Standard Hollywood Depravity--A Ray Electromatic Mystery

by Adam Christopher

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  For Sandra, always

  You ask me how anybody can survive Hollywood?

  Well, I must say that I personally had a lot of fun there.

  —Raymond ChandlerNovember 7, 1951

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  They say that what happens in Saratoga Springs, stays in Saratoga Springs. Only on this particular occasion I find myself obliged to break with the rules of late-night bar chat, because this novella owes its very existence to one of those random moments that are undoubtedly the best bits of any convention. In this instance it was World Fantasy 2015, where Tor.com’s Associate Publisher Irene Gallo and I hatched a plan to expand the Raymond Electromatic Mysteries beyond a series of three books (which start, incidentally, with Made to Kill and continue on to Killing is My Business). And who was I to argue? I’d already started this whole shebang with a novelette, “Brisk Money,” written for Tor.com back in 2014. Standard Hollywood Depravity felt like coming home.

  My thanks then to Irene and the whole team at Tor.com who work very, very, very hard making writers like me look good—Lee Harris, Mordecai Knode, and Katharine Duckett. Thanks also to editor Miriam Weinberg and to cover designer extraordinaire Will Staehle, who (at the time of writing) has designed and covered an extraordinary nine of the twelve books I’ve had published, and he only didn’t do the other three because they were tie-ins. Lucky doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about that particular statistic.

  Literary superagent Stacia J. N. Decker of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner helped get this novella into shape with her extraordinary eye, for which I remain forever grateful.

  And finally, thanks to my wife, Sandra, who continues to amaze me with her love, support, and encouragement. This novella is for you.

  1

  The story of how I came to meet a girl called Honey started late on a fall Tuesday night when I was nursing a scotch and watching girls dance in a nightclub that was named after both of those things.

  The fact that I couldn’t drink the scotch didn’t matter much to me. Nor did it matter much to the man behind the bar. I just kept the glass in front of me, sometimes sliding it a few inches across the dark and greasy wood into my left hand, sometimes a few inches in the opposite direction, and so long as I occasionally put a two-dollar bill folded lengthways somewhere near the glass, the man behind the bar was happy enough to occasionally relieve me of it. On top of all that I was keeping myself tucked away in the corner. It seemed only polite, seeing as I was six feet and something more of bronzed steel-titanium alloy that filled out a tan-colored trench coat the same way a ’64 Plymouth Fury filled out the parking bay of a narrow suburban garage.

  Not that I felt conspicuous. This seemed to be my lucky night for going undercover, which was something I rarely did on account of the fact that I was not only a robot but the last robot, which tended to make me stick out in a crowd just somewhat.

  But not here and not tonight, because there was a band playing in the club and they were pretty good too, not only at playing what they were playing but at commanding the attention of the club’s clientele. This was on account of the fact that the band was five handsome boys from across the pond with hair that looked long enough to be annoying in the morning and suits that seemed to shine under the lights and voices that were polished with an accent that people in this country seemed to like, and quite a lot too. They played on the stage at the back of the room that stood maybe two feet higher than the dance floor. I wondered if they were famous. I wouldn’t know. But they looked cute and the beat was strong and steady and the girls in the big bird cages suspended from the ceiling right over the dance floor were doing their level best to keep up. There were four of them and they were a mass of swinging limbs and shaking heads and tassels that shimmied like an alpine waterfall.

  Business as usual for a club like this.

  Except this didn’t seem like a usual night. Sure, the club was packed and most of those squeezed around tables that were too small to put anything really useful on were as thin and as young and as cute as the band on the stage. They were the kind of kids who lived on tobacco smoke and drinks made out of gin and vermouth and a twist of lime and who liked to go out in nice clothes and shake those clothes to the sound of music.

  For a moment I felt old and then for another moment I wondered whether this particular feeling was something I’d inherited from Professor Thornton. I couldn’t be certain, but I was fairly sure this would not have been his kind of party.

  Among those drinking and those moving to the beat underneath the dancing girls, sure, I was out of place.

  But I wasn’t the only one. I would even go so far as to say I was one of many.

  At the back of the club, away from the lights, in the dark where the cigarette smoke floated thickest, were scattered a bunch of men. These men all wore suits and coats and their hats stayed firmly where they had been placed. These men were all of a build and disposition that suggested work done in darkness and behind closed doors, work that was messy and wet and not something you told your friends about. My logic gates told me that the way the men sat hunched and silent and immobile at the back tables and at the bar stools near my own little dark corner suggested that they were not in fact here for a night on the town. They were all here for something else entirely.

  Just like me, in fact. So no, I didn’t feel out of place, not in the slightest.

