Killing Is My Business Read online

  “He have any visitors?” I asked. Carmina would have been a little hard to miss, although now that I thought about it I hadn’t seen the guard outside the door the last time I’d come this way.

  The guard shrugged. He was getting good at it. He’d clearly had lots of practice. “He’s probably passed out,” he said. “Damn fool is a drunk, you ask me.”

  I hadn’t but the guard was right. Emerson Ellis had looked a little seedy back in Falzarano’s study and he had gotten a lot seedier the last time I saw him. Falzarano might have been covering his accommodation but I wondered if he was going to make Ellis pay for his bar tab.

  The guard sighed and didn’t quite shove me out of the way, but I could tell he wanted to. Instead he thumped on the door with the bottom of a fist and he yelled down at the doorknob as he did it.

  “Hey! Ellis! Wake up, you got a visitor here!”

  We both waited. There was no reply. I turned my audio receivers up but I couldn’t hear anything over the breathing of the guard at my shoulder and the tick of the watch on his wrist.

  The guard looked at me. His lips were a little apart and while I couldn’t see his eyes I could see his eyebrows as they peeked out over the top of his narrow black glasses.

  I jerked my chin at him. “You’re supposed to be looking after Ellis for Mr. Falzarano, right?”

  The guard nodded.

  “So I suggest you check on him, because the old man isn’t going to be too pleased if anything happened to his houseguest right under his nose. Nor will he be happy to hear about how the men he pays to guard his guests disappear off into the night when they should be up here wearing holes in the carpet.”

  The guard gritted his teeth and he gave me a nod. Then he slid his rifle down to lean against the wall and he fumbled with a set of keys that hung on his belt. Eventually he found the right one and unlocked the door and we went inside.

  The room was full of everything it had been last night with the exception of Emerson Ellis. I walked around to the foot of the bed and followed the twisted pile of sheets that spilled out over the bedstead and over toward the big window that looked out over the big lawn by the side of the house.

  The sheets didn’t quite reach the window but the window was open. The guard had got there ahead of me and he was leaning out.

  “God dammit!” he muttered, and then he pulled himself out. “Goddamn idiot went down the trellis,” he said as he passed me at speed. “I’ll let the others know. We’ll have to search the grounds.”

  He left and I was alone in the room. I went to the window and looked outside.

  The guard was right. The trellis below Ellis’s window wasn’t quite true to the wall. The tendrils of the plant climbing it were bent and broken, and a little farther down two of the wooden struts that made up the crosshatching were broken, the pale yellow wood at the splits showing up against the dark green paint.

  Emerson Ellis had said he wanted to go home, and it looked like he’d made his break. I turned back to the room and looked at the bed. He’d tried the old routine of tying sheets together, but had abandoned it once he realized he had a perfect ladder right outside. On the nightstand next to the bed was a half-empty bottle of scotch and there was an empty one down on the floor beside it.

  I heard raised voices. I turned back to the window. The big lawn was filling up with guards, the one from outside Ellis’s room now coordinating his pals. Soon the guards were pointing this way and that way and they were nodding to each other. A couple of patrols with Dobermans showed up and were sent merrily on their way.

  That Ellis had gotten past the guards patrolling outside was interesting. Maybe he’d been watching their movements from his window just like I had. Maybe he hadn’t been quite as drunk as he had seemed.

  I left Ellis’s room and I headed for the stairs. Before I even got close I saw Alfie rattling up them two at a time.

  “Here, there’s a right flap on, and no mistake!” he said. His eyes were wide behind his glasses and his chest moved up and down from the short burst of unexpected exercise.

  I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “I know. Ellis is out.”

  Alfie’s labored breathing paused for a second and he stood up a bit straighter.

  “Eh?”

  “Ellis,” I said. “He’s made a break for it. Climbed out his window.”

  Alfie grimaced like an eyewitness to a road traffic accident. “Eh? No, mate. It’s one of the guards.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s dead, mate.”

