Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  Like what a bunch of radioactive movie stars were doing in a basement of a club, talking in Russian accents, dressed up in some kind of protective gear while they had a secret meeting of what looked like the Hollywood Communist Party. Like what the missing movie star Eva McLuckie—my client—was doing in the middle of it all.

  Like what dead movie producer Chip Rockwell was doing alive, if not exactly well, giving orders to his comrades in a voice that made me want to scratch my fingers down a blackboard just to get it out of my head.

  I turned to leave.

  And then my alarm went off and I woke up to another beautiful morning in Los Angeles.

  13

  I woke up and stretched inside my mind—a tic from Thornton’s template, given I had nothing in particular to stretch—and looked around the computer room. Ada was all around me, her circuits clicking like a Cadillac cooling in an evening breeze.

  There was a newspaper sitting on the table in front of me. First edition, Wednesday, August 11. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was the fact that it was alone. Although I had no specific memory of it, I was sure my hat usually kept it company. And what in turn kept my hat company was my jacket, which should have been on the back of the chair.

  Something wasn’t right, although I had no empirical data to go on. It was just a hunch. A feeling somewhere in the diodes down my left side.

  I glanced down. My chest door was open and the cables were plugged in. Then I saw that my jacket and hat weren’t the only items of clothing missing. Gone too were my shirt and tie, pants, underwear, shoes, socks, the lot. I was as naked as the day I was built, six feet ten of bronzed steel and nothing else.

  That wasn’t necessarily a problem. I was a machine, after all. The clothes were an afterthought but I liked suits and hats and shoes (especially shoes) and I wore them because it made me feel more … normal.

  I looked up and into the winking and blinking lights of the console on my right.

  “Everything at the cleaners today, Ada?”

  Ada hadn’t said anything yet, but before she spoke there was a pause like she was dragging on her fifth cigarette of the morning.

  “If you want to think of it like that, knock yourself out.”

  “If I want to think of what like what, Ada? Shouldn’t I be wearing a suit?”

  “Like every self-respecting button man, Chief.”

  “So what gives?”

  I unplugged and stepped out of the alcove and moved to the table and looked at the paper. I wondered who delivered it. Maybe it wasn’t delivered. I supposed the first edition was probably on sale before midnight and I supposed there was a newspaper box on the corner outside the office. The person who delivered the paper to the table in the computer room was probably me, making sure I had a chance to catch up on the world around me as soon as I got out of bed. A small but vital effort in compensating for the fact that I couldn’t remember yesterday at all.

  “So many questions, so little time, Ray,” said Ada. “Now quit yakking, I’m reading.”

  “Don’t tell me—Agatha Christie?”

  Ada laughed and there was a clinking like she was stirring the creamer into her first coffee of the morning. A moment later that image had gone. “Actually, the effects of ionizing radiation on human tissue, as a matter of fact.”

  “Sounds like a wheeze.”

  “I have some bad news to break to you.”

  “Spill.”

  “Don’t you want to sit down first?”

  “Ada.”

  “I heard that bad news is best heard with the knees bent.”

  “The more you dawdle the more I rust, Ada.”

  “Okay, Chief,” she said. “You had a little accident.”

  “Oh?” I paused and started an internal diagnostic. The universe had been created four minutes ago and everything felt real swell, but I didn’t like Ada’s tone.

  “Yeah,” said the boss. “I’m afraid to say you won’t see that suit again. Your hat, either.”

  “Oh.” I liked that hat.

  “There’s another suit and shirt and tie and hat in the closet.”

  So I said thanks and went over to it. It looked like a tall white cabinet like the other tall white cabinets in the room, and when I opened it I found it had a dozen suits in brown and yellow pinstripe and three long trench coats in tan and two hats and a bunch of folded shirts and rolled ties. I had no idea I kept such a gentleman’s wardrobe. There was a drawer at the bottom that had five pairs of black shoes lined up in a neat row.

  “Oh,” I said again, and Ada laughed while I got dressed, but at least when I was dressed I felt myself again so I turned back around and watched the tapes spin and the lights flash and I asked the obvious question.

  “So what happened to the suit? What kind of accident did I have? Road traffic?”

  “Nuclear,” said Ada. “You were so hot I had to send your clothes to the bottom of the ocean in a lead casket.”

  I gave my diagnostic subroutine the hurry-up. Maybe Ada sensed something because she laughed again.

  “Don’t get in a sweat, Chief,” she said. “You’re fine.”

  “It wasn’t a power leak? Batteries okay?”

  “Not a power leak. Your chassis is sealed tighter than my purse.”

  Coming from her I took that as a compliment. But it was a relief, anyway. I put the diagnostics on the back burner and stood there in the computer room like a statue for a while. Ada didn’t speak. The clock above the door that led to the outer office ticked away toward oblivion. Outside the window the sun was casting long shadows on the rough brick of the building opposite. I glanced at the paper and thought about picking it up to read and then I thought twice.

  “Something on your mind, Chief?”

  “I was just thinking,” I said.

  “So I gathered.”

  “No, I mean, I was just thinking. You know that the color magenta isn’t part of the visible spectrum of light?”

