Strawman Made Steel Read online

She left, her slim contours fading down the corridor like a vision. I let out a breath.

  “She’s nice,” Ailsa said. I grunted noncommittally.

  “You’ve a nice pair of bags growing under those lovely eyes,” I said. “Who told you to hang around tonight?”

  “She caught me as I was leaving. I stayed. We chatted. She’s money, but nice money.”

  Ailsa collected her bag, coat and gloves, and came over to the door. She seemed to hesitate, then said, “About this morning. You’re wrong.”

  I collected my coat and hat from where they lay, crumpled and desiccated like the corpse of a man that had died waiting.

  “You’re wrong,” she said, “about no one thinking you’re the best at anything. For one, you never forget anything. And you make a girl feel safe. You make this girl feel safe.”

  I tousled her hair and said, “Knock it off. I forgot my birthday, didn’t I?”

  She pouted. “You don’t forget things you want to remember.”

  She looked out the door to the corridor along which Miss Speigh had left. “You going to ask her to dinner?”

  “She’s a client.”

  “So what?”

  “I’m taken,” I said, and hung a smile on my dial the way a squatter hangs a picture.

  A frown puckered her forehead, putting the sprinkle of freckles there into new array. Then I got my second dose of pity that day. She reached out and twisted the gold band on my finger.

  “How long has it been?”

  “I don’t remember. It makes no difference.”

  I trudged up stairs to the twenty-seventh story, not for the first time ruing the lack of vacant office space on lower floors.

  The mirror hung in the gloom like a moonstruck pool. I grit my teeth, entered it, and endured its sensory assault. Some days finding my way back out the other side to electrified New York is like navigating in a blizzard; others like the view from 30,000 feet on a moon-drenched night, all glossed lakes and rivers and highways. On those nights, I have but to mark my destination and fall. Either way, the atmosphere tears at my skin.

  The first smell I perceived on leaving the mirror in the hallway of my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen was a perfume. The tincture of a perfume. The bare memory.

  A harsh beeping assaulted my ears. It was coming from the smoke detector in the hall ceiling above me. Its battery was dying, with Academy-Award-winning grit. I reached up and tore the battery cover open, and pried the battery out.

  The alarm speaker fell silent, and let me hear the tail end of a voice speaking to my answering machine. Telemarketer disguised as survey-taker. Second one in two days. I thought about introducing them to each other.

  The call cut out and the machine snapped off. I stood in the sudden silence watching neon light pulse through the window at the end of the hall. In a wedge of black sky beyond, the lights of a Boeing Longhaul winked.

  I headed for the bedroom, sloughing clothes along the way, found the bar and poured myself whiskey. I dropped into the easy chair by the double bed and was immediately accosted by every put-off ache, every shrugged pain and niggling thought. I closed my eyes, took a heavy slug from my glass and tried to make them all shut up.

  What did they say about Speighs? One a day keeps the doctor away? No, that was apples. They were apples. She’d be apples.

  I took another slug, lay another hammer blow on all that was awry.

  I opened my eyes again and let my gaze fall on the desk abutting the opposite wall. Its mahogany surface shone dully in the pale light of the electric bedside lamp. The only items on its surface were a typewriter―an antique Royal 10, with the special math keys in black―a laptop computer, and the watch I had worn the first time I stepped through the mirror. It was stone dead.

  I searched myself inwardly, but found no trace of sleep. I hauled myself up, stopped by the bar to top up from the bottle, and sat at the desk in front of the typewriter. Time to open the case officially.

  From a drawer I got a sheet of bonded letter, and fed it into the typewriter. I wound it on with a grinding rasp, snapped the guide flat, and lay my fingers on the cold keys.

  I glanced at the top row of keys and found the forward slash. Editors call it the solidus. I like the name. Sounds heavy, substantial.

  A solidus. That’s how I viewed mirrors now. I entered one and slid its length into the future. A future. I don’t know. The line between entry and exit was like a log in Time’s stream. As long as I kept my balance, I could step from one end to the other.