  I felt an amplification coil begin to get a little hot somewhere under my collar.

  “What?”

  Alfie turned and pointed somewhere in the opposite direction to Ellis’s room.

  “They’ve found him out in the bloody bushes is what! Bloody well killed he was.”

  Alfie turned and raced down the stairs. I followed.

  So much for Emerson Ellis sneaking quietly past the guards.

  25

  “What a to-do,” said Alfie, drawing long and slow on his cigarette. “What a bloody to-do.”

  We stood together on the topmost step of the many that led up to Falzarano’s front door, collars up against a breeze that was stiff but by no means cold. It didn’t stop Alfie shivering inside his suit. And I didn’t blame him. We stood there and watched as men with hats and guns moved around the gravel driveway below us, talking, pointing, a fair amount of nods and even more shakes of the head signifying something, anything, nothing. All this went on while the big fountain carried on its show with the dead guard laid out on the gravel behind it. His gun was beside him. His sunglasses were still in place. His arms had been drawn up so his hands were clasped over his chest like he was on show down at the local morgue.

  He was dead. I couldn’t see any blood. I wondered how Ellis had done it. Maybe a rock to the back of the skull. There were plenty of rocks around, in the garden and in the trees and at the edges of the driveway. That’s how I would have done it. A rock to the back of the skull in the middle of the night and nobody would know until you were a long, long way away.

  Beside me Alfie shivered and smoked and shook his head while he smoked.

  “Didn’t think he had it in him,” he said.

  I frowned on the inside and nodded on the outside. Alfie was right. Emerson Ellis was small, soft. The dead guard was a head taller and made of stronger stuff.

  Clearly everyone had misjudged the little real estate magnate.

  “You say he climbed out the window?”

  I nodded again. Alfie held his cigarette out at arm’s length and considered it very carefully.

  “Bloody cheek,” he said. “It was only a bit of protection, wasn’t it? Eh? The old man was just keeping his business interests in order, weren’t he, eh?”

  “I suppose he was,” I said. The breeze shifted and Alfie’s smoke got in my optics.

  “I mean I don’t blame him,” said Alfie. “Not after the last fella. Now there was a scene, and no mistake.”

  I raised a metaphorical eyebrow. Out on the driveway the men with guns had thinned a little, looking for clues in the undergrowth no doubt. What they really needed was a private detective. “The last fella?”

  Alfie nodded. “Yeah,” he said, his eyes scanning the scene before us. “I tell ya.”

  I said nothing. Alfie smoked.

  Then I said, “You tell me what?”

  “Oh! Well, now.” Alfie leaned in toward me. “I tell ya. There he was, and then there he wasn’t, eh?”

  Then Alfie did something a little strange, which was to lift his cigarette hand high in the air and stick his thumb out. Then he turned his fist so the thumb was pointing down, and he brought the fist down, all the while making a whistling sound that wasn’t a million miles away from the sound you’d expect a bomb to make when it was sent on its merry way to ground zero.

  “Bang,” said Alfie. “There it was. Jumped out of the bleeding window, he did. Sixth floor, so I heard. Smashed up his mo
tor too. Shame about that.”

  “Yeah, real shame.”

  “It was a nice car.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Alfie smoked. While he smoked I thought about a few things.

  “This guy who took a dive,” I said, “his name wasn’t Vaughan Delaney, was it?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Alfie. He sucked the cigarette, seemed satisfied that he had extracted its full worth, then tossed it over the side of the stone steps. Then he extracted a lighter from one pocket of his black trench coat and a packet of cigarettes from another and soon enough he had another one kindled. “Another of the old man’s business associates. Worked for the city, I think. Planning department or something. I don’t know. Mr. Falzarano had him on the hook for something.”

  I nodded. Alfie knew something. How much, I had to find out.

  “So Falzarano is into real estate now?” I asked.

