Strawman Made Steel (9 page)

I frowned. I was having a time keeping up with
the names. “Euripides, Eutarch, Eustace? What happened? You and Dorrita get
stuck on a page in the baby book?”

She dismissed my comment with a tilt of her
chin and a plume of smoke. “The prefix
Eu
means good. It is propitious.”

“Well, it’ll be propitious for this case if
I can keep my ducks lined up. I’d settle for Eury, Tarch and Stacey?”

My suggestion met with silence, so I
flipped back a page in my notebook, and ran a finger over my scrawl from the
previous day.

“How did your daughter get that cut on her
jaw?”

“If I recall, she tripped and fell against
the edge of a coffee table.” She sighed. “So many of my husband’s things still
clutter this place. He was impulsive that way. It is my weakness to not want to
part with them.”

“That include the hired help?” I said.

“Only my butler.”

“Plus doorman, plus cook makes three in
total. Any others?”

She shook her head.

“Not a lot for a modern lady,” I said.

“Dorrita said it makes one lazy, and I have
come to agree.”

“You look after them? Holidays, insurance?”

“Dorrita always gave them one night a week
to be free to follow their dreams. He knew what it was to be the kicking boy.”

“Which day is that?”

“Thursday. It has always been Thursday.”

As I surveyed the drawing room, I was
imagining the butler dusting its shelves in a neat white apron. Half of the
wooden furniture looked antique. A dark oak bookcase probably dated from at
least the early 1900s. Most antiques did—those that hadn’t been broken for
firewood in the bleak winters after the Event, or salvaged for smelting in the
rebuild. Furniture built post-2000 wasn’t known for its longevity.

On a shelf, a plant potted in an
age-cracked biomass battery box provided a jarring note to the old-world taste.
The plant was asleep in the day, the only evidence of its genetic tinkering the
faintest glowing tracery of veins in its leaves. Come night, its
bioluminescence would serve as an exquisitely expensive nightlight.

My attention was hooked by a row of
glass-fronted boxes, the kind that usually contain pin-stuck bugs. But there
were no bugs. Each box held a different object, and I strained in the dim light
to make them out.

Evelyne noticed my gaze and a smile touched
her lips.

“I call it my damp rag collection.” She
twisted lithely and pointed to the first in the row. A faint sparkle glimmered
from within it. “That one contains a twenty-five carat diamond said to have
been grown, using a process in vogue two centuries ago, from the bequeathed
remains of an entire orchestra. It was given to me by the former CEO of DL Plastics
Ltd. He sought to woo me and avert a takeover. I let him woo me, then bought
his company the following morning. A damp rag is all that was left of that once
powerful man.”

I lost interest. “Trophies,” I said, and
her teeth showed white.

“Yes, Mr. McIlwraith, trophies,” she said,
and her smile vanished. “When my husband died he left me alone, in charge of
one of this country’s largest family empires. How long do you think it was
before New York’s vultures began to circle?”

I didn’t answer. My thoughts were drifting
out the window to the garden that commanded a view of Manhattan, when I heard a
voice rumble from the direction of the front door.

Evelyne’s eyes glittered as she said,
“Eustace is here. He always visits his mother.”

Heavy footsteps announced the approach of
the eldest male Speigh. He entered the drawing room and came to rest over feet
splayed at shoulder width. He took his time surveying the setup without a trace
of self-consciousness. I couldn’t read the expression he fixed on his mother.

Eustace Speigh stood maybe five foot nine
inches tall. He was compact. Compact like a block of granite, compressed. He
was wearing too much for the weather, but the angles of his shoulders and the
bulges of his muscles were visible through the coarse twill coat he’d neglected
to doff. Beneath its wide lapels was visible a grey flannel jacket. A starched
cotton shirt, foulard, and khaki slacks completed the picture of a businessman
pretending at an Ivy League education. His loafers were the tell―they lacked
the patina of long wear.

“You the dick?” he said, and waved the hat
he held crumpled in his hand in my direction. His thick, dark eyebrows were
separated by pinched skin. His face had a male heaviness.

“You tell me, Mr. Speigh. I thought I was
investigating a murder. But maybe I’m the butt of an elaborate joke. Most of
your family seem to be having a gay old time.”

The dark brows throttled that pinch of
skin. He shifted his weight over his feet.

“What the hell are you implying?” He said
it low, with control. This was no muppet.

“Implying nothing. Your brother’s in the
freezer, and you seem about as upset as a beagle at open season.”

“Different strokes. I loved my brother.”

“Loved or love?”

He grunted, and moved to the sideboard to
pour himself a drink. With his back turned he spoke to his mother. “I don’t
know why you hired this guy. Damn cops can do the job.”

“The police aren’t here,” she said. “He
is.”

He turned, took a slug of whatever, and ran
a speculative eye over me again with that same overtness.

“So he is,” he said. Then, “And what have
you discovered, Mr. ...?”

“McIlwraith.”

“Mr. McIlwraith.”

I told him. He seemed to think about it.

He said, “Okay. So you’re more than a
pretty face. What do you want?”

“I’ll think about that. For now, just
answers to a couple of questions.”

He sculled the rest of his drink and said,
“Shoot.”

“Where were you the night your brother was
murdered?”

He didn’t bat an eyelid.

“My townhouse, staring into the john on
account of my mother’s chicken pot pie,” he said. “Ask my staff.”

“I wasn’t the one who marinated the chicken
in whisky,” said Evelyne, gazing through the French windows at the sifting
greenery.

I said to Eustace, “Do I have your
permission to poke around Alltron Corp?”

He laughed. “Since when did dicks ask
permission to poke their noses in? Sure. I’ll send word. Tell ‘em to roll out
the carpet.”