  “You learn something new every day.”

  “Me particularly.”

  I thought about the color magenta. I thought about the color gold. I thought about Egyptian princesses.

  I don’t know why I thought about these things, but I did. They were fragments. Abstract ideas floating around in my circuits. Something from yesterday, probably. The more I thought about these things the more they faded away.

  After a few minutes of chasing echoes around my circuits I cleared my throat, or I pretended to. It sounded like the clutch in my Buick slipping and this got Ada’s attention.

  “Don’t worry about it, Chief,” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said, and I wondered if that were true or not. “I’m guessing we had a job yesterday.”

  “That we did.”

  “One that had me juggling plutonium.”

  “You know, you might not be too far from the truth there, Raymondo.”

  I glanced down at the newspaper. Kennedy was in Cuba and there was a special film premiere on Friday. Special enough to be front-page news, with a photo of a guy in dark glasses and a carved block of wood on his head that I took to be his hair and very poor taste in clothes. His picture was bigger than the president’s.

  That’s Hollywood for you.

  “Anything I should know about yesterday?” I asked, my eyes back on the spinning tapes and flashing lights. Some of the tapes stopped spinning and reversed at top speed. I didn’t like it when that happened. Ada wasn’t telling me something.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ray.”

  “I’m not even sure what there is to be worried about. Do you need me back on the job or what?”

  “We’ll need to talk about that later, Chief. In the meantime, we have a new number.”

  I shrugged, on the inside anyway. This was how it worked. Ada ran the show and I did the heavy lifting. She could remember yesterday and I couldn’t. So all I could do was trust her and do what she said. Today was a new day and there was a new job.

  There wa
s a printer to my right, underneath one of the consoles. It began spitting out a continuous sheet of perforated paper. It sounded like a sewing machine on overdrive.

  I walked over and picked up the edge of the paper and slid it through my fingers as I read the information coming out of the wall. The letters were big and black, all capitals.

  A name. An address. A number.

  The address was the Ritz-Beverly Hotel. It was on Sunset Boulevard. That didn’t bother me. It wasn’t far to go.

  The number I took to be a room somewhere in the hotel. So far, so good.

  The name I didn’t recognize and there was the rub. I thought I should. I tried again but came back with a handful of nothing. If I had known it, I didn’t now. Maybe I never had. Maybe it was just an echo of Thornton’s template stuck between a solenoid and a silicon chip. Because with his personality and mannerisms came his memories. Not all of them and not memories exactly. But impressions, ideas, notions that were vague and smoky.

  Maybe Thornton had known a person called Eva McLuckie.

  I looked up and picked a point where the wall met the ceiling. There were no electronic eyes in the computer room but I knew Ada could see me.

  “New target,” I said.

  Ada said nothing.

  I looked down at the paper in my hand. My eyes were drawn back to the name, no matter where else I pointed them. While I fought with my optics another printer began churning. There was a long slot in the computer bank above the ticker-tape machine. Photographic printer. We didn’t always get pictures, but they were useful when we did. I didn’t know how Ada got our clients. Contacts made while we were a detective agency, probably. You meet all kinds in that line of work.

  But that wasn’t my department. My department was walking out the door and doing the job. Today, seemed like I had a little help.

  The churning stopped and a photograph flopped out of the printer and into the catch tray like a disappointed man falling into an empty bed. The picture was facedown. I reached for it.

  “I don’t like this,” said Ada when my hand was halfway home.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Ada was silent. Maybe she was thinking things over. I read the info sheet again. Then I looked up. “Ada?”

  Then I thought again about the color magenta, and when I thought about gold this time it wasn’t the color but the metal.

  It was something from yesterday.

  Ada seemed to sigh, or maybe I just thought she did. Somewhere in the afterimage of a memory an older woman pulled her legs up off the desk in the front office and tucked her skirt down a little as she turned to look out the big window as stormy weather approached.

  I didn’t like that imagery much so I forgot about it and reached for the photo and picked it up and turned it over and held it up so I could get a good look.

  “Wait a minute, Ray,” said Ada. “Cool it a little.”

  I looked at the photograph and I had a sinking feeling somewhere between my voltage converter and neutron flow reversal coil.

  “You know who this is, don’t you, Ada?”

  “You too, Chief,” she said.

  “So you going to lay it out for me or not?”

  “Quiet, Raymondo. I’m thinking.”

  “Okay,” I said. I curled the photo and slipped it into my jacket. Then I grabbed one of the new hats from the closet. I was ready to roll. All I needed was the word from Ada.

  I stood there with my hat in my hand for quite a while. To make a change I put the hat on and stood there some more. I looked around the room for nothing in particular. My hat suddenly felt like it didn’t fit so I took it off and checked the label inside. I assumed this number was the same size as the old one so I put it back on. It didn’t feel any better.

  Ada’s tapes chattered and lights flashed. She wasn’t talking. I didn’t like it.

  Something was wrong.

  I stood there a while longer and then when I was done standing I reached into my pocket and took out the photograph of the target.

