Killing Is My Business Read online

  I nodded and I turned around and I walked out through the doors. Somewhere behind me Carmina giggled again. I closed the doors and left them to it.

  Ten o’clock.

  Bingo.

  14

  I left Falzarano’s castle and I drove back to the office. When I got to the hallway outside the office I thought I could smell coffee and before I opened the door I thought I could see someone through the bubbled glass moving around behind my big desk. A woman with big hair smoking a cigarette as she stood looking out the window.

  When I opened the door there was nobody there and I knew there never had been.

  Then I went through that office and into the computer room. Ada’s lights flashed and tapes spun. I took off my trench coat and Ada gave a whistle. I paused, half out of my coat, and then I realized what she was whistling about. I finished taking off the coat and I hung it on the back of the door and I shucked off the tattered remains of my suit jacket and shirt. They dropped to the floor without any fanfare in particular. I stood and looked at them and then I took off my hat and tossed it onto the table.

  “So,” I said, “how much of this wonderful plan did they actually tell you? I was expecting an attempt on Falzarano’s life. I didn’t expect the whole restaurant to get blown up.”

  I had the strangest feeling Ada shrugged. “Well, chief,” she said, “whatever happened, happened, and it seems to have done the trick. Zeus Falzarano got scared and Raymond Electromatic got himself a new job. Looks like everything’s coming up roses.”

  I made a humming sound that was similar to a broken air conditioner and I went over to the window. The street outside was lit plenty and despite the hour there was a good amount of road traffic. Life in Hollywood went on despite the loss of its most expensive and most exclusive eating spot.

  “I expect it’ll make all the papers tomorrow,” I said, still looking out the window.

  “Oh, I’m sure it will.”

  “With no mention of Zeus Falzarano.”

  “Well,” said Ada, “why would there be? Nobody had heard of him except the cops and the robbers and neither of them need to read the newspaper to find out what happened.”

  I made that humming sound again. I liked it. I thought it might annoy Ada so I made it some more. I was trying to tell her I wasn’t happy without actually saying it. But I figured she knew what I felt. We were the same computer, in many ways. She was the brains and I was the brawn. Same program. Just different ways of running it.

  I went to the closet and opened it. I looked over the shirts and jackets and other things. The shirts were all cream and the jackets were all brown with a yellow pinstripe.

  “So Falzarano says he has a big idea he wants to talk to me about tomorrow,” I said, not turning around, not doing anything except looking at all the clothes. “I guess his big idea is me working for him, which is what was supposed to happen. Which means I get inside his house and I get a chance to find out what he’s hiding before the client sends his carrier pigeon and I finish off the real job I’m being paid to do.”

  Ada laughed and sucked on a cigarette that was nothing but an electric dream of mine. “Got it in one, chief.”

  I frowned on the inside. I picked a shirt at random and got to work.

  “Remind me what, exactly, I’m looking for?”

  “Well, Ray, come on,” said Ada. “How do I know what you’re looking for until you find it?”

  I’d finished with the shirt. I looked up into the corner of the room. “Why did I know you were going to say that?”

  “Because you know me like no other, Raymondo.”

  I hummed. Ada blew smoke. This time I was the one who did the shrugging. “Okay,” I said, and I turned back to the closet. I had five jackets to choose from and they were all the same but I still took my sweet time picking.

  Ada chuckled quietly. Maybe she was reading my thoughts. Chances were she just knew me very well and knew the kind of moods I got into.

  And chances were that Professor Thornton got into moods just like these ones too and he’d handed them down to me along with every other aspect of his personality.

  “So what’s the game?” I asked. “What, I just walk in and do what Falzarano tells me?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Ada. “You do what he tells you and you keep doing it until we get the word. In the meantime you poke around his house, see what skeletons he keeps in those closets of his.”

  I nodded. “Any idea how long this is going to go on for, exactly?”

  “Nope. Until you find what it is you find. Don’t worry about it. For now, you’re employed by Zeus Falzarano and you’ll like it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I looked over at the alcove where I plugged in each night. I thought about the tapes spinning in my chest and I thought about the shiny new cover over them. I wanted to ask Ada about that, but there was something else pressing on my electric mind. Something was worrying me and now I had a finger on it.

  “Falzarano has a big house,” I said.

  “The lifestyles of the rich and criminal,” said Ada.

  I looked up into the corner. “Big enough for all his boys to live in—maybe not all the time, but certainly when they’re jumpy. Falzarano needs lots of fingers on lots of triggers, and he needs them close by.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “So chances are that from tomorrow morning his entourage is going to be plus one mid-sized robot.”

  “Fingers-crossed, chief.”

  “One mid-sized robot,” I said, “who will turn into a pumpkin if he doesn’t come home in time.”

  A reel on one of the mainframes slowed and I watched as the tape spooled out into a big loop that nearly touched the floor. Then the reel sped up again and the tape snapped back into place.

  “These are the facts as we know them, chief,” said Ada.

  I paused. I made the humming sound again. I waited for Ada to say something but I had a feeling she was blowing smoke out the window.

  “So what happens?” I asked.

  Now Ada paused. Perhaps to finish that cigarette. Perhaps to turn from the window and fold her arms.

