Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

In the hallway, I hesitated in front of the full-length mirror and took inventory. I looked like a dog’s chew-toy. I needed a shave. It could wait.

  I stepped into the mirror.

  I left behind the hallway. I left behind my flat. I left behind Manhattan Island in the first blush of the new millennium.

  Somewhere, backstage of Reality, in corridors no wider than a forgotten taste and no longer than a yearning gaze, my image and I met, shook hands, and went our separate ways.

  How’s it feel, the mirror travel? Like slipping into a cool bath on a summer’s day; like being strained through razors steeped in a lake of fire; like déjà vu.

  I stepped out on the far side, feeling my way with dumb hands, remembering the previous night’s tumble onto a restroom floor. My shoulder fired off an after-shock of pain.

  I stood a moment while the fog in my head dispersed. The fog was manageable on short trips―I’d left Hell’s Kitchen and arrived in Harlem, as the crow flies barely three miles. I had no idea what was the longest trip my flesh could handle, but I intuited a trip to London would make me a vegetable. I’d tried for Staten Island once. Worst hangover I ever had.

  I watched the trip-slick fade from the mirror’s surface. It never ceased to fascinate me, like a bubbling pot or a burning log. It moiled like oil on water, shrank into itself and disappeared with a sound like soda fizz, and left me staring at my own reflection.

  Then I turned to bask in another view. Through the soot-grimed glass of a window on the twenty-seventh story, I saw straight down the spine of Manhattan Island.

  I could watch that forever, too.

  In many ways it resembled the city in which I had woken, a piled-up mass of concrete and steel. Lights were dying, one by one or in blocks, as morning bloomed. The streets were thronged.

  But this Manhattan existed in the future.

  The mirror had taken me three miles, and two-and-a-half centuries.

  Far off at the island’s southern tip, the horizon was blotted by a two-thousand-foot giveaway: the hulking, haze-dimmed contours of Liberty Borough, an impossibly thin mountain of built habitat. Liberty was the first true ecology. A single structure lumped over blocks of Lower Manhattan, which could’ve swallowed the Empire State and barely raised a belch.

  Farther south the silhouettes of the other vast ecologies, Lincoln, Jervis-Battery, and Goiĕ, were smaller smudges. But Liberty was enough to remind me I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

  The mirror had taken me to New New York. Newer York.

  Contrary to popular hope, this future city was not so much bright, as cunning. It had to be. When the apocalypse turned out the lights, only the cunning survived. When the nightmare fell between one second and the next, and plunged the world into darkness, she forged a way through chaos to the other side—scarred and listing a little, but still the queen of cities.

  This apocalypse wasn’t the big one with the horses, the famine and plague and pestilence. Although plenty of that followed.

  This apocalypse didn’t bring anything. It took something. Something very small.

  It took the electron.

  That’s my version, anyway.

  The history books say the Event stole man’s ability to reliably harness electric charge and all that entails, power grids, computers, telephones, TV—at its core, the near speed-of-light actuation of physical bodies at a distance.

  The poets say the gods toppled Einstein and once more made Newton king.

  I say some pipe burst in Reality’s plumbing, and muscle matters again on the streets of New York.

  But this morning my thoughts concerned something more mundane. My aching side reminded me I had a score to settle.

  I padded out of the room on dust-damped treads, debated taking the stairs, and instead tugged the pull-rod that called the elevator.

  On the ninth floor I found the door to my office unlocked, and braced myself for a sermon.

  What I got was a raised hand and a whisper.

  “Client,” Ailsa said. She came over to me, smelling of lilac, and with a frown took my coat and straightened my collar. “From the nosebleeds.”

  She meant the upper floors of Liberty. Which made the client rich.

  I prodded the door to the inner office open and entered.

  The only window in the room framed the silhouette of a woman.

  She turned and said, “Janus McIlwraith?”

  I said, “In the flesh.”

  I dumped my briefcase, sat behind my desk, and swiveled to face her.

