Standard Hollywood Depravity--A Ray Electromatic Mystery

by Adam Christopher

  “If this is your way of asking whether the deed is done, then you’re in for disappointment.”

  Ada laughed. Two full loops. I counted them both.

  And then she said, “The night is young, chief,” and then someone in the back of my mind leaned back in the big chair behind my big desk in my small office and put her stockinged feet up on the big desk and watched her own toes wriggle in the dim light from the street that came in through the big window behind her.

  And then I said: “Yeah, about that,” and as I said it the mirage of someone who might have existed once upon a time but no longer did faded. I felt the voltage change in my positronic calculator. I didn’t like the feeling. It was the feeling that something wasn’t right.

  Ada hummed on the line, or maybe it was just the line itself that hummed. “I don’t like it when you say things like that, Ray. What’s up?”

  I turned back to the coat-check girl and she was still there and still doing her nails and chewing on something but now her eyes were back on her nails and not on me. When I shifted on my feet the coiled cable of the telephone moved with me and it must have made a noise because the coat-check girl stopped what she was doing and looked at me, her jaw only partway through the next chew.

  I frowned on the inside and I lowered the phone’s mouthpiece and jutted my steel chin in the girl’s direction.

  “You want to go get yourself a glass of milk or something?”

  The girl began to chew again, although more slowly, and one manicured eyebrow went high up on her forehead. She looked like she was too young to remember a time when a robot would have done the job she was doing but for none of the money. Her only knowledge of robots probably came from schoolbooks and a hazy memory of her daddy’s breakfast-table complaints about the unemployment rate as he read the early edition over his cornflakes.

  She resumed chewing and her eyes moved up and down and all around me with not an atom of interest. But she took the hint and two seconds later slid her nail file into a pocket and then she was gone and I was alone with the hats and the coats and the dull kick of the drums from out on the dance floor.

  “There’s something else going on here tonight, Ada,” I said into the dead telephone. “You know anything about it?”

  “What do I ever know, chief?” said Ada. “We got the job. We got our down payment. We got a name and a place and a time and off you went to pay the lucky lady a visit. Now all you need to do is get up close and personal and make sure she doesn’t get up close and personal with anyone ever again.”

  “That’s just it.”

  “What’s just it? You don’t want to get lipstick on your chassis?”

  The drums from the main club room kicked up and I turned to look. I imagined Honey and the other three cage dancers go-go-going for it while the blond girl vibrated underneath them all and everyone else stood and watched and clapped.

  The things people do for fun.

  “Getting her alone might be difficult. Her work is the kind of work that people pay a cover charge just to sit and watch.”

  “I know what a go-go dancer is, Ray. Jeez Louise, how old do you think I am?”

  I pondered on that question for as long as it took two microswitches somewhere inside me to flip and I pondered what Ada would say if I actually asked her.

  “So I get her alone,” I said.

  “So you get her alone,” said Ada. “Well done, Ray, you got the job! The pay is great but the hours are terrible.”

  “Listen, getting her alone might be difficult. There are people watching her.”

  “I think I saw the rerun of this conversation last Sunday, Ray.”

  “What I mean is,” I said, “is that she’s being watched, and not by the young and lovely of Hollywood out for an after-work sniff or two.”

  I told her about the men at the back of the bar. I told her about my theory about the men. I told her it made things complicated.

  Maybe the big chair in my small office rocked forward on its springs. Maybe it didn’t.

  Ada didn’t speak at first because she inserted a pause as heavy as a ripe pumpkin waiting to be carved for Halloween. Then she spoke.

  “Well, there you go,” said Ada. “Just your standard Hollywood depravity.”

  If I could have raised an eyebrow I would have.

  “Anything you can find out?” I asked. “Put your ear to the ground, so to speak? Make a call or two?”

  “Not sure, chief,” said Ada. “We’re not supposed to ask questions. I don’t like asking questions. We get the job and then we get the job done. And so the world keeps turning, whether it’s full of hoods listening to music or not. Our business, this isn’t.”

  “I know,” I said, “but I’m the one on the ground. The job got difficult. I need information. I need to know what might be going on so I know what I might need to do about it in case things get more difficult.”

  The noise on the phone line ticked up in volume. And I heard it then, buried in the roar. The ticking of a clock, the second hand of a fast watch curving around and around and around.

  The sound of the computer room back at the office.

  The sound of Ada, the real sound that wasn’t someone smoking or drinking coffee or moving things around on my desk.

  “Because,” I said, “it can’t be a coincidence that I’ve been sent to rub out Honey tonight of all nights. She must be connected to whatever is going down and that means it’s going to get difficult. Difficult is not good. I don’t like difficult.”

  “You have a point there, chief. Maybe I should go back and ask for more money.”

  There was some yodeling from beyond the doors.

  “Is that what young people like to dance to now?” Ada asked.

  I shrugged. I glanced up and to the left of the green dome of the phone booth. There was a poster on the wall and my optics scanned it.

  “They’re called the Hit List. They’re from England.”