  I slid my glass from one hand to the other and watched as, like me, the men didn’t drink the drinks that were sitting in front of them. What they did do was smoke. The air was thick with it. My clothes were going to need to be laundered after this and not just to get rid of the bloodstains.

  I watched the men and for a moment there I entertained the notion that maybe I wasn’t the last robot in the world after all. But then a lug in a suit a half size too small, with a hat a half size too big drooping low over a brow his Neanderthal ancestors would have been proud of, snorted as he kept watch on the rest of his friends and then poked a finger into the problem nostril and had a good rummage around.

  So he was human enough. Robots didn’t have sinus problems, although as I watched him out of the corner of my optics, for a second I swore there was an itch somewhere in the middle of my faceplate and for another second, I had an image of a man in a tweed jacket pulling a striped handkerchief out of an overstuffed pocket and giving his nose a good one.

  And then it was gone and I looked back down at my scotch and I saw that the barman had made another withdrawal from the bank of the Electromatic Detective Agency. I looked up but he had moved somewhere else. What was in front of me now was the mirror at the back of the bar. It ran the whole length and it showed me the room and myself pretty well. I noticed that the top button of my trench coat had come undone. I did it up. It was a little tight. Then there was another movement in the mirror.

  To get into the main room of the club you walked through a set of swing
ing double doors. The doors were behind me and now they swung and I watched in the mirror as another young couple waltzed right in.

  He was thin and young and blond and had cheekbones to die on a hillside for and a firm mouth just built for kissing. She was more of the same. Together the lovely pair paused at the threshold. I wondered if he was going to carry her over it. Then she looked around and nodded at something and they headed for almost the only table that wasn’t otherwise engaged, a small circular number like all the rest in the joint that was positioned right on the dance floor’s eastern front. As they moved to it, the men watched them move and I watched the men. I think the boy noticed their audience by the way he fixed the smile on his face and kept his eyes on his lady friend as he held the chair out for her. If she noticed anything was wrong with this scene she didn’t show it. She was here for a good time and already her blond bob was swaying to the beat and her eyes were on the go-go dancers above and the mass of bodies twisting on the floor below.

  I frowned on the inside and switched my scotch from my left hand to my right. The couple were fine, exactly the right kind of cute for the club, the same as all the others, and yet they worried me and I didn’t know why and that worried me some more. Maybe it was because the boy looked nervous. Maybe it was because the girl didn’t seem to notice.

  I thought about this and then I thought about it some more as the young couple at the table leaned into each other. She was saying something and whatever he was saying back she didn’t like because now the sway of her bob was to a different rhythm. I imagined he was telling her he wanted to leave. He’d seen the heavies at the back of the room and he didn’t like them and I didn’t blame him.

  And given what I had to do that evening I wished she would take his advice.

  Her and all the others.

  A moment later she pulled back and shook her head and then he pulled back and frowned and then she got up and went onto the dance floor. So much for that. The other kids dancing made room for her and soon enough she found a nice spot near the stage. Then she bent her arms at the elbows, bent her legs at the knee, and started shaking herself around to the beat. The band noticed and picked up a little and the guy in the front spun around on the toes of one of his Cuban heels. Everyone seemed to like this, and in another few moments everyone in club was watching the girl show what she could do.

  Everyone in the club except the boyfriend, who was too busy working on his frown and too busy studying the grain of his little round table.

  One of the go-go dancers bent down in her cage and moved her arms around like she was beckoning to the girl to come up and join her. The girl down below laughed and moved closer and the two of them began to dance together at separate altitudes.

  I watched the pair dance and I thought about the job I was here for and my optics moved up from the girl on the floor to the one up in the cage. I assumed she was a good dancer on account of the fact that the establishment was willing to pay her to dance for hours at a time. I had to admit that dancing was not something my circuits could get a grip on. It seemed like a lot of effort to oscillate in time to a beat and all everyone seemed to be doing was getting sweaty and out of breath.

  Maybe that was part of the appeal.

  I turned my attention back to the crowd in the club. Couples were now peeling off the dance floor, eager for refreshment, faces alight with smiles and laughter and lips already twitching in anticipation of fresh cigarettes. The boyfriend had slumped in his chair, but his eyes were finally on his girl out on the floor.

  And the men at the back stayed right where they were. Some of the kids glanced over at them and there were some whispers, but other than that nobody seemed to think much was wrong. It was a free country and if you wanted to wear your overcoat to a bar while you didn’t drink anything that was entirely your business and nobody else’s.

  I thought about this for a moment. Then I thought about this again.

  I adjusted my hat and tried to sink into the shadows by the bar. I was starting to get a feeling I knew what was going on and what kind of business the men were here for. It was a sinking kind of feeling that materialized just under my pan-neural charge coil. I didn’t like it much.