  Alfie shrugged into his collar. “No idea, mate.” He paused. “Don’t think it was real estate. The old man had a hand in manufacturing, I think. Think he was going to build something. A factory, maybe. I don’t know. Nothing to do with me, mate. But whatever it was, someone found out something and old Vaughan Delaney decided to take a shortcut from his office to his car.”

  Alfie smoked. And then he turned to me. “Here, what’s with the questions, eh?”

  I looked at Alfie. His big eyes moved over my face from behind the magnifying lenses of his glasses.

  I shrugged and I made a point of turning back to watch the men with guns do nothing in particular down in the driveway. “Nothing in particular,” I said. “I was just wondering. Ellis is in the construction trade too. No wonder Mr. Falzarano wants to keep a close eye on him, after what happened to Delaney. Keeping a close eye on his business interests, like you said.”

  “Yeah, well, yeah,” said Alfie, and he said it like he absolutely knew that to be the truth.

  I thought about Coke Patterson. I had no idea who he was or what his relationship with Zeus Falzarano had been. Falzarano had wanted him frightened, not dead, but dead he was and neither Alfie nor I had laid a finger on him.

  And neither, apparently, had we laid a finger on Vaughan Delaney, and Vaughan Delaney was also not frightened but as dead as Coke Patterson. Only Vaughan Delaney had done the job to himself.

  Hadn’t he?

  And now the third party, Emerson Ellis, was gone. I was amazed enough that he’d made it down the trellis without breaking his leg or even his neck but I was more impressed by the way he’d been able to take out one of Falzarano’s handpicked house guards.

  I guess that whoever had first said that appearances can be deceiving had been a wise man indeed.

  One of the guards down below looked up at us and said something and waved at Alfie. Alfie shivered and looked at me, like I needed to give him permission. But give it I did, with a nod that was returned in kind. Alfie trotted down the stairs toward the others.

  My presence was clearly not needed. Which was fine by me, because I wanted to do a little bit of that private detecting I’d used to be so good at. There was one person who didn’t fit into the story, and that person was Coke Patterson, and I didn’t know if it was important or not but I wanted to find out.

  And that was what I was supposed to be doing. I was inside Falzarano’s organization in order to find things out.

  With Ellis gone and one guard dead, I thought I should do my duty and report to the boss. I only hoped he was a little more awake than last time.

  Because while he was my boss, at least for the moment, there were a few questions I wanted him to answer.

  26

  On my way to Falzarano’s study I passed some of his guards. They were all heading outside and they all carried rifles and they all moved quickly, their eyes hidden behind their sunglasses, their lips pressed tight. I didn’t need to see their eyes to read their mood. One of their comrades had had his ticket punched and it seemed like Emerson Ellis had been the one to punch it. Now Falzarano’s entire organization was moving to find him.

  The boss was going to be in a hell of a mood, which was good news for me, because it meant he was distracted, and distracted was good because when you asked people things when they were distracted they tended to say things they normally would want to keep to themselves.

  At least that’s what my programming told me.

  In the hallway to Falzarano’s office I was suddenly alone. The doors ahead of me were closed. The silence was deep enough to swim in, and my footsteps on the thick carpet added precisely nothing to it as I moved to the doors and stopped outside them. I listened. I heard nothing. I opened the doors.

  Falzarano’s office was empty.

  I stepped in and I closed the doors and I looked around. Okay, Falzarano wasn’t here. He was somewhere else. Supervising. Telling people what to do. Telling people to find Emerson Ellis and to hell with the consequences. Wanted, dead or alive. Although preferably alive because he had a factory to build.

  Or perhaps Falzarano had gone back to sleep and it was Carmina giving the orders. That possibility seemed like a fairly distinct one to me. Falzarano was an old man. Carmina, his love, was at least thirty, forty years younger. As far as I could tell, Falzarano’s boys paid her as much respect as they paid him, which was to say an awful lot.

  So yeah. Carmina knew what she was doing all right.

