Made to Kill (8 page)

I relaxed too, although I was careful to lean on the bar only lightly in case I left a robot-shaped dent. Up close the black bar was actually a deep scarlet veneer that really was worth writing home about and I would have hated to see a lug like me scratch it up. I figured if anyone should scratch it it should be an A-lister. They could afford the repair bill.

Then there was a crackling noise, and I thought for a moment that I really had scratched the bar so I stood upright. Fresco watched me, then smiled, then returned his attention to his cigarette.

The crackling sound kept on going. It sounded like eggs in a pan. I looked at Fresco but he seemed to be happy smoking and he certainly wasn’t frying any eggs I could see.

I looked around. The sound kept on going.

“So what brings you to our little Temple, Sparks?”

I turned to face Fresco. He was leaning on the bar with his elbow now. I looked at his dinner jacket and wondered if I should break the news. I decided not to.

“Business before pleasure, I’m afraid,” I said.

“Aren’t they one in the same?”

Fresco laughed again and I stood wondering what he varnished his hair with. He puffed hard enough on his cigarette to send a message to the East Coast and then he clicked his fingers. A woman appeared out of the smoke. She was standing behind the bar and maybe she always had been there. She was Chinese like all the staff seemed to be but unlike the servers canvassing the room she had her long hair straight down and when she turned around to fill Fresco’s order I saw the back of her silk dress was missing. She had a tattoo of a dragon curling down her spine.

Then she turned back around and moved three long thin glasses of fizzy wine onto the bar. Fresco nodded but didn’t say thanks and he didn’t swap the glasses for any money either. The woman faded away and the movie star pushed a glass toward me. I said thanks and took it and held it by the thin stem. Fresco finished half of his in a single gulp and didn’t say anything when I didn’t do the same.

“Truth is, Mr. Peterman,” I said, “is that I’m here looking for someone.” I paused and changed my mind. “Actually, a couple of people.”

“Looking?”

“I’m a private eye, as a matter of fact.”

“No trouble I hope, Sparks?”

“Can’t say.”

The smile that darted around Fresco’s thin lips was playful and furtive at the same time. I figured that if you put that smile up on a silver screen say sixty to seventy feet across and half that high you could make a lot of women swoon and a lot of money in the process.

Whatever it took to make it in this town, Fresco Peterman had it. Even in a plaid dinner jacket you could see from the moon, he had it.

“Can’t say or won’t say?” said Fresco, and he said it somewhere on the road between an accusation and a weary but wry question. It was like he was reading from a script, feeling out the emotions and the tone and the voice of the character he was playing. Maybe he wasn’t so happy to chat now he knew I was detective.

“Can’t,” I said, ad-libbing as fast as my circuits could manage. “I’m hoping they’re okay, but you never know.”

“They?”

The crackling sound was still there. I wondered what the hell it was. Nobody else seemed to be bothered by it and it was so faint it surely couldn’t be heard over the hubbub of the club anyway. Must have been a bug in my audio. I glanced around the bar, looking for a phone. I didn’t have much time before I had to head back to the office but I thought I should probably dial in and say hello to the boss.

I turned back to Fresco. He still had that smile on his lips and his cigarette didn’t seem to burning any lower. Now that’s what I call acting.

“They?” he asked again, like I was drying on the stage and he was giving me a prompt.

“You know Charles David, I expect. Eva McLuckie, too.” I asked.

Fresco barked a laugh. It was staccato and loud but while it bounced against the noise of the club no problem it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

I rolled my neck, in case that crackling was cellophane stuck in my collar from the dry cleaners. It wasn’t.

“Charles is a great friend, Sparks, and Eva is a great gal.” He said it like he had no idea who I was talking about and like he couldn’t have cared less. Then he drained his fizzy wine and went looking around the bar for another.

“Say, is Mr. David here tonight?” I asked. “You could call me a fan.”

“Ray, you’re a fan.”

“Ah, yes, that’s good.” I said. “But is he here? Seems like everyone else from
Red Lucky
is.” I waved a big steel hand in the general direction of everyone.

“Oh, hey,” said Fresco, suddenly animated, suddenly sliding closer and suddenly nudging me with a elbow. “You’re coming to the premiere, of course?”

