Strawman Made Steel (36 page)

“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: