Blackstone and the New World (14 page)

‘So Inspector O’Brien’s corruption investigation didn’t bother you?’ Blackstone said.

‘That’s what I’m sayin’. I knew he was never goin’ to uncover what I done wrong, because I never done nothin’ wrong.’ Plunkitt smiled. ‘Which brings us right back to where we started, which is that I had no reason on God’s green earth to have the man hit. Any more questions you’d care to ask, Alex?’

‘No,’ Meade said weakly. ‘Thank you for your time, Senator.’

‘My pleasure,’ Plunkitt told him. He turned to Blackstone again, and fixed him with his piercing eyes. ‘Say, for the sake of argument, that my worst enemy was given the job of writin’ my epitaph when I’m gone. An’ say, for argument’s sake again, that he tried to work out the worst possible thing he could write about me. You followin’ me so far?’

‘I’m following you so far,’ Blackstone agreed.

‘An’ say he wasn’t allowed to lie. Say he could write anythin’ about me as long as it was the truth. Do you know what the worst thing he could come up with would be?’

‘No,’ Blackstone said. ‘What would it be?’

A fresh smile spread across the senator’s broad face. ‘“George W. Plunkitt”,’ he said. ‘“He seen His Opportunities and He Took ’Em.”’

TWELVE

I
t wasn’t Blackstone’s normal practice to start drinking that early in the morning, but when he saw the look of mute appeal in Meade’s eyes as they passed the saloon on 12th Street, he quickly decided that even if
he
didn’t need the boost that a shot of alcohol would give him, the sergeant certainly did.

He sat Meade down at a table, went over to the bar, and ordered a draft beer for himself and a whiskey for the sergeant. When he returned to the table, Meade was gazing down speculatively at his hands, as if wondering if they were up to the job of strangling him.

‘Cheer up,’ Blackstone said.

‘Cheer up?’ Meade repeated bleakly, grabbing the shot glass as a drowning man might clutch at a straw, and knocking the whiskey back in a single gulp. ‘Cheer up! Plunkitt ran rings round me. You warned me he might, but I was such an arrogant little prig that I wouldn’t listen to you.’

‘He’s been in the game a long time,’ Blackstone said consolingly. ‘He was at it before you were even born.’ He hesitated for a second, before asking, ‘Did Plunkitt really dandle you on his knee at one of the Tammany Hall picnics – or was that just a tactic to knock you off balance?’

‘I don’t know,’ Meade admitted. ‘He may have dandled me on his knee! He may even have ruffled my goddam hair and told me I was a sweet kid. I don’t remember.’

‘But you did
attend
Tammany picnics?’

‘We attended a few of them,’ Meade said, with the shame evident in his voice. ‘My father despises the whole Tammany crowd – but if you want to do business as a lawyer in New York City, you sometimes have to force yourself to be pleasant to them.’

‘You do what you have to do,’ Blackstone said. ‘I sometimes have to force myself to be pleasant to my assistant commissioner – and that man is the scum of the earth.’

‘Really?’ Meade asked gratefully.

‘Really,’ Blackstone confirmed.

But he was thinking, even so, I’d rather cut my own arm off than go on a
picnic
with Todd.

‘Why am I so stupid?’ Meade wailed. ‘Why did it have to turn out that Plunkitt was the organ grinder and I was no more than the monkey? And what would Clarissa have thought of me if she’d been there? Would she
ever
have considered marrying me after that?’

‘Clarissa
wasn’t
there,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘And the way things turned out wasn’t your fault. You can only do serious damage to the enemy if you have the right ammunition – and we didn’t.’

‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’ Meade asked. ‘Do you think the only graft he’s involved in
is
what he calls “honest graft”?’

‘I don’t know,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘But even if it is true – even if every cent he’s ever made has been, strictly speaking, legal – that still doesn’t make him exactly a choirboy, does it?’

Meade forced a smile on to his face. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not even a defrocked one.’