  She was a girl. Young, maybe twenty, maybe not quite. She had black hair cut in a bob that was big at the back and small at the front and her bangs were so straight you could use them to survey a building. She had a small face made smaller by the thick, dark rings of eyeliner. She looked like an Egyptian princess.

  This was Eva McLuckie. I wondered who she was. I wondered what she had done to get herself on someone’s hit list.

  As I stood on the spot I had a feeling I had known the answers to both of those questions yesterday.

  I had just forgotten what those answers were.

  And then Ada spoke.

  “Ray, we need to talk.”

  I was all ears.

  14

  The Ritz-Beverly Hotel was a very particular kind of pile and one that was farther away than I thought. Farther still as I took the scenic route, weaving up and down and back and forth across West Hollywood—precautions seemed necessary, after what Ada had told me back at the office. It would have made the hairs go up on the back of my neck, if I had any. But thanks to Thornton, I still knew exactly what that felt like.

  Eva McLuckie. She was our client—our first one, anyway. She was a movie star and she’d taken out a hit on another movie star, one Charles David. The only issue was that the current whereabouts of Mr. David were unknown, which meant I had to do a little of the old private detecting first just to find him. It seemed like a lot of work but as motivation went the amount of gold sitting in the brown athletic bag sitting by the desk in the outer office was right up there.

  Then Ada told me about the Temple of the Magenta Dragon and the fact that our client Eva McLuckie had supposedly dropped out of the public eye herself—apparently in order to take out hits on her co-stars and host little meetings of her own particular kind of private club in the Temple’s basement.

  None of which made any particular kind of sense, but it was early days yet and I wasn’t worried. So far, so good.

  The real problem was what else had been lurking in the Temple basement. This problem made my circuits ache like a bad tooth.

  This problem had a name.

  Chip Rockwell.

  I’d asked Ada to repeat everything to me twice, because the first time I wasn’t sure I believed my audio receptors, even though I could have rewound and played it all back to myself. In fact, that’s just what Ada did.

  That wasn’t all she played. She had my memory tape from the previous day lined up and she gave me the highlights. The dark basement and assembled crowd and the guy who Eva called “Mr. Rockwell” sitting there in his suit and bandages looking as much like a living human being as I did.

  And that voice. I couldn’t get it out of my circuits. It buzzed like a wasp, a monotone like a shorting wall socket had developed a voice and a bad temper.

  Chip Rockwell. Movie producer, head of Playback Pictures. The big time. Even the soda jerk knew him.

  I knew him, too.

  Because I’d killed him.

  Ada had told me about the job because I didn’t remember it. Three years ago. Back when she called the shots while I slept on the job. The story went that Rockwell had fallen in with the mob and was using his studio to launder their money. Something must have gone wrong, because someone took out a contract with us on Rockwell’s life, which I prematurely ended one dark and stormy night courtesy of a dangerous stairwell in the backlot of his own studio.

  Chip Rockwell was dead. It had been big news.

  But three years later the dead guy was sitting up in a basement on Sunset Boulevard, in dinner jacket and bandages, talking through some kind of machine.

  Which meant he wasn’t dead. Injured, and badly by the sound of it, but not dead.

  That was a problem. It meant that we hadn’t fulfilled the contract. If news of Rockwell’s survival got back to the original client, chances were they’d want their money back. Chances were they would want far more than just money. And if Rockwell was still alive, he might remember me and my l
ate-night visit. Our little enterprise risked exposure.

  Except it had been three years. We hadn’t had any trouble, according to Ada. Everyone thought Rockwell was dead. Still dead. Which meant his current state of health was a secret. Which meant we were still in the clear.

  For now.

  And then on top of this, the new job from the new client. One that seemed to intersect the first in a way that neither Ada nor I much liked.

  I was to kill Eva McLuckie.

  Now, this was hinky and we knew it. A little care was required here. Sure, I could have found Eva and punched her ticket, but the way the two jobs tangled was by no means coincidental. Couldn’t have been. Throw in Chip Rockwell and things weren’t just tangled, it was a bona fide Gordian knot.

  So while Ada tried to go back to our new client for some more information, I headed out to the Ritz-Beverly Hotel. Just for a look, nothing more. If Eva was there, I wasn’t going to kill her. She was supposed to be calling the office for a daily update and I could give it to her in person and then ask for an update of my own.

  So I took the scenic route. I had a hunch that someone had seen Eva come to the office yesterday, which meant she was being watched. Then Ada reminded me of the mystery man on the road above the Hollywood Sign and I had to concede the fact that maybe I was being watched, too.

  At least I had been careful with the man from the Parks Department. Nobody had seen that.

  Whether I had been paranoid or not didn’t seem to make much of a difference, because for most of the way to the hotel I was in fact being followed by a gold coupe with a white roof that looked like you could pull it back if it was a nice day.

  But it was a nice day now and the top was up. There was only one person in the car, and while he was making some kind of effort not to be seen, it wasn’t working.

  I figured I could deal with that problem when the time came and eventually I turned past the sign that said THE RITZ-BEVERLY HOTEL in a flowing script that looked like handwriting.