Made to Kill (13 page)

“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?”

“This job. And the other one. They’re fishy. I want to know what we’re really getting ourselves into. Do you know what I found in room four-oh-seven?”

“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 happen 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 didn’t blame him.

The parking lot was where I’d left it, as was my car.

The gold coupe was gone.

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, 8
^th
Street, Hoover then Western and I had one optic on the traffic 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 he 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. 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 into 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 name movie star.

I glanced over to 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 would just think I’m 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 worrying.

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 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 non-existent 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.

I reached into an inside pocket and pulled out the photograph. I straightened it out and I held it out the right way around for him to look at.

Charles pointed at the photograph with his gun. “That’s Eva McLuckie.”

I tossed the photograph onto the desk. “I know,” I said.

Charles coughed. It was dry. When he was done he heaved a breath and I saw more blood on his teeth.

He was sick. Ada knew it and now I could see it for myself.

I wondered how much radiation a normal man, even one with a big full beard, could take before he got ill.

Before he got dead.

Charles coughed again and pinched his nose with his free hand like his sinuses were about to blow.

“You are working together on something?” I asked.

“Ah, yes, you could say that. I mean, we
were
. Before everything.” He waved the gun around to indicate the entirely of the world around him.

“Before everything what?”

“Before they found out. They’re all in on it. Eva, too. I knew she wouldn’t last long but I had hoped it was longer—
argh!
”

He let the gun droop in his grip as he took his free hand from his nose and plunged it into his jacket. He fumbled then pulled out a small plastic cylinder. He popped the lid with his thumb, all the while trying to keep the gun pointed somewhere in my general direction.

His thumb slipped and the container dropped. Small white pills hit the rug and scattered like a teenage gang caught drinking in the street.

“Ah, dammit,” said Charles. He bent awkwardly at the knees while trying to keep his upper body straight and trying to reach the pills. I moved forward to help but he jerked back and nearly fell over. Then he brought the gun up high. “Stop right there,” he said. He stepped forward, treading on some of the pills. He seemed to have forgotten about them.

“You don’t look good, Mr. David,” I said.

At this Charles laughed. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “There’s no way out of this one for me. I should have known, of course. First Fresco and Alaska. Then Eva. They’ve got them all. All that work, gone, gone. But I had to try, didn’t I?”

I looked Charles David in his bloodshot eyes.

“Who’s got them? Where’s Eva now, Charles? What were you trying to do?”

Charles laughed. He adjusted his grip on the gun.

“Charles! You wanted to talk, so let’s talk. What were you trying to do?”

“Enough!”

“Talk to me, Charles. What’s going on?”

He laughed again. “What’s going on is this, detective.”

Then he pulled the trigger.

Like I said, guns don’t worry me. I have a bronze steel chassis reinforced with titanium and some alloys that Professor Thornton had invented and the Federal government was pretty pleased with.

But while guns don’t worry me I was sure someone else in the building or the street outside would hear the shots and call the police and that I could do without.

But nobody called the cops because nobody heard the gun. Nobody heard the gun because it didn’t fire.

Charles didn’t seem to notice. He held it up and pulled the trigger and it went
click-click-click-click.

“You’ve got the safety on,” I said.

Charles made his surprised expression and he turned the gun again to look at the side of it. He swore, fussed with a switch, then turned the gun back on me. But while he’d been fussing I’d moved closer and before he tried the trigger again I placed a big hand over the muzzle and pulled slightly. The gun slid out of his sweaty grip with the greatest of ease. His arm hung there in the air for a second or two. Then he let it swing by his side.