Killing Is My Business Read online

  “Nothing much,” I said, “only that he’s fed up of being in this house and he wants to go home. He claims to be a very important person.” I ended with a shrug.

  Carmina pursed her lips. “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. I don’t know. That’s Papa’s business. All I know is that Ellis is doing work for him. He was here often.”

  Now it was my turn to do some of that playacting. “That so?” I asked in a way that suggested I was more interested in the contents of the drinks cabinet Carmina was resting one hand on.

  “Then one night he came in, and he hasn’t left yet.”

  I hrmmed. “He must like the way you mix a cocktail.”

  A smile appeared somewhere near Carmina’s mouth. “He was drunk when he arrived.”

  “He’s doing his best to keep up appearances right now.”

  Carmina laughed. “I told you, Emerson Ellis is a pig.”

  That didn’t stop her from working on the drinks cabinet. Finally it opened and she looked down at the contents.

  “This business he’s doing,” I said, “for Mr. Falzarano. Any idea what it is?”

  “No,” said Carmina. She was still looking down at the bottles and she really did sound like she couldn’t have cared less. That may have been true, but I had a feeling that her answer just now had been anything but.

  “Must be important,” I said. “I mean, important enough that Mr. Falzarano doesn’t want Ellis out of range. Maybe he’s in danger and Falzarano is keeping him safe. Until the job is done, I mean.”

  Carmina extracted a bottle from the cabinet and turned back around. She caressed the bottle and she seemed extremely interested in the label on the outside of it.

  “I was told you were a private investigator,” Carmina said to the bottle.

  I shrugged. “Once upon a time.”

  Carmina dragged her eyes up to my optics. The smile was still there somewhere but it was getting harder to spot. “Seems strange, Papa hiring you to protect him.”

  I shrugged again. “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he sees my worth.”

  The smile reappeared over the horizon like a rising sun. Carmina moved closer to me and as she did she moved her shoulders in a way that made the front of her dress spread itself open just that little bit more. She took a finger and planted it on my chest.

  “Oh yes, he sees your worth,” she said. “We all do.”

  I glanced down at the bottle of whatever it was, now sandwiched between my chassis and her bosom.

  “The pig wants another drink, and if he’s so important to Mr. Falzarano then maybe we should humor him.”

  Carmina looked up at me. Her hair fell back in front of one side of her face, right over her left eye. “You sure you don’t want to join us?”

  I held up a hand. “Thanks for the offer. Maybe next time.”

  Carmina sighed, the expression dramatic, the act back in force.

  Then she swooshed across the carpet, bottle swinging, and left the study, and when she turned around to close the double doors behind her there was a sparkle in her eye and in the instant before she was gone I could have sworn those eyes moved up and down.

  Finally I was alone. I went to the desk and started looking.

  21

  Somewhere I heard the clink of a spoon against a ceramic mug, but when I looked up from the table all I could see were Ada’s computer banks, a thousand lights flashing in arcane sequence, a thousand miles of tape racing from one reel to the next. Above the door that led out to the main office, the clock’s smooth second hand cruised ever onward. In one minute it would be midnight.

  Four hours until I was due to meet Alfie. Four hours until we were due to put the frighteners on Coke Patterson.

  I’d struck lucky in Falzarano’s office. Once Carmina was out of the way I’d waited a few minutes. I killed time by reading the titles off the spines of all the books that lined the walls of the room. There were eight hundred and thirty books on display and a quarter of them were duplicate copies of Falzarano’s own blockbuster.

  His hulk of a desk had nothing on the top of it but a blotter and the crystal ashtray and the telephone and the small pad Falzarano had used earlier. I’d checked the pad but it was clean, not even an impression left on the top sheet.

  The underneath of the desk had been more interesting. The thing was fitted with more pullout storage space than the average family home. There was one big long drawer that ran just about the full width of the desk. It had a big lock with a tarnished brass escutcheon that wouldn’t have looked out of place pinned to the chest of a war hero.

  I’d stopped and listened a moment but heard nothing from beyond the doors. Carmina was in another part of the house so I’d gone for broke and pulled on the big long drawer. It had slid open without a sound.

  What I had found in that drawer I’d laid out on the desk and taken pictures of with the twin cameras behind my optics and now those pictures had been printed at the office and were laid out across the table.

  I looked up into the corner of the room the way I always did when I wanted to make sure Ada was watching.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  Ada laughed. “So cool and modest too. I knew I liked you, Raymondo.”

  I looked back down at the pictures. “I’m guessing this is what we were after?”

  “I’m guessing you’re right, chief.”

  The photographs were black and white, but the original papers had been blue. They were big, rectangular papers, covered in fine white lines and tiny white text that popped against the deep dark background. The papers had been so big I’d had to stand tiptoe just to get a good shot of them.

  They were blueprints. They’d just been sitting in Falzarano’s unlocked top drawer. I pointed this out to Ada and she tsked. “What happened to hiding a safe behind a picture on the wall? Don’t the bad guys keep stuff in safes anymore?”

  I shrugged. “What does he need with a safe or a locked drawer when the whole house is under armed guard?”

