Strawman Made Steel (19 page)

I was closing the dossier when a sheet
slipped from it. I wasn’t sure how I’d missed it. Maybe I’d slept without
realizing. I turned it over. It was an addendum. It recorded an interview by a
police detective with a Tombs inmate named Harold Duffy. Harold was a retired
slugger who claimed to have run a drug deal for the Strawman a whole four years
before the police had ever heard the name. The report was initialed by the
interviewing detective, a P.G., whoever that was.

An addendum stapled to the addendum noted
that Harold Duffy was shivved in his cell a week after his confession and died
a day later.

I replaced the loose sheets, and tossed the
dossier onto the floor by the recliner. I fished in its cracks for the TV
remote. I pressed the On button and the old Akai fired its tube with an
arthritic crackle. The screen fuzzed with analog snow a moment, then resolved
into CNN. They were still banging on about some Global Financial Crisis.

I chuckled. They didn’t know the meaning of
the term.

I don’t know how long I watched. New York
doesn’t sleep, but some time in the dead of night it pauses to draw breath. It
was then that I pulled the woolen comforter off the back of the recliner and
draped it over my legs, and drifted off with the TV’s lullaby in my ears, the
smell of dust in my nostrils, and a single, long strand of red hair I’d found
threaded into the comforter twined around my fingers.

— 12 —

Next morning was a slow start until
someone put a bomb under it.

I ate a long, lazy breakfast of ham, eggs,
hashbrowns, toast, and coffee at a diner a block over from my apartment. The
waitress only raised an eyebrow at my battered face, which was already starting
to rainbow. I’ve always been a fast healer.

I tipped her better than she deserved.
Breakfast had come with a side serve of attitude. I put it down to fall. It was
coming on. Trees were shedding leaves on a gusting wind that loosed them in
great flocks like deranged birds. But my lungs had clung to a residue of
spring.

Ailsa was out again when I arrived at my
office. She had left two messages on my desk―one cabled, and one hand
delivered.

A rare mood of deliberation was on me. I
sat behind my desk, pulled open the top drawer, and picked through its clutter
for my silver letter-opener―a gift from a happy customer. I tilted the blade to
read the inscription: To JM. Think of me. Carrie.

The girl had wanted company more than her
stolen Yamaha F-three-ten. A genuine antique. I was only able to supply the
guitar.

Okay. So I’d thought of her.

I gripped the letter-opener’s sculpted
handle and sliced the envelope open.

Through the slit I’d made, I teased out a
single sheet. The sheet’s letterhead was a stylized lighthouse, which I knew to
mean the New York Blaze without having to read the caption. The Blaze was an
independent rag, older than most, and employer of Arnold Coffey, the patron of
the Whipped Elephant and one time feted hack.

My mood of deliberation evaporated before I
read a word of his message, which consisted of a single line. Hand delivered
messages weren’t the most expensive way to talk to someone, but neither were
they cheap. Coffey’s expense line with the Blaze for ferretting out scoops was
healthy enough to cover it, but Coffey had known tougher times; his glib pen
should have at least filled the sheet.

I read the message. All it said was: Heard
a rumor. Now’s a good time for that holiday you talked about. The Keys are
lovely this time of year.

I threw the letter-opener into the drawer,
slammed it shut, and picked up the cable and tore it open with my hands.

It was from Carl Inker. My curiosity burned
to know what omens his all-seeing eye had read in the cable flicker that, night
and day, washed the walls of his nook.

His message was even shorter than Coffey’s.

It said:

CHECKED HOW SPEIGH ESTATE NOW STANDS BUT
NOTHING CLEAR STOP COPS PUT POI ON JM TIME TO DIVE STOP WILL KEEP POKING

So now I was a Person Of Interest. He was
telling me the cops wanted to question me.

I scratched my head and read it again.

Nope. Still sounded too Delphic, not enough
Oracle.

