Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  “How?”

  “I’m not an idiot. I thought maybe I’d just get the hell out of here. So I dug around. The guy who gave me the job was just a grunt. I tailed him from Eastside, found his contact at a restaurant across the street from the Constellation Bar on Rector Street―slope-shouldered guy with, ah―” He paused, blinked. “―A spiral tattoo on his neck, and then tailed that guy. But if I had to guess―and I guess well―the spiral was also just a mule.”

  Whoever had paid for the job had used at least two cutouts, which probably made it a big operation. But it hardly made it the Strawman or bust.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Tritt. “But I’ve done the odd job for the networks. And nothing was organized like this. They set up the alias, squared it with the bank so if you checked it would hold up.”

  “I did,” I grunted. “It did.”

  “They knew when you’d finished working for that rail guy―”

  “Cleeves,” I said.

  “Yeah, Cleeves. Good job that didn’t make it to the papers, right?”

  It had been a good job. Cleeves got his money back, in exchange for his dignity. But the dignity of lecherous rail barons wasn’t front and center right then.

  Tritt kept talking.

  “So chances were you’d go straight on out to the scrapyard that night. And the money,” he said, and couldn’t help a smile splitting his shining face.

  “Big?” I said matter-of-factly.

  “School fees are paid up to college,” he said.

  I sat silent, kicked around what he’d told me. Tritt’s glib tongue was still too. He was probably mentally fondling his paycheck.

  “You ever hear the name Frieter?”

  He shook his head.

  “See a guy like an accountant on speed?” I said “Big double-decker glasses, itchy trigger finger?”

  He shook his head again.

  I slapped my thighs and stood. “Well, my love to your family. You’ve been so helpful.”

  He smiled, then absorbed what I’d said. He came to pieces again.

  “You won’t say anything.” He wrestled with himself. “I’ll pay you―”

  “Why do people in this city keep throwing money at me?” I said, more to myself than Tritt.

  I looked at him again. A man shrunken with fear, and riven by greed. Maybe his story about the photos was true. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he didn’t even have a family in Boston.

  “I’m invoicing you for one tetanus shot. Stay out of my way and I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

  I turned away, didn’t want to watch him fawn.

  The trip home that night was smooth, the atmosphere between mirrors calm. It still stung like desert wind on raw flesh, but the way was clear.

  The passage between the dead floor above Harlem and my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen looped through the ever-shifting dream geometry of that place. I imagined myself a comet riding streamers of interstellar gravitational current, and then a bacterium swimming the intestine of a threadworm.

  I don’t navigate so much as intuit. The trip home, taken so many times, has the force of habit, of a well-worn rut.

  I stepped from the mirror into the hallway and waited for my skin to stop prickling. This trip felt like finding what’s at the bottom of the bottle. From outside came the wail of an ambulance, and beneath it, from an adjacent apartment, the rumble and crunch of a sub-woofer.

  I doffed my coat and for the first time in many nights snubbed the whiskey and instead sat at the typewriter.

  * Middle brother, Eutarch, confirmed that all three brothers were at the crime scene. Wonder what Eustace thinks about that. Eustace lied about being home sick that night.

  * Nicole’s scar from attempted rape – Eveylne’s reticence natural. Nicole thinks Eutarch had a hand in setting up the assault. Eutarch and Eury fought about something.

  * See what a good shake does to Eutarch – cops to shake, hopefully bake.

  * From Tritt I learn that someone knew my case load prior to sending me to the scrapyard – they didn’t get it from me or Ailsa. Surveilled.

  * Why me?

  I ripped the sheet from the typewriter, passed an eye over it, and filed it away with the others.

  From my coat in the hall I retrieved the Strawman dossier I’d obtained the previous day from Organized Crime. I returned to the bedroom and sat in the recliner.

  I held it up end-on and groaned. It was a half-inch thick. When Joseph Valachi had outed New York’s Cosa Nostra boss, Vito Genovese, he’d managed to do it in twenty-two pages. Since when did brevity become a vice?

  I folded the cover back and began to read.

