Hell of a job, cleaning the hillside on his own. But he got on with it and I got on with mine. I took another look back at the sign.
And lo if there wasn’t a guy up there, above the sign, standing on what must have been the summit road the man from the Parks Department had talked about. The man was silhouetted against the sky behind him and no matter what I did I couldn’t bring the contrast around to make him out, but I could see he was wearing a trench coat and a hat. Tourist, I guessed, stopping to take in the air and the view. I didn’t blame him.
The man from the Parks Department grunted, then made a satisfied sigh that you could have heard down on Sunset Boulevard. I looked and saw he had got the metal scrap out of the bush. Then I looked back up at the sign and the man had gone, so I forgot all about him and got back to work.
6
I spent a few hours on that hot hillside but I didn’t find anything and I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. There was dirt and there was brush and there was trash and while I could have taken some dirt for spectrographic analysis—being a robot has some uses—I didn’t see the point. Charles David certainly wasn’t here now and the idea that he’d left something useful, as my client had suggested, was rapidly receding into the realms of fantasy.
Which meant I was at square one. Not even that. Square zero. I started to wonder if Mystery Girl was cracked in the head. The only information she’d given us about the target was a last-known address that turned out to be a hillside high over Hollywood.
I checked around me. Some clouds had materialized high above but they were fighting a losing battle against that infinite blue.
I hadn’t seen the man from the Parks Department for a long time, so I thought what the hell and pulled up the collar of my coat and whispered to Ada.
“I got nothing.”
“Hands, Raymondo, hands.”
I turned on my heel, decreasing my elevation by two inches as I drilled into the dirt.
“So now you want me to use a telephone?”
“Someone could be watching.”
“There’s nobody up here but me.”
“What about your ranger friend?”
I looked around one more time. “No clue.”
Ada sucked on her cigarette. I stood there and listened. “Okay, time to head home,” she said after a moment. “Looks like we’re going to need to sit tight on this one. She’ll call tomorrow. Maybe we can get something more to chew on then. And if nothing else, she’ll want the gold back when we tell her we’ve come up with a big fat zilch. But it’s her own fault.”
I nodded to nobody. “Ada giving a refund? Don’t tell me you’re developing a conscience?”
At that she laughed. A full three loops this time. “Hey, I didn’t say we would give it to her.”
“Someone is going to want that gold back, whether it’s Mystery Girl or not.”
“Right. And then we can ask them a few questions. This thing is starting to stink like week-old fish.”
“Okay, I’m coming back,” I said. I lowered my collar and adjusted my hat and headed back up toward the sign and the little hut and the parking lot where I had left my car. I’d gone farther than I’d thought and finding the path back up was harder than finding it down.
As I approached the lip of the little plateau I could hear the sound of trash being dumped. Must have been my friend from the Parks Department loading up his Parks Department truck. I kept on climbing and for a moment I wondered what bright-eyed pencil pusher back at the office had decided on eye-popping green as the most suitable livery for their official vehicles. Then I slipped in the dirt and found myself going backward for a foot or two before coming to a graceful halt.
The sound from up ahead stopped. The ranger had heard me. I thought about calling out to say it was me, but as there was no one else on the hill I decided I could save my breath. So to speak.
Then I heard something else. It was that ticking sound again, slow and steady. The sun and the hot tin roof of the hut. It sure was a beautiful day and I bet the man from the Parks Department was looking forward to clocking off the dusty hillside.
I continued my ascent.
When I got to the car the pickup was still there along with the hut, the door of which was open. The man from the Parks Department was rummaging inside for something as the roof over his head ticked and ticked and ticked.
I took the window of opportunity and scooted around the back of the hut. It had been put up close to the embankment that supported the summit road above me, but there was room enough to squeeze in. There were some empty canvas sacks crumpled up and shoved out of sight. Some were covered with dust.
But not all of them.
I picked up the first one, then the second. They were recent additions. I kept digging until I reached the bottom. The soil there was the same yellowish pebble scree that covered the hills.
The soil had been disturbed. It didn’t tax my skills of observation to see that there was a small area of dirt that was looser than the surrounds. Someone had been back here. Someone had hidden something.
Someone like Charles David?
I brushed the soil with my foot and about an inch below the surface I saw a black tag that could have been canvas. I reached down and pulled it, and pulled out a metal spike ten inches long and maybe four across. At the end opposite the point was a screw cap with a metal loop for the canvas tag.
I stood up and looked at the spike and turned to head back to the car to give Ada a call. I stopped when I saw the man from the Parks Department standing at the corner of the hut with his hands on his hips.
“You’d better be on your way, mister,” he said. “You can’t rightly be back here any more than you can be on the hill at all. Say, what’s that you got there?”
I walked toward him, holding the spike out. Together we emerged into the sun and stared at the object as it lay across my bronzed steel palms.
