Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  He dug beneath his jacket and retrieved his wallet. He flashed it open, let me see the wad of cash stowed neatly there, and jinked a chunk of it free. He held it out to me. “Here. On the House.”

  I left it hanging there.

  “Take it,” he said. “It’s your birthday. Play money. I’ll take your bet, take it straight back.”

  “What’s your wager?”

  His gaze slid sideways. “Nicki.”

  Nicole drew breath to speak but said nothing. I watched her expression split between outrage and apprehension. I realized she was hanging on my response.

  “Keep your money,” I said. I dug the Diogenes chip out of my coat pocket. “I’ll take your wager.”

  I flipped the chip into the air and caught it. He watched it like a cat. I’d found something for him to look at more fascinating than my face.

  We moved toward the table, and a gap opened to allow us to its edge.

  Eutarch spoke to the croupier. “Rocks for the man.”

  The croupier’s arm swept across the green baize in an arc, and deposited two dice. I picked them up, massaged them around my palm. Listened to their knuckle-bone clacking.

  I put the chip on the pass line, and pulled my hand back, cocked ready to throw. I looked at Eutarch. He’d doused his cigarette, and was standing with arms planted in his pants pockets, chest puffed out with mirth.

  All eyes waited on my static fist.

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he said, irritated I was spoiling his drama.

  “The wager. That chip for your sister. Tell you what I’ll do. If I lose, I’ll throw in a story.”

  “A story,” he said, brow dropping like a man who’s built a mail-order bomb only to find a piece left over.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A story about three boys who had a wingding in an Eastside warehouse on the anniversary of there papa’s birthday. One got lost on the way home. You’ll love it. It’s a comedy.”

  I pulled the trigger, shot the dice across the field. But I was watching emotions crawl over Eutarch’s face like a line of caterpillars rippling head to tail. Good for him we weren’t playing poker.

  “Seven out,” said the croupier. “The gentleman wins.”

  I smiled. “You got another sister?” I said. “Go again. Double or nothing.”

  All the mirth evaporated from the frame of Eutarch Speigh. “You got a death wish, shamus.” He turned and stalked away.

  “Your bet, sir,” said the croupier. He pushed the chip to the table’s rim.

  “Keep it,” I said. “Belonged to the House anyway.”

  I turned to smile at Nicole. “Your place or mine, doll?”

  But Nicole Speigh had stepped back into winter. She ranged a frosty gaze on me. “Is that it? This is just a big game to you? Aren’t you going to ask him what happened?”

  My smile popped a tack, swung for a moment by one corner, and fell to the floor.

  “You need to learn the slow game,” I said. “Give it time. He’ll tell me without my asking.”

  I glanced about the room. A bar curved along one side. “Let’s get a drink.”

  She said nothing, but followed. I ordered, took both drinks out onto a wide, glassed-in balcony. Light filtered through curtains draped under the glass to be caught in effervescing liquid. At night, with the curtains swept back, there would be a stunning blaze of Milky Way or light pollution.

  I leaned against a lintel and offered Nicole a drink. She joined me, back against the glass, arms crossed until thirst finally beat out annoyance and she took the glass.

  “So you won. I’m yours,” she said. She glanced at the ring on my finger. “What will you do with me? What will your wife think?”

  I clucked my tongue. “Not won. Redeemed.” Then, “I lost my wife. Nine years ago.”

  Her eyes grew luminous. “I’m so sorry. Was―was she ill?”

  “Ill? She married me, didn’t she?” I swigged liquid from my glass, felt it fizz at the back of my throat. “But I said she was lost not dead.”

  I had a moment to watch her gaze warp with confusion before the only other stray couple in the room quickly departed.

  I indicated the door with my head. “Patience. See?”

  We hadn’t had to wait long. Two black-garbed heavies took up station on the entrance to the balcony. Eutarch entered, his game-show smile falling from his face like the curtain on closing night.

  He strolled over to us and planted his feet. He shrugged his suit a couple of times to settle it on his shoulders. Looked like a nervous tick to me. I don’t think he was even aware he was doing it.

