Strawman Made Steel (22 page)

I said, “It’s Mr. Speigh I wanted to talk
to. Is he here?”

She shrugged. “More or less.” But didn’t
move.

I strained my ears but heard nothing above
the rattling of a pot lid coming from deeper within the house.

“It’s about his brother.”

“I had a brother,” she said. “Chief
Inspector of the railway here.”

I smiled, thought of the late train.

“Died of a stroke,” she continued.

Self-induced?
I wondered, but said nothing.

She turned and walked along the hall. She
carried the gun like a broom, and her bony haunches tussled with the fabric of
her slip, making a play of shadows over her spare rump.

I followed her in dimness that smelt of
boiled beans. At the foot of a flight of stairs she paused, and swung the butt
of the rifle in their direction.

“He’s up there,” she said and left me.

I mounted the steps and went in search of
Jahan Speigh.

I found him slung in an armchair, staring
detachedly into space.

I told him I wanted to ask a few questions
about his brother, and offered him a card. His hand took it before his eyes
sought me out.

I sat on a worn Ottoman, my back to the
small flames playing in the fireplace.

He read my card.

I read him.

A touch of it. Just a touch of familial
likeness, a skerrick of Jahan’s genetic capital had stolen as far as his
nephews and niece. You could see it in the line of his nose, and the deep
groove between nose and mouth. But not nearly as much as the Liselle genes. The
little embryonic machines that had churned out Eustace, Eutarch, Euripides,
then Nicole, had evidently valued that man-tinkered stock more highly.

He had a round head, but not fat. He was
the kind of thickset that could be fat or muscle. He wore the chair like a pair
of favorite pants.

I tried to imagine Dorrita’s face. Strange
that I hadn’t seen it in picture or portrait anywhere in Evelyne’s castle in
the clouds.

At length he stirred, sat up straighter,
and cleared his throat.

He opened his mouth, but I spoke first:
“What’s your secret?”

He grew more alert, his gaze probing
through a haze. “Come again?”

“You must be the best preserved crack-head
in the east.”

He laughed loud. I heard a step behind me
and turned to see his wife at the door. She had the gun, and wasn’t holding it
like a broom. She surveyed the room once, then disappeared again.

Jahan laid an arm along the scalloped arm
of his chair, and his gaze grew dull again and began to travel the room. I saw
it light on a sideboard not three feet from his sprawled arm.

I nodded at it. “May I?”

He flicked his hand in acquiescence. I
rose, crossed to the sideboard, and tugged open its wide and flat top drawer.
Glass vials rolled with the motion to clunk against the back of the drawer.
Strewn over its base were countless items of the druggist’s ephemera. He was
doing crack, freebase, you name it. I lifted a glassine dimebag to my eye and
read the brand stamped on it: Powder Keg. I recognized it.

I turned holding the bag and found him
smiling a Cheshire grin.

I said, “This is current. You been visiting
my city?”

He waved a dopey hand. “Anna.”

I dropped the packet back into the drawer
and pushed it shut. “What’s in here?” I said, indicating the second of the two
drawers.

“Downtown,” he said.

Heroin. That’s where he was now. But he’d
probably done the coke from the top drawer in the morning.

“You went Uptown this morning, seven o’clock?”

“Uptown? I’ve been all over town.” He
laughed at his own joke.

I sat again on the Ottoman. I looked at his
face and fancied I saw somewhere in their depths, way back there, under the
drug’s blanket, a flutter of fear.

“I’m not here to bust you. I just want
answers.”

He shifted in his seat, sprawling in a new
array of flesh. “Stalemate,” he said.

“What?”

“You wanted to know my secret: stalemate.
Docs tell me the body’s a drug factory. So who cares where the drugs come
from―inside, outside, it’s all the same. So long as you find a new level.”

In my experience the new level was the base
of a coffin. Jahan had some cast-iron constitution and a lot of luck working
his way.

Through a window cracked open to vent smoke
gathered by the poor flu, I heard the lonesome call of a train whistle. The
night was getting on.

I pulled my notepad out. Time to test the
quality of the man’s mind.

“Is your brother dead?”

He frowned and fished clumsily again for my
card.

“Who the hell are you again? Of course he’s
dead. He was murdered years ago.”

“About the time your sinecure dried up, I
know. Evelyne Speigh knows too. But does Dorrita know?”

“She never liked me.”

I hesitated before deciding to play my
favorite card. “She’s my boss.”

That stung him awake.

“Boss?”

“Client, I should say. I’m working on a
case for her.”

“What case?” he said, and was looking at me
askance through screwed up eyes.

“Never mind. Is Dorrita alive?”

“She has no reason not to like me. I’m the
better brother.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m alive,” he said, and flashed a set of
teeth that wouldn’t have upset a horse trade.

“Could’ve fooled me,” I said.

All of a sudden his torso swelled with taut
muscle as he propped himself up on his elbows, and yelled “Anna.”

Mere seconds elapsed before his wife
entered the room, whereupon she opened the second drawer in the sideboard and
began prepping a mainline.

I watched her administer her husband’s
regimen with morbid fascination. Here was a man that subsisted on opiates and
alkaloids like bread and water. The drugs entered his system each day like
waves of reinforcing troops. On reaching the front they fought to a standstill.
And in the no-man’s land between coke and heroin, Jahan Speigh eked out his
life, its flame fed by a reservoir I couldn’t see.

Anna finished and left. Silence descended,
marred only by a sigh that leeched from Jahan’s lips as he collapsed slowly
into his chair like a punctured Zeppelin.