  She was some piece of work. Nearly my height. Hair so blonde it glinted silver. A body to inspire a roller coaster tycoon. Erect as a gallows. Gravity didn’t seem to bother with her like it did me.

  She was eighty if she was a day.

  Gene therapy in her blood, like the dog that mauled me (not an encouraging comparison). The real deal.

  But not perfect. There were always telltale signs. Her hair, now that I looked at it, had once been strawberry blonde. And her eyes. They never had got that right, like the weight of years had to settle somewhere. The skin around hers was beaten metal.

  The genetic legacy made her some kind of royalty.

  She sat opposite me and folded those legs away primly.

  “I’ll get to the point, Mr. McIlwraith. I’m here about a murder.”

  “I don’t do murder.”

  “I’m not asking you to perform one, Mr. McIlwraith. I want you to solve one.”

  I knit my fingers and turned my thumbs out. She continued.

  “The victim’s name is Euripides Speigh.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Doubtless. He was murdered this morning. His body was discovered in a dumpster behind the Miracle Hotel.”

  I opened a drawer of my desk and rummaged through it for tobacco and a paper. I tapped leaf into the paper and began to sift it, buying time to collect my thoughts.

  “The police are on it?” I said.

  She smiled as though it were a joke. I caught her gaze. Her green irises were nearly eclipsed by the pupils. I saw that they were the real wells of years―you can’t erase the weight of life an eye sees.

  “I’m at the business end of a sticky case,” I said.

  “I’m not asking you to work solely for me, Mr. McIlwraith.”

  I licked the paper and sealed it.

  She unfolded a hand that looked pure marble until it moved, retrieved a lighter from her bag, and extended it to me.

  I exhaled and we looked at each other through a veil of smoke.

  “What’s your interest in the case, Miss...?”

  “Mrs,” she said. “Speigh.”

  The penny had fallen from the top of Liberty. When it finally hit the pavement, it rang like a bell. I removed the cigarette from where it was perched on my lip.

  “Euripides was your―”

  “Son, yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Speigh.”

  “Call me Evelyne, and why should you be sorry?”

  I made vague circles with my cigarette.

  “I want to know how my son was murdered, and why. Some say you are the best.”

  “You been talking to my mother?”

  I pulled a pen and battered notebook from my pocket and flipped it to a blank page.

  “Who would want your son dead, Mrs. Speigh?”

  Her gaze turned inward for a moment, then she said, “He has always been a successful boy. But...” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Married? Girlfriends?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “More than one at a time?”

  “There are some things a mother would rather not know,” she said.

  That wasn’t an answer, but I let it lie.

  “Did he work?”

  “Yes. Atlas Consolidated kept him busy.” She made it sound like a school project. “Downtown, East Village, somewhere or other.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Yesterday. The w
oman was an iceberg.

  “Where was this?”

  “At my home. I was hosting a soirée for family friends. All of my children were present.”

  “And what time did he leave this soirée?”

  “Oh, say around four in the afternoon.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, he was alone.”

  “Happy?”

  “Heavens no. He was furious.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  I wrote that down and when I looked up she had retrieved her handbag. Apparently the interview was at an end.

  She rose like a flower reaching for the sun. Her marble fingers flashed over my desk, and by some sleight-of-hand, left a neat stack of cash in their wake.

  “Money is no obstacle.”

  In my experience, money was the biggest. Mishandled, it could kill a man.

  I retrieved the cash and followed her to the outer office.

  Ailsa sat straight-backed in front of her typewriter peering at what had to be the world’s most interesting invoice.

  Evelyne rested a hand on the doorknob, turned and said: “Your secretary has my address. Please keep me abreast of your investigation.”

  She opened the door and was half-through it when I laid a hand on it.

  I lifted the flap of her bag and slipped the money inside. “This is a COD agency.”

  A line from Chandler flitted through my mind, something about a down-at-heels brain emporium.