  By the time I finished, my eyelids felt like they were made of lead. This was the wash-up: the moniker ‘Strawman’ had first hit the Newer York police radar eleven years prior in the Manhattan precincts, when snitches began using it to gain a premium on their information―a Strawman job meant a big job. After that, it had mushroomed in the other boroughs, and even been heard upstate and on the west coast. It had been tagged to heavy revenue spinners, bank fraud, drug trafficking and laundering. But it seemed the Strawman wasn’t above protection rackets, blackmail and extortion, and even the occasional hit―almost as though those crimes were seasonal sports, a bit of spice on the meat and veg of money making. But as time wore on it became difficult to separate genuine use from hijackers riding on its reputation. The Organized Crime Bureau estimated the size of the Strawman’s network in the hundreds. It was a guess. That was how big they thought the iceberg was based on the bit poking above the water. But even if their guess was too small by half, it still wasn’t big enough to sink a ship like New York. There were some pretty big fish on the OC register, and it was always full.

  I was closing the dossier when a sheet slipped from it. I wasn’t sure how I’d missed it. Maybe I’d slept without realizing. I turned it over. It was an addendum. It recorded an interview by a police detective with a Tombs inmate named Harold Duffy. Harold was a retired slugger who claimed to have run a drug deal for the Strawman a whole four years before the police had ever heard the name. The report was initialed by the interviewing detective, a P.G., whoever that was.

  An addendum stapled to the addendum noted that Harold Duffy was shivved in his cell a week after his confession and died a day later.

  I replaced the loose sheets, and tossed the dossier onto the floor by the recliner. I fished in its cracks for the TV remote. I pressed the On button and the old Akai fired its tube with an arthritic crackle. The screen fuzzed with analog snow a moment, then resolved into CNN. They were still banging on about some Global Financial Crisis.

  I chuckled. They didn’t know the meaning of the term.

  I don’t know how long I watched. New York doesn’t sleep, but some time in the dead of night it pauses to draw breath. It was then that I pulled the woolen comforter off the back of the recliner and draped it over my legs, and drifted off with the TV’s lullaby in my ears, the smell of dust in my nostrils, and a single, long strand of red hair I’d found threaded into the comforter twined around my fingers.

  — 12 —

  Next morning was a slow start until someone put a bomb under it.

  I ate a long, lazy breakfast of ham, eggs, hashbrowns, toast, and coffee at a diner a block over from my apartment. The waitress only raised an eyebrow at my battered face, which was already starting to rainbow. I’ve always been a fast healer.

  I tipped her better than she deserved. Breakfast had come with a side serve of attitude. I put it down to fall. It was coming on. Trees were shedding leaves on a gusting wind that loosed them in great flocks like deranged birds. But my lungs had clung to a residue of spring.

  Ailsa was out again when I arrived at my office. She had left two messages on my desk―one cabled, and one hand delivered.

  A rare mood of deliberation was on me. I sat behind my desk, pulled open the top drawer, and picked through its clutter for my silver letter-opener―a gift from a happy customer. I ti
lted the blade to read the inscription: To JM. Think of me. Carrie.

  The girl had wanted company more than her stolen Yamaha F-three-ten. A genuine antique. I was only able to supply the guitar.

  Okay. So I’d thought of her.

  I gripped the letter-opener’s sculpted handle and sliced the envelope open.

  Through the slit I’d made, I teased out a single sheet. The sheet’s letterhead was a stylized lighthouse, which I knew to mean the New York Blaze without having to read the caption. The Blaze was an independent rag, older than most, and employer of Arnold Coffey, the patron of the Whipped Elephant and one time feted hack.

  My mood of deliberation evaporated before I read a word of his message, which consisted of a single line. Hand delivered messages weren’t the most expensive way to talk to someone, but neither were they cheap. Coffey’s expense line with the Blaze for ferretting out scoops was healthy enough to cover it, but Coffey had known tougher times; his glib pen should have at least filled the sheet.

  I read the message. All it said was: Heard a rumor. Now’s a good time for that holiday you talked about. The Keys are lovely this time of year.

  I threw the letter-opener into the drawer, slammed it shut, and picked up the cable and tore it open with my hands.