  “That’s a deep question, Ray,” said Ada. “A little late to be getting philosophical, isn’t it?”

  I watched the tapes spin and the lights flash. I hummed again. Ada just laughed. “You’ll sneak,” she said.

  “I’ll sneak?”

  “You’ll sneak. There and back. Shouldn’t be more than an hour’s round-trip. Bad guys are always sneaking around. Nobody will bat an eyelid.”

  “Or,” I said, “their eyelids will be fluttering all the way back to the office. I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

  Now it was Ada’s turn to hum. “Okay, no problem,” she said. “You know how to lose a tail. So lose them. Add another hour’s travel. No problem.”

  I didn’t say a word for thirty-seven seconds. I watched the clock above the door. I calculated pi to five thousand decimal places but it didn’t do much to cool my circuits. When I opened my mouth grill again I made the humming sound, only this time just a little bit louder.

  Ada laughed. I knew she would.

  I sighed. It was pretty much the same sound as the humming. “You sure about this?”

  “It’ll work.”

  “Are you sure it will work?”

  “What, don’t you trust me, Ray?”

  The first answer to that question that came to mind was yes. But then I thought about my repaired chest unit and I wasn’t so sure anymore, so I didn’t answer right away. When I did the answer was still yes.

  “Time for an early night, chief,” said Ada. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  I hummed. “A job interview.”

  Ada laughed.

  And then I stepped into my alcove and plugged myself in and I turned myself off.

  15

  It was coming up to a quarter of ten in the morning when I cruised between Falzarano’s stone lions and past his real life dogs
with the real life handlers and cruised the half-mile down to the castle, the sound of Ada’s laugh still echoing around my compression wafers after this morning’s pickup. When we were done I expressed a few concerns. No doubt I had expressed the very same last night as well, only I didn’t remember it.

  I didn’t need to remember it. I wouldn’t have liked the plan last night and I sure as hell didn’t like it this morning. The plan made the transistors fizz somewhere around where Professor Thornton’s stomach would have been. After the pickup and my complaints, I’d read more of a paperback book that was sitting on the table in the office to try to cool my circuits. Several pages had bent corners. But I started from the start and within a few chapters I felt a little better. If I had a soul I would have said that reading was good for it.

  Now as I headed down the driveway to Falzarano’s castle I thought more about the plan. The driveway was long and I had plenty of time to do my thinking but I slowed the Buick to a crawl to buy a few extra minutes and I watched the men with the dogs and rifles shrink in my rear view and I thought some more. Then the driveway came to an end: standing in the gravel oval in front of the big fancy fountain were three more men with rifles. Their eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses that were completely opaque, but I knew just what they were looking at.

  Me.

  And more to the point, those shaded eyes would be looking at me all the time. I was the new boy. I was also different from them. I wasn’t expecting my welcome to be warm but I didn’t blame them in the slightest. Falzarano’s boys were on alert and now their boss’s apparent savior was walking among them by personal invitation.

  Situation like that, I’d be watching pretty closely too, if only I could find a pair of designer sunglasses big enough to fit around my face.

  There were three men in the driveway but there were ten times that number between the house and gate up at the road, and the house in front of me looked big enough to house hundreds.

  Which made the idea of sneaking back to the office in the small hours something of a worry. The more I told myself to cross that bridge when I came to it, the more I found myself plotting an escape route.

  I killed the car and realized there was another one not far behind me. A moment later the three pairs of sunglasses hiding three pairs of eyes were pointed away from me and back up the drive.

  The other vehicle was small and blue, a two-seater, open-topped. It looked nice and fast but a little small for my taste. The driver had blond hair with a wave and was wearing glasses like the others, but his suit was lighter, almost the same blue as his car.

  While I sat in my big Buick the driver of the little car pushed its nose against the shrubbery by the garage just next to me. Then he got out, said something cheerful to the others with a wave that was positively jaunty, and then skipped up the steps and into the house. He hadn’t spared me a glance.

  I got out of my car more slowly and I said less and I counted the stairs as I took them inside. There were more stone lions at the top by the door, guarding the approaches. They looked annoyed, their muzzles open and frozen in place, eyes narrow.

  I knew how they felt.

  * * *

  I stood around inside the entrance hall of the house and looked over the dark wooden paneling that stretched from the checkerboard tiles on the floor, went up the walls and the sweeping stairs that rose on each side and then past the big railed landing that wrapped around the upper part of the hall and kept on going across the ceiling high above, as though the carpenter had got lost in his work and forgotten to stop for lunch. There was a grandfather clock with a pretty painted dial showing yokels shoveling hay into a wagon. What they planned on doing next, I couldn’t guess, as there was no horse attached to the wagon. Bit of an oversight.

  Of the driver of the other car, there was no sign. Up on the landing at the top of the stairs were more men with guns and sunglasses. They might even have been looking at me. It was hard to tell, but my feelings on the matter were no different now that I was on the inside of the house from what they had been when I had been on the outside.

