Killing Is My Business Read online

  But it worked. I had Emerson Ellis’s address—addresses, plural. Because Emerson Ellis was successful and what successful man didn’t own five houses?

  I still didn’t know where Emerson Ellis was but I had a feeling in my logic gates that I was getting closer.

  His telephone numbers were less useful. Five calls to his office was one thing. A call to each of his houses was another entirely. I didn’t know who wanted him dead or why and nor did I care, but it occurred to me that Emerson Ellis might have been missing for a reason. Maybe with his success came a paranoia, or maybe he really did know that someone was out to get him. Calling his private numbers was out. If he was holed up at one of his homes I didn’t want to give him any reason to be worried, at least more than he was already. I’d just have to go and visit him in person. But before that I parked myself outside his office in Beverly Hills with a sandwich and a coffee and watched a while, in case the boss came back, in case the boss really was there all along and just didn’t want to be bothered. When you’re the boss, you only take the calls you want to take, after all.

  His office was buzzing like a beehive. People came and went. None of them was Emerson Ellis, and unless he had locked himself in the restroom, he really wasn’t in.

  I sat at the counter in the drugstore and watched the office for an hour. Then I checked my watch. Then I pulled the list of addresses Cheryl from information had given me up out of my memory and in front of my optics and I crosschecked them against the maps I pulled up out of my permanent store. I frowned, on the inside.

  My coffee was cold. I unwrapped my sandwich. It was two slices of rye bread and enough pastrami to pack into a mid-sized suitcase for a long vacation. It was a shame to waste it, but I couldn’t eat it even if I wanted to.

  Instead I stood up and left the sandwich and coffee where they were and I headed out into the street. There was a trash can right by the door on the inside of the drugstore but I couldn’t bring myself to kill the sandwich or the coffee.

  Emerson Ellis, however, was another matter.

  6

  Emerson Ellis owned five private properties. These included a city apartment that was more like the entire top floor of a building in West Hollywood, another smaller affair in downtown LA, and three houses, one in the Hollywood Hills near Griffith Park, one in Burbank near the giant lot of a movie studio, and one in Phoenix, Arizona.

  The apartments were a bust. I got in easily, even to the big two-floor penthouse, on account of the fact that both premises were empty of anything except very expensive thin air. The concierges of both buildings were more than happy to let me take a look around. Both were impressed that a robot PI wanted their assistance, and I suspected both were a little disappointed by the empty rooms when they unlocked them for me. There were no dead bodies and no bloodstains and no bricks of dope in sight.

  The two houses in Los Angeles were a different matter. I headed to the one in Burbank first and when I arrived I thought I’d entered the movie studio back lot next door by accident. The house was a curious mix of Adobe and late classic Grecian, a rank of ionic columns holding up a terracotta roof and the whole thing wrapped in rough plaster. It didn’t work in the slightest.

  The building was new. So new that the columns, walls, and roof were all there was. The whole place was surrounded by chain-link fences, and there were the tools of construction all over the place and a big placard on the inside of the fence that proclaimed this monstrosity to be YET ANOTHER EMERSON ELLIS DEVELOPMENT.

  So he was using his own company to build himself a new house. Good for him. If I owned a building company and wanted a house built then I’d call myself too.

  But it was evident that he wasn’t here. Nobody was. The place was locked up and the construction tools lay just where the laborers had left them whenever that had been.

  That left the house around the back of Griffith Park. It was pushing six o’clock and traffic was going to be all kinds of hell but it wasn’t like I had to stop for dinner.

  * * *

  The house in Griffith Park was infinitely more interesting if only for the fact that it was the only one out of the four properties I’d been to that day that was both complete and furnished and it looked like it had been that way for a good century or more.

