Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  The temperature kept dropping beneath the cloudless sky. My breath was puffing out like locomotive steam as I made my way along the sidewalk toward my office building. I’d exited the subway a stop early and was glad of the walk.

  The street was empty for the time of night, like there was a party somewhere that I didn’t know about. Hardly a soul on the sidewalk, either.

  And then I saw her. Standing out front of my building, bundled against the cold, and lit by yellow gaslight.

  “Ailsa,” I said, and saw she was shivering despite her thick coat with its high collar.

  Her gaze darted out from the depths and took me in piecemeal, before she looked me in the eye. Then, before I knew it, she had flung her arms around me and buried her head in my coat.

  I stroked her hair and waited for her to stop trembling.

  At length she let go and made an effort to wipe at the wet patch she’d left on my coat. Without looking up, she said, “I thought you were dead.”

  “Only on the inside,” I said, and couldn’t help smiling at the intensity of her ministrations.

  At my voice, she glanced up, and then in a rush punched me in the gut. I took a moment to breathe again. She had a mean right hook.

  “When the police told me that place was owned by gangsters,” she said, referring to the Witt’s End, “and then you didn’t show up.” A tear rolled over her cheek and she smeared it away with the back of her hand. “Then they told me what they found in the room behind the bar. The hook hanging from the ceiling...” Her voice trailed off.

  “I thought I told you to visit with your Aunt Eldrich?”

  “It’s Elspeth,” she said, and her lips crooked with the first hint of a smile.

  Finally I saw a cab approaching. It was empty, so I waved it down.

  “Here,” I said. “Go home. Then tomorrow, you go and stay with your aunt. Take a holiday. Read a book. Smell the roses.”

  The cab creaked to a halt at the curb and I opened the door.

  Ailsa slipped onto the waiting seat, but put an arm out to brace the door open.

  “I’m not done with you yet,” she said. She patted the seat next to her. “Share the cab.”

  I shook my head.

  She gave me a rueful smile and said, “Five years and you still don’t trust me with your address?”

  “I get nagged enough nine to five,” I said.

  I leaned on the door and she let it swing inward.

  Before it closed, I said, “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe I will tell you some day.” I shut the door, and watched her talk to the driver.

  A thought struck me, and I rapped on the window. She wound it down with a question in her eyes.

  “Why were you standing on the sidewalk?”

  “The sidewalk was better than a dark office.” And then she smiled evilly. “The gas got cut off.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” she said, and inspected her nails. “I’ll take that pay rise now.”

  “Okay. Five percent. One for each year.”

  “Ten,” she said, and wound the window up. The cab growled and pulled away from the curb. I watched it dwindle then disappear around a corner.

  “Ten,” I said to the empty street, and laughed. She didn’t know it, but I would’ve taken fifteen.

  — 23 —

  “Her own children?” said the nurse.

  Charlie was following me through my apartment like a lost dog. She’d helped herself to a mug of tea, but it was going cold in her hands.

  “Like the tigress that ate her cubs,” I said.

  “That’s horrible,” she whispered.

  No argument there.

  I entered the cramped room off the hallway that had served as Grace’s library. I flicked the light switch, and the globe blew with a pop and tinkle. I swore and asked Charlie to get out of the light leaking from the hallway. I leaned close to a row of books and squinted to read their spines. Dust made me sneeze.

  “Who would believe it?” she said. Her eyes were wide as they roamed through the gloom.

  “If she’d convinced Eustace to kill me, perhaps no one. They had Dunning’s corpse. He was the one with the blood on his hands.” (And, I thought, his head, and his chest.)

  I felt her shiver. “You took a risk with her son. He might have done it. Pulled the trigger.”

  I was shaking my head when I found the book I was after. “There is always a chance. Men are irrational creatures. But I was banking on him being able to count.”

  “Count?”

  “Four gargoyles, three bodies. One vacancy. I was confident he’d spot the pattern. Evelyne wasn’t about to stick her daughter in the last one.”

