“English, please. American vernacular if you have it.”
“Outside,” he said. “There’s a right old fuss. There’s cars up at the road, all over the show. The boys have seen people, down in the woods, too, like they’re trying to sneak in. It’s a right old doo-lally. I’ve been looking for you all over. All hands on deck, mate, all hands on deck! So pull your finger out and get a bloomin’ move on!”
Alfie rushed off and left a trail of blue cigarette smoke in his wake.
And then the telephone on Falzarano’s desk rang. I picked it up. I knew it was for me.
“What’s going on, Ada?”
“Didn’t your mother teach you to say ‘hello’ first?”
“I’ve found out Falzarano’s secret.”
“Do tell.”
I told her. I described the computer room. I described the alcoves and people who were in those alcoves. When I was done Ada sipped her coffee for a moment or two and then she spoke.
“Good boy, Ray. Very good. Now, listen. I’ve got some instructions for you.”
I frowned on the inside and somewhere in my circuits Ada stirred more creamer into her cup.
“No comment on Falzarano and the fact that he’s not entirely what he looks like on the outside? Or that his boys are perhaps even further in that general direction? Or did you already know?”
“No, I didn’t know, but now I do. You’ve done good. The client is going to be very pleased.”
“You think this is what they wanted, along with the blueprints?”
“I’d put money on it, chief. But there’s a time and a place for this conversation, and pretty soon you’re going to be out of both of them. You’ve got company coming, and lots of it.”
I glanced out of the open doors of the office. Alfie was long gone and I couldn’t see or hear anyone else.
“So I heard,” I said. “Who are they? You want me to get out?”
“As fast as your little legs will take you. But not before you’ve done the job.”
“I’m not sure I like the timing, Ada. But I think I can handle Falzarano.”
“That’s great, but the job’s changed.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Ada sipped her coffee. “I want you to kill everyone, Ray.”
There was a pause and a beat and I listened to the ticking of the fast hand of a stopwatch far away.
“Nobody gets out of this alive.”
35
Alfie had been right. Falzarano’s castle was in uproar. I hit the entrance hall and kept on going to the main door, but on my way across the checkerboard I had to stop to let a group of boys with guns rush out from somewhere deeper in the house. By the time I’d followed, the group had already split around the fountain and were racing up the drive in the night, rifles clacking and gravel crunching and sunglasses—of course, the sunglasses—in place.
Ada had told me to clean the house out. I had accepted the order but that didn’t mean I had to like it. I had no qualms about killing because killing was business. Falzarano was a target. Like Ellis had been. The job was the job and that’s what we got paid to do.
But this was something different. Cleaning the house meant taking out the targets and then everyone else. And there was a whole lot of everyone and now I knew they weren’t quite what they looked like. As I stood and considered my options at the top of the stairs more guards appeared and ran around the driveway and the fountain and off up to the main gate out of sight and off around the side of the house and off into the trees around us. Dogs barked and footsteps crunched.
Falzarano—or at least something that looked a good deal like Falzarano—was asleep in the hidden computer room. He was an easy mark, the job I was supposed to do. I figured he could sit just where he was until I was ready for him.
In the meantime I wanted to find out just what was going on. I didn’t like the job Ada had given to me. I didn’t like the way it coincided with the arrival of the intruders, none of whom I’d actually seen yet.
Ada knew something I didn’t. And I had a feeling the new arrivals did too.
I made it down to the fountain and went to pick a direction to sniff in when Alfie jogged around from the other side. When he saw me he jerked his head to one side.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll take the back.” He pulled the gun that had once belonged to Stefano from the back of his pants and he led the way.
I followed. Alfie’s plan was a good one. With all the focus at the front of the house it seemed like a good idea to go help out with the others securing the rear of the property.
Not that that was what I was planning on doing. Getting Alfie around the back of the house meant I’d have the chance to ask him a few questions.
And the woods looked like a good place to hide a body.
Alfie walked ahead of me, gun hanging loosely in one hand, cigarette magically stuck to his bottom lip. We moved past the garage and ducked down a path between the palm trees and then we were on the big lawn by the side of the house. I looked up at the castle and looked at the trellis that led up to the window of the room that Emerson Ellis had been put in.
How Ellis had ended up in the piano I didn’t know but clearly he had come down the side of the building. The damage to the trellis and the vegetation was too good to be staged. So he’d escaped, made a break for it, perhaps timing his run with the guard patrols he’d watched from his window like I had. Then he was away, most likely across the lawn, over the small wall, into the thick stand of pines that Alfie and I were now heading toward. The pines were a good place to hide.
Except he’d met someone in the pines. The evidence said it was a guard, one Ellis had clobbered with a rock. If he’d done that—if he’d been capable of it—then his route might have been clear. It was a difficult way back through the trees to civilization but a desperate man was capable of many difficult things.
Did that include killing a guard? I doubted it. And I doubted it even more considering Emerson Ellis had not escaped through the pines. He’d been killed and his body had been taken back inside and hidden in the piano.
