Strawman Made Steel (4 page)

I stripped off the gloves and tossed them
in the other dumpster.

“Learn anything?” said Tunney.

“Not much to see,” I said.

“I could’ve saved you the trouble.”

I squinted at the sky. The sun was pushing
through a cloud, burning it white. I hitched the sleeve of my coat up and found
my watch.

“Got the time?” I said.

Tunney sighed. This time I was executor of
his mother’s death warrant. He told me. I wound and reset my watch.

I walked to the cordon, and Tunney followed
to make sure I didn’t steal the silver. I dipped under it and turned.

I said, “That dumpster has a whole lotta
nothin’.”

He shrugged ‘search me’.

“Dumpster outside the Miracle Hotel,” I
said, “and not a napkin or shampoo bottle or shower cap with the monogram. Not
even a matchbook stub.”

Watching his medicine-ball face was like
seeing the sunrise for a second time that morning.

I said, “I’d get your boys working on where
the hell that dumpster came from.”

Without a word to me, he turned and began
barking orders.

I sauntered along Park Ave happy to have
the cops do the grunt work.

It was 10:29. Soon Wall Street would
be getting its second wind on a wave of caffeine. At the corner of West 53rd I
descended the stairs to the subway. I could have found the entrance by smell
alone, a gaping mouth in the sidewalk, venting a mixture of diesel and coal-gas
fumes.

I boarded the subway at Lexington and did
some thinking while it tugged me back and forth on the trip cross-town. I
decided Tunney had been told to wait till I showed before processing the body.
That meant the Speighs wielded some clout. While the cops hunted down the real
crime scene, I determined to learn the extent of that clout.

I disembarked at Eighth Ave, where a breeze
coming off the Hudson forced back the diesel fumes, and walked toward the
Meatpacking District. I entered a brown block of office floors off Ninth. Five
flights up I found the door on which was printed in gold letters: Prometheus
Investment Brokerage, principal F. Carl Inker.

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.

“Mid
pac
for Mid
west
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.