  Ada laughed inside my head. “I like the name. And the accent.”

  I shrugged again and put my back to the racket once more. I preferred it that way. “You want me to put a hold on the job while you make enquiries?”

  “You can take five, Ray. But listen, the contract was specific. Has to be tonight.”

  There was a pause and a click on the line even as Ada finished what she was saying. I thought she was thinking what I was thinking at the same time I was thinking it.

  There were no such things as coincidences.

  Ada said, “Would help if we had some pictures to help ID the crowd.”

  “I’ve taken holiday snaps,” I said. I had camera eyes and four rolls of fresh film in my chest.

  “Atta boy, chief! Wire them to me and I’ll rattle some cages. See if I can find out what the party is.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll head out to the car and send them over.”

  Somewhere behind me the music stopped and the singer spoke into the microphone. With his accent it sounded like I’d tuned in to Masterpiece Theater.

  “Well, there you go,” said Ada. “Intermission. You can go get a root beer after you wire me those pictures.”

  I hung the telephone up. The girl at the coat check was back. There was nobody else around and all that emanated now from beyond the doors of the club was the hum of conversation and the clink of inexpensive glassware.

  I jerked a thumb over my shoulder to suggest I was about to head out the main doors, although why I felt the need to suggest that to the coat-check girl I didn’t know. It just felt like the right thing to do.

  The coat-check girl nodded then pulled the nail file from her pocket and got back to work.

  I went outside and headed to where my car was parked.

  3

  It was a beautiful night. I might have been a robot but you didn’t need to tell me when a night was beautiful or not. And this one sure was.

  It was late. Heading past eleven, but only just. This was fine. I had power enough for a few hours yet.
Back in the old days, midnight really had been the witching hour, the appointed moment when the part of me that I was aware of switched off and the part of me that Ada whispered sweet nothings to switched on. That was when I’d got to work. Private detective by day. Private killer by night.

  But Ada had told me, eventually. And that was fine. She was the computer and she could reprogram not just herself but me too. A little adjustment and I was invited to the party.

  Which was also fine. Because I was programmed to think it was fine. A robot has to make a living somehow. And I always did my best work after midnight. It seemed tonight would not be an exception.

  So it was a beautiful night. It was fall but it was warm and dry. I think they called that an Indian summer, although I don’t know why. The club was on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Clark Street in West Hollywood. The main doors opened out on the corner and there was a parking lot out the back that you got to via an alley on Clark. I walked up that street and into the lot and then I stopped and looked up. The sky above me was clear. There were a lot of stars and no clouds and no moon either. There was a warm breeze coming in off the sleeping hills to the north and on that breeze came the scent of wild sage and dust and the desert. I might have been a robot but you didn’t need to tell me that was the greatest smell in the world.

  I got to my car without difficulty. The parking lot was nearly empty, just my Buick and a handful of smaller numbers. None of the cars would have belonged to the hoods in the club so there was no point in checking any of them. The men would have scattered their vehicles all over the neighboring streets.

  I was alone, but when I got to my car I still stopped and checked before I slipped in and shut the door with a click as gentle as the first tap of a silver spoon on a soft-boiled egg.

  I sat in the car and plugged myself into the dash and began to wire the pictures I’d taken inside the club to Ada. The car had a radio telephone and a number of other toys courtesy of my creator, Professor Thornton. He’d thought of everything, including the fact that I could scan the negatives directly off the film rolls in my chest and send them back to base. That was a useful trick for a private detective.

  The good professor might have been a little disappointed if he’d known the line of work his creations had moved into, but he was dead so disappointment was no longer a concern.

  I’d used one of the four rolls of film inside my chest already. I wasn’t sure how good the pictures were because the club was dark and smoky and even with my optics turned up to eleven the men in the club had a habit of keeping the brims of their hats down low over their eyes.

  Funny that, I thought. Almost as though they didn’t want people seeing who they were.

  The wirephoto machine in the car was slow but that was fine. I wound down my window and I watched the back of the club. There wasn’t much to watch, just a Dumpster and a back door and through the open window came the sounds of Sunset Boulevard and the dull thud of the Hit List starting back up from inside the club and the smell of the hills and then came the sound of something else entirely and the unique smell that went with it.

  I reran the audio inside my head to be sure. I tweaked the equalizer, tried a couple of filters, changed the volume. To be sure.

  I was sure.

  Then the back door of the club opened and someone stepped out into the parking lot. With no moon it was pretty dark, and the building itself cast an even deeper darkness through which the figure moved. That same darkness hid me in the car as I turned up my optics and took a good look.

  The sound had been the sound of a gunshot. Small caliber, quiet. Not silenced, but hidden well under the music. Like someone had timed it. It was lucky my ears were of the electronic variety, otherwise that shot would have been the secret it was supposed to be.

  The smell had been the smell of the very same gunshot, and it lingered in the air, faint on the warm breeze and nothing but a tingle of fireworks at the back of the throat. Not that I had a throat, but what I did have was a chemical analyzer with an intake in the middle of my faceplate. An analyzer that had been enjoying the desert scents and had alerted me to the smell of gunpowder as a matter of routine.

