I didn’t know what the contraption was for. I took a couple of pictures and listened to the ticking clock. There was no clock in this room, either.
And then I realized what it was. My Geiger counter was doing its best to get my attention. I frowned and told myself to do better. It was just that it had never gone off as far as I could remember (which today was about five hours) so I didn’t expect to hear it.
I turned it up and I took some readings. It sounded like someone was grilling a steak in my head.
I headed back to the master bedroom, following the crackling. There was another door, next to the big set that led out. Somehow I’d missed it, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t miss it now. As I got close the crackle got louder.
The door opened into a wide corridor, which after a couple of steps I realized wasn’t a corridor. It was a walk-in closet, bigger (I guessed) than most of the regular hotel rooms. As I walked forward I slid open the sliding doors that lined either side of the passage. They were empty save for big chromed coat hangers permanently attached to the rails. Even in the honeymoon suite, the Ritz-Beverly didn’t trust its guests all the way.
The passage ended in more sliding doors. I opened them. More space for clothes. Drawers here, big and wide and small and shallow. And underneath, at floor level, a big black rectangular safe.
My Geiger counter was now putting out a continuous howl. I feared for the safety of my new suit and hat.
The safe was locked. There was a combination dial on the front and a chromed handle. I turned the Geiger counter down and focused my audio receptors on the locking mechanism buried inside the safe’s door. It didn’t take long to crack the combination as I listened to the tumblers catch and engage and disengage.
Breaking into things was a useful skill in a job like mine.
Inside the safe was a box. I pulled it out. It was black plastic, and the plastic was textured, like it was pretending to be leather when it was anything but. The box was not quite a cube, a little taller than it was deep, ten inches high and eight square. The lid had a metal flip-catch, which I flipped.
The inner surface of the lid was lined with a metal that was dull gray and a little soft to the touch. Lead, but nowhere near enough of it to shield the outside world from the hot contents of the box. Under the lid was a stiff foam packer in two halves, the top half squeaking like a mouse in the jaws of a housecat as I pulled it out.
I looked into the box.
Inside was a square something. It looked like a cube made of frosted glass. Inside that glass was a tracery of filaments, like someone had printed a computer circuit on the inside of a giant ice cube.
I tilted the box this way and that to get a look. The sides of the box were also lead-lined. There was nothing else in the container. No label or writing or any kind, unless it was on the bottom, but I didn’t much feel like taking a look. I figured I’d exposed the hotel to enough radiation today. So I put the top half of the foam spacer back in, closed the lid, put the box in the safe, closed it, and spun the dial.
Then I left the honeymoon suite as I had found it and headed for the hotel lobby.
There was a phone call I needed to make.
17
There was a different bellhop waiting for me in the lobby this time. His smile was nicer. There were two young ladies behind the reception desk on my left, one of whom was dealing with a hotel guest who was nothing more than two legs as thin as pins with a sphere of fur balanced on the top.
I pulled my collar up and my hat down and headed for the row of four wooden phone boxes that lay beyond the forest of soft furnishings, in an alcove that mirrored the spot where the piano was dropped. The pianist was still there, swaying on his stool with his eyes closed as he played. I didn’t blame him. If I had to sit in the lobby for hours at a time I’d keep my eyes closed, too.
The booths had narrow double doors fitted with leaded stained glass. I went to the second booth along.
And then I turned to face the man sitting on the sofa opposite.
He had on a broad-brimmed fedora made of green rabbit felt, and he had his arms folded and his legs crossed tight. He looked uncomfortable and not at all concerned about the creases he was putting into his nice brown suit. His tie was red and it was pulled too tight as well, pinching the skin of his neck just below the waterline of a big orange beard. He wore dark glasses under the brim of his hat and he kept the brim down like I wouldn’t notice him sitting there.
I stepped away from the telephones and closer to the man.
Charles David looked up at me but he kept everything folded tight. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his glasses.
“It’s the beard,” I said. “Too distinctive. Stands out like a traffic light. Lose the beard. And maybe you’d make a better tail if you unwound and tried a bit harder.”
He sighed and the sigh was a long one. He looked better in the photograph that was inside my jacket than in the flesh. I wasn’t sure whether it was the fiery color of his beard that did it, but the skin of his face had a green tinge and there was a sweat on his brow. Altogether he looked a little seasick.
“That’s what they said,” he said, “but I told them, no-can-do. This beard is my livelihood. Do you know I have it insured for one million dollars?”
I whistled. It sounded like a truck making an emergency stop at the lights and made the bellhop and the two girls at reception and the ball of fur who was still arguing over a bill turn to look at me. I ignored them.
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, and then I started running through some options. I couldn’t kill him here. I had to get him alone. Didn’t matter much where. I had an entire hotel of rooms around me but after a second thought I discounted that idea. A movie star dies in the tub in his room and a lot of people would start talking about the big robot they saw in the lobby.
No, I had to get him somewhere else.
