Strawman Made Steel (35 page)

“I’m tempted to say Love,” I said. “But
that wouldn’t be fair to Love. Let’s settle for the second oldest in the book:
Cain’s sin. Jealousy.”

Revulsion rippled through Evelyne’s
features as her hand rose to her breast. “But I―”

“Not for you, Evelyne. He was jealous of
Dorrita’s affections.”

The silence that fell around the table told
me I wasn’t turning fresh sod. I drained the last drop of my drink and put the
glass on the table. The butler didn’t offer me another. My guess is he knew I’d
just pulled the ignition pin on the table. It was about to explode.

When it did, it was Evelyne’s voice that
penetrated.

“Can you prove it?”

Eustace reared out of his chair. I had to
wave him down with the gun.

“You sound like a cop, mother,” he barked.
“Look at him! You can see it in his eyes.”

“And Eury?” said Nicole. Tears had left
glistening tracks over her cheeks. “I― I don’t understand, Janus.”

“Be glad you don’t,” I said. “Warped love
makes the most twisted tracks of all.”

To Evelyne I said, “I work on hunches.” I
stood and rounded the table keeping the gun trained on a spot between Eustace
and Dunning. “He confessed on the way up here.” I eyed the chairs around the
table looking for something hefty. But they were wooden, miter joints. Too
flimsy. I kept scanning the periphery of my vision as I spoke. “But I’m
guessing Mr. Dunning won’t oblige by repeating his confession. I will need to
substantiate my claim.”

I judged I had moments before Eustace lost
his rein on the fury that was making him tremble.

There was silence. Somewhere far off a gull
cried.

My gaze dipped a moment to gauge the weight
of a flowerpot. Too heavy.

Then a gunshot tore the air.

And another.

I spun to see Dunning ragdoll onto the dewy
grass. He had a hole in his chest and a hole in his head.

Eustace’s gun was trained on him, trembling
at the end of Evelyne’s arm.

She said in monotone, “He went for the
gun.” Her gaze found me. “I was first.”

“Put it down, Evelyne,” I said. The .38
persuaded her. She handed the gun to Eustace.

It seemed then that everyone but me
breathed for the first time in minutes. Nicole wept silently. Eustace ordered
the butler to call the cops. Evelyne seemed frozen in place.

“What are you going to tell the cops when
they get here?” I said to Eustace. He shrugged as if it were a dumb question.

Evelyne said in a small voice, “Tell me you
do have proof.”

I shrugged.

Then froze.

Nicole sniffed up a tear, and said, “How
did―” but I had to cut her off. I was getting my bones on the spirit world.

“Proof?” I said in answer to Evelyne’s
question. “No, not me. But I know the guy who does.”

Eustace’s brow crinkled in confusion.
“Who?”

“Your father. Dorrita Speigh. He’s here,
you know.”

“Janus!” Nicole whispered hoarsely.

From the corner of my eye I saw a shovel
planted in the garden bed not five feet beyond the nearest hurricane lamp. It
looked to have a weathered, hardwood shaft and cast-iron blade. Sturdy enough.

I grasped it, and said, “How does that
verse go? ‘His blood cries out to me from the ground.’”

I stepped toward the flowerbed, and
pivoting on my left foot, built speed like a hammer-thrower. I became a
man-size spinning top. The shovel clove the air―

And crunched on the smooth, stony back of
the nearest gargoyle. The stone broke beneath the blow. Curved segments
collapsed inward like pieces of old Easter egg, leaving a jagged window on
something dark.

I swung the shovel again and the something
dark fell out and away. It sprawled across the freshly turned earth of the
flowerbed. It was covered in perished plastic, which split, and from it spilled
a human pelvis bone.

Nicole screamed.

Eustace cried out with a sound that made no
words, and I heard his chair clatter against the table.

I kneeled by the remains.

“I’d say the remains of one
homo-sapiens-sapiens – man. Caucasian. Male of the species.”

With the shovel I pried among the plastic
and bone. I found an arm, and propped it on the shovel blade to examine the
bones of its hand. It was short one finger. A ring finger.

“By name, Dorrita Speigh.”

I peeled plastic away from a round lump and
found the skull. Maybe I had a touch of the blood-simples again, but the eye
sockets seemed to stare with an unquiet melancholy.

 
“What’s that?” I bent my ear over the skull
that had once encased the brain of Dorrita Speigh. “You don’t say?”

I swiveled to stare at Evelyne. She
returned my stare, and I saw understanding erase her expression. She knew I
knew she knew.

