Strawman Made Steel

by Brett Adams

  The cabin floor grated as it was pulled off the line and dragged into an entry port. Someone was getting on.

  The door slid open and strong perfume puffed into the cabin heralding the arrivals. An elderly couple, the woman wrapped in layers of silk, her head covered in a motley of velvet and feathers, the man dour in double-breasted dark pinstripes and tailored shoes. His pocket square was a burst of yellow and the only telltale he wasn’t a funeral director. I guessed they were heading for a society soirée on an upper level. I guessed the next time either of them hit the streets of New York would be in a coffin. Maybe the man was dressed for the event.

  They sat on the bench at right angles to us. The woman smiled that well-practiced smile that doesn’t wrinkle the cheeks. I returned the smile and watched as her eyes travelled over me. When they hit the .38, the smile let go of the rest of her face.

  I addressed myself to the surgeon again. “Do you know how many homicides are committed by loved ones? By partners? Lovers? It’s an astonishing statistic. A horrific statistic. An indictment of the human race.”

  I didn’t get an answer from him, so I tried the couple.

  I got no response from the woman either. She was searching for the exit cable. Her husband nodded at me as if I’d commented on the weather. A minute later the surgeon and I had the cabin to ourselves again.

  Another couple of minutes and it was our stop. I hauled him upright and prodded him in front of me. I managed only one wrong turn before finding the corridor I wanted. It was still bare. No one had bothered to hang a frame or arrange some flowers. But it no longer felt like it needed murder holes. The thing it reminded me of most of all now was the Bridge of Sighs that arched from the real world into the Tombs all that way below our feet.

  At the end of the corridor the same wooden door barred our way with its lion’s head knocker. I gave the lion a pat and rapped once on the door.

  We were greeted by the eunuch. He hesitated before opening the door wide. Inside, in the vestibule, he held his hand out for my gun.

  “This?” I said. “It’s a cigarette lighter.”

  He had to shift a lot of flesh, but he proved he could smile. He turned on his heel and left us.

  The next sentinel to challenge us was Evelyne’s strip-thin butler. He still looked like doped fabric stretched over a wooden frame. His gaze took us in with that indefatigable calm common to his trade.

  “Mr. McIlwraith, it is a pleasure,” he whispered. “Whom did you wish to see?”

  “Mrs. Speigh,” I said.

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He raised his hand. “I’m afraid then you will need to make another appointment. She is entertaining visitors.”

  “Family?” I said.

  He pursed his lips coyly.

  “Perfect,” I said, and prodded the surgeon forward.

  “I’m afraid I cannot―” the butler began.

  I waved the .38 at him. “Need a light?” I said.

  A calm fell over his face. He stepped to one side and with a tilt of his head indicated for us to pass.

  We went single file beneath the twin, sweeping staircases, and past the fixed glares of Liselles of Christmas past. The drawing room where Evelyne had reclined and pronounced judgment on her family was dark and silent. A gentle breeze probed between the open glass doors that gave onto the terrace and gardens. I pushed the surgeon out into the cool night air and let him trailblaze through the curtain of thorny vine.

  I kept the point of the barrel in the small of his back while I attempted to button my coat with one hand. It was cold, near dew-point. And silent, as if the city noise down below had to struggle against gravity, and failed.

  As we emerged from beneath the trees I spotted a table and, clustered around it, three people lit by hurricane lamps scattered across the lawn and gardens.

  But for a moment all I saw was the sky. Swept away was the day’s smog. Even the high haze of cirrus was gone. I stared straight into the unimaginable Deep. The stars burned at arm’s reach. I tilted my head back as if they were rain and for a moment felt clean. Fortified.

  A gasp signaled that someone had seen us. As we approached the table I saw it was Nicole. She half-rose and turned toward us.

  “Hi, Honey,” I said. “Don’t get up on account of us.”

  Silent as death, the butler appeared and arranged two extra chairs around the table. The man had style.

  I pushed the surgeon into one, and sat in the other, gun trained on him.

