I Only Killed Him Once

by Adam Christopher

  Check the spare wheel.

  Well. Maybe I would. I wondered if Ada knew what that meant. I decided not to ask her about that either. Not yet, anyway.

  Ada’s lights flashed and now they seemed to be dimmer, and her tapes spun and they seemed to spin slower. I moved to the table and I made a show of picking up the newspaper and opening it and straightening the pages up. A moment later I thought I heard the click of a metal teaspoon against a ceramic mug and I thought I could smell coffee being brewed somewhere close by, but I knew I was mistaken so I ignored it.

  I stood by the window and I read a story about the mysterious death of a real estate magnate but I didn’t take it in. I was too busy replaying the conversation with Touch Daley. I wished I’d taken a snap or two of him with the cameras that sat behind my optics.

  Then there were two sharp clicks. I lowered the newspaper.

  “Okay, Ray,” said Ada, sounding like she’d just finished the last hot gulp from her mug and was working up to make a start on the next cigarette in the line. “Time for you to get to work.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said. I put the newspaper down and I picked up my hat. In the corner of the room a thin ribbon of ticker tape began its dive toward the floor from the slot in the computer bank as Ada printed off my instructions. I walked over and held the paper between my hands as it continued to crawl from the slot.

  I looked up into the corner of the room. “Bay City?”

  “Bay City,” said Ada.

  I pursed my lips, or at least it felt like I did. “That’s a little out of the way.”

  “It’s a nice place,” said Ada. “Classy. The sunshine will be good for your circuits. I hear they have a lot of it out there.”

  The ticker-tape machine stopped. I tore the strip off, read it again, then curled it up and slipped it into my pocket.

  Then I put my hat on and headed for the door.

  “Send me a postcard!” said Ada, but I was already gone and I was thinking about other things.

  8

  Ada was right. After taking myself and my car west through Hollywood and then Beverly Hills and on toward the coast, I discovered that Bay City was indeed a neighborhood with a certain kind of class. The sunshine sure didn’t hurt. We had sunshine in the rest of Los Angeles but here the sunshine felt like it was in a different class too. Maybe it was the nice big houses the place seemed full of. Maybe it was the view of the bay itself as I pulled into a beachside parking lot to get my bearings. Beyond the rail of the lot and the slope of the sand the ocean was a vast and flat expanse of blue so deep some might even be tempted to call it azure.

  Myself, I settled on blue as good enough. I turned the car off and I sat there with the window down and the breeze coming in and cooling down the inside of the car. That was as good for my circuits as the sunshine was, because since walking out of the office and getting in my car in the garage, those circuits had been doing a lot of work and my electronics were getting a hell of a baking. I was a robot and that meant I didn’t get headaches, but Professor Thornton sure must have because right then my head felt like someone had an industrial vice and was applying it liberally across my temples.

  I put one bronzed titanium alloy elbow on the doorframe and enjoyed the cool sea breeze for a moment and then I turned and looked down at the object that was giving me that headache. It sat on the passenger seat and I hadn’t touched it. It had been there when I had gotten into the car and there it still lay.

  It was a hat. It had a folded crown and a narrow brim that curled toward the rear. I would have called it a trilby. It was black and I could tell just by looking at it that even if it was my style, which it wasn’t, it was a good deal too small for my own cranium.

  But about the right size for Touch Daley. In fact, I would have said the hat was his, apart from the fact that he had been wearing it in the office when I last saw him. Or at least he had been clutching it with those long fingers of his. It was a sensible hat and quite smart too and it went with his suit and the more I thought about it the less likely it seemed that, after our little meeting not an hour ago, he had gone down into the garage and found my car and opened it with keys of his own and placed the hat there for me to find.

  The hat didn’t sit well on either of my primary or secondary resonating voltage wafers.

  I sat there looking at the ocean and looking at the hat and then I did what any good detective would do when confronted with a mystery. I investigated. And I started by picking up the hat. I examined it. It was a nice hat and not a cheap one either. I turned it over. The band around the edge was a little worn but not too much. There was nothing inside the hat except that sea breeze. I held it by the crown and flipped the band inside out. There was nothing there either.

  I went to put the hat back where I had found it and that’s when I found my second clue. Because sitting on the passenger seat underneath the hat was a single sheet of yellow lined paper, a page of something like a legal pad. With the hat in one hand I picked up the paper and I let it fall open along the fold and I read what was inside it.

  It wasn’t much. Two lines of nothing much, in fact.

  The second line was an address.

  The first line was an instruction. It read:

  GO HERE INSTEAD.

  Both lines were written in mechanical pencil in a handwriting I recognized immediately on account of it being my own.

  I rested the note on one knee and the hat on the other and I looked out at the ocean. It was lunchtime and the beach was doing reasonable business considering it was a weekday. Bay City seemed to have enough of a population of those lucky enough not to heed the demands of the nine to five that they could take advantage of the sun when it shone, which was often, and the water when it shimmered and glittered and lay as flat as a pool table, which was always. I was just a robot in his car minding his business and taking in the view and nobody seemed to mind that too much.

  I decided I liked Bay City.