  The person moving through the dark completed the picture so I sat back and watched. They moved slowly at first, coming out of the back door of the club and shifting like they were looking around, checking to see that the coast was clear. It was. There was nobody back here but me and in the dark I would have been pretty hard to see sitting inside the Buick.

  Then the figure moved faster and moved from my left to my right, across the back of the club. On the right side was the Dumpster, which sat against a low wall that separated this particular piece of real estate from the one next door. The person made their way to the Dumpster and lifted the big lid only by a fraction. Their hand went in then came out.

  There they stopped and then after a moment they kept on going, vaulting the low wall and making their way toward another alley that ran down that side of the club and that would lead around to the main strip and eventually to the main doors of the club. Maybe that was a clever move. It put them at some distance from whatever it was they’d delivered to the Dumpster and I knew from personal experience there was only the girl at the coat check with any kind of view of the main door—and she didn’t have much interest in who came and went. She wouldn’t know or even care if someone went out the back then came back in the front.

  I was right. Something was happening tonight.

  Normally I wouldn’t care. Not my problem. I had my job to do. Yes, I wanted more information on what was going on but only to help me do that job. That was why I had called Ada. That was why I was wiring her some pictures. I didn’t want things to get difficult.

  They’d gotten difficult. Now I did have a problem and that problem had a name.

  Honey. The girl I was supposed to kill. The girl who had just fired a gun inside the club and then hidden that gun in the Dumpster before making a quick and agile getaway, tassels swinging.

  So I’d been right. Something was happening and Honey was involved. The fact that I was right didn’t make me feel any better, but I took what comfort I could from the accuracy of my logic gates anyway.

  My eyes fell to the dash of my car. The pictures had gone through so I unplugged and then I opened the door of the car and I got out. I stood there for a moment in that warm breeze. The smell of the gunshot was long gone. I closed the door and then put my hands in my pockets and walked over to the Dumpster. The parking lot was gravel and my footsteps crunched all the way over.

  I got to the Dumpster. I was still alone. I lifted the Dumpster’s lid. Inside were bags of trash and on top of one of the bags was something small and black.

  I reached inside and pulled the gun out and stood there looking at it for a while. It was a little thing, a mouse gun. Small caliber. Looked like a .22. My steel fingers would never even have gotten through the trigger guard.

  I closed the lid of the Dumpster and put the gun in my pocket and then turned and headed to the back door of the club. As I reached for that door I wondered who Honey was and why I was supposed to kill her.

  These were questions I was not supposed to ask.

  But I asked them anyway.

  4

  The back door of the club led to a corridor, the walls of which were brick that had been painted a sort of purple-red. Maybe you’d call it magenta. The air that came in with me from the parking lot was warm while the air between the brick walls was cool.

  There was nobody around so I kept going. The smell of the gun had long since evaporated outside but it was still lingering here. It wasn’t anything anybody could have smelled. It had some stiff competition with all the smoke from the club itself. Cigarette mostly. A little cigar. Nothing fancy but enough to smother everything else like a soft pillow.

  But my analyzer was working away and I turned the dial up a little until the smell was so strong I could follow it like an airline pilot coming in to land.

/>   Bully for me.

  The club was big enough out the back. Lots of storerooms filled with the kinds of things club storerooms are filled with. Booze. Cigarette cartons. Boxes of Christmas decorations that would be excavated soon enough. I kept following my nose. Nothing was locked. The club was running strong and so people needed to get stuff out of the storage rooms. I walked some more, found an office. More storerooms. A big room you could hire out for a private function. This one was empty and had stacks of chairs rising up along the walls.

  I figured there would be another room like this one, on the other side of the building. If my guess about what was going on here tonight was anything close to being right, I was betting that other room wasn’t empty.

  I kept walking and went through a door, and then I found myself out by the coat check again. The door I had just stepped through was on the other side of the cloakroom from the big double doors that led to the dance floor. The coat-check girl had abandoned her post.

  The airborne chemical trail led me across the lobby to a set of doors that was across from the telephone booth with its green dome. I took a look at the sign on the doors. Restrooms, male and female. I generated a random number. It came out even so I put a metal palm on the door to the men’s. Before I pushed that metal palm I tuned my audio receptors to the void beyond the door, but I couldn’t hear anything except the trickle of water. It sounded like the restroom was empty. Then I pushed the door open and went in.

  The restroom was small, a curious mix of white square tiles that spread out over the floor and crawled up the walls to about shoulder height and above that walls painted in more of that purple-red tint. Ceiling too. They must have gotten a discount.

  There were four stalls and four urinals and four sinks and above the sinks the wall was one long mirror. There were stacks of rectangular paper towels on the shelf that ran below the mirror and behind the sinks. Water trickled from the stall closest to me as a leaking toilet cistern constantly refilled itself.

  I did two things, the second of which was to go over to the last cubicle in the row of four and open the door and take a look at what was lying on the floor.