  The men were muscle. Pure and simple. They were goons and gangsters, mobsters, hoods. Thugs, garden variety, and they weren’t dancing because they weren’t here to dance and they weren’t drinking because their bosses had told them to keep off the sauce.

  They were here to watch. To guard the approaches. Maybe their bosses were here too, but not at the bar. Somewhere else. Somewhere behind doors that were closed and guarded by more wide men in big suits.

  So sure. I did fit right in after all. It was dark in the corner and the club was smoky and like the others I had kept my hat on and pulled down. As far as they knew, I was one of them.

  I had to admit, it was a crying shame. Because I wasn’t here for them, or their bosses. I did a head count. Must have been every hood in Los Angeles collected together under a single roof. The thought of the potential collars available to me here sent my circuits fizzing. I could clean up LA in a heartbeat, if I had one. All I’d need to do was make a call. Rattle off the number of my private investigator’s permit and the boys in blue would have a good night.

  Except I wasn’t a detective any more. Sure, my license was still valid. It was a good cover. Let me move around places and ask questions without having questions asked back.

  But I was here for that other reason. That other job, the one my boss, Ada, had sent me to do.

  The job I was programmed to do.

  I was here to kill someone.

  The person I was here to kill wasn’t wearing a suit or a hat and that someone sure wasn’t picking his teeth with a toothpick while he leaned against the back of his chair and watched his cigarette smoke ride thermals to the ceiling like the lazy daydream of a sailor lost at sea.

  I glanced back at the girl on the dance floor. She was still going for it. So was the go-go dancer in the cage above her. Every now and then she glanced down at the girl and smiled and the girl smiled and they both shimmied and shimmied.

  I focused on the girl in the cage. She had black hair that shone and that curled up as it touched her bare shoulders. She wore a small red two-piece outfit that looked like it would be pretty good for swimming in if it wasn’t for all the tassels that shook like palm trees in a hurricane. She wore white leather boots that were tight around the calf and that ended just below her knees.

  She looked like she was good at her job and she looked like she was enjoying it too.

  I knew precisely two things about her.

  First, I knew her name was Honey.

  Second, I knew she had to die.

  2

  There was a telephone booth out by the coat check. The payphone was stuck on the wall and there was a half dome of see-through green plastic curved over it. I couldn’t fit underneath the dome so I stood next to it. I reached for the phone. Then I turned and looked at the girl at the coat check do her nails as the music thudded from the dance floor beyond the big double doors. Behind the girl I could see a large collection of coats and hats neatly hung, and I knew that none of them belonged to the men at the back of the bar. They needed their coats to hide all their guns and their knives and they needed their hats in place because every crook worth his salt needed a low-pulled brim to peer out from under.

  I thought about the men awhile as I stood by the telephone. I hadn’t expected them to be here and I didn’t like them being around. I was here on a job. Which meant it had to be clean—in and out and no fuss made.

  But there was something else going on at the club tonight. That made things less clean. More complicated. Whatever it was that the bad guys were here for I needed to stay out of it. Which was not in itself an unusual proposition because staying out of things was something of a hobby of mine. Sure, it wasn’t easy, being the last robot in the world, but I got by. I was just lucky that my being the last robot in the world was,
at least as far as I could tell, one of the key reasons why people never put two and two together and came up with an answer about the little enterprise Ada ran out of the office in the building on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga.

  That, and the fact that I was good at my job. So good they paid me to do it, in fact.

  But still, the men in the club were a surprise and surprises were not good for business. I had to call the office and let Ada know about it.

  I kept my optics on the coat-check girl while my hand reached under the green dome and grabbed the telephone. I put it against the side of my head and the receiver clicked in my ear and I heard the faint roar of an ocean far away.

  “So have you done the twist again,” Ada asked, “like you did last week to the neck of that dentist from Des Moines?”

  The girl at the coat check glanced up and kept filing her nails without looking. That seemed like quite a skill.

  I turned my back on her.

  “You’ll need to tell me about last week sometime,” I said.

  “Oops, sorry, Ray. Loose lips sink ships,” Ada said, and then she made a sound like those lips were wrapped around the end of a cigarette and taking a healthy draw.

  Considering Ada was a computer the size of an office, this image seemed unlikely. But still it was there. Dancing in front of my optics.

  And then it was gone.

  She kept talking. “Anyway, last week, long story short, once upon a time there was this guy, a dentist, and then, what do you know, he got his neck broke. Someone twisted it the wrong way. Not that there is a right way.”

  “What was that about loose lips?”

  “Hey, can’t a girl change her mind?”

  I didn’t answer. Ada ignored my silence.

  “Say, do they still do the Watusi?” she asked—mostly, I suspected, to herself. “I lose track. I don’t get out much you see, Raymondo.”