Strawman Made Steel (5 page)

“Excuse me.” It was Weatherall.

I showed him my rubber ball. “Still getting
the hang,” I said, and bounced it off the carpet.

For the second time that morning I was escorted
from a place by a suspicious brow.

On my way out I stopped by the desk. The
lady behind it didn’t seem to have moved.

“Did Eury drink?” I said. “Get into a lot
of fights?”

She reacted as if I’d slapped her. She
flushed clear through her foundation, and her eyes glanced anywhere but at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

A tear ran over her cheek. She wiped it
with a finger and smeared her mascara. I offered her a clean handkerchief,
which she took and dabbed on her eye.

“Did you go to this party with him
yesterday?”

She shook her head. I fancied I saw a
thousand speculations flit
―why not?―
through her eyes. Pity the one soul
who could answer them had left the planet. Torture.

“How about before that. You see him
yesterday morning?”

She nodded.

“Happy?”

She smiled despite the tears. “How could he
not be? Didn’t they tell you? That was what the celebration was for,” she said.
“He was receiving his―”

“Majority?” I said.

“Freedom. Full access to his inheritance,
which till then had been locked in trust.”

From rich, to rich and unencumbered.

She dabbed one last tear away and returned
my handkerchief. She attempted to replace her mask.

“As for drink,” she said. “He never drank
in front of me. Ever. Or fought.” She hesitated. “One time only, he came here
with a black eye.”

“When was that?” I said.

“I don’t know. A month ago? Two?”

I thanked her and re-joined my Russian
friend in the elevator. On the way down, I grappled with the concept of a rich
kid who worked, didn’t drink, and didn’t fight. It disturbed my equilibrium.

From there I took a cab to Tunney’s
police station―command post of Manhattan’s Third Ward, with oversight of five
of the island’s precincts. It was a hive of fat, tired, blue bees.

That’s unfair. Inker’s whiskey hadn’t
dented my headache, and it took me half an hour to track down Tunney. At that
moment he could have been the queen bee. It took another five minutes of me
staring at him through the press to get some time alone. I knew he’d been
leaned on to keep me in the loop. He knew I knew it.

He plowed his way into his office, and I
guess trusted me to get sucked in by his slipstream. He started speaking before
he’d turned around.

“Alright smart-ass. The dumpster travelled
halfway across town.”

I leaned against the door, hands deep in my
pockets, and let him blow himself out.

“But nobody saw it. Amazing, huh? City of
thirty-million throwbacks and no one saw a thing.”

I tugged the corners of my mouth down.

“Nobody saw a five-ton dumpster picked up
by a ten-ton rig and carried half-way across Manhattan in the dead of night,
and planted right outside Park’s busiest hotel.”

He rifled through his desk drawers, hunting
for something. A sheen of sweat lay down the back of his thick neck.

“Some of the graffiti on the thing had turf
tags. We narrowed it down to a square mile, and the rest was old fashioned
legwork.”

He straightened up and turned, holding a
bottle.

“There’s more than that dumpster smells.”
He said it to the bottle. He raised it to his lips, then pulled if far enough
away to say, “And before you get on your high horse, this is medicinal―codliver,
bitters, and extract of chicory. Tastes like liquefied dung. You’re welcome to
it.” He swigged, and grimaced. “Less I see of you, the less of this shit I need
to swallow, so out with it.”

“Have you found the driver?”

“Need to find the truck first.”

I said, “You haven’t told me where the
trail led.”

He tilted the bottle, shook his head,
twisted its top back on, and jammed it into a drawer.

“Granton. Warehouse by the river.”

That was Eastside. Where the UN had once
stood. What business did a Speigh have there, day or night? I said as much.

“My question exactly,” said Tunney. “But I’ve
got a bigger one for you, genius: Why can’t the Examiner find a cause of
death?”

That raised my eyebrows. “The boy was all
bent out of shape.”

“All post-mortem,” he said. “No, the body
of Euripides Speigh, forty-two looking like twenty-four, has everything in its
place, and is just hitting its stride. Only problem being it’s stone dead.”

“Blood alcohol?”

“Barely one drink.”

I could see Tunney thinking “only”. I was
thinking what was rare for a drunk was rarer for a teetotaler.

I made that move with my mouth again. “Maybe
the boy had a freak condition. Something undetectable in the brain? It
happens.”

“Not to guys in dumpsters. That’s
horseshit.”

He had a point. I got the address of the warehouse
and left Tunney to his mood.

Outside, the wind had shifted. I could smell
rain. Thick, dark clouds were banking up for a show, and you knew it was going
to be a good one when the litter started running faster than the citizens.

I ducked into a pharmacy and bought
aspirin. In a diner across the street I ordered an all-day breakfast―ham, eggs,
hashbrowns, the lot―and took a seat at the window. Someone had left a copy of
the Times on the bar. I flicked through it, but the Speigh murder had been too
late for the morning copy.

Sitting there I noticed a tight feeling in
my side that meant my shirt had stuck to the wound. Something else to look
forward to.

My breakfast arrived and I hung my head
over it a moment, inhaling deeply. I ordered coffee, then alternated swallows
of breakfast, coffee, and aspirin till things looked rosier.

The heavens let loose and pelted the street
and sidewalk. Heavy drops dashed against the window in isolated spatter, then
joined and ran till the street writhed like a live thing. The water lifted
winter’s smell from the pavement and wafted it indoors, humus and soot and
shit.

I left the waitress a smile and a good tip,
turned my collar up, and went in search of a cab. I’d need to wear my good
spirits like a knight his armor heading out Eastside. Eastside specialized in
denting things it didn’t like.

