Strawman Made Steel (3 page)

What I got was a raised hand and a whisper.

“Client,” Ailsa said. She came over to me,
smelling of lilac, and with a frown took my coat and straightened my collar.
“From the nosebleeds.”

She meant the upper floors of Liberty. Which
made the client rich.

I prodded the door to the inner office open
and entered.

The only window in the room framed the
silhouette of a woman.

She turned and said, “Janus McIlwraith?”

I said, “In the flesh.”

I dumped my briefcase, sat behind my desk,
and swiveled to face her.

She was some piece of work. Nearly my
height. Hair so blonde it glinted silver. A body to inspire a roller coaster
tycoon. Erect as a gallows. Gravity didn’t seem to bother with her like it did
me.

She was eighty if she was a day.

Gene therapy in her blood, like the dog that
mauled me (not an encouraging comparison). The real deal.

But not perfect. There were always telltale
signs. Her hair, now that I looked at it, had once been strawberry blonde. And
her eyes. They never had got that right, like the weight of years had to settle
somewhere. The skin around hers was beaten metal.

The genetic legacy made her some kind of
royalty.

She sat opposite me and folded those legs
away primly.

“I’ll get to the point, Mr. McIlwraith. I’m
here about a murder.”

“I don’t do murder.”

“I’m not asking you to perform one, Mr. McIlwraith.
I want you to solve one.”

I knit my fingers and turned my thumbs out.
She continued.

“The victim’s name is Euripides Speigh.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Doubtless. He was murdered this morning.
His body was discovered in a dumpster behind the Miracle Hotel.”

I opened a drawer of my desk and rummaged
through it for tobacco and a paper. I tapped leaf into the paper and began to
sift it, buying time to collect my thoughts.

“The police are on it?” I said.

She smiled as though it were a joke. I
caught her gaze. Her green irises were nearly eclipsed by the pupils. I saw
that they were the real wells of years―you can’t erase the weight of life an
eye sees.

“I’m at the business end of a sticky case,”
I said.

“I’m not asking you to work solely for me, Mr.
McIlwraith.”

I licked the paper and sealed it.

She unfolded a hand that looked pure marble
until it moved, retrieved a lighter from her bag, and extended it to me.

I exhaled and we looked at each other
through a veil of smoke.

“What’s your interest in the case,
Miss...?”

“Mrs,” she said. “Speigh.”

The penny had fallen from the top of
Liberty. When it finally hit the pavement, it rang like a bell. I removed the
cigarette from where it was perched on my lip.

“Euripides was your―”

“Son, yes.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Speigh.”

“Call me Evelyne, and why should you be
sorry?”

I made vague circles with my cigarette.

“I want to know how my son was murdered,
and why. Some say you are the best.”

“You been talking to my mother?”

I pulled a pen and battered notebook from
my pocket and flipped it to a blank page.

“Who would want your son dead, Mrs. Speigh?”

Her gaze turned inward for a moment, then
she said, “He has always been a successful boy. But...” She shook her head. “I
don’t know.”

“Married? Girlfriends?”

“No. Yes.”

“More than one at a time?”

“There are some things a mother would
rather not know,” she said.

That wasn’t an answer, but I let it lie.

“Did he work?”

“Yes. Atlas Consolidated kept him busy.”
She made it sound like a school project. “Downtown, East Village, somewhere or
other.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Yesterday.”

Yesterday
.
The woman was an iceberg.

“Where was this?”

“At my home. I was hosting a soirée for
family friends. All of my children were present.”

“And what time did he leave this soirée?”

“Oh, say around four in the afternoon.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, he was alone.”

“Happy?”

“Heavens no. He was furious.”

“Any idea why?”

“None whatsoever.”

I wrote that down and when I looked up she
had retrieved her handbag. Apparently the interview was at an end.

She rose like a flower reaching for the
sun. Her marble fingers flashed over my desk, and by some sleight-of-hand, left
a neat stack of cash in their wake.

“Money is no obstacle.”

In my experience, money was the biggest.
Mishandled, it could kill a man.

I retrieved the cash and followed her to
the outer office.

Ailsa sat straight-backed in front of her
typewriter peering at what had to be the world’s most interesting invoice.

Evelyne rested a hand on the doorknob,
turned and said: “Your secretary has my address. Please keep me abreast of your
investigation.”

She opened the door and was half-through it
when I laid a hand on it.

I lifted the flap of her bag and slipped
the money inside. “This is a COD agency.”

A line from Chandler flitted through my
mind, something about a down-at-heels brain emporium.

“But there is something I want,” I said. “I’m
small-time. There’s not a person in this city who thinks I’m the best at
anything. And the cops certainly didn’t send you. So who put you on to me?”

Her eyes flickered, the first ripples I’d
seen in those wells. “Be satisfied I don’t intend to press charges for
trespassing.” She handed me a dirty scrap of paper, and left. I let her pull
the door shut.

I turned the paper over. One half was smeared
with oily dirt, patterned by what could have been a boot print. It was my
business card. It must have fluttered free in my flight from the scrapyard the
previous night.

I heard a rush of intaken breath. Ailsa
stood in front of me, peering at the side of my neck.

“You’ve got a three-inch gash here.” She
ran her finger gently alongside its length. Next to the raw skin, her finger
felt like a cube of ice.

“Slipped down a fence,” I said. Her face
wrinkled in vicarious pain. “Running from a nightwatchman’s frisky pet.” Was
that a lie?

“The client―the banker’s place?” she said,
a glint of anger in her eyes.

“I’d like to know.” I glanced at the door
through which Evelyne Speigh had left.

Ailsa followed my gaze.

“And her?” she said, with that mix of
admiration and jealousy unique to the fairer sex.

“Her son’s dead, murdered.”

“Oh!” Her eyes, wide, gleamed above the
hand she put to her face. “Really?”

“Really.”

I tousled her short-cropped hair. Who
needed New York for four seasons in one day? Ailsa could do them all in one
minute.

“How awful,” she breathed.

I shrugged, then slipped my stiff frame
into my coat.

Before I left, I retrieved a glass tumbler
from the bottom drawer of my desk, where it had avoided Ailsa’s cleaning wand.
I hooked a twist of coat hanger over its lip to buffer its outer surface, and
slipped it into a coat pocket. My banker friend from the previous day had
needed a nerve-steadier, and he’d left me some pristine prints.

Ailsa followed me into the corridor.

“What’ll I say if the banker shows up?”

“Tell him I’m charging his account for one
tetanus shot. And if he wants any more help, he’d better come clean.”

“Where are you going?”

“To look at a body.”

— 3 —

The Miracle Hotel commanded the corner
of Park Ave and East 56th. I took a cab to within a couple of blocks and walked
the rest.

It was hard to believe, wading through the
flood of human flesh flowing on the sidewalk, it was little more than a hundred
years since New York had come to the brink of extinction.

I’d read the history books. Following the
Event or
Singularity
―science-speak for mysterious crap on a cosmogenic
scale―the city had shed folk like a cat sheds fur in summer.

But here I was, shoulder to shoulder with
New Yorkers. The same purposeful walks, the same stares, focused beams that
slid over each other, fearing entanglement. And everywhere the subterranean
thrum of boilers.

Chaos, recovery, war, and renewal changed
the face of New York, but not her heart.

It took no time to find the alley with the
body. A crowd milled at its mouth, spreading back from the police cordon like
spilled milk.

I pushed my way to the front, flashed my
license at a green-looking cop, and slipped under the ribbon.

Major Jackson P. Tunney picked me out and
came at me as though he’d been waiting for a target.

“Get lost, Mac,” he said.

“Never,” I said. “Got a wonderful sense of
direction.”

He grunted. “I’ve got a digit could direct
you.”

Tunney had a medicine ball head―big, round
and red. A line of blonde fuzz connected his ears at the back. His eyes were
black buttons, and they fumed with habitual disappointment.

“Where is he?” I asked.

He jerked a thumb in the direction of a
rusting dumpster.

“Time of death?”

“M.E. said, ‘Some time in the past’, and I
could quote him on that.”

“Who found the body?”

“Doped-out Spaniard. Kept asking if there
was a ‘
recompensa,
’ like the stiff was a lost dog.”

I nodded at the dumpster. “Can I take a
look?”

He nodded like I was extracting his mother’s
death warrant. “Make it snappy. Forensics are about to bag him.” I had a
suspicion they’d been waiting for me.

I grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from the
CSI trolley and hoisted myself to the rim of the dumpster. It was hard up
against the side of the Miracle, and from the smell, took garbage from the
restaurant and the laundry. It was one of two massive cast-iron buckets in the
alley, of the type that are hauled and emptied once a week. In winter, it wasn’t
uncommon to find folks sleeping in them, snuggled up with the rats.

Euripides Speigh sprawled face down in one
corner like another piece of garbage, like a ragdoll some giant two year old
had thrown in a tantrum. I counted at least three important joints flexing a
way God never intended.

I cast my eyes over the contents of the bin
before lowering myself in. I picked my way over to him and squatted in the
trash.

From the corner of my eye I saw his leg
move. My heart went offline for the seconds it took to learn it was a rat
crawling up his trousers. I flushed it out, and poked it into a corner with a
rolled-up Times.

There was no blood, and no impact crater,
which meant he hadn’t fallen. His shoes, which pointed in odd directions, were
supple-looking black leather―old favorites but cared for. His coat was tailored
wool. Beneath it, the collar of a starched white shirt could be seen, stained
with no more than a day’s worth of sweat and grime. The sum effect was expensive
but subdued elegance. The guy had taste.

His head was rotated too far to the left,
and afforded a view of his profile. It left me no doubt he was a Speigh. If
this guy was forty-odd, the gen-lines were strong in his blood too. The one
dead olive eye visible was frosting up already, but the skin wouldn’t have
looked out of place on a college student.

“We need to wrap.” It was a CSI.

I sent my hands lightly over the dead man’s
coat, and into its pockets. Nothing beat a first-hand investigation. Sometimes
the technicians didn’t note which personal effects came from which pocket.
Sometimes that mattered.

For a rich man, his pockets were bare.
Perhaps that’s one of the luxuries of wealth.

I found nothing in his coat pockets. In his
pants’ pockets I discovered three gambling chips from Diogenes Casino. Beneath
his coat, he wore a black silk waistcoat. In the right breast pocket was a
white handkerchief, folded with a precision to make Pythagoras swoon. Tucked
behind the handkerchief was a pair of reading glasses. The lenses were
circular, and one was fractured in a web of lines.

“That’s time, Mac,” said Tunney.

I stood, and with one last scan of the body
and its mattress of trash, dismounted the dumpster.