Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  The Medical Examiner often requests bloodwork straight from the scene, separate to forensics. But if it isn’t stored dry it grows mold.

  “Rain,” I added, hoping the connection wasn’t beyond him.

  He ran an eye over me again, ran it by habit past the pocket where my ID should have been hanging instead of wedged inside back-to-front. But he wasn’t seeing anything. Didn’t even take a laugh from my face. My guess, he was drinking the perfume and presence of the liquid-eyed woman by his side.

  Potent wasp. Crazy ant.

  He picked a clipboard off a forensics cart and jammed it at me, already turning away. “Sign,” he said, and went back to saying ‘yes’ in negatives.

  I signed. The tension in my arm leapt through this sudden outlet and splurged a tangled mess of ink that looked like one of Shakespeare’s six extant signatures―none of which, incidentally, spell Shakespeare.

  If the Latino suspected it was me behind the wager, she gave no indication, just kept plying her charm.

  I took a pair of rubber gloves from the forensics cart and tugged them on, then sheathed my shoes in plastic booties. I padded over to the suite door, a moth larva hungry for the buffet.

  The cop on the door stepped aside to let me through, his eyes on the handful of newshounds still hanging about. The door showed no obvious signs of forced entry.

  One step inside the Giuliani Suite and my mind dumped all voluntary thought.

  The fog of war froze where it drifted and pressed down with a numbing weight. The shock I felt was sub-conscious and visceral, like the pain that gathers after the gut punch. Only later did I pick it over and decide it was recoil from the trace of such pure and efficient violence. The floor, walls, the entire suite screamed with its voice.

  Two steps in and my feet slipped. I had to cock my arms and splay my legs to keep my balance. A CSI squatting in the footprint of a piece of small furniture that had been removed, laughed. The guy was no girl guide, but the laughter had a tremor in it. Hammett might have called it Blood Simple. Whatever that means, it sounds better than crazy.

  I’m no spatter expert, but the scene spoke to me of an inversion. The exuberance was intended to look uncontrolled. But if so, it was the ordered chaos of a Pollack. The murderer had had free reign, and the time to employ it.

  The slippery terrain demanded I attend to my step―a small mercy that shrank my horizon to the bald tops of my shoes and the foot of floor immediately before them.

  I picked my way across the parquet to an island of carpet. A corner of the carpet was stained with fluid that didn’t look like blood, and through it the carpet was frayed in a number of parallel lines. Around it sat a pair of leather couches―brushed leather and steel―facing each other over a low, glass-topped coffee table. The setup fenced a space designed to host soirée conversation, but its effect was spoiled by the blood of Eutarch Speigh. The air above it vibrated with silent indignation.

  Or maybe I was going Blood Simple.

  From my carpet haven I could see into the bedroom. A craze of rust-colored footprints led into and away from there and I guessed it to be the epicenter.

  I headed for it and passed a technician carrying a plastic bag. I must have given him a strange look, because he said, “Ice. Was in the ensuite sink.”

  I entered the bedroom and found two CSIs who seemed to be working out in a spiral from the queen-size bed. It was a four-poster, hung with purple cloth meant to invoke the East. The CSIs would have fun dismantling it. I ignored them, and hunted for the site of my botched sample, which would have been recorded on the detail sheet, had one existed. But when my gaze swept the bed, it was arrested by an object lying dead center, snug in the folds of a stained silk sheet like something you’d buy at a jewelers.

  I suppose I should have guessed, but it took me a moment to recognize the object.

  The name my head first handed me was ‘cigar’. But cigars aren’t articulated. Nor do they have nails.

  The next idea, ‘cockroach,’ was no better―this object was pink and fleshy. But unlike the finger housed in a black cylinder in Evelyne Speigh’s drawing room, this one precluded the possibility of its belonging to a living man.

  A voice said, “Think we should chalk it?”

  One of the CSIs was straightened up on his knees, stretching his back.

  I made no reply but the busy signal.

