Made to Kill (4 page)

With not a little effort I hung up the telephone. Somewhere I thought I heard Ada laughing and there was a creak like she was leaning back in the chair behind my desk back at the office.

I moved across the parking lot. The drop at the edge was pretty steep but to my left there was a track which was still steep but a little better. I headed down it slowly. I slid on the dirt. I looked down the hill. I didn’t like the possibilities if I lost my balance.

I frowned on the inside. “If Charles David was sightseeing up here then he had a death wish.”

“That gives me an idea,” said Ada.

If I had an eyebrow I would have raised it, but I didn’t, so I just kept on going down. The path went south and then turned to the right and headed toward the letters. I stopped and looked. I was looking at the D. The letters were big and tall and while the angle of the hillside was alarming there was a wide track both in front and behind the letters. Safe enough to take a closer look. I kept up a running commentary for the benefit of a certain computer.

“Wow, they’re big,” said Ada.

I looked up at the side of the D. It was slightly too far away to be towering exactly, but I still had to look up to see the top.

“Forty-five feet each,” I said, doing the trigonometry in my head a couple of times just to be sure.

“Good place for a suicide then.”

I looked around. “Long way to come for it. You’d need to be committed.”

“Or a good place to make it
look
like a suicide.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked back up at the sign and nodded in quiet appreciation.

“Jump off or get thrown, what’s the difference?” said Ada. “By the time you hit the deck nobody is going to know either way.”

She had a point.

“Still seems like a job of work,” I said.

“Just let me file it away for future reference. Now keep looking.”

I looked. The hillside on the other side of the path was damn steep. It was hard and rough and dusty and covered in rocks and scrub. I didn’t particularly feel like falling onto it from the path, let alone from the top of any of the forty-five feet tall letters.

It was quiet up on the hill. The breeze had picked up a bit but it didn’t carry much on it. High above a jet liner defaced the clear blue sky with a vapor trail that was dirty at the edges.

I moved to the letters, taking the path at the front. I looked up. The letters looked good. In fact, they looked better than good. Fresh paint. No rust. They were made up of metal panels. Tin perhaps. Each was inlaid with light sockets and in each socket was a bulb. I looked out across the rest of the sign. There must have been four thousand bulbs screwed into the hillside. Some of the panels were a little flatter than the others too. Replacements.

“They’ve done a good job,” said Ada.

I shrugged.

“You don’t remember, do you?” she asked.

I shrugged again. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

Ada laughed. It ran through on a loop twice but at the end was something new, like she was taking a drag on a cigarette. I wasn’t sure that was part of the recordings that made up her voice or just an echo of something rattling around inside my circuits.

“The sign was falling apart last time I looked,” she said.

“When was that exactly?” I asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“You and me both then.”

“But they’ve fixed it up. Got it looking nice.”

I pondered. I turned and looked at the view and pondered some more.

“The movie premiere,” I said. “The big national one.” I turned back to the sign. “They were doing up Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for it. They must have done up the sign too. Part of the big show.”

“All eyes on Hollywood,” said Ada.

“I guess so.”

“Wonderful, terrific. The city has done us proud, Ray. Now, keep looking.”

I ground something inside my throat. It sounded like someone starting a cement mixer.

“For what?” I asked.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Ray. So how about you quit yakking and start snapping.”

I walked around. I looked at the view and I looked at the letters of the Hollywood Sign. I moved around to the back. Each letter had a ladder or two on the back but there was nothing much to stand up on once you reached the summit.

I followed Ada’s instructions and began taking photographs with my optics. After a few minutes I was onto my second roll of film. I had four packed in my chest.

After a few more minutes I was wondering what the hell I was doing here. The mystery girl had done nothing but left us an address to check out which turned out to be an access road leading to the Hollywood Sign. And that was really a fabulous piece of information because here I was looking at the sign and admiring the view and finding nothing at all.

