Killing Is My Business Read online

  Apartment 12D was a door identical to all the others in the hallway. White wood with gold trim and gold hardware. Alfie picked the lock of this door with a great deal less swearing while I kept watch. The building was certainly nice and I discovered I liked Art Deco, as faded as that particular glamor was here. The building was fairly narrow on the outside so I figured the apartment beyond the door Alfie was working on was probably equally small and narrow. There were probably a dozen buildings just like this within throwing distance.

  Alfie opened the door. I was right. The apartment was nice but small and it was full of stuff that was packed into it in such a way that suggested the place was really not quite big enough but that’s just what you put up with if you wanted to live in this part of the city but you didn’t have money like Zeus Falzarano had money.

  I closed the door behind us and the light from the corridor vanished and we were left in darkness. I turned my optics up but then realized Alfie didn’t have the knack for that so I reached for a table lamp and turned it on and then I reached for the frilly silky thing that was on the back of a nearby chair and I threw it over the lampshade. That plunged us into a red-tinted glow that for some reason made me think of a sinking submarine.

  Thornton again. I’d never thought about submarines before, let alone ones drifting into the abyss. Maybe he’d been in the navy.

  Alfie moved like a cat through the apartment, which is to say he turned and twisted his body around occasional tables and side tables and easy chairs and dining chairs as he navigated his way to the back of the place. The only pieces of him that touched anything were the unmarked soles of his shoes.

  I was bigger than he was but I was good at moving around without anyone knowing I’d been there, so I managed well enough. Maybe just a little slower.

  There was a hallway at the back of the apartment with doors coming off it. Bathroom. Cupboard. Another cupboard. Then a third. They were probably pretty handy for storing your illicit moonshine back in the days of flappers and Prohibition.

  The hallway ended at another door. Alfie was standing next to it when I came up to him. He had his shoulder against the door and his ear too and one gloved hand was ready on the doorknob. My logic gates clicked and told me this was the single bedroom and that behind the door Coke Patterson would be asleep, pleasantly unaware of his nocturnal visitors and the message they brought from mob boss Zeus Falzarano.

  Alfie looked at me, gave me a nod, and then opened the door. The room beyond was darker, but I could see a bed and something in it.

  Alfie went in. I followed. And then I stopped and watched because I had a certain feeling about what Alfie was about to find. I didn’t know what it was. Just the way my circuits buzzed.

  There was just the one body in the bed. The covers were heavy and looked orange although that might have been the weak light coming in from the shaded lamp all the way over in the front room. There was a crocheted throw on top of the blankets and the body underneath it all lay on its back and was covered right up to the neck.

  The heavy orange blankets and the crocheted thing were as still as I was. But Alfie didn’t seem to notice. He walked up to the head of the bed, leaned over the body of Coke Patterson, and brought his nose right up to the other man’s.

  “Coke Patterson,” said Alfie, his lips pulled back into a rictus grin, his heavy glasses in serious danger of sliding right off of his nose, “you are a bloody dead man. Wake. Up.”

  He punctuated those two words with a hefty stab at Coke Patterson’s chest. The chest that hadn’t moved ever since Coke Patterson had stopped breathing who knew how long ago.

  “Oi!” said Alfie, as loud as he dared, which was plenty loud enough. “Patterson! Get the hell up. We need to have a little chat.”

  More stabs of the chest. Then Alfie stood up and looked down the length of Coke Patterson’s body. Then he looked at me.

  I reached down and grabbed the heavy blankets and pulled the lot off the bed and onto the floor in a single motion.

  Coke Patterson lay on the bed in an undershirt and boxer shorts and nothing else. The sheets underneath him were rumpled and were white apart from the patch on the left side that was a much darker color. In the dim bedroom the circle of color looked brown but I knew it was probably a dark red.

  Alfie folded his arms then readjusted his glasses then refolded his arms. “What the bloody hell is all this then, eh? Eh?”

  I pointed at the bed. It seemed unnecessary but it gave me something to do. “Seems like someone got here before us.”