  At this Ada laughed. “Little does he know his pet robot snoops for a hobby. He’s going to be annoyed with himself when he ends up dead.”

  I rearranged the photographs on the table and resumed my inspection, tracing the lines on one of the plans with a bronzed steel-titanium finger.

  The blueprints included building plans as well. There was a diagram of one big building that was long and boxy. The plans showed the building in various elevations and at varying levels of detail. I pushed that picture away and dragged over another. This showed something else, a smaller building with a neighboring area surrounded by a high fence. The blueprints for this place showed the development with the fence both in situ and removed to show what lay behind it, which was detailed on another sheet. Looking at this one I tried to make sense of a series of big boxy constructions covered in pipes and fins. There were other things too, poles wrapped in coils and tall pylons with cables. The scale on the blueprints told me these things were fairly big, like small buildings in themselves.

  “So what is all this?” I asked. “It’s big. Not just one building, but a whole lot in a cluster. Looks industrial, maybe a factory or warehouse?”

  “Got it in one, Ray.”

  I tapped the picture of the boxes and coils. “Whatever he’s building looks like it will need a lot of juice,” I said. “This could be plans for his own electric power station.”

  Ada’s purr filled the whole room. “As you said, chief, interesting stuff.”

  “And what else is interesting is this,” I said. I pulled one of the pictures off the bottom of the pile and tapped it. It was a close-up of one of the corners of the blueprints, showing a boxed block of white text. The same block was stenciled into the corner of each sheet of the plans.

  “Prepared by Emerson Ellis Building and Construction.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” said Ada. “You want to build a factory, you hire the best commercial developer in the city.”

  “Emerson Ellis,” I said. “The sam
e Emerson Ellis Falzarano is hiding inside his house.”

  If Ada took a sip of coffee I wouldn’t have blamed her given the hour. I knew she was a night owl. I also knew she was a computer and she didn’t drink coffee and just like that the image and the sound vanished.

  “Well, he has a good reason to hide,” said Ada, “and that reason is you.”

  I pursed my lips, or it felt like I did. I’d been doing it a lot lately. It felt good. It helped me think.

  Of course I was the reason Emerson Ellis was in hiding. I didn’t remember him but some other part of me did and had been trying to tell me all this time.

  “The Jaguar,” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “He drives a Jaguar. Green thing from England. Very nice. I parked next to it this morning and I thought it rang a bell. And that bell has been ringing ever since.”

  “Huh,” said Ada. “Another memory fragment on your tape. I’d say your system needed another overhaul, but these little flashes seem to come in handy sometimes.”

  I was going to ask what she meant about another overhaul, but then I knew about how she had reprogrammed me to be a killer and I also knew about the new cover on my chest. I must have put that on myself, under her guidance, after something happened to the old one.

  “So Emerson Ellis was another job, then?” I asked. “Except that couldn’t have gone too well given that he’s still alive and well and has Zeus Falzarano’s lady friend plying him with liquor.”

  “He’s our open case,” said Ada. “You went looking but he’d gone to ground. But at least we know where that ground is now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Now we know where Ellis is. You want me to see to that job too while I’m there?”

  Ada hrmmed. Beside me the tapes on one of the big mainframes spun one way and then another and the lights flashed in sequence. Ada was thinking.

  I went back to the pictures. The plans were crawling with text outside of the corner boxes, all of it technical, a lot of it measurements of length, height, angle. Then I noticed another block, one on each of the plans, this time circular instead of square, positioned at the top corner of each sheet, the exact place varying a little. The text was black and a little hard to read against the dark of the blueprint paper but I managed.

  “Application approval oh-eight sixty-seven,” I read. “Vaughan Delaney, Department of City Planning.”

  “Now there’s a funny surprise,” said Ada.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Another name I knew once.”

  “That’s right, chief. Another job. Only unlike Ellis, Vaughan Delaney is dead.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Only you didn’t kill him.”

  “Oh.” There was no denying I was a little disappointed.

  “He did the deed for us.”

  “Oh.”

  I looked back at the photographs. I rearranged them again, like it made any difference. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “Falzarano wants to build a factory and a power station. He hires Emerson Ellis Building and Construction. The plans are approved by Vaughan Delaney, city planner.”

  “Except if the one and only Zeus Falzarano is into real estate, you can bet there’s something fishy about it,” said Ada. “Chances are he doesn’t want anyone looking at it too closely, so he greases a few palms to make sure it all goes through without a fuss.”

  “One such palm belonging to Vaughan Delaney.”

  “Well, he did have a very nice car.”

  “Only once the plans were approved,” I said, “Vaughan Delaney dies by his own hand?”

  “Apparently so.”

  Something about that didn’t feel right. “Except he didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

  “I’m listening, chief.”

  “Vaughan Delaney dies and that spooks Falzarano, so much so he grabs Emerson Ellis and hides him away. The reason Ellis is so upset about it is because he’s not at Falzarano’s castle voluntarily.”

  “Oh really? He said that?”

  “Ada, the guy would have told his life story to a potted palm tree if you put a hat on it. He’d just downed a bottle of scotch and was looking for another. All he said was that he was very important and that he was grateful to Falzarano but that he wanted to go, and he wanted to go now, because he had important work to do.”