  The hat I liked a little less. The note, forget about it. I didn’t want to talk about that note.

  But it did give me a clue about what I should do next.

  Ada had sent me on a job. She had given me a name and an address and those details were sitting on the little strip of ticker tape that was rolled up and inside my jacket pocket. I had no further instructions but I knew what I was doing. I’d wasted no time in getting to Bay City despite the fact it was daylight. My line of work was one that required discretion and secrecy and not getting caught, and daylight was often something of a hindrance. But that didn’t mean I had to sit and watch the sea all day, even if that seemed like it would be nice. No, what I had to do now was not entirely unlike what Professor Thornton had programmed me for. Being a private detective was a good cover but it also equipped me with a certain set of skills that came in useful.

  All I had was a name and an address and Ada trusted me to get on with the rest of it. What she didn’t know was that I had apparently preempted myself and left the note with the other address, which was also in Bay City.

  If there was one thing I didn’t believe in, it was coincidences.

  So I looked at the ocean and I looked at the note and I decided that the Raymond Electromatic of yesterday probably knew what he was talking about and that the Raymond Electromatic of today would do well to trust him.

  Call it . . . self-employment. I was on a case of my own devising and I was my own client.

  I liked that.

  But first I had another little job to do: I was going to get out of the car and take a look under the spare wheel in the trunk like Mr. Touch Daley had suggested.

  I folded the note and I put it in my pocket. I put the hat back on the passenger seat. Then I pulled the brim of my own down a little more over my optics. I took the keys out of the ignition and I opened my door and I closed it with a metallic crunch that was both satisfying and quite possibly audible from the office back in West Hollywood. But I was out in the open with nothing to hide, so I hid nothi
ng. As I walked around to the back of my Buick a couple of people strolled past on the boardwalk that abutted the parking lot and only one pair of eyes even looked in my direction.

  I’d done enough thinking so I didn’t waste any more time on it. I slipped the car key into the lock of the trunk, gave it a twist, and pulled the lid up.

  The trunk was empty. The floor was a carpeted board with a little canvas pull tag. It didn’t look like it had been disturbed, but then I wasn’t sure if I expected it to be or not.

  I checked to see who was around me and there were several people but none of them showed me any interest. But it didn’t hurt any to play it cool. I had the strangest feeling that there was something going on in the world and I didn’t know what it was. Call it an ache, a kind of dull throb that ran down the diodes on one side of my chassis and back up the other.

  Because if there was something going on, I had known about it—yesterday.

  I leaned over like anyone would and I pulled the pull tag and I lifted the floor of the trunk. There was a spare wheel underneath and some tools in a sort of leather holster. I lifted the wheel. There was nothing underneath it. I checked the wheel itself. There was nothing hidden inside the rim, and the tire itself was intact and inflated to what felt like the correct pressure. Then I put the wheel back and I unbuckled the holster of tools and laid it out along the top of the wheel. I had everything there to switch one wheel for another and I had to admire Buick for their attention to detail as every tool was embossed with the make and model of my car. It was a very nice set of tools, but there was nothing there that a reasonable motorist would not expect to find in their trunk and there wasn’t anything hidden either.

  I stood with the sunshine on my back as I pondered the results of my investigation and the advice Touch Daley had given me in the office. His words had been simple and hardly open to interpretation, but there was nothing here. Maybe Ada was right and there was nothing that Touch Daley said that was worth listening to.

  Including warnings of imminent peril.

  The four wheels of the car currently in situ were doing just fine so I wrapped up the tools and I put them back and I slid the floor of the trunk back into the car but no matter what I did, it wouldn’t lay flat. I tried a few times then gave up.

  I stopped and looked at it awhile and then I thought again about that something going on. Maybe it was just paranoia. Or maybe that was the human condition I’d heard so much about. I didn’t know. I was a robot who couldn’t remember what he’d had for lunch yesterday. The human condition was a little beyond my purview.

  I closed the trunk and strolled around to the driver’s door and slipped back inside the car. It was still hot. Hotter, perhaps, now that the cool sea breeze had died and the air was left to sit just where it was and get lightly broiled by that famous Bay City sun.

  I reached into the pocket of my coat. I took out the strip of ticker tape. I read the name and the address that was on it.

  Then I took out the folded sheet of note paper with the other address and the instruction.

  GO HERE INSTEAD.

  Then I put both back into my pocket and I started the car and backed out of the lot and got back onto the street and as I drove toward the address on the notepaper I hoped that the information the Raymond Electromatic of yesterday had acquired was a little more useful than the vague suggestions of the mysterious Mr. Touch Daley.

  9

  I didn’t know where the address on the yellow note was going to lead me but I found it soon enough, on a quiet street a few blocks down from the beach. The building in question wasn’t residential although it was in a block that was a mix of houses and storefronts. It was largish and neatly rectangular in a way that suggested the architect was either an aficionado of European minimalism or desperately bored by his work. The whole construction was set back from the street to make room for a parking lot, the rear half of which the building loomed over as it rode a parade of columns that were anything but Greco-Roman. The section of the building thus supported had very big windows high up and they were all open. From within came the sound of activity.

