Strawman Made Steel (8 page)

The shadow anchored beneath Liberty Borough
was doing the same, its dark band creeping over SoHo and Greenwich like a
divine blight. I guessed if we could still put a man into orbit, he’d be able
to read the time from that sundial.

I decided to call on the heart of the
Speigh Empire. Keep it abreast of my investigation.

I took a cab downtown, watching Liberty’s
silhouette loom. Sun struck its western face, and glinted from glass-encased
elevators riding its surface, and the pendulous bodies of cable cars that
struck out from many levels and around the compass.

To think ‘skyscraper’ was coined for a hat.

Some hat.

The tumbledown shape of the megascraper,
cubic but irregular, put me in mind of a ziggurat. A grotesquely large ziggurat
to assuage the thirst of a grotesquely large god. Just visible near the summit,
poking from a redoubt at the southwest corner, was the barrel of a sixty-pound
stantion gun. It was rusted in place, staring out at the Atlantic, its barrel
like the rotted trunk of a redwood.

Seen from its summit, Liberty’s uppermost
floors fanned out to steal the sunlight like a mountainside terraced for rice.
The Speigh’s owned part of that sun-rich footprint. I’d called on massive,
rambling estates upstate amid the color of Westchester county. The Speigh’s
place was like that, only it sat a thousand feet above the streets of
Manhattan.

I rode an internal elevator to their floor.
I wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing, and it was cheaper. The elevator was
huge. Could have been a subway train, only it pressed me down not back.

The front door to the Speigh’s was at the
end of a long, bare corridor. I half-expected to see the shadowed apertures of
murder holes cut into the ceiling. The building’s superstructure was covered
with veneer or lathed panels where possible, but here and there the grey,
almost sticky-looking, plascrete butted through. Couldn’t shift the stuff with
dynamite. Couldn’t make it any more either. To cure it took Giga-volts.

The front door was made of wood but put me
in mind of a bank vault. Bolted to the middle of it was a massive lion’s head
with a knocker locked in its jaws. I gave it a rap.

It opened immediately, whisper quiet, and I
was greeted by a towering man in a white uniform. I handed him my card, and
told him my business. While he read it, I scanned his mountainous flesh. His
head was cherubic, ensconced in rolls of fat that propped up his chin. He
looked like a eunuch. I wondered briefly if it would be rude to ask him for a
strain from
La Donna Mobile
. Hanging from his button-hole was a dark―almost
black―rose. I’d seen the kind before at funerals.

Without a word he put out a hand like a
dinner plate. I reached beneath my coat and slipped my .38 from its holster. I
lay it in that hand, which swallowed the gun whole.

He waved me in, swung the door closed, and
disappeared through a door in the anteroom.

Before me was a long, vaulted space. The
floor was tiled in black and white. Two flights of steps peeled away on either
hand, rose, and curved to meet at a corridor running left and right, and mirroring
one that ran under the stairs. Beneath the arch formed by the stairs I could make
out another hall, furnished dimly, and beyond that the first hint of sunlight.

I headed for the light, the sound of my
footsteps ricocheting off the floor and hardwood paneling. Dead Speighs gazed
down at me from oil portraits. I gave them back the eye, and so didn’t notice a
butler materialize like a ghost by my side, silent and slim. The guy could’ve
been my conscience.

“Sir can find Mrs. Speigh in the garden,”
he said. His normal voice was a whisper. Maybe he was an up-skilled librarian.
“Ahead and to the right. May I take your coat?”

“No thanks,” I said. He retracted the hand
he’d proffered. I said slim. Cadaverous, more like. The skin was stretched over
his face like doped cloth over the frame of a Hurricane fighter.

He tilted his head with deference and
floated back to the well of lost souls or maybe the kitchen.

I travelled the length of another room―a
drawing room dominated by a grand piano. I was a fly yearning for open air. The
sunlight I’d seen had been bounced in from outside by cleverly hidden mirrors
and played out over the piano, chaise lounges and coffee tables.