Charles David looked around. I followed his gaze. The others in the hotel lobby had gone back to their own business. Then he said, “Look, I don’t have time for this,” and then after a short pause he said, “We need to talk.”
“Sure,” I said. Sounded like getting him out of the hotel would be a little easier than I first thought. “Tell me,” I said, “do you ever take down the top on that gold coupe, or do you worry about the upholstery getting faded?”
Before he could answer, the phone in the booth behind me rang. Charles David nearly jumped out of his skin but with his arms and legs all locked up he just jerked on the sofa and made it creak. His mouth formed an O with the million-dollar soup-catcher all around it.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I think that’s for me.”
I went back to the second booth from the left. I couldn’t fit into the box, so I reached in and picked up the receiver and stood there looking at the stained glass in the folded doors. In the scene, Sir Galahad seemed to be having some trouble averting his eyes from a woman in a thin white nightie with lace around the edges. They were standing in a forest. The woman was going to catch a chill, dressed like that.
On the telephone was nothing but a hazy white noise, like a waterfall in the distance.
“You’ll never guess who I’ve run into,” I said into the phone.
“I hope your trigger finger didn’t get too itchy,” said Ada inside my head. “You were supposed to just take a look, remember?”
“Don’t worry. The girl isn’t here. But I was tailed.”
“By?”
“By a man with a beard worth one million dollars,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether I believed that or not but I thought Ada would get the picture.
“You’re being tailed by Charles David?” asked Ada.
“I am,” I said.
“Now there’s a happy coincidence. Say, maybe he wants your autograph.”
“No,” I said, “what he wants is to talk.”
“Talk?”
“Question is, do we want to listen?”
“What are you driving at, Ray?”
“I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”
“It’s the honeymoon suite.”
“Ooh, dishy.”
“Not when the double king has been wheeled out and replaced by a nuclear-powered dentist’s chair and the happy couple happens to be our pair of clients. They’ve been staying here three months, apparently.”
The phone hissed in my ear. It sounded like rain on a hillside.
“Oh,” said Ada. “Well, isn’t that just tickety-boo?” Then there was a flicking sound, like someone trying to get a damp cigarette lighter to catch.
“I don’t like it when you say tickety-boo, Ada.”
“Do you think Eva McLuckie and Charles David are really married?”
“Not in the slightest. Whatever they are partners in, it isn’t holy matrimony.”
Ada paused and then she said, “Quite the three-pipe problem.”
I didn’t know what that meant so I ignored it. “Anything your end?”
“Not a peep. Can’t get hold of our new client.”
“And no call from McLuckie herself, right?”
“Got it in one,” said Ada. “So what else was in the hotel room?”
I gave her the top-to-bottom description. After I’d sketched out the safe and the safe’s contents, Ada made a humming sound.
“Okay,” she said. “You left the box where it was?”
“I did. It’s too hot to move. Lead-lined, but only just.”
“You’ve probably soaked up a bit. You should come back to the office.”
I checked my Geiger counter and it rattled off news I didn’t much like but could have been worse. Ada was right. I wasn’t quite a walking uranium rod but I didn’t want to spread it around the rest of the hotel.
Ada asked, “Is Charles David still there?”
I glanced over. The movie star was still on the sofa. He was looking out the front windows of the hotel lobby.
“He is.”
“Okay, Chief, listen up. He wants to talk to you, he can talk to you. Bring him back to the office with you.”
“Isn’t that a little risky?”
“He doesn’t know what you do, Ray. He’ll think you’re a private dick, that’s all.”
“Eva McLuckie knows what I do.”
“Well, depending on how the conversation goes, his visit to the office could be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, if you know what I mean.”
I frowned on the inside as I watched Charles David just a few feet away. I pulled the telephone closer to my mouth.
Force of habit.
“Maybe he can tell us some more about what’s going on at the Temple of the Magenta Dragon,” I said. “I don’t know if Rockwell lives in the basement or is just wheeled in for special occasions, but we still need to know where he’s been for the last three years.”
“You’re right about that, Chief. So head back here. Give Charles the office address and he can drive himself. Probably best if you two aren’t seen together.”
I said okay and put the telephone back on the cradle. I motioned Charles David over.
“So you want to talk to me?”
Charles David nodded with quite some vigor.
“Fine,” I said. “But not here.” I gave him the address and I gave him Ada’s instructions. Charles David nodded again, vigor intact, then left. It seemed a bit of risk, letting him out of my sight like that, but he seemed pretty interested in having a conversation and he seemed to like the idea that we could have it somewhere private like my office.
I waited a few minutes, then as I headed for the doors I thought about giving the pianist a two-buck tip only to realize he’d deserted his post. I wished him well in his escape.
The parking lot was where I’d left it, as was my car.
The gold coupe was gone.
