Made to Kill (7 page)

I thought I knew the feeling. There was something about seeing Eva McLuckie’s face up on the wall that would do that to man and robot alike.

“Shame about her too,” said the kid.

I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy looking. Eva McLuckie was a real looker. Small. Might call her petite.

The kid shook his head. “She disappeared. She was filming, oh…” The kid winced like he was watching a prize fighter take a dive. Then he clicked his fingers a few times.

Dark hair cut into a bob that was as big as a coal scuttle at the back.

“A movie anyway, something,” said the kid. “And she disappeared.”

Bangs cutting a razor-straight line above her eyebrows, which were two sculpted arches above two big eyes ringed in black.

“Zip.” The kid clicked his fingers again.

Eva McLuckie, looking like an Egyptian princess.

“Zip, huh?” I asked.

The kid looked me in the optics and nodded.

“Zip. Gone. No trace.”

Eva McLuckie, looking a hell of a lot like the Mystery Girl who had walked into the office with a bag full of gold and an offer I couldn’t refuse.

The other soda jerk and his girlfriends were in a deep huddle but I leaned closer to my kid anyway. Seemed my stop for a root beer float was starting to pay off.

“What happened?” I asked

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

There went that line of inquiry. Maybe the kid behind the bar could sense my deflation because he said: “Apparently she went into her trailer one night and in the morning she wasn’t there. That’s what I heard, anyway. Nobody at the studio knows where she went. Someone said they were filming all the other parts and they hope she’ll turn up to finish the picture. Shame, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Big shame.”

It was starting to feel like I knew something the world didn’t.

“She’ll miss the party,” said the milk boy.

“Ah,” I said. I paused. I watched Eva’s picture but she wasn’t saying much. “What party?”

“The
party
. The red carpet, y’know,” said the kid, and he leaned forward until his nose was nearly touching mine. There weren’t many people who liked to get so close to a robot.

Well, that close to a robot like me and lived to tell.

“Everyone else will be there,” he said. “Fresco. Rico. Alaska. All of them.” He shook his head and looked at the invisible spot on the counter again. “Man, it cuts me up, it really does.”

Of course. The big premiere. Friday night on the red carpet for
Red Lucky.
I still had a snap of the newspaper article from this morning on file. I brought it up and had a quick re-read.

Red Lucky.
Motion picture history, it said. A cross-studio co-production the likes of which has never been made. The article listed the principal cast and that list included Eva McLuckie. Charles David too. It also included almost everyone who had their mugs plastered over the ice cream parlor wall and a whole lot of people who didn’t. I read the list twice and when I was done it looked like me and the milky bar kid here were the only two people in town without a speaking part.

All the major studios cooperating with each other seemed like a pretty big deal. It would take quite a bit of cash money to get everyone temporarily out of their exclusive contracts and working for the competition. The competition who also happened to be co-producer of the motion picture.

Sounded like a real headache to me.

Then again, maybe money wasn’t quite the issue it used to be for some people these days. Just look at Eva McLuckie. She had a habit of carrying her bank balance around in gold bars in a fancy athletic bag.

Well.
Somebody’s
bank balance.

“I hope she turns up,” said the kid.

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

And then I said thanks and left a two dollar tip and headed for the Temple of the Magenta Dragon.

***

As I walked down the block towards the Temple I contemplated my plan to get in. As plans went it was pretty simple: I was going to walk up to the door and see what happened. It was a plan, I had to admit, largely dependent on how well disposed the man on the door felt about the fact my face was made of metal. A flash of my detective shield usually did the trick when I had to get in somewhere but chances are the Temple would be a different proposition if it was as exclusive as Ada said it was.

The doorman was there behind a purple velvet rope hanging from two golden stands that were placed on the sidewalk around the club’s door. The door was closed. There was no line to get in but there were some peepers hanging around on the street wearing not enough clothes, perhaps ready to throw themselves at their favorite movie star or casting agent should either cross the threshold.