  “But there is something I want,” I said. “I’m small-time. There’s not a person in this city who thinks I’m the best at anything. And the cops certainly didn’t send you. So who put you on to me?”

  Her eyes flickered, the first ripples I’d seen in those wells. “Be satisfied I don’t intend to press charges for trespassing.” She handed me a dirty scrap of paper, and left. I let her pull the door shut.

  I turned the paper over. One half was smeared with oily dirt, patterned by what could have been a boot print. It was my business card. It must have fluttered free in my flight from the scrapyard the previous night.

  I heard a rush of intaken breath. Ailsa stood in front of me, peering at the side of my neck.

  “You’ve got a three-inch gash here.” She ran her finger gently alongside its length. Next to the raw skin, her finger felt like a cube of ice.

  “Slipped down a fence,” I said. Her face wrinkled in vicarious pain. “Running from a nightwatchman’s frisky pet.” Was that a lie?

  “The client―the banker’s place?” she said, a glint of anger in her eyes.

  “I’d like to know.” I glanced at the door through which Evelyne Speigh had left.

  Ailsa followed my gaze.

  “And her?” she said, with that mix of admiration and jealousy unique to the fairer sex.

  “Her son’s dead, murdered.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes, wide, gleamed above the hand she put to her face. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I tousled her short-cropped hair. Who needed New York for four seasons in one day? Ailsa could do them all in one minute.

  “How awful,” she breathed.

  I shrugged, then slipped my stiff frame into my coat.

  Before I left, I retrieved a glass tumbler from the bottom drawer of my desk, where it had avoided Ailsa’s cleaning wand. I hooked a twist of coat hanger over its lip to buffer its outer surface, and slipped it into a coat pocket. My banker friend from the previous day had needed a nerve-steadier, and he’d left me some pristine prints.

  Ailsa followed me into the corridor.

  “What’ll I say if the banker shows up?”

  “Tell him I’m charging his account for one tetanus shot. And if he wants any more help, he’d better come clean.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To look at a body.”

  — 3 —

  The Miracle Hotel commanded the corner of Park Ave and East 56th. I took a cab to within a couple of blocks and walked the rest.

  It was hard to believe, wading through the flood of human flesh flowing on the sidewalk, it was little more than a hundred years since New York had come to the brink of extinction.

  I’d read the history books. Following the Event or Singularity―science-speak for mysterious crap on a cosmogenic scale―the city had shed folk like a cat sheds fur in summer.

  But here I was, shoulder to shoulder with New Yorkers. The same purposeful walks, the same stares, focused beams that slid over each other, fearing entanglement. And everywhere the subterranean thrum of boilers.

  Chaos, recovery, war, and renewal changed the face of New York, but not her heart.

  It took no time to find the alley with the body. A crowd milled at its mouth, spreading back from the police cordon like spilled milk.

  I pushed my way to the front, flashed my license at a green-looking cop, and slipped under the ribbon.

  Major Jackson P. Tunney picked me out and came at me as though he’d been waiting for a target.

  “Get lost, Mac,” he said.

  “Never,” I said. “Got a wonderful sense of direction.”

  He grunted. “I’ve got a digit could direct you.”

  Tunney had a medicine ball head―big, round and red. A line of blonde fuzz connected his ears at the back. His eyes were black buttons, and they fumed with habitual disappointment.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  He jerked a thumb in the direction of a rusting dumpster.

  “Time of death?”

  “M.E. said, ‘Some time in the past’, and I could quote him on that.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Doped-out Spaniard. Kept asking if there was a ‘recompensa,’ like the stiff was a lost dog.”

  I nodded at the dumpster. “Can I take a look?”

  He nodded like I was extracting his mother’s death warrant. “Make it snappy. Forensics are about to bag him.” I had a suspicion they’d been waiting for me.

  I grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from the CSI trolley and hoisted myself to the rim of the dumpster. It was hard up against the side of the Miracle, and from the smell, took garbage from the restaurant and the laundry. It was one of two massive cast-iron buckets in the alley, of the type that are hauled and emptied once a week. In winter, it wasn’t uncommon to find folks sleeping in them, snuggled up with the rats.

