Made to Kill (5 page)

“What about your ranger friend?”

I looked around one more time. “No clue.”

Ada sucked on her cigarette. I stood there and listened. “Okay, time to head home,” she said after a moment. “Looks like we’re going to need to sit tight on this one. She’ll call tomorrow, maybe we can get something more to chew on. And if nothing else, she’ll want the gold back when we tell her we’ve come up with a big fat zilch. But it’s her own fault.”

I nodded to nobody. “Ada giving a refund? Don’t tell me you’re developing a conscience?”

At that she laughed. A full three loops this time. “Hey, I didn’t say we would
give
it to her.”

“Someone is going to want that gold back, whether it’s Mystery Girl or not.”

“Right. And then we can ask
them
a few questions. This thing is starting to stink like week-old fish.”

“Okay, I’m coming back,” I said, lowering my collar, adjusting my hat, and heading back up toward the sign and the little hut and the parking lot where I had left my car. I’d gone farther than I’d thought and finding the path back up was harder than finding it down.

As I approached the lip of the little plateau I could hear the sound of trash being dumped. Must have been my friend from the Parks Department loading up his Parks Department truck. I kept on climbing and for a moment I wondered what bright-eyed pencil-pusher back at the office had decided on eye-popping green as the most suitable livery for their official vehicles. Then I slipped in the dirt and found myself going backwards for a foot or two before coming to a graceful halt.

The sound from up ahead stopped. The ranger had heard me. I thought about calling out to say it was me, but as there was no one else on the hill I decided I could save my breath. So to speak.

Then I heard something else. It was that ticking sound again, slow and steady. The sun and the hot tin roof of the hut. It sure was a beautiful
day and I
bet the man from the Parks Department was looking forward to clocking off the dusty hillside.

I continued my ascent.

When I got to the car the pick-up was there along with the hut, the door of which was open. The man from the Parks Department was rummaging inside for something as the roof over his head ticked and ticked and ticked.

I took the window of
opportunity and scooted around
the back of the hut. It had been put up close to the embankment which supported the summit road above me, but there was room enough to squeeze in. There were some empty canvas sacks crumpled up and shoved out of sight. Some were covered with dust.

But not all of them.

I picked up the first one, then the second. They were recent additions. I kept digging until I reached the bottom. The soil there was the same yellowish pebble scree that covered the hills.

The soil had been disturbed. It didn’t tax my skills of observation to see that there was a small area of dirt that was looser than the surrounds. Someone had been back here. Someone had hidden something.

Someone like Charles David?

I brushed the soil with my foot and about an inch below the surface I saw a black tag that could have been canvas. I reached down and pulled it, and pulled out a metal spike ten inches long and maybe four across. At the end opposite the point was a screw cap with a metal loop for the canvas tag.

I stood up and looked at the spike and turned to head back to the car to give Ada a call. I stopped when I saw the man from the Parks Department standing at the corner of the hut with his hands on his hips.

“You’d better be on your way, mister,” he said. “You can’t rightly be back here any more than you can be on the hill at all. Say, what’s that you got there?”

I walked towards him, holding the spike out. Together we emerged into the sun and stared at the object as it lay across my bronzed steel palms.

The man from the Parks Department swept the cap off his head with one hand, returned that hand to his hip, then peered at the spike with his nose an inch away from it.

“Is that what you were looking for, detective?”

“Maybe that it is,” I said.

“Are you going to open it?” he asked. He stood tall and then when I didn’t move he waved his hat at the spike.

I unscrewed the end. It was on pretty tight but when it was off it revealed the spike to be a hollow tube. There were some documents in it.

“Well I’ll be…” said the man from the Parks Department.

I had even less to say, so I tipped the tube out instead. The documents slid out.

They consisted of four photographs and some papers that were folded in three. Letters, maybe.

The photographs were all portraits. Head-and-shoulders, soft lighting, the subjects posed with shoulders turned just so and gazes carefully directed into the elegant middle distance. The kind of photographs you’d find in a glossy magazine. I didn’t know who any of the people were but the man from the Parks Department was able to fill me in and he did so without me even having to ask.

