Strawman Made Steel Read online

  Fredrick Carl Inker, principal and only. Inker was one of those guys who had been doomed by the census takers to tick ‘Other’ for occupation until terms like ‘brokerage’ became vogue. He was part bard, part genius―only, no one knew at what, himself included. He was a restless spirit whose latest caper was to read the Wall Street ticker like tealeaves.

  I rapped on the glass and entered. A smell of carbon hung in his small, dimly lit reception room. In one corner a woman transcribed stock figures direct from an expensive fiber link that had been plumbed in. Names and figures encoded in light strobed the blank wall above her shorthand machine. Her fingers were a blur.

  If she noticed me enter, she gave no sign. Then the inner door banged onto its limits and Inker emerged. His glass eye seemed fixed on the typist, but the other burned in my direction.

  “Midpac for Midwest is an expensive typo, honey―” he bellowed before his tongue caught up with his eye. “Mac? Come on in. Coffee?”

  Inker was a weather system, a chaotic object. His pants were checked and his shirt striped, and the first impression I got was of a court jester in motley.

  I followed him into his inner sanctum, swept crap off a seat, and took a load off.

  “Black and five, thanks,” I said. “And a drop of whiskey, if you’ve got it. I’ve a headache on a comeback.”

  He decanted a turgid-looking black liquid into a cup, added sugar and something from an unlabeled bottle, and set it down on the desk in front of me.

  He sat and seemed to enjoy a moment’s silence.

  I took a swig of coffee, burnt my mouth, and noted its surprisingly hard kick.

  “So what is it?” said Inker. “That Pursell stock tank and now you want to pay me back?” he said, but he was smiling. He knew I never took his advice.

  “What do you know about the Speighs?”

  “We talking about the New York Speighs?” I nodded. “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you’ve got. What they’re into. What shape they’re in.”

  “Nothing pear-shaped, is a good bet.” He swiveled till his back faced me, and began picking over ranks of folders lining the rear wall of his office. “They are the ever-so rare marriage of old money and true cunning.”

  “Cunning?” I probed.

  “Aha,” he said, and slipped a folder from among a thousand that looked the same to me. It was an inch thick. He slapped it on the desk, opened it, and began leafing through its loose sheaf of papers.

  From where I sat, it looked to be a dossier. Prospectuses, year-end reports, notices of dividend, and news clippings. But covering every inch of space were scribbled messages, balloons, and connecting lines, as though the dossier had been left within reach of a bored kid with a pencil and a jar of amphetamines. If it was a mind map, Inker’s head was the Wild West.

  “I’m surprised you never heard of them,” he said, pausing to write on the sheet under his hand. The tips of his fingers were smudged with graphite.

  “I didn’t say I hadn’t.”

  He reached the last page and closed the folder.

  I drank more coffee and lamented my dead tastebuds.

  “In short?” he said. “If it’s in the dictionary, they own a piece of it. They’ve got hedges on hedges.”

  “Specifically?”

  “They’re silent partners on half the enterprises in New York.”

  I must have looked skeptical.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m exaggerating, but they’ve got hooks in banks, hotels, breweries, a nice slice of the exchange, legacy biotech, casinos, stables, charities, contracts with City Hall―”

  “Which casinos?”

  “Broadway, Diogenes, Fontana.”

  I downed the rest of my coffee and changed my mind about those taste buds.

  I said, “Anything shady?”

  Inker’s live eye rested on me a moment, calculating, before he replied, “I don’t do that stuff any more.”

  I countered, “But it’s prudent to know.”

  Inker tilted his head. “Sure. Everybody has wheels that need greasing.”

  I stood, and said, “Thanks.” He must have spied my .38.

  “When did you last use that?”

  I lifted a coat flap as if to confirm it was still there. A redundant gesture. All day, every day I could feel its killing mass slotted into the speed rig, tucked up under my arm, lying against my heart.

  “Last night. One shot. Killed a bitch.”