The man from the Parks Department swept the cap off his head with one hand, returned that hand to his hip, then peered at the spike with his nose an inch away from it.
“Is that what you were looking for, Detective?”
“Maybe that it is,” I said.
“Are you going to open it?” he asked. He stood tall and then when I didn’t move he waved his hat at the spike.
I unscrewed the end. It was on pretty tight but when it was off it revealed the spike to be a hollow tube. There were some documents in it.
“Well I’ll be…” said the man from the Parks Department.
I had even less to say, so I tipped the tube instead. The documents slid out.
They consisted of four photographs and some papers that were folded in three. Letters, maybe.
The photographs were all portraits. Head and shoulders, soft lighting, the subjects posed with shoulders turned just so and gazes carefully directed into the elegant middle distance. The kind of photographs you’d find in a glossy magazine. I didn’t know who any of the people were but the man from the Parks Department was able to fill me in and he did so without me even having to ask.
“Hey now,” he said and he pointed with a finger covered in dust. “That’s Fresco Peterman.” The picture to which he was referring showed a thick-necked man with a chiseled jaw and chiseled hair and a smile showing more teeth than an angry shark. The dust from the ranger’s finger fell onto Mr. Peterman’s charming face. I flicked it off and shuffled to the next one in the deck. A woman, long white hair with a wave to it. Skin smooth as silk.
“Alaska Gray. Boy, she’s a looker and no mistake.”
Photograph number three. Big eyebrows. A mustache worthy of a police commissioner somewhere on the East Coast where it got cold in the wintertime.
“Erm. Ah.” The man from the Parks Department added some dust to his beard as he rubbed it. “Ah. Silverwood? Silverman? Can’t remember. Not keen on his pictures. Kinda, y’know.”
I looked at the man and he looked at me.
“Y’know,” he said. “What�
��s the word I’m looking for? Erm. Ah.” Then he clicked his fingers. “Y’know. Boring.”
“Oh.”
The last image was another man. His hair was curly and too long for my taste, as were his sideburns. They stuck to his cheeks like two furry lamb chops.
“Rico. Rico Spillane. He’s funny,” said the man from the Parks Department. “Say, what else you got there?”
I unfolded the papers. It was a set of five or six sheets. Invoices of some kind. I didn’t follow the numbers but it all looked like bills for food and drink, ordered in bulk. Each page was from a different supplier. All were addressed to the same place.
The man from the Parks Department had stopped talking. He stood there with a frown on his face that was deep enough to send for sleigh dogs and extra supplies.
“The Temple of the Magenta Dragon,” I read aloud. “Any ideas?”
My new friend shook his head and rubbed his beard.
“No, no sir. What are these? Stolen, maybe?”
“Could be. Don’t rightly know yet.”
The man backed away a little and he waved his cap at me.
“Well, look now, I don’t much like that idea. This is city land, mister. I think I’m going to need to call my boss, Mr. Overington.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I’m a licensed PI—”
The man shook his head. I watched as some dust drifted off it and into the sunlight.
“No, no, this needs to be by the book. You can talk to Mr. Overington yourself. You just wait there, mister, I’ll call him from the hut. Won’t be but a jiffy.”
He walked away from me—and quickly, too.
I curled the documents from the tube and slid them into my inside coat pocket, and with the hollow spike in one hand I followed him.
The man from the Parks Department was about to make a telephone call he really shouldn’t.
And I’m afraid I had no choice but to stop him.
7
I left the body of the man from the Parks Department in the front seat of his lime-green pickup. Seemed as good a place as any. He would be missed eventually but I bet the farm that the death cert would say “heart attack” or “cardiac arrest.” Maybe if the medical examiner doing the autopsy did it well he or she would pick up the signs of something else, but I didn’t count on it. The ranger was an older guy carrying a little too much weight doing a hard job under a hot sun.
As I drove back to town I picked up the telephone that sat next to me.
“Hello, Ada,” I said.
“You stop to pick flowers?”
“I picked something else, actually.” I described the spike and the contents thereof. Ada whistled.
“I’m guessing you know what this all is, then?” I asked.
“What you found is what they call in the business a dead-drop spike. You put your best secrets inside, push the thing into the ground somewhere quiet, and either you pick it up later or you tell your buddies where to go looking.”
“What kind of business?”
“The spying kind.”
I let that bounce around my transistors for a moment or two.
“Ah, Ray?”
“Still here, Ada. Are you saying that Charles David, the famous movie star, is some kind of spy?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Chief. I’m just telling you what you found.”
“And the papers? What’s the Temple of the Magenta Dragon?”
Ada made a cooing sound like she’d just found exactly the right kind of handbag.
“Oh, Ray, Ray, Ray, where have you been hiding?” asked Ada.
