Free Strawman Made Steel by Brett Adams

loved my brother.”
    “Loved or love?”
    He grunted, and moved to the sideboard to
pour himself a drink. With his back turned he spoke to his mother. “I don’t
know why you hired this guy. Damn cops can do the job.”
    “The police aren’t here,” she said. “He
is.”
    He turned, took a slug of whatever, and ran
a speculative eye over me again with that same overtness.
    “So he is,” he said. Then, “And what have
you discovered, Mr. ...?”
    “McIlwraith.”
    “Mr. McIlwraith.”
    I told him. He seemed to think about it.
    He said, “Okay. So you’re more than a
pretty face. What do you want?”
    “I’ll think about that. For now, just
answers to a couple of questions.”
    He sculled the rest of his drink and said,
“Shoot.”
    “Where were you the night your brother was
murdered?”
    He didn’t bat an eyelid.
    “My townhouse, staring into the john on
account of my mother’s chicken pot pie,” he said. “Ask my staff.”
    “I wasn’t the one who marinated the chicken
in whisky,” said Evelyne, gazing through the French windows at the sifting
greenery.
    I said to Eustace, “Do I have your
permission to poke around Alltron Corp?”
    He laughed. “Since when did dicks ask
permission to poke their noses in? Sure. I’ll send word. Tell ‘em to roll out
the carpet.”
    He leaned down, pecked his mother on the
cheek, and strode toward the hall.
    “One more,” I said.
    He halted and turned, gathered moss.
    “Your father,” I said. “What sort of a man
was he?”
    “That’s easy,” he said. His smile had left.
“He was the guy they first wrote that rags to riches story about. Son of Swiss
immigrants who washed up here with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Tough as nails when he had to be. But he made it didn’t he.”
    He left and I heard a door boom shut.
    I glanced up at the portraits floating
against the wall in the adjoining hall. Yeah, they were sneering at me.
    “Liselle,” said Mrs. Speigh. She had come
to my side without me hearing her. “The money. The lineage. The pedigree ,”
she said. Her voice dripped with something that would polish brass. “All of it
borne in the name Liselle, my maiden name; itself a common first name borrowed
a long time ago for a reason no one remembers.”
    “And your husband?”
    “Was a gutter rat, then gopher, then
packer, then floor manager, then... Well, you have to have a chunk of capital
even to make it onto the map of a Liselle.”
    I didn’t need to ask where that first chunk
of capital sat. My mind went to a decrepit warehouse squashed in the tumbledown
of Eastside.
    “Would you like to meet my husband?” she
said.
    I wondered what passed for a martini in
this place. I didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait for one. She brushed past me
into the hall, went to a mantelpiece and retrieved a black cylinder about the
size of a saltcellar. It was smooth with a dull sheen. She unscrewed its top
and rummaged in it with her thin fingers.
    When she withdrew her hand she turned to
me, smiled, and said, “Mr. McIlwraith meet Mr. Speigh Senior.” She turned her hand
over and mine moved like a robot to catch whatever she held.
    Something fell into my hand about the size
and weight of a large cockroach. I held it close. It was a finger. Dry and
brown, with a nail like a snail shell, but unmistakably a finger.
    With effort I rode an urge to retch, and
with a dip of my head said, “Mr. Speigh.”
    “You’re gorgeous,” Mrs. Speigh said. “That
was his ring finger. He wore a heavy gold band. You can still see the imprint.”
    I prodded it. Ring fingers made me nervous.
Why the ring finger when the man presumably had two perfectly good pinkies?
    She gazed at it a moment longer, then said,
“Here, give that back to me.” I tipped the finger back into her pale hand.
    She dropped it back into the cylinder like
an uneaten hors d'oeuvre, screwed the top on, and replaced the cylinder on the
mantelpiece.
    “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m