Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  “You could list this lawn alone on the stock exchange,” I said.

  “Call it excess. But a lady in my position has certain expectations put upon her.”

  “I wasn’t judging. What position is that?”

  She ignored the question. “I made all of this from fallow earth and bare concrete. The previous owner wasn’t the nurturing type.”

  I scanned the ground again. My gaze got stuck on a series of statues―four crouched monsters, their backs to the flower bed, jutting from the limiting wall into thin air like rocky protuberances.

  “Was the previous owner the gargoyle type?”

  She tracked my gaze. “No. They are my own. I remodeled following the death of my husband. Some women cut their hair.” She stroked one of the things grainy flanks. “They are from Verona, from the workshop of Puccelli. You have heard of Puccelli?”

  I hadn’t. The hunched, bulbous-headed creatures didn’t enflame a desire to hear of any Puccelli. To judge by one sample of his work, Puccelli had a thing for phalluses.

  “Would you care for a drink?”

  “No, thank you. I came to fill you in on my investigation.”

  “Well, at least keep a widow company while she drinks.” The line sounded absurd formed by those lips, and she knew it.

  I followed her through the grounds and back into the drawing room. It felt cold after the early afternoon sun.

  The butler ghosted in again. The lady ordered a martini without looking at him. He inclined his head to me and whispered, “For sir?”

  My head said whiskey sour and my mouth said water. He drifted away and Mrs. Speigh opened a pearl-inlaid cigarette case, from which she withdrew a cigarette, inserted it into a jade holder, and lit up. She pursed her lips and exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “Will you at least join me in a cigarette?”

  I shook my head. “Trying to quit.”

  She nibbled on the end of the smoker, and smiled around it. “I wonder. Which of life’s pleasures are non-negotiable for you, Mr. McIlwraith?”

  She lay herself along a chaise lounge. I sat facing her on the edge of an easy chair.

  “How much do you want this murder solved?”

  Her body, until then strung in a feline posture, went rigid. Her eyes flashed and she half sat up.

  “I want you to pursue it with the utmost energy. What else could you think?”

  “That’s not an answer to my question, but let’s run with that.” From a coat pocket I tugged my notebook, and behind it arranged my thoughts.

  “Euripides was murdered between midnight and three yesterday morning.”

  She nodded. Her gaze fixed upon me.

  I said, “Or maybe he wasn’t.”

  She didn’t bat an eyelid at that.

  “If that sounds odd,” I said, “I suppose it should. It’s a philosophical matter that turns on causes and effects.”

  She let go another streamer of smoke into the fractured sunlight.

  “I’m no philosopher, Mr. McIlwraith, but if it will help solve this murder, I will listen.”

  “Is a man murdered when the murderer pulls the trigger or when the hammer strikes the bullet? Or when that bullet tears flesh? Normally the distinction is of no account―the chain of events is so brief.” I drew a finger over the open page of my notebook as if connecting dots. “In this case it happens to be entirely of account. The trigger was pulled sometime during the previous day, and the hammer didn’t fall until the wee hours of yesterday.”

  The butler appeared, and I was silent a moment while he arranged our drinks. Mrs. Speigh took no notice of him, but sat silently smoking, watching me.

  “One more bit of grit in the eye: a gun is a mechanism, a machine. The trigger doesn’t talk to the hammer, and the hammer wouldn’t listen if it did. But the hammer that fell on poor Euripides, someone thought about that―maybe.”

  The lady continued to smoke and stare, and, for all I know, undress me. I explained the poison, what we knew of it anyway. I explained how it was possible it had been given to Euripides during the day and activated that night by something as simple as a shot of spirits. I deduced for her how one or two people might be implicated in the murder.

  Then I told her how the body had been moved to the Miracle from its initial resting place outside a warehouse in Eastside, and how I believed Euripides had played a game of chance that night, using Diogenes chips, with one other person, or perhaps two.

  I closed my notebook and settled back in the chair. She put the cigarette down, wet her lips with the Martini, and said, “Thank you. But I’m sure you could have informed me of all this by communiqué. I gather you want something from me.”