It turned out that the doorman, a gorilla wearing a tuxedo and a permanent scowl, was called Robert and he was a swell guy who thought it was a real pleasure for the club to be entertaining the last robot in the world. Before I even had a chance to pull the shield from my inside pocket he grabbed my hand with one that was about as big and he shook it and then he unclipped the velvet rope and knocked on the black door. The door opened and I turned to Robert with my steel fingers touching the brim of my hat. He saluted in return and then went back to guarding the approaches.

In front of me stretched a black corridor and down that black corridor came the sound of people talking, laughing, drinking, laughing some more, talking some more. Music too. Something with a beat. All those sounds got louder as I got closer. I kept walking.

And then I was in the Temple of the Magenta Dragon.

The room was large and square and had a low ceiling that was painted a flat matte black, as were all the walls but the far one, which was instead upholstered like a Chesterfield sofa in oxblood leather. The room was dark and smoky, and what light there was came from a blend of white and pink spots that mixed with the smoke to make the Chinese décor pop off the black walls. There were dragons and intricate pierced lattice work and some more dragons. The low ceiling was supported by an arcade of pillars that resolved when I got closer into carved bamboo stems that weren’t black but were a deep jade green. The overall effect was of being outdoors on an ancient Chinese terrace under an ancient Chinese sky on a warm and foggy night.

The so-called Temple was full of people. The servers were Chinese men and Chinese women, the women dressed in black silk wraps with red trim and with their black hair pulled back into buns skewered into place with long black sticks tipped in red, the men dressed in more or less the male equivalent. They balanced trays and skirted the club patrons with an elegance as smooth as the silk they were wearing.

The patrons were another story altogether. They stood in groups and they sat at any number of small round tables that were scattered across the room.

And they were all rich. I could tell that by the clothes, the hair, the jewels, the jewels and the jewels. The light and smoke reduced the men to pinky-purple ghosts floating in the room, the white of their shirts and their teeth the only really distinguishable features. But the women glittered, what skin that wasn’t covered by evening wear slung low in the front as well as the back covered by pearls and diamonds and other treasures that took that pink and white light and did something special to it before shooting it back at my optics like a laser beam. There were a lot of people in the room but I recognized a large chapter by their photos that hung on the wall of the ice cream parlor just a half block away. Not every member of that parade was here in the Temple. I matched a dozen faces and none of them were Charles David or Eva McLuckie.

I walked forward into the club. People parted. People looked at me and laughed but they laughed in that way that spoke of true happiness only found in those who don’t need to worry about their retirement. People nodded at me and those nods were appreciative, like they were watching the Mona Lisa stretching her legs around the gallery after hours. I couldn’t smile, not on the outside, so I trod carefully as I took a route across the room and tried not to feel like the Queen of England. I was big but people got out of my way. Nobody seemed to mind. In fact, everybody seemed real pleased to see me.

Which I have to admit I liked, before I realized the reason why.

There was no fear or unease in the room because these people—and their
livelihoods
—hadn’t been threatened by the robot revolution of the 1950s. These people were rich and famous and no doubt a lot of that wealth and fame was second generation or more—the movie business could run down a family line like hair and eye color. They operated in a rarified atmosphere where they could afford to be curious about a novelty like me. My presence was clearly unexpected but it was also amusing to them, if not downright entertaining. The Temple of the Magenta Dragon was wall-to-wall talent and I was wading neck-deep in the A-list—and for one night only I was part of the crowd.

I reached a table and everyone at the table turned to me with big smiles. They looked about ready to burst into applause, so I saved them the trouble and took a left turn and I found myself at the bar.

The bar was busy, mostly with wait staff who were loading up the champagne buckets like it was the only liquid left with which to put out the burning palace. I didn’t want to interrupt them to ask for a drink I couldn’t drink, so I turned around and watched the crowd and listened to the music.