So Ellis hadn’t killed a guard. Someone else had. The same someone who killed Ellis and stashed his body. The piano was a good place to hide it. Even if Ellis had met his fate in the pine trees, come morning his body or his freshly dug grave would have been found by the dogs. The piano was an especially good place to hide him if his death had been ordered by Carmina. She would have needed help to get him in. Help from the person who had killed him.
From the person I was now following into the pine trees.
Alfie Micklewhite. Francis Cane. The man from International Automatic.
There was nobody else it could have been. And if Alfie was responsible for the death of Emerson Ellis, there was more than a fair chance he was responsible for the death of Vaughan Delaney as well.
Which meant Carmina and Alfie weren’t helping Falzarano build a factory. They were trying to stop him.
And why they wanted to stop him was the question I was planning on putting to Alfie in person.
Except by the time I turned around from observing the side of the house, Alfie had left me on the lawn and had disappeared into the pine trees already.
I followed.
* * *
The farther I got from the house the quieter it got, the sounds of the guards running and shouting and the dogs barking getting fainter and fainter and melting into the sounds of crickets and owls and twigs crunching underfoot. If there were trespassers somewhere in the trees around me they were doing a better job of staying quiet than I was.
The dull glow of the pale moonlit night plunged into an inky blackness once I was among the pines. It was a great place to hide in and it seemed like a weakness of Falzarano’s secluded property. He had a lot of guns and a long driveway, but if you could get in from the side you could almost get right up to the house under a good deal of cover.
I turned my optics up and kept going. The ground sloped downward
and the slope was getting steeper. I’d been out ten minutes. There was no sign of Alfie and I hadn’t found his trail either. I stopped and listened but there was nothing much to listen to and I certainly hadn’t heard any shooting yet. I’d come the wrong way, clearly. The intruders weren’t on this side of the house at all.
I turned and started back up the slope and then I heard a crack. I turned toward the noise, cycling my optics through a series of filters to try to get some kind of clear signal, but it was too dark and my optical light was too bright and all I got was a snowy sort of fuzz in pinks and greens.
But somewhere in that storm I saw something move, a shape that was nothing more than a silhouette but one shaped rather like a man. Whoever he was he was hunched over, trying to keep a low profile. His outline was long, like he was wearing a coat, and he had a hat on and he was carrying something in an outstretched arm.
A gun. A big one too, although it was hard to be sure given that I couldn’t see anything properly yet.
But whoever it was it wasn’t Alfie because Alfie wasn’t wearing a hat or a coat.
One of the intruders. On his own, a scout sent around from the main party, just to watch the house. It was hard to see, but maybe the hat and maybe the coat matched the ones worn by the men in the car we’d sent rocketing down the valley. This guy was heading up to the house through the pines and he was moving quietly, his footfalls cushioned by the thick bed of brown needles. He was a good deal more fleet-footed than I was, although he was also half my size and a tenth the weight.
I slipped behind a tree then peeked out the other side to get a better look. I blinked and my optics began to clear faster, but when they were clear the intruder was nowhere in sight.
I turned to head back up the hill at a diagonal. If Alfie was still somewhere on this side of the house then with a bit of luck the intruder would be between us.
There was a snap behind me, followed by a crash. I spun around and saw someone else approaching. He was also in a hat but the overcoat was missing and the gun he was carrying was long and thin. A rifle. One of Falzarano’s boys, having made his way around from the front of the house. He hadn’t seen me and he was headed on down the hill through the pines.
I turned and tried to gauge the direction of my target but there was no movement ahead and only the sound of the guard crashing around somewhere behind me.
I headed up the hill, slipping in the loamy dirt. In a few minutes I was higher up the hill but the pine trees were just as thick and I couldn’t find any trail so I kept going and trusted I was headed in the right direction. After ten minutes the glow of the houselights began to light my horizon and I could see the hard edge of the low wall that ran alongside the big lawn. I moved to one side and a branch came into the line of my optics and blocked out the light.
That’s when I saw him.
He was lying against that same wall, his back to me, his head tucked in and his arms pressed together. He was wearing a black suit and a black hat and in the right angle formed by the wall and the ground he was dressed pretty well for camouflage so long as it remained dark.
I crouched down beside him and grabbed his shoulder. He rolled over without any resistance and his arms flopped around. His eyes were open, which was not a good sign but I checked anyway and sure enough he was dead.
I didn’t know who he was. His suit was black, likewise his hat and his tie. His shirt was white but when I opened his jacket to check for identification I saw the shirt was staining another color on the man’s left side, down around the kidney. I checked it. The shirt had a tear in it and there was a corresponding slot cut in the man’s side.
He’d been killed. Like Coke Patterson had been killed.
I thought he’d been carrying a gun when I saw him before but he wasn’t carrying it now and a quick look around told me he hadn’t dropped it. He hadn’t just been stabbed and fallen against the wall either. The tracks in the pine needles were clear. He’d been dragged and dumped by the wall in a rough attempt to hide him.
Inside his jacket pocket was a roll of breath mints and a clean handkerchief and a wallet. The wallet had nothing but a two-dollar bill in it and a charge card for a department store downtown.
