Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  “That time of the month, McIlwraith?”

  “Every day of the month, Coffey” I said, and took the stool next to the sub-editor of the Blaze’s social pages. He was leaning on the bar, and from the pile of ash in the tray at his elbow, looked like he’d chain smoked the morning away on that stool.

  “Not dead yet?” he said, and coughed a puff of ash out of the tray.

  “Disappointed?” I said. “You should talk.”

  “None as sanctimonious as a reformer,” he said, and drew heavily on the cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. His lips tugged around it unevenly, warped by the dead nerves on one side of his face.

  “I’m no reformer,” I said. “I just don’t want that morning to come where I’m contemplating my own lung for breakfast.”

  “Charmed,” he said, and called for a drink. “Bet you fart middle-C too.”

  I added my own order and scanned the room again to see if anyone was still taking too much of an interest in me.

  “You didn’t get my cable, then?” he said, and a tightness came into his face.

  “I got it. Took a cure in the country. Did wonders for my aura. Got a little purple into it.”

  Coffey’s eyes travelled over my face and marked the divots the bluestone had taken.

  “So I see. But what I had in mind was more of a sabbatical. See the sights, breath the air”―the bartender put our drinks on the bar with a rap of wood. Coffey brought his to his lips, paused―“avoid death,” he finished, and sculled.

  Coffey excused himself and headed for the john. I sat with a hand curled around the cool glass and tried not to feel the weight of stolen glances.

  A sensation flitted through my mind like a long-forgotten memory half-seen. Its substance was the deliciousness of doing nothing, of an idle afternoon. I felt weary with a mind too long harnessed. I wanted to dump my head at the city limits and slap its rump.

  It was in that frame of mind, straining not to be there, not to be anywhere, that I saw a runner appear at the entrance to the bar. The boy’s body was framed a moment in the doorway, before it entered swift as a thrush into the smoke and press of the room.

  I tried to imagine the boy to be a force of nature. He was a wave curling on a beach, a cloud in the shape of a boy. But my ears caught his voice and the illusion fell apart. He was asking after Coffey.

  “Kid,” I said, loud enough to carry, and when he looked my way, flicked a thumb toward the john.

  I watched him make a bee-line for the men’s and tried to imagine he was a tumbleweed driven on the wind.

  No good. The boy was a runner, and in his hand was a message for Mr. Grover St-Claire Coffey, Esquire, whom he would find pissing four-hundred proof into one of the Whipped Elephant’s shallow urinals.

  I gripped my glass and raised it to my lips, and said, “To work life balance.”

  That was when a hurricane tore out of the john. A Cat-Five, at a guess, and much more believable than my tumbleweed.

  The hurricane wore Coffey’s grey flannel suit and bore down on me with inhuman speed. It slapped the glass from my lips before a drop had crossed them. The glass sailed through the air, slewing liquid, to bounce once on a table and smash into the wall.

  The hurricane had an eye, and it engulfed the room in astonished silence.

  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.

  “Did your mother get along with him?”

  “Hated him,” said Nicole with certainty. “Like her mother.”

  “Why?”

  Nicole stretched her head upon her neck, arched her back, and laughed for the first time that afternoon.

  “Same answer.”

  “You don’t know,” I said. “Yet you all guess. What a family, a regular Cluedo game.”

  “A what?”

  “Foreign term. Never mind.”

  She turned more pages. I silently absorbed.

  Dorrita Speigh, the Dorrita Speigh of turned up sleeves and frank gaze, had impressed me. But as time wore on, that afternoon’s and the years accreted in geological layers of image, I saw with a pang of loss the same flaccidity creep in around the eyes of Dorrita Speigh, the same milkiness cloud his piercing gaze.

  When she reached the end of the photoalbum, she rose and retrieved another without a word. The sun dropped from the sky while we waded deep into the collective memory of Liselle-become-Speigh.

  Nicole paused often over photos of Eury, occasionally touching one with a finger as if it were a talisman. In time, too, she paused to gather in the memory of Eutarch. I pretended not to notice the tear that crested her cheekbone to leave a glimmering trail on her skin.

  The sun had disappeared altogether when Nicole poured herself wine from a decanter. Blood-red it looked in the poor light of the angle-poise lamp at the arm of the couch.

  I unfolded the corner of a photo that had dog-eared, and was surprised by the touch of her finger on mine.

  “How did you get this scar?” she said. Her finger slipped along mine to reveal a band of red flesh a quarter-inch wide. Her touch came to rest on my knuckle. It felt like I’d shorted the mains.

  “Cable-strippers,” I said.

  “Good God,” she said. “Who did that to you?”

  “A madman,” I said.

  I didn’t tell her the madman had been me.

  Having opened the lid on her own memories, she respected the privacy of mine. I liked that about her.