“Hey now,” he said and he pointed with a finger covered in dust. “That’s Fresco Peterman.” The picture to which he was referring showed a thick-necked man with a chiseled jaw and chiseled hair and a smile showing more teeth than an angry shark. The dust from the ranger’s finger fell onto Mr. Peterman’s charming face. I flicked it off and shuffled to the next one in the deck. A woman, long white hair with a wave to it. Skin smooth as silk.

“Alaska Gray. Boy, she’s a looker and no mistake.”

Photograph number three. Big eyebrows. A moustache worthy of a police commissioner somewhere on the East Coast where it got cold in the wintertime.

“Erm. Ah.” The man from the parks department added some dust to his beard as he rubbed it. “Ah. Silverwood? Silverman? Can’t remember. Not keen on his pictures. Kinda, y’know.”

I looked at the man and he looked at me.

“Y’know,” he said. “What’s the word I’m looking for. Erm. Ah.” Then he clicked his fingers. “Y’know. Boring.”

“Oh.”

The last image was another man. His hair was curly and too long for my taste, as were his sideburns. They stuck to his cheeks like two furry lamb chops.

“Rico. Rico Spillane. He’s funny,” said the man from the Parks Department. “Say, what else you got there?”

I unfolded the papers. It was a set of five or six sheets. Invoices of some kind. I didn’t follow the numbers but it all looked like bills for food and drink, ordered in bulk. Each page was from a different supplier. All were addressed to the same place.

The man from the Parks Department had stopped talking. He stood there with a frown on his face that was deep enough to send for sleigh dogs and extra supplies.

“The Temple of the Magenta Dragon,” I read aloud. “Any ideas?”

My new friend shook his head and rubbed his beard.

“No, no sir. What are these? Stolen, maybe?”

“Could be. Don’t rightly know yet.”

The man backed away a little and he waved his hand with the cap in it at me.

“Well look now, I don’t much like that idea. This is city land, mister. I think I’m going to need to call my boss, Mr. Overington.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I’m a licensed PI—”

The man shook his head. I watched as some dust drifted off it and into the sunlight.

“No, no, this needs to be by the book. You can talk to Mr. Overington yourself. You just wait there, mister, I’ll call him from the hut. Won’t be but a jiffy.”

He walked away from me, and quickly too.

I curled the documents from the tube and slid them into my inside coat pocket, and with the hollow spike in one hand I followed him.

The man from the Parks Department was about to make a telephone call he really shouldn’t.

And I’m afraid I had no choice but to stop him.

I left the body of the man from the Parks Department in the front seat of his lime-green pick-up. Seemed as good a place as any. He would be missed eventually but I bet the farm that the death cert would say “heart attack” or “cardiac arrest.” Maybe if the medical examiner doing the autopsy was doing it well he or she would pick up the signs of something else, but I didn’t count on it. The ranger was an older guy carrying a little too much weight doing a hard job under a hot sun.

As I drove back to town I picked up the telephone that sat next to me.

“Hello, Ada,” I said.

“You stop to pick flowers?”

“I picked something else, actually.” I described the spike and the contents thereof. Ada whistled.

“I’m guessing you know what this all is, then?” I asked.

“What you found is what they call in the business a dead drop spike. You put your best secrets inside, push the thing into the ground somewhere quiet, and either you pick it up later or you tell your buddies where to go looking.”

“What kind of business?”

“The spying kind.”

I let that bounce around my transistors for a moment or two.

“Ah, Ray?”

“Still here, Ada. Are you saying that Charles David, the famous movie star, is some kind of spy?”

“I’m not suggesting anything, chief. I’m just telling you what you found.”

“And the papers? What’s the Temple of the Magenta Dragon?”

Ada made a cooing sound like she’d just found exactly the right kind of handbag.

“Oh, Ray, Ray, Ray, where have you been hiding?” asked Ada.