  “Then Eury’s body―”

  “Was stolen from his tomb and put on Evelyne’s trophy shelf. Whereas Eutarch flew direct from the Landmark Hotel―minus a finger―didn’t pass Go, definitely didn’t collect $200.”

  “But that’s appalling.” After a pause, she added: “I wonder how Evelyne intended to murder Eustace.”

  I didn’t.

  “How did you know she and Dunning had secreted the bodies in the gargoyles?”

  I shrugged, “Hunch. The timing fit; they were installed around the time Dorrita disappeared. And the bodies were probably smuggled in on Thursdays, when the hired help wasn’t around to interrupt. Maybe it was the way she caressed the gargoyle the day I visited? But it didn’t matter. If not there, we would have found them nearby. That’s what trophies are for. A reminder, close to hand, of a victory.” I remembered the glass-fronted boxes in Evelyne’s drawing room. Her damp rag collection, she’d called it, the leftovers of mannish pride. “And Evelyne liked trophies.”

  “And,” Charlie said, warming to her topic, “when you found Eury’s entire body was missing from his crypt, not just a finger, you knew the trophy was the whole body.”

  I nodded. “Required a large trophy cabinet.”

  “And the fingers?”

  “A blind. Or more likely, for a woman of Evelyne’s superstitions, a pattern that began in spite when she had Dunning butcher her husband’s ring finger, and ended by assigning a finger for each of her three sons: pinky, index, and middle, in that order.”

  I yanked the book down and tilted it to the light. Gilded lettering imprinted in its scuffed leather cover said, Chicago Almanac, 1989, A ― Meisner.

  Charlie slurped her tea once then set it down on the bookshelf.

  “Why did she go to the lengths of having Eury’s body thrown in a dumpster and moved?”

  “Ah,” I said, and flopped the almanac open. I was in the F’s. I hunted forward, turning the pages over in sheaves. “That piece of genius was Eutarch’s.”

  “The middle brother? But I thought you said he was innocent.”

  “Innocent? I didn’t say that. But he didn’t kill his brother. When Eury keeled over at the brothers’ little memorial get-together for their late father, he panicked, called in a favor, tried to make it look like a mugging gone wrong. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. He might have even saved his brother if he’d known more about the poison his own company was developing for him.”

  “Who then?”

  “Evelyne. Eury had to die, and she chose the poison—probably had Dunning slip it into his drink at the party—to tell Eutarch his game was almost up, too. Eury’s death was the writing on the wall.”

  Charlie placed her hand over her forehead.

  “Headache?” I said, as I flipped into the L’s.

  “Getting one,” she said. “So why did she choose now to kill Eury?”

  “Maybe it was as cold-blooded as not wanting Nicole to trust Eury more than her. Eury strikes me as the brother who was developing the keenest insight into the nature of his mother. Or maybe she’d been waiting years. The Liselles are a superstitious bunch. Their family tomb is an embarrassing kneel-and-scrape to every thing ever called a god. Maybe Evelyne had been waiting, reading the tea
leaves and the lizard gizzards to know if her crop of sons were tainted.”

  “Tainted?―” she began, then, “Nicole!”

  I glanced up from the book. “Clever girl. We’ll make a gumshoe of you yet.”

  “The man who assaulted Nicole. Evelyne set that up,” she said.

  “Men 101,” I said. “Evelyne’s first big lesson for her only daughter: men are bastards. But Eury caught on. Then did his damnedest to get her out of New York, and away from her mother.”

  Charlie stared into the distance. “Ironic.”

  Irony didn’t begin to cover it.

  I ran a finger down the names listed under L. I got to Listerman, Lister-Smith ... no Liselle. I had narrowed the search to year and city and street, from a partial record of a deceased estate property sale, but couldn’t make the last connection. Couldn’t find a face. I snapped the book shut and slotted it back onto the shelf.

  Charlie retrieved her cup and followed me down the corridor and into the bedroom.