  Always I travelled the same distance into the future and back, leaping over the Event into post-electric New York. Every day that passed in the present was matched by a day passed in that future, but half a year out of kilter. Spring here was fall there, and the seasons had woven in counterpoint for every one of the nine years I’d been a traveller in time.

  A solidus? At times the mirror felt more like an escape key. But the Royal lacked that innovation.

  The other thing that drew me to the typewriter was the mental discipline it exacted. You can’t just blaze away with crap on a typewriter. It makes you pay for errors. The wise man slows down, collects his thoughts, and then plays them out like chess moves.

  I typed:

  Case File ― The murder of Euripides Speigh. Investigation on behalf of Mrs. Evelyne Speigh, and Miss Nicole (real name?) Speigh...

  And, I thought, half of Manhattan. I watched the ribbon jump and slap against the page as I typed. Whole constellations of case details lay hidden in that ribbon, black on black.

  I paused, wanting to collect only the most salient points, to be done with it. I typed, a rat-tat-tat filling the silence.

  Day 1:

  * Bookended by Speighs ― Evelyne, the matriarch, a fortress of stoicism or something; Nicole, Evelyne’s youngest child and only daughter, a shipwreck tossed onto my shore by the storm of her brother’s death.

  * According to Inker, the Speighs have fingers in many pies.

  * Euripides played a game of chance the night he died. Who with? Why Eastside?

  * COD unknown. Expect more. Cops aren’t poking in the right organ.

  * Body abused and moved post-mortem.

  I paused, waiting for a thought to come winding through the gears of my mind into my consciousness. It dropped, crawled along a rut, a little ball-bearing, and fell kerplunk into view. It was an image of the list Nicole had given to me. I typed.

  * Euripides murdered early morning after his deceased father’s birthday.

  I lifted my fingers from the keys a moment then added one more item.

  * Why me?

  I ripped the paper free of the typewriter, trundled the deep drawer of the desk open, and dropped it into an unlabeled folder.

  With that job done, I discovered that the ball-bearing had been plugging my head. Now it was free, sleep was oozing down all my mind’s paths.

  I drank the rest of the whiskey down, loosened my tie, and lunged onto the bed.

  I dreamed of a redheaded Nicole Speigh.

  — 6 —

  I got to the office late morning. But I felt fresh. The sun was shining. The sap was flowing. The birds were warbling, and in the litter-strewn rambles of the Park love was being given and taken―mostly taken.

  Ailsa was out. She’d left two telegrams arranged on my desk.

  The first was from Tunney and said simply:

  SEE ME

  The second was less spendthrift. It was from Inker. It ran:

  CANT GET MY HEAD OUT OF SPEIGHS NOW THANKS STOP FINANCIALS VERY HEALTHY WITH ONE ANOMALY STOP PURCHASED A BLACK HOLE FOUR YEARS BACK CALLED ALLTRON CORP STOP LEGACY BIOTECH INTER ALIA IS A DOLLAR SINK TOO BIG A DRAIN FOR SPEIGHS ONLY STOP MUST BE SILENT PARTNERS

  One of these days I’d have to pay Inker. He was too easy. You could toss him a half-eaten strip of fact and he’d dig up a corpse. He obsessed like a kid with a new toy.

  I rode an elevator to the ground. Today the building had woken on the right side of the street. I
stopped at a sidewalk newsvendor, bought all three morning papers, and got on the subway.

  I scoured each newssheet as the train bucked around, but learned nothing about the murder I didn’t already know. No hint of why Tunney would want to see me anyway.

  The police station was still busy, but less of it was concentrated on Tunney. I got straight into his office and found him planted behind his desk. Sunlight streamed through a half-shuttered window behind him. He seemed to sit in a blizzard of dust, staring at a spot on the floor.

  I sat and waited for him to stir.

  His chair creaked and he said, “Wanna drink?”

  “It’s morning.”

  “Not for long. And why do you care?”

  I let that pass.

  “We have a COD. And with it we can nail time of death to within a few hours―between midnight and three.”

  “Brain spasm?” I said.