At length he opened his eyes. They found my
face, and he said, “Dorrita is dead.”

I changed tack. “Were you in the business?”

He reached for a finger of brandy that had
until then sat undisturbed within arm’s reach and sipped.

“I tried. I tried hard. But I could never
get my head around it―offsets, and rates of return. Give me something to hold.
A diesel primer.” He drained his glass. “I was a disappointment.”

“And Mr. Liselle, Evelyne’s father, watched
the reins pass to his son in law with a dignified but diminishing eye,” I
prompted.

“Him? He died before ever I came on the
scene.” Jahan peered at his arm as if it had been left by an inconsiderate
passer-by. “No great loss by all accounts.”

“Whose accounts?”

“Evelyne and her mother. They called him
every kind of bastard. Dorrita did too, for no reason I know. So much for high
society.”

I caught myself licking my lips, and
realized my gaze had been doing laps between the recumbent Jahan and his empty
brandy glass.

“So what do you think happened to your
brother?”

He shrugged into the upholstery, picked up
his glass, saw it was empty, and set it down again. He yelled, “Anna!”

“You read the papers,” he said. “That’s
what happened.”

Anna appeared again, and with a minimum of
motion poured a fresh brandy, and slipped from the room.

He took a slug of brandy and with an oiled
voice added, “Only thing I’ll say is that crap about his appendix is just that:
crap.” He paused to run a speculative eye over me. “Bitch poked him in a
drunken funk. He showed me the scar.” He prodded himself in the gut. “I’m no
doctor, but that ain’t where your appendix is. He probably deserved it.”

I doodled in my pad. I had a nice
yellow-billed loon shaping up. “So you want me to peddle your dirt with Evelyne
to see if I can’t wheedle a little grift for her favorite brother in law.”

The frown that formed on his face came
slow. Made him look like a bear.

“I never said that.”

“Not in words.”

I snapped my notebook shut, stood, and
turned to go.

I heard the creak of a chair spring and
glanced over my shoulder.

Jahan was standing, white as a sheet. He
said, “Dorrita wasn’t much of a husband. I know. Older brother. Always the
master hand. In control. And near the end―”

His gaze went out the window. “He was
skittish. A little crazy. Maybe too much Swiss blood from the cloistered alps.
Like me.”

He pulled his gaze back into the room and
rested it on the fire.

“But it broke Evelyne’s heart when he
disappeared. I can’t imagine what losing two sons must feel like.” His words
were empty of human emphasis; they came out like bullet points―maybe that was
the drug.

I donned my hat, and with a tilt of the
head, left Jahan Speigh to whatever remained of what he called life.

Anna saw me to the door. The rifle had
finally been propped against a dead grandfather clock in the hall. Her hand caught
at my coat as I stepped over the threshold.

“Don’t judge him,” she said.

“I’m no judge, ma’am,” I muttered. Before I
could move she gripped my coat again.

“Between two and three in the morning he’ll
get reacquainted with the world again. For a few hours of exquisite pain,
before it begins again tomorrow, he’ll cry.”

Her eyes held me, slick with their own film
of moisture.

“He did love his brother, Mr. McIlwraith.”

— 14 —

I must’ve been channeling Tunney when
I got off the train at the Hamburg-Reading Junction. My solution to the hunger
gnawing my gut was a bag of jellybeans from a kiosk on the platform.

The night wind was whipping up, sweeping
the concrete better than a broom. I watched a woman wrestle a cigarette and
lighter from her coat, which flailed about her. She lit up, and a gust tore a
comet trail of embers from the cigarette, and sent it eddying across the
tarmac.

I was standing, propped on the stubby shelf
of the station’s cable office waiting for the clerk. From the station in
Lebanon I’d cabled Inker for an update. I wanted to know if it had cooled any
at home. I didn’t want to arrive at Grand Central to a welcome party in blue.

“No message, sir,” said the clerk.

I thanked him, moved down the platform,
planted my backside against the wall, and waited for the whistle.

Thirty feet from me lay the train in great,
glistening silver segments. Passengers were still embarking, and by the cabin
lights I could see them threading through the carriages, hunting for empty
seats.

I was three jellybeans in when I spotted
the seat-changer.

I had wanted to know if I was still hot.
The seat-changer told me I was molten.

He moved from one carriage to the next
through the connecting door, and took the first empty seat he came to. He was
tall and heavy. He sat upright and got a good bead on the seated passengers.
After no more than a minute, he moved off down the cabin, out of sight, and
presumably into the next.

It was then I remembered the boy from
Lebanon station’s message post. The one who’d taken off when I asked about
Jahan Speigh. He was the forgotten invoice on the spike of my memory.

Cursing myself, I jammed the jellybeans
into my coat and boarded the train.

I found him three carriages along. He was
just rising from his seat to move on when I caught him on the shoulder and
forced him back down with my left hand. With my right I dug the muzzle of the
Steel Lady under his ribs.

He didn’t look at me. Sat still, except for
a roving right hand. I jabbed the gun into him, and the hand halted and settled
back on his lap.

With my free hand I took his piece and
slipped it into my coat.

He knew the score.

Better than I did. Because a moment later
the pressure of a heavy body fell on my flank.

“Squeeze up,” said a voice.

I hazarded a glance to my left and all I
saw was blue. Cop.

“And while you’re at it, give the boy back
his gun,” breathed the cop.

I handed back the gun and in short order I
was sitting sandwiched between two guys not much smaller than me, contemplating
a pension.