Killing Is My Business

by Adam Christopher

  I didn’t have a cigarette to suck but I was wearing a hat and I adjusted it just like everyone else. I stood there and watched as in just a few minutes more people came out of the building and from up and down the street to form a not insubstantial audience around the wrecked car.

  I walked back to my own vehicle and got in. I kept my eyes on the scene. Someone in shirtsleeves had climbed up onto the hood of the Plymouth Fury, but on reaching the windshield he’d stopped with his hands on hips like he was unsure of the route ahead.

  Sitting between me and the passenger seat in my car was a telephone. It started to ring. I let it ring and I started the car and pulled away and headed up toward Hollywood. When I was clear of the scene by an intersection or two I picked the phone up.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “What’s cooking, Ray?” Ada sounded cheerful as she always did and she sounded like she was pulling on a cigarette which she sometimes did and which I knew to be merely an echo in my circuits of someone else, given that my boss was a computer the size of an office.

  “I’m heading back,” I said. “Get the coffee on.”

  “Nice piece of action downtown, Ray.”

  I frowned, or at least it felt like I frowned. My face was a solid flat plate of bronzed steel-titanium alloy and my mouth was a slot and a grill that was about as mobile as any of the four faces carved onto the side of Mount Rushmore.

  “If you’re talking about the untimely end of Vaughan Delaney, then I guess that is action of a fashion,” I said. “Although I have to ask how you knew about it given that it happened all of three minutes ago.”

  “Oh, it’s all over the place, Ray. Someone called it in to the cops and I just happened to be listening in. Then everybody started calling it in to the cops.”

  “I did think it was a little early for the late edition.”

  “It’ll be front page tomorrow,” said Ada. “Perhaps below the fold. Depends what other standard Hollywood depravity goes on before sundown, I guess.” Ada blew smoke around my circuits. “Not your usual style, but you know what I say, whatever works, works.”

  “Except I had nothing to do with the death of Vaughan Delaney.”

  “That’s good, chief. Keep it up. Deny everything, ask for your phone call, and don’t speak until you get a lawyer.”

  I came up to a set of lights that were red. I’d come several blocks and was at the corner of Beverly and South Union. I didn’t like this part of the city. Hollywood might have been crummy but downtown Los Angeles was strange to me, too many tall buildings standing too close to one another. I wouldn’t be happy until I was back home.

  The lights changed and I kept on in a westerly direction.

  “Ada, listen, it wasn’t me,” I said. “The city planner hit terminal velocity under his own volition.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, as in, oh well, accidents happen.”

  “You don’t sound too worried.”

  “Should I be?”

  “Do we still get paid?”

  “Well,” said Ada, “the target is dead, isn’t he?”

  “That he is.”

  “So job done. That was good of Mr. Delaney to do our work for us. Nice and clean is the way I like it.”

  I made a buzzing sound like a bumblebee trapped under a glass. Ada got the message and she laughed.

  “Don’t worry about it, chief,” she said. “Come back to the office and take the rest of the day off.”

  I thought again about the paperback book I was going to buy. As I drove I kept an optic out and I hit pay dirt nearly at once.

  There was a bookstore on the corner with a Buick-sized space right outside it.

  “I’m on my way,” I said as I pulled the car up. “I’m just making a little stop first.”

  “Going for a root beer float, chief?”

  I frowned on the inside again and Ada started laughing.

  “Go knock yourself out,” she said. And then the phone was dead.

  When I got out of my car I paused a while in the sunshine of the late morning. I turned and looked at the bookstore, and then I turned and looked down the street in a southeasterly direction. Four miles away Los Angeles city planner Vaughan Delaney was being scooped out of the broken roof of his red-and-white 1957 Plymouth Fury.

  Then I swung the door of the Buick closed and I headed into the bookstore with just one thought buzzing around my solenoids.

  It sure was a shame about that car.

  3

  “What kind of car was it again?”

  I looked up from my book. In the computer room behind my office Ada’s lights flashed and her reel-to-reel tapes spun and I could hear the buzz and the hum and the sound of the second hand on a fast stopwatch ticking ever onward.

  “Plymouth Fury,” I said. “1957. Red and white. Excellent condition. Not sure what the Blue Book was, but I’d say the value dropped pretty quick this morning.”

  “Like Vaughan Delaney,” said Ada. “That sure is a shame.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Still, I guess the widow could collect on the insurance.”

  “Car or life?”

  “Either or,” said Ada. Then her tapes went back to spinning and I went back to my book. On the cover was a man in a silver suit with a fishbowl on his head and next to him was a woman in a chain-mail bikini and nothing else. She had blond hair long enough to touch the rocky ground they were standing on. Above them the sky was black and the man in the space suit was pointing a ray gun at a tentacled monstrosity that was crawling over the horizon. The rocky surface belonged to the planet Aldabaran III and if the man and his alien beauty didn’t get back to the safety of his 22 Model Sirus Hardtop then they were going to be in all kinds of trouble.

  I was four chapters in and loving every page.