  “Janus―” Nicole began and was interrupted by Eustace Speigh.

  “Trust a shamus to crash a party,” he said, but I chose to find a twinkle in his eye. He didn’t seem any happier since last we’d met.

  “Crash?” I said. “Access all areas, wasn’t it?”

  Evelyne sat resplendent in a chiffon evening robe, her neck swathed against the cold by a delicate fur. Her gaze travelled from me to the surgeon and back again. Her expression was unreadable.

  At last she said, “Good evening, Mr. McIlwraith. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “I thought you’d like to know,” I said, and swept my hand in a gesture that took in the two Speigh women. “I’m done.”

  Nicole’s brow wrinkled in confusion. She glanced from the gun to its target. “What are you playing at, Janus? Have you been drinking?”

  I wished.

  She continued, “And why are you holding Mister Dunning at gun point?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Father’s surgeon,” said Nicole. “You must know that.”

  I turned to look at Dunning as if to confirm this information.

  “Oh, his surgeon. Yeah,” I said. “And, if I may add something of importance to my two clients―” I nodded in turn to Nicole and Evelyne “―also his murderer.”

  While I waited for a reaction, I turned toward the butler who was waiting in the half-dark between lampfall, motionless as the gargoyles perching on the ledge nearby, and said, “Can I get a drink?”

  “Certainly, sir,” he said.

  “Sour and straight,” I said. “No spit.”

  Evelyne was the first to speak. “Is this another example of your darling wit? A practical joke?”

  “I seem to remember expressing a suspicion along those lines days ago,” I said. “Do you remember? But, no. I’m quite serious. You engaged my services to find your son’s murderer. Here he is. It just so happens he also murdered your husband.”

  I watched Eustace. His figure was a patchwork of dark and light carved by the lamplight, but even so I marked how his back came away from his chair. The fingers of his free hand, resting on the table, curled together. He watched Dunning, but he spoke to me.

  “Spill it, McIlwraith. I’m not in the mood for games.”

  The butler returned with my drink. I drank and took a moment to lubricate my tongue. From the corner of my eye I noticed one of Eustace’s fists disappear from the table.

  I trained my revolver on him and said, “Nicole, would you kindly relieve your remaining brother of his firearm. I’d just as rather not have another murder tonight.”

  For a moment Eustace’s eyes seemed to blaze with a real fire. Then the fire died, leaving in its wake a blankness that only a fool would think less dangerous. With a jerk, he tossed a gun across the table. It skidded and clunked to a stop next to Nicole’s plate. She glanced at it once and left it where it lay.

  He said, “You’d better be playing it straight. It’s worth your life.”

  “You tried that already,” I said with a grim smile. “Apology accepted.”

  Evelyne spoke to Dunning. “It seems Mr. McIlwraith believes what he says, but surely it can’t be true, Peter?”

  The surgeon glanced at me and replied, “You have entangled yourself with a madman, Evelyne. What can I say?”

  His reply seemed to hearten her. She turned to me and said, “Janus, how could Peter be implicated in any of this? He is a medical man. A surgeon. What
on earth would drive him to...” Her eyes glinted with moisture.

  “I’m tempted to say Love,” I said. “But that wouldn’t be fair to Love. Let’s settle for the second oldest in the book: Cain’s sin. Jealousy.”

  Revulsion rippled through Evelyne’s features as her hand rose to her breast. “But I―”

  “Not for you, Evelyne. He was jealous of Dorrita’s affections.”

  The silence that fell around the table told me I wasn’t turning fresh sod. I drained the last drop of my drink and put the glass on the table. The butler didn’t offer me another. My guess is he knew I’d just pulled the ignition pin on the table. It was about to explode.

  When it did, it was Evelyne’s voice that penetrated.

  “Can you prove it?”

  Eustace reared out of his chair. I had to wave him down with the gun.

  “You sound like a cop, mother,” he barked. “Look at him! You can see it in his eyes.”

  “And Eury?” said Nicole. Tears had left glistening tracks over her cheeks. “I― I don’t understand, Janus.”