— 4 —

The cop who met me outside the
warehouse in Granton had a drop of what was probably water hanging from his
nose. He ran the sleeve of his department-issue all-weathers across his nose
and said, “Who the hell are you?”

I flipped open my wallet and showed him my
license and gun permit. He read aloud as though for my benefit: “‘Janus
McIlwraith, Provenor. Licensed to operate by Tri-State Authority.’

“That a fact?” he said, and tucked his
thumbs into his belt. “
Janus
. That a girl’s name?”

I just smiled. What was it to me if this
slob wasn’t up on his Greek deities?

He slipped his nightstick from a loop on
his belt and used it to part my coat flap. He peered at the gun in my holster.
“A Lady Smith?” He rasped the back of a hand across three-day stubble. “That a
girl’s gun?”

“Sure,” I said. “Bend over and I’ll see if
it’ll bake you a cake.”

Before his face got any redder, I said,
“Cut the crap. I know Tunney told you to roll out the carpet for me.”

He got surly then and let me through a
cordon that was an attempt to partition off a non-entity―the space where a
dumpster, and maybe a body, had been. The dumpster’s footprint was impressed
into the sod at the base of the landward side of the warehouse. Beside that,
the building looked like any one of the thousand warehouses jammed together on
the Manhattan bank of the East River.

Above the flattened dirt, a stairway ran up
the wall, with one switchback, and terminated at a door.

I climbed the stair and paused at the
corner to admire the view. A crowd of reporters and locals had gathered. To the
east, the remains of Queensboro bridge―a handful of pilings―stuck out of the
water like the bones of a dead colossus. Then I went on up to the landing. As I
got to the door, a technician emerged carrying a plastic bag. He was whistling,
but then, he was dry.

“Any more bodies?” I said.

He shook his head and said, “Not much of
anything. Maybe three sets of shoes came up here, but the rain isn’t helping.
Inside, we lifted some prints.”

I entered and waited for my eyes to adjust
to the gloom. The only skylight in the place was long-clogged with debris.

I was on a mezzanine overlooking a work
floor. The work floor was sunk in deep gloom, and my eyes couldn’t pick out
much more than an idle hoist wreathed in a century of cobwebs. In a corner of
the mezzanine was a foreman’s office. Around the walls were dirty looking
whiteboards and paper charts covered in scribbles that might as well have been
hieroglyphics.

The furniture was sparse―a table, three
chairs all neatly tucked in. On the face of it, the only brand of death this
room was dealing was boredom.

I knelt and scraped a digit across the
floor. It came away a dusty brown. I spotted a couple of gouges through the
dust that could have come from chair legs, and maybe fancied I could see some
of those boot prints the cop had mentioned.

The table was stained and a smell of liquor
hung over it. In the middle of it sat a handful of tumblers on a serving tray.
They hadn’t been dusted for prints yet, so I retrieved from my coat the tumbler
my banker had drunk from and, with a glance at the back of the technician on
his knees in the foreman’s office, set it down next to the others. Fingerprint
identification in Newer York was a labor-intensive job, and murder scene
evidence had priority.

I squatted again to peer under the table,
then at the skirting under the empty cabinets lining one wall. There was
nothing to see but dead cockroaches and a casino chip.

I pinched the chip by the edges and pulled
it into better light. Issue of Diogenes Casino. Enough pocket money for me for
a year.

On my way out I passed the technician with
the bag, coming back up the stairs. I wondered if he was going to bag the
cockroaches.

From the landing I made out two sets of
tire tracks within the cordon, fresh enough to have gathered rain in stripes
and zigzags.

I made my way to the edge of the swelling
crowd, and nearly collided with a guy trying in vain to light a limp cigarette.
When I offered him a light, his eyes widened a little more than my act of
kindness warranted.

I said, “Why are you following me around?”

His gaze pinballed through the crowd before
he said, “What are you talkin’ about?”

“You were at the Miracle. And you weren’t
here when I showed up but now you are.”

He sucked on the cigarette then said, “Want
the dope on the Speigh hit?”

“You telling me you have it?”

“No. But I know the guy who does. If you
want it, meet me out back of Smiley’s Bar in half an hour.”

I’d never heard of it so I took the
address. He left. It was a short walk so I killed time in the neighborhood and
tried not to get mugged. The wind was tearing holes in the clouds, and letting
golden sun pour down like the rain had. I enjoyed the dazzle of it over the
East River. It hid the muck.

If ever there was a likely place to get
mugged it was out back of Smiley’s Bar in Eastside.

The opinion was retrospective by about one
second.

My contact was waiting in the alley, and I
didn’t see the other man standing in a shallow portico. He sapped me and the
lights went out on my epiphany.

It was a while after consciousness stirred
before they came back on, but didn’t avail me much. I was trussed by my arms to
a girder with my feet on the floor, in darkness that felt spacious. I could
smell rotting wood and accelerant. My headache had a friend, and I groaned just
to check I was awake.

I saw a little light fall past me. It left
a comet tail on my retina that burned green. The light bounced on the floor and
lay still. As it sat it waned, but by then I’d woken up enough to see it was a
cigarette butt.

Then a voice from above spoke to me. It
spoke the most profound things: “Half a pound of tuppeny rice, half a pound of
treacle...” A pause. Another red light fell and bounced away in the darkness.
Silence.

There was another round of that, and this
time I saw something else on the floor. The burning cigarette bounced behind an
object. Even in the weak light, I could see the object’s silhouette. It was a
can. My guess was it was filled with accelerant. A chill rode my spine like a
helter skelter.