Strawman Made Steel Read Online Free Page A

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 his
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.
    Fredrick Carl Inker, principal and only.
Inker was one of those guys who had been doomed by the census takers to tick ‘Other’
for occupation until terms like ‘brokerage’ became vogue. He was part bard,
part genius―only, no one knew at what, himself included. He was a restless
spirit whose latest caper was to read the Wall Street ticker like tealeaves.
    I rapped on the glass and entered. A smell
of carbon hung in his small, dimly lit reception room. In one corner a woman
transcribed stock figures direct from an expensive fiber link that had been
plumbed in. Names and figures encoded in light strobed the blank wall above her
shorthand machine. Her fingers were a blur.
    If she noticed me enter, she gave no sign.
Then the inner door banged onto its limits and Inker emerged. His glass eye
seemed fixed on the typist, but the other burned in my direction.
    “Mid pac for Mid west is an
expensive typo, honey―” he bellowed before his tongue caught up with his eye.
“Mac? Come on in. Coffee?”
    Inker was a weather system, a chaotic
object. His pants were checked and his shirt striped, and the first impression
I got was of a court jester in motley.
    I followed him into his inner sanctum,
swept crap off a seat, and took a load off.
    “Black and five, thanks,” I said. “And