The dirt around the sign was sandy and it kept my footprints real well, but then I did weigh an imperial ton so most surfaces keep my footprints real well. There were other markings in the dirt, but then I expected there to be. The sign had been renovated sometime in the very recent past and they must have had a lot of people and ladders and equipment up here.

I looked back up at the sign and calculated a few angles for the hell of it, threw in some estimated wind speeds, average body weight, air resistance. Ada was right. The sign had some interesting possibilities.

Then I turned away from the sign and headed down the hillside.

Carefully.

The hill was steep but boulders and ruts and the curve of geology made a convenient series of natural steps that spiraled downward. As I made my way down I started noticing the place was littered with bits of wood and metal and glass. Some of the metal and wood was white, some of it was stained orange with rust. The glass was mostly broken but it was clearly the remains of old light globes. It was the detritus from the sign, leftover from the renovation. There was a lot of it.

“Hey, excuse me! Sir? Sir! You can’t be here, sir. Sir!”

I turned to my left and there was a guy in blue coveralls over a blue denim shirt with a blue denim cap on his head. He was pushing fifty and had a good tan and a beard like Abraham Lincoln. He held a rake with a long wooden handle in one hand. Around his middle was a yellow rope that was slack and traveled somewhere up the hill toward the Hollywood Sign. Balanced in a rut behind him was a big canvas sack that was a deep sea green in color.

I cleared my throat like an old Chrysler in need of an oil change changing gears, and then I said “Private eye,” and I pulled out the wallet with my license in it.

The man made his way to me and I made my way to him. When we were within fighting distance he peered at the wallet and looked up at my face. He frowned and pushed back his cap a little and made a huffing sound. “That a fact, mister?”

I nodded. “Machines can’t lie,” I said, lying through my circuits. “I thought I was a sir?”

“Oh,” said the man. He kept the frown on his face and pulled the front of his cap down, and then he sniffed and he said: “I’m not sure how it ever worked with you lot. Are you a sir or a mister?” He sniffed again. “Damned if I know. Does it make a difference?” A third sniff. “Anyway, nobody supposed to be up here without permission. This is all private land. Restricted access. Too dangerous. Even for—” he paused and waved the hand that wasn’t holding the rake—“sirs or misters like yourself.”

He stood back and leaned on the rake with both hands like a wizard in double denim.

“I’ve been engaged to find a missing person,” I said, hoping this would wipe the frown off the guy’s mug, but all it did was add a crinkling of the nose to it. I wondered if I should stop talking in case I turned the guy’s face all the way inside-out.

The man seemed to be considering something. Whether it was what I had just said or not, it was hard to tell. Then he gave another sniff and half-turned away. He looked at the ground. “You can either help me pick up trash or you can get the hell out. I’ll leave that to you.”

The man was old enough to remember robots and I had a hunch he hadn’t liked them then and he didn’t like them—
me
—now.

He stood there, waiting for an answer. I didn’t give him one. Instead I looked back up at the sign.

“How many you get,” I asked, “jumping off that thing?”

The man shuffled in the dusty soil. When he looked at me he folded his arms over the end of his rake in a way that didn’t look at all comfortable. He didn’t seem like he wanted to give me an answer and as far as I was concerned that was just fine.

I held up my hands and said “okay,” and then I turned and tried to pick out the path I’d taken down. I took one step and then another, and then the man behind me said: “Fewer than you think.”

I turned back around. I was about two feet higher up the hillside than he was and I was another one and half taller than him in the first place. From where I was he looked quite far away.

“Okay,” I said.

“But some,” he said. He started raking up some trash. Then he stood up and leaned back on the rake and looked up at the sign. I followed his gaze.

“I mean,” he said, “you really want to do it, you’ll find a way. But don’t ask me. I’m just from the Parks Department. The place is locked up at night but there’s nobody here. So you want to get in, you could.” He paused, looked at me, that frown back and deeper than ever. “You did.”

