Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  The road was steep and got steeper. I changed gears and pushed the car upward and wondered where I was going. The view was pretty nice up here. I guessed even movie stars liked to take long drives in the hills now and again to admire it.

  The telephone that sat in the cradle between me and the passenger seat rang. I picked it up.

  “Having a nice time, Chief?”

  Ada always spoke before I could say hello.

  “Nice day for a drive, Ada.”

  “You’re right there. Turn left.”

  I turned left with one hand on the wheel. The narrow winding tarmacked road became a narrow winding dirt road and after a minute there was nothing in the rearview but a brown cloud of dust. Seemed like a strange place to be going.

  “What was Charles David doing up here anyway?” I asked.

  “Maybe he was taking a hike,” said Ada. “People hike. Even actors.”

  I passed a small sign on a big pole but the sign was covered with dust and I couldn’t read it so I kept going. Then the road ended in a big gate and beyond the gate was a building made of corrugated steel, something like a Quonset hut but smaller and with a flat roof. In front of the hut was nothing except a pickup in a surprising shade of lime green. That was all I could see. The road up to the gate was lined with tall brush that obscured the view of anything else.

  The gate was closed. It was also locked.

  “Dead end,” I said.

  “Then better bring it back to life,” said Ada.

  I put the telephone down and left the car running. The padlock on the gate was pretty big and strong but I was bigger and stronger and I broke it without breaking a sweat. Now unlocked, the gate swung open under its own gravity and I walked back to the car and got in it and drove through. I stopped next to the pickup, then saw what was out of the rearview and reversed, swung the car around, and backed up against the hut.

  I killed the engine and stepped out, taking a moment to take in the view, which was worthy of quiet appreciation. It looked like half of California was spread out below me, beyond the hills that tumbled down and vanished into a plain as flat as an ocean. I was too far and too high to see any detail, but Hollywood basked in the afternoon sun and that sun caught on windshields and windows and the metal roofs of some buildings, making the whole place sparkle like seaweed washed up on a beach. A little farther, on the left, was downtown Los Angeles proper, a few tall fingers grasping through a reddish haze.

  I scanned back to Hollywood and turned down the brightness in my optics and had a little look but I couldn’t see my office.

  The telephone rang again. I turned back to the car and reached into it and pulled the phone out, stretching the coiled lead out through the door as I stood and kept on drinking in the scene.

  I got the first word in this time.

  “Ada.”

  “Wow, Raymondo, what a view, baby!”

  I smiled on the inside. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so enthusiastic.”

  “Hey,” she said, “I don’t get out much.”

  “You don’t get out ever. And you have no idea what I’m looking at.”

  “Can’t a gal use her imagination? I know your location and I know your elevation. The rest is easy, like that.”

  There was a sound like someone snapping their fingers in my ear.

  “I’m not sure you can guess what else is up here, Ada.”

  “So why don’t you give me the tour, Chief?”

  I switched the phone to my other hand and rested my free arm on the roof of the car. I looked down to my right. The steel hut and its parking lot—if you could call it a parking lot—were on a plateau that was artificial, cut into the hillside. The edge of the plateau dropped off fiercely, which allowed the remarkable view. But just over the edge was the top of another structure. It was a series of white panels, elaborately arranged into geometric shapes on the front of wooden telegraph poles and crisscrossed with smaller poles as reinforcement. Even though I couldn’t see any more than the top of edge of the structure and even though I was looking at it from behind, it didn’t take much detective work to see what it was.

  I was standing in a dirt parking lot that overlooked the back of the Hollywood Sign. I said as much to Ada, and then I said, “Seems our movie star was sightseeing.”

  “Go take a closer look, Chief. Don’t worry about the telephone. Nobody is watching.”

  I felt a little electric surge down my left side. I was supposed to use the phone when I talked to Ada outside the office. I was programmed for it. It was part of the act. Even though Ada talked to me directly inside my mind, Thornton figured it wasn’t a good look for a robot to be seen talking to himself in the street.

  But that was just the half of it. The telephone might have sounded dead when we called each other, but it wasn’t really. I still spoke out loud when I used it but there was a signal howling down the line, a pulse Thornton wove around the frequencies of the standard telephone service, a hidden trick that connected me to Ada directly. That signal took my voice and made it inaudible and undetectable—the perfect scramble, proof against any kind of tapping.

  Thornton was a clever man who’d figured that a robot PI and his control computer probably needed a little privacy.

  The only thing he hadn’t figured out was that the control computer he’d built for me was smarter than he was. In the five years we’d been in business, Ada had made some changes of her own, and not just to me.

  Which is to say the telephone in the car was a special kind of telephone, and if I stayed within a certain range of it I could pick up Thornton’s secret pulse signal even when the phone was on the hook. The signal was much weaker and the range was lousy, but it was okay.

  It still made my circuits ache, but Ada hadn’t solved that little bit of programming angst yet.

  I glanced back at the hut. There was no sound from it and no movement through the three dusty windows in its side. There was a faint ticking sound, which I put down to the heat of the Hollywood sun shining down on the hut’s metal roof.

