Strawman Made Steel (20 page)

“Rain,” I added, hoping the connection wasn’t
beyond him.

He ran an eye over me again, ran it by
habit past the pocket where my ID should have been hanging instead of wedged
inside back-to-front. But he wasn’t seeing anything. Didn’t even take a laugh
from my face. My guess, he was drinking the perfume and presence of the
liquid-eyed woman by his side.

Potent wasp. Crazy ant.

He picked a clipboard off a forensics cart
and jammed it at me, already turning away. “Sign,” he said, and went back to
saying ‘yes’ in negatives.

I signed. The tension in my arm leapt
through this sudden outlet and splurged a tangled mess of ink that looked like
one of Shakespeare’s six extant signatures―none of which, incidentally, spell
Shakespeare.

If the Latino suspected it was me behind
the wager, she gave no indication, just kept plying her charm.

I took a pair of rubber gloves from the
forensics cart and tugged them on, then sheathed my shoes in plastic booties. I
padded over to the suite door, a moth larva hungry for the buffet.

The cop on the door stepped aside to let me
through, his eyes on the handful of newshounds still hanging about. The door
showed no obvious signs of forced entry.

One step inside the Giuliani Suite and my
mind dumped all voluntary thought.

The fog of war froze where it drifted and
pressed down with a numbing weight. The shock I felt was sub-conscious and
visceral, like the pain that gathers after the gut punch. Only later did I pick
it over and decide it was recoil from the trace of such pure and efficient violence.
The floor, walls, the entire suite screamed with its voice.

Two steps in and my feet slipped. I had to
cock my arms and splay my legs to keep my balance. A CSI squatting in the
footprint of a piece of small furniture that had been removed, laughed. The guy
was no girl guide, but the laughter had a tremor in it. Hammett might have
called it Blood Simple. Whatever that means, it sounds better than crazy.

I’m no spatter expert, but the scene spoke
to me of an inversion. The exuberance was intended to look uncontrolled. But if
so, it was the ordered chaos of a Pollack. The murderer had had free reign, and
the time to employ it.

The slippery terrain demanded I attend to
my step―a small mercy that shrank my horizon to the bald tops of my shoes and
the foot of floor immediately before them.

I picked my way across the parquet to an
island of carpet. A corner of the carpet was stained with fluid that didn’t
look like blood, and through it the carpet was frayed in a number of parallel
lines. Around it sat a pair of leather couches―brushed leather and steel―facing
each other over a low, glass-topped coffee table. The setup fenced a space
designed to host soirée conversation, but its effect was spoiled by the blood
of Eutarch Speigh. The air above it vibrated with silent indignation.

Or maybe I was going Blood Simple.

From my carpet haven I could see into the
bedroom. A craze of rust-colored footprints led into and away from there and I guessed
it to be the epicenter.

I headed for it and passed a technician
carrying a plastic bag. I must have given him a strange look, because he said,
“Ice. Was in the ensuite sink.”

I entered the bedroom and found two CSIs
who seemed to be working out in a spiral from the queen-size bed. It was a
four-poster, hung with purple cloth meant to invoke the East. The CSIs would
have fun dismantling it. I ignored them, and hunted for the site of my botched
sample, which would have been recorded on the detail sheet, had one existed.
But when my gaze swept the bed, it was arrested by an object lying dead center,
snug in the folds of a stained silk sheet like something you’d buy at a
jewelers.

I suppose I should have guessed, but it
took me a moment to recognize the object.

The name my head first handed me was ‘cigar’.
But cigars aren’t articulated. Nor do they have nails.

The next idea, ‘cockroach,’ was no
better―this object was pink and fleshy. But unlike the finger housed in a black
cylinder in Evelyne Speigh’s drawing room, this one precluded the possibility
of its belonging to a living man.

A voice said, “Think we should chalk it?”

One of the CSIs was straightened up on his
knees, stretching his back.

I made no reply but the busy signal.

Two facts had priority:

First off, the room hosted only a remnant
of the body of Eutarch Speigh―something
not
reported in the Times―which
made it unlikely the ME had even bothered attending the scene. My disguise
began aging in dog years.

Second, I heard, coming as it was through
two doorways and a lot of real estate, the rumbling brogue of J.P. Tunney.
Which was to douse my disguise in gasoline and set it alight.

I bent and pretended to retrieve my sample,
listening for that voice. It died away. When it rose again I knew he was suited
up to inspect. He was coming in.

I stowed my sample, stood up straight, and
tried to read the angles in the suite for an alcove, for a place off the beaten
path that the distracted eye might overlook.

I saw, instead, hanging lopsided on a rack,
the blazer Eutarch had worn the previous day at the Diogenes. For a split
second my eyes played tricks, and it was the man himself, forlorn and impotent,
come to see his own curtain call.

Tunney’s voice swelled as he cleared the
doorway into the suite’s loungeroom.

I could make it to the ensuite. And maybe
Tunney’s curiosity would be sated with the finger.

But the blazer was too tempting.

I crossed the room to the rack and dug a
hand into its pockets. On the third try, inside left pocket, I found it. My
card. The second one I’d offered him the day before.

As Tunney entered the bedroom, on an urge I
flipped the card to the blank side.

Only it wasn’t blank. Written in black ink
in large unmistakable figures was the name of the hotel, and a time, Eleven PM.

I wasn’t just a Person of Interest. This
was a full-tilt setup. It was a cast-iron bear trap and I had my ass on the
trigger plate.

And that’s what Tunney’s button-black gaze
saw when he looked at me.

But perhaps he was accustomed to PIs with
their breaches clamped in steel jaws, because, with the barest hint of arrest,
his gaze swept on, covering the rest of the room.