  “Well I can bloody well see that, can’t I?” said Alfie. He sighed and fiddled with his glasses again.

  I looked down at the body. I couldn’t tell when the man had died but he looked pretty fresh. I moved around to the other side of the bed and pulled a bit at his stained undershirt. There was a hole in it in the side and underneath that was a slot cut into the man’s side in a corresponding position.

  “Knife to the kidneys,” I said. “Somebody knew what they were doing.”

  “What, and he just lay there and let them have at it?”

  I looked around. There was a nightstand on either side of the bed and on the one nearest me there was a wide shallow glass with a little clear liquid in it. Beside the glass was a pill bottle. I picked that up first and unscrewed it. It was empty. The label on the outside had Coke Patterson’s name printed on it along with his address. Alfie was watching me, so I tossed him the pill bottle and then I picked up the glass.

  “Sleeping pills,” he said.

  The liquid in the glass was vodka. I told Alfie. He nodded.

  “So our friend Coke had trouble getting his kip, then?”

  “Which made it easier for the killer to come in and slice him in the side.”

  Alfie shook his head and he tossed the empty pill bottle onto the bed. “Well, this is a right bloody to-do, isn’t it? Mr. Falzarano’s going to be over the moon, isn’t he? Dance a bloody jig he will.”

  I put the glass back down on the nightstand and was glad I couldn’t leave fingerprints. “I think we should go,” I said. “All we can do is tell Falzarano what we found.”

  “Yeah, well, right you are, Charlie,” said Alfie. I looked at him. He still had his arms tightly folded. He seemed fairly annoyed at the death of Coke Patterson. Alfie had been cheated of his morning fun.

  Then Alfie shook his head and he slid out of the apartment and I followed and a few minutes later we were driving into the sunrise of another beautiful day in Hollywood, California.

  23

  We drove the dawn streets in silence. I was lost in my thoughts and I imagined Alfie Micklewhite was lost in his.

  I had no idea who Coke Patterson was or what he had done to Zeus Falzarano to earn an early morning visit from two of his boys, but I imagined Alfie was right, the old man wasn’t going to be pleased. Not that it was anything to do with us. All we could do was go back to the big house and tell the boss what we’d found.

  The streets were getting busier already and the traffic lights had switched back to their daytime sequence except for the set in front of us, which were as dead as Mr. Patterson back at Pacific Breeze. There was a policeman in the middle of the street wearing a white covering over his hat and big white gloves that came up to his elbows. There was a whistle in his mouth and he was blowing it with some enthusiasm as he directed traffic. It was always a pleasure, seeing someone really enjoying his work.

  “Course we never had robots in England,” said Alfie. He had one wrist resting on the top of the wheel and the other one was busy managing the cigarette he was smoking. His window was cracked to let the smoke out but all it was doing was letting cold morning air in.

  “That so?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. He pointed through the windshield at the policeman. “You fellas used to have them all over the shop, right? That was you directing traffic once upon a time, eh?”

  I frowned on the inside.

  “And I heard they was all over the pl
ace, running trains and busses and the like, delivering the post, collecting the rubbish. Sorry, garbage.” He turned to me. “Or is it trash? Honestly, the way you bloody well garble the mother tongue, it’s hard to keep track.” He turned back to the windshield. “Still, must have been a right lark, eh?”

  I ran his words through my processor a few times to do a little translation of my own before I felt qualified enough to answer his question correctly.

  “Well,” I said, “that was a little before my time. But you’re right. Once upon a time there were robots. And then there weren’t.”

  Alfie sucked so hard on his cigarette I thought he was going to swallow it. “So how comes you’re still here, then, Charlie?”

  “I was the last robot out of the factory,” I said. “I was supposed to be the first of a new generation, but as soon as I stepped out the door the whole federal robot program was cancelled. They shut down the Department of Robot Labor and that was that.”