  “I get it,” said Ada. “Delaney didn’t commit suicide. He was killed and it was made to look that way.”

  “Right. Because with Delaney out of the way, whoever succeeds him will no doubt review his recent permits. Instead of being quietly filed away in a dusty vault somewhere underneath downtown, with the city planner himself on hand to obfuscate proceedings as needed, Falzarano’s plans will come out in the open.”

  “Good word that, Raymondo. ‘Obfuscate.’ I’m impressed. I must remember to use that in casual conversation.”

  I frowned on the inside. I think Ada knew I did because she laughed. I glanced down at the plans again.

  “So whoever our client is,” I said, “they want to stop Falzarano from building his factory. We were hired to take out Delaney, Ellis, and now Falzarano. The client knows the three of them were doing something, something big—big enough to kill each of the players to stop it. But they weren’t entirely sure what that something was.”

  “Hence the arrangement to get into Falzarano’s place and find out.”

  I whistled. I looked out the window. The blind was up and all I could see was myself and the computer room around me reflected in the black glass.

  “The client has resources and know-how,” I said. “They arranged the restaurant hit. That kind of thing couldn’t have been easy.”

  “They have deep pockets, that’s for sure,” said Ada. “You were following Vaughan Delaney nearly a month, and let me tell you, your hourly rate has a tendency to make the eyes water.”

  “That’s interesting.” I gestured at the photographs on the table. “You think this is all they want?”

  “I’ll check and let you know. That’s good work, Ray.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Ellis. He’s a weak link. If I take it softly I think I can get him to spill a little more on these grand plans.”

  “Great idea.” Ada blew more smoke around my circuits. “Keep him alive for the moment, see what you can shake out. Now, about that other job.”

  I looked up into the corner of the room. “The other job?”

  “The one Falzarano has for you. What was that guy’s name again?”

  “Coke Patterson,” I said. “Seems like he is—or was—a close associate. Alfie says he’s been around Falzarano a while. That’s all I have. He’s done something to annoy the old man but I don’t know what.”

  “Okay,” said Ada. “You’re heading out at four, right?”

  “On the dot. I’ll take forty winks and a new tape before I go back.”

  “Okay, good. Plenty of time. But first things first.”

  “First things first?”

  “Won’t take long. When you’re done there’ll be time to come back and get a new tape, then you can go on your playdate with Alfie.”

  I stacked the photographs on the table. I squared the edges, squeezed them tight.

  “What won’t take long?”

  Ada took a puff of her imaginary cigarette. “I have a little job for you.”

  22

  I have to say I liked Hollywood at four in the morning. It was quiet. Those who had gone out for a night on the tiles were either already home or were locked in for the long haul. It was still a couple of hours before the working crowd stirred and the nightshift was still beavering away.

  Four in the morning was a good time for certain deeds. I liked four in the morning.

  I wasn’t sure my companion could say the same. The Shelby Cobra had the top up and I sat in the passenger seat while Alfie Micklewhite sat behind the wheel, and between yawns as wide as the Grand Canyon and the continual sweeping of one hand over his hair as he tried to flatten his blond curls into
his signature look he managed to keep us more or less on the right part of the road. There was hardly any traffic to bump into nor many parked cars to swipe so we were safe enough and we made good time. The traffic lights were all asleep, their middle orange lights blinking, blinking, blinking, like we were a plane coming in to land and they were guiding us down onto the runway.

  “I don’t suppose anywhere in this bloody town will do a decent cup of tea at this time of the morning,” said Alfie. He yawned again and his eyes remained shut for so long I thought about reaching over and taking the wheel. Then he was back in control and pushing at his hair again. He glanced at me. “You fancy a cuppa, Charlie?”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. I kept my eyes on the road. “You sure you know where we’re going?”

  “Of course I bloody do.” Another yawn. “The Pacific Breeze apartments. Number 12D. I know where I’m bloody well going. Pacific bloody Breeze. Honestly.”

  “Sorry for asking,” I said.

  The Pacific Breeze building was an Art Deco wonderland that consisted of a tall oblong with rounded edges that went straight up to catch the air it was named after. The outside of it was crawling with sunray motifs and arches and other bits and pieces that people in the 1920s seemed to like carving into every available flat surface. The building didn’t have much in the way of grounds but what it did have was filled with so many palm trees I wondered if Alfie had remembered to bring the machete and mosquito nets.

  We parked out back. There was nobody around and the sun was still a ways from making its appearance. Once we were out of the car Alfie seemed to wake up, his expression set, his whole body somehow tighter, full of a sort of springy energy, the eyes behind his big glasses now the steel gray of the dusty sidewalk.

  We went in the back through a loading door Alfie picked the lock of without much difficulty but with plenty of cursing. Inside the Art Deco theme continued. The corridors were lit with sconces decorated with chrome sunray moldings. The carpet was red and edged with gold and was thin but it muffled our footsteps well enough. We went up via the service elevator because we didn’t want to meet any early risers. The service elevator was so ornate I almost wanted to take the risk and have a look at the one designed for the residents.