  I sat at my desk, pushed the typewriter to one side, and drew the laptop in front of me. Last ditch and then I’d give it away.

  Charlie sat on the bed, making its springs creak.

  “So where do you come into it,” she said.

  Where did I come into it?

  “I suppose Nicole―”

  “No,” she said. “I understand why she hired you. But why would Evelyne? She might as well have signed her death warrant.”

  I lifted the laptop’s lid. It squeaked on stiff hinges. A green light glowed on its surface and the harddrive spun up.

  “You’re asking me to read a woman’s mind?”

  “Don’t be so fusty,” she said. “Besides, don’t tell me you don’t have an answer. I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Every man in Evelyne’s life had a purpose,” I said. “She domesticated them all―one way or another. I’m no different.” I turned to Charlie and gave her a wink. “Pity no one told her you can’t tame a McIlwraith.”

  The laptop finally lit with a login screen. I typed Grace’s credentials in―graciemac. Password―john8Thirty2.

  Charlie slurped tea. I resisted the temptation to tell her to knock it off, it was cold.

  “Take an inventory of the men in her life: Her husband was dead. Two sons also, with one more to do. Her partner―Dunning―had no interest in her flesh. She had Dorrita’s brother out in Lebanon on a sharp hook made of crack and every other kind of pain killer. Her butler is a waif who she could bend over her knee and spank if it came to it. Her house help is a tub of flesh, and for all I know really is a eunuch. (Parts of post-Event Europe have gone nouveau-Renaissance, complete with real castrados.) The rest of mankind she kept on the far end of strangled lines of communication.”

  The laptop screen began to fill with icons.

  “And then there was me. I think she might have had a real attraction to me, but in the end, I was just a ferret.”

  A liquid explosion burst in the air. I felt its cold spray on my neck. I gave Charlie a moment to mop her face of tea before I swiveled her way.

  “You can take the bedspread to a laundry on the way out.”

  “Ferret?”

  “Yeah, ferret. She sent me down the hole to eat the weak things. Cat’s paw. Auditor. Evelyne was cleaning house, and her sons weren’t the only things tossed out in the spring-clean. She was tracing all of their loose, ill-thought, and therefore dangerous, rackets. She was minimizing exposure. Anything I could find, well maybe the cops could find too.”

  I opened a web browser and entered the address for the Chicago Public Library, then followed the links to the online newspaper archive.

  “That’s why the surgeon didn’t kill you when he had the chance.”

  The memory of his cigarette on my ear made me grimace. The skin still hadn’t healed.

  “I dug up the meat trafficking. The poison. Anything too exposed,” I said.

  “And she didn’t put him back on the hunt till it was too late,” she said.

  “I’m guessing she realized I was getting too close to her when I potted her pet in Organized Crime, Detective Gallant.”

  I entered the street and year into the search box, and a name, Nicole Speigh’s middle name: Liezel.

  Charlie sighed. “So she really is the Strawman?”

  “Right now she is. Dorrita was the one that climbed out of the gutter. But he washed the grime off enough to appear the knight in shining armor to Evelyne, only to have her shove him right back into the muck.”

  “You think it was her that did it?”

  The melancholy in Charlie’s voice turned my head. She sat gazing at nothing.

  “You’d make a good basset hound,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” I continued. “When you stab a man in the guts, you mean to kill him. As luck had it, the first attempt put her next to Mr. Dunning, who had the very same desire, albeit for the opposite reason. The two of them probably plotted just beyond earshot while Dorrita lay recovering and vulnerable. That meeting netted her a partner in crime, who helped her to do it right the second time. Their ransom ruse was amateurish, but you can’t say they didn’t learn in the saddle. They became proficient very fast...”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

  I said, “Was it in her to begin with?―the demonic, the whatever you want to call it? Or did he stir it up when he assaulted her?”

  I turned back to the screen, and discovered that the internet had passed where every other means had failed. It had pulled the record of one Greta Liezel, great-great times six (give or take) grandmother to Evelyne Speigh nee Liselle.