“Well, I—”

“No, look, I insist. No, no, you’ll be my guest. I insist. It’ll be great, Sparks, trust me. It’ll be great.”

I nodded. “Well, thanks,” I said, and I wondered what Ada would say to a night off. Then I quit wondering and started steering my new celebrity buddy back around to the topic at hand.

“So is he—”

“Who, Chuck? I don’t think he’s here. Not tonight. Haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Okay. How about Ms. McLuckie?”

“You sure there’s no trouble, Sparks?”

“Well, like I said, I’m not at liberty to discuss matters. But let’s just say there are some concerned parties involved.”

“Oh she’s fine, fine,” said Fresco. He said it like he had no idea what I was talking about.

“But she’s not here either?”

Fresco’s eyes narrowed like he was thinking very hard about the question. He reached inside the construction he thought was a dinner jacket and pulled the cigarette case out again. He took out a cigarette and replaced the case inside the jacket. Then he reached into the other side and took out another case. It was also silver but it was smaller, like a box for matches. He kept his narrow eyes on me as he flipped the lid of the box, took out a single small white round pill from among the other small white round pills inside, and put it in his mouth. He snapped the box shut with a little more force that seemed really necessary, pocketed the box, then used the last swirl of champagne in his dead glass to get the small pill down his throat.

Then he put the glass down and he said: “No, she isn’t here.” Then he looked around the bar again. “What do I have to do to get some service?” he asked nobody in particular, but when he snapped his fingers the lady behind the bar with the dragon tattoo materialized and refreshed his drink. I thought that kind of service was actually pretty good.

“I heard she walked out of a picture,” I said.

Fresco gulped his fizzy wine and when he came up for air he gasped like he’d just taken a long cool draught from a Scandinavian mountain spring. He fixed me with his eyes again. They were still narrow. Maybe a bit hard now, too.

“She’s fine. Resting. Nervous exhaustion, you know. It’s a tough job we have.”

I looked at the half-empty glass in Fresco’s hand and then I looked around the smoky interior of the Temple of the Magenta Dragon and the jewels that glinted in the dark like the span of the Milky Way and I thought, yeah, it’s a tough job you have.

“And the walk-out?”

Fresco finished his drink and pressed the empty glass into the bar top. Then the smile flickered, once, twice, then reignited as the movie star barked another one of his short harsh laughs. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Sparks. I shouldn’t be like that. Not with a swell guy like you. No, that part isn’t true. Where’d you read it? The
Daily News
?”

I didn’t commit one way or the other. Fresco shook his head again. He put his new cigarette between his lips but rather than wait for my parlor trick he reached over the bar and grabbed a flat book of matches from a small collection of the same.

“The
Daily News
,” he said with a shake of the head and a flick of the wrist as his cigarette caught fire. “Those asinine pinheads. They don’t know jack, Sparks. If I were me I’d throw them off the Hollywood Sign, the whole lot.”

I didn’t say anything in reply but I did think that was an interesting statement to make.

Then his silver-haired companion reappeared at his side, curling one arm up to his shoulder, and touched her lips to a spot of skin somewhere behind Fresco’s right ear. They talked with some animation in low voices but I was distracted by something else.

That crackling had gotten louder. A lot louder.

Then I blinked, or at least it felt like I did, and I saw Fresco’s glamorous friend was looking at me with cool blue eyes. Her hair glowed pink in the lights of the club.

“Sparks,” said Fresco, the playboy demeanor back and turned up to eleven, “I’d like you to meet a very great friend of mine, Ms. Alaska Gray.”

I gave a small nod.

“Alaska,” said Fresco, cigarette in hand as he gestured at me like a landscape gardener pointing out a particularly fine specimen of tall pine, “what you see before you is an example of the pinnacle of human achievement, a wonder of the modern age—hell, a wonder of
any
damn age at all. Because this fine fellow is in fact the very last robot in the world, one Mr. Raymond Electromatic.”

Alaska’s eyebrow went up and she held out her hand and turned her head in a way I would have said was alluring. I took the hand as gently as I could but while I knew the protocol I didn’t bother with a kiss. I didn’t have any lips and I figured my bronzed steel face was a probably a little cold to the touch anyway.