  “Anyone I know,” said Inker, and laughed like a jester. Then, quietly: “I never did say thanks, for that business with Gillian.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  He seemed surprised, then said, “Me too. It still might.” His good eye had a sheen like the glass one.

  I let myself out, past the teletypist who still hadn’t registered my existence. I noticed for the first time how knotted-up her fingers were, like oak roots, and wondered what age transcoders took their pension.

  As I headed across town, I also wondered how long it would be before Inker’s Speigh dossier listed the shirt on my back.

  The headquarters of Atlas Consolidated was housed in a pillbox that reached forty-seven floors into the smog above East 13th Street, not far from the dust of the last Palladium. The building sat back from the street, and in the middle of the plaza out front rose a twenty-foot statue of its mascot. Pigeons roosted in the clefts made by his deltoids. A colossal glass lens rested on his back. Its center had to be a foot thick. If the sun got through it, the hotdog stand across the street was toast.

  I had to detour around a crew working, from the smell, on a sewer line beneath the plaza. Atlas’s sewer line looked fine.

  I entered the lobby and looked up the executive floor of Atlas Co. The elevator attendant resembled a shrunken Czarist general in red coat and silver buttons, complete with epaulettes. It was that kind of place.

  At the thirty-ninth floor I said, “Спасибо,” to the general, and exited the elevator into a spacious lobby of marble and onyx. A single desk lay at its end, bracketed by downlamps, and attended by a slim young lady in form-hugging black linen. Her classical looks were suffocating beneath a heavy layer of foundation. Her eyes managed to see me and not. They were shot with red.

  I handed her my card, smiled, and said, “I wanted to speak with Mr. Euripides Speigh’s personal assistant.” I didn’t expect a return smile. Her foundation looked set.

  She took the card and disappeared through a door to my left without a word, and reappeared a moment later with a tall man who introduced himself to be Robert Weatherall. I followed him through the door into what I assumed was his office. Folders were strewn across a desk already thick with paper. He didn’t sit or offer me a seat.

  “I’m sure you can appreciate that this is a very difficult time for us, Mr. McIlwraith―”

  “Worse for Mr. Speigh,” I said.

  Weatherall didn’t see the humor in it. He turned his back and left the office. Soon we were weaving through a warren of office-space, me stuck to his heels like a bored kid.

  “The police detectives have already been,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m not sure what more I can add.”

  “I’m not the police.”

  “That is plain.”

  “Just a few questions,” I said, and retrieved my notebook and pen. It caught his eye when he rounded a cubicle. He stopped and pivoted to face me in what looked like a reflex motion. Few men can resist the lure of being quoted.

  “What do you do here?―I mean Atlas.”

  He smiled till I saw most of his teeth. “Move the world, Mr. McIlwraith.”

  I scanned the busy dens clustered around us.

  “One piece of paper at a time,” I said, and wrote that down.

  He shook his head. “Most of the messages flying up and down the east coast pass through Atlas products. Optics: fiber, condensers, alloys. We focus the naked flame a thousandfold and make it speak―”

  “Sounds like you have
a head for the business,” I said.

  He paused and pursed his lips. “It will sound corny to your hard-bitten ear, Mr. McIlwraith, but I am proud to work here. And Mr. Speigh”―a shadow passed over his face―“was a fine employer, I happily confess. I was about to tell you, before you interrupted, that it was because of Mr. Speigh that Atlas expanded into construction, services, security―”

  “So he did some work, huh?” Billionaire playboy with his cuffs rolled up. That had to be a first.

  Weatherall’s answered by walking away. I followed him through an oak door into a cavernous office with square feet of view on downtown Manhattan. He eased the door shut and a hush fell on the room.

  He advanced on a bureau hard up against the window. A much-used blotter covered half its surface, weighed down with a cherry wood set with a crystal inkwell. A heavy book obscured the rest of the desk. It lay shut, and its cover pronounced it the appointment book of one Euripides E. L. Speigh.