  There was a click, and then the reel on one of Ada’s mainframes slowed to a halt, then spun up again in the opposite direction. I looked up into the corner of the room where there was nothing but the ceiling and the wall, but for some reason it felt like the spot from which the boss looked down on her employee.

  “Something up?” I asked. I folded the corner of the page and closed the book.

  “New job,” said Ada. “Take a look.”

  There was a ticker-tape machine built into one of the consoles. It sprang to life. I got up and went over and took a look at what the tape said. There was a name and an address.

  “Emerson Ellis.” I looked back up into the corner. “Who’s Emerson Ellis?”

  “That doesn’t matter, Ray. You know that.”

  There was a photographic printer next to the ticker-tape machine. It began to grind. I watched the slot for what felt like a very long time and then a picture poked out and flopped into the wire tray underneath.

  I pulled it out and uncurled the edges and took a look. The photograph was of a man with a round face and soft features and a bald head that was surrounded by a halo of dark hair.

  “That’s Emerson Ellis,” said Ada. “Now, be a good boy and go pay him a visit.”

  I put the photograph into my jacket. I picked my hat up off the table and my coat off the back of the door.

  And then I went to go and meet Mr. Emerson Ellis.

  And I was fairly sure he wasn’t going to be very pleased to meet me.

  4

  After a detour or two I finally followed the address on the ticker tape and headed west across town until I could see the shield of the city of Beverly Hills. I found the address quickly on a busy, high-class street lined on one side by offices and on the other with boutiques, both factions engaged in a cold war over how many acres of plate glass window they could fit across their respective frontages to display the quality of their products or the glamor of their clients or customers within.

  If I’d been to Beverly Hills before I didn’t know it, but already I was planning on making as early a departure as possible.

  I drove up and down the street twice and spent w
hat time I’d gained getting there looking for a place to put the car. I found an angled spot around the corner and then I walked back to the address on the ticker tape, surveying the office from across the street. Like all the other addresses on this block it was a wall of glass behind which beehive hairdos and slim-fitting suits moved.

  I frowned, on the inside. Before I did a job I liked to watch the scene a while, preferably from the comfort of my car, but having to park around the corner put paid to that.

  There was a neon sign reflected in the windows of the office across the street. The sign was green. It didn’t flash, because neon signs don’t flash in Beverly Hills. But I liked what the sign said.

  I turned on my heel and walked into this city’s equivalent of a corner drugstore. A few minutes later I was leaning on the counter by the window and I had a great view of the street and the office across it. Next to me were five stools lined up for customers to sit and drink their coffee and eat their sandwiches and watch the world go by. But while the drugstore was quite busy, for some reason nobody much felt like sitting next to me. And that was just fine. My day had been too long already and I wasn’t much in the mood for company.

  I had bought a coffee and a sandwich. I couldn’t resist, and I didn’t want to take up space in the store without paying rental. The sandwich looked great but I left it untouched on the plate in front of me. The coffee I held cupped in one hand and then periodically in the other. I enjoyed the feeling of warmth that spread with ease through my well-conducting steel-titanium skin and I enjoyed the smell of the coffee as the steam wafted up into the chemical analyzer that sat in the middle of my face in a geometric approximation of a human nose.

  I watched the office across the street, flipping through a selection of optical filters to try to cut the glare and reflection from all that glass. That helped. I could see now that the desks inside the office were arranged in a kind of wide V, the point farthest away, to give all of the staff the benefit of the big windows. And while that meant the workers within could look right out, it also meant that people on the outside could look in, admiring the five men and two women as they worked and typed and smoked and drank coffee. One guy was even eating a sandwich, the green paper being unwrapped on his desk the same green paper that enclosed the sandwich on the counter in front of me.

  As locations went, I could see why Emerson Ellis had picked it. The office was well placed on a good street with a lot of amenities within easy reach.

  Emerson Ellis, it turned out, was some kind of real estate magnate, and already I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him because I was suspicious of alliterative names. I didn’t know if that was some natural instinct or programming. Perhaps my creator, Professor Thornton, had once known a character with alliterative initials and they hadn’t got on and I’d inherited that trait along with a lot more of old Thornton, rest his soul.

  I also didn’t like Emerson Ellis because he wasn’t at the damn office. I knew he wouldn’t be, but after following his echo all over two cities already today I wanted to come and make sure for myself. I felt a solenoid spark even as I thought about the target and his infuriating habit of not being where I wanted him to be.

  Then I looked down at my unopened sandwich and I switched my coffee to my other hand and I felt a little better.

  Emerson Ellis was the boss, and to remind everyone of that fact he had named his company after himself and he had put that name in large gold letters across the field of glass that formed the street-side wall of his office. Emerson Ellis Building and Construction. There was also a telephone number and an address, as if prospective clients staring up at the gold letters a foot high each couldn’t remember where they were.