He made no motion other than to scratch at
his crescent of blond tuft. He said nothing other than to comment that Eutarch
Speigh was shorter than he’d imagined.

He took a look in the ensuite―maybe to
satisfy himself the body hadn’t been flushed down the toilet―then left. I
waited a full minute after his voice had died away before venturing back into
the living room. Past the cop on the door I saw the press mob was still thin.
Tunney had dragged some of it with him when he left.

I retraced my steps to the cop guarding the
evidence, and bent to strip off my soiled booties and gloves. I happened to
notice an ashtray on the evidence trolley bagged in clear plastic. With a quick
check that the cop wasn’t watching, I rifled through the cluster of plastic
bags in the same compartment. In two I found cigarette stubs: Jamaican Spirit’s
and Empire’s―my own brand, when I wasn’t on the wagon. Who knows, if I hunted
further maybe I would have found a photo of me and Eutarch in the Giuliani
Suite playing with knives and baseball bats.

I signed out.

I worked backwards along the morning’s
trajectory, retrieved my clothes from behind the cistern (We’d been through a
lot together, those pants and I), dumped the cast-offs, and gathered my coat.
The lobby was still thick with folk that didn’t belong.

On the street, I’d passed my cafe and taken
a left down a one-way lane when a big, grey sedan came to a stop beside me, its
engine burbling.

“Get in,” said Tunney.

 
I
had no reason not to. We were moving before I shut the door.

“Jellybean?” said Tunney without taking his
eyes off the road. I took one from a paper bag wedged into a mess of fast-food
litter on the center console. The jellybean was black. Bad omen. But my
favorite flavor. I chewed while Tunney maneuvered past parked cars. We reached
a cross street and Tunney put his foot down. The car growled, its back dipped,
and we swung round the corner and into the traffic.

He dug a jellybean from the bag with the
precision of habit, jammed it into his mouth, and spoke around the wet smack of
his chewing. “I’m coming round to your brain spasm theory,” he said. “Nothing
else explains your being in that room.”

His gaze flicked at me, gleaming. “You want
to suicide by cop, do it some other beat. The paper work would kill me.”

“Not your beat,” I said, and stole another
jellybean. Yellow. My least favorite.

He sighed and shook his head in a play at
long suffering. But it wasn’t mockery deepening the creases around his eyes.

I wondered if the moment called for an
apology. Couldn’t think of anything to apologize for. “You going to send me to
boarding school now?”

“Number One,” he said, and wagged a fat
index finger at the roof. “You argued with the latest Speigh stiff yesterday.”

Acknowledged.

“Number Two,” he said, wagging the finger
again. Turned out it wasn’t counting, just emphasizing. “Before that, you tore
out of that hack bar with the stiff’s sister.”

Also acknowledged, barring the strength of
the verb. I would have said ‘strode’.

“Number Three,” he said, and gave off the
finger altogether to grip the wheel two-handed like he wanted to strangle it.
“You fitted him up for his brother’s murder―dropped prints and poison on my
desk yesterday.”

Couldn’t argue with that like you can’t
argue with Swiss cheese.

“Save your breath,” I said. “Numbers Four
through Six, respectively: I have no alibi for last night; I find Nicole Speigh
remarkably attractive and heard from her own lips how her brother might have
set her up for date rape; and―for dessert―I also have no alibi for the night
the youngest Speigh boy, Eury, was murdered. That enough?”

“No,” said Tunney. “You left out fiddling
the evidence at the first scene. And”―he cast me an annoyed glance―“on form,
probably the second.”

I ate another jellybean and said, “It’s a
nice theory. Why don’t you find out who gave it to you.”

We sat a moment in the relative silence of
mastication and turgid traffic until Tunney broke it. “If you’re smart you’ll
get the hell out of the city until this blows over.”

“I can’t do the case from the country,” I
said.

“You can’t do it from a cell in the Tombs
either.”

“You can’t do it full stop,” I said, then
regretted it.

Tunney’s chin lifted and his lips
compressed until there were dark hollows under the corners of his mouth. But he
didn’t blow up. “What’s the harm in giving it a week?” he said. “One week and
we’ll have blown this frame out of the water.”

“My guess, the next Speigh doesn’t have a
week,” I said. “You noticed the pattern, right?”

“Two ain’t a pattern,” he said.

Great. We were arguing semantics.

“It drew the eye,” I said.

“I know what’s drawing your eye,” he said.

“You don’t know the first damn thing about
me,” I said, and cracked the door open.

We were going maybe thirty, but some
instinct caused Tunney to jam the brake on. I was already moving as a howl of
tires and horns crashed over me. I got out of the car and left Tunney to it.

He shouted at me through the noise. I
heard, “Just a week, and live, dammit!” before rounding a corner that cut it
all loose.

New York’s a damn big beast. You can get
lost in a square foot of pavement. I merged with the flow and let it lose me a
while.

— 13 —

It was the heat that finally got to
me.

Not the cops. Cops I could spot from a
mile. No, it was whoever was behind the frame-up that gave me a feeling like a
hangover.

Afternoon was slinking off the streets when
my feet took me off the pavement and into the dim corridors of the Columbus
branch of the NYC Public Library.

It was a building of lofty, dark ceilings
and wide, polished balustrades. Chatter pocked with occasional laughter floated
into the stairwell to mingle in its cool air. It was impossible to pinpoint
separate sound sources―they were a kind of collected voice, like the collected
voice of the library itself set down in print.

I followed the signs to the broadsheet
archive, a monolithic cabinet set far back on the third floor.

I’m not usually one for platitudes. I say
run with scissors. But one ghosted smugly into my brain as I covered the
distance to the archive: ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’