  The name Liezel―‘a common first name borrowed a long time ago for a reason no one remembers,’ Evelyne Speigh had said, but had neglected to add it had also been Anglicized, probably for no better reason than that it was smoother on the ears and eyes. Attached was a publicity photo of an attractive middle-aged blonde.

  Despite being generations removed from Evelyne Speigh, the lady in the photo had the same raw strength. She looked out at me with eyes that could cut. Here was the first high priestess to worship at the foot of the mitochondrial tree.

  Or maybe it was indigestion.

  “Did Evelyne inherit a taint in the blood?” I said to Charlie. “...I don’t know.”

  I snapped the laptop lid shut.

  “But I know this: The law knows nothing of taint. Only murder. Everyone has a choice.”

  Later that night after Charlie had left (without the bedspread), I sat at the Royal.

  A sheet of letter hung out of its mouth, and the clatter of its keys still rang in my head.

  The last line was the final score:

  Love, 0.

  Fear, 3.

  I re-checked the facts, and pulled the paper free. I opened the drawer by my hip, hunted for the closed-case folder, and pried its mouth open.

  The sheet hung above it a moment, before some impulse made me insert it back into the Royal. I wound it forward to the end of the text, and added one more bullet point.

  I typed:

  * Why me?

  I yanked the paper out, and hunted in my pocket for my card that was stamped with scrapyard grime. The one I’d dropped as I ran for my life, hunting for a mirror, on the night my life got snarled with the whole Speigh mess. I clipped it to the sheet and put it in the drawer, but not in the closed-case folder. I put it in the next one along, the one that held a sheaf of cold cases. They were the ones that spoke to me sometimes when I opened the drawer, or got me up in the middle of the night and sent me out onto New York’s cold streets.

  — 24 —

  Two months later I was in the Park, walking the Ramble after dark. I could take it. I wore a bulletproof smile.

  I was shedding tension after a morning in court in Newer York. Evelyne’s deposition. The cops seemed to think I knew a thing or two.

  But something had already begun to unknot my muscles. I found it deep in the Time’s notices, a two-line note, a twent
y-dollar job. It said:

  To JM, Hans safe and sound. We begin rebuilding the dream. T.

  My now-legal immigrant friend, Thor, had found his son. They’d made it.

  See? Bulletproof. A crack junkie could have pissed on me and I would have complimented the weather.

  I discovered on making my apartment that the smile wasn’t bombproof.

  I slipped my coat off to hang it on a peg in the vestibule above Grace’s shoes, and ran a hand through its pockets on habit. What I found in the right inner pocket was about ten megatons worth.

  It was a note written on yellow legal pad in a thin, elegant hand. This is what it said:

  “Janus.

  It could have been so different for you and I.

  But that is the past. My interest lies with the future. Keenly. I am a luxury model, and the Tombs will not treat me well. I shudder at the thought. It will kill me.

  So I offer you a deal. Destroy the case against me―you can find a way―and I will tell you why our paths first crossed. Why I had to see Janus McIlwraith in the flesh and up-close―even if we did have our misunderstandings. (I’m sorry to have set Gallant and Dunning on you. They are both dead now. Will you forgive me?)

  I cannot say more now—there are other, powerful parties that would take an interest in your answer. They call you by a different name: phlogiston”

  (A memory rose of paging through Grace’s Webster’s Unabridged for that word. Phlogiston: the combustive, fire-like element at the center of a very old and very dead scientific theory.

  Looks like the fire was me.

  But why? What interest could anyone have in a crusty provenor with a long-lapsed warranty?

  Then my mind flashed further back, to a scrapyard and a psychotic midget and a bioengineered dog. The midget had wanted to ask me a question. With a bolt of intuition that felt like divine revelation, I knew he’d wanted to ask me whether it was true my daily commute took in two-and-a-half centuries.

  Someone in Newer York other than Nate knew about the mirrors.

  But I quickly forgot this realization when I read the rest of the sentence.)