  Euripides Speigh sprawled face down in one corner like another piece of garbage, like a ragdoll some giant two year old had thrown in a tantrum. I counted at least three important joints flexing a way God never intended.

  I cast my eyes over the contents of the bin before lowering myself in. I picked my way over to him and squatted in the trash.

  From the corner of my eye I saw his leg move. My heart went offline for the seconds it took to learn it was a rat crawling up his trousers. I flushed it out, and poked it into a corner with a rolled-up Times.

  There was no blood, and no impact crater, which meant he hadn’t fallen. His shoes, which pointed in odd directions, were supple-looking black leather―old favorites but cared for. His coat was tailored wool. Beneath it, the collar of a starched white shirt could be seen, stained with no more than a day’s worth of sweat and grime. The sum effect was expensive but subdued elegance. The guy had taste.

  His head was rotated too far to the left, and afforded a view of his profile. It left me no doubt he was a Speigh. If this guy was forty-odd, the gen-lines were strong in his blood too. The one dead olive eye visible was frosting up already, but the skin wouldn’t have looked out of place on a college student.

  “We need to wrap.” It was a CSI.

  I sent my hands lightly over the dead man’s coat, and into its pockets. Nothing beat a first-hand investigation. Sometimes the technicians didn’t note which personal effects came from which pocket. Sometimes that mattered.

  For a rich man, his pockets were bare. Perhaps that’s one of the luxuries of wealth.

  I found nothing in his coat pockets. In h
is pants’ pockets I discovered three gambling chips from Diogenes Casino. Beneath his coat, he wore a black silk waistcoat. In the right breast pocket was a white handkerchief, folded with a precision to make Pythagoras swoon. Tucked behind the handkerchief was a pair of reading glasses. The lenses were circular, and one was fractured in a web of lines.

  “That’s time, Mac,” said Tunney.

  I stood, and with one last scan of the body and its mattress of trash, dismounted the dumpster.

  I stripped off the gloves and tossed them in the other dumpster.

  “Learn anything?” said Tunney.

  “Not much to see,” I said.

  “I could’ve saved you the trouble.”

  I squinted at the sky. The sun was pushing through a cloud, burning it white. I hitched the sleeve of my coat up and found my watch.

  “Got the time?” I said.

  Tunney sighed. This time I was executor of his mother’s death warrant. He told me. I wound and reset my watch.

  I walked to the cordon, and Tunney followed to make sure I didn’t steal the silver. I dipped under it and turned.

  I said, “That dumpster has a whole lotta nothin’.”

  He shrugged ‘search me’.

  “Dumpster outside the Miracle Hotel,” I said, “and not a napkin or shampoo bottle or shower cap with the monogram. Not even a matchbook stub.”

  Watching his medicine-ball face was like seeing the sunrise for a second time that morning.

  I said, “I’d get your boys working on where the hell that dumpster came from.”

  Without a word to me, he turned and began barking orders.

  I sauntered along Park Ave happy to have the cops do the grunt work.

  It was 10:29. Soon Wall Street would be getting its second wind on a wave of caffeine. At the corner of West 53rd I descended the stairs to the subway. I could have found the entrance by smell alone, a gaping mouth in the sidewalk, venting a mixture of diesel and coal-gas fumes.

  I boarded the subway at Lexington and did some thinking while it tugged me back and forth on the trip cross-town. I decided Tunney had been told to wait till I showed before processing the body. That meant the Speighs wielded some clout. While the cops hunted down the real crime scene, I determined to learn the extent of that clout.

  I disembarked at Eighth Ave, where a breeze coming off the Hudson forced back the diesel fumes, and walked toward the Meatpacking District. I entered a brown block of office floors off Ninth. Five flights up I found the door on which was printed in gold letters: Prometheus Investment Brokerage, principal F. Carl Inker.