  Weatherwall heaved it open with practiced ease to the previous day, which was marked by a ribbon, and then turned back two more days to the Friday. He stepped back and gestured for me to look.

  I did. It was wall to wall. Even lunch was marked at Café Martin, reservation for a Mr. Speigh and a Mr. Custom-Plastics. Lifestyles of the rich and dog-tired.

  Only blank pages now for Euripides E. L. Speigh. I closed the diary.

  “Before, you said ‘security’,” I said. “What kind of security are we talking about?”

  “Line checks. Anti-tampering.” He smiled again. “The information flowing in the fibers our clients buy is money, and illegal tapping is booming.”

  That sounded to me like paying Sisyphus by the hour for boulder-rolling.

  At that moment the office door swung open a foot and a head poked round its edge.

  The head said, “Kramer can’t find the Roxon file.”

  Weatherall strode from the room, saying over his shoulder, “Please don’t touch anything.”

  When he left I opened the diary and flipped it over to Sunday. The afternoon was blocked out with the text: MOTHERS. Below that was a naked asterisk. I shut it again and cast my gaze over the office.

  Other than the bureau there were few personal touches. A bathroom and wardrobe opened off one side. I rummaged in my coat pocket for a rubber ball, and then entered the bathroom.

  The cleaner had already been over it. A spotless toilet set stood on the vanity and, in taste, matched the guy I had frisked in the dumpster. The wardrobe overflowed with suits transitioning to spring, a number swathed in dry-cleaner’s plastic. At the far end hung a lady’s cocktail dress, a size six at a guess. The kitten pumps beneath were size seven.

  “Excuse me.” It was Weatherall.

  I showed him my rubber ball. “Still getting the hang,” I said, and bounced it off the carpet.

  For the second time that morning I was escorted from a place by a suspicious brow.

  On my way out I stopped by the desk. The lady behind it didn’t seem to have moved.

  “Did Eury drink?” I said. “Get into a lot of fights?”

  She reacted as if I’d slapped her. She flushed clear through her foundation, and her eyes glanced anywhere but at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  A tear ran over her cheek. She wiped it with a finger and smeared her mascara. I offered her a clean handkerchief, which she took and dabbed on her eye.

  “Did you go to this party with him yesterday?”

  She shook her head. I fancied I saw a thousand speculations flit―why not?―through her eyes. Pity the one soul who could answer them had left the planet. Torture.

  “How about before that. You see him yesterday morning?”

  She nodded.

  “Happy?”

  She smiled despite the tears. “How could he not be? Didn’t they tell you? That was what the celebration was for,” she said. “He was receiving his―”

  “Majority?” I said.

  “Freedom. Full access to his inheritance, which till then had been locked in trust.”

  From rich, to rich and unencumbered.

  She dabbed one last tear away and returned my handkerchief. She attempted to replace her mask.

  “As for drink,” she said. “He never drank in front of me. Ever. Or fought.” She hesitated. “One time only, he came here with a black eye.”

  “When was that?” I said.

  “I don’t know. A month ago? Two?”

  I thanked her and re-joined my Russian friend in the elevator. On the way down, I grappled with the concept of a rich kid who worked, didn’t drink, and didn’t fight. It disturbed my equilibrium.

  From there I took a cab to Tunney’s police station―command post of Manhattan’s Third Ward, with oversight of five of the island’s precincts. It was a hive of fat, tired, blue bees.

  That’s unfair. Inker’s whiskey hadn’t dented my headache, and it took me half an hour to track down Tunney. At that moment he could have been the queen bee. It took another five minutes of me staring at him through the press to get some time alone. I knew he’d been leaned on to keep me in the loop. He knew I knew it.

  He plowed his way into his office, and I guess trusted me to get sucked in by his slipstream. He started speaking before he’d turned around.

  “Alright smart-ass. The dumpster travelled halfway across town.”

  I leaned against the door, hands deep in my pockets, and let him blow himself out.

  “But nobody saw it. Amazing, huh? City of thirty-million throwbacks and no one saw a thing.”