  The policeman pointed a giant white glove in our direction and waved us on. Alfie stuck the cigarette in his mouth and worked the gears and we lurched onward. Alfie gave the cop a wave as we went past.

  “And, what, they just let you hang about the place and become a private detective?”

  “They did. Too much money had gone into me and my computer so they let our program continue as a sort of experiment, to see if a robot really could live independently in the real world. Private investigations was what they programmed me for so private investigations it was.”

  “You learn something, Charlie, you learn something.”

  I wasn’t sure if Alfie was joking or not. He was concentrating more on driving one-handed and smoking his cigarette than listening to me.

  Falzarano’s place was a little way away yet so I changed the subject.

  “What about you? What brought you to the States?”

  “Oh, the usual,” said Alfie. “I wanted to be an actor.”

  “You wanted to be an actor?”

  “Yes, that’s right, Charlie, I wanted to be an actor. Blimey.” Alfie glanced at me like I’d just insulted his mother. Then he returned his attention to the road. “I’d been doing odd jobs around the place back home but I got fed up with the weather and decided to move on. And where else do you come for the glitz and the glamour, eh? The City of bleeding Angels is where, my friend. And I tell ya, what a town this is, eh, eh?”

  We began to climb the hills and I studied the road ahead.

  “So how did an actor become a heavy for a man like Falzarano?”

  Alfie grinned. His cigarette somehow stuck to his bottom lip and flapped around as he spoke. It was quite a trick.

  “Oh, well now, you see, turns out acting isn’t quite my bag, right? On account of the fact that I’m bleeding diabolical at it. Course I didn’t know that at first. Looks easy, right? You just pretend to be someone else. Not very hard. Except it was bloody impossible. Anyway, found myself at something of a loose end, Charlie. A loose end. Also, I didn’t say what those odd jobs were back home, now did I, eh?” He shrugged and wrestled with the wheel. “Anyway, Alfie, I thought to meself, Alfie, why don’t you do what you’re good at, eh, lad? So I asked around and got myself a nice little position with Mr. Falzarano. Know what I mean? How did you put it? Alternative options? Eh? Well, there you go. Found meself an alternative option.”

  I nodded. I didn’t remember saying that but that was just business as usual so I believed him. Alfie looked at me and he laughed, and then the cigarette fell off his lip and onto his lap.

  “Oh, bloody Nora!” Alfie scrambled to retrieve his lost smoke. He looked down and he dragged the hand on the wheel with him and we crossed the centerline. The hill road was quiet but another car was coming back down and we were pointing right at it.

  I grabbed the wheel and pulled it back toward me. The other driver was quite within his rights to lean on his horn and he did so heavily.

  Alfie looked up and he had the cigarette back in his mouth. He said thanks around it, gave me a wink magnified by his glasses, and we continued up the hill.

  “No problem,” I said, and I held my breath the rest of the way.

  24

  Falzarano took the news better than I thought he would, which is to say he sat in his chair behind his desk with his eyes closed and first Cuban of the morning filling the air around his head with blue smoke that was so thick I couldn’t even see if the old man was breathing or not. So far he’d only uttered a single syllable, and that had been the “well?” that had been spit out as soon as Alfie and I parted the carpet en route to his desk.

  On the way in Alfie had told me to do the talking, but standing in front of the desk, all he did was twist his mouth without making any words. The fingers of his right hand flickered in front of his belt, like he was getting cigarette ash off them, while with his left hand he worked on his troublesome coiffure.

  I did the talking. Just the facts as I knew them. I tried to keep it simple and I think I succeeded given that I didn’t know a heck of a lot to begin with.

  When I was done Falzarano didn’t speak. He didn’t open his eyes and his cigar was literally going up in very expensive smoke.

  Alfie sniffed and turned to me and made a shape with his mouth. Then he shrugged.

  I thought Alfie made a good point.

  And then the doors behind us opened very quietly and were shut with the same volume.

  “You’ve done well, my boys.”

  I turned and watched Carmina walk toward us and I wondered why she was whispering. A moment later that seemed the lesser of two mysteries when Falzarano jerked into life behind his desk.

