‘We need to know what was on that piece of paper you gave to Inspector O’Brien,’ Meade said in a rush.
Mrs de Courcey arched an eyebrow. ‘To whom?’
‘To Inspector O’Brien,’ Meade repeated. ‘He was the policeman who visited you on Tuesday.’
The eyebrow remained arched. ‘May I ask what it is that leads you to believe that?’
‘We have information.’
‘And who informed you?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
Mrs de Courcey sighed. ‘One of the many drawbacks to being a successful business woman in this city is that one does tend to acquire enemies,’ she said regretfully. ‘There are even some people, you know, who are so jealous of my good fortune that they will do anything — including telling outrageous lies — in an effort to bring me down.’
‘We don’t think it is a lie,’ Meade said.
‘And I am telling you, with my hand on my heart — ’ Mrs de Courcey paused to slowly rub her ample bosom — ‘that the gentleman in question was never here.’
Meade was even less in command here than he’d been when he was dealing with Senator Plunkitt, Blackstone thought. The woman had stirred up his patriotism, then embarrassed him with sexual innuendo, and the result was that now he was being far too soft on her.
‘You need to get one thing straight,’ the Englishman said harshly. ‘We’re here looking for Inspector O’Brien’s killer. That’s all we’re concerned with, so we have no interest at all in nailing a woman who, however elegantly she speaks, is no more than the madam of a whorehouse.’
Mrs de Courcey looked outraged. ‘I. . I’ve never. .’ she began.
‘Shut up and listen,’ Blackstone ordered her. ‘You have two choices. The first is to tell us what you told Inspector O’Brien, and we’ll leave it at that. The second is to refuse to tell us, but that would be a mistake, because when we find out what it was ourselves — and we will find out — we’ll be coming after you.’
By a truly valiant effort, Mrs de Courcey had recovered most of her composure and now she turned to Meade, smiled, and said, ‘We Americans pride ourselves on being direct, and we tend to see the English as reserved. Yet so often, it’s quite the reverse, don’t you think?’
But the spell she had cast over Meade had been broken.
‘Doesn’t matter how he chose to say it,’ the sergeant told the madam. ‘What’s important is that what he said was quite true. You do only have two choices.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Mrs de Courcey, who had not quite given up the battle for Meade’s soul. ‘Although,’ she added softly, ‘you’re quite right that those would be my choices if things had happened as you say they did. But, you see, they simply did not. This Inspector O’Reilly of yours-’
‘It’s O’Brien, as you know very well,’ Blackstone snapped.
‘This Inspector O’Brien of yours never came here, so I could not possibly have given him an addr-’
Then Mrs de Courcey fell silent.
‘An address?’ Blackstone asked, pouncing on the word. ‘Who said anything about it being an address you’d given him?’
The woman still said nothing.
‘You’d like to take back the words if you could, wouldn’t you?’ Blackstone taunted. ‘But it’s too late now.’
‘What else could it have been that I was supposed to have written?’ Mrs de Courcey demanded, and her voice was suddenly coarser. ‘A love poem from the whore to the cop? Instructions on how to cure the clap? It has to be an address — only I didn’t write nothin’!’
‘We could arrest you, you know?’ Meade said.
‘Grow up, sonny!’ Mrs de Courcey said contemptuously. ‘But do it somewhere else — ’cos I want you out of my knocking shop right now!’
‘I’ll pull that bitch in for questioning if it’s the last thing I do,’ Meade said angrily, as they walked away from the brothel.
He was whistling in the dark, Blackstone thought.
‘You’ll never get a judge to sign the warrant,’ he said aloud.
‘I will if I pick the right judge — and offer to pay him the right bribe.’
‘I’m not sure there is such a thing as the right judge,’ Blackstone said, hating the thought of putting the rock back on top of Meade’s spring of optimism, but knowing that it had to be done.
‘You don’t know this city like I do,’ Meade said stubbornly. ‘As I’ve told you often enough before, money talks.’
‘Of course it does,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But we both know that all men aren’t really equal, and neither is all money. There’s some money which has greater powers of persuasion than the rest.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Meade demanded.
‘What’s the first question that the judge you try to bribe is going to ask his clerk?’
Meade thought about it. And as he did, his expression grew gloomier and gloomier.
‘He’s going to ask whether or not Mrs de Courcey pays her bribes on time,’ he said finally.
‘Exactly. And if she does — and I’m sure she does — what’s his next move going to be?’
‘He’ll turn down the bribe. It’ll really cut him up to do it, but he’ll do it anyway.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the web of corruption works on a perverted kind of trust, and if Mrs de Courcey’s bribes didn’t get her the protection she expected, the other madams would start asking themselves whether it was worth them paying their bribes.’
‘And if that happened, the whole system would collapse,’ Blackstone said. ‘And nobody involved in it wants that.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Meade said. ‘You’re always so damned right.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to go down to the Lower East Side. Do you want to join me?’
‘All right,’ Blackstone said. ‘But why, in particular, do you want to go there now?’
‘Because it’s a festering boil on the ass of New York City — and that makes it the perfect location for getting disgustingly drunk in.’
SIXTEEN
He was lying flat out, on a cast-iron bed with a rather lumpy mattress — that much he had already established — but other than that, Sam Blackstone had no real idea of where he was.
Slowly it started to come back to him. He was in New York City. He was in a hotel — the Mayfair Hotel on Canal Street.
Locating himself should have made him happier, but it didn’t. He was feeling rougher than he could remember feeling for a long, long time. A smithy seemed to have been established inside his head while he’d been sleeping, and the blacksmith was already hard at work, hammering out innumerable horseshoes and using his brain as the anvil. Even worse than that, a tannery had been set up inside his mouth, so that now he seemed to be in imminent danger of being poisoned by his own breath.
His back ached. His legs ached. Whenever he looked towards the light streaming in from the window, he noted that his vision was blurred — but he didn’t do much of that, because the light made his pupils burn.
He lay on the bed, trying to retake control of his body, and thinking about the previous night.
He and Meade had probably visited at least ten or twelve saloons on the Lower East Side, and had a minimum of two drinks in each one. In Kleindeutschland, they had supped foaming steins of beer. In one of the less salubrious saloons on 5th Street they had drunk a whiskey which would have made embalming fluid taste good. They had been accosted by scores of prostitutes of all colours. They had been invited into several opium dens. That he had ever found his way back to his hotel when this excess was over had been little short of a miracle.
And why had they done it? he asked himself, as the blacksmith in his head eased off for a second.
They had done it because — though neither of them was prepared to openly admit it — they both knew that their investigation was dead, and they were attending its wake.