  I tugged the corners of my mouth down.

  “Nobody saw a five-ton dumpster picked up by a ten-ton rig and carried half-way across Manhattan in the dead of night, and planted right outside Park’s busiest hotel.”

  He rifled through his desk drawers, hunting for something. A sheen of sweat lay down the back of his thick neck.

  “Some of the graffiti on the thing had turf tags. We narrowed it down to a square mile, and the rest was old fashioned legwork.”

  He straightened up and turned, holding a bottle.

  “There’s more than that dumpster smells.” He said it to the bottle. He raised it to his lips, then pulled if far enough away to say, “And before you get on your high horse, this is medicinal―codliver, bitters, and extract of chicory. Tastes like liquefied dung. You’re welcome to it.” He swigged, and grimaced. “Less I see of you, the less of this shit I need to swallow, so out with it.”

  “Have you found the driver?”

  “Need to find the truck first.”

  I said, “You haven’t told me where the trail led.”

  He tilted the bottle, shook his head, twisted its top back on, and jammed it into a drawer.

  “Granton. Warehouse by the river.”

  That was Eastside. Where the UN had once stood. What business did a Speigh have there, day or night? I said as much.

  “My question exactly,” said Tunney. “But I’ve got a bigger one for you, genius: Why can’t the Examiner find a cause of death?”

  That raised my eyebrows. “The boy was all bent out of shape.”

  “All post-mortem,” he said. “No, the body of Euripides Speigh, forty-two looking like twenty-four, has everything in its place, and is just hitting its stride. Only problem being it’s stone dead.”

  “Blood alcohol?”

  “Barely one drink.”

  I could see Tunney thinking “only”. I was thinking what was rare for a drunk was rarer for a teetotaler.

  I made that move with my mouth again. “Maybe the boy had a freak condition. Something undetectable in the brain? It happens.”

  “Not to guys in dumpsters. That’s horseshit.”

  He had a point. I got the address of the warehouse and left Tunney to his mood.

  Outside, the wind had shifted. I could smell rain. Thick, dark clouds were banking up for a show, and you knew it was going to be a good one when the litter started running faster than the citizens.

&
nbsp; I ducked into a pharmacy and bought aspirin. In a diner across the street I ordered an all-day breakfast―ham, eggs, hashbrowns, the lot―and took a seat at the window. Someone had left a copy of the Times on the bar. I flicked through it, but the Speigh murder had been too late for the morning copy.

  Sitting there I noticed a tight feeling in my side that meant my shirt had stuck to the wound. Something else to look forward to.

  My breakfast arrived and I hung my head over it a moment, inhaling deeply. I ordered coffee, then alternated swallows of breakfast, coffee, and aspirin till things looked rosier.

  The heavens let loose and pelted the street and sidewalk. Heavy drops dashed against the window in isolated spatter, then joined and ran till the street writhed like a live thing. The water lifted winter’s smell from the pavement and wafted it indoors, humus and soot and shit.

  I left the waitress a smile and a good tip, turned my collar up, and went in search of a cab. I’d need to wear my good spirits like a knight his armor heading out Eastside. Eastside specialized in denting things it didn’t like.

  — 4 —

  The cop who met me outside the warehouse in Granton had a drop of what was probably water hanging from his nose. He ran the sleeve of his department-issue all-weathers across his nose and said, “Who the hell are you?”

  I flipped open my wallet and showed him my license and gun permit. He read aloud as though for my benefit: “‘Janus McIlwraith, Provenor. Licensed to operate by Tri-State Authority.’

  “That a fact?” he said, and tucked his thumbs into his belt. “Janus. That a girl’s name?”

  I just smiled. What was it to me if this slob wasn’t up on his Greek deities?

  He slipped his nightstick from a loop on his belt and used it to part my coat flap. He peered at the gun in my holster. “A Lady Smith?” He rasped the back of a hand across three-day stubble. “That a girl’s gun?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Bend over and I’ll see if it’ll bake you a cake.”