  “So does the shamus want the carrot or the stick?” he said.

  “How about some answers,” I said. “Where did you leave Eury Monday morning?”

  “You think you’re a big enough fish to take me, McIlwraith?”

  From nowhere, Nicole spoke with a fury. “Why won’t you answer, dammit!”

  His eyes slid over to her. “Always so emotional, Nicki.”

  Tears mingled with her anger. “He was our brother―”

  “Don’t I know that!” he growled over her. His heavy breathing filled the silence for a moment.

  Emotion was running. I dived in, hoping it would lubricate his tongue.

  “Eastside or Park Ave, Eutarch. Where’d you leave the body?”

  He turned on me, face florid, and jammed a finger into my breastbone. “Get out of my sight before I mince you.”

  I held my hands up, conciliatory. “Okay. Just thought I’d give you a chance to rehearse before you tell it to the cops.”

  I brushed past him. Took one step. Then another.

  “Hell you talking about? The cops?”

  My back prickled. His voice had dropped into that register that stands the hackles up. Inside, he’d taken whatever was burning him up and harnessed it, focused it. Only question was what he planned to do with it.

  I turned to face him. “They’ll pay you a visit. Today. Tomorrow. Be polite, at first.”

  Eutarch shrugged his suit again. His shoulders were surging with his breath.

  “Why would they do that?” he said.

  I paused a beat, then said: “That’s what they do to a guy who was the last to see a man before he was croaked.”

  “And why would they think I’m that guy,” he said, so low I barely heard it.

  “They’ll work it out,” I said, and winked. “Today. Tomorrow.”

  His shoulders slumped the smallest way. His life swallowed another bite of vigor. The gen-lines strained a touch tauter. Now his head looked less the bust and more the platter of over-ripe fruit.

  His gaze picked out a fleck of marble on the floor and he spoke.

  “It wasn’t just me. Eustace was there too. It was Dad’s birthday. All three of us play poker there, once a year like clockwork. It’s no secret.”

  “Mother doesn’t know,” said Nicole.

  “So what happened?” I said. “You lose a hand?”

  “We always do. No one cares. We play with chicken feed. Toast Dad’s ghost. Tell stories. Get plastered—even Eury. Go home.”

  “But this time, Euripides didn’t go home,” I said.

  Eutarch picked his gaze off the floor and gave it to me: “He was alive when I left.”

  The words were on my tongue. They hovered there, above the chessboard, the knight in ascension. My grasp lingered... released.

  “Sure. But was he breathing?” Check.

  I saw in his eyes the crisis come. Damn my curiosity if I wasn’t more intent on which way it would go than what I’d do if it ran me over. Didn’t matter in the end.

  He slid a hand beneath his suit. When he pulled it free it held a pen. He dipped the other hand beneath the opposite lapel and drew out a slip book. He scribbled in the book, tore off a slip, and passed it to me.

  “Get the hell out of New York. Don’t come back.”

  He brushed past me.

  I looked at the slip. It
was a check for more money than I could make in my lifetime―legally or otherwise.

  “I’m not that cheap,” I said, balled up the check, and tossed it onto the floor.

  He spoke over his shoulder. “Sure you are. Just need to find the right currency.” He turned on the threshold. “I’ll ask that pretty little secretary of yours. What’s her name―Effie? Ailsa?”

  He leered, turned, and left. The two heavies were sucked into his slipstream. Nicole and I were left to our half-drunk liquor and our moods.

  Outside I parted ways with Nicole. She offered me a ride but I needed space. Having her near cluttered my head.

  She argued like the good host. “But I’m yours,” she said. The trace of self-mockery didn’t stop her words running over my scalp like teasing fingers.

  “No, you’re not. I meant it. Redeemed. Set free.” Then, “Wasn’t that what Eury wanted?”

  “I’ll never know.”

  “Never’s a long time,” I said, and shut the door on her. It pissed the chauffeur off, but I didn’t let it hurt my feelings.

  It was barely three in the afternoon but it felt like a full day. I splurged again and caught a cab to the police station. Paid Tunney a visit and dropped a dirty, dog-eared card and vial of poison on his desk.