18
I took the long way back to the office. It was just off the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, but my detour was by way of La Brea Avenue, 8th Street, Hoover, then Western, and I had one optic on the traffic up ahead the whole way. There were plenty of coupes on the road and some were even gold but those that had removable lids were open and none looked to be driven by a man with dark glasses and facial hair insured for a sum big enough to fight a small land war over.
Just as intended. By my reckoning Charles David should have got to the office well ahead of me. He seemed to understand my request for discretion well enough.
But the traffic was heavy thanks to the lane closures around Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and by the time I reached my building and went up to my office it was later than I would have liked.
He was hiding behind the door.
I could hear him breathing and I could see his shadow behind the frosted glass before I was halfway down the hallway outside the office. He was holding something I thought was probably a gun.
So much for a quiet chat. Still, that was okay. Guns didn’t worry me.
The door was unlocked. He must have had a skeleton key. I didn’t loiter. I opened the door and I walked in and then I stopped in the middle of the outer office. The door to the computer room was closed. From beyond the door came the sound of someone typing, which I knew was really micro-switches flipping.
There was another sound. A click. I was right about the gun.
I turned around.
Charles David had the coat and the hat and dark glasses on and that famous beard was glistening with droplets of sweat like someone had thrown a handful of diamonds onto a grass lawn. He looked hot and bothered and in need of a Pepto-Bismol. His gun was pretty interesting. A pistol, automatic. Pretty big, too. A Beretta maybe. It looked new and it was probably expensive for anyone who wasn’t a big-time movie star.
I glanced over at the computer room door. I wasn’t afraid for myself and my radioactive suit was on the way out anyway. But I was a little worried about Ada. A man with a gun and an idea could do a lot of damage if he got in there.
Then again, nobody knew about her, and if Charles had read the stencil on the door he’d just have thought I was a private detective.
One he wanted to talk to at the point of a gun, apparently. He didn’t say anything as he pointed it at me, but he did sway on his feet a little.
I frowned, somewhere. “You feeling okay, bub?”
Bub smiled and showed me a lot of white Hollywood teeth. My frown lit up the circuits down one side of me and back up the other like a jukebox.
There was a streak of blood across his two front teeth.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” said Charles, and he waved the gun up and down like he preferred to nod with that rather than his head. Maybe he didn’t want to mess that famous beard up any.
The phone on the desk rang. I knew who it was. I didn’t move. Charles didn’t either but his eyes moved to it and his mouth opened again like it had back at the hotel. He seemed to find telephones worrisome.
Then he nodded with the gun again. “This happen to you a lot?”
If I had an eyebrow to raise I would have. “People don’t use the telephone to talk to you?”
Charles didn’t seem to like this. His eyes went around the room then came back to my face. “Someone’s watching you, aren’t they? They called at the hotel and now they’re calling here.” He ground his molars. I could tell by the way the beard moved at the back of his jaw. “They’re everywhere,” he said in a low voice. “They get everywhere, get to everyone, everyone.”
I had a feeling he was talking mostly to himself.
The telephone jangled.
“Or,” I said, “I’m just a popular robot. Do you mind?”
Charles dragged a hand across his damp forehead but his hand was as sweaty as his face so all he did was move moisture around. Then he nodded with the gun, which I took to be a yes.
I walked to the desk and picked up the phone. “Raymond,” I said into the
speaking end.
The phone hissed uselessly in my left audio receptor and Ada exhaled a nonexistent lungful of smoke in my mind.
“You found out what two-first-names wants yet?”
I lifted the telephone from the desk so as not to stretch the cable any and looked Charles up and down.
“Not quite,” I said and at that Charles perked up, lifting his chin and standing on his toes like a ballerina getting her cue.
“How does he look?” Ada asked.
“Like he’s eaten a plate of bad oysters. He’s sick, isn’t he? And you know he’s sick.”
Two-first-names didn’t seem to be bothered about being talked about in the third person.
“It was just a hunch,” said Ada. “So start talking to him. I’ll wait here.”
I nodded and put the phone down.
“You are a popular robot,” said Charles. He was smiling again and had returned his heels to the floorboards. “You should be in pictures.” There was still blood on his teeth.
I laughed. It sounded like a garbage truck grinding its gears in a low tunnel. “Y’know,” I said, “I don’t think you’re the first person to say that.”
“So you’re a detective?” asked Charles.
I looked at the gun in his hand. It looked heavy. I looked at his face.
“Yes. Private investigator, licensed by the city. Do you normally wave handguns at licensed private investigators?”
Charles tilted the gun like he had to read the engraved model number on the side. His eyes were invisible behind the opaque glasses. With his mouth open he looked surprised. He swayed on his feet again.
“Ah…” he said, and then he said, “Ah,” again.
Then he pointed the gun back at me. “They gave it to me.”
“Who’s they?”
“What were you looking for at the hotel?”
“I was looking for a woman. Still am. I was led to believe she had a room at the Ritz-Beverly Hotel, but she wasn’t there.”
“I … what?” asked Charles. His beard moved in a way that seemed to indicate a state of confusion.
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