Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  It rose up behind the grille like a vehicle from hell. I drew the grille back, stepped into the elevator, pressed the actuator for the eighth floor, and stepped back out before it moved. I hurried back to the stairs and strained to match its speed without blowing a gale.

  It beat me by a handful of seconds. I squatted in the dark by the end of the corridor and waited.

  Nothing but the same blue carpet and tight-ass lighting regime. This carpet was in better nick than that of the lobby.

  I stood and moved down the corridor. About a foot in from the stairwell, something beneath the carpet went snick. Could have been an access panel to the heating lines.

  I crouched at the door of 8a, below its black peephole like an eye, and rested my ear against the grain of its timber. Nothing.

  I did the same for 8b and got the same result.

  I returned to 8a and examined the lock. It was a Michigan. Solid but not impregnable. I slipped a high-tensile pick from my coat and went to work on it. When I sprung the lock, I leaned on the door hard to soak up its reverb.

  I gripped the doorknob and teased it round until the tongue popped free.

  I knelt at the wall, reached, and gave the door a push.

  I counted to five, and stole a glance into the room. I saw a clutter of shapes defined by light spilling from the corridor. I stood and reached a hand around the door jamb and hunted up and down the wall for a switch. My hand brushed a chain and I gave it a tug. There was a click and a hiss of flame feeding on backed-up gas before it settled and cast a yellow glow over the room.

  When I looked again it was over my gun sight. I saw a living room. A couple of leather couches faced off across an expensive-looking Indian rug. I strafed the barrel across the couch tops, and hunted among the lamps standing guard over the couches and clusters of ornamental wooden furniture.

  I entered and pulled the door shut behind me.

  A book lay open on an end table. I picked it up with one hand and tipped its cover closed. It was a history of Renaissance art. I put it back down, and it flopped open to the same page. I ran a hand over the bulbous brass fixture of a lamp behind a couch. It was cold as the crypt waiting for Euripides Speigh.

  It was a small apartment. I poked my nose into kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. The furniture and fixtures were all of a theme. Dark, burled wood, real leather, brass fittings with the first stain of patina. Solid, subdued, and expensive without screaming it. And taken all together, somehow sterile. The apartment was a made oasis hidden in humble surrounds. Pity no one bothered to live in it. Its rooms felt like they were waiting for a real-estate agent.

  I let myself out, re-locking the door, and turned my attention to the door across the way, 8b.

  It had the identical lock, and I took a nick out of my record getting it open.

  What greeted me when I opened that door took some interpreting, but lack of light had nothing to do with that. The room burned with a cozy glow.

  I was looking at the mirror-image living room to the apartment across the hall, but the resemblance didn’t get past the floorplan.

  The room was stuffed with the ordered chaos of a museum. A place for everything and everything in its place. A ship’s cabin lashed down for the sea of life. A tinker’s wagon.

  I entered, again pulling the door shut behind me.

  I stared over the .38’s sight, tracing a zigzagging course over the room’s contents because it gave me no natural line. A series of waist-high bookshelves and cabinets enforced a subsidiary, maze-like floorplan on the fixed dimensions. I stepped forward to open out the space. My eyes scanned past a utility trunk supporting a CCP semi-automatic rifle, part broken down, its scope balanced on its fat end like a miniature lighthouse. Abutting that was a glass-paned cabinet, and in that was a human skull. The wells of the skull’s eye sockets stared up at me. What at first appeared to be a discoloration of its bone turned out to be many tiny crosses inked on, like capital cities on a world globe. The cabinet rested against an easy chair with worn fabric on the arms and a deep depression in its seat cushion. On a blondewood end table next to the chair perched stacks of neatly folded socks, handkerchiefs, and underwear. The silver line of a pair of tweezers glinted from the lip of the table.

  My inventory of the contents of the room was compressed into less than three seconds.

  When my search returned to its origin I got a crawling feeling over the skin of my neck, like someone had traced my spine with a feather tip.