I checked the pocket opposite and found something else. Another wallet, a bifold a good deal smaller than the other one. I flipped it open and a rectangular piece of stiff card about the size of a matchbox cover fell out. While I reached down to pick it up I looked at the wallet. On each side was a clear plastic insert and behind one was a piece of printed card and behind the other was a photograph.
The man in the photograph was the same man now lying at my feet. According to the card in the other fold of the wallet, his name was Jackson Waid and he was a special agent with the Department of Robot Labor. The identification card was signed at the bottom by both Jackson Waid and his boss, Special Agent Touch Daley.
I stared at the card for quite a while. My optics followed the curl of Touch Daley’s signature and for a moment I saw a man standing on a rooftop and then he and the rooftop were gone.
The other piece of card that had fallen out of the wallet was cut to the right size to be slipped behind the plastic of an ID wallet just like the one belonging to Jackson Waid. I was looking at the back of it so I turned it around.
It was a photograph. Same as Jackson Waid’s. Same hat. Same suit. Same firm expressionless expression. The photograph of another special agent from the Department of Robot Labor. There was no identification card with the photograph, but I bet it would have been signed by Special Agent Touch Daley as well.
Only I didn’t need the card to know who the agent was. I’d seen him before. Once in Falzarano’s house and then again as he lay cooling in his own bed.
The man was Coke Patterson.
I pocketed the photograph and then I headed back toward the house. I’d wasted enough time now.
I had a job to do.
36
The house was quiet and empty. All the guards were now outside. I still hadn’t heard any gunfire and as I’d crunched across the gravel of the driveway things seemed to have calmed down. Falzarano’s boys weren’t running quite as fast as they had been. I wasn’t sure that was actually a good thing. If things were settling in for a siege then that was going to make things difficult for me. Difficult was not something I liked.
And now I knew why Ada wanted me to get out fast. Because the new arrivals were agents from the Department of Robot Labor. Back in the day, DORL had been a part of the federal government, overseeing the robot program of the 1950s that had changed the world and ultimately led to the creation of myself and Ada, work for which the department’s chief roboticist, Professor C. Thornton, PhD, had been personally responsible.
And the world had got unchanged and DORL was mothballed along with all its products. All, that is, except me. I was the last robot built and my program was allowed to run. I was a private detective doing a good job and Ada was doing an even better one.
Especially once she figured out that killing people paid more than helping them.
And now someone had brought DORL out of cold storage, and I had a feeling I knew that already because the name Touch Daley rang a particular kind of bell somewhere. He and his reactivated department had gotten wind of something going on at Falzarano’s hillside hideout. So they sent in an agent, Coke Patterson, to find out what. And find out he did, only for someone to find him out. Whether that was before or after he’d gotten word back to his own boss, I didn’t know, but DORL clearly missed him and had issued standard departmental ID photos to their other agents so they’d know who they were looking for. If DORL thought he was missing then they couldn’t have found his body. Someone must have cleaned up Patterson’s apartment. I hadn’t seen a piano in there so his body must have been hidden somewhere else.
The question was, who had discovered Coke Patterson’s secret? Falzarano might have had a suspicion. He’d sent me and Alfie over to Patterson’s apartment to give him a fright, only
someone had got there first. Maybe the same someone who’d gotten to Vaughan Delaney. Maybe Emerson Ellis too. My prime suspect was Alfie, but he’d looked as surprised as I’d felt back at Patterson’s place.
Alfie, the man who was working under an assumed name, who said he had come to Hollywood, California to become a movie star.
I had a sudden feeling he was a better actor than he said he was.
None of this mattered much to me at this particular juncture and I knew that come the morning I wouldn’t remember a thing about it anyway. I had a job to do and that job had been made difficult by the arrival of DORL.
I had to get in and get out, quick. To hell with the rest. Cleaning the house would have been difficult before, but it was impossible now, so Ada would have to make do with the original job and she’d like it.
Inside Falzarano’s house I crossed the checkerboard entrance hall and headed toward Falzarano’s study. There was nobody there. The books were scattered behind the desk where I had left them and the hidden door was closed as I had left it.
I walked over and jammed a finger on the button on the bookcase. The bookcase clicked and swung open an inch like it had before and I swung it open some more and headed down the secret passage behind it to the computer room.
The doors were closed so I opened them and stepped inside. It was all still there, with one exception.
Falzarano.
His alcove was empty and the fat gray cable was hooked onto the console next to it. The alcove next to his was empty as it had been before. Stefano reposed in the third.
“What are you doing here?” A woman’s voice, heavy with a foreign accent and something else too, the words coming fast, loud. It was the voice of a woman who was not afraid, but who knew the current situation was not as she wanted it and was about to get worse.
Carmina was standing not in the main doorway but in another one on my left, the white panel sliding shut behind her like it wasn’t a door at all. She was still wearing the white lab coat over her dress and she looked surprised to see me. She walked slowly toward me, looking up and down all the while like she hadn’t seen me before in her life. The way she moved told me she had no idea of who was banging on the gates.
Killing Is My Business Page 18