Strawman Made Steel
Page 15
Evelyne had mentioned they paid a ransom. She hadn’t said nobody took it.
In a rare show of restraint, the Times didn’t connect the dots for the reader. The kidnappers had probably gotten cold feet, murdered Dorrita (if he still lived), and flown.
I reached the end of the reel. Its free end flapped against the machine’s head. I rewound it, loaded up the next reel, but didn’t find much. De-fingered Squillionaires could only hold the public’s interest for so long. The paper dropped it like a flyblown peach.
So I returned the Times reels to the archive and instead tried the Star. It only took three pages for me to find the first article about aliens, and I don’t mean Mexicans. The Star’s that kind of paper. Even my ass wouldn’t read the Star.
But in its pages, a couple days after the Speigh story broke, I found exactly what I was looking for. The Star had put its muckrake through the Speigh family tree, branch and twig.
One gnarly remnant caught my attention. Dorrita Speigh had one brother, Jahan, alive as of eleven years ago. From the amount of copy the Star got from Jahan, he hadn’t much liked his brother or else the Star was paying well. Maybe both.
Jahan lived in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a four-hour trip from Manhattan.
It would make Tunney happy, and God knows the man needed some happy.
Maybe I was sick of high society. Maybe the heat really was getting to me. Maybe I’d been beating in the branches for too long. Lebanon, and Mr. J. Speigh, was the closest I was going to get to the root.
I returned the Star reels to the archive, and left the library already smelling country air.
Two hours later I was sitting with the other human cattle being freighted east on the Raritan Valley Line, bound for Lebanon via Allentown, deciding that the country air smelt a lot like the city air.
Once out of NYC sprawl, the train had threaded east and south down the Appalachian valley. We passed Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where there was no star. The city brooded under a perpetual haze of foundry smog that would have blotted it from the sky in any case. Refineries flocked the railway, standing like clusters of vast, dirty bottles with necks of warped glass, all bent and tangled.
Neither did Allentown own any Billy Joel. What it did own was a million wells sunk to suck the shale gas buried in the vast Appalachian Basin. They pocked the landscape wherever the gaze fell, and marched into the horizon like the Armada at World’s End. Probably why the air smelt no better than that wafting over Manhattan’s concrete and tarmac.
The train idled at Allentown, waiting for a connection. I got out onto the platform to stretch my legs and pine over the cigarette stand. I bought a bag of peanuts and a copy of the Times, the same edition Ailsa had brought up that morning to wreck my day.
When I got back on the train my seat was still warm. I opened the paper, ignoring the cover, and folded it over on the crossword page. 1 Across ― Six-letter word beginning with S. Leading family of America’s second Gilded Age.
No. That’s not what it said. Not on the paper, anyway.
With a diesel grunting the train hauled itself out of the station, swaying over one junction after another, and through the tangle of lines knit into the city.
We skirted a ridge marking the northern wall of the great valley, a barrier of land like crinkled paper that forms what geologists call a physiognomic province. Railway men call it a pain in the ass.
The rhythmic motion of the train gradually beat out the crossword. I tugged my hat down over my face and dozed.
When I woke, night was stealing through the sky, and the lights of Lebanon were flaring to life.
I waited for the train to leave, and the platform to empty, before making my own way to the concourse. It meant I had to wait, but I’d wanted to eyeball everyone who’d come on that train. Like every paranoid knows―it probably is you they’re looking at.
Opposite the station were taxi ranks and a bus depot. Between them was a plaza filled with day-weary commuters. The acoustics were awful. I passed a hire car counter and a kebab joint before finding what I wanted: a message post. Boys were clumped out front of it in various postures―Holmes’ Street Arabs―each waiting for a commission.
I raised my voice over the din: “Jahan Speigh. Who knows where he lives?” I got two to give me the same address and left them to split the cash.
Happy to find Jahan hadn’t dropped off the perch, I didn’t notice another boy take off.