  I’d been so focused on covering the room, I hadn’t looked at the walls. They’d been a blur in my peripheral vision until that crawling feeling invited me to take a look.

  The wall was full of eyes.

  Familiar eyes.

  Every square inch of wall, except what was occluded by a tall bookshelf and a fake hearth, was covered by photos. Some were seated in gilt frames and mounted. Others were naked paper stuck to the plaster with adhesive.

  All of them were portraits, or pieces cropped from larger photos, blown up, and made into portraits.

  The subject of every portrait was a man. The same man.

  I sighted them over the gun barrel and returned each gaze. Something in me wanted to put them in order, to rehearse again that mysterious sense of loss I’d felt the last time I’d looked at the progress of these eyes.

  It was Dorrita Speigh’s eyes that filled the room.

  I checked the rest of the apartment to make sure there weren’t any nasty surprises.

  There weren’t any nasty surprises.

  There was no one home.

  Coming back into the living room and under the glare of those eyes, I cut across to the bookshelf. It’s a bad habit of mine. I poked through a few volumes, German philosophy from the look of them, but my interest soon died.

  The room made me feel sad. I pitied its owner. Pitied him like one pities the fox lying on the road with half its insides smeared by tire tracks, as behind its eyes frantic, animal thoughts run in circles while life’s light fades.

  I exited and locked the door behind me. That grim pity got locked away too.

  In the dim light of the corridor I was struck by a memory strong as hallucination of feet dangling from a ceiling. I remembered Eury Speigh’s body, thrown like a ragdoll into a dumpster. I remembered the blood-slick on the 51st floor of the Landmark Hotel. I remembered the finger like a cockroach on the mantelpiece of the Speigh mansion in the clouds. I remembered Nicole Speigh’s voice...

  I quit remembering.

  Standing there across from 8a, I re-holstered the Steel Lady.

  I took five strides down the corridor, pulled her out again, and sank onto one knee by the wall, facing back the way I’d come.

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  He’d slipped the lock off while I’d been in 8b, so the door to 8a swung inward without so much as a whisper.

  The doorway vomited a figure into the gloom.

  “Drop it or I blow you a new hole,” I said, and re-cocked the .38 for punctuation.

  The man froze.

  I heard something heavy thud on the carpet.

  “And the other one,” I said.

  He hesitated, then drew a gun from the small of his back. He dropped it. It hit the carpet with a lighter thud and sat next to the other gun.

  I rose from my crouch and closed the gap between us, keeping that impassive face just over the .38’s sight.

  Up close, I could see how I’d mistaken him for an accountant. Neat, small, pale, bespectacled. The skin over his brow and about his eyes creased in lines deep enough to indicate habitual concentration, but not deep enough to indicate an object of concentration he much cared about. My only mistake had been thinking he counted beans rather than beings. Surgeons’ shop talk, if it’s honest, sooner or later touches on the fear of seeing patients as lumps of meat. A fear that can begin to feel like a joy. Full blown it creates a god-complex. The stink of it was on him.

  But there was one lump of flesh this surgeon had cared about. I’d ju
st seen his shrine to it. To the flesh of Dorrita Speigh.

  The surgeon’s eyes watched me. They were the only part of him moving.

  “Put your hands behind your back and turn around,” I said. “Easy.”

  He turned.

  I kept my revolver trained on his back while I dug hand-cuffs out of my coat.

  I’d just pulled them free, when I saw a tendon in his right wrist grow taut. I was expecting it, but give the man credit. He was fast.

  He became a blur as he spun on the spot. His arms flung out like a whirly gig. His left caught my hand where it was closed over the butt of the .38 and rammed it high, and his right fist smashed into my shoulder. My deltoid soaked up the knuckle blow, but there was a sting in the fist that I couldn’t do much about―six inches of cold steel. It was a surgical lancet, and with it he’d pinned my shoulder to the wall.

  We were frozen in a posture that would have made a lovely cover for Ballroom Dancing Quarterly. It was a deadlock. I had the gun and he had the pain.

