Strawman Made Steel (31 page)

That train of thought didn’t stop him
ripping another mouthful off his burger.

“Except the women,” he said.

“The women?”

“Yeah. Far as we can tell, most got
parceled out to sweat shops south of the Tristate border. But not that kind of
sweat shop. None got sold to a feral like Goiĕ. Ain’t that funny?”

He was amazed the women hadn’t been sold as
sex slaves. Prostitution was probably the largest return on investment for
human trafficking. That or organ harvesting. And Goiĕ, the mega-scraper that
could be seen as a faint smudge to the south of Manhattan, was the biggest
client. Three-quarters built when the Event forever stopped work on her, Goiĕ
was a ghetto that killed cops. So they didn’t bother with it.

“Crook with a heart,” I said. “You meet one
every so often.”

He shot me a disdainful glance, and said,
“Yeah, and I’ve got a factory bottling unicorn farts you could invest in.”

We crested an on-ramp and merged with the
traffic on the mid-level of the FDR heading downtown. The East River sat heavy
on my left, and brown like it had been turned upside down.

“So what can you tell me about your errant
detective, Gallant? How grubby did he get his fingers?”

MacLure tilted his head back, opened his
mouth, and dropped the last piece of burger down his throat as if it was a
pickled herring.

“Like I said, early days. They’re being
very careful.”

“They?” I said. “You brought Internal
Affairs into this?” There was no reason to think whatever cancer Gallant
represented hadn’t spread across bureaus to Internal Affairs.

“
My
detectives, Mac,” he said. “You
think I’m an idiot?” He didn’t wait for an answer. I’d have reminded him
Gallant
was
one of his detectives. “We’re starting from the present and
tracing him back. And,” he looked at me, “you were right. His big pawprint’s
right there on the murder of the Speigh boy, the second one.”

“Eutarch,” I said.

“That’s right. Well, on that case, one of
the officers dispatched to the Landmark canvassed the floors above and below.
He was debriefed by Gallant, and Gallant did a do-over on the report and put
his signature to it.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “The original paper
work got lost.”

“Yeah, so we went over it with the officer.
Most of it struck him as fine. The devil was in the detail. During the first
interviews there was a bus boy who said his trolley disappeared and re-appeared
on the 50th floor.”

“A trolley?”

“I know. Who’s to say it wasn’t a lazy
staffer from another floor. But why would Gallant be rubbing out that little
number? If it had been a laundry trolley, I could understand. Those things
would fit a body.”

I imagined Eutarch’s body wrapped in its
limbs, minus a single digit, being trundled through the corridors of the
Landmark Hotel. Gave new meaning to the phrase ‘taken to the cleaners’.

“Suppose you had tracked the luggage
trolley down,” I said, “gotten trace, or at least confirmed how the body was
removed. Then what? You still had no suspect. Trail would have just died a step
further on.”

“Gallant couldn’t have known that he wasn’t
the only one raking over the coals. He wasn’t the primary officer on the case.
Nobody was reporting to him.”

Darkness fell as we slipped into the shadow
of Liberty. Far above, the citadel’s peak was clawing the guts out of a dirty
cloud. MacLure angled in front of a ten-seater van with blacked-out windows
spewing out a streamer of dirty exhaust, and then sank down the off-ramp to
Whitehall and skirted Battery Park.

“Which is how it turned out,” he said,
swinging his head from left to right, seeing which street had a clear run.

“What turned out?”

“There
was
a suspect. A detective
from Homicide coaxed the memory from a busboy whose immigration status is
somewhat fluid. Anyway, this guy saw someone the day of the murder leaving the
50th floor via the stairs. That’s it. Might’ve been someone’s mother bringing
them a soup lunch. And he only remembered that because whoever it was wore a
hat and a cloak with the collar turned up. But it wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t
wet.”

“Man or woman?” I said.

“Didn’t catch the face, couldn’t tell.
Could’ve been a smallish man or a largish woman,” he said and grunted.

“Or a Doberman on its hind legs,” I said.

“You said it. So in the end that came to
three fifths of squat anyway.”

“Except that the murderer might have carted
the body, part way at least, on a luggage trolley.”

A car-sized hole opened in the right lane.
MacLure speared his car into it, raising a squeal of tires from the car behind.

“Here’s another thing,” he said. “I sent a
man to the Tombs to check Gallant’s last three interviews. He recorded one with
a Harold―”

“Duffy,” I said. A mental snapshot of an
interview record signed with the initials P.G. flashed through my brain.

He gave me a queer look.

“I read the Strawman dossier,” I said.
“Harold’s information pushed the Strawman’s debut back a few years.”

MacLure nodded. “But his cell mate said
Duffy told him he was on the west coast at the time he claimed to be running a
drug deal for the Strawman in Florida―so one of the them was bullshitting.”

“And Duffy died a week later,” I said.
“Convenient.”

“Convenient,” MacLure agreed.

So, minus Gallant’s false information, the
Strawman’s beginnings were back at the police estimate of eleven years. That
was in the ballpark of Dorrita Speigh’s disappearance from the scene.

MacLure nosed the Patriot onto Rector St.
and ground to a halt behind a clot of traffic.

“Well, thanks,” I said.

“Serve and protect,” he said, with only a
hint of irony.

“Drop me here,” I said.

The car had begun to move and he had to
step on the brake as I opened the door.

“This isn’t―” he began.

“Bookshop,” I said, and jerked a thumb over
my shoulder at the storefront.

I glimpsed MacLure’s face as he squeezed
the throttle and propelled the Patriot’s bulk back into traffic. Placid as
ever. Stone driving a stone.

The streets and sidewalks were alive with
lunch-hour traffic. Second-hand sunlight was bouncing off the mirrored face of
a neo-Modern across the street. It felt almost as good as the real thing.