  It was from Carl Inker. My curiosity burned to know what omens his all-seeing eye had read in the cable flicker that, night and day, washed the walls of his nook.

  His message was even shorter than Coffey’s.

  It said:

  CHECKED HOW SPEIGH ESTATE NOW STANDS BUT NOTHING CLEAR STOP COPS PUT POI ON JM TIME TO DIVE STOP WILL KEEP POKING

  So now I was a Person Of Interest. He was telling me the cops wanted to question me.

  I scratched my head and read it again.

  Nope. Still sounded too Delphic, not enough Oracle.

  Either Inker had been drinking the communion wine or he assumed I knew something I didn’t. His message read like paragraph one of page fifty-three of a book I’d browsed in a store.

  I found the missing piece of information a minute later tucked under Ailsa’s arm. She came huffing up the stairs with her head down, and collided with me on the fifth-floor landing. Out of breath, she just thrust a paper into my hands.

  I flopped the heavy rag open to the headline. Went no further. There, beneath the Times banner, in great gothic capitals was written: Room of Blood―Second Speigh Heir Murdered.

  I scanned the page, ransacking it for the vital statistics. Facts were sparse. It had been written in a hurry. Murder had been done some time after Eutarch had left the Diogenes late Wednesday afternoon (shortly after Nicole and me) and before midnight, when the scene was discovered by a bellboy at the Landmark Hotel.

  Shoving the paper under my arm, I gave Ailsa a quick kiss on the cheek. I took one step down and turned.

  “Didn’t I tell you to take the rest of the week off?”

  She pursed her lips and said archly, “No.”

  “Take the rest of the week off.”

  “No,” she said, tucking her hand into the crook of her waist. “What’s going on?”

  “You work too hard. Go visit with that aunt of yours in Scranton―what’s her name, Eldred.”

  “It’s Elspeth, and you know that.” I saw her rummage in her mind for an excuse to stay. “The gas gets cut off tomorrow. Are you going to take time out of getting beat up to pay it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Marked in my diary. Right after the morning flagellation.”

  I took her by the shoulders and pressed her down the stairs until she stopped resisting. I put her in a cab, then hailed one for myself.

  Fifty minutes later I was striding down a corridor on the 51st floor of the Landmark Hotel, my feet scuffing the plush carpet’s loose nap.

  I was a wanted man on a beeline for the honeypot.

  My coat was doffed, stuffed in a cloakroom off the lobby. I’d left my tie in its pocket, and undone the top two buttons of my shirt. Into my hatband was stuck my card, deep enough to obscure the print. Tucked under my arm was a parcel wrapped in brown paper, and in my hands I held my notepad and pen, two-handed, like a tennis ace about to serve. Which altered my gait, canted my back. I’d leafed past the page with the doodle of a flower missing a petal, past the notes from my interview with Evelyn Speigh. Fresh murder, fresh page.

  The hunched backs of the press mob were the first sign I was at the crime scene. The mob was mottled shades of brown by damp from the sifting rain outside, and surged like a live thing. Camera flash blazed over it randomly.

  I merged with it, peering over heads and shoulders, and reconnoitered.

  A snatch of view of the doorway beyond the police cordon confirmed my hope. Tunney’s men weren’t holding the fort. I didn’t recognize the officer barring the door with a chest like a horse’s rump, which meant the DA had punted the case across departments―and not, thankfully, all the way to the feds.

  The murder had happened in the Giuliani Suite, which was one of only five deluxe suites on the floor. They were arranged in a pentagon around a core that held the elevator bank and stairwell. Ringing the core was a space as wide as a normal hotel room, and a chunk of this had been carved out-of-bounds by the tape cordon.

  The cordon was Step Seven in the manual: ensure no access by unauthorized persons—i.e., me. For Euripides murder, Tunney had been my skeleton key. Was no longer.

  But I wanted into that room. Needed to get close enough to feel the crime. To find the connection, if any, to the one I was being paid to solve. To see if someone was making a collection of Speighs. (My mind flitted to Nicole, and just as quick I batted her image away. I didn’t need it running interference.)

  So I’d had to come up with my play.