  He leaned his face in closer till I could smell his breath and see the yellow stain of pterygiums on his sclera through the lenses of his glasses big as bus windows.

  “How’s it feel?” he said, and levered the lancet. I tried bracing his arm with mine but he still managed to pull it down. The movement caused a chrysanthemum of pain to explode in my shoulder. The sparks bounced and skittered through my nervous system so much I nearly let go his arm. Beads of sweat sprang out on my forehead.

  “Prickly,” I said, and found my lungs at the bottom of a long drop.

  “That’s the brachial plexus,” he said, and waggled the lancet. “There’s a network of nerve ganglia tucked up under that flesh in your shoulder. A big one. Can you feel the strength weeping from your body?”

  He pushed his head further forward to say, “You should’ve pulled the trigger when you had the chance.”

  “I will if I need to,” I said.

  I thought about it.

  “I don’t need to,” I said, and smiled.

  The smile seemed to upset him. I don’t think the surgeon believed a man with a blade of steel through his brachial plexus should be smiling. But there were a few facts that had failed to settle in his grey matter. Unfortunate for him.

  “You’re a smart guy,” I said, “but a slow learner.”

  Inside, I took the Medusa-head of pain in my shoulder and compressed it until it became a ball-bearing, smooth and small and cold.

  Then slow and steady, I began to lower that ball-bearing toward the floor. The point of the lancet scraped behind me against the plaster and jumped as it nibbled at it. But it was just noise to the ball-bearing.

  “I warned you last time that Fate sliced me in two. The other guy that lives in here with me got all the fight and none of the flight. He’s not as smart as me. Tends to be a bit literal. It can be annoying. But he remembers what he hears. He once heard a coach say ‘steel don’t feel’. He likes that sort of thing.”

  I unhooked my right hand from his forearm and let it dangle like the big hand of a clock at half-hour. My knees bent with my downward slide till my free hand was only inches above the carpet.

  Panic flashed in his eyes when he saw my fingers descending on the small automatic he had dropped.

  He had a moment to choose whether to dig in and keep me pinned, hoping I would run out of gas, or let go and dive for the gun himself.

  He chose “all of the above.”

  He let go of the lancet and simultaneously dipped and drove his shoulder into mine and reached for the gun.

  But the muscles in my legs were coiled like springs, cocked against the wall. I drove a knee into his groin.

  He made a coughing noise and froze for a moment as if suspended by a wire.

  Then he slapped onto the carpet and deflated like a spent airbag.

  I yanked the lancet from my shoulder and knelt to cuff him.

  When I rolled him right way up, I saw his fall had smashed the right lens of his glasses.

  — 22 —

  I gave in and splurged. I paid for an external elevator up Liberty.

  Maybe it came from a sense of the dramatic. Or perhaps it was the complaints rising again from my shoulder. I was about to invoice my clients and realized my expenses had run to more than the usual pound of flesh.

  During the day, the elevator tracks made dark lines easy to see up the outer surface of the borough, and the cabins slipped along them like impossible dewdrops. At night you marked the dewdrops by the single lamp burning in each. The locals called the elevators and cable cars that freighted the vertical borough’s imports and exports of human flesh ‘totes.’

  They always made me think of tsetse flies bothering a buffalo.

  We had the cabin to ourselves, me and my surgeon friend. He sat across from me, his back to the cityscape slowly spreading away behind him. His cuffed wrists were wedged behind him. His right eye appeared smaller than his left on account of the smashed lens. Its lower lid was framed with blood that had run from a cut like red mascara. His thin lips were pressed together, but otherwise he appeared relaxed, and had been that way since we passed the precinct station and kept going. On my thigh rested the Steel Lady, pointing his direction, on the off chance he wanted to start a conversation with her.

  The cabin crested an angle and its gimbal screeched metal-on-metal into the ethereal silence as it rotated to keep us level. I took the opportunity to try to spark a conversation. None had taken so far. It didn’t matter to me. I was just trying to be sociable.

