Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  It turned out that the doorman, a gorilla wearing a tuxedo and a permanent scowl, was called Robert and he was a swell guy who thought it was a real pleasure for the club to be entertaining the last robot in the world. Before I even had a chance to pull the shield from my inside pocket he grabbed my hand with one that was about as big and he shook it and then he unclipped the velvet rope and knocked on the black door. The door opened and I turned to Robert with my steel fingers touching the brim of my hat. He saluted in return and then went back to guarding the approaches.

  In front of me stretched a black corridor and down that black corridor came the sound of people talking, laughing, drinking, laughing some more, talking some more. Music, too. Something with a beat. All those sounds got louder as I got closer. I kept walking.

  And then I was in the Temple of the Magenta Dragon.

  The room was large and square and had a low ceiling that was painted a flat matte black, as were all the walls but the far one, which was instead upholstered like a Chesterfield sofa in oxblood leather. The room was dark and smoky, and what light there was came from a blend of white and pink spots that mixed with the smoke to make the Chinese décor pop off the black walls. There were dragons and intricate pierced latticework and some more dragons. The low ceiling was supported by an arcade of pillars that resolved when I got closer into carved bamboo stems that weren’t black but a deep jade green. The overall effect was of being outdoors on an ancient Chinese terrace under an ancient Chinese sky on a warm and foggy night.

  The so-called Temple was full of people. The servers were Chinese men and Chinese women, the women dressed in black silk wraps with red trim and with their black hair pulled back into buns skewered into place with long black sticks tipped in red, the men dressed in more or less the male equivalent. They balanced trays and skirted the club patrons with an elegance as smooth as the silk they were wearing.

  The patrons were another story altogether. They stood in groups and they sat at any number of small round tables that were scattered across the room.

  And they were all rich. I could tell that by the clothes, the hair, the jewels, the jewels, and the jewels. The light and smoke reduced the men to pinky-purple ghosts floating in the room, the white of their shirts and their teeth the only really distinguishable features. But the women glittered—what skin that wasn’t covered by evening wear slung low in the front as well as the back was covered by pearls and diamonds and other treasures that took that pink and white light and did something special to it before shooting it back at my optics like a laser beam. There were a lot of people in the room but I recognized a large chapter by their photos that hung on the wall of the ice cream parlor just a half block away. Not every member of that parade was here in the Temple. I matched a dozen faces and none of them were Charles David’s or Eva McLuckie’s.

  I walked forward into the club. People parted. People looked at me and laughed but they laughed in that way that spoke of true happiness only found in those who don’t need to worry about their retirement. People nodded at me and those nods were appreciative, like they were watching the Mona Lisa stretching her legs around the gallery after hours. I couldn’t smile, not on the outside, so I trod carefully as I took a route across the room and tried not to feel like the Queen of England. I was big but people got out of my way. Nobody seemed to mind. In fact, everybody seemed real pleased to see me.

  Which I have to admit I liked, before I realized the reason why.

  There was no fear or unease in the room because these people—and their livelihoods—hadn’t been threatened by the robot revolution of the 1950s. These people were rich and famous and no doubt a lot of that wealth and fame was second generation or more—the movie business could run down a family line like hair and eye color. They operated in a rarified atmosphere where they could afford to be curious about a novelty like me. My presence was clearly unexpected but it was also amusing to them, if not downright entertaining. The Temple of the Magenta Dragon was wall-to-wall talent and I was wading neck-deep in the A-list—and for one night only I was part of the crowd.

  I reached a table and everyone at it turned to me with big smiles. They looked about ready to burst into applause, so I saved them the trouble and took a left turn and found myself at the bar.

  The bar was busy, mostly with waitstaff who were loading up the champagne buckets like it was the only liquid left with which to put out the burning palace. I didn’t want to interrupt them to ask for a drink I couldn’t drink, so I turned around and watched the crowd and listened to the music.

  Some crowd. I matched a few more faces to the photos from the ice cream parlor. I looked at a few more jewels, a few more hairdos, a few more jaws going up and down. The eyes of everyone in the room had left me and returned to conversations and plunging necklines and the bottom of champagne glasses.