  “Be glad you don’t,” I said. “Warped love makes the most twisted tracks of all.”

  To Evelyne I said, “I work on hunches.” I stood and rounded the table keeping the gun trained on a spot between Eustace and Dunning. “He confessed on the way up here.” I eyed the chairs around the table looking for something hefty. But they were wooden, miter joints. Too flimsy. I kept scanning the periphery of my vision as I spoke. “But I’m guessing Mr. Dunning won’t oblige by repeating his confession. I will need to substantiate my claim.”

  I judged I had moments before Eustace lost his rein on the fury that was making him tremble.

  There was silence. Somewhere far off a gull cried.

  My gaze dipped a moment to gauge the weight of a flowerpot. Too heavy.

  Then a gunshot tore the air.

  And another.

  I spun to see Dunning ragdoll onto the dewy grass. He had a hole in his chest and a hole in his head.

  Eustace’s gun was trained on him, trembling at the end of Evelyne’s arm.

  She said in monotone, “He went for the gun.” Her gaze found me. “I was first.”

  “Put it down, Evelyne,” I said. The .38 persuaded her. She handed the gun to Eustace.

  It seemed then that everyone but me breathed for the first time in minutes. Nicole wept silently. Eustace ordered the butler to call the cops. Evelyne seemed frozen in place.

  “What are you going to tell the cops when they get here?” I said to Eustace. He shrugged as if it were a dumb question.

  Evelyne said in a small voice, “Tell me you do have proof.”

  I shrugged.

  Then froze.

  Nicole sniffed up a tear, and said, “How did―” but I had to cut her off. I was getting my bones on the spirit world.

  “Proof?” I said in answer to Evelyne’s question. “No, not me. But I know the guy who does.”

  Eustace’s brow crinkled in confusion. “Who?”

  “Your father. Dorrita Speigh. He’s here, you know.”

  “Janus!” Nicole whispered hoarsely.

  From the corner of my eye I saw a shovel planted in the garden bed not five feet beyond the nearest hurricane lamp. It looked to have a weathered, hardwood shaft and cast-iron blade. Sturdy enough.

  I grasped it, and said, “How does that verse go? ‘His blood cries out to me from the ground.’”

  I stepped toward the flowerbed, and pivoting on my left foot, built speed like a hammer-thrower. I became a man-size spinning top. The shovel clove the air―

  And crunched on the smooth, stony back of the nearest gargoyle. The stone broke beneath the blow. Curved segments collapsed inward like pieces of old Easter egg, leaving a jagged window on something dark.

  I swung the shovel again and the something dark fell out and away. It sprawled across the freshly turned earth of the flowerbed. It was covered in perished plastic, which split, and from it spilled a human pelvis bone.

  Nicole screamed.

  Eustace cried out with a sound that made no words, and I heard his chair clatter against the table.

  I kneeled by the remains.

  “I’d say the remains of one homo-sapiens-sapiens – man. Caucasian. Male of the species.”

  With the shovel I pried among the plastic and bone. I found an arm, and propped it on the shovel blade to examine the bones of its hand. It was short one finger. A ring finger.

  “By name, Dorrita Speigh.”

  I peeled plastic away from a round lump and found the skull. Maybe I had a touch of the blood-simples again, but the eye sockets seemed to stare with an unquiet melancholy.

  “What’s that?” I bent my ear over the skull that had once encased the brain of Dorrita Speigh. “You don’t say?”

  I swiveled to stare at Evelyne. She returned my stare, and I saw understanding erase her expression. She knew I knew she knew.

  “Only one sin older than Cain’s,” I said. “Adam’s. The little ‘g’ god.”

  And now the end game.

  “Eustace,” she commanded. “Shoot Mr. McIlwraith.”

  “Don’t be too hasty,” I said, and stood. I crab-walked to quarter Eveylne and her son. “Don’t you want to hear it all?”

  At another time, Eustace’s face would have made a funny sight. Angry and bewildered, like a bear that had been stung on the nose.