  “Not much. Just to know how your family ticks.”

  She burst out laughing, a strangely uncontrolled sound.

  When she had gathered her decorum about her again, she said, “Do you have children, Mr. McIlwraith?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Therapists talk to me of the effect on a child of nature and nurture yet neglect the most powerful force.”

  She drew on her cigarette again and vented its smoke in a billowing cloud that eddied chaotically before dissipating.

  “Blind chance,” she said. “Chance like a falling star. Chance like a murder.”

  If she was counting on me chancing on her meaning, she was in for a disappointment. I waited for light.

  “I’m their mother, but I could not have guessed the effect upon my children of my husband’s murder.”

  I hazarded a guess: “Your eldest took the mantle; your two youngest clung to each other; and the middle sibling went all to sea.”

  “Bravo, Mr. McIlwraith. You have it, more or less. Perhaps they were reverting to type. But if so, they were types I had never before glimpsed.”

  I pulled my lip. “How did the brothers get on?”

  “Like brothers.”

  “How about their women folk?”

  She smiled. “I’ve already told you, I don’t keep up to date with their conquests.”

  “How would you,” I said, “if you never invite them over?” Evelyne frowned, so I explained: “I talked to Eury’s lady friend this morning. She said she didn’t get an invite to the party.”

  “Perhaps not from him,” she said. “But the invite was made. However,” she said, and her gaze momentarily found her lap, “Euripides was not the first to spot this ‘lady friend’, merely the first to offer her a job. That honor was Eutarch’s, and perhaps explains his reticence in bringing her here.”

  I frowned. I was having a time keeping up with the names. “Euripides, Eutarch, Eustace? What happened? You and Dorrita get stuck on a page in the baby book?”

  She dismissed my comment with a tilt of her chin and a plume of smoke. “The prefix Eu means good. It is propitious.”

  “Well, it’ll be propitious for this case if I can keep my ducks lined up. I’d settle for Eury, Tarch and Stacey?”

  My suggestion met with silence, so I flipped back a page in my notebook, and ran a finger over my scrawl from the previous day.

  “How did your daughter get that cut on her jaw?”

  “If I recall, she tripped and fell against the edge of a coffee table.” She sighed. “So many of my husband’s things still clutter this place. He was impulsive that way. It is my weakness to not want to part with them.”

  “That include the hired help?” I said.

  “Only my butler.”

  “Plus doorman, plus cook makes three in total. Any others?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not a lot for a modern lady,” I said.

  “Dorrita said it makes one lazy, and I have come to agree.”

  “You look after them? Holidays, insurance?”

  “Dorrita always gave them one night a week to be free to follow their dreams. He knew what it was to be the kicking boy.”

  “Which day is that?”

  “Thursday. It has always been Thursday.”

  As I surveyed the drawing
room, I was imagining the butler dusting its shelves in a neat white apron. Half of the wooden furniture looked antique. A dark oak bookcase probably dated from at least the early 1900s. Most antiques did—those that hadn’t been broken for firewood in the bleak winters after the Event, or salvaged for smelting in the rebuild. Furniture built post-2000 wasn’t known for its longevity.

  On a shelf, a plant potted in an age-cracked biomass battery box provided a jarring note to the old-world taste. The plant was asleep in the day, the only evidence of its genetic tinkering the faintest glowing tracery of veins in its leaves. Come night, its bioluminescence would serve as an exquisitely expensive nightlight.

  My attention was hooked by a row of glass-fronted boxes, the kind that usually contain pin-stuck bugs. But there were no bugs. Each box held a different object, and I strained in the dim light to make them out.

  Evelyne noticed my gaze and a smile touched her lips.

  “I call it my damp rag collection.” She twisted lithely and pointed to the first in the row. A faint sparkle glimmered from within it. “That one contains a twenty-five carat diamond said to have been grown, using a process in vogue two centuries ago, from the bequeathed remains of an entire orchestra. It was given to me by the former CEO of DL Plastics Ltd. He sought to woo me and avert a takeover. I let him woo me, then bought his company the following morning. A damp rag is all that was left of that once powerful man.”