  The Griffith Park house was a gray shingle mansion that looked like it should have been balanced on a hilltop in New England instead of California. There were porticos and arched windows and a covered porch and a front door big enough to drive my car through if it wasn’t at the summit of a face of stairs that looked like you needed oxygen and crampons to ascend. On the left side of the house was a big bay window through which I could see a lot of books in tall dark bookcases. On the right side the wall of the house was flatter but that flat wall just kept going up and up until it broke free of the main house and turned itself into a tower complete with a balcony a princess could lean on as she tried to catch sight of her forbidden lover on a moonlit night in Renaissance Italy. All of this was planted at the end of a driveway as long as the Pacific Coast Highway and twice as scenic. It was the kind of house you could go inside of and not come out until a half dozen presidents and their mistresses had filed through the Oval Office.

  I had to admit I liked the thing and I stood there liking it quite a while after I’d pulled the car up in front. The sun was heading to bed and in the gathering gloom the house looked like another transplant from a studio back lot, like Emerson Ellis’s Burbank property, only this one would be occupied by a pale gentleman with sharp fangs and a big black cape.

  I thought twice about mounting the stairs but had come to a decision and was about to make an attempt on the north face when the front door opened and a man stepped across the threshold. He was wearing a gray pinstripe morning suit with crisp wing collars and a cravat you could go to sleep under. The posy pinned to his buttonhole was big enough to throw over your shoulder at a wedding.

  He wasn’t Emerson Ellis. He looked more likely to be the butler and he looked like he’d been built with the house back in eighteen hundred and frozen stiff.

  “Can I help you, sir?” he asked in a way that didn’t require his mouth to move any.

  I lifted my hat and held it there at altitude.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I was wondering if the master of the house would be at home?”

  The butler lifted his chin and pointed his nostrils at me. “I’m afraid Mr. Ellis is not at home to receive guests, but if you would leave your card I will ensure he contacts you at his earliest convenience.”

  I lowered my hat back onto my head. I stayed at the bottom of the stairs and the butler stayed at the top. Neither of us moved. I wondered if maybe he was a robot too.

  “Mr. Ellis is not at home to receive guests, or is just plain not at home?”

  The butler’s lips twitched, which was a neat trick as they hadn’t moved so far in our conversation.

  “I am not at liberty to discuss the whereabouts of my employer, Mister…?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a card. I wondered about folding it into a miniature paper airplane and launching it up to the butler but decided instead to walk up the steps and deliver it myself. The butler watched me hike up the stairs and then looked at me once I was at the top.

  I offered the card from between two steel-titanium fingers and the butler did his best not to touch the card at all while taking it. I watched his eyes move over the text. The lip twitched again and this time it stayed twitched. This close I could see he didn’t have any fangs, at least.

  “As I said,” said the butler, “I am not obliged to divulge the movements of Mr. Ellis to anyone.”

  “You don’t need to tell me about his movements. I just want to know if he is currently stationary in the fourth drawing room on the left.”

  I was bluffing. I may have been a robot but I didn’t have X-ray vision and while I could feel heat it wasn’t like I could see the glowing outline of somebody through a wall.
It occurred to me that both of these things would actually have been quite handy, times like this. Maybe I could ask Ada for an upgrade.

  The butler gave me both barrels as he lifted his nose a little higher and set his sights on a far distant horizon. I wondered if that was where Emerson Ellis was.

  “If you wish to talk to Mr. Ellis,” said the butler, “I suggest you speak to his attorney. I would be quite happy to furnish you with the particulars.”

  I shrugged. “So his attorney knows where he is? He’d be the only one who does. Seems nobody in this town knows.”

  The butler stiffened the muscles in his already rock-solid neck. “Indeed,” he said, not meaning anything at all except get the hell off of my lawn.

  “In fact, I’m going to assume that Mr. Emerson Ellis is not at home and hasn’t been for some time. Is that assumption anything close?”

  That did it. The butler moved an eyebrow a half-inch upwards. I almost gave him a round of applause. The eyebrow stayed where it was while the eyeball underneath rolled down to look at the card I’d handed over.