If I had an eyebrow to lift I would have lifted it. I didn’t feel the need to answer that particular question and Ada came back on the line pretty quickly.

“Sorry. It’s only the hottest joint in town, Ray.”

“What, a club of some kind?”

“A club of one of a kind. Nobody can get in.”

“Something about what you said doesn’t quite make sense, Ada.”

“No, Ray, listen. The Temple is a nightclub. Everyone who is everyone goes there.”

“Even the ones who can’t get in?”

“That’s the whole point. Nobody can get in unless they are
somebody
.”

“Okay.”

“Movie stars, producers, directors, agents. The big agents, anyway. But the Temple is where it’s at. It’s where the rich and famous of this wonderful town go to wet their whistle with no one looking.”

“The rich and famous, huh?”

“You betcha.”

“Like Charles David.”

“Absolutely. Only it looks like he went there for more than a drink and a dance.”

“Maybe he wanted some souvenirs.”

“Souvenirs which he must have stolen from an office at the Temple only to hide in a dead drop spike up on a mountainside, alongside some pictures of his famous friends? I know everyone needs a hobby, Ray, but even famous movie stars aren’t that crazy.”

“I think I should go to this Temple and take a look around then.”

“Yes,” said Ada, “you do that. Hey, your ranger friend. The one who was cleaning up. Did he find the spike, or did you?”

“I did.”

“Oh, good.”

“But he saw me.”

“Not so good. I assume you took care of things?”

“I did.”

“Can a girl ask how?”

I explained how. Ada sighed when I was done.

“Seems a shame,” she said, “when you had that big sign right there.”

“You mean I could have made it look a suicide instead?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well,” I said. “I guess I could have. But I had to be quick. He was about to call up his boss and tell him a robot was up at the sign finding things.”

“Fair enough.”

I was back in Hollywood traffic now. I said goodbye to Ada and put the telephone receiver back where I had found it.

It was getting late but it was still just a little early for the jet set to get set up at their Temple. I had enough time in my pocket to take a cruise past this magical private club and get the lay of the land and maybe do a little of that old fashioned surveillance I used to be so good at.

Back when I really had been a detective. Back before Ada took a wrench to my programming and came up with a new and far more profitable business venture.

A metaphorical wrench, I mean.

Because it turned out that Thornton had been
too
good. Ada was programmed to make a profit and whether the Prof had meant it to be or not, that program was her prime directive. Thanks to the detective agency, she’d accumulated a lot of contacts—on
both
sides of the law—and in me she had a robot who was big and strong and who could get into places without drawing attention, despite being six feet ten of bronzed steel in a hat.

And a robot she could
control
.

See, we were a team. Ada did the thinking and I did the legwork. Which included that surveillance I was so good at, on account of the fact I didn’t need to breath or eat or drink or shift my ass around on the seat to get more comfortable. Stick me in front of a suspicious house and I could watch it all day. Just so long as I was back at the office by midnight, otherwise the memory tape in my chest would run out and I’d be no good for anything anymore.

That’s what Ada had said, anyway.

The truth was somewhat different. She’d always told me to be home by midnight because the memory tape in my chest needed to be copied off to a master reel and my batteries needed a recharge. Both of these things took six hours.

Except they didn’t. The batteries and the memory tape both lasted a full twenty-four hours and charging up the former and transferring the data from the latter hardly took any time at all. That gave several hours in the smallest part of the day for Ada to get to work.

What she had been doing was this: at midnight, she switched the conscious part of my electromatic brain off. And then she gave me new instructions, ones which usually involved sneaking up on people and throwing them out of windows or down stairs or squeezing them in the front seats of pick-up trucks, lime green or otherwise. Turns out I had quite the knack.

During the day I was a private detective and during the night I was a private killer and I didn’t even know it.

And I didn’t know it for quite a while. There I was being all private dick and being good at it when really all my poking and prodding and questioning and investigating had another purpose, one for a job that only happened at certain hours when the captain was not, shall we say, at the wheel.