  I’d done that downstairs in a cafe across the street from the Landmark. I’d ordered four shots of espresso in the smallest cup that would hold them. Nearest thing to jumper leads that don’t slur your speech in this city. Then let the coffee go cold waiting to see which uniforms came across the street for a cheap lunch. No familiar faces, as confirmed.

  The coffee had for once stirred no desire. My mind was thick with the fog of war. Someone wanted my blood. My head insisted on weighing candidates―Tunney? His pals a few floors up in Organized Crime? The DA’s office? Ailsa’s Aunt Eldred? No one jumped out, but they kept on coming around, like a line of abandoned luggage. The fog was there to stay until time and chance blew it away. The best I could do was wade in hands outstretched.

  So I’d mentally charted the ebb and flow of the crime scene 51 floors above my little stake-out: first cops to respond, raising the alarm, squaring away the crime scene with heavy steps of veiled zest; the pay-rolled dicks and their lackeys sniffing out the human shrapnel of witnesses before they scattered too far; the DA in a delirium, on his rocket to the nearest judge, and back with the warrant so fast the air still smelt of his aftershave; the investigators who began the outright tedium of inventorying the scene down to the last cinder and misshapen hair.

  A busy nest of ants indeed. Familiar enough.

  But to enter the nest and―just as important―leave it, one couldn’t be a plump grasshopper named McIlwraith. One had to ply some magic. One had to be the wasp or the moth larva. Wasps invade nests by releasing a pheromone that drives ants so nuts they don’t notice the wasp; moth larva look so much like ant larva the ants mistake them for their own, carry them home, and put on the silver service.

  So there I was. At the mouth of the ant nest.

  First, the moth.

  I retraced my steps to the elevator, sighed at the shrunken old operator, took it down a floor, got out, and found the men’s restroom. I waited in a cubicle for a man at the urinal to finish―guy must’ve drunk the keg himself―then pulled the parcel from beneath my arm. I tore it open, shed my pants and shirt, and redressed in the pleated grey trousers and spotless white collar I’d bought at a menswear on the way to the hotel. I took the card from my hatband, stuck a paper clip over it, and dropped it
on its end into the pocket of my new shirt. I wrapped my old shirt, pants, and hat in the torn paper, and stowed them behind the cistern.

  I took one look at myself in a poster-sized mirror, wet my hands and swept my hair back, and thought briefly of home.

  I left the mensroom and took the stairs to the landing on the 51st floor, and paused to listen. Didn’t have long to wait. The timing was neat.

  A commotion rode through the press mob, and it disappeared as fast as dishwater, barring a few floaters, down a plungered drain. The plunger in this case was a rumor, sown in the lobby by an urchin owning a shiny new coin, that the deceased’s brother, Mr. Eustace Speigh, the only remaining male heir to the Speigh Empire, had arrived. A contingent of hacks and photographers bustled past me on a mission to forestall the elevators at the 50th.

  But that was just clearing the decks. Next came the wasp.

  I knew she’d arrived when I heard a conversation start up between a man and a woman. It sounded like a soprano parking a bulldozer.

  That was my cue. I rounded the exposed-concrete of the firewall and saw a Latino girl whose raw beauty was undimmed by the house whites she wore. She was speaking not to the cop on the door, but the one guarding a slowly accumulating pile of evidence. It sat bagged and tagged in an assortment of containers and envelopes in what CSIs call the quarantine.

  He had his hands up, and with a broad smile was saying ‘No’ is as many ways he could think to make her keep talking.

  I walked straight over to them, under cover of boldness, and interrupted her plea to bring the officers contraband sustenance (A day’s wage was riding on her performance―but she didn’t know I was footing the bill; a shiftless laundry hand downstairs was playing escrow and picking up a commission for sourcing her in the first place.)

  “Bloods are botched,” I said to the cop. “Need doing over.”

  The cop’s eyes flickered in annoyance before he detached his attention from the Latino and gave it to me. Perfect.

  He scanned me and I supplied what he wanted: “Stanton. I’m with the ME”―there is a Stanton that works for the ME. I met him once. I hoped he wasn’t on this case―“The Bloods we got were wet.”