  “A private investigator?”

  I nodded, just a little. “Confidential inquiries.”

  The butler nodded just a little himself. Then he pivoted on the heel of one polished black shoe like he was on hinges and he gestured with his arm.

  “I think you had better come inside,” he said, in case I hadn’t got the picture.

  I’d got it all right. I adjusted my hat and I went into the house.

  7

  The interior of Emerson Ellis’s hillside hideaway appeared to be made entirely out of interlocking wooden panels all stained a uniformly dark brown. The hallway was bordered by a staircase on one side and on the other by a wall with a sideboard against it big enough to row across the Atlantic in. There was a chandelier above and a Persian carpet below and the former of these buzzed slightly.

  I decided I didn’t like the house. It looked like a New England mansion and it would have been better for all concerned if it moved back there at once. This was not a house for the California climate. It felt hot and stuffy in the evening and I imagined it would be worse during the day. With the butler sewn into his penguin suit I could picture him ending each and every day with an ice bath.

  Right now the butler was looking at his feet. I followed his gaze. He’d put a lot of elbow grease into the shine on his shoes and I thought he wanted me to congratulate him when he spoke again without looking up.

  “I suppose one can be trusted, in your line of work?”

  Then he looked up. He’d begun to wring his hands in front of the middle button of his waistcoat.

  I nodded. The butler was defrosting so I went right on in. “As I said, confidential inquiries are my specialty. I need to find your employer on a private matter. I tried his Beverly Hills office today but he failed to make an appearance, so I thought I’d try a personal visit to his other listed properties. I found two of these empty and one under construction. That only left one more in the state of California.” I used my hat to point around the woodwork. “This house seems to be the only one that is actually a house.”

  The butler nodded. “Myself and Mrs. Hurst keep the house in good running order, sir.”

  Sir. As the butler continued to warm I found myself moving up in the world. Keep going and maybe I’d have a house and butler myself one day.

  “Mrs. Hurst?”

  “The, ah, wife, sir,” said the butler, gesturing vaguely somewhere behind. “She is head house parlor maid for Mr. Ellis.”

  “You haven’t seen him in a while, have you? Just like everyone else?” The butler nodded. Fine, sign language would do me. We could use semaphore if it would help and there was a flag at hand. I looked over the butler’s shoulder. “Mrs. Hurst know any more?”

  At this the butler shrugged and said, “She did see him last, but that was, oh, a week ago. She said that she heard him rummaging around upstairs, sir. She inquired if he required assistance and found him packing a case, and rather in a hurry he was too, sir. She said he didn’t answer her and didn’t say a thing at all, sir, but when she tried to help he shouted at her and flew out of the room, knocking her clean over. She said he was in quite a rage, sir.”

  The butler looked worried so I gave him my best encouraging smile, which was completely invisible, so instead I said:

  “Go on.”

  “Well, sir,” the butler went on. “She ran downstairs after him but, well, she’s not as young as she once was. Too late she saw Mr. Ellis leaving in one of his cars. He hadn’t even closed the front door after him.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Mrs. Hurst was in quite a state, sir. I had to make two whole pots of tea just for her. And she used all the honey that was in the pantry.”

  I nodded. “Understandable,” I said. “And quite sensible. You’re a good man, Hurst.”

  The butler seemed pleased with this, as far as I could tell with a face that wouldn’t crack.

  “Any idea where he went?” I asked.

  The butler shook his head and shrugged at the same time.

  “There is one more property on my list. An address out in Phoenix, Arizona,” I said. “Any chance he was heading out that way?”

  “He has a house there, yes,” said the butler. “It’s possible that was his ultimate destination—in fact, I even telephoned ahead. Mr. Ellis has a … well, a business associate, I think you would call her, who lives in the city. One of his managers, I believe. A Ms. P. Garcia. Under normal circumstances we would call ahead and she would arrange to have the house ready for him. This time he had already left and we didn’t know where he was going, but she said she would open the house and then call back.”