Wars turn on moments.
The moon was poking its brow over Lebanon’s light haze when my cab drew up at the address. I figured if I got my business done in under an hour I could catch the late train and be home, snug in bed, well before the witching hour.
I told the cabbie to wait. Without a word he wound his seat back and closed his eyes. Not the nervous type.
Jahan Speigh lived in a mansion. That’s how it looked at first sight. But it didn’t take much to penetrate the illusion. The building was like the husk a lobster casts off before it leaves to be a happy lobster someplace else. It reeked of neglect. Eleven years of neglect maybe.
The grounds were walled in. Cast-iron gates were thrown back on their limits, and rusted in place. Fruit trees that might have once been nipped and tucked into espalier perfection were bursting over the walls and hanging low over lawns grown high. Come autumn the place would stink of rotten fruit.
I opened my coat and loosened the Steel Lady beneath my arm. Trespassers were shot first and challenged later.
The gravel drive crunched under my feet as I trod my way to the door. A path of desire―a line of dirt hard-packed by foot-traffic―led off around the back. I mounted the steps to the stoop and the formal entrance.
I reached the door to be met by the dull gaze of an iron knocker. Some kind of mountain cat. I gripped the improbable ring threaded through its nose and rapped loud. An animal scurried beneath the curling planks of the stoop.
I heard floorboards creak. The door handle turned, and then the door, sticky with disuse, opened an inch.
“Who is it?” a whisper, southern. Might have been warm air escaping the building.
I prodded my card into the gap. Thin fingers took the card, and the door closed.
A moment later it re-opened, but only an inch.
“What do you want?”
I considered feeding the door another card. The house seemed to respond to treats.
I said, “To talk to Mr. Speigh.”
The door closed a fraction, paused. Then came a rattle of chain on wood and the door swung wide to reveal a woman no bigger than a girl. She wore a loose slip of pale blue that fell in a straight line from her thin shoulders to the floor. Straight grey hair fell half that distance down her back. The only thing about her that looked younger than sixty was the scope mounted on the rifle she had leveled at my crotch.
She wasn’t bothering to sight through it. All she had to do was to wave the gun in my general direction, pull the trigger, and I’d shed a hundred pounds.
“I’m Mrs. Speigh,” she said in that same lilting whisper. “You can talk to me.”
Mrs. Speigh.
God, the kaleidoscope. I couldn’t help it; I laughed.
She watched me like a Jersey milker, then untucked the rifle from beneath her arm and rested its butt on the floor.
I said, “It’s Mr. Speigh I wanted to talk to. Is he here?”
She shrugged. “More or less.” But didn’t move.
I strained my ears but heard nothing above the rattling of a pot lid coming from deeper within the house.
“It’s about his brother.”
“I had a brother,” she said. “Chief Inspector of the railway here.”
I smiled, thought of the late train.
“Died of a stroke,” she continued.
Self-induced? I wondered, but said nothing.
She turned and walked along the hall. She carried the gun like a broom, and her bony haunches tussled with the fabric of her slip, making a play of shadows over her spare rump.
“He’s up there,” she said and left me.
I mounted the steps and went in search of Jahan Speigh.
I found him slung in an armchair, staring detachedly into space.
I told him I wanted to ask a few questions about his brother, and offered him a card. His hand took it before his eyes sought me out.
I sat on a worn Ottoman, my back to the small flames playing in the fireplace.
He read my card.
I read him.
A touch of it. Just a touch of familial likeness, a skerrick of Jahan’s genetic capital had stolen as far as his nephews and niece. You could see it in the line of his nose, and the deep groove between nose and mouth. But not nearly as much as the Liselle genes. The little embryonic machines that had churned out Eustace, Eutarch, Euripides, then Nicole, had evidently valued that man-tinkered stock more highly.
He had a round head, but not fat. He was the kind of thickset that could be fat or muscle. He wore the chair like a pair of favorite pants.