  “What’s this?” he said, like I’d dumped a bedpan in his lap.

  “The murder weapon, made with Alltron Corp’s equipment if not blessing. And Eutarch Speigh’s fingerprints. Cross-check with the crime scene and see who calls Snap.”

  He withdrew his chubby hand from the vial as if it had bitten him and indicated the card.

  “We already have a hit on that. I was about to follow it up.”

  Now it was Tunney flinging the bedpans.

  “A shot glass?” I said, thinking of the banker’s glass I’d planted at the warehouse crime scene.

  His brow wrinkled and he nodded. “You’re uncanny, Mac,” he said. “I don’t have an angle on how the guy got twisted into this mess, but his name is Ryan Tritt. Confidence man. He’s in the Tombs now on some charge. I was about to send the boys to pay him a visit.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I planted the glass. Couldn’t wait for a low-priority search. But check that card. You can thank me later.”

  I exited fast. Couldn’t make out what Tunney shouted through the door. Sounded like a lot of one-syllable words.

  I stalked the halls that bustled with New York’s finest clad in blue, heading for the exit. I had thought the day done, but Tunney had handed me an after dinner mint.

  I decided I had room for a little more.

  — 11 —

  The Tombs.

  From as far back as 1838 the city’s lockup has been called the Tombs. The architect of the original copied an Egyptian Mausoleum. Cute.

  The latest incarnation of the Tombs stands over the same ground as the original. Ground once hollowed and lapped by the virgin water of a lake formed in a valley made by Bayard Mount and the oyster middens of Chalk Hook, before it came to be called the Collect Pond.

  And collect it did―the sewage of tanner and slaughterhouse, and then the human sewage of the twice-failed colony. In the end, they leveled Manhattan’s only hill to fill it, and the boggy, mosquito-infested swamp that took its place hosted a slum named Five Points―America’s first.

  Five Points produced a string of men like Al Capone. But he was a boy scout compared to the gangster’s New York bred after the Event.

  I said the current Tombs stands over the same ground. To be precise, ten stories above it. This modern Tombs is a seven story, ten-thousand square foot splinter wedged snug in the guts of Liberty Borough. A cage housed in freedom.

  I’m not sure if that’s irony. It’s damn funny in any case. My head tried to sort it out while I shuffled forward in a queue at glacial speed, waiting to see my confidence man, Mr. Tritt.

  The Tombs has, beyond the public facade, few access points for a complex its size. It is encased in a deadzone that is only skewered by a single bank of elevators, and punctured by a handful of bridges like the one on which I waited, the aptly named Bridge of Sighs. The jail itself seems to float in Liberty’s structure as though the megascraper had excluded a toxic particle.

  When I got to the counter at the queue’s head I surrendered my piece. They frisked me anyway, gave me a form to fill in, and told me to wait on a bare bench fixed to the wall. I didn’t bother flashing my card. It would only have gummed the works.

  Half an hour later I was reading the backs of my eyelids, having decided it was irony, when a guard called into the room: “Forster.”

  That was the name I’d put on the form. I doubted Mr. Tritt would want to see me.

  The guard who led me to the visiting room smelled of sweat. The air was hot with the heat of thousands of seething men. The engines driving the air conditioning were big enough to power cruiseliners, but the mechanical actuators retrofitted to the building could never match electronic sensors.

  I sat in the booth indicated by the guard and watched the empty seat on the other side of the perforated glass, waiting for it to fill.

  Tritt entered, eyes full of questions. When he saw me he looked like he might vomit, and backed out like a dog pulling its snout from a bee hive.

  I had a split second to stop him. I breathed the word ‘Strawman’ with theatre emphasis and watched him freeze.

  The choice had been that or ‘Speigh’. Perhaps it didn’t matter. The names worked like keys to the city. I was beginning to think them a handy acquisition.

  Tritt sat twisted away from me. He was a far cry from the confident-but-pissed banker that had strolled into my office over a week ago. The bright yellow prison overalls didn’t help. Justice is swift in Newer York―but so is the flow.