He leaned down, pecked his mother on the
cheek, and strode toward the hall.

“One more,” I said.

He halted and turned, gathered moss.

“Your father,” I said. “What sort of a man
was he?”

“That’s easy,” he said. His smile had left.
“He was the guy they first wrote that rags to riches story about. Son of Swiss
immigrants who washed up here with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Tough as nails when he had to be. But he made it didn’t he.”

He left and I heard a door boom shut.

I glanced up at the portraits floating
against the wall in the adjoining hall. Yeah, they were sneering at me.

“Liselle,” said Mrs. Speigh. She had come
to my side without me hearing her. “The money. The lineage. The
pedigree
,”
she said. Her voice dripped with something that would polish brass. “All of it
borne in the name Liselle, my maiden name; itself a common first name borrowed
a long time ago for a reason no one remembers.”

“And your husband?”

“Was a gutter rat, then gopher, then
packer, then floor manager, then... Well, you have to have a chunk of capital
even to make it onto the map of a Liselle.”

I didn’t need to ask where that first chunk
of capital sat. My mind went to a decrepit warehouse squashed in the tumbledown
of Eastside.

“Would you like to meet my husband?” she
said.

I wondered what passed for a martini in
this place. I didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait for one. She brushed past me
into the hall, went to a mantelpiece and retrieved a black cylinder about the
size of a saltcellar. It was smooth with a dull sheen. She unscrewed its top
and rummaged in it with her thin fingers.

When she withdrew her hand she turned to
me, smiled, and said, “Mr. McIlwraith meet Mr. Speigh Senior.” She turned her hand
over and mine moved like a robot to catch whatever she held.

Something fell into my hand about the size
and weight of a large cockroach. I held it close. It was a finger. Dry and
brown, with a nail like a snail shell, but unmistakably a finger.

With effort I rode an urge to retch, and
with a dip of my head said, “Mr. Speigh.”

“You’re gorgeous,” Mrs. Speigh said. “That
was his ring finger. He wore a heavy gold band. You can still see the imprint.”

I prodded it. Ring fingers made me nervous.
Why the ring finger when the man presumably had two perfectly good pinkies?

She gazed at it a moment longer, then said,
“Here, give that back to me.” I tipped the finger back into her pale hand.

She dropped it back into the cylinder like
an uneaten hors d'oeuvre, screwed the top on, and replaced the cylinder on the
mantelpiece.

“I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing
with that. I wonder myself. It was all they sent back, to prove they had him.
But I knew he was dead.”

“A man can live without a finger,” I said.

“Yes, I wrestled with that hope for many
years. I paid the ransom, but...”

I suddenly had a strong desire for sun on
my skin. I took my leave and headed out. She followed me to the door, where the
eunuch appeared again, and without a word gave me my gun.

Part of me had one more question for Mrs. Speigh.
I argued with myself, and I guess that part won: “Why did your nightwatchman
try to kill me with a dog?”

Her full lips drew into a line before she
answered. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The nightwatchman of that
facility was found in the morning―in his office, bound and gagged. Your card
was found on the premises. You can understand how that looked.”

“No dogs? No deranged midgets? No Liberty
Borough bankers?”

She shook her head, brows pinched in confusion.
“Just your card.”

While I rode the elevator to the ground,
one thought stuck to my mind like a fly on flypaper. It was about the scar on
Nicole Speigh’s neck. No mother forgot how her only daughter got a scar like
that.

— 7 —

Back on the street, I found an
exchange office and looked up Alltron Corp. The address listed in large was in
Brooklyn. It was called a ‘campus’.

Before heading over the bridge, I stopped
at a bar called The Whipped Elephant. Between the hours of eleven and two it
played host to newshounds, who flocked into the joint for ten-minute lunches,
cheap rumor, and cheaper drinks. I ordered a ham on rye and sat at the bar with
an eye on the door. I was hoping to see a guy I know who sub-edits the society
pages of an independent rag.

There was no sign of my guy. I left
half-disappointed. The sandwich was half-good.

The trains that pump Brooklyn’s humanity
into and out of Lower Manhattan are big―so big they seem parts of the bridge.
When they move, the bridge is a colossal engine block encasing massive
connecting rods.

I rode the train, my hand clutching a loop
of leather, and watched a trawler on the river heading out. Sunlight glinted
from its cabin windows. Waves on the Hudson made its mast pivot like a spinning
top, so that the gulls hanging over it were having trouble finding a perch. The
boat’s hull ploughed through a smear in the water that told me another engine
in the sewage treatment plant had bust.

Alltron was in a part of Brooklyn that had
been heavily shelled. When rebuilding, a visionary in the Borough planning
division had decided that technology parks―such as they were―beat plain parks.
Alltron sprawled over twenty acres of one such park. I had fun finding
reception.

When I gave my name to the girl at
reception, her eyes lit with purpose. It seemed I was persona grata, access all
areas.

I had a job convincing her I wanted neither
the CTO nor a flunky tour. That troubled her, like I was a potential customer
that had wandered out of her sales-pitch matrix into no-man’s land. (“You want
free money?” “No.” Crickets.)

“I don’t want a manager, and I don’t want
the janitor. I want someone in charge who gets their hands dirty.”

Eventually, with the aid of an
organizational chart, we settled on a “sub-divisional adjunct”. I spotted the
sub-division I wanted: therapeutic bio-tech, endogenous. In my head that translated
loosely to something like ‘squeeze a squid for what ails you.’ Antidotes and
the like.

And antidotes were just the flip side of
the coin to poison.

I walked a mile to find the office of Dr
Lucius Arnold. The good doctor was in.