Standard Hollywood Depravity--A Ray Electromatic Mystery

by Adam Christopher

  Above the smile was something else entirely. A look. A something dark and cunning that lived behind her eyes. A look that told me all I needed to know.

  Power. She had it. Whoever she was. In a room full of hoods, standing in front of Zeus Falzarano himself, she had power. She had power and she knew it.

  She lifted a hand and she placed it on the box so gently she was hardly touching the thing at all.

  The thing that was the source of her power. The box was hers.

  She was the seller.

  “Gentlemen,” she said and she said it with her chin pointed down and with her eyes scanning the audience from beneath her brows. She could hold the attention of a man in a way that only his favorite sports team could and she knew that too.

  Oh, she was good. Of that I had no doubt. I could see now she was older than I’d first thought, more than a few years separating her from her boy waiting out in the club. And with those years came experience and a certain kind of confidence which was now proudly on display.

  “Thank you all for coming,” she continued, talking through her smile, her blond hair flashing in the light that hung alone above the table behind her. “I know what it took to bring you all here. I know a lot of you have come a very long way for this.”

  Her gaze dropped down to Falzarano and her smile flickered at the corners. She gave him a nod.

  “Mr. Falzarano, it is truly an honor.”

  Falzarano gave a quiet laugh and muttered something that might have been Italian. Then he waved a hand at her, rolling it in the air, a gesture both acknowledging her greeting and telling her to get the hell on with it.

  The woman interlaced her fingers in front of her lap and addressed the room.

  “As you know, I invited you all here because I have recently acquired a unique item which I believe will be of great interest to you and your syndicates.”

  I looked at the box on the table. I wondered what was inside it and what could possibly be so important and so valuable. Diamonds? No. The woman had said item, singular. Not stones, but jewelry, then. A famous piece, recently stolen? I’d probably read about it in the paper, only I had no memory of it as I had no memory before breakfast this morning.

  Whatever was in the box, it was enough to draw hoods from all over the country to the back room of this club in West Hollywood and it was enough to bring the reclusive Falzarano down from his castle. It was enough for Boxer to send his best—Honey—to come to steal it, switching herself in for one of the dancers so she could get in nice and close. Which, on the face of it, seemed like a pretty good plan. All she had to do next was get out of the room with it.

  That particular requirement seemed like it would present more of a problem.

  The blond woman turned the wattage of her smile up a notch. She unlinked her hands and moved one to float over the box while sending the other plunging down the front of her blouse. Her blouse was a black number with ruffles, and from within she pulled out a key on the end of a slim chain hanging around her neck—a key which, thus extracted, she slid into the lock on the front of the jewelry box before giving it a half turn counterclockwise. I half-remembered a saying about being able to hear a pin drop, but tonight the tiny click of the lock disengaging sounded as loud as a bank vault being unsealed.

  The auctioneer picked the box up and turned it around, the open lid resting against her middle, as she presented the contents to the assembled. She gestured to the star attraction within with the sweep of an elegant hand.

  I wouldn’t have said what went around the room was a gasp. Men like that didn’t gasp. What they did was clear their throats and sit up straight and shoot looks at each other and adjust their ties. Me, I did less gasping on account of the fact that I couldn’t breathe as a matter of course. But what I did do was focus my optics on the object nestled on a velvet bed inside the box. It was small and dull and silver and I didn’t know what I would do with it if it was mine, but I suddenly had a very great urge to find out what it was for.

  “Gentlemen, I think you all know the secrets this can unlock, and what those secrets are worth to you.”

  With those words that urge just got a great deal stronger. So strong that I came to a decision.

  The thing in the box had no intrinsic value. I could see that. But what it represented was clearly important, so important that there were people in this room who were prepared to pay a fortune for it and a girl who was prepared to kill so she could steal it.

  And I was going to help her. Because, that thing in the box, I wanted to know all about it and I thought Ada might like a little look-see too.

  I settled back and thought over what I was going to do next.

  Kill the girl. Take the box.

  My job just got a whole lot easier.

  9

  If the room had been quiet before, it now fell into a hush as deep as the deep green sea. It was so quiet all I could hear was the ticking of a clock. The fast hand of a stopwatch forever speeding into the future.

  I wondered if I should call Ada, tell her about the new plan. But there wasn’t time and I wasn’t sure she would be too pleased, at least not until she saw what I was currently planning to bring back to the office.

  So instead I stood just where I was and I kept my optics on the auctioneer and the box and the mysterious something on the velvet bed within.

  The auctioneer paused, playing that smile over her audience like a spotlight searching for an escaped prisoner.

  “Gentlemen, we open the bidding at one hundred thousand dollars.”

  There came a series of sighs and hisses from different areas of the room, like someone had let the air out of all the tires in a car sales yard at once. Some looks were exchanged and some heads shaken. Everyone here must have known the starting price would be high but perhaps not that high.

  My friend from the lobby broke the ice with a twitch of the newspaper in his left hand. He looked calm. He’d told me that he thought the item could sell for a million bucks. He seemed more prepared than the rest of them.

  The auctioneer nodded. “Do I hear one hundred and ten?”

  The auction had begun.

  The bids began clawing for altitude. I watched and listened. Soon enough the auction became a two-man race. Falzarano and my friend with the newspaper. The kingpin kept his bids running and my man kept his newspaper twitching like a dog’s tail batting summer flies. Nobody else seemed that interested. They all watched and listened with the folded arms and stooped heads and bunched shoulders of defeat.

  The price climbed. I didn’t know who my friend with the newspaper represented. It wasn’t Tieri, after all. Bob was growing cold in the toilet and sooner or later someone was going to ignore the OUT OF ORDER sign and Malone’s boy would find his gun was gone. I cast an eye over the room but I had no idea who Malone’s boy was. Could have been anyone. Could have been my friend with the newspaper.

  “Four hundred thousand dollars,” said the auctioneer. This was directed at the newspaper man. He didn’t hesitate. His wrist twitched and the newspaper twitched with it and the price went up another rack.

  Then it happened. Of course it was coming. It was all part of the show.

  Falzarano raised a hand and he said, “One million dollars,” in that heavily accented voice of his. I couldn’t see the faces of his two boys but I could imagine their smiles.

  The auctioneer gave Falzarano a little bow and then turned to the newspaper man. I thought that turn was a little pointed. She knew. Falzarano knew. The newspaper man knew it as well.

  The paper moved again and this time it was more than a twitch.

  The auctioneer looked at Falzarano. “One million, one hundred thousand.”

  The old man’s head moved a little to the left and then a little to the right and then he gave a nod.

  “One million, two hundred thousand,” said the auctioneer.

  My friend shook his head. The newspaper in his hand didn’t move an inch. The auctioneer’s smile shone down on the mob
boss sitting in front of her.

  “Sold to Mr. Falzarano for one million, two hundred thousand dollars,” she said, and no sooner had she spoken than she snapped the lid of the jewelry box shut. She placed it down on the table behind her, then turned and began to applaud. She kept it going for more than a little while even though it was the only sound in the whole room.

  Well now. One million dollars and change. A lot of change. Cool or hot, I’d be clapping too if I had just parked that in my lap.

  Falzarano nodded. Then he leaned into his boy again. They whispered something. I turned my ears up but all I caught was in a language I didn’t know how to process. Italian. But I thought I got the drift because the man gave a very curt nod and then he stood up very sharply, headed to the side door, and disappeared beyond it.

  That was when Honey raised an eyebrow and did her level best to use it to point to the same door and the man who had just left.

  I got the message.

  While the rest of the room stood and began to form a line to kiss the ring of the retired kingpin to congratulate him on his purchase I slipped out the back without a sound.

  10

  Sunset Boulevard seemed about as busy at half past midnight as it was during rush hour. For a lot of folk the Hollywood night was young and the air was still good. I still wasn’t breathing and the change in temperature didn’t bother me but for some reason I felt better out of the stuffy back room of the club. So I pretended to take a breath that was both long and deep and then I picked up the pace and headed around the corner and into the parking lot. I could have gone out the back but I hadn’t because I didn’t want Falzarano’s boy to know he was being followed.

  There was a new car in the lot. It was parked horizontally to take up spaces designed for three cars. It was black. It was big but subtle. There was no acreage of hood and fins big enough to fly to the moon with. Instead it was long and shaped like a teardrop, everything tucked away, like a bird diving underwater. Classy. Expensive. Something European, not American. Something imported. Exotic.

  Falzarano’s ride.

  I liked it.

  I didn’t know which of his two boys had driven it. Maybe they took turns. I even wanted to take the thing for spin myself. But one of them was currently up to his waist in the backseat, his ass presented in my direction as he leaned in to reach for something down in a footwell. When he was done reaching he stood tall. In one hand he held his sunglasses. In the other hand he held a briefcase. I took a good look. Black. Hand-tooled leather. Expensive. An import, like the car, like the two boys, like Falzarano himself.

  The man closed the back door of the car and I had to appreciate the way the door swung on its hinges and the way it clicked into place with no effort at all and with the satisfyingly solid clunk of an old country manor being locked up for the night.

  The man stopped where he was. He’d seen me. Which was fine because I was now standing right in front of him.

  Then he grinned and then he dropped his sunglasses onto the ground and then he shoved the hand now free inside his jacket to reach for something I assumed had bullets in it. His hand stayed just where it was because before he got to his gun I had got to his wrist and broken all the bones therein.

  The boy was good. He grimaced and his face went red and his eyes narrowed but he clenched his jaw so as not to make a sound. The boy was very good. He knew what to do. He knew he had to fight even with the odds so heavily stacked against him.

  But the moment was fleeting and the fight went out of his eyes as I put my other hand around his neck and gently pushed him to the ground.

  He didn’t get up again.

  I opened the back door of the car. I appreciated the engineering. It was all so precise. The door was weighted just so. As I pulled it toward me I knew every mechanical element of its construction had been designed and built by hand to be satisfying. You spent that much on a car, you wanted to be satisfied.

  Then I picked the guy up and I threw him in the back and I admired the way the door gently drifted back to the closed position with a clunk that was neither heavy nor light but finely balanced in between.

  The marvels of European engineering.

  Then I picked up the briefcase. I felt the weight. I shook it a little by the handle and I admired the way the little stacks of bound cash inside gently shifted within.

  Then I picked up the man’s sunglasses. I put them in my pocket. I looked down. There was no sign of a struggle because there hadn’t been one, and then I turned to look at the car. It was black and silent and the back windows were tinted and you couldn’t see the body lying across the seat even from a foot away. Suited me just fine.

  In the dull reflection of the car’s rear window I saw the back door of the club fly open. I saw Honey run out at a fair pace. She was holding something in an old laundry bag. She had the bag pressed against her middle with both hands. Whatever was inside it looked rectangular, shallow, something like a good-sized jewelry box.

  She stopped. She looked at the big black car and she looked at the briefcase in my hand. She nodded. She understood. Then she pointed her chin at a small blue Lincoln parked across the lot from my car.

  “That yours?” she asked.

  I pointed with the briefcase at the big Buick. “The other one.”

  Honey nodded again and headed straight for it. She didn’t wait for me to follow. She got to my car and darted around it and opened the passenger door. She put the bag into the footwell. Then she stood up and looked at me across the roof.

  “Let’s go,” she said. She got into the car.

  I didn’t need another invitation.

  What had I said about this job getting easy?

  11

  I drove, but not too fast. Traffic was fair and we didn’t need any undue attention.

  Honey knew what I was doing because she kept quiet and she kept her eyes on the road as she sat next to me in the passenger seat. The bag was back on her lap and she had both arms wrapped around it. If anyone got a glimpse of us when we stopped at traffic lights they might have looked twice at the big guy filling out a trench coat who had kept his hat on and the small girl wearing not much, but this was Hollywood, California, and what people did in their cars was not anyone else’s business.

  She gave directions. A left, a right, a left again, and then straight. I knew the streets. I had a map of the city in my permanent store. I wasn’t the kind of robot to get lost. I imagined the map had been essential for my old job. It sure was for the new one. I knew where to find people and I knew the best places to sneak up on them and I knew the best places to take them afterward. Although most often I left them where they were. That was a good trick, one of the tools I used to avoid suspicion. You kill someone and you move the body then that person’s absence is noticed and when it is noticed people start looking and when people start looking they find things you don’t want them to find. A body in a Dumpster in an alley will lead to things. I was good at not leaving fingerprints and at not leaving any other kinds of clues but even I wasn’t perfect. Inviting people to look where I don’t want them to look is asking for a world of trouble.

  But you kill someone somewhere people expect them to be—in their office or in their kitchen or in a motel room in the arms of their mistress—and you make it look good then people are still suspicious but maybe they don’t go looking quite so far as they should.

  So goes the theory.

  Except tonight I had my target sitting right next to me and I was driving her around. My plan had been to arrange an accident in the club, one involving my steel fingers and her windpipe. There was already one body in the joint along with a lot of men who, on the balance of probabilities, were probably not so keen on any undue attention. Nobody would have reported anything. In fact, they might well have helped cover it up.

  That would have been a nice piece of work. Satisfying, in a professional sense. Like the weight of the door on Falzarano’s crimemobile.

  Now that was out the w
indow, but things weren’t all bad. Honey was sitting next to me. So I couldn’t kill her at work. But I could kill her somewhere else. Somewhere dark and quiet. She wouldn’t be found for a while. I could make it look good. And then I’d be back in the office. Ada would be happy because I would have done the job and would have a briefcase full of miniature portraits of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley and, as a bonus, a jewelry box with something inside I thought she would really want to see.

  I kept driving and I asked: “What happened back at the club? Last I saw you were in a roomful of people who were all carrying iron of some description and were probably not in a mood to be friendly.”

  Honey laughed. It made her tassels swing. She leaned an elbow up on her door and said, “I brought it in. I just took it out again.”

  I frowned on the inside. “You mean they just let you walk out with Falzarano’s prize?”

  Honey’s only response was a shrug. This was a girl who had got a job done and knew she had done it well. I didn’t blame her at all.

  “Okay,” I said, “So who was the auctioneer and where did she get it?”

  Honey glanced sideways at me. An expression of some description flirted briefly with her face but I couldn’t quite see what it was because I was too busy watching the road.

  “Her name is Athena. I know a whole lot about her, if you consider jack to be a whole lot of anything. But Boxer knows her. Or knew her. They have a history, I think. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. But she’s an independent operator. Doesn’t work for nobody. I think Boxer’s been on her tail for a while, ever since whatever good thing they had going went sour. But like I said, none of my business. What is my business is getting the package out of her hands and into mine.”

  “And into Boxer’s,” I said.

  At this Honey just smiled.