  Inside the office window was an easel and on that easel was a large rectangular card, a yard wide and almost that high. On the card was an illustration of squares and rectangles that looked exactly like the kind of building development you wouldn’t want to live next to. The easel and its card were angled in the window so people could stop and look and be suitably impressed, if not mildly disgusted. The card proudly boasted that it was a development worth ten million dollars and I was surprised they hadn’t put a chaise lounge out on the sidewalk for people of a nervous disposition to faint onto.

  Emerson Ellis had a nice thing going. Business was good. So good the boss apparently didn’t have to do any actual work anymore. That was the kind of business you could aspire to. But some of us had to work for a living.

  Robots included.

  Today was no different. Today I had a job to do and it was a job for which Ada would collect a nice paycheck. Maybe not enough to build a concrete monstrosity like the one on display in the real estate office window, but you had to start somewhere.

  Of course, if today had gone according to plan, Emerson Ellis wouldn’t be building the development either. A lot of people were going to be disappointed but probably a lot more were going to be relieved. It wasn’t often that my job intersected with a public service.

  There was only one problem as I sat there at the drug store counter with a coffee that was cooling and a sandwich that was curling at the edges and that problem was Emerson Ellis himself and the fact that I couldn’t find him to kill him.

  In fact, nobody could find him, whether they wanted to turn off his lights or buy him a scotch.

  That wasn’t to say he was missing, as such. Far from it. It was just that he wasn’t anywhere that people knew. Not his friends, not his coworkers. Emerson Ellis was a busy man. Emerson Ellis was a successful man. He didn’t get where he was today by telling people where he was at any given moment.

  I had hoped to get lucky, that luck helped to not a small degree by the fact that I was a private detective and that finding people was one of those things that private detectives were supposed to be good at.

  Well, I had been a private detective. I was still programmed for it even if that wasn’t my job anymore—not since Ada, a computer designed to make a profit, had discovered that killing people paid rather more than just finding them—and I was still registered and licensed and insured and listed in the Los Angeles telephone directory as such and we kept the office in the Cahuenga building and it still had THE ELECTROMATIC DETECTIVE AGENCY stenciled on the door, although in gold letters only one-sixth the size of the ones painted on the glass of Emerson Ellis Building and Construction.

  As a cover, being a private eye was as good as any, if not better. As the last robot in the world, my existence wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t advertised; if you knew about me or found out about me then you’d know I was a private eye and that was life as we know it.

  But despite my new programming as an assassin, courtesy of Ada, I still had my old primary programming as a private eye from Professor Thornton. I may not have remembered what the weather was yesterday or who the president of the United States was at the moment but I sure as hell knew the criminal statutes of the state of California and I knew how to pick a lock and to listen to a conversation in a bar without getting caught doing it.

  These skills were programmed in. Hardwired into my permanent store along with the flags of the world and the names of fifty-two different kinds of nautical knots and how to tie them. And while that meant I could probably do a passable job of sailing a ship, it also meant that while I was out doing my real job of killing people for money without getting caught I could also sneak around and be discrete and investigate that which needed investigating to make my real job not just easier but possible.

  Because the first thing you had to do when you wanted to kill someone? You had to find them.

  5

  Since walking out of the office with Emerson Ellis’s name and office address on that little strip of ticker tape, I’d spent most of that afternoon looking for him and here’s what I found:

  Nothing.

  Emerson Ellis was successful. I had gotten that idea after just a few phone calls, the first step in my unsatisfying afternoon flitting between Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. I cal
led his office five times with five different voice modulations from four different telephone booths dotted around Hollywood and downtown. Just being careful. I spoke to three different women, secretaries or typists or both, one of whom had developed the no doubt useful skill of being able to type while she handled telephone inquiries. I asked for the boss. I was a client late for a meeting. I was a potential client interested in the pile of concrete on display on the big card in the window. I was Emerson Ellis’s dentist. I was calling from city hall about a permit and there was a problem with the paperwork and Emerson Ellis really had better call me back tout de suite or there was going to be a delay. An expensive delay.

  There were no dice to be had. Emerson Ellis was busy and successful and he didn’t need to tell his staff where he was and he didn’t need to have his secretaries fill out his diary for the week. If he was on vacation, nobody knew it. If he was at the dentist, nobody questioned why his dentist was apparently calling to say he was late.

  With no Emerson Ellis to investigate, I investigated Emerson Ellis Building and Construction. It was as successful and busy as its founder. It dealt with high-end commercial real estate, which meant several of the staff had big houses with swimming pools thanks to their sizeable commission earnings. The rest had anything from a quiet bungalow to a second-floor apartment. All of this thanks to the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills telephone directories and a nice woman called Cheryl at information who I spoke to for a good length of time. She had a pet corgi called Napoleon. Napoleon sounded like a nice dog and Cheryl sounded like a nice owner. When she asked what I did I told her I was in confidential inquiries. She seemed to like that, the way she laughed. And once she knew she was talking to a private eye she was keen to help, although she was equally keen to remind me that she really shouldn’t be doing this and when she gave me Emerson Ellis’s home telephone number and his home address she gave it in a whisper that must have sounded at least a little suspicious to the other directory-assistance girls sitting around her.