  Now I got what Ada had been talking about. This wasn’t just a nightclub. This was a temple. A place of solitude where the biggest cats in Hollywood could just come and be regular people who drank the most expensive liquor in town and wore diamonds like they were cut glass. This was a place you came to enjoy the company of your peers, unmolested by the great unwashed. Everyone here was the same. Everyone here could relax and not worry about being rich and not worry about being famous with the only other people who really understood what that meant.

  I started to make a list of who was I going to pump first. The fact that Charles David was a patron, maybe even a regular one, was obvious. The question of how and why he had got a hold of some company accounts was another matter. Someone here—scratch that, everyone here—would know him. Who to collar first, I had no idea.

  Then someone planted himself next to me at the bar. He was one of the few men not wearing a black dinner jacket. In fact, his dinner jacket seemed to be a green and yellow plaid that under the pink and white lights did something strange to my vertical hold. As I tried to restore the balance in my optics a woman with long white hair and a face thirty years too young for such a color joined the man and he leaned around to kiss her behind the ear. She glanced at the man and then glanced at me and then she headed off to powder her nose or polish her jewels. The man in plaid watched her backside sway away from him. Then he turned to the bar and shook his head at, apparently, himself, before taking a silver cigarette case from inside his plaid monstrosity. He opened the case and took out a cigarette and inserted it into his mouth. And then he stood there with the cigarette sticking out perpendicular to his face like he didn’t quite know what to do next.

  I knew the man from his photograph at the ice cream parlor. Square-jawed and square-haired with a neck that would make a football lineman weep with envy.

  Fresco Peterman.

  Seemed I had found my first line of inquiry.

  10

  I reached forward with my right hand. I extended a finger. If Fresco Peterman saw it coming, he played it cool as a blue spark danced on my fingertip in front of his face. In fact, he even leaned forward a little to touch the end of his cigarette to my improvised lighter. A second later the end was glowing red and the lips around that cigarette pulled back to show me as many of his perfect teeth as possible.

  “Hey, thanks, Sparks,” Fresco said in a tone that suggested he had his cigarettes lit by the last robot on Earth every day of the week. Without lifting his arms from the bar he sucked on his cigarette and then blew smoke out around it. He nodded at me, then turned back to the bar, then finally brought his hands up into view and rested them on top of it. “Anyone ever put you in a motion picture?” he asked the empty bar space in front of him.

  I pursed my lips, or at least it felt like I did. It didn’t matter because I didn’t have lips and Fresco Peterman wasn’t looking anyway.

  “No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, nobody has yet.”

  Fresco’s shoulders jerked as he laughed and smoked and laughed some more. “I bet you wouldn’t have too much trouble learning your lines either, eh, Sparks?”

  I helpe
d him laugh and it sounded like a lime green pickup stripping its gears as it tried to get up the Hollywood Hills. “You may have a point there.”

  Fresco nodded and smoked and nodded again. Then he pulled the cigarette out and turned around to offer me his hand. “Peterman,” he said. “Fresco Peterman.”

  “I thought I recognized the face,” I said. I took his hand carefully and shook it. His grip was pretty good. Not as good as Robert’s. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Peterman. Raymond. Raymond Electromatic. I’m honored.”

  “Electromatic, Electromatic,” said Fresco, rolling the surname around his mouth along with a healthy volume of smoke. He nodded and the smoke wafted from the corners of his mouth and from his nose like one of the dragons clinging to the ceiling over our heads. “There’s something there, I swear it,” he said. “You should talk to my agent sometime. I’ll introduce you.”

  “Well, Mr. Peterman, I wouldn’t say no to that.” I smiled on the inside, and I thought maybe Fresco could see it, just for a moment, the way he leaned back and relaxed and smiled on the outside.

