Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  And let’s just say when I turned up at Thornton’s lab the meeting didn’t go quite as I had originally planned it.

  How did I remember any of that? Well, someone starts adjusting your electromatic brain and the computer code it runs, you remember it whether you have a twenty-four-hour memory tape in your chest or not. The whole kit and caboodle had been flashed into my permanent store to give me a new primary directive. One that told me what my new job was.

  It was a shame about Professor Thornton, it really was, but I’d had no choice in the matter. We couldn’t let anyone—myself included—get in the way of our new business plan.

  I thought about Thornton quite a lot, and that included the time it took to unwind my journey down the Hollywood Hills. But I was soon back in the real world and I let those thoughts float away like dandelion fluff on a cool evening breeze.

  After negotiating more of the heavy traffic no doubt caused by the commotion around the Chinese Theatre, I found myself on Sunset Boulevard and cruising past a long line of clubs on both sides of the strip. I kept my optics open and the speed low. There were clubs for dancing. Clubs for drinking. Clubs for drinking and staring at dancing girls dressed like peacocks. Clubs for staring at dancing girls dressed in much less than that.

  I don’t know what I expected the Temple of the Magenta Dragon to look like. Something like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, I suppose, but I only supposed that in retrospect, because what I didn’t expect was the famous temple of high-class pleasure to be a plain black door sandwiched between a steak house and a building with no apparent signage.

  I parked up and sat in the car and took a good long look.

  The door wasn’t all black. There was gold on it, in the form of the numbers 6277 near the top and in the middle a character that looked Chinese. I wondered what it said, if it said anything. I didn’t know Mandarin or Cantonese and I wondered if the proprietors did. Ada could look it up, if it was important. I doubted it was but I took a picture anyway.

  The traffic was heavy on the Sunset Strip, and there were a lot of people around. I hunkered down in the car. With a little luck nobody would pay me much attention. I was just a big guy taking a snooze in his car with his hat pulled down low. Real low.

  I watched a while but there was no action and the black door of the magenta temple remained very closed and I guessed it would remain in that state for a little while longer. What I really wanted were some facts on the club and its clientele. The documents in the dead drop didn’t tell me anything worth a dime. But looking down the street I saw the prime spot for a little homework.

  It was an ice cream parlor that looked pretty nice. The front of it was all glass and that glass curved at the corners around the door. But it was what was behind that glass that caught my optic. I zoomed in for a closer look. The view through was distorted by the curve of the windows but I could pick out enough detail to pique my interest.

  Inside the ice cream parlor was a mirror that ran the length of the back wall behind the counter. Above that mirror was a row of photographs and they all showed an older man—the proprietor, clearly—in a white cap and apron, standing next to people dressed rather more impressively. There was a scrawl in the empty white space of each of the pictures, which was mostly the man’s apron.

  They were autographs. The wall of photographs was a wall of fame, a record of the rich celebrities who had popped in for a root beer float before dancing the night away at their private little club just a few doors down.

  Right now a tall glass of something cool and creamy sounded like a pretty swell idea, and I didn’t even drink.

  8

  The ice cream parlor was busy, which I thought was a good sign if you were looking for an ice cream, but there was room enough for a one-ton steel man to pull up a stool at the bar in front of the soda fountain. Except I didn’t, because the stools were too small and I would have concertinaed it like a bus driving into a cinder-block wall if I had tried to sit down. So I just stood and leaned a little.

  On my right were two girls who must have been about sixteen and in front of me was a soda jerk who looked about the same age wearing his white cloth garrison cap with an air of authority I had to admire. He nodded at me, like he saw robots in his joint all the time, and asked me what I wanted.

  I considered his adolescent complexion, the skin rubbed clean raw in a hearty but failed attempt to get his acne under control. I wondered on the quality of information I’d be able to pump out of him and lamented the obvious fact that the old guy in the photographs in rank and file on the wall wasn’t on duty.

  Then I ordered a root beer. When the kid asked if I wanted a float, I said sure, why not. It seemed rude to take up space in his joint—and take up space I certainly did—and not pay the rent before I started asking him questions about the parlor’s famous patrons.

  The root beer float arrived in a glass worthy enough to be handed to the winner of the Monaco Grand Prix. I said thanks and I paid for it with some of that cash Ada was so fond of, and then I saw the two girls looking, the one nearest out of the corner of her eye like she really wasn’t trying to look at all, the other through the bird’s nest of the first girl’s hair like a Peeping Tom checking out the housewife next door through the garden hedge. I glanced at the kid behind the bar. He seemed to be waiting to see what I did with my float. I pulled the glass toward me. The girls next to me froze and seemed to hold their breath for a very long time.

  “Knock yourself out,” I said, sliding the giant float across the bar. The two girls looked at the glass and then looked at the soda jerk and then looked at me and the one hiding in the other’s hair giggled, trying to stifle it with her hand.

  I assumed this was standard operating procedure for teenagers in an ice cream parlor when being given a free drink by a robot so I didn’t argue. Then the girls took the float and shared two straws and started sucking. At least they fell into that proportion of the populace who didn’t find me too scary to look at.