Either Inker had been drinking the
communion wine or he assumed I knew something I didn’t. His message read like
paragraph one of page fifty-three of a book I’d browsed in a store.

I found the missing piece of information a
minute later tucked under Ailsa’s arm. She came huffing up the stairs with her
head down, and collided with me on the fifth-floor landing. Out of breath, she
just thrust a paper into my hands.

I flopped the heavy rag open to the
headline. Went no further. There, beneath the Times banner, in great gothic
capitals was written: Room of Blood―Second Speigh Heir Murdered.

I scanned the page, ransacking it for the
vital statistics. Facts were sparse. It had been written in a hurry. Murder had
been done some time after Eutarch had left the Diogenes late Wednesday
afternoon (shortly after Nicole and me) and before midnight, when the scene was
discovered by a bellboy at the Landmark Hotel.

Shoving the paper under my arm, I gave
Ailsa a quick kiss on the cheek. I took one step down and turned.

“Didn’t I tell you to take the rest of the
week off?”

She pursed her lips and said archly, “No.”

“Take the rest of the week off.”

“No,” she said, tucking her hand into the
crook of her waist. “What’s going on?”

“You work too hard. Go visit with that aunt
of yours in Scranton―what’s her name, Eldred.”

“It’s Elspeth, and you know that.” I saw
her rummage in her mind for an excuse to stay. “The gas gets cut off tomorrow.
Are you going to take time out of getting beat up to pay it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Marked in my diary. Right
after the morning flagellation.”

I took her by the shoulders and pressed her
down the stairs until she stopped resisting. I put her in a cab, then hailed
one for myself.

Fifty minutes later I was striding down a
corridor on the 51st floor of the Landmark Hotel, my feet scuffing the plush
carpet’s loose nap.

I was a wanted man on a beeline for the
honeypot.

My coat was doffed, stuffed in a cloakroom
off the lobby. I’d left my tie in its pocket, and undone the top two buttons of
my shirt. Into my hatband was stuck my card, deep enough to obscure the print.
Tucked under my arm was a parcel wrapped in brown paper, and in my hands I held
my notepad and pen, two-handed, like a tennis ace about to serve. Which altered
my gait, canted my back. I’d leafed past the page with the doodle of a flower
missing a petal, past the notes from my interview with Evelyn Speigh. Fresh
murder, fresh page.

The hunched backs of the press mob were the
first sign I was at the crime scene. The mob was mottled shades of brown by
damp from the sifting rain outside, and surged like a live thing. Camera flash
blazed over it randomly.

I merged with it, peering over heads and
shoulders, and reconnoitered.

A snatch of view of the doorway beyond the
police cordon confirmed my hope. Tunney’s men weren’t holding the fort. I didn’t
recognize the officer barring the door with a chest like a horse’s rump, which
meant the DA had punted the case across departments―and not, thankfully, all
the way to the feds.

The murder had happened in the Giuliani
Suite, which was one of only five deluxe suites on the floor. They were
arranged in a pentagon around a core that held the elevator bank and stairwell.
Ringing the core was a space as wide as a normal hotel room, and a chunk of
this had been carved out-of-bounds by the tape cordon.

The cordon was Step Seven in the manual:
ensure no access by unauthorized persons—i.e., me. For Euripides murder, Tunney
had been my skeleton key. Was no longer.

But I wanted into that room. Needed to get
close enough to feel the crime. To find the connection, if any, to the one I
was being paid to solve. To see if someone was making a collection of Speighs.
(My mind flitted to Nicole, and just as quick I batted her image away. I didn’t
need it running interference.)

So I’d had to come up with my play.

I’d done that downstairs in a cafe across
the street from the Landmark. I’d ordered four shots of espresso in the
smallest cup that would hold them. Nearest thing to jumper leads that don’t
slur your speech in this city. Then let the coffee go cold waiting to see which
uniforms came across the street for a cheap lunch. No familiar faces, as
confirmed.