  I looked around. There were a lot of books, and the piano, and the easy chairs and a couple of smaller occasional tables around them, and the rug, and the big desk. I’d already done the desk. There was nothing on the occasional tables and while it was possible there was something hidden underneath the rug I didn’t much feel like getting down on my hands and knees to take a look. Not just yet anyway. My attention was on the books and on the shelves that held them. You could hide a lot of things on shelves like that. Hell, you could hide a lot of things in the books themselves. And that wasn’t even counting the possibility of secret doors, hidden compartments, books that weren’t really books and shelves that weren’t really shelves but portals to valuable caches of information, of data.

  I frowned. There were a lot of books. I lifted my hat from my head then I put it back down again as I calculated how long I wanted to risk turning the office over. It was going to be a big job and with all the fuss over Ellis and the dead guard I figured my time was relatively short. I was alone in the office at the moment but that was a stroke of luck I didn’t want to lean too heavily on.

  Ahead of me, about one nautical mile away, sat the telephone on the edge of Falzarano’s desk. It was the only telephone I’d seen in the house so far. I thought this was a good time to use it.

  “Ray, it’s been an age!” said Ada inside my head as I listened to the roar of the ocean coming through the earpiece. “You never write, you never call. A gal gets real lonely, Ray.”

  “It’s been all of two hours.”

  Ada made a sound that suggested she was more interested in stirring her coffee than discussing the finer points of timekeeping. “So what’s cooking, chief? You got something for me?”

  “Maybe yes,” I said, “maybe no.” I filled her in on the events of the morning, from Coke Patterson to Emerson Ellis to the demise of the guard. While I spoke Ada hummed like she was taking notes and then when I was done she puffed on something that might have been a cigarette.

  “Okay,” she said. “Interesting times, Ray, interesting times.”

  I curled the cable of the telephone around my hand as I looked around the empty office.

  “I’m in the old man’s office now. I’ll see if there is anything else to be found, but I’m starting to think that Falzarano keeps his secrets locked in his own head. Or maybe Carmina is the one with the secrets.” I told her about the little scene with her and the boss, when Alfie and I had reported back after the Coke Patterson job.

  Ada made a cooing sound. “Aw, Ray, you’re doing well. You’re doing really well! Let me do some digging, see what comes up.”

  �
��You think Carmina is important?”

  “Oh, you’d better believe it, chief, you’d better believe it.”

  Then the lights in the office dimmed and the room was filled with a low humming. I looked at the ceiling, my audio receptors taking readings. By the time the humming had stopped and the lights had come back on I had frequency, amplitude, a decibel rating. I also had something of a direction.

  I turned and looked at the bookcase behind Falzarano’s desk, the one filled with nothing but copies of his own book.

  “Mission control to Raymond Electromatic, come in, Ray!”

  I lifted the mouthpiece back to my mouth. “Sorry. I just found something else to look into.”

  “Atta boy, chief.”

  “Gotta go.”

  I was short of time so I killed the call. As I put the phone down I thought I heard Ada laughing and then I was alone and the office was silent once more.

  I walked around the desk. The room was rectangular and the wall behind the desk, like the wall with the main doors opposite, was one of the short ones. The shelves ran all the way across. They went from the floor to the ceiling. They were home to Falzarano’s prize collection.

  I Didn’t Have Chip Rockwell Killed But If I Had Here’s How I Would Have Done It.

  I looked. I listened. There was no humming. There was no sound at all. The air was still. There was no breeze to suggest a secret passage, unless it was very well sealed, if not hermetically so.

  I turned around. The lights were shining bright and steady.

  I thought again about the humming. It was a power draw, a strong one, the drag too big, the main fuse board of the big house straining against the load. And it wasn’t just an increased load from the lights outside. I couldn’t see them from Falzarano’s office because Falzarano’s office didn’t have any windows, but it was daylight outside. Had been for hours.

  As I contemplated this fact there was a click from behind me and a whoosh of air and another click. I went to turn around but I heard a woman purr and then I heard something with an infinitely higher pitch and then and then