  I relaxed too, although I was careful to lean on the bar only lightly in case I left a robot-shaped dent. Up close the black bar was actually a deep scarlet veneer that really was worth writing home about and I would have hated to see a lug like me scratch it up. I figured if anyone should scratch it, it should be an A-lister. They could afford the repair bill.

  Then there was a crackling noise, and I thought for a moment that I really had scratched the bar so I stood upright. Fresco watched me, then smiled, then returned his attention to his cigarette.

  The crackling sound kept on going. It sounded like eggs in a pan. I looked at Fresco but he seemed to be happy smoking and he certainly wasn’t frying any eggs I could see.

  I looked around. The sound kept on going.

  “So what brings you to our little Temple, Sparks?”

  I turned to face Fresco. He was leaning on the bar with his elbow now. I looked at his dinner jacket and wondered if I should break the news. I decided not to.

  “Business before pleasure, I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Aren’t they one and the same?”

  Fresco laughed again and I stood wondering what he varnished his hair with. He puffed hard enough on his cigarette to send a message to Canada and then he clicked his fingers. A woman appeared out of the smoke. She was standing behind the bar and maybe she had always been there. She was Chinese like all the staff seemed to be, but unlike the servers canvassing the room she had her long hair straight down and when she turned around to fill Fresco’s order I saw the back of her silk dress was missing. She had a tattoo of a dragon curling down her spine.

  Then she turned back around and moved three long, thin glasses of fizzy wine onto the bar. Fresco nodded but didn’t say thanks and he didn’t swap the glasses for any money, either. The woman faded away and the movie star pushed a glass toward me. I said thanks and took it and held it by the thin stem. Fresco finished half of his in a single gulp and didn’t say anything when I didn’t do the same.

  “Truth is, Mr. Peterman,” I said, “is that I’m here looking for someone.” I paused and changed my mind. “Actually, a couple of people.”

  “Looking?”

  “I’m a private eye, as a matter of fact.”

  “No trouble I hope, Sparks?”

  “Can’t say.”

  The smile that darted around Fresco’s thin lips was playful and furtive at the same time. I figured that if you put that smile up on a silver screen say sixty to seventy feet across and half that high you could make a lot of women swoon and make a lot of money in the process.

  Whatever it took to make it in this town, Fresco Peterman had it. Even in a plaid dinner jacket you could see from the moon, he had it.

  “Can’t say or won’t say?” said Fresco, and he said it somewhere on the road between an accusation and a weary but wry question. It was like he was reading from a script, feeling out the emotions and the tone and the voice of the character he was playing. Maybe he wasn’t so happy to chat now he knew I was a detective.

  “Can’t,” I said, ad-libbing as fast as my circuits could manage. “I’m hoping they’re okay, but you never know.”

  “They?”

  The crackling sound was still there. I wondered what the hell it was. Nobody else seemed to be bothered by it and it was so faint it surely couldn’t be heard over the hubbub of the club anyway. Must have been a bug in my audio. I glanced around the bar, looking for a phone. I didn’t have much time before I had to head back to the office but I thought I should probably dial in and say hello to the boss.

  I turned back to Fresco. He still had that smile on his lips and his cigarette didn’t seem to be burning any lower. Now that’s what I call acting.

  “They?” he asked again, like I was an actor in need of a prompt.

  “You know Charles David, I expect. Eva McLuckie, too?” I asked.

  Fresco barked a laugh. It was staccato and loud but while it bounced against the noise of the club, no problem, it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  I rolled my neck, in case that crackling was cellophane stuck in my collar from the dry cleaner’s. It wasn’t.

  “Charles is a great friend, Sparks, and Eva is quite something let me tell you.” He said it like he had no idea who I was talking about and couldn’t have cared less. Then he drained his fizzy wine and went looking around the bar for another.

  “Say, is Mr. David here tonight?” I asked. “You could call me a fan.”

  “Ray, you’re a fan.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s good,” I said. “But is he here? Seems like everyone else from Red Lucky is.” I waved a big steel hand in the general direction of “everyone.”

  “Oh, hey,” said Fresco, suddenly animated, sliding closer and nudging me with an elbow. “You’re coming to the premiere, of course?”