The coffee had for once stirred no desire.
My mind was thick with the fog of war. Someone wanted my blood. My head
insisted on weighing candidates―Tunney? His pals a few floors up in Organized
Crime? The DA’s office? Ailsa’s Aunt Eldred? No one jumped out, but they kept
on coming around, like a line of abandoned luggage. The fog was there to stay
until time and chance blew it away. The best I could do was wade in hands
outstretched.

So I’d mentally charted the ebb and flow of
the crime scene 51 floors above my little stake-out: first cops to respond,
raising the alarm, squaring away the crime scene with heavy steps of veiled
zest; the pay-rolled dicks and their lackeys sniffing out the human shrapnel of
witnesses before they scattered too far; the DA in a delirium, on his rocket to
the nearest judge, and back with the warrant so fast the air still smelt of his
aftershave; the investigators who began the outright tedium of inventorying the
scene down to the last cinder and misshapen hair.

A busy nest of ants indeed. Familiar
enough.

But to enter the nest and―just as
important―leave it, one couldn’t be a plump grasshopper named McIlwraith. One
had to ply some magic. One had to be the wasp or the moth larva. Wasps invade
nests by releasing a pheromone that drives ants so nuts they don’t notice the
wasp; moth larva look so much like ant larva the ants mistake them for their
own, carry them home, and put on the silver service.

So there I was. At the mouth of the ant
nest.

First, the moth.

I retraced my steps to the elevator, sighed
at the shrunken old operator, took it down a floor, got out, and found the men’s
restroom. I waited in a cubicle for a man at the urinal to finish―guy must’ve
drunk the keg himself―then pulled the parcel from beneath my arm. I tore it
open, shed my pants and shirt, and redressed in the pleated grey trousers and
spotless white collar I’d bought at a menswear on the way to the hotel. I took
the card from my hatband, stuck a paper clip over it, and dropped it on its end
into the pocket of my new shirt. I wrapped my old shirt, pants, and hat in the
torn paper, and stowed them behind the cistern.

I took one look at myself in a poster-sized
mirror, wet my hands and swept my hair back, and thought briefly of home.

I left the mensroom and took the stairs to
the landing on the 51st floor, and paused to listen. Didn’t have long to wait.
The timing was neat.

A commotion rode through the press mob, and
it disappeared as fast as dishwater, barring a few floaters, down a plungered
drain. The plunger in this case was a rumor, sown in the lobby by an urchin
owning a shiny new coin, that the deceased’s brother, Mr. Eustace Speigh, the
only remaining male heir to the Speigh Empire, had arrived. A contingent of
hacks and photographers bustled past me on a mission to forestall the elevators
at the 50th.

But that was just clearing the decks. Next
came the wasp.

I knew she’d arrived when I heard a
conversation start up between a man and a woman. It sounded like a soprano
parking a bulldozer.

That was my cue. I rounded the
exposed-concrete of the firewall and saw a Latino girl whose raw beauty was
undimmed by the house whites she wore. She was speaking not to the cop on the
door, but the one guarding a slowly accumulating pile of evidence. It sat
bagged and tagged in an assortment of containers and envelopes in what CSIs
call the quarantine.

He had his hands up, and with a broad smile
was saying ‘No’ is as many ways he could think to make her keep talking.

I walked straight over to them, under cover
of boldness, and interrupted her plea to bring the officers contraband
sustenance (A day’s wage was riding on her performance―but she didn’t know I
was footing the bill; a shiftless laundry hand downstairs was playing escrow
and picking up a commission for sourcing her in the first place.)

“Bloods are botched,” I said to the cop.
“Need doing over.”

The cop’s eyes flickered in annoyance
before he detached his attention from the Latino and gave it to me. Perfect.

He scanned me and I supplied what he
wanted: “Stanton. I’m with the ME”―there
is
a Stanton that works for the ME. I met him once. I hoped he wasn’t on this
case―“The Bloods we got were wet.”

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