‘Because he’d never have had the opportunity for this “honest graft” of his if he hadn’t been an important politician,’ Blackstone continued. ‘And he’d never have become an important politician in this city if he hadn’t used all possible means – legal
and
illegal – to fix elections.’

Meade’s smile had been growing in strength as Blackstone spoke, and now he looked positively amused.

‘Have I said something funny?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Meade replied. ‘Or rather, it’s not what you said that was funny, so much as it’s the fact that it was
you
who said it.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘You remember me meeting you down at the docks, don’t you?’ Meade asked.

‘Of course I do.’

‘And you remember me saying that there were no real detectives in New York City?’ Meade paused, and suddenly looked a little troubled. ‘I was maybe being a little disloyal to Inspector O’Brien when I said that,’ he continued, ‘but I’ve always thought of him as a moral crusader rather than a true detective.’ He paused again. ‘Anyway, you remember me saying that about the Detective Bureau?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And you didn’t believe me, did you?’

‘Well, I . . .’ Blackstone began, uncomfortably.

‘Now imagine that instead of talking about the Detective Bureau, I’d talked about Senator Plunkitt. Imagine if I’d delivered
then
that little speech on Plunkitt that you delivered just
now
. You’d have thought I was a prime candidate for the funny farm, wouldn’t you?’

Good God, Meade was right, Blackstone told himself. He
would have
thought the sergeant was a candidate for the funny farm. But now his whole view of the city – his whole way of
thinking about it
– had altered.

And how long had that
taken
?

Amazingly – incredibly – it had taken less than a day and a half!

Yet, in some ways, he was starting to feel as if he’d never existed anywhere else – as if New York City had been his entire universe for as long as he could remember.

So maybe the city
did
actually have the power to change people, without them even really noticing it happen.

And maybe that power was both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

‘What’s on your mind, Sam?’ he heard Meade say.

Blackstone grinned self-consciously. ‘I was worried about becoming a new man without ever having got the old one quite right.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘Shall we get back to the matter of Senator George Plunkitt?’

‘Sure.’

‘The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that when he said he had no real idea why Inspector O’Brien visited him, he wasn’t lying.’

‘But he
had
to know,’ Meade protested. ‘Otherwise, none of it makes any sense.’

‘None of
what
makes any sense?’

‘I knew Patrick O’Brien well. Very well indeed. Given the opportunity to speak to Plunkitt, he wouldn’t have wasted that time by talking about the weather, or baseball, or if Oklahoma should be a state.’

‘But that’s just what Plunkitt says he
did
talk about,’ Blackstone said. ‘And I believe him.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Meade said stubbornly. ‘Patrick was one of the most direct men I’ve ever met.’

‘Perhaps, but . . .’

‘No,’ Meade corrected himself, ‘he was
the
most direct man. If he had accusations to make, he’d make them, without even stopping to think about the consequences that might have on his own career. And if he wanted help or information, he’d come right out and ask for it, even if he knew there was a good chance of his request being turned down.’

‘But there might be circumstances when . . .’

‘His opinion of himself wasn’t based on what others thought of him, or what they were prepared to do for him. He was his own man, you see. He was
always
his own man.’

‘Maybe not
always
,’ Blackstone cautioned. ‘Sergeant Saddler did say he’d been acting strangely for the last few days of his life.’

‘But
why
wouldn’t he tell Senator Plunkitt what it was he wanted?’ Meade asked, still fretting over the point like a wild dog worrying a dead sheep, and
almost
conceding that George Plunkitt had been speaking the truth. ‘And what
was it
that he wanted?’

‘I don’t know,’ Blackstone said crisply, ‘but we’re not going to find out by sitting here, are we?’

‘So what’s your plan?’ Meade asked.

Yes, what
was
his plan? Blackstone wondered. Where
did
they go after they’d come up against the brick wall which was Senator Plunkitt?

‘
My
plan is to follow your
plan
,’ he said. ‘
My
plan is go back to the Lower East Side, and see if we can pick up O’Brien’s trail.’