  With not a little effort I hung up the telephone. Somewhere I thought I heard Ada laughing and there was a creak like she was leaning back in the chair behind my desk back at the office.

  I moved across the parking lot. The drop at the edge was pretty steep, but to my left there was a track that was still steep but a little better. I headed down it slowly. I slid on the dirt. I looked down the hill. I didn’t like the possibilities if I lost my balance.

  I frowned on the inside. “If Charles David was sightseeing up here then he had a death wish.”

  “That gives me an idea,” said Ada.

  If I had an eyebrow I would have raised it, but I didn’t, so I just kept on going down. The path went south and then turned to the right and headed toward the letters. I stopped and looked. I was looking at the D. The letters were big and tall and while the angle of the hillside was alarming there was a wide track both in front and behind the letters. Safe enough to take a closer look. I kept up a running commentary for the benefit of a certain computer.

  “Wow, they’re big,” said Ada.

  I looked up at the side of the D. It was slightly too far away to be towering, exactly, but I still had to look up to see the top.

  “Forty-five feet each,” I said, doing the trigonometry in my head a couple of times just to be sure.

  “Good place for a suicide, then.”

  I looked around. “Long way to come for it. You’d need to be committed.”

  “Or a good place to make it look like a suicide.”

  “Oh,” I said. I looked back up at the sign and nodded.

  “Jump off or get thrown, what’s the difference?” said Ada. “By the time you hit the deck nobody is going to know either way.”

  She had a point.

  “Still seems like a lot of work,” I said.

  “Just let me file it away for future reference. Now keep looking.”

  I looked. The hillside on the other side o
f the path was damn steep. It was hard and rough and dusty and covered in rocks and scrub. I didn’t particularly feel like falling onto it from the path, let alone from the top of any of the forty-five-foot-tall letters.

  It was quiet up on the hill. The breeze had picked up a bit but it didn’t carry much on it. High above a jet liner defaced the clear blue sky with a vapor trail that was dirty at the edges.

  I moved to the letters, taking the path at the front. I looked up. The letters looked good. In fact, they looked better than good. Fresh paint. No rust. They were made of metal panels. Tin, perhaps. Each was inlaid with light sockets and in each socket was a bulb. I looked out across the rest of the sign. There must have been four thousand bulbs screwed into the hillside. Some of the panels were a little flatter than the others, too. Replacements.

  “They’ve done a good job,” said Ada.

  I shrugged.

  “You don’t remember, do you?” she asked.

  I shrugged again. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  Ada laughed. It ran through on a loop twice but at the end was something new, like she was taking a drag on a cigarette. I wasn’t sure that was part of the recordings that made up her voice or just an echo of something rattling around inside my circuits.

  “The sign was falling apart last time I looked,” she said.

  “When was that, exactly?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You and me both then.”

  “But they’ve fixed it up. Got it looking nice.”

  I pondered. I turned and looked at the view and pondered some more.

  “The movie premiere,” I said. “The big national one.” I turned back to the sign. “They were doing up Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for it. They must have done up the sign, too. Part of the big show.”

  “All eyes on Hollywood,” said Ada.

  “I guess so.”

  “Wonderful, terrific. The city has done us proud, Ray. Now, keep looking.”

  I ground something inside my throat. It sounded like someone starting a cement mixer.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Ray. So how about you quit yakking and start snapping.”

  I walked around. I looked at the view and I looked at the letters of the Hollywood Sign. I moved around to the back. Each letter had a ladder or two on the back but there was nothing much to stand on once you reached the summit.

  I followed Ada’s instructions and began taking photographs with my optics. After a few minutes I was onto my second roll of film. I had four packed in my chest.

  After a few more minutes I was wondering what the hell I was doing here. The mystery girl had done nothing but left us an address to check out that turned out to be an access road leading to the Hollywood Sign. And that was really a fabulous piece of information because here I was looking at the sign and admiring the view and finding nothing at all.

  The dirt around the sign was sandy and it kept my footprints real well, but then I do weigh an imperial ton so most surfaces keep my footprints real well. There were other markings in the dirt, but then I expected there to be. The sign had been renovated sometime in the very recent past and they must have had a lot of people and ladders and equipment up here.

  I looked back up at the sign and calculated a few angles for the hell of it, threw in some estimated wind speeds, average body weight, air resistance. Ada was right. The sign had some interesting possibilities.

  Then I turned away from the sign and headed down the hillside.

  Carefully.

  5

  The hill was steep, but boulders and ruts and the curve of geology made a convenient series of natural steps that spiraled downward. As I made my way down I started noticing the place was littered with bits of wood and metal and glass. Some of the metal and wood was white, some of it was stained orange with rust. The glass was mostly broken, but it was clearly the remains of old light globes. It was the detritus from the sign, left over from the renovation. There was a lot of it.

  “Hey, excuse me! Sir? Sir! You can’t be here, sir. Sir!”