  “It’s curious that your first instinct was to try to rub me out rather than get away,” I said. “Not that it would have worked, but you weren’t to know that.” I shifted forward over my knees, on my forearms, letting the revolver dangle. “You knew once the elevator was rising, someone was coming. From the trip-plate in the corridor at the very latest. You hid, but chose not to stay hidden. So tell me, was it the folded underwear? You couldn’t abide me loose with that image? Was that it?”

  No bites. He didn’t move an inch. I held onto the underwear theory.

  I patted my pockets in search of a cigarette before I remembered I was on the wagon. His eyes, big and small, tracked my hand.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s work backwards. How did you get Eutarch Speigh’s body out of the Landmark?”

  One side of his lip curled the smallest amount. He knew he was being baited with professional cache, but resisted manfully.

  I continued. “No forced entry, so I assume Eutarch was expecting you. Or at the very least happy to receive a drop-in visit.”

  Still nothing but the shimmer in his eyes of reflected city lights sliding slowly away.

  “Eutarch was no titan, but he must’ve weighed―what?―a hundred and eighty pounds?”

  The line took a nibble: “A hundred and eighty three,” he said.

  “Eighty-three, huh? You look like a fit guy. Maybe you’re bench-pressing that much, but I can’t see you hauling a hundred and eighty three pounds of anything very far.”

  The line tugged with a respectable bite.

  “Do you know what percentage of the body consists of water?” he said.

  “No,” I lied.

  He swiveled to face me and sat up straighter. His shoulders were hunched by his handcuffed wrists, pointing at me in two knobbly domes. Hooked through the lip.

  “Seventy percent.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But most of that is tied up in tissue. You can’t just open a plug in a man’s heel and drain it out.”

  His lids folded over his eyes and re-opened in a gesture that conceded the obvious.

  “Blood accounts for seven liters, but you are right. However, weight is never the problem with a body.”

  I remembered the room on the 51st floor, the lurch in my stomach when I’d slipped in the blood. I remembered the other fluid stains, and the marks scored in the carpet.

  I played the part, and shook a declamatory finger at the cabin roof. “You’re right
. The thing with bodies isn’t weight. It’s size. You pack a body for holidays and it’s guaranteed you’re picking it up at the over-sized baggage counter.”

  I couldn’t see his hands, but I remembered the feel of them when I’d shackled him. Their skin was smooth, their fingers thin and supple, not yet knotted by age. His fingernails were trimmed in perfect arcs and filed smooth. They were the tools of his trade, and he serviced them like his life depended on it. He was a professional turkey carver.

  “Three cases?” I said.

  “Three cases,” he said.

  “Ice on the way in, lumps of Eutarch on the way out.”

  He nodded.

  “I hope you tipped the bellboy well.”

  “I didn’t see him to tip him.”

  My mind went to the finger of Dorrita Speigh, that pruney lump of flesh and bone that, even age-shriveled, bore the marks of a precise, expert dissection. The report in the Times had said as much.

  “And Dorrita?” I said. “I’m guessing just the two pieces.”

  He shrugged and sent his lopsided gaze out the window. Touchy subject.

  “How about Euripides? Poison, post-mortem brutalization. If I didn’t know better I’d say you were branching out with that one.”

  His head jerked once in the negative, as if I’d insulted his genius. “Just the poison,” he admonished.

  “Given to Eury on the one day of the year he was certain to take a drink—his pop’s birthday,” I said. “You must be very smart or very lucky.”

  His only response was to raise an eyebrow.

  The cabin juddered again as we rode over another ridge on the made-mountain. I watched his torso sway under the motion. His gaze switched to the glass porthole above us, which offered a view of the terraced upper levels of Liberty. The view seemed to quicken him.

  He said, “You haven’t asked me why I saved your life.”

  “I haven’t, have I.”

  I don’t think that was the answer he was hoping for. Whatever play he’d been about to make sank back into the cesspool that served him for a mind.