Strawman Made Steel (7 page)

“How did you get that?” I said.

“Oh. This?” She placed a hand over it
reflexively. “I tripped down a stair and landed on the balustrade. I almost
forget it now.”

“Can I escort you to the street, Miss
Speigh?”

“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. My
driver is waiting for me.”

She left, her slim contours fading down the
corridor like a vision. I let out a breath.

“She’s nice,” Ailsa said. I grunted
noncommittally.

“You’ve a nice pair of bags growing under
those lovely eyes,” I said. “Who told you to hang around tonight?”

“She caught me as I was leaving. I stayed.
We chatted. She’s money, but nice money.”

Ailsa collected her bag, coat and gloves,
and came over to the door. She seemed to hesitate, then said, “About this
morning. You’re wrong.”

I collected my coat and hat from where they
lay, crumpled and desiccated like the corpse of a man that had died waiting.

“You’re wrong,” she said, “about no one
thinking you’re the best at anything. For one, you never forget anything. And
you make a girl feel safe. You make this girl feel safe.”

I tousled her hair and said, “Knock it off.
I forgot my birthday, didn’t I?”

She pouted. “You don’t forget things you
want to remember.”

She looked out the door to the corridor
along which Miss Speigh had left. “You going to ask her to dinner?”

“She’s a client.”

“So what?”

“I’m taken,” I said, and hung a smile on my
dial the way a squatter hangs a picture.

A frown puckered her forehead, putting the
sprinkle of freckles there into new array. Then I got my second dose of pity
that day. She reached out and twisted the gold band on my finger.

“How long has it been?”

“I don’t remember. It makes no difference.”

I trudged up stairs to the
twenty-seventh story, not for the first time ruing the lack of vacant office
space on lower floors.

The mirror hung in the gloom like a
moonstruck pool. I grit my teeth, entered it, and endured its sensory assault.
Some days finding my way back out the other side to electrified New York is
like navigating in a blizzard; others like the view from 30,000 feet on a
moon-drenched night, all glossed lakes and rivers and highways. On those
nights, I have but to mark my destination and fall. Either way, the atmosphere
tears at my skin.

The first smell I perceived on leaving the
mirror in the hallway of my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen was a perfume. The
tincture of a perfume. The bare memory.

A harsh beeping assaulted my ears. It was
coming from the smoke detector in the hall ceiling above me. Its battery was
dying, with Academy-Award-winning grit. I reached up and tore the battery cover
open, and pried the battery out.

The alarm speaker fell silent, and let me
hear the tail end of a voice speaking to my answering machine. Telemarketer
disguised as survey-taker. Second one in two days. I thought about introducing
them to each other.

The call cut out and the machine snapped
off. I stood in the sudden silence watching neon light pulse through the window
at the end of the hall. In a wedge of black sky beyond, the lights of a Boeing
Longhaul winked.

I headed for the bedroom, sloughing clothes
along the way, found the bar and poured myself whiskey. I dropped into the easy
chair by the double bed and was immediately accosted by every put-off ache,
every shrugged pain and niggling thought. I closed my eyes, took a heavy slug
from my glass and tried to make them all shut up.

What did they say about Speighs? One a day
keeps the doctor away? No, that was apples. They were apples. She’d be apples.

I took another slug, lay another hammer
blow on all that was awry.

I opened my eyes again and let my gaze fall
on the desk abutting the opposite wall. Its mahogany surface shone dully in the
pale light of the electric bedside lamp. The only items on its surface were a
typewriter―an antique Royal 10, with the special math keys in black―a laptop
computer, and the watch I had worn the first time I stepped through the mirror.
It was stone dead.

I searched myself inwardly, but found no
trace of sleep. I hauled myself up, stopped by the bar to top up from the
bottle, and sat at the desk in front of the typewriter. Time to open the case
officially.

From a drawer I got a sheet of bonded
letter, and fed it into the typewriter. I wound it on with a grinding rasp,
snapped the guide flat, and lay my fingers on the cold keys.

I glanced at the top row of keys and found
the forward slash. Editors call it the
solidus
. I like the name. Sounds
heavy, substantial.

A solidus. That’s how I viewed mirrors now.
I entered one and slid its length into the future.
A
future. I don’t
know. The line between entry and exit was like a log in Time’s stream. As long
as I kept my balance, I could step from one end to the other.

Always I travelled the same distance into
the future and back, leaping over the Event into post-electric New York. Every
day that passed in the present was matched by a day passed in that future, but
half a year out of kilter. Spring here was fall there, and the seasons had
woven in counterpoint for every one of the nine years I’d been a traveller in
time.

A solidus? At times the mirror felt more
like an escape key. But the Royal lacked that innovation.

The other thing that drew me to the
typewriter was the mental discipline it exacted. You can’t just blaze away with
crap on a typewriter. It makes you pay for errors. The wise man slows down,
collects his thoughts, and then plays them out like chess moves.

I typed:

Case File ― The murder of Euripides Speigh.
Investigation on behalf of Mrs. Evelyne Speigh, and Miss Nicole (real name?)
Speigh...

And, I thought, half of Manhattan. I
watched the ribbon jump and slap against the page as I typed. Whole
constellations of case details lay hidden in that ribbon, black on black.

I paused, wanting to collect only the most
salient points, to be done with it. I typed, a rat-tat-tat filling the silence.