  I turned to my left and there was a guy in blue overalls over a blue denim shirt with a blue denim cap on his head. He was pushing fifty and had a good tan and a beard like Abraham Lincoln. In one hand he held a rake with a long wooden handle. Around his middle was a yellow rope that was slack and traveled somewhere up the hill toward the Hollywood Sign. Balanced in a rut behind him was a big canvas sack that was a deep sea green in color.

  I cleared my throat like an old Chrysler in need of an oil change changing gears, and then I said, “Private eye,” and I pulled out the wallet with my license in it.

  The man made his way to me and I made my way to him. When we were within fighting distance he peered at the wallet and looked up at my face. He frowned and pushed back his cap a little and made a huffing sound. “That a fact, mister?”

  I nodded. “Machines can’t lie,” I said, lying through my circuits. “I thought I was a ‘sir’?”

  “Oh,” said the man. He kept the frown on his face and pulled the front of his cap down, and then he sniffed and he said, “I’m not sure how it ever worked with you lot. Are you a sir or a mister?” He sniffed again. “Damned if I know. Does it make a difference?” A third sniff. “Anyway, nobody’s supposed to be up here without permission. This is all private land. Restricted access. Too dangerous. Even for”—he paused and waved the hand that wasn’t holding the rake—“sirs or misters like yourself.”

  He stood back and leaned on the rake with both hands like a wizard in double denim.

  “I’ve been engaged to find a missing person,” I said, hoping this would wipe the frown off the guy’s mug, but all it did was add a crinkling of the nose to it. I wondered if I should stop talking in case I turned the guy’s face all the way inside out.

  The man seemed to be considering something. Whether it was what I had just said or not, it was hard to tell. Then he gave another sniff and half-turned away. He looked at the ground. “You can either help me pick up trash or you can get the hell out. I’ll leave that to you.”

  The man was old enough to remember robots and I had a hunch he hadn’t liked them then and he didn’t like them—me—now.

  He stood there, waiting for an answer. I didn’t give him one. Instead I looked back up at the sign.

  “How many you get,” I asked, “jumping off that thing?”

  The man shuffled in the dusty soil. When he looked at me he folded his arms over the end of his rake in a way that didn’t look at all comfortable. He didn’t seem like he wanted to give me an answer and as far as I was concerned that was just fine.

  I held up my hands and said “Okay,” and then I turned and tried to pick out the path I’d taken down. I took one step and then another, and then the man behind me said, “Fewer than you think.”

  I turned back around. I was about two feet higher up the hillside than he was and I was another one and half taller than him in the first place. From where I was he looked quite far away.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But some,” he said. He started raking up some trash. Then he stood up and leaned back on the rake and looked up at the sign. I followed his gaze.

  “I mean,” he said, “you really want to do it, you’ll find a way. But don’t ask me. I’m just from the Parks Department. The place is locked up at night but there’s nobody here. So you want to get in, you could.” He paused and looked at me, that frown back and deeper than ever. “You did.”

  I nodded. No point in arguing.

  “You seen many people up here?” I asked.

  “Jumpers?”

  I shrugged. “Or not.”

  The man went back to raking. “You get sightseers. They mostly stay out on the road and take pictures. You can get a view from up top. Kids come in, too. Seems a good place for necking I guess. What do I know? They don’t cause any problems.”

  “No vandalism?”

  The
man laughed and doubled his efforts at raking up the debris. “Maybe once. But they came and done up the sign. Looks as good as new now. Better, even. Those lights haven’t worked in, oh, forty years at least.”

  “When did they fix it up?”

  “Oh, they just gone and finished about two days ago. No, three days ago. Took them all of a week. Had a lot of men up here. Lot of men. Hard workers, too. Foreign, see. You want good workers, you get foreign workers.”

  I didn’t know enough about it to venture an opinion so I didn’t say anything.

  The man kept raking. “Heard them talking,” he said. “Yes, I did. Foreign workers. Good sort. Hard workers. You want good workers, you get foreign workers.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said. “Shame they didn’t clean up after themselves.”

  The man straightened up and laughed. He took his cap off, took in the view, then put his cap back on. “This mess has been here years. The sign was falling down something real good. None of this is from them. They were good workers. Real clean. Real tidy.” He paused. “I think they were Russian. I guess it’s real tidy back in the USS of R.”

  Then the ranger looked at me with narrow eyes. “I guess you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay?”

  “You’re okay. Have a look around all you want, mister. Just lock the gate on your way out.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that he was going to need a new padlock. “So I’m a mister then?”

  The man laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. Are robots misters or sirs?” He raked a little then stood tall and leaned on the rake. “Say, did they ever make lady robots?”

  I told him I didn’t remember and he laughed and shook his head and muttered something to himself. Then he walked to his canvas bag and shoveled crap into it. Then he hoisted it up over a shoulder and moved on. I watched him for a few minutes and saw him stop on another patch of hill where the rubbish from the sign had clumped around some brush. Tucked around his safety rope at the back was a pair of thick gloves that he pulled out and pulled on. They nearly came to his elbows. He bent over and started tugging on a large angled piece of metal with sharp edges.