  Two facts had priority:

  First off, the room hosted only a remnant of the body of Eutarch Speigh―something not reported in the Times―which made it unlikely the ME had even bothered attending the scene. My disguise began aging in dog years.

  Second, I heard, coming as it was through two doorways and a lot of real estate, the rumbling brogue of J.P. Tunney. Which was to douse my disguise in gasoline and set it alight.

  I bent and pretended to retrieve my sample, listening for that voice. It died away. When it rose again I knew he was suited up to inspect. He was coming in.

  I stowed my sample, stood up straight, and tried to read the angles in the suite for an alcove, for a place off the beaten path that the distracted eye might overlook.

  I saw, instead, hanging lopsided on a rack, the blazer Eutarch had worn the previous day at the Diogenes. For a split second my eyes played tricks, and it was the man himself, forlorn and impotent, come to see his own curtain call.

  Tunney’s voice swelled as he cleared the doorway into the suite’s loungeroom.

  I could make it to the ensuite. And maybe Tunney’s curiosity would be sated with the finger.

  But the blazer was too tempting.

  I crossed the room to the rack and dug a hand into its pockets. On the third try, inside left pocket, I found it. My card. The second one I’d offered him the day before.

  As Tunney entered the bedroom, on an urge I flipped the card to the blank side.

  Only it wasn’t blank. Written in black ink in large unmistakable figures was the name of the hotel, and a time, Eleven PM.

  I wasn’t just a Person of Interest. This was a full-tilt setup. It was a cast-iron bear trap and I had my ass on the trigger plate.

  And that’s what Tunney’s button-black gaze saw when he looked at me.

  But perhaps he was accustomed to PIs with their breaches clamped in steel jaws, because, with the barest hint of arrest, his gaze swept on, covering the rest of the room.

  He made no motion other than to scratch at his crescent of blond tuft. He said nothing other than to comment that Eutarch Speigh was shorter than he’d imagined.

  He took a look in the ensuite―maybe to satisfy himself the body hadn’t been flushed down the toilet―then left. I waited a full minute after his voice had died away before venturing back into the living room. Past the cop on the door I saw the press mob was still thin. Tunney had dragged some of it with him when he left.

  I retraced my steps to the cop guarding the evidence, and bent to strip off my soiled booties and gloves. I happened to notice an ashtray on the evidence trolley bagged in clear plastic. With a quick check that the cop wasn’t watching, I rifled through the cluster of plastic bags in the same compartment. In two I found cigarette stubs: Jamaican Spirit’s and Empire’s―my own brand, when I wasn’t on the wagon. Who knows, if I hunted further maybe I would have found a photo of me and Eutarch in the Giuliani Suite playing with knives and baseball bats.

  I signed out.

  I worked backwards along the morning’s trajectory, retrieved my clothes from behind the cistern (We’d been through a lot together, those pants and I), dumped the cast-offs, and gathered my coat. The lobby was still thick with folk that didn’t belong.

  On the street, I’d passed my cafe and taken a left down a one-way lane when a big, grey sedan came to a stop beside me, its engine burbling.

  “Get in,” said Tunney.

  I had no reason not to. We were moving before I shut the door.

  “Jellybean?” said Tunney without taking his eyes off the road. I took one from a paper bag wedged into a mess of fast
-food litter on the center console. The jellybean was black. Bad omen. But my favorite flavor. I chewed while Tunney maneuvered past parked cars. We reached a cross street and Tunney put his foot down. The car growled, its back dipped, and we swung round the corner and into the traffic.

  He dug a jellybean from the bag with the precision of habit, jammed it into his mouth, and spoke around the wet smack of his chewing. “I’m coming round to your brain spasm theory,” he said. “Nothing else explains your being in that room.”

  His gaze flicked at me, gleaming. “You want to suicide by cop, do it some other beat. The paper work would kill me.”

  “Not your beat,” I said, and stole another jellybean. Yellow. My least favorite.

  He sighed and shook his head in a play at long suffering. But it wasn’t mockery deepening the creases around his eyes.

  I wondered if the moment called for an apology. Couldn’t think of anything to apologize for. “You going to send me to boarding school now?”

