.
'

‘There's that clever trick again,' Blackstone told Meade. ‘Just as they talked about Big Bill as if he was alive, when in fact he was dead, they talked about Rudge as if he was dead, when the truth was that he was very much alive.'

‘Rudge died in a fire in his apartment,' George said. ‘Read the police report. They found his body in his bedroom.'

‘They found
a
body in the bedroom,' Blackstone corrected him. ‘Or rather, since the fire had been so fierce, they found the dead man's bones. And those bones, according to Dr Carr, who's recently read the report, belonged to a much bigger man than Rudge.' He paused again. ‘That, of course, would explain the two men with the armoire.'

‘What two men with the armoire?' George asked.

‘On the day of the fire, two men arrived at Rudge's apartment while he was still at work, carrying the armoire. Twenty minutes after he'd got back, they left again, taking the armoire with them. And what was in that armoire? When they arrived, it was your dead father. When they left, it was Rudge.'

‘Rudge did die in that fire in his apartment,' George said stubbornly. ‘Your doctor's wrong about the bones.'

‘I don't imagine he was entirely happy with the idea of living underground, but you probably gave him no choice in the matter,' Blackstone said. ‘However, you had to do something to make his life bearable, and that's why you allowed him a visitor once a month – a visitor who Fanshawe brought from the Blue Light Club, and who Rudge asked to call him “Daddy”.'

They'd certainly been painted in the photographs that Mrs Fairbrother had shown him, Blackstone thought. And tall, too – tall enough to be men!

‘It was because of Rudge's “lady” friends that the guards had to die, wasn't it?' he asked. ‘I imagine your original plan was just to drug them – that would certainly have been easy enough. But then you learned – perhaps through Fanshawe – that Joseph Turner knew all about the Blue Light Club on the Lower East Side.'

‘Turner had never met your father, so he didn't know that Big Bill's taste would never have run to “fairies”,' Meade said. ‘But there was always the danger that he'd talk to someone else about it, and that that someone would draw the correct conclusion – which was that if the man in the bunker liked fairies, then that man could never have been William Holt.'

‘So Turner had to die,' Blackstone continued. ‘There was simply no alternative. And by incorporating his murder into the kidnapping, you not only gave the killer a perfectly understandable motive for that murder, but you made the kidnapping seem much more real, too.'

A fatuous smile – half-relief, half-triumph – suddenly appeared on George's face. ‘I've just found a big hole in your theory,' he said.

‘Have you?' Blackstone asked.

‘Indeed I have. According to you, we covered up our father's death to safeguard the value of our shares. Is that right?'

‘Yes.'

‘And yet we were prepared to fake a kidnapping, which was bound to have a similar effect. How do you explain that?'

‘You've had seven years to re-jig the company so that you could protect yourselves from a fall in share prices,' Meade said. ‘You told us yourselves that you signed an agreement with another company the very day your “father” was “kidnapped”.'

‘But you'd have had to fake it even if it ruined you,' Blackstone added. ‘You had no other choice – because your father was about to be subpoenaed by the grand jury, and there wasn't any way of explaining why he couldn't appear without implicating yourselves in his murder.'

George's smile had already faded away into nothingness, but he made one last attempt to fight back.

‘If Rudge didn't die in the fire, but lived here instead, where is he now?' he asked.

‘He died in the woods outside this house, four days ago – just as you intended him to – and now he's in the Coney Island mortuary,' Meade said.

George looked thunderstruck.

‘You didn't know we'd found the body, did you?' Blackstone asked. ‘But your brother did. He realized quite a while ago that that was the only possible way we could know so much.'

They had returned to the parlour, but now, instead of occupying a sofa each, the two brothers had decided to sit side by side.

‘Your path has certainly been littered with bodies,' Blackstone said, looking down at them. ‘Let me see if I can remember them all. There was Fanshawe and Rudge, Turner and Cody—'

‘Mad Bob and Jake the Snake,' Meade interrupted.

‘Yes, it's quite true that you hired a second set of killers to rub out your first set,' Blackstone said to the brothers, ‘but we'll never be able to prove that, and anyway, rubbing out Bob and the Snake was almost a public service – so you get a free pass on those two.'

‘How very kind of you,' Harold said.

‘And now we come to the big one – the one that started everything,' Blackstone continued. ‘I mean, of course, your father's murder. Would you care to tell us about it?'

Harold smiled sardonically. ‘No, if you're so smart,
you
tell
us
,' he said.

‘All right, I will,' Blackstone agreed. ‘I can't tell you
exactly
when he was killed, but it must have been some time between when Knox shot him and the evidence against Knox went missing.'

‘Your father couldn't pay the bribe because he was already dead,' Blackstone said. ‘And you didn't
want
to pay it, because if the case ever went to court, Big Bill would have to appear as a witness – and, of course, he couldn't.'