Alaska took a breath and seemed to hold it. She looked sideways at Fresco. “And you know him as… Sparks?” she asked. She’d let the breath out first.

Fresco laughed and adjusted his cigarette and nudged me with that loose elbow again. “Go on, Sparks, give her the show.”

I lifted my hand, palm up, fingers curled like I was ready to catch a falling apple. Then I deliberately shorted a solenoid and let the little excess charge leak through my fingertips.

And as I watched Alaska watch the blue arcs jump from finger to finger with wide-eyed delight with Fresco rocking back on his heels with laughter, I listened to the crackling sound and realized just what the hell it was.

I needed to talk to Ada, and quick.

I closed my hand. Show over.

Fresco recovered himself and patted the front of his plaid jacket like he was checking it was still there. Sadly it was.

Alaska raised a tall glass that had appeared in her hand and gave me a salute. “I’m impressed, Mr. Electromatic.”

Fresco leaned back into Alaska as he looked at me. “I was just saying, my dear, that Sparks here should be in the movies.”

The crackling sound ran on and on and on. I started taking readings.

“You know,” said Fresco. “Science fiction. He’d fit right in, right?”

“Oh, science fiction! It’s a scream!” said Alaska, doing her best impression of surprise at winning an Oscar by placing her free hand on her chest and leaning back like a ladder was about to fall on her. “It’s all Aldebaran and pink pretzels and the fourth moon had already risen, right?”

I didn’t know anything about pretzels and why they would be pink, but right now I had other things to worry about. Like why that nervous exhaustion Eva McLuckie had so sadly come down with hadn’t prevented her from walking into my office with a bag of gold. Like how a strange chase up to the Hollywood Sign had led me to the Temple of the Magenta Dragon.

Like how one movie star had apparently taken out a contract on the life of another.

Like how Fresco Peterman and Alaska Gray laughed and drank and smoked and while they did those things they crackled like kids at camp eating graham crackers under the bed sheets.

I took another reading from my Geiger counter. Fifty-seven rads was wafting off Fresco. Nearly eighty off Alaska. These two were the hottest stars in Hollywood.

Literally.

I left them laugh and drinking and smoking and radiating and headed for the telephone at the end of the bar.

“
I can’t believe it,” said Ada inside my head as I held the telephone to my ear. The roar of the club behind me didn’t have any impact on our private conversation.

“They’re radioactive. Cooked medium rare by my calculation.”

“I mean,” said Ada, “what the hell kind of name is Fresco? First name Al, by any chance?”

I simulated a frown. “Um. Fresco is his first name. Fresco Peterman. Are you listening to me, Ada?”

“I’m all ears, Raymondo. So, those movie stars are hot, and not just on the silver screen. What are you going to do about it?”

I checked the time. It was running out faster than I thought. Pretty soon my batteries would be empty and my memory tape full. That didn’t sound like much fun.

“I’ll talk to some more people. Maybe take a look around a little. Both Charles David and Eva McLuckie are apparently out of the picture—”

“Very good, Ray.”

“Pun
not
intentional, but this is their crowd. Fresco knew a little. Maybe someone else will know a lot. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Hilarious,” said Ada. “What is?”

“How one movie star would take out a contract to kill another. I’ve heard of professional jealousy, but this seems a bit dramatic.”

“You’re doing it again, Ray.”

“Ah, oh.”

“But,” she said, “you’re right. If Eva is behind the contract at all.”

“The gold. I remember.”

“Right. So go take a look around. Ask some questions. But don’t make me wait up, Raymond. I need you back here by curfew.”

“I got it.”

I put the phone down and thought things over and then I turned around to face the room and I thought things over some more. Fresco hadn’t said much that was useful and really the most interesting thing about him was his taste in clothes and the little personal problem he had with radioactivity. His lady friend too. They’d both been exposed to something, maybe for a long time given the amount of energy rising off of them.

But did that have anything to do with the absence of Charles David? It was hard to see any connection but my case felt a little kooky. Fresco and Alaska’s radioactivity certainly was. Seemed worth a bet to keep one bit of weirdness in mind as I investigated the other. But in the meantime I needed to find something out soon so I could give the lovely and nervously exhausted Eva McLuckie her report tomorrow.