  “Kill him,” she said.

  “The second time I met your mother,” I said, “she told me she was not above getting her hands dirty. I pointed out she was wearing gloves.” I pinned Eustace with my gaze. “But make no mistake, Mr. Speigh. Hers is the hand that moves the glove.” I glanced at the bloodied flesh that had once been a surgeon. “Don’t you be the next glove.”

  I watched Eustace like a hawk, tensed to react in a split second.

  The night air stretched like a bowstring.

  Then I saw what I’d hoped for. The slightest shift of posture. He rested on his back leg. The gun in his hand dipped a fraction toward the ground. He’d decided to hear me out.

  I went on before he changed his mind.

  “Your mother killed your father. Then Eury, and Eutarch. And next...”

  I watched him fill in the blank.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Odds on you were next.” I waggled my fingers. “You want to keep your middle fingers? Polite guy like you would need both.”

  When Eustace spoke again it was to his mother. “So you would kill me too, and Nicole?”

  “No, no,” I interrupted. “You’re not getting it at all. She would never kill her daughter.”

  “Mother, why?” Nicole breathed.

  “The Liselle well is poisoned,” I said. “It’s a slow poison, but deadly.

  “I don’t know how far back it goes, but at least as far as your grandfather. He taught your grandmother to hate. She taught your mother to hate. And,” I turned to Nicole, and with my finger traced the scar beneath her chin, “she’s begun your education.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” Nicole whispered. Her eyes got that faraway look. Maybe she was hoping to wake from a dream.

  “Sense?” I said. “Sure it does. You just need to look at it through the right lens.

  “Imagine a girl that grows into a woman learning from the man closest to her―her own father―that what men do is abuse, destroy, and shame. And then one day that woman is shocked to discover true love, and escapes into the arms of a husband. Now what do you think it was like to later discover that the man she loved wasn’t so different, after all? That maybe the Liselle poison had spread a little. I think it would be a spark to a powder keg. A friend of mine would call it a brain spasm.”

  The night was silent but for the hiss of a rising breeze.

  “How do you like that lens? Make sense?”

  I got no response from Nicole. She still appeared to be reaching for a dreamscape.

  “Of course, there might have been another girl. This other girl
might have had what we could call a congenital brain spasm. She might have married an ex-gutter-rat precisely for his street capital: his muscle, his street-smarts. Pump a billion dollars into that capital and sooner or later a smart women could build an empire―but not one that would show its true face in daylight. That woman might even have the patience to see if her sons were the type to toe the line―”

  Nicole returned with a snap, and said to her mother through gritted teeth, “What could Eury possibly have done to you?”

  “Only steal away your mother’s most cherished possession,” I said. “Aim to take it away from New York. Take her away from a mother that would give a man the okay to lay violent hands on her daughter. They probably fought about it at the party.”

  I glanced at Evelyne for confirmation, but she was silent and still.

  “That lens is just plain cracked down the center,” I said.

  “But, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t employed for a psych profile. I was employed to find who murdered Eury Speigh. Well,” I said, and took a last draught of Evelyne Speigh, “there she is.”

  The butler glided out of the darkness and informed us the police had been contacted.

  “He’s lying,” Evelyne said to Eustace. “You are a dear boy. I couldn’t harm a hair on your head. But if you want your mother to spend the rest of her life rotting in the Tombs, all you need do is stand there.”

  Eustace raised the gun.

  Movement startled me.

  Nicole stood in front of me, between me and the bullet.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Eustace spoke. “Relax, Nicole. That’s not going to happen.”

  He swung the gun toward his mother, and as a fat tear slid incongruously down his hard profile, he said to the butler, “Tell the cops we’re waiting.”

  In that half light, Evelyne didn’t look beautiful any more. Shadows carved her down to the bone till she looked like nothing more than raw structure, made to endure.

  I leaned over to the crown of Nicole’s head and kissed her golden hair.

  Then I strode from that garden without looking back. The cops would have to catch me up later.

  I needed a bath.

  Or a fire.