I tried to imagine Dorrita’s face. Strange that I hadn’t seen it in picture or portrait anywhere in Evelyne’s castle in the clouds.
At length he stirred, sat up straighter, and cleared his throat.
He opened his mouth, but I spoke first: “What’s your secret?”
He grew more alert, his gaze probing through a haze. “Come again?”
“You must be the best preserved crack-head in the east.”
He laughed loud. I heard a step behind me and turned to see his wife at the door. She had the gun, and wasn’t holding it like a broom. She surveyed the room once, then disappeared again.
Jahan laid an arm along the scalloped arm of his chair, and his gaze grew dull again and began to travel the room. I saw it light on a sideboard not three feet from his sprawled arm.
I nodded at it. “May I?”
He flicked his hand in acquiescence. I rose, crossed to the sideboard, and tugged open its wide and flat top drawer. Glass vials rolled with the motion to clunk against the back of the drawer. Strewn over its base were countless items of the druggist’s ephemera. He was doing crack, freebase, you name it. I lifted a glassine dimebag to my eye and read the brand stamped on it: Powder Keg. I recognized it.
I turned holding the bag and found him smiling a Cheshire grin.
I said, “This is current. You been visiting my city?”
He waved a dopey hand. “Anna.”
I dropped the packet back into the drawer and pushed it shut. “What’s in here?” I said, indicating the second of the two drawers.
“Downtown,” he said.
Heroin. That’s where he was now. But he’d probably done the coke from the top drawer in the morning.
“You went Uptown this morning, seven o’clock?”
“Uptown? I’ve been all over town.” He laughed at his own joke.
I sat again on the Ottoman. I looked at his face and fancied I saw somewhere in their depths, way back there, under the drug’s blanket, a flutter of fear.
“I’m not here to bust you. I just want answers.”
He shifted in his seat, sprawling in a new array of flesh. “Stalemate,” he said.
“What?”
“You wanted to know my secret: stalemate. Docs tell me the body’s a drug factory. So who cares where the drugs come from―inside, outside, it’s all the same. So long as you find a new level.”
In my experience the new level was the base of a coffin. Jahan had some cast-iron constitution and a lot of luck working his way.
Through a window cracked open to vent smoke gathered by the poor flu, I heard the lonesome call of a train whistle. The night was getting on.
I pulled my notepad out. Time to test the quality of the man’s mind.
“Is your brother dead?”
He frowned and fished clumsily again for my card.
“Who the hell are you again? Of course he’s dead. He was murdered years ago.”
“About the time your sinecure dried up, I know. Evelyne Speigh knows too. But does Dorrita know?”
“She never liked me.”
I hesitated before deciding to play my favorite card. “She’s my boss.”
That stung him awake.
“Boss?”
“Client, I should say. I’m working on a case for her.”
“What case?” he said, and was looking at me askance through screwed up eyes.
“Never mind. Is Dorrita alive?”
“She has no reason not to like me. I’m the better brother.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m alive,” he said, and flashed a set of teeth that wouldn’t have upset a horse trade.
“Could’ve fooled me,” I said.
All of a sudden his torso swelled with taut muscle as he propped himself up on his elbows, and yelled “Anna.”
Mere seconds elapsed before his wife entered the room, whereupon she opened the second drawer in the sideboard and began prepping a mainline.
I watched her administer her husband’s regimen with morbid fascination. Here was a man that subsisted on opiates and alkaloids like bread and water. The drugs entered his system each day like waves of reinforcing troops. On reaching the front they fought to a standstill. And in the no-man’s land between coke and heroin, Jahan Speigh eked out his life, its flame fed by a reservoir I couldn’t see.
Anna finished and left. Silence descended, marred only by a sigh that leeched from Jahan’s lips as he collapsed slowly into his chair like a punctured Zeppelin.
At length he opened his eyes. They found my face, and he said, “Dorrita is dead.”
I changed tack. “Were you in the business?”