  “Well, I—”

  “No, look, I insist. No, no, you’ll be my guest. I insist. It’ll be great, Sparks, trust me. It’ll be great.”

  I nodded. “Well, thanks,” I said, and I wondered what Ada would say to a night off. Then I quit wondering and started steering my new celebrity buddy back around to the topic at hand.

  “So is he—”

  “Who, Chuck? I don’t think he’s here. Not tonight. Haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “Okay. How about Ms. McLuckie?”

  “You sure there’s no trouble, Sparks?”

  “Well, like I said, I’m not at liberty to discuss matters. But let’s just say there are some concerned parties involved.”

  “Oh she’s fine, fine,” said Fresco. He said it like he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “But she’s not here either?”

  Fresco’s eyes narrowed like he was thinking very hard about the question. He reached inside the construction he thought was a dinner jacket and pulled the cigarette case out again. He took out a cigarette and replaced the case inside the jacket. Then he reached into the other side and took out another case. It was also silver but it was smaller, like a box for matches. He kept his narrow eyes on me as he flipped the lid of the box, took out a single small white round pill from among the other small white round pills inside, and put it in his mouth. He snapped the box shut with a little more force than seemed really necessary, pocketed the box, then used the last swirl of champagne in his dead glass to get the small pill down his throat.

  Then he put the glass down and he said, “No, she isn’t here.” Then he looked around the bar again. “What do I have to do to get some service?” he asked nobody in particular, but when he snapped his fingers the lady behind the bar with the dragon tattoo materialized and refreshed his drink. I thought that kind of service was actually pretty good.

  “I heard she walked out of a picture,” I said.

  Fresco gulped his fizzy wine and when he came up for air he gasped like he’d just taken a long, cool draught from a Scandinavian mountain spring. He fixed me with his eyes a
gain. They were still narrow. Maybe a bit hard now, too.

  “She’s fine. Resting. Nervous exhaustion, you know. It’s a tough job we have.”

  I looked at the half-empty glass in Fresco’s hand and then I looked around the smoky interior of the Temple of the Magenta Dragon and the jewels that glinted in the dark like the span of the Milky Way and I thought, yeah, it’s a tough job you have.

  “And the walkout?”

  Fresco finished his drink and pressed the empty glass into the bar top. Then the smile flickered, once, twice, then reignited as the movie star barked another one of his short, harsh laughs. He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Sparks. I shouldn’t be like that. Not with a swell guy like you. No, that part isn’t true. Where’d you read it? The Daily News?”

  I didn’t commit one way or the other. Fresco shook his head again. He put his new cigarette between his lips but rather than wait for my parlor trick he reached over the bar and grabbed a flat book of matches from a small collection of the same.

  “The Daily News,” he said with a shake of the head and a flick of the wrist as his cigarette caught fire. “Those asinine pinheads. They don’t know jack, Sparks. If I were me I’d throw them off the Hollywood Sign, the whole lot.”

  I didn’t say anything in reply but I did think that was an interesting statement to make.

  Then his silver-haired companion reappeared at his side, curling one arm up to his shoulder, and touched her lips to a spot of skin somewhere behind Fresco’s right ear. They talked with some animation in low voices but I was distracted by something else.

  That crackling had gotten louder. A lot louder.

  Then I blinked, or at least it felt like I did, and I saw Fresco’s glamorous friend was looking at me with cool blue eyes. Her hair glowed pink in the lights of the club.

  “Sparks,” said Fresco, the playboy demeanor back and turned up to eleven, “I’d like you to meet a very great friend of mine, Ms. Alaska Gray.”

  I gave a small nod.

  “Alaska,” said Fresco, cigarette in hand as he gestured at me like a landscape gardener pointing out a particularly fine specimen of tall pine, “what you see before you is an example of the pinnacle of human achievement, a wonder of the modern age—hell, a wonder of any damn age at all. Because this fine fellow is, in fact, the very last robot in the world, one Mr. Raymond Electromatic.”