Herbie's Game

  Also by Timothy Hallinan

  The Junior Bender Series

  Crashed

  Little Elvises

  The Fame Thief

  Herbie’s Game

  The Poke Rafferty Series

  A Nail Through the Heart

  The Fourth Watcher

  Breathing Water

  The Queen of Patpong

  The Fear Artist

  For the Dead

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things

  Everything but the Squeal

  Skin Deep

  Incinerator

  The Man With No Time

  The Bone Polisher

  HERBIE’S GAME

  Copyright © 2014 by Timothy Hallinan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallinan, Timothy.

  Herbie’s game : a Junior Bender Mystery / Timothy Hallinan.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-61695-429-1

  eISBN 978-1-61695-430-7

  1. Thieves—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—California—LosAngeles—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A3923H47 2014

  813′.54—dc23 2013045393

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Illustration by Katherine Grames

  v3.1

  For

  Munyin Choy

  creator, scorekeeper, and team captain of

  Munyin’s Game

  which I have played happily

  for thirty years

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  1. Ur-Hamlet

  2. The Only Piece of Paper That Could Kill Him

  3. Always Do the Hard Thing First

  4. Like Something Dreamworks Burped

  5. An Established Burglar of Spotless Repute

  6. A Middle D

  7. We Tend to Die Early

  8. Herbie’s Game

  9. Elfin

  10. I Hope the News Got Broke to You Gently

  11. It Can Be a Dolphin If It Can Do the Job

  12. How to Look Like You Admire Stupidity

  Part Two

  13. That Thing Hanging Over Your Head

  14. Wasted Love

  15. And Then You Find Out You’re a Radish

  16. Hi, Girlfriend

  17. Temporal Amber

  18. Like Fighting With a Tulip

  19. He Seemed to Have Been Born in a Dozen Places

  20. The Eternal Redeemer

  21. An Absolute Bar Code to Designate Criminal Stupidity

  Part Three

  22. The Long Rippling Arpeggio on the Harp

  23. The Monte Carlo Method

  24. The Essentials About All of You

  25. An Entrepreneur First and a Crook Second

  26. Bad, Cheap, and Ugly

  27. The Worst Word in the Crook’s Dictionary

  28. The Ponytail Gang

  29. The Hobgoblin of Small Minds

  Part Four

  30. Like Being Run Over by a Car Made of Wool

  31. You Don’t Know What’s on the Other Side of That Door

  32. The Only Pros in the Room

  33. Natural Selection Favors the Timid

  34. The Famous Three Reasons

  35. Vacation Videos of the Damned

  36. Rainbows

  37. Simple Subtraction

  38. Duff

  39. If She’ll Have Me

  40. The Beautiful One

  Afterword

  Eighteen minutes in—just two minutes short of my limit—I was ready to write the place off.

  It was a very nice house in a very nice part of the Beverly Hills flats. A very nice car was usually standing in the driveway, a BMW SUV so new the odometer hadn’t hit the hundreds yet, and I could smell that canned new-car fragrance through the closed windows. The locks on the house’s doors, it seemed to me during my week of taking the occasional careless-looking careful look, would yield to a persuasive argument. No bothersome alarm tip-offs. Inside, I was sure, would be a lot of very nice stuff.

  And I was right: there was a lot of nice stuff, although most of it was too big to lift. A European sensibility had expressed itself in a lot of stone statuary, some of it very possibly late Roman and some of it, for variety’s sake, Khmer, plus a gorgeous polychrome German Madonna in painted linden wood, possibly from the sixteenth century. As tempting as these pieces were, they were all too heavy to hoist, too bulky to carry, and too hard to fence, especially since my premier fence for fine art, Stinky Tetweiler, and I were on the outs.

  So I was adjusting to the idea that the evening would be a write-off as I went very carefully through the drawers in the bedroom, putting everything back exactly where I’d found it and counting down the last ninety seconds. And, as is so often the case, the moment that I gave up was also the moment that fate, with its taste for cheap melodrama, uncoiled itself in the darkness, and my knuckles bounced off one of the things that sends a little sugar bullet straight through a burglar’s heart: a jewelry box. It was cardboard, not velvet, but it was a jewelry box, and it rattled when I picked it up.

  Ever since my mentor, Herbie Mott, taught me the rules of burglary, I’ve practically salivated at the sound of something rattling in a small box.