  “You’re the only one has brain spasms, McIlwraith. No, poison. Biotoxin. Something new, which is why forensics didn’t spot it straight up. But built on an old pattern. We could have just as easy missed it.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Gall bladder. Trace metabolites. The toxin is a substrate-plus-trigger type. He was probably fed the substrate some time during the day and got the trigger that night. Trigger could be something as simple as alcohol. Won’t know until we sequence it.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Paralyses the muscles. Victim probably stays conscious, but gradually his heart stops beating and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it. Got someone to give you CPR for an hour, you’ll be right as rain. I guess he was short on good Samaritans.”

  Tunney looked subdued. I guessed he thought there was already a full catalogue of ways to kill a man.

  “They have any idea on latency?”

  “At a guess, the poison remains potent for twelve hours. After that, the end result is maybe the worst bout of indigestion you’ve ever had.”

  That put the start of the murder window squarely in Evelyne Speigh’s soirée.

  “Source?” I said.

  “There are about a dozen labs this side of the continent that could put the thing together. We don’t have the legs to check them all. Have to wait for something else to pop.”

  His gaze flicked to me. “You have anything to add?”

  I shook my head.

  His brows drew down in the slightest scowl.

  “And you think he died in that Eastside warehouse?” I said.

  “Best bet.”

  I said, “I want to know what he was doing there in the first place.”

  Tunney swung away from me on his chair. “I want to know when the Yankees are going to win a double header.”

  I left him to that dire muse.

  Outside in the corridor, a stray thought snagged my attention. I stuck my head back into his office. He hadn’t moved.

  “Do you guys keep a sheet on the Strawman?”

  Tunney rummaged for the bottle that held the liquid that looked like it came from a sick horse, and said, “Sure. See MacLure. He’s heading organized crime now.” He swigged straight from the bottle. “Lot of good it will do you. If I had a nickel for every ill shafted home to a strawman I’d be drinking pina-colladas in Florida. Strawman gave my old lady gout.”

  “One more thing, “ I said pulling the door almost shut. “I left a dead midget in a building across the East River.”

  I swung past the Organized Crime Bureau, and with Tunney’s blessing obtained a copy of the Strawman dossier for bedtime reading. Outside, the clock above City Hall was nudging past midday. The shadows of lampposts and the quickening limbs of sidewalk trees were beginning to tilt northeast.

  The shadow anchored beneath Liberty Borough was doing the same, its dark band creeping over SoHo and Greenwich like a divine blight. I guessed if we could still put a man into orbit, he’d be able to read the time from that sundial.

  I decided to call on the heart of the Speigh Empire. Keep it abreast of my investigation.

  I took a cab downtown, watching Liberty’s silhouette loom. Sun struck its western face, and glinted from glass-encased elevators riding its surface, and the pendulous bodies of cable cars that struck out from many levels and around the compass.

  To think ‘skyscraper’ was coined for a hat.

  Some hat.

  The tumbledown shape of the megascraper, cubic but irregular, put me in mind of a ziggurat. A grotesquely large ziggurat to assuage the thirst of a grotesquely large god. Just visible near the summit, poking from a redoubt at the southwest corner, was the barrel of a sixty-pound stantion gun. It was rusted in place, staring out at the Atlantic, its barrel like the rotted trunk of a redwood.

  Seen from its summit, Liberty’s uppermost floors fanned out to steal the sunlight like a mountainside terraced for rice. The Speigh’s owned part of that sun-rich footprint. I’d called on massive, rambling estates upstate amid the color of Westchester county. The Speigh’s place was like that, only it sat a thousand feet above the streets of Manhattan.

  I rode an internal elevator to their floor. I wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing, and it was cheaper. The elevator was huge. Could have been a subway train, only it pressed me down not back.

  The front door to the Speigh’s was at the end of a long, bare corridor. I half-expected to see the shadowed apertures of murder holes cut into the ceiling. The building’s superstructure was covered with veneer or lathed panels where possible, but here and there the grey, almost sticky-looking, plascrete butted through. Couldn’t shift the stuff with dynamite. Couldn’t make it any more either. To cure it took Giga-volts.

