Strawman Made Steel (26 page)

My hand, the one that had held the glass,
returned to the point where it had been before my drink was slapped free. It
hung there forlornly.

“The grog that bad?” I said, but noticed
Coffey’s eyes were on me, not the splash of whiskey that was still collecting
along a crack at the baseboard.

For an answer he thrust a snatch of paper
into my hand, the hand whose fingers still curled around a glass they no longer
held.

I uncrumpled the paper and recognized it to
be a cable transcript. By habit my eyes flitted to the box in the top left
corner to read the identity of the sender. It was Carl Inker. The Carl Inker I
had visited not three hours before.

I read the message. It said:

URGENT STOP MCILWRAITH MUST NOT DRINK STOP
IT WOULD BE MURDER

I looked back at Coffey. The corners of his
mouth had a twitch that wanted to be a smile, but the smile seemed unsure of
itself, as if it had been invited to a party without the dress code. Maybe he
thought he was the butt of a practical joke. His jaw moved like he was working
up a conversation, but I spoke first.

“Tell Inker I got the message. Tell him
also, I forgive him.”

Coffey’s face drew grim.

“Give me Nicole Speigh’s address,” I said.

He did. There are some advantages to being
an editor of the social pages.

I left the pub with a hundred pairs of eyes
on me, but I had a mind only for my math. I double-checked. Triple-checked. But
there was no avoiding the result. It had to be Inker who slipped me the poison.
As to why: he’d been leaned on. Hard. I didn’t know the specifics. Didn’t need
to. All it meant was that Time’s flywheel had slipped a cog and was running
free over the ground. Soon it would run someone else over.

“Janus,” said Nicole when she’d opened
the door to the fifteenth-floor apartment in the Upper West Side. She sounded
breathless. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She’d either been hitting the turps or
crying. Maybe both.

“What’s a Speigh heiress doing opening her
own door?” I said.

“Don’t call me an heiress,” she said with a
hint of bite. “Not here.”

She seemed to hesitate before she opened
the door to admit me.

I passed her and found myself wrapped in
the sight and smell of a woman’s abode. A number of Nicole’s coats hung in an
alcove off the hall, and seemed to fill the small space with her perfume. On a
low table against the wall in the vestibule a single cutting of redbud, whose
blooms were just starting to brown at the tips, struck a pose from a
bottle-thin clay vase. From somewhere a gramophone played a much-used platter
of depressed Austrian, Mahler perhaps.

She eased the door closed and said, “Can I
take your coat?”

“I can hang my own coat,” I said. I hung it
on the only free peg. It looked like a dead bush in a blooming garden.

Nicole walked along the hall. I followed.

She said over her shoulder, “Can I get you
a drink?”

I laughed. It made her turn sharply.

“What is so amusing?” she said with an
indignation that only made me laugh harder.

When I still managed no reply, she said, “I
take it you didn’t come here simply to laugh at me.” Her eyes travelled over my
face. I saw her wince when her gaze found the broken skin. It wasn’t hard to
find.

“No ma’am,” I said. “Private Investigator
Janus McIlwraith reporting on the investigation for which you, the client,
Eunice Liezel Speigh, have engaged me.”

She didn’t even bristle at her real name,
which I had dug up from the city registrar, unable to believe her mother would’ve
given up on the
Eu
after going three rounds with it. I watched her try
and fail to read my mood. Hell of a job. I couldn’t do it.

“Then report,” she said, and sat on a
leather couch that backed onto a large plate-glass view of Manhattan.

I sat opposite her in a recliner, on its
edge, feet squarely planted. I reached my notebook out of my pocket, skipped
back to the page corresponding to the last day I’d talked to Nicole, at the
Diogenes, and began to fill her in on my activities since that day.

She watched from behind veiled eyes,
without a murmur even for the murder of her second brother, all the way to when
I had my whiskey slapped from my hand not an hour before.

“Oh!” she exclaimed and covered her mouth
with a perfect, soft hand.

“Oh?” I said.

“You’ve been poisoned?”

“Not if I don’t get on the turps.”

She nodded, evidently understanding.

Silence seeped into the room. I watched a
Zeppelin inch across the sky far out over the bay. It skirted clouds like
foothills. The sun lay along the crest of its bulbous body in a fan of fire.

When my gaze returned to Nicole, her figure
was drained of color by the sun-washed tableau behind her. She seemed clad in
black.

She broke the silence. “The police
released...”

I nodded.

“When is the funeral?” I said.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Where?”

“Will you attend?” she said, a hitch in her
voice. I couldn’t tell what she thought of the idea.

“No. Just keeping my facts straight.”

She told me the address of the cemetery and
I jotted it down.

More silence. Then, “Can I get you―” she
began, and fell silent just as quickly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I do not feel quite
myself.”

“I wonder,” I said, “who it is we feel when
not ourselves.”

“You’ve an odd sense of humor, Janus.”

She thought I was being funny.

My hands played with the notepad resting on
my leg. I held it up and flipped through a few pages.

“There’s an awful lot of space in here,” I
said, and caught her eye. “And I can’t help thinking you could fill it up.”

Without a word she rose, crossed to a
sideboard, and poured a drink. She returned to the couch, sat, and drank a
mouthful. Her eyes brooded behind her upraised glass.

“Do you want to know what I expected to
find the night I first visited your office?”

I put my notepad away, laced my fingers and
turned my thumbs out.

“Hit me.”