  It sounded like I’d come to some kind of health club. Maybe a small, private gymnasium.

  I took all this in as I pulled into the lot and then I turned the car around as I eased into a slot, so I was left facing the street rather than the building. I liked to do that. It seemed less obvious than sitting there staring dead ahead.

  I killed the engine and looked into the rearview just as a middle-aged man with wet gray hair came out of the main doors hidden between all those columns. He was wearing a navy-blue track suit with a red stripe down the leg and he had a red towel slung over one shoulder and a canvas bag slung over the other. The canvas bag was long enough to carry a guitar. Maybe he was the in-sauna entertainment.

  More sounds emanated from the high windows. The sounds were of movement punctuated with a light, metallic clattering and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on a polished floor and there was periodic shouting coupled with a periodic buzzing like the intercom in a doctor’s waiting room in a bad part of town.

  Despite all the noise, the place seemed to be having a quiet spell, at least going by the number of cars in the lot. It was mid-afternoon and a hot one at that. Maybe everyone else was down at the beach. That sounded like the better option and I didn’t even swim.

  I got out of the car and locked it and stood for a moment looking at the other vehicles keeping mine company. There was nothing much to speak of, except for one big German number, a silver sedan with a hood long enough for the hundred-yard dash and an ornament on the radiator cap that was shaped like a trefoil and rose up like a gun target. The car was unusual and expensive and polished to a good shine.

  I stood by my car for a moment and I looked at the other car and I listened to the symphony of activity from within the building. Then I ventured through the columns and went inside.

  I found myself in a lobby that was devoid of any life and that had a desk at the end behind a glass divider. There was a cork noticeboard on my left and a set of stairs on my right and a big set of double doors somewhere between them. The doors had little square windows in them reinforced with a wire mesh.

  I headed left.

  The noticeboard was divided into four named sections and was covered with pinned papers. The second section had a fancier name panel than the others, a thing of dark wood and gold letters more in keeping with a firm of lawyers than a gym club.

  Or perhaps a firm of private detectives. I looked at the letters and wondered if the same guy had done the notice on the door of my office.

  The panel said BAY CITY FENCING CLUB and the notices beneath it were a list of members with a column for a check mark and something about their annual Christmas dance.

  I took one long look down the list of members and then I took Ada’s ticker tape out of my pocket and took a somewhat shorter look down that. I didn’t need to. I knew every letter printed on it. But I did it all the same and then I read the list of members again. There was no match but I wasn’t sure if I expected there to be. I was trusting my past self on this one.

  Satisfied I had interrogated the noticeboard, I went to the big double doors but I didn’t open them. There was no sound from beyond and when I looked through the square wired windows all I saw was an empty gym. I pulled one of the door handles in an experimental fashion and found it was locked.

  It seemed all the action was happening upstairs. So I turned right and took the stairs up one level where I found myself in a smaller lobby with a smaller set of double doors. The sounds were louder and when I tried the left -hand door it swung open without protest.

  It was another gym, this one a good deal larger than the one downstairs on account of the extension that advanced out over half the parking lot. The room was predominantly yellow in color. It had bleacher seats rising along one wall and various rope-based apparatus hanging from the ceiling.

  There were small trampolines stacked upright ag
ainst the far wall and two pommel horses likewise pushed out of the way of what was going on in the middle of the hall, which was nothing short of one-on-one combat.

  There were two long strips taped to the floor, twenty yards long and five wide. Next to each, in the middle, was a trestle table with a box on it with lights. Each box had a power cord that was taped to the floor as they ran out along the room to the outlets on the wall.

  I counted six people in total taking part in the sport—four engaged in bouts, two acting as referees. They were all dressed in white, with short breeches and long socks, and jackets with high collars.

  The Bay City Fencing Club was in full flow.

  The four fencers on the pistes were wearing masks fronted with white mesh that hid their faces, and from the backs of their jackets trailed a wire leading to a spool that sat at either end of the pistes. As the fencers fenced, their weapons clattered against each other, occasionally ringing off an opponent’s guard like a hammer striking a bell. The men bounced up and down and back and forth and their shoes squeaked on the strips as they tried their damnedest to keep out of reach of their opponent’s weapon.

  With everyone so engaged I stood by the door unnoticed. I watched awhile. There was a kind of beauty in it, a ballet as the combatants danced up and down their strips, parrying their opponents, riposting, attacking, defending. Quite often the attacks were successful and resulted in a buzzing sound and a light from the box on the trestle table and a cry of delight from the man who had landed a hit. Fists were raised and masked heads were shaken and then the referee called them back to the en garde position, sometimes after a not insubstantial conversation in French.

  To my surprise I was able to follow the action without too much difficulty. I checked my permanent store and found a rule book. I guess Professor Thornton had liked fencing too. I could see why. It was a good way to keep fit, and there was also a romance to it as well as a kind of beauty. I knew that fencing was a sport like any other and they even had it at the Olympics along with swimming and running and other more commonplace efforts. But fencing was different somehow. Some—fencers, most likely—might even call it sophisticated.