If I had an eyebrow to lift I would have lifted it. I didn’t feel the need to answer that particular question and Ada came back on the line pretty quickly.
“Sorry. It’s only the hottest joint in town, Ray.”
“What, a club of some kind?”
“A club of one of a kind. Nobody can get in.”
“Something about what you said doesn’t quite make sense, Ada.”
“No, Ray, listen. The Temple is a nightclub. Everyone who is everyone goes there.”
“Even the ones who can’t get in?”
“That’s the whole point. Nobody can get in unless they are somebody.”
“Okay.”
“Movie stars, producers, directors, agents. The big agents, anyway. But the Temple is where it’s at. It’s where the rich and famous of this wonderful town go to wet their whistle with no one looking.”
“The rich and famous, huh?”
“You betcha.”
“Like Charles David.”
“Absolutely. Only it looks like he went there for more than a drink and a dance.”
“Maybe he wanted some souvenirs.”
“Souvenirs that he must have stolen from an office at the Temple, only to hide in a dead-drop spike up on a mountainside, alongside some pictures of his famous friends? I know everyone needs a hobby, Ray, but even famous movie stars aren’t that crazy.”
“I think I should go to this Temple and take a look around, then.”
“Yes,” said Ada, “you do that. Hey, your ranger friend. The one who was cleaning up. Did he find the spike, or did you?”
“I did.”
“Oh, good.”
“But he saw me.”
“Not so good. I assume you took care of things?”
“I did.”
“Can a girl ask how?”
I explained how. Ada sighed when I was done.
“Seems a shame,” she said, “when you had that big sign right there.”
“You mean I could have made it look a suicide instead?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Well,” I said. “I guess I could have. But I had to be quick. He was about to call up his boss and tell him a robot was up at the sign finding things.”
“Fair enough.”
I was back in Hollywood traffic now. I said good-bye to Ada and put the telephone receiver back where I had found it.
It was getting late but it was still just a little early for the jet set to get set up at their Temple. I had enough time in my pocket to take a cruise past this magical private club and get the lay of the land and maybe do a little of that old-fashioned surveillance I used to be so good at.
Back when I really had been a detective. Back before Ada took a wrench to my programming and came up with a new and far more profitable business venture.
A metaphorical wrench, I mean.
Because it turned out that Thornton had been too good. Ada was programmed to make a profit and whether the professor had meant it to be or not, that program was her prime directive. Thanks to the detective agency, she’d accumulated a lot of contacts—on both sides of the law—and in me she had a robot who was big and strong and who could get into places without drawing attention, despite being six feet ten of bronzed steel in a hat.
A robot she could control.
See, we were a team. Ada did the thinking and I did the legwork. Which included that surveillance I was so good at, on account of the fact I didn’t need to breathe or eat or drink or shift my ass around on the seat to get more comfortable. Stick me in front of a suspicious house and I could watch it all day. Just so long as I was back at the office by midnight, otherwise the memory tape in my chest would run out and I’d be no good for anything anymore.
That’s what Ada had said, anyway.
The truth was somewhat different. She’d always told me to be home by midnight because the memory tape in my chest needed to be copied off to a master reel and my batteries needed a recharge. Both of these things took six hours.
Except they didn’t. The batteries and the memory tape both lasted a full twenty-four hours and charging up the former and transferring the data from the latter hardly took any time at all. That gave Ada several hours in the smallest part of the day to get to work.
What she had been doing was this: at midnight, she switched the conscious part of my electromatic brain off. And then she gave me ne
w instructions, ones that usually involved sneaking up on people and throwing them out of windows or down stairs or squeezing them in the front seats of pickup trucks, lime green or otherwise. Turns out I had quite the knack.
During the day I was a private detective and during the night I was a private killer and I hadn’t even known it.
And I hadn’t known it for quite a while. There I was, being all private dick and being good at it, when really all my poking and prodding and questioning and investigating had another purpose, one for a job that only happened at certain hours when the captain was not, shall we say, at the wheel.
But then I found out.
The thing with a magnetic tape system is that the wipes aren’t always perfect, no matter how strong the magnet you wipe over them is. Good enough, sure, but never 100 percent proof.
So I started seeing things.
They were afterimages, really—flashes, I called them—of people and places and jobs. And the thing was that I really was a pretty good detective, so when I started remembering things I shouldn’t have been remembering, I started investigating. Once I started putting things together and seeing a pattern I put things together a little more and then I went to visit Professor Thornton.
I’d identified the problem, and that problem was Ada. A problem, I’d hoped, that Thornton would be able to fix.
Except Ada fixed me first. She let me in on the secret—I guess she felt she had to, as I was about to blow the lid on our new operation to the very man who had created us. Not only did she lay it all out for me, she very kindly came up with one or two little adjustments to my own master program that made me see things the way they really were.
See? A team, I tell you.
Made to Kill Page 4