‘Why
should
we have killed him that night?' George demanded.

‘Fool!' Harold spat angrily.

‘What your brother means is that you've just given the game away, because I never said he
was
killed on
that
night,' Blackstone told George. ‘But if you want me to give a reason why it happened then, I will.' He paused for a moment. ‘According to the police report, filed by our old friend Inspector Flynn, your father wasn't alone when Knox tried to kill him. He had a woman with him.'

‘He always had women with him,' George said with disgust.

‘Knox thought that the woman was a common whore – but I'm guessing she wasn't. Your father – monster that he was – was known for seducing any woman he could, including the wives of close associates. And I think this time he got even closer than that – I think that this time the woman was Virginia.'

‘That's a disgusting suggestion,' George said.

‘Seducing your son's wife,' Blackstone mused. ‘That's the supreme act of bullying, isn't it? But it was also a big mistake. When George came to his father's aid that night, and saw the two of them together, he must have been so shocked he hardly knew what he was doing. Certainly, his first act was to protect your father by disabling Knox – but that was no more than a reflex action. But later, when the shock had worn off, he found that he was in a blinding anger, because this really
was
the straw that broke the camel's back. I would guess – and again, I
am
guessing, though you have pretty much confirmed it – that you confronted your father that very same night, George, after the police had had taken Knox away, and then, in a towering rage, you killed him.'

‘Of course, you'll never be able to
prove
any of this,' George said.

‘Oh, George, why
are
you such a fool?' Harold asked, exasperatedly.

‘Your brother's right,' Blackstone agreed. ‘If you think we can't prove it, you
are
a fool. Even as we speak, your father's body is being disinterred from the grave that bears Rudge's headstone.'

‘It's only bones,' George said.

‘Indeed it is,' Blackstone agreed. ‘And one of those bones, the scapula, will have a chip out of it which will be a perfect match with the wound your father received when Knox shot him.'

‘You've no idea what it was like to have a father like ours – to go through the miserable childhood we went through,' Harold said, with unexpected vehemence. ‘We'd
earned
a better life when we grew up. We were
entitled
to it. And if we had to kill our father to get it, who can blame us?'

‘You may have a point,' Blackstone conceded. ‘But how do you justify killing the two Pinkerton men?'

‘If we were to have what we deserved, they were necessary sacrifices,' Harold said, with an indifference which was even more shocking than his sudden anger.

‘There's a lot of your father in you,' Blackstone said thoughtfully. ‘Probably much more of him than there is in George.'

‘Do you think I don't know that?' Harold demanded. ‘Do you think I don't have that brought home to me every single day, when I see just how weak my big strong brother really is?'

‘Please, Harold, don't . . .' George begged, as tears began to run down his cheeks.

‘I love you, George,' Harold said, and he began crying, too. ‘You're the most important thing in the world to me. But you have to see that none of this would have happened if only you'd been a different man.'

THIRTY

‘
N
ow haven't you just gone and made me look like some kind of prize idjit?' Inspector Flynn asked, gazing up from his hospital bed at his visitor.

‘You made a valuable contribution to the investigation,' Blackstone told him.

‘Sure, and what could be
more
valuable than chasing after a man who's already been under the sod for seven years?' Flynn countered, with just a flicker of a smile appearing at the corners of his mouth.

‘Without the work you put in, there'd have been no investigation at all,' Blackstone pointed out.

‘And I'm not sure that would have been such a bad thing,' Flynn said, growing more serious. ‘If I'd have kept my nose out of it, Harold and George would have got away with doing the world a favour – and the two Pinkerton men would still be alive.' He paused. ‘It could be argued that those two men's deaths are on my head.'

‘You can't think about it like that,' Blackstone told him. ‘You just have to do what you believe is right, and hope that people don't get hurt in the process.'

Flynn's amused grin returned for a moment. ‘You're wasted in Scotland Yard, Mr Blackstone,' he said. ‘You'd have made a damn fine priest.'

‘Which, given your opinion of priests, is not necessarily a compliment,' Blackstone said.

‘That's right enough,' Flynn agreed.

‘So what are your plans when you're discharged from hospital?' Blackstone wondered. ‘Will you stay on Coney Island? Or now that your reason for being there has gone, will you ask for a transfer back to Manhattan?'

‘Maybe neither,' Flynn said reflectively. ‘Maybe, now I've got my own personal monkey off my back, I'll go back to the old country and help my compatriots get the monkey off theirs.' He paused again. ‘It's you English I'm talking about,' he amplified.

‘I know it is,' Blackstone said. He flicked open his pocket watch. ‘I have to go.'

‘And what might you be rushing off to?' Flynn asked. ‘Is Wall Street so grateful that you've proved Bill Holt is finally dead that it's throwing you a victory parade?'