  Same with the soda jerk. Which was good news for me.

  It was full dark outside, the Strip lit in shifting curtains of blue and white and red as the neon signs came to life. That light shone on the counter of the ice cream parlor and in the eyes of the soda jerk standing behind it. He had his arms folded now, his lips pursed, just like he was waiting to field my first question. While he waited another teen came out of the back, hat on and apron in the right place. The new jerk could have been the other’s twin. They exchanged a look and a nod that didn’t need any words to go with it. The new kid looked at me and his gaze stayed there quite a while. Then he got on with serving customers while talking to the two girls next to me, both of whom he seemed much more enthusiastic about.

  I played statues with the kid in front of me for a few seconds more, then I nodded up at the row of famous faces that looked down on us both.

  “Looks like you get a lot of stars in here to taste the root beer,” I said with a smile that only I knew about.

  The kid jerked his chin like I was an old pal from the army who had a little hat just like his. “Robots like movies?”

  “You bet I do,” I said.

  This got his interest. He lost the cool, his arms unfolding and a smile moving his bad skin around. He leaned in. “You going to the big premiere, then?” He moved his head a little to one side, but I knew where he meant: Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

  “I understand you need to be a certain kind of person to get an invite to the red carpet,” I said.

  The kid’s jaw opened and I saw he was chewing gum. “Come on,” he said, “you’re the last one, aren’t you? Doesn’t that make you famous?” Then he stood back and looked me up and down while his jaw moved in the same direction. “Yeah, you’d clean up pretty well. Little oil, little polish. Say, they make tuxes in your size?”

  I decided I liked him.

  “Not sure I’m the right kind of famous,” I said. “May come as a shock, but not everyone likes a robot.”

  “
Ah, that’s a shame.”

  “So who comes in here, anyhow? You get any regulars?” I poked a steel thumb over one shoulder. “I hear they have a club just down the block. This looks like a great place to stop on the way for a glass of milk.”

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah. Look.”

  The kid turned and pointed to the photographs. There were musicians, directors, actors, actresses, baseball players, and boxers. There were a couple of football players and a TV game show host and the editor of a big important newspaper from a big important city.

  At least that’s what the kid said. I didn’t recognize any of them except the ones I had pictures of in my jacket pocket.

  That is to say, if I’d known who the others were once, I didn’t remember them now. Damn that magnetic tape memory.

  So I just nodded and went along with it. The kid looked at me over his shoulder and saw me nodding and he cracked a smile wide enough to sail the Atlantic in and then he showed me his back again and kept up with the commentary. He was in his element now and I got the impression that working the fountain was the best job in town.

  “And there’s Alaska Gray,” he said. “Rico Spillane. Parker Silverwood. Fresco Peterman. He was in here just last week he was, was Fresco. Look.”

  The soda jerk pointed to a picture at the end of the row. Four-for-four, they were the folk whose pictures Charles David had stuffed in a tube and buried up by the Hollywood Sign.

  “Fresco’s a great guy, great guy,” said the kid. “Likes root beer and a float.” He looked over his shoulder and gave me the eyebrows. I tried to return the expression but I had no eyebrows to give, so instead I said, “Best floats in town, goes the story.”

  That might have been true or it might not have been. I had no idea. But the kid waggled his eyebrows and turned back to the wall. He raised his arms like a conductor about to tell his orchestra to put the pedal to the metal and he kept running.

  “Bob Thatcher. Millicent Olivier. Charles David—”

  Bingo.

  “You know his beard is insured for a million bucks?”

  That I did not know. But I’d had my first sighting. Not a live one, but now I had two photographs of the missing star. You might even call it a set.

  “Oh,” said the kid, “and Sheira Shane. Oh boy.” He let out a wet whistle at this picture, a black woman with a head shaved nearly to the scalp. She was in a strapless dress and had a long arm draped around the kid’s boss and the kid’s boss looked pretty pleased with the situation.

  “Oh boy,” I said, after making a clicking sound that I hoped the kid would take as mutual appreciation of the female form. Then I saw his shoulders drop. “What is it?”

  The soda jerk sighed with perhaps a little more theatricality than was strictly necessary, and turned back around.

  “Well, mister, they all used to come in here quite a lot. I thought they liked it. But recently … well, Fresco was last week like I said, but the others…”

  “The others?”

  “Well, mister, they don’t come here so often anymore. I suppose they’re busy people, but still, it’s a shame. A real shame, it is.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Like Charles David?” I pointed to the photograph. “You could call me a fan. I’d love to get his autograph one day.”

  The kid’s smile came back. “Oh yeah! He’s great. Did you see Blackmailers Don’t Shoot? That movie! Man alive. Charles David is an artiste.”

  I made some more noises the soda jerk seemed to like.

  “So when was he last here?”

  The kid frowned. “Not for a while. Maybe a month. Busy, right? Actually, I remember. Last time he was here, he was sick in the bathroom. Say, I hope he’s okay.”

  “Stomach flu maybe,” I suggested. “Goes around, even movie stars.” While I said that I filed away the information about Charles David’s movements.