  But … the lid was stuck. It felt like it hadn’t been popped in years, and the accumulation of humidity and air-born schmutz had created a kind of impromptu mucilage. The word schmutz, I reflected as I ran a little pen-knife in between the box and the lid, had entered Middle English via Yiddish and German, where it meant, as it means now, dirt, specifically, a kind of sticky, yank-your-fingers-back-fast dirt.

  The top pulled free from the box with a faint sucking noise, like an air-kiss. I shook out one—no, two—objects and aimed my little penlight at them.

  And heard the hum of an engine: a car, coming up the driveway.

  Hurrying will kill you more often than taking your time will. I looked at the two objects closely, listening for the motor to cut out, listening for the slam of a car door.

  One of the pieces I recognized immediately, a glittering little slice of history and bravery—valor, even—in platinum, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. It looked real, it looked fine, it looked like about $12,000 from a good fence.

  The brakes let out an obliging soprano note as the car stopped, and the engine cut out.

  The other piece, well …

  The other piece looked like something that had been made in the dark by someone who was following directions over the radio or some other medium with no REPLAY button. Slap it together from whatever was at hand, don’t make a second pass, don’t look at it too closely. It bore a sort of ur-resemblance to the $12,000 one, in the same way that a supposedly crude revenge play that scholars call the ur-Hamlet is thought to be the direct ancestor and inspiration of Shakespeare’s greatest hit, but this piece wouldn’t have fooled an inanimate object at forty paces.

  A car door closed. Then I heard another.

  The two pieces were in the same box for a reason. I replaced the lid, slipped the box into my pocket, put the drawer back in its original order, and let myself out the back just as the front door opened.

  Wattles once told me he was always happy in the morning because he hadn’t hurt anybody yet.

  So it’s easy to imagine him singing something late-sixties/early-seventies—“Take It Easy,” maybe, or “Born Free”—as he clumped out of the elevator in the black-glass, medium-rise office
building where he did all the bad things that comprised the business of Wattles, Inc. Easy to imagine him, sport-jacketed and red-faced, following his beach-ball gut down the hall, dragging his left leg behind him like a rejected idea and looking, as he had for twenty years, like he’d be dead in fifteen minutes.

  His hair would still be damp. His shave would be aggressively successful. He’d reek of Royall Lyme aftershave, forty bucks a bottle, with the little lead crown on the cap. As he would say, class stuff. Taken together, then: all these characteristics identified Wattles as he undid the cheap locks on the outer door to his office.

  Identified him externally, that is. Wattles’s interior landscape, a column of dark, buzzing flies looking impatiently for the day’s first kill, was tucked safely out of sight.

  Tiffany, the new receptionist, was, as always, at her desk, wearing her permanent expression: pretty in kind of a plastic way, happy, perpetually surprised enough at something to be saying, Oh! A brunette this week, she was wearing her LaLa the French Maid costume, although Wattles actually preferred Nurse Perky. Still, change was good. He’d had to replace his first receptionist, Dora, when a truly lethal crook named Rabbits Stennet had nearly discovered her secret, which was that she had been modeled on his wife, Bunny, about whom Rabbits went all Othello whenever anyone even looked at her. Rabbits had once backed his car over a parking attendant at Trader Vic’s because the man had taken the liberty of turning on Bunny’s seat-warmer.

  So Dora had been hastily shredded in bulk, all two hundred of her, and replaced by Tiffany: same latex blow-up doll, different nose, different eye color, different wigs.

  Wattles had probably squinted at Tiffany as he went to the office’s inner door and its array of very good locks, because she was sagging a little. He might have heard the soft hiss of a leak, which meant that he would have to find the little battery-powered pump and top her off.

  Or maybe just pop the valves and let her deflate, replace her with another one. After all, there were more than three hundred and fifty of her boxed up in the closet, waiting for the mail-order lovers who were the clientele of Wattles’s one legitimate business. $89.95 a pop, although Wattles wasn’t sure that was the best way to put it.

  All the blow-ups leaked sooner or later, thanks to the low manufacturing standards of the Chinese factory where they were produced, which Wattles hadn’t complained about because it ensured re-orders. Maybe he’d put a new one at the desk. Nurse Perky again. Or maybe Venice Skater Girl, although that was kind of informal for the office, and the shoes were expensive.