Some crowd. I matched a few more faces to the photos from the ice cream parlor. I looked at a few more jewels, a few more hair-dos, a few more jaws going up and down. The eyes of everyone in the room had left me and had returned to conversations and plunging necklines and the bottom of champagne glasses.

Now I got what Ada had been talking about. This wasn’t just a nightclub. This was a temple. A place of solitude were the biggest cats in Hollywood could just come and be regular people who drank the most expensive liquor in town and wore diamonds like they were cut glass. This was a place you came to enjoy the company of your peers, unmolested by Mr. Joe Q. Public. Everyone here was the same. Everyone here could relax and not worry about being rich and not worry about being famous with the only other people who really understood what that meant.

I started to make a list of who was I going to pump first. The fact that Charles David was a patron, maybe even a regular one, was obvious. The question of how and why he had got a hold of some company accounts was another matter. Someone here—scratch that,
everyone here
—would know him. Who to collar first, I had no idea.

Then someone planted themselves next to me at the bar. He was one of the few men not wearing a black dinner jacket. In fact, his dinner jacket seemed to be a green and yellow plaid that under the pink and white lights did something strange to my vertical hold. As I tried to restore the balance in my optics a woman with long white hair and a face thirty years too young for such a color joined the man and he leaned around to kiss her behind the ear. She glanced at the man and then glanced at me and then she headed off to powder her nose or polish her jewels. The man in plaid watched her backside sway away from him. Then he turned to the bar and shook his head at, apparently, himself, before taking a silver cigarette case from inside his plaid monstrosity. He opened the case and took out a cigarette and inserted it into his mouth. And then he stood there with the cigarette sticking out perpendicular to his face like he didn’t quite know what to do next.

I knew the man from his photograph at the ice cream parlor. Square-jawed and square-haired with a neck that would make a football lineman weep with envy.

Fresco Peterman.

Seems I had found my first line of inquiry.

I reached forward with my right hand. I extended a finger. If Fresco Peterman saw it coming, he played it cool as a blue spark danced on my fingertip in front of his face. In fact, he even leaned forward a little to touch the end of his cigarette to my improvised lighter. A second later the end was glowing red and the lips around that cigarette pulled back to show me as many of his perfect teeth as possible.

“Hey, thanks, Sparks,” Fresco said in a tone that suggested he had his cigarettes lit by the last robot on Earth every day of the week. Without lifting his arms from the bar he sucked on his cigarette and then blew smoke out around it. He nodded at me, then turned back to the bar, then finally brought his hands up into view and rested them on top of it. “Anyone ever put you in a motion picture?” he asked the empty bar space in front of him.

I pursed my lips, or at least it felt like I did. I didn’t matter because I didn’t have lips and Fresco Peterman wasn’t looking anyway.

“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, nobody has yet.”

Fresco’s shoulders jerked as he laughed and smoked and laughed some more. “I bet you wouldn’t have too much trouble learning your lines either, eh, Sparks?”

I helped him laugh and it sounded like a lime green pick-up stripping its gears as it tried to get up the Hollywood hills. “You may have a point there.”

Fresco nodded and smoked and nodded again. Then he pulled the cigarette out and turned around to offer me his hand. “Peterman,” he said. “Fresco Peterman.”

“I thought I recognized the face,” I said. I took his hand carefully and shook it. His grip was pretty good. Not as good as Robert’s. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Peterman. Raymond. Raymond Electromatic. I’m honored.”

“Electromatic, Electromatic,” said Fresco, rolling the surname around his mouth along with a healthy volume of smoke. He nodded and the smoke wafted from the corners of his mouth and from his nose like one of the dragons clinging to the ceiling over our heads. “There’s something there, I swear it,” he said. “You should talk to my agent sometime. I’ll introduce you.”

“Well, Mr. Peterman, I wouldn’t say no to that.” I smiled on the inside, and I thought maybe Fresco could see it, just for a moment, the way he leaned back and relaxed and smiled on the outside.