  I lost interest. “Trophies,” I said, and her teeth showed white.

  “Yes, Mr. McIlwraith, trophies,” she said, and her smile vanished. “When my husband died he left me alone, in charge of one of this country’s largest family empires. How long do you think it was before New York’s vultures began to circle?”

  I didn’t answer. My thoughts were drifting out the window to the garden that commanded a view of Manhattan, when I heard a voice rumble from the direction of the front door.

  Evelyne’s eyes glittered as she said, “Eustace is here. He always visits his mother.”

  Heavy footsteps announced the approach of the eldest male Speigh. He entered the drawing room and came to rest over feet splayed at shoulder width. He took his time surveying the setup without a trace of self-consciousness. I couldn’t read the expression he fixed on his mother.

  Eustace Speigh stood maybe five foot nine inches tall. He was compact. Compact like a block of granite, compressed. He was wearing too much for the weather, but the angles of his shoulders and the bulges of his muscles were visible through the coarse twill coat he’d neglected to doff. Beneath its wide lapels was visible a grey flannel jacket. A starched cotton shirt, foulard, and khaki slacks completed the picture of a businessman pretending at an Ivy League education. His loafers were the tell―they lacked the patina of long wear.

  “You the dick?” he said, and waved the hat he held crumpled in his hand in my direction. His thick, dark eyebrows were separated by pinched skin. His face had a male heaviness.

  “You tell me, Mr. Speigh. I thought I was investigating a murder. But maybe I’m the butt of an elaborate joke. Most of your family seem to be having a gay old time.”

  The dark brows throttled that pinch of skin. He shifted his weight over his feet.

  “What the hell are you implying?” He said it low, with control. This was no muppet.

  “Implying nothing. Your brother’s in the freezer, and you seem about as upset as a beagle at open season.”

  “Different strokes. I loved my brother.”

  “Loved or love?”

  He grunted, and moved to the sideboard to pour himself a drink. With his back turned he spoke to his mother. “I don’t know why you hired this guy. Damn cops can do the job.”

  “The police aren’t here,” she said. “He is.”

  He turned, took a slug of whatever, and ran a speculative eye over me again with that same overtness.

  “So he is,” he said. Then, “And what have you discovered, Mr. ...?”

  “McIlwraith.”

  “Mr. McIlwraith.”

  I told him. He seemed to think about it.

  He said, “Okay. So you’re more than a pretty face. What do you want?”

  “I’ll think about that. For now, just answers to a couple of questions.”

  He sculled the rest of his drink and said, “Shoot.”

  “Where were you the night your brother was murdered?”

  He didn’t bat an eyelid.

  “My townhouse, staring into the john on account of my mother’s chicken pot pie,” he said. “Ask my staff.”

  “I wasn’t the one who marinated the chicken in whisky,” said Evelyne, gazing through the French windows at the sifting greenery.

  I said to Eustace, “Do I have your permission to poke around Alltron Corp?”

  He laughed. “Since when did dicks ask permission to poke their noses in? Sure. I’ll send word. Tell ‘em to roll out the carpet.”

  He leaned down, pecked his mother on the cheek, and strode toward the hall.

  “One more,” I said.

  He halted and turned, gathered moss.

  “Your father,” I said. “What sort of a man was he?”

  “That’s easy,” he said. His smile had left. “He was the guy they first wrote that rags to riches story about. Son of Swiss immigrants who washed up here with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Tough as nails when he had to be. But he made it didn’t he.”

  He left and I heard a door boom shut.

  I glanced up at the portraits floating against the wall in the adjoining hall. Yeah, they were sneering at me.

  “Liselle,” said Mrs. Speigh. She had come to my side without me hearing her. “The money. The lineage. The pedigree,” she said. Her voice dripped with something that would polish brass. “All of it borne in the name Liselle, my maiden name; itself a common first name borrowed a long time ago for a reason no one remembers.”