  The kid nodded. “I guess.” Then he returned to the photographs. After another handful of famous faces he stopped again. He hrmmed but didn’t turn around.

  “And then there’s Chip Rockwell,” he said.

  I looked at the photograph. It showed a middle-aged man in thick glasses and a checkered sports jacket. He was shaking hands with the old guy in the apron, but he didn’t look too happy. Maybe his ice cream had melted.

  “He was a great producer,” said the boy. “I mean, he made some good pictures. A few great ones, too.” He shook his head. “Sad about him. It still cuts me up something fierce.”

  “Something happened?”

  “Yeah, it was big news. Accident. He fell down some stairs.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I left it at that. I wondered if I had had something to do with it, but then people can fall down stairs with or without my help.

  Then the kid pointed to the last photo on the row.

  “And then there’s Eva McLuckie.”

  He and I seemed to stare at that last picture quite a while. I made another clicking sound, but this time it was my camera taking a snap. I think the kid heard because he turned around and this time his smile wasn’t quite so wide. He chewed his lip thoughtfully as he studied something indefinable on the counter in front of him. He reached forward and scratched at the nothing with a thumbnail. Then he adjusted his cap and then he folded his arms again.

  I thought I knew the feeling. There was something about seeing Eva McLuckie’s face up on the wall that would do that to man and robot alike.

  “Shame about her, too,” said the kid.

  I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy looking. Eva McLuckie was really quite something. Small. Might call her petite.

  The kid shook his head. “She disappeared. She was filming, oh…” The kid winced like he was watching a prizefighter take a dive. Then he clicked his fingers a few times.

  Dark hair cut into a bob that was as big as a coal scuttle at the back.

  “A movie anyway, something,” said the kid. “And she disappeared.”

  Bangs cutting a razor-straight line above her eyebrows, which were two sculpted arches above two big eyes ringed in black.

  “Zip.” The kid clicked his fingers again.

  Eva McLuckie, looking like an Egyptian princess.

  “Zip, huh?” I asked.

  The kid looked me in the optics and nodded.

  “Zip. Gone. No trace.”

  Eva McLuckie, looking a hell of a lot like the Mystery Girl who had walked into the office with a bag full of gold and an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  9

  The other soda jerk and his girlfriends were in a deep huddle but I leaned closer to my kid anyway. Seemed my stop for a root beer float was starting to pay off.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  There went that line of inquiry. Maybe the kid behind the bar could sense my deflation because he said, “Apparently she went into her trailer one night and in the morning she wasn’t there. That’s what I heard, anyway. Nobody at the studio knows where she went. Someone said they were filming all the other parts and they hope she’ll turn up to finish the picture. Shame, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Big shame.”

  It was starting to feel like I knew something the world didn’t.

  “She’ll miss the party,” said the milk boy.

  “Ah,” I said. I paused. I watched Eva’s picture but she wasn’t saying much. “What party?”

  “The party. The red carpet, y’know,” said the kid, and he leaned forward until his nose was nearly touching mine. There weren’t many people who liked to get so close to a robot.

  Well, that close to a robot like me and lived to tell.

  “Everyone else will be there,” he said. “Fresco. Rico. Alaska. All of them.” He shook his head and looked at the invisible spot on the counter again. “Man, it cuts me up, it really does.”

  Of course. The big premiere. Friday night on the red carpet for Red Lucky. I still had a snap of the newspaper article from this morning on file. I brought it up
and had a quick re-read.

  Red Lucky. Motion picture history, it said. A cross-studio co-production the likes of which had never been made. The article listed the principal cast and that list included Eva McLuckie. Charles David, too. It also included almost everyone who had their mugs plastered over the ice cream parlor wall and a whole lot of people who didn’t. I read the list twice and when I was done it looked like me and the milky bar kid here were the only two people in town without a speaking part.

  All the major studios cooperating with each other seemed like a pretty big deal. It would take quite a bit of cash money to get everyone temporarily out of their exclusive contracts and working for the competition. The competition that also happened to be co-producers of the motion picture.

  Sounded like a real headache to me.

  Then again, maybe money wasn’t quite the issue it used to be for some people these days. Just look at Eva McLuckie. She had a habit of carrying her bank balance around in gold bars in a fancy athletic bag.

  Well. Somebody’s bank balance.

  “I hope she turns up,” said the kid.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said.

  And then I said thanks and left a two-dollar tip and headed for the Temple of the Magenta Dragon.

  * * *

  As I walked down the block toward the Temple I contemplated my plan to get in. As plans went it was pretty simple: I was going to walk up to the door and see what happened.

  It was a plan, I had to admit, largely dependent on how well disposed the man on the door felt about the fact my face was made of metal. A flash of my detective shield usually did the trick when I had to get in somewhere but chances were the Temple would be a different proposition if it was as exclusive as Ada said it was.

  The doorman was there behind a purple velvet rope hanging from two golden stands that were placed on the sidewalk around the club’s door. The door was closed. There was no line to get in but there were some peepers hanging around on the street wearing not enough clothes, perhaps ready to throw themselves at their favorite movie star or casting agent should either cross the threshold.