  “You’ve done well, my boys,” said the old man. He smiled and sucked on his cigar and his eyes glittered behind the smoke. In the meantime, Carmina continued her slow way toward the desk. She took the scenic route, around the piano, her fingers trailing over the ebony surface. Then she hit the bookcase and her fingers were now at head height, conducting a survey of the tomes by touch alone.

  “It can’t be helped,” she whispered.

  “It can’t be helped,” said Falzarano at a rather more elevated volume.

  “As far as I am concerned, you did the job that was asked of you,” she whispered. Falzarano repeated the phrase.

  My attention was torn between the two of them. My face was immobile, given that it was made entirely of metal, but Alfie was doing enough expressions for the pair of us.

  “I will call for you when I need you again.” Carmina was at the desk now.

  Falzarano sat up. He leaned forward and lowered his cigar onto the edge of the crystal ashtray, balancing it just so. “I will call for you when I need you again,” he said. He was looking at us as he leaned and he kept on leaning. He was as frozen as I was.

  Carmina walked around behind him, and laid her arms across the old man’s shoulders. If he knew she was there, he didn’t give any indication.

  Beside me Alfie rolled his shoulders. Then he stuffed both hands into the pockets of his jacket and he stuck his elbows out and he gave a little bow.

  “Right you are,” he said. He used one of his protruding limbs to nudge my arm. Then he turned and left.

  I looked at Carmina and I looked at Falzarano. The latter didn’t move and the former gave me a very small smile but she didn’t take her eyes off me.

  Out in the corridor I closed the doors behind me. Alfie was absently searching his person for something to smoke but he stopped when he saw me.

  “Well then,” he said, “that was all right then, eh?”

  If I could have raised an eyebrow I would have. “That was all right?”

  “Well,” said Alfie, “he doesn’t seem too worried about Coke Patterson, does he? Seems like someone got in before us, did the job, eh? No problem.”

  “No problem? If I were the boss I’d think that was very much a problem.”

  Alfie cleared his throat and resumed his search for tobacco. “Yeah, well, I was just looking on the bright side, eh
? He says it’s okay, it’s okay. Okay?”

  “Except he didn’t say it. She did.”

  Alfie froze again, hands in the middle of patting down his own jacket. He glanced at me sideways from behind his plate-glass glasses. “Yeah, I noticed that. Odd, innit?”

  “That’s one way of describing it.”

  “Here, it’s early, maybe he didn’t get his kip, eh? Maybe she was just giving him a few, y’know, prompters. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. I told you, he looked a little peaky. Not getting his kip, that’s it.”

  I hrmmed. Alfie jerked his head back at the sound.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “you told me no such thing.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what I mean.”

  I stood and watched Alfie locate his cigarette and ignite it with his own lighter. While he did this, I heard a humming sound rise and fall from somewhere behind me. The lights in the hallway dimmed a little in perfect synch. A moment later the humming stopped and the lights came back on bright.

  I glanced at Alfie, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. He was too busy examining the burning end of his cigarette.

  “Speaking of kip, I’ll see you later,” said Alfie, and with that he walked down the hallway and disappeared around the door at the far end.

  I waited in the corridor. I looked at the lights in their sconces on the walls. They didn’t dim again.

  Then I decided to have another little chat with Emerson Ellis.

  * * *

  There was a guard outside Ellis’s assigned room. I nodded at him and he nodded at me and then as I raised a metal knuckle to knock on the door the guard just gave me a shrug so I knocked.

  “Mr. Ellis?” I asked the wood of the door at very close range.

  There was no response. I tried again, the knock and the question both a little louder. Still nothing.

  I stepped back and looked at the guard.

  “Is Mr. Ellis in there?”

  The guard shrugged. “Well I saw him go in, bub,” he said. He had a bad attitude that came with wearing sunglasses indoors, and I was pretty sure I was far from being his bub. “And I sure as hell didn’t see him come out.”