  The front door was made of wood but put me in mind of a bank vault. Bolted to the middle of it was a massive lion’s head with a knocker locked in its jaws. I gave it a rap.

  It opened immediately, whisper quiet, and I was greeted by a towering man in a white uniform. I handed him my card, and told him my business. While he read it, I scanned his mountainous flesh. His head was cherubic, ensconced in rolls of fat that propped up his chin. He looked like a eunuch. I wondered briefly if it would be rude to ask him for a strain from La Donna Mobile. Hanging from his button-hole was a dark―almost black―rose. I’d seen the kind before at funerals.

  Without a word he put out a hand like a dinner plate. I reached beneath my coat and slipped my .38 from its holster. I lay it in that hand, which swallowed the gun whole.

  He waved me in, swung the door closed, and disappeared through a door in the anteroom.

  Before me was a long, vaulted space. The floor was tiled in black and white. Two flights of steps peeled away on either hand, rose, and curved to meet at a corridor running left and right, and mirroring one that ran under the stairs. Beneath the arch formed by the stairs I could make out another hall, furnished dimly, and beyond that the first hint of sunlight.

  I headed for the light, the sound of my footsteps ricocheting off the floor and hardwood paneling. Dead Speighs gazed down at me from oil portraits. I gave them back the eye, and so didn’t notice a butler materialize like a ghost by my side, silent and slim. The guy could’ve been my conscience.

  “Sir can find Mrs. Speigh in the garden,” he said. His normal voice was a whisper. Maybe he was an up-skilled librarian. “Ahead and to the right. May I take your coat?”

  “No thanks,” I said. He retracted the hand he’d proffered. I said slim. Cadaverous, more like. The skin was stretched over his face like doped cloth over the frame of a Hurricane fighter.

  He tilted his head with deference and floated back to the well of lost souls or maybe the kitchen.

  I travelled the length of another room―a drawing room dominated by a grand piano. I was a fly yearning for open air. The sunlight I’d seen had been bounced in from outside by cleverly hidden mirrors and played out over the piano, chaise lounges and coffee tables.

  The drawing room ended in the prospect of the dark boughs of oaks through French windows in perpetual dan
ger of French kisses from said oaks. Beyond them hung a tangled lower story of rhododendrons and roses, and peeping through the breeze-stirred foliage, pale patches of an endless sky.

  I stepped out into shadow. New oak leaves burned light green above me. The smell of just-wet earth was in my nostrils.

  “This way, Mr. McIlwraith,” said a female voice. The garden baffled its direction, and blunted my sense of distance. I couldn’t tell if it was Mrs. or Miss who had beckoned. Or maybe the eunuch did theatre.

  I trod a path straight ahead to where at least there was more light. Some species of creeper hung down in stray vines and lay snarled in the shrubbery. I parted them like a bead curtain, snicked my hand on one, and belatedly realized they were studded with thorns. The heavy, wet air contrasted with the air pushing in from the city, which smelled of spent exhaust and the ocean.

  I emerged onto a neat lawn and found Mrs. Speigh’s backside staring at me from a formal flowerbed hard up against the Manhattan skyline.

  She turned at my approach. “Good afternoon, Mr. McIlwraith. Excuse me while I plant out the last of these.”

  “Snapdragons,” I said. She smiled. “I’m partial to Peonies myself.”

  She bent and fussed over a patch of rich-looking, dark dirt. Her form was swathed in a spare cotton blouse and deep green slacks. Working clothes, but they fit her like a glove. My first sight of bespoke gardening wear. Her hair was gathered up and hidden beneath a blood-red scarf. It accentuated the sculpted contours of her high cheek bones, and the firm but feminine sweep of her jaw.

  She worked in silence a minute, tamping down the tender seedlings, then said over her shoulder. “What’s the matter, Mr. McIlwraith. Didn’t think I was one to get my hands dirty?”

  “You’re wearing gloves.”

  She stood, and stepped out of the bed. She slipped her hands from gloves of dirt-stained leather. Her hands came to rest, clasped loosely before her, and shining with marble luster.

  “What do you think of my garden?” she said, and swept her gaze in an arc that terminated somewhere over Staten Island.