  “Number One,” he said, and wagged a fat index finger at the roof. “You argued with the latest Speigh stiff yesterday.”

  Acknowledged.

  “Number Two,” he said, wagging the finger again. Turned out it wasn’t counting, just emphasizing. “Before that, you tore out of that hack bar with the stiff’s sister.”

  Also acknowledged, barring the strength of the verb. I would have said ‘strode’.

  “Number Three,” he said, and gave off the finger altogether to grip the wheel two-handed like he wanted to strangle it. “You fitted him up for his brother’s murder―dropped prints and poison on my desk yesterday.”

  Couldn’t argue with that like you can’t argue with Swiss cheese.

  “Save your breath,” I said. “Numbers Four through Six, respectively: I have no alibi for last night; I find Nicole Speigh remarkably attractive and heard from her own lips how her brother might have set her up for date rape; and―for dessert―I also have no alibi for the night the youngest Speigh boy, Eury, was murdered. That enough?”

  “No,” said Tunney. “You left out fiddling the evidence at the first scene. And”―he cast me an annoyed glance―“on form, probably the second.”

  I ate another jellybean and said, “It’s a nice theory. Why don’t you find out who gave it to you.”

  We sat a moment in the relative silence of mastication and turgid traffic until Tunney broke it. “If you’re smart you’ll get the hell out of the city until this blows over.”

  “I can’t do the case from the country,” I said.

  “You can’t do it from a cell in the Tombs either.”

  “You can’t do it full stop,” I said, then regretted it.

  Tunney’s chin lifted and his lips compressed until there were dark hollows under the corners of his mouth. But he didn’t blow up. “What’s the harm in giving it a week?” he said. “One week and we’ll have blown this frame out of the water.”

  “My guess, the next Speigh doesn’t have a week,” I said. “You noticed the pattern, right?”

  “Two ain’t a pattern,” he said.

  Great. We were arguing semantics.

  “It drew the eye,” I said.

  “I know what’s drawing your eye,” he said.

  “You don’t know the first damn thing about me,” I said, and cracked the door open.

  We were going maybe thirty, but some instinct caused Tunney to jam the brake on. I was already moving as a howl of tires and horns crashed over me. I got out of the car and left Tunney to it.

  He shouted at me through the noise. I heard, “Just a week, and live, dammit!” before rounding a corner that cut it all loose.

  New York’s a damn big beast. You can get lost in a square foot of pavement. I merged with the flow and let it lose me a while.

  — 13 —

  It was the heat that finally got to me.

  Not the cops. Cops I could spot from a mile. No, it was whoever was behind the frame-up that gave me a feeling like a hangover.

  Afternoon was slinking off the streets when my feet took me off the pavement and into the dim corridors of the Columbus branch of the NYC Public Library.

  It was a building of lofty, dark ceilings and wide, polished balustrades. Chatter pocked with occasional laughter floated into the stairwell to mingle in its cool air. It was impossible to pinpoint separate sound sources―they were a kind of collected voice, like the collected voice of the library itself set down in print.

  I followed the signs to the broadsheet archive, a monolithic cabinet set far back on the third floor.

  I’m not usually one for platitudes. I say run with scissors. But one ghosted smugly into my brain as I covered the distance to the archive: ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’

  The broadsheet archive was an egg that got left out of the big basket: the digital basket. The basket that overnight effectively disappeared from the panoply of human accomplishments, taking with it everything from the collected mind-farts of overwrought teenagers to the substance of entire multi-national corporations.

  The Event only removed one card from the House of Cards called Reality, and somehow left it standing. Pity it happened to be the one we bet the farm on.

  Digital data: prior to the Event, man’s number one industry. If you could eat it, we could have fed a billion Earths—money, health, news, entertainment, marriage, and even simulated weather systems accurate to a blade of grass. Oceans of data recorded on DVDs, hard disks, silicon, and, later, in the loopy traits of sub-atomic particles.