He reached for a finger of brandy that had until then sat undisturbed within arm’s reach and sipped.
“I tried. I tried hard. But I could never get my head around it―offsets, and rates of return. Give me something to hold. A diesel primer.” He drained his glass. “I was a disappointment.”
“And Mr. Liselle, Evelyne’s father, watched the reins pass to his son in law with a dignified but diminishing eye,” I prompted.
“Him? He died before ever I came on the scene.” Jahan peered at his arm as if it had been left by an inconsiderate passer-by. “No great loss by all accounts.”
“Whose accounts?”
“Evelyne and her mother. They called him every kind of bastard. Dorrita did too, for no reason I know. So much for high society.”
I caught myself licking my lips, and realized my gaze had been doing laps between the recumbent Jahan and his empty brandy glass.
“So what do you think happened to your brother?”
He shrugged into the upholstery, picked up his glass, saw it was empty, and set it down again. He yelled, “Anna!”
“You read the papers,” he said. “That’s what happened.”
Anna appeared again, and with a minimum of motion poured a fresh brandy, and slipped from the room.
He took a slug of brandy and with an oiled voice added, “Only thing I’ll say is that crap about his appendix is just that: crap.” He paused to run a speculative eye over me. “Bitch poked him in a drunken funk. He showed me the scar.” He prodded himself in the gut. “I’m no doctor, but that ain’t where your appendix is. He probably deserved it.”
I doodled in my pad. I had a nice yellow-billed loon shaping up. “So you want me to peddle your dirt with Evelyne to see if I can’t wheedle a little grift for her favorite brother in law.”
The frown that formed on his face came slow. Made him look like a bear.
“I never said that.”
“Not in words.”
I snapped my notebook shut, stood, and turned to go.
I heard the creak of a chair spring and glanced over my shoulder.
Jahan was standing, white as a sheet. He said, “Dorrita wasn’t much of a hus
band. I know. Older brother. Always the master hand. In control. And near the end―”
His gaze went out the window. “He was skittish. A little crazy. Maybe too much Swiss blood from the cloistered alps. Like me.”
He pulled his gaze back into the room and rested it on the fire.
“But it broke Evelyne’s heart when he disappeared. I can’t imagine what losing two sons must feel like.” His words were empty of human emphasis; they came out like bullet points―maybe that was the drug.
I donned my hat, and with a tilt of the head, left Jahan Speigh to whatever remained of what he called life.
Anna saw me to the door. The rifle had finally been propped against a dead grandfather clock in the hall. Her hand caught at my coat as I stepped over the threshold.
“Don’t judge him,” she said.
“I’m no judge, ma’am,” I muttered. Before I could move she gripped my coat again.
“Between two and three in the morning he’ll get reacquainted with the world again. For a few hours of exquisite pain, before it begins again tomorrow, he’ll cry.”
Her eyes held me, slick with their own film of moisture.
“He did love his brother, Mr. McIlwraith.”
— 14 —
I must’ve been channeling Tunney when I got off the train at the Hamburg-Reading Junction. My solution to the hunger gnawing my gut was a bag of jellybeans from a kiosk on the platform.
The night wind was whipping up, sweeping the concrete better than a broom. I watched a woman wrestle a cigarette and lighter from her coat, which flailed about her. She lit up, and a gust tore a comet trail of embers from the cigarette, and sent it eddying across the tarmac.
I was standing, propped on the stubby shelf of the station’s cable office waiting for the clerk. From the station in Lebanon I’d cabled Inker for an update. I wanted to know if it had cooled any at home. I didn’t want to arrive at Grand Central to a welcome party in blue.
“No message, sir,” said the clerk.
I thanked him, moved down the platform, planted my backside against the wall, and waited for the whistle.
Thirty feet from me lay the train in great, glistening silver segments. Passengers were still embarking, and by the cabin lights I could see them threading through the carriages, hunting for empty seats.