“Only one sin older than Cain’s,” I said.
“Adam’s. The little ‘g’ god.”

And now the end game.

“Eustace,” she commanded. “Shoot Mr. McIlwraith.”

“Don’t be too hasty,” I said, and stood. I
crab-walked to quarter Eveylne and her son. “Don’t you want to hear it all?”

At another time, Eustace’s face would have
made a funny sight. Angry and bewildered, like a bear that had been stung on
the nose.

“Kill him,” she said.

“The second time I met your mother,” I
said, “she told me she was not above getting her hands dirty. I pointed out she
was wearing gloves.” I pinned Eustace with my gaze. “But make no mistake, Mr. Speigh.
Hers is the hand that moves the glove.” I glanced at the bloodied flesh that
had once been a surgeon. “Don’t you be the next glove.”

I watched Eustace like a hawk, tensed to
react in a split second.

The night air stretched like a bowstring.

Then I saw what I’d hoped for. The
slightest shift of posture. He rested on his back leg. The gun in his hand
dipped a fraction toward the ground. He’d decided to hear me out.

I went on before he changed his mind.

“Your mother killed your father. Then Eury,
and Eutarch. And next...”

I watched him fill in the blank.

“That’s right,” I said. “Odds on you were
next.” I waggled my fingers. “You want to keep your middle fingers? Polite guy
like you would need both.”

When Eustace spoke again it was to his
mother. “So you would kill me too, and Nicole?”

“No, no,” I interrupted. “You’re not
getting it at all. She would never kill her
daughter
.”

“Mother, why?” Nicole breathed.

“The Liselle well is poisoned,” I said. “It’s
a slow poison, but deadly.

“I don’t know how far back it goes, but at
least as far as your grandfather. He taught your grandmother to hate. She
taught your mother to hate. And,” I turned to Nicole, and with my finger traced
the scar beneath her chin, “she’s begun your education.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Nicole
whispered. Her eyes got that faraway look. Maybe she was hoping to wake from a
dream.

“Sense?” I said. “Sure it does. You just
need to look at it through the right lens.

“Imagine a girl that grows into a woman
learning from the man closest to her―her own father―that what men do is abuse,
destroy, and shame. And then one day that woman is shocked to discover true
love, and escapes into the arms of a husband. Now what do you think it was like
to later discover that the man she loved wasn’t so different, after all? That
maybe the Liselle poison had spread a little. I think it would be a spark to a
powder keg. A friend of mine would call it a brain spasm.”

The night was silent but for the hiss of a
rising breeze.

“How do you like that lens? Make sense?”

I got no response from Nicole. She still
appeared to be reaching for a dreamscape.

“Of course, there might have been another
girl. This other girl might have had what we could call a
congenital
brain spasm. She might have married an ex-gutter-rat precisely for his street
capital: his muscle, his street-smarts. Pump a billion dollars into that
capital and sooner or later a smart women could build an empire―but not one
that would show its true face in daylight. That woman might even have the
patience to see if her sons were the type to toe the line―”

Nicole returned with a snap, and said to
her mother through gritted teeth, “What could Eury possibly have done to you?”

“Only steal away your mother’s most
cherished possession,” I said. “Aim to take it away from New York. Take
her
away from a mother that would give a man the okay to lay violent hands on her
daughter. They probably fought about it at the party.”

I glanced at Evelyne for confirmation, but
she was silent and still.

“That lens is just plain cracked down the
center,” I said.

“But, in the end, it doesn’t really matter.
I wasn’t employed for a psych profile. I was employed to find who murdered Eury
Speigh. Well,” I said, and took a last draught of Evelyne Speigh, “there she
is.”

The butler glided out of the darkness and
informed us the police had been contacted.

“He’s lying,” Evelyne said to Eustace. “You
are a dear boy. I couldn’t harm a hair on your head. But if you want your
mother to spend the rest of her life rotting in the Tombs, all you need do is
stand there.”

Eustace raised the gun.

Movement startled me.

Nicole stood in front of me, between me and
the bullet.

There was a moment’s silence, then Eustace
spoke. “Relax, Nicole. That’s not going to happen.”

He swung the gun toward his mother, and as
a fat tear slid incongruously down his hard profile, he said to the butler,
“Tell the cops we’re waiting.”

In that half light, Evelyne didn’t look
beautiful any more. Shadows carved her down to the bone till she looked like
nothing more than raw structure, made to endure.

I leaned over to the crown of Nicole’s head
and kissed her golden hair.

Then I strode from that garden without
looking back. The cops would have to catch me up later.

I needed a bath.

Or a fire.

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?”