‘So you think it’s a good plan, do you?’ Meade asked, with suspicious innocence.

No, not really, Blackstone thought. In fact, not at all. But it’s the
only
plan we’ve got.

‘It could work,’ he said aloud. ‘Longer shots than that have been known to come off.’

‘The reason I’m asking, Sam, is that when you told me to go down to the Lower East Side last night, I got the distinct impression it wasn’t because you thought it was
good
plan – it was because you were looking for an excuse to get me out of your hair for a while.’

‘That’s what you thought, was it?’ Blackstone asked, non-committally.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. And after I’d left you at the luxurious Hotel Rat-trap on Canal Street, and I was walking through the Lower East Side, I began to see the hopelessness of the plan – as it stood – for myself.’

‘As it stood?’ Blackstone repeated.

‘That’s right,’ Meade agreed. ‘And I started to realize that we desperately needed to come up with something that would give us an extra edge. And that’s when I had my idea.’

He was deliberately teasing, Blackstone thought. But after the morning the boy had had, what was wrong with letting him have his bit of fun?

‘What idea?’ he asked.

‘This,’ Meade said, reaching into his pocket, taking out a small poster, and laying it flat on the table between them.

The banner along the top of the poster screamed:

And beneath it was a photograph of the man it referred to.

It came as a shock to Blackstone to realize that though he’d been investigating O’Brien’s death for a day and half – and had built up an image of him through what others had told him – he had not, until that moment, had any real idea of what the man himself looked like.

Now he studied the picture carefully, and was forced to concede that Meade’s description had been perfectly accurate, for while O’Brien had not been particularly good-looking, he had a presence about him which shone through even in a grainy photograph.

There was more text underneath:

‘I thought of putting “substantial reward”,’ Meade said, ‘but they’re very suspicious of long words on the Lower East Side. And anyway, “big” should certainly get their attention.’

‘And how big
is
“big”?’ Blackstone wondered.

Meade shrugged. ‘Depends who earns the reward. If the information comes from a Bowery wino, I can pay him out of the change in my pocket. If it comes from a prosperous East Side merchant, I’d probably have to empty my bank account in order to raise a large enough sum to make him talk.’

‘So you’re offering this reward yourself?’

‘I am,’ Meade agreed – almost defiantly, as if he expected Blackstone to tell him that he was acting like a complete fool.

But Blackstone didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘The idea only came to you last night, and you’ve already had the poster printed?’

‘That’s right.’

Blackstone whistled softly. ‘Then it’s been a very quick job,’ he said. ‘Even with the backing of Scotland Yard, I’d never have got it done anything like as quickly in London.’

‘Maybe not,’ Meade agreed. ‘But this is a city in which money not only talks, but talks in a very loud voice indeed. You really should have learned that by now, Sam.’

‘How many posters did you have printed?’

‘A thousand.’

Blackstone whistled again. ‘That’s very good,’ he said. ‘But they’re no use to us just sitting in a big stack. We need to get them distributed around the streets as soon as possible.’

‘They’ve
already
been distributed,’ Meade said. ‘I hired a team of bill stickers at the same time as I went to the printers. They’ve been plastering the posters all over the Lower East Side since early this morning.’

Blackstone clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Good work!’ he said.

Meade positively beamed. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’d almost given up hope of
ever
hearing you say that.’

THIRTEEN

I
n Alex Meade’s considered opinion, Inspector Michael Connolly had been a very poor street detective, and made an even worse head of the Detective Bureau, a position he had held ever since Thomas Byrnes had left the police department with his $350,000 bank account still intact.

The man himself was in his late forties, and was rapidly losing the battle with both his expanding waistline and his receding hairline. He was a traditionalist in many ways, preferring chewing tobacco to either cigars or the newfangled cigarettes, and still believing – like his predecessor – that the best psychological tool to employ in an interrogation was the old-fashioned billy-club.