  But the Event had rendered all of it inaccessible in the blink of an eye. Much of it was still there, hidden in relics from before the Event—but as useless as printed text to a blind man.

  I ran a hand over the wooden bulk of the broadsheet archive. This archive housed microfilm. Plain, old-fashioned photographic exposures of broadsheets, shrunk to fit 800 to a reel of 35mm film. It stretched back in unbroken sequence, barring a few hiccups, to life on the other side of the mirror and earlier. Somewhere in the archive, printed in miniature, was the cover of today’s yet-electrified New York Times. Hell, one day, just for a laugh, I’d catch up on the classifieds from centuries in the future.

  But not today.

  I ran a finger along the wooden cabinet’s grain hunting for the dates straddling the murder of Dorrita Speigh. I found them, trundled the drawer open, and removed two boxes of film, a chunk of the archive three weeks long.

  I found a microfilm machine in a crook of the shelves that afforded me a view of the approaches. The machine was a mix of wood, metal, and faux-Bakelite that interior designer’s probably call H.G. Wells Chic.

  I slipped the first reel from its box, skewered it on the machine’s pin, slipped the head of the film under the glass and onto the receiving reel, and wound it on. At the side of the machine was a crank for tensioning a spring that drove the reel. I wound it, fired up the unit’s lamp, and played with the lens until the Time’s banner stood out crisp.

  The headline was criticizing the President’s pro-Anglo concessions on Atlantic trade under the epithet “Sellout Shaw” and a cartoon of her in lingerie sewn from swatches of the English flag. Must’ve been a slow news day. I wondered what the hell you’d find in the editorials.

  The date was too early by a week. With a twist of the seek knob the pages blurred into a stream.

  I halted the flow and read the date. Still three days early. I twitched the knob and jogged the reel forward until I reached D-day.

  I couldn’t have missed it.

  Emblazoned across the Times was the headline: Grim Message Proves Magnate Kidnapping.

  I read the article. A lot of hot air, sensation without specifics. So I spun the reel forward a few more days and looked for something substantive. I found it on a page four rehash, and garnered the facts.

  On the Fifth of April, a Thursday, Dorrita Speigh simply failed to return to his Liberty Borough estate.

  I paused. Today was Friday. Which, in the normal flow of things, me
ant yesterday had been Thursday. Dorrita and his second son, Eutarch, had both ‘disappeared’ on a Thursday—the day the Speigh hired help were free to chase their dreams. Evelyne had told me so. Would her eunuch be wearing a black rose for Eutarch, as he had for Eury?

  I read on.

  Dorrita had recently finished a term of convalescence following surgery for a temperamental appendix, and was beginning to ease back into the day-to-day direction of his empire, when he vanished from the byways of the Borough.

  His usual routes were combed and re-combed but no trace of him could be found. His wife, Evelyne Speigh, told police he’d walked different routes to regain his strength. These were combed too. Then the Borough was turned upside down, as much as something weighing a gazillion tons can be turned upside down. Nothing.

  Then came the finger that had the press salivating.

  It was hand-delivered in a cigar box. The hapless delivery boy was hunted down and grilled but no leads came of it. The boy had taken the job on the street from a “man” wearing a “hat” and that was that.

  The Times had the gall to pun that the finger pointed nowhere. It was immaculately severed and well preserved, but held no trace evidence. The cops assumed the ring finger had been severed to obtain the gold wedding band.

  The cigar box had also carried a typewritten note demanding a ransom, and specifying an amount to make the eyes water, and a drop point upstate. The note threatened that the clock was ticking. If the instructions were not followed to the letter, the next delivery would need a bigger box.

  Perhaps they meant to return Dorrita’s hat next?

  “Unlikely,” I said to myself just to break the silence. My voice echoed, playing with itself in and out of idle shelves.

  I jogged the reel further forward. The Speigh kidnapping faded further into the paper as it fell out of the news cycle. The next headline I found declared: Speigh Ransom Paid But Kidnappers Missing. The ransom delivery was made, but no one bothered to pick it up. No head-sized boxes showed up either.