Day 1:

* Bookended by Speighs ― Evelyne, the
matriarch, a fortress of stoicism or something; Nicole, Evelyne’s youngest
child and only daughter, a shipwreck tossed onto my shore by the storm of her
brother’s death.

* According to Inker, the Speighs have
fingers in many pies.

* Euripides played a game of chance the
night he died. Who with? Why Eastside?

* COD unknown. Expect more. Cops aren’t
poking in the right organ.

* Body abused and moved post-mortem.

I paused, waiting for a thought to come
winding through the gears of my mind into my consciousness. It dropped, crawled
along a rut, a little ball-bearing, and fell kerplunk into view. It was an
image of the list Nicole had given to me. I typed.

* Euripides murdered early morning after his
deceased father’s birthday.

I lifted my fingers from the keys a moment
then added one more item.

* Why me?

I ripped the paper free of the typewriter,
trundled the deep drawer of the desk open, and dropped it into an unlabeled
folder.

With that job done, I discovered that the
ball-bearing had been plugging my head. Now it was free, sleep was oozing down
all my mind’s paths.

I drank the rest of the whiskey down,
loosened my tie, and lunged onto the bed.

I dreamed of a redheaded Nicole Speigh.

— 6 —

I got to the office late morning. But
I felt fresh. The sun was shining. The sap was flowing. The birds were warbling,
and in the litter-strewn rambles of the Park love was being given and
taken―mostly taken.

Ailsa was out. She’d left two telegrams
arranged on my desk.

The first was from Tunney and said simply:

SEE ME

The second was less spendthrift. It was from
Inker. It ran:

CANT GET MY HEAD OUT OF SPEIGHS NOW THANKS
STOP FINANCIALS VERY HEALTHY WITH ONE ANOMALY STOP PURCHASED A BLACK HOLE FOUR
YEARS BACK CALLED ALLTRON CORP STOP LEGACY BIOTECH INTER ALIA IS A DOLLAR SINK
TOO BIG A DRAIN FOR SPEIGHS ONLY STOP MUST BE SILENT PARTNERS

One of these days I’d have to pay Inker. He
was too easy. You could toss him a half-eaten strip of fact and he’d dig up a
corpse. He obsessed like a kid with a new toy.

I rode an elevator to the ground. Today the
building had woken on the right side of the street. I stopped at a sidewalk newsvendor,
bought all three morning papers, and got on the subway.

I scoured each newssheet as the train
bucked around, but learned nothing about the murder I didn’t already know. No
hint of why Tunney would want to see me anyway.

The police station was still busy, but less
of it was concentrated on Tunney. I got straight into his office and found him
planted behind his desk. Sunlight streamed through a half-shuttered window
behind him. He seemed to sit in a blizzard of dust, staring at a spot on the
floor.

I sat and waited for him to stir.

His chair creaked and he said, “Wanna
drink?”

“It’s morning.”

“Not for long. And why do you care?”

I let that pass.

“We have a COD. And with it we can nail
time of death to within a few hours―between midnight and three.”

“Brain spasm?” I said.

“You’re the only one has brain spasms,
McIlwraith. No, poison. Biotoxin. Something new, which is why forensics didn’t
spot it straight up. But built on an old pattern. We could have just as easy
missed it.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Gall bladder. Trace metabolites. The toxin
is a substrate-plus-trigger type. He was probably fed the substrate some time
during the day and got the trigger that night. Trigger could be something as
simple as alcohol. Won’t know until we sequence it.”

“What does it do?”

“Paralyses the muscles. Victim probably
stays conscious, but gradually his heart stops beating and there’s not a damn
thing he can do about it. Got someone to give you CPR for an hour, you’ll be
right as rain. I guess he was short on good Samaritans.”

Tunney looked subdued. I guessed he thought
there was already a full catalogue of ways to kill a man.

“They have any idea on latency?”

“At a guess, the poison remains potent for
twelve hours. After that, the end result is maybe the worst bout of indigestion
you’ve ever had.”

That put the start of the murder window
squarely in Evelyne Speigh’s soirée.

“Source?” I said.

“There are about a dozen labs this side of
the continent that could put the thing together. We don’t have the legs to
check them all. Have to wait for something else to pop.”

His gaze flicked to me. “You have anything
to add?”

I shook my head.

His brows drew down in the slightest scowl.

“And you think he died in that Eastside
warehouse?” I said.

“Best bet.”

I said, “I want to know what he was doing
there in the first place.”

Tunney swung away from me on his chair. “I
want to know when the Yankees are going to win a double header.”

I left him to that dire muse.

Outside in the corridor, a stray thought
snagged my attention. I stuck my head back into his office. He hadn’t moved.

“Do you guys keep a sheet on the Strawman?”

Tunney rummaged for the bottle that held
the liquid that looked like it came from a sick horse, and said, “Sure. See
MacLure. He’s heading organized crime now.” He swigged straight from the
bottle. “Lot of good it will do you. If I had a nickel for every ill shafted
home to a strawman I’d be drinking pina-colladas in Florida. Strawman gave my
old lady gout.”

“One more thing, “ I said pulling the door
almost shut. “I left a dead midget in a building across the East River.”

I swung past the Organized Crime
Bureau, and with Tunney’s blessing obtained a copy of the Strawman dossier for
bedtime reading. Outside, the clock above City Hall was nudging past midday.
The shadows of lampposts and the quickening limbs of sidewalk trees were
beginning to tilt northeast.