  “And your husband?”

  “Was a gutter rat, then gopher, then packer, then floor manager, then... Well, you have to have a chunk of capital even to make it onto the map of a Liselle.”

  I didn’t need to ask where that first chunk of capital sat. My mind went to a decrepit warehouse squashed in the tumbledown of Eastside.

  “Would you like to meet my husband?” she said.

  I wondered what passed for a martini in this place. I didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait for one. She brushed past me into the hall, went to a mantelpiece and retrieved a black cylinder about the size of a saltcellar. It was smooth with a dull sheen. She unscrewed its top and rummaged in it with her thin fingers.

  When she withdrew her hand she turned to me, smiled, and said, “Mr. McIlwraith meet Mr. Speigh Senior.” She turned her hand over and mine moved like a robot to catch whatever she held.

  Something fell into my hand about the size and weight of a large cockroach. I held it close. It was a finger. Dry and brown, with a nail like a snail shell, but unmistakably a finger.

  With effort I rode an urge to retch, and with a dip of my head said, “Mr. Speigh.”

  “You’re gorgeous,” Mrs. Speigh said. “That was his ring finger. He wore a heavy gold band. You can still see the imprint.”

  I prodded it. Ring fingers made me nervous. Why the ring finger when the man presumably had two perfectly good pinkies?

  She gazed at it a moment longer, then said, “Here, give that back to me.” I tipped the finger back into her pale hand.

  She dropped it back into the cylinder like an uneaten hors d'oeuvre, screwed the top on, and replaced the cylinder on the mantelpiece.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing with that. I wonder myself. It was all they sent back, to prove they had him. But I knew he was dead.”

  “A man can live without a finger,” I said.

  “Yes, I wrestled with that hope for many years. I paid the ransom, but...”

  I suddenly had a strong desire for sun on my skin. I took my leave and headed out. She followed me to the door, where the eunuch
appeared again, and without a word gave me my gun.

  Part of me had one more question for Mrs. Speigh. I argued with myself, and I guess that part won: “Why did your nightwatchman try to kill me with a dog?”

  Her full lips drew into a line before she answered. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The nightwatchman of that facility was found in the morning―in his office, bound and gagged. Your card was found on the premises. You can understand how that looked.”

  “No dogs? No deranged midgets? No Liberty Borough bankers?”

  She shook her head, brows pinched in confusion. “Just your card.”

  While I rode the elevator to the ground, one thought stuck to my mind like a fly on flypaper. It was about the scar on Nicole Speigh’s neck. No mother forgot how her only daughter got a scar like that.

  — 7 —

  Back on the street, I found an exchange office and looked up Alltron Corp. The address listed in large was in Brooklyn. It was called a ‘campus’.

  Before heading over the bridge, I stopped at a bar called The Whipped Elephant. Between the hours of eleven and two it played host to newshounds, who flocked into the joint for ten-minute lunches, cheap rumor, and cheaper drinks. I ordered a ham on rye and sat at the bar with an eye on the door. I was hoping to see a guy I know who sub-edits the society pages of an independent rag.

  There was no sign of my guy. I left half-disappointed. The sandwich was half-good.

  The trains that pump Brooklyn’s humanity into and out of Lower Manhattan are big―so big they seem parts of the bridge. When they move, the bridge is a colossal engine block encasing massive connecting rods.

  I rode the train, my hand clutching a loop of leather, and watched a trawler on the river heading out. Sunlight glinted from its cabin windows. Waves on the Hudson made its mast pivot like a spinning top, so that the gulls hanging over it were having trouble finding a perch. The boat’s hull ploughed through a smear in the water that told me another engine in the sewage treatment plant had bust.

  Alltron was in a part of Brooklyn that had been heavily shelled. When rebuilding, a visionary in the Borough planning division had decided that technology parks―such as they were―beat plain parks. Alltron sprawled over twenty acres of one such park. I had fun finding reception.