I nodded. No point in arguing.

“You seen many people up here?” I asked.

“Jumpers?”

I shrugged. “Or not.”

The man went back to raking. “You get sightseers. They mostly stay out on the road and take pictures. You can get a view from up top. Kids come in too. Seems a good place for necking I guess. What do I know? They don’t cause any problems.”

“No vandalism?”

The man laughed and doubled his efforts at raking up the debris. “Maybe once. But they came and done up the sign. Looks as good as new now. Better even. Those lights haven’t worked in, oh, forty years at least.”

“When did they fix it up?”

“Oh, they just gone and finished about two days ago. No, three days ago. Took them all of a week. Had a lot of men up here. Lot of men. Hard workers too. Foreign, see. You want good workers you get foreign workers.”

I didn’t know enough about it to venture an opinion so I didn’t say anything.

The man kept raking. “Heard them talking,” he said. “Yes, I did. Foreign workers. Good sort. Hard workers. You want good workers you get foreign workers.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said. “Shame they didn’t clean up after themselves.”

The man straightened up and laughed. He took his cap off, took in the view, then put his cap back on. “This mess has been here years. The sign was falling down something real good. None of this is from them. They were good workers. Real clean. Real tidy.” He paused. “I think they were Russian. I guess it’s real tidy back in the USS of R.”

Then the ranger looked at me with narrow eyes. “I guess you’re okay.”

“I’m okay?”

“You’re okay. Have a look around all you want, mister. Just lock the gate on your way out.”

I didn’t want to tell him that he was going to need a new padlock. “So I’m a mister then?”

The man laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. Are robots misters or sirs?” He raked a little then stood tall and leaned on the rake. “Say, did they ever make lady robots?”

I told him I didn’t remember and he laughed and shook his head and muttered something to himself. Then he walked to his canvas bag and shoveled crap into it. Then he hoisted it up over a shoulder, and moved on. I watched him for a few minutes and saw him stop in another patch of hill where the rubbish from the sign had clumped around some brush. Tucked around his safety rope at the back were a pair of thick gloves that he pulled out and pulled on. They nearly came to his elbows. He bent over and started tugging on a large angled piece of metal with sharp edges.

Hell of a job, cleaning the hillside on his own. But he got on with it and I got on with mine. I took another look back at the sign.

And lo if there wasn’t a guy up there, above the sign, standing on what must have been the summit road the man from the Parks Department had talked about. The man was silhouetted against the sky behind him and no matter what I did I couldn’t bring the contrast around to make him out, but I could see he was wearing a trench coat and a hat. Tourist, I guess, stopping to take in the air and the view. I didn’t blame him.

The man from the Parks Department grunted then made a satisfied sigh that you could have heard down on Sunset Boulevard. I looked and saw he had got the metal scrap out of the bush. Then I looked back up at the sign and the man had gone, so I forgot about him and got back to work.

I spent a few hours on that hot hillside and I didn’t find anything and I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. There was dirt and there was brush and there was trash and while I could have taken some dirt for spectrographic analysis—being a robot has some uses—I didn’t see the point. Charles David certainly wasn’t here now and the idea that he’d left something useful, as my client had suggested, was rapidly receding into the realms of fantasy.

Which meant I was at square one. Not even that. Square zero. I started to wonder if Mystery Girl was cracked in the head. The only information she’d given us about the target was a last-known-address that turned out to be a hillside high over Hollywood.

I checked around me. Some clouds had materialized high above but they were fighting a losing battle against that infinite blue.

I hadn’t seen the man from the Parks Department for a long time so I thought what the hell and I pulled up the
collar of my coat and whispered to Ada.

“I got nothing.”

“Hands, Raymondo, hands.”

I turned on my heel, decreasing my elevation by two inches as I drilled into the dirt.

“So
now
you want me to use a telephone?”

“Someone could be watching.”

“There’s nobody up here but me.”