  The grandfather clock’s hands moved until they showed nine fifty-nine and then part of the wood-paneled wall in front of me opened and out stepped a woman who Ada had reminded me was called Carmina. Ada had also reminded me to watch her closely, so I started right now. She was wearing a green dress that was cut too high at the side and too low down the front. Her hair was black and long and piled as high as the haystack on the clock face. She had gold bangles on her arms and when she raised her arms to the ceiling they came clattering to a halt at her elbows.

  “Ray!” she said with a grin as wide as her cleavage and with an accent as heavy as the gold on her arms. “It is so good to see you! I hope you are well! Please, come with me! Papa is waiting for you!” It was quite a performance, each phrase was a shout, like she wanted everyone inside the house and out of it to know how pleased she was to see me. I glanced up at the landing but the guards hadn’t moved any. The front door behind me was still open and I could hear the others walking around on the gravel of the driveway.

  I was about to take my hat off when Carmina slid forward across the tiles and pressed the length of her body against my side. The big slit in the side of her dress had opened up and I could feel the heat of her flesh against my leg. She got herself cozy and got one bare arm up the middle of my back and with a gentle push she shepherded me toward the doors she’d come through and the magical wonderland that lay beyond. As we walked Carmina leaned her head against my arm and she seemed to be softly singing something.

  I kept myself to myself. I figured she was Falzarano’s lady but inside his empire she could do just what she liked with who she liked and maybe he liked her doing it. I wasn’t here to judge. I was here for a job interview.

  Through the doors was a corridor lined with more wood paneling and a fine gray granite and laid in a red carpet with a pile so deep it felt like I was walking through sand.

  The passage ended in a set of double doors. Our approach had been muffled by the flooring and as we got closer I could hear people talking in the closed room ahead of us.

  Then the pressure on my back ceased as Carmina uncurled herself from me and went up to the doors. She stretched out the same arm that had guided me and she knocked twice high on the doors and then without waiting pushed at the middle of them with both hands. Then she pivoted on the toe of a shoe that had a very high heel and made a sweeping motion with her arm that I took to be an invitation. As I passed her in the doorway I braced myself for more canoodling, but she left me alone.

  Falzarano’s study was how it had been in Ada’s pickup—very big, very wide, full of books and big leather chairs and air that was warm and close.

  Then the doors clicked shut behind me and I looked at the men in the room and they looked back at me.

  Falzarano was there. He was slouched behind his desk like only an old man can slouch. He had both hands locked onto the arms of his chair. On the desk in front of him was an ashtray with a cigar quietly burning on the edge. As I got close I saw that the books on the shelf immediately behind him were different from all the others in the room but were all the same as each other. There must have been a hundred copies of the same book with white spine and red letters.

  I Didn’t Have Chip Rockwell Killed But If I Did Here’s How I Would Have Done It. Zeus Falzarano’s magnum opus.

  In front of the desk were two men. The one on my left was tall and slim and he had black hair that was swept back from the forehead and shone darkly in the light of the study like fresh tarmac. The light itself wasn’t that bright but apparently enough for the man to be wearing sunglasses, which matched the shades of all the other guards I had seen. He was clean-shaven and wore a nice aftershave along with a suit that was tight and narrow in all the right places.

  The man standing next to him was the driver of the blue number in the driveway and he would have been the belle of this particular ball had his friend with the s
ensitive eyes not been showing him up. This close I could see he was tall like his pal but built of more solid stock, with a thick neck sprouting from a shirt that was lime green. It took me a moment to realize he was wearing a tie as well; it was just that it was the exact same color as the shirt. His powder-blue suit was looser and looked more comfortable. This man was blond and his features were rounded but mostly hidden behind a pair of glasses that were a little more practical indoors than those of his friend. They were almost but not quite square and had thick black frames and thick lenses that enlarged his eyes just enough that you were impressed. His hair was pushed to one side to form a series of crisp curling waves that would have made the best patisserie chef in Paris weep into his mistress’s bosom. His sideburns were longer than what was fashionable and they had a vague suggestion of orange in them.

  Falzarano picked the cigar up and planted it between his front teeth and he slapped the wood of his desk with both hands.

  “Ray, my friend, my friend, my friend,” he said around his cigar, and then he glanced down at the gold clock that was sitting over in another county on the edge of his desk. “Punctual, punctual, punctual,” said Falzarano. “Very punctual. As I expect you to be, my friend. Of course, of course.”

  I took the opportunity to doff my hat. The man in the sunglasses did nothing except squeeze the wrist he held in front of his belt buckle a little harder. Blondie pursed his lips and I saw his eyes move up and down me behind his glasses. You couldn’t miss it. It was like watching television.

  Falzarano pulled the cigar out and used it as a baton, pointing out the highlights of the room with the hot end.

  “Ray, Ray, I would like you to meet some friends of mine. Gentlemen!”

  I looked at the guy with the sunglasses. His lips were pressed tightly together. I couldn’t decide whether he was annoyed or whether it was just his general demeanor.

  Blondie jerked into life and gave a good-natured chuckle.

  “Hello, Charlie! The name’s Alfie. Alfie Micklewhite. But you can call me Alfie. It’s Alfie to me mates and we’re all mates here, eh? Alfie? All right. All right. How do you do, eh?”