  Tritt’s dark hair was lank, plastered to his scalp. He hadn’t shaved it for lice. Didn’t seem to think he’d be staying.

  When he sat there silent I realized he was waiting for me to talk. My mind wheeled furiously. I had to say something fast.

  “You’re lucky to be alive, Tritt,” I said, and strained to read him. “Dick you are, you probably thought I was the real deal. That’s your first fail, which is one more than most get with the bossman.”

  “I’ll fix it,” he said savagely over his shoulder. “Give me a job, and I’ll fix it this time.”

  I couldn’t have asked for more. He really was an idiot.

  “Did nothing about this setup stick in your craw?” I said. “Why the hell would a banker use a private dick to snatch a deed? A car salesman might, maybe. A pimp. Hell, a pimp’s mother―”

  Tritt hissed, “Keep it down.” His eyes flitted about the room. A murmur of conversation came from a couple of booths down.

  I pressed on. “Bankers have whole departments to handle that crap. The boss has no use for dimwits who jump at any half-assed tale. Those guys end up being worked by the cops.”

  Tritt was hunched up on his chair. He chewed in turn on the nail of each digit of his right hand. Then a glimmer came into his eye and I saw his smile spread either side of his hand.

  “Something just stuck in my craw,” he said. His limbs unhooked, and flowed to a new level. “They paid. They don’t pay for nothing.” He jutted his dark-peppered chin at me. “You were no test. You’re the one fishing.”

  Okay. Not a complete idiot.

  “Could be,” I said, magnanimous in concession. I leaned toward the glass, and said, “But who’s to say we’re not partners?”

  It took a while for the threat to dawn on him. His body contracted into the posture in which it had started.

  A hoarse whisper was all that would escape his mouth. “Shut your mouth. You know what they do to snitches in here.”

  “The Strawman would do worse.” A guess, but an informed guess.

  The color drained from his face, leaving it a pasty white slick. His three-day growth stood out like typewritten text.

  “Talk,” I said, “Then I’ll get out of here and you’ll never
see me again. Who sent me to see the psychotic midget and his demon dog?”

  Tritt sat back and began chewing the nails of his left hand. Fear had demolished the lifeblood of his trade. Behind his pupils, cogs were whirring fast, as he looked for an exit from the bog I’d tossed him in.

  When he lowered his hand and sat forward again, I guessed his frantic mind had dug up a character sheet for him to play to. The change in his manner was dramatic. Chameleonic. If I hadn’t already seen the naked actor I might have fallen for it ... again.

  “You got kids?” he said. Didn’t wait for an answer. “I got kids. Three. Boy, girl, boy.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The youngest needs a kidney.”

  He breathed a world-weary sigh, gave me a wry smile.

  “No. They’re fine. Fantastic, in fact.”

  “Your wife needs a kidney?”

  He shook his head. “They’re all fine. Living the suburban life in Boston. Private school. Tennis club. The American nightmare.”

  “Funded by a litany of defrauded widows,” I said.

  An edge of anger cut his words. “Hey, I pump the fat cats.”

  “A regular Robin Hood,” I said. He looked at me blankly. “So you have a happy satellite family. I don’t care. I want to know who wanted what from me. Wanted it enough to kill me.”

  “That’s just it,” he said, voice coated in oil again. “I didn’t want the job. Would’ve run a mile from it.” A tear budded in his eye.

  “But you didn’t. You waltzed into my office in Wall St. Stripes and sold me the bull.”

  “Because in the brief were photos of my kids.” He dragged a finger across his leaking eye. “I got the message. And besides, I didn’t know they were going to do the dirty on you.”

  Sure he didn’t. His kids had just been dangled off a cliff. His boss was a regular Samaritan.

  “Kids,” I said. “Family. That how the Strawman insures the work?”

  “Strawman?” he said, disdain straining through his character. “Nobody said that name.”

  “Then why did you wet yourself when I said it?”

  “Nobody says straight out, ‘You got a job from the Strawman.’ But you know.” He shivered. I couldn’t tell if it was part of the act.