“A saint. Or else a devil.” She swallowed
hard on the drink. Her eyes screwed up and she had a time speaking again. “My
mother doesn’t do middle of the road.”

“And?” I said.

“And what?” she said, knowing full well my
meaning.

“What did you find?”

“I still don’t know.”

“You lied to me when you told me how you
got that scar,” I said.

“And you haven’t forgiven me, is that it?”

“Your mother lied too.”

Her shoulders lifted a little and she shook
her head the barest amount as if to say, “And?”

“I understand the lie,” I said. “What I don’t
get is two different lies.”

The bottom of her glass was suddenly the
most interesting sight in creation.

“You said you thought your closest brother,
Eury, wanted you out of New York.”

A nod, gaze still drowned.

“And this was...when?” I made a show of
mental math.

“Two months ago,” she said. “Why?” Her eyes
were on me again, her brow puckered with concentration.

“I’m just curious what the rest of your
family made of his attitude.”

“What are you implying?”

“Not implying anything. Just asking a
question.”

She shook her head again and drank. This
time she jutted one finger from the hand wrapped around the glass at me.

“Your questions live on a whole world of
implications. So tell me.”

I ignored her command. “Let’s play a game.
I’ll say a word, and you say whatever comes to mind. Okay?”

Her only move was to uncross and re-cross
her legs.

“Pretzel,” I said.

She swallowed again from her glass, and
turned her head to let her gaze slide out the window.

“Taxicab,” I said.

Nothing. I’d have to start playing it with
myself soon.

“Redbud,” I said.

I was mentally prepping another word when
she said in a voice little more than a breath, “Thaw.”

“Cloud,” I said.

“Dream,” she said.

“Shadow.”

“Nightmare.” She shivered. Drank again.
“Night.”

“Euripides.”

The look she gave me then made me feel like
an indulged child. Add it to Preacher Nate’s pysch profile. Hell, I never said
I was an artist.

“Play.”

“Eutarch.”

“Run.”

“Eustace,” I said.

She paused, said “Stand,” and then all in a
rush, “or would you prefer game, set, match. No? Red, white, and blue. God damn
it, Janus. I could handle coldness or comfort, but you come in here and play
games. You’re always playing games. Two of my brothers are dead and the third
ploughs on like nothing’s happened.”

Her eyes were glimmering with unshed tears
when she finally blew herself out.

“Poison,” I said.

She tipped her head back and the last of
the drink disappeared down her bare neck. For a moment I thought she meant to
dash her glass against the floor. Instead, she placed it on a table and
composed her hands in her lap.

“I refuse to believe Eutarch murdered
Eury.” Now I could feel the heat in her carry across the feet of thin air
between us. “He might have been a son-of-a-bitch but he’s no brother-killer.”

I doodled on my notepad, remembering
Eutarch Speigh, little Caesar of Diogenes Casino before he was a pool of blood
and a lifeless digit.

“Take out fratricide,” I said. “That still
leaves a lot of crime in the book.”

“I’m not saying he was a saint,” she said.

“He was cooking up poisons,” I said.

“Aren’t we all?”

I didn’t want to end up in philosophy hour
discussing the human condition. I said, “Why did your mother stab your
father?”―a bit of my conversation with Uncle Jahan I’d left out of my recap.

My words were like a wave dousing a flame.
Her hand went to the scar at her neck.

“Did you ever fight with your...wife?”

“We fought with violent silence,” I said.
“But I want to know why your mother stuck a knife in your father.”

“You would have to ask her. She was drunk.
I don’t know.”

“But you don’t deny it happened.”

“Of course not. The same surgeon that
stitched my father back together tidied this up.” She indicated the scar on her
neck.

“Handy,” I said.

“Father had long used this plastic surgeon.
I think he knew he’d have a job keeping up with mother, and plastic surgeons
have that knack for discreetness when money is involved. But what does any of
this have to do with my brothers?”

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “You know, I don’t
think I’ve seen a photograph of your father.”

Nicole rose and left the room. Her dress
made a swishing sound on her legs that seemed to fill the silence until she
returned holding a bulky leather-bound book. It was a photoalbum. It had the
smell of an archived thing. She placed it on the coffee table parallel to the
couch, and folded back its cover. With one hand she began to turn its creaking,
thick pages, and with the other she indicated the space next to her on the
couch.

I rounded the table and sat, and with one
eye watched the montage of Liselle identities pass, and with the other watched
her reactions.

To look at her face you’d have thought her
engrossed in memory. But she said, “What caused your wife to fight with you in
silence?”

“My face,” I said. “Seems to be the kind
that starts a fight.”

“Your obtuseness,” she said.

“She didn’t like the people I worked for. I
didn’t think she was in a position to judge,” I said. Then, “There,” and
stabbed a finger into the portrait of a man.

“Dorrita Speigh,” she said simply.

“Handsome man,” I said.

“This is from before he met mother.”

He wore a white shirt, collar folded and
tied. But the sleeves were rolled back in stacks of evenly gathered cuff. A
stain on his cheek was not five o’clock shadow but grime.

“Penetrating gaze. Lamps of the soul. Like
yours,” I said. Then, “Take after his father-in-law?”

I caught an odd look in Nicole’s eye,
before she flipped further into the book and found her maternal grandfather.
His clothes said stern, authoritarian in every fiber from Oxfords to Homburg. I
looked for evidence of a kindly glint in the crow-black eyes peering from the
half-shadow beneath his hat rim, but all I found were two jellies in flesh like
poached eggs that merely suggested some private source of dissolution.