The drawing room ended in the prospect of
the dark boughs of oaks through French windows in perpetual danger of French
kisses from said oaks. Beyond them hung a tangled lower story of rhododendrons
and roses, and peeping through the breeze-stirred foliage, pale patches of an
endless sky.

I stepped out into shadow. New oak leaves
burned light green above me. The smell of just-wet earth was in my nostrils.

“This way, Mr. McIlwraith,” said a female
voice. The garden baffled its direction, and blunted my sense of distance. I
couldn’t tell if it was Mrs. or Miss who had beckoned. Or maybe the eunuch did
theatre.

I trod a path straight ahead to where at
least there was more light. Some species of creeper hung down in stray vines
and lay snarled in the shrubbery. I parted them like a bead curtain, snicked my
hand on one, and belatedly realized they were studded with thorns. The heavy,
wet air contrasted with the air pushing in from the city, which smelled of
spent exhaust and the ocean.

I emerged onto a neat lawn and found Mrs. Speigh’s
backside staring at me from a formal flowerbed hard up against the Manhattan
skyline.

She turned at my approach. “Good afternoon,
Mr. McIlwraith. Excuse me while I plant out the last of these.”

“Snapdragons,” I said. She smiled. “I’m
partial to Peonies myself.”

She bent and fussed over a patch of
rich-looking, dark dirt. Her form was swathed in a spare cotton blouse and deep
green slacks. Working clothes, but they fit her like a glove. My first sight of
bespoke gardening wear. Her hair was gathered up and hidden beneath a blood-red
scarf. It accentuated the sculpted contours of her high cheek bones, and the
firm but feminine sweep of her jaw.

She worked in silence a minute, tamping
down the tender seedlings, then said over her shoulder. “What’s the matter, Mr.
McIlwraith. Didn’t think I was one to get my hands dirty?”

“You’re wearing gloves.”

She stood, and stepped out of the bed. She
slipped her hands from gloves of dirt-stained leather. Her hands came to rest,
clasped loosely before her, and shining with marble luster.

“What do you think of my garden?” she said,
and swept her gaze in an arc that terminated somewhere over Staten Island.

“You could list this lawn alone on the
stock exchange,” I said.

“Call it excess. But a lady in my position
has certain expectations put upon her.”

“I wasn’t judging. What position is that?”

She ignored the question. “I made all of
this from fallow earth and bare concrete. The previous owner wasn’t the
nurturing type.”

I scanned the ground again. My gaze got
stuck on a series of statues―four crouched monsters, their backs to the flower
bed, jutting from the limiting wall into thin air like rocky protuberances.

“Was the previous owner the gargoyle type?”

She tracked my gaze. “No. They are my own.
I remodeled following the death of my husband. Some women cut their hair.” She
stroked one of the things grainy flanks. “They are from Verona, from the
workshop of Puccelli. You have heard of Puccelli?”

I hadn’t. The hunched, bulbous-headed
creatures didn’t enflame a desire to hear of any Puccelli. To judge by one
sample of his work, Puccelli had a thing for phalluses.

“Would you care for a drink?”

“No, thank you. I came to fill you in on my
investigation.”

“Well, at least keep a widow company while
she drinks.” The line sounded absurd formed by those lips, and she knew it.

I followed her through the grounds and back
into the drawing room. It felt cold after the early afternoon sun.

The butler ghosted in again. The lady
ordered a martini without looking at him. He inclined his head to me and
whispered, “For sir?”

My head said whiskey sour and my mouth said
water. He drifted away and Mrs. Speigh opened a pearl-inlaid cigarette case,
from which she withdrew a cigarette, inserted it into a jade holder, and lit
up. She pursed her lips and exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “Will you at least
join me in a cigarette?”

I shook my head. “Trying to quit.”

She nibbled on the end of the smoker, and
smiled around it. “I wonder. Which of life’s pleasures are non-negotiable for
you, Mr. McIlwraith?”