  “And she did?”

  Hurst nodded. “The next day, at around ten o’clock. Mr. Ellis had failed to arrive.”

  “Okay. Which car did he take?”

  “Ah, it was the Jaguar, sir. E-Type. An English import, like myself”—a smile and a chuckle here, me and the butler were practically war buddies now—“dark green, right-hand drive.”

  “Okay.” That was something. “Can you get me the license plate?”

  “Ah, yes, sir. If you will wait here, I can fetch the relevant documentation.”

  The butler gave me a slight bow and then he turned and vanished into the woodwork. He was gone a while and while he was gone I looked around and I turned my audio receivers up. There was no sound except for what I assumed was the butler looking through a file of paperwork in a study somewhere and the rattle of someone in the kitchen. Mrs. Hurst, probably.

  I thought the butler was telling the truth. Nobody could be that rusty otherwise. His paycheck depended on his employer and his employer skipping town a week ago was clearly playing on the man’s nerves.

  Emerson Ellis hadn’t gone to his house in Phoenix, but then with a car you could drive other places than Arizona. The problem here was that my jurisdiction, as far as a paid assassin can be said to have one, was southern California, and even then was mostly limited to Los Angeles and its neighbors. It was purely for practical reasons—I couldn’t be out of range of my office, as I had to go back at least once a day to get the memory tape slowly turning in my chest swapped out for a fresh one and to get a top-up charge on my batteries. The batteries were okay. They could go for days, even weeks, before they were flat, but as my memory was the limiting factor, why risk it?

  The butler came back in six minutes and twenty-two seconds and he handed me a yellow slip of paper. It was the title to a 1963 Jaguar E-type, British racing green, six-cylinder, 3.8 liters. It was a lot of car. It was a shame that Emerson Ellis was missing and Vaughan Delaney was dead because I thought they would have got along rather well.

  “Thanks,” I said. I took a picture of the title with the cameras in my eyes and then I took a second just to be sure. I handed the title back and the butler nodded and squeezed it gently with his hands. I headed for the door and he opened it for me. There was no ski lift at the
top so I had to make the stairs on my own, and when I got to the bottom I turned around as the butler called down.

  “I hope you find him, sir.”

  I lifted the hat from my head and gave it a little wave like a half-hearted revolutionary from a small Caribbean island.

  I wanted to find him too, but I wasn’t sure Mr. and Mrs. Hurst were going to be too pleased about what I planned to do with their employer when I did.

  As I drove off up the driveway I looked in the rearview mirror. The butler was still standing where he was and now he was joined by a woman of the same age wearing a black dress and a white apron and small hat in the same colors.

  Of course, once I’d found Mr. Emerson Ellis I’d have to come back to the big gray house and have another chat with the Hursts. When their boss disappeared for a second time in a permanent fashion the police would come a-knocking and the two servants would remember a big robot who came one early evening and asked a lot of questions.

  One thing about this business was that leaving such loose ends untied was a very bad idea indeed.

  8

  I woke up in the computer room that sat out back of the office of the Electromatic Detective Agency. It was six in the morning and already the sun was rising high and casting a deep shadow over the brown brick of the building across the street, the building that was the first thing I saw each and every morning I woke up in the alcove in the computer room.

  I never remembered this, of course, but I knew it to be true.

  Around me Ada’s lights flashed and her dials spun and several miles of magnetic data tape flew in one direction or another between big reels on the big computer mainframes.

  I reached up and unplugged myself. The cable was fat and gray and made of a soft, corrugated plastic. The port was in my chest behind a hatch and as I closed that hatch I noticed it was a different color than the rest of me and that it arched outwards a little, like it was shaped to fit something larger than what was currently behind it, which was my memory—an ingenious piece of micro-engineering that allowed two reels of magnetic tape to be shrunk down and packed into my chest. I had a fresh reel in there right now.