MacLure didn’t know it but he’d cleared the
decks. He’d confirmed I had one case instead of two, and the common denominator
was the Strawman.

— 21 —

At the fourth coffee, I had to give in
and vent my bladder.

I also had to wonder what kind of bean they
served in The Illustrated Man. My system is well and truly inured to Arabica,
but I had some kind of buzz going. My hands were fretting for a cigarette.

Plumbing attended to, I sat again at my
table, which was tucked into a streetside corner on the inside of the T.I.M. A
massive sheet of plate-glass window came just shy of my table and afforded a
view of the sidewalk. I could see everybody coming or going, whereas I’d be a
dark smear to anyone entering until their eyes adjusted to the T.I.M.’s
by-design retro-futuristic aesthetic. The collection of up-scaled astronomical
devices―some real, some fantastic―looked no more authentic than it had done the
first visit. Steel armatures hung over tables in places like the boughs of a
metal forest. It was the sort of place you could do a quiet deal.

I retrieved the novel I’d bought from where
it sat wedged into a cluster of cups that no one had bothered to clear away.
The title was rendered in gothic script: The Red Web. It was a piece of
speculative fiction set in an alternate history where wireless technology had
beaten wired and the Russians owned the Internet. The premise was a stretch,
and it was littered with anachronisms that had nothing to do with the
historical twist. (The Higgs Boson didn’t come out of the Los Alamos labs that
built the bomb. Way too early.) But I was wearing my polka-dot belief
suspenders today and went along for the ride, if for no other reason than the
weird sensation of reading technology imbued with the aura of fantasy. In Newer
York, that’s what the electron was: pure magic. I thumbed my book open to the
page I’d dog-eared and became a fly on the wall in Voldemort Putin’s Kremlin.

Later, the rising chatter of conversation
alerted me to the approaching lunch-hour rush. Tables were filling with middle
management and lawyers’ wives.

I had to put the book down. I didn’t want
to miss the tattooed hulk if he chose today to hook-up with the next link in
the chain that led to the Strawman.

Movement in the corner of my eye arrested
my attention, and I spotted a waiter making a beeline for my table. It was so
odd. Who can get a waiter?

He looked sharp in midnight pleated slacks
and blood-red shirt. He had a sharp tongue too.

“You’ll need to order.”

“I did,” I said with a smile, and tapped
the lip of one of my cups with a fingernail.

“Lunch,” he said. “You’ll have to order
something off the menu.” He kept his tone level, but his gaze swept the filling
tables of all those paying customers and he may as well have added ‘asshole’.
He probably sent sympathy cards for weddings.

“Fine,” I said. “Get me a menu.”

He whipped one from some place at the back
of his pants and his face was transformed into wide-lipped smarm.

I took the menu and he left to harass
another coffee drinker.

The menu was an arty foldout done all over
in techno-fantastic designs. I unfolded it and as soon as I ran my eye over it
the breath froze in my lungs.

Above me a neon sign lit up. It flashed
Idiot
in reds and blues.

The chain of thought that led to this
neon-lit revelation went something like this:

The Illustrated Man (T.I.M. to the hip),
the restaurant, was named after The Illustrated Man, the book, written in the
20th Century by Ray Bradbury. It is a collection of short stories about a
future that is now the past. The stories are tied together by a central
conceit, the eponymous illustrated man. This man is a vagrant whose every inch
of skin is covered by tattoos. (See where this is going?) The tattoos were
inked by a witch, and cast a spell on anyone who looks at them too long. Each
tattoo comes to life to share its story with the enthralled victim.

The tattoo I was looking at didn’t move but
for a brief moment it did hold me in thrall.

There on the inside of the lunch menu was
the figure of a man. He was covered in tattoos, and inked on his neck was the
tattoo of a spiral.

Then I remembered Ryan Tritt’s face on the
other side of the glass in the Tombs’ visiting room when he told me the story
of how he’d tailed a man here. I remembered the hitch in his voice before he’d
told me of seeing the next link in the message chain he was tracking, a large,
slope-shouldered man with a tattoo of a spiral on his neck.

It wasn’t hard to see he’d realized
mid-confession that he was about to put me way too deep on the trail of the
Strawman. So the conman had reached, lamely, feebly, for something, anything,
other than the complete truth.

Which was fine. But I’d been an idiot to
buy it, for the simple reason that anyone who bothered protecting their chain
of communications with cut-outs wouldn’t put a link in the middle of it that
stood out a mile―a person, say, with a distinctive tattoo.

See? Idiot.

The revelation left me feeling conflicted.
On the upside, I had a good book and the prospect of a nice lunch. On the down
side, my conscience would probably complain if I charged the lunch to a Speigh.
Plus, any minute now, another Speigh might be pushed off the perch.

I scanned the rapidly filling room and
tried to drink from an empty coffee cup.

For a moment, the dark spaces between the
restaurant props were filled with Nicole Speigh’s haunted eyes.

That’s when something tickled my brain. A
little itch in my eye.

I focused, and hunted the room for the
source of the itch. When I realized it wasn’t the first time I’d felt it, I
forgot about lunch.

Three tables away from me I saw a waiter,
not my waiter, taking an order from a table stuffed with suits. Nothing
abnormal about that.

The abnormality I found etched into my
memory of ten minutes prior.

I’d watched the same waiter return the
receipt and change to a table of two men in hackneyed grey suits. Then he’d
made a racket clearing the table.

Problem was, no one at the table had paid.

They’d drunk coffee that, by their faces,
was of the Irish persuasion, devoured a plate of pie, and then taken change for
a non-existent payment.

The other word for that kind of change is
retainer
.