She lay herself along a chaise lounge. I
sat facing her on the edge of an easy chair.

“How much do you want this murder solved?”

Her body, until then strung in a feline
posture, went rigid. Her eyes flashed and she half sat up.

“I want you to pursue it with the utmost
energy. What else could you think?”

“That’s not an answer to my question, but
let’s run with that.” From a coat pocket I tugged my notebook, and behind it
arranged my thoughts.

“Euripides was murdered between midnight
and three yesterday morning.”

She nodded. Her gaze fixed upon me.

I said, “Or maybe he wasn’t.”

She didn’t bat an eyelid at that.

“If that sounds odd,” I said, “I suppose it
should. It’s a philosophical matter that turns on causes and effects.”

She let go another streamer of smoke into
the fractured sunlight.

“I’m no philosopher, Mr. McIlwraith, but if
it will help solve this murder, I will listen.”

“Is a man murdered when the murderer pulls
the trigger or when the hammer strikes the bullet? Or when that bullet tears
flesh? Normally the distinction is of no account―the chain of events is so
brief.” I drew a finger over the open page of my notebook as if connecting
dots. “In this case it happens to be entirely of account. The trigger was
pulled sometime during the previous day, and the hammer didn’t fall until the wee
hours of yesterday.”

The butler appeared, and I was silent a
moment while he arranged our drinks. Mrs. Speigh took no notice of him, but sat
silently smoking, watching me.

“One more bit of grit in the eye: a gun is
a mechanism, a machine. The trigger doesn’t talk to the hammer, and the hammer wouldn’t
listen if it did. But the hammer that fell on poor Euripides, someone thought
about that―maybe.”

The lady continued to smoke and stare, and,
for all I know, undress me. I explained the poison, what we knew of it anyway.
I explained how it was possible it had been given to Euripides during the day
and activated that night by something as simple as a shot of spirits. I deduced
for her how one or two people might be implicated in the murder.

Then I told her how the body had been moved
to the Miracle from its initial resting place outside a warehouse in Eastside,
and how I believed Euripides had played a game of chance that night, using
Diogenes chips, with one other person, or perhaps two.

I closed my notebook and settled back in
the chair. She put the cigarette down, wet her lips with the Martini, and said,
“Thank you. But I’m sure you could have informed me of all this by communiqué.
I gather you want something from me.”

“Not much. Just to know how your family
ticks.”

She burst out laughing, a strangely
uncontrolled sound.

When she had gathered her decorum about her
again, she said, “Do you have children, Mr. McIlwraith?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Therapists talk to me of the effect on a
child of nature and nurture yet neglect the most powerful force.”

She drew on her cigarette again and vented
its smoke in a billowing cloud that eddied chaotically before dissipating.

“Blind chance,” she said. “Chance like a
falling star. Chance like a murder.”

If she was counting on me chancing on her
meaning, she was in for a disappointment. I waited for light.

“I’m their mother, but I could not have
guessed the effect upon my children of my husband’s murder.”

I hazarded a guess: “Your eldest took the
mantle; your two youngest clung to each other; and the middle sibling went all
to sea.”

“Bravo, Mr. McIlwraith. You have it, more
or less. Perhaps they were reverting to type. But if so, they were types I had
never before glimpsed.”

I pulled my lip. “How did the brothers get
on?”

“Like brothers.”

“How about their women folk?”

She smiled. “I’ve already told you, I don’t
keep up to date with their conquests.”

“How would you,” I said, “if you never
invite them over?” Evelyne frowned, so I explained: “I talked to Eury’s lady
friend this morning. She said she didn’t get an invite to the party.”

“Perhaps not from him,” she said. “But the
invite was made. However,” she said, and her gaze momentarily found her lap,
“Euripides was not the first to spot this ‘lady friend’, merely the first to
offer her a job. That honor was Eutarch’s, and perhaps explains his reticence
in bringing her here.”