  So he was probably singing, full of illegal plans, thinking about blowing up a new Tiffany, and smelling all limey when he tried to stick a key into the first of his very good inner locks and couldn’t. It wouldn’t go in. He leaned down, grunting a little as the movement squeezed his gut, and saw that the inner tumbler was upside down.

  So were the others.

  The door had been opened, and whoever had undone those very good locks hadn’t even taken the trouble to lock things up again.

  He went inside, leaving Tiffany to hiss in desolate solitude, and got the TV remote that opened the panel in the wall opposite his desk, but when he turned to aim it, he put it back down. The panel was open. So was the door of the safe behind it. He didn’t even bother to go look.

  The one thing that was sure to be missing was absolutely going to be the piece of paper that could kill him.

  He wheeled his chair over to the window and plopped down, watching the San Fernando Valley work up its daily output of smog. Wattles knew whole battalions of crooks, but he could only think of one person who knew where his office was, could pop those particular locks, and was also enough of a smart-ass to leave them popped.

  He could also only think of one person who could help him figure out whether he was right.

  Problem was, they were the same person. And this, unfortunately, was where I came into the narrative, because both those people were me.

  Trying to ignore all the birds on the wallpaper, I looked at the bird in the brooch with the kind of regret a farmer might feel just before he beheads the chicken his children have named Pookie. It was going to be hard to part with it.

  While platinum has been the top of the hill for jewelers for decades, giving the ultra-rich an opportunity to sneer at gold, it’s still a relative newcomer to the vault. Unlike gold and silver, which have dangled from wrists and ears since the dawn of the two-syllable word, platinum didn’t become available in quantity until the early 1900s. In fact, when the Spanish conquistadors discovered lumps of it in the gold they were ripping from the earth of what is now Colombia, they tried to melt it and failed, and then tossed it away as a nuisance. They called it “platina,” meaning “little silver,” and one theory was that it might be unripe gold. In the nineteenth century, Lavoisier conquered the metal’s high melting point by using oxygen, which, conveniently, he had just discovered. So, by the end of the nineteenth century, there it was: an increasing supply of this beautiful, high-luster metal, brighter than silver and harder than iron, and no one knew what to do with it until Cartier, founded in Paris in 1847, figured out how to use it to support precious stones.

  And boy, did they figure it out.

  The object in front of me, perhaps an inch and a half in height, blazed with fifty to seventy tiny diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The stones decorated the platinum body of a bird—the rubies on the breast and the sapphires on the wings, with the diamonds adorning the head. The bird perched behind a graceful, curving grid of platinum in the form of a bird cage.

  Which meant that I was experiencing one of those head-on environmental and temporal collisions that frequently remind me that every moment I live contains all the others I’ve experienced or even read about. I was sitting, surrounded by wallpaper birds, in a feverishly avian room—bird bedspread, bird lighting fixture, bird knickknacks, actual, somewhat depressed-looking birds caged glumly in the corner—in Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, certainly the north San Fernando Valley’s most obsessive motel—and staring at another caged bird, this one made of precious stones and platinum on a royal-family-quality brooch crafted in the late 1930s. I was also smelling nail polish, which I always associated with my mother, from a brush wielded by Ronnie Bigelow, who was emphatically not my mother. Ronnie, her knees tucked to one side, was adding production value to the almost-king-sized, almost-functional Magic Fingers massage bed labeled THE BIRDY RUB, its coverlet decorated in printed parrots the color of healthy lung tissue. Ronnie’s eyes took bites out of the brooch as she smoothed a tiny brush over the nail of her right baby finger.

  “Why the cage?” she asked.

  “It represents the imprisonment of France by Germany,” I said. “It’s liberation jewelry from World War II. The red, white, and blue bird stands for France, and the cage symbolizes the Nazi occupation. Cartier made these and sold them in Paris under the noses of the Nazis, which was pretty brave, considering the famous Nazi sense of humor.” I held it up to the light from the window, and the stones caught fire. “Imagine a willowy French socialite with one of these gleaming on the shoulder of her gown, making small talk as she dances with some Heinrich from the Gestapo. After the war, Cartier changed the design by putting the bird on top of the cage. Voilà. Freedom.”

  “How do you know she was willowy?” Ronnie said. “Socialites eat pretty good, and French socialites probably get their pick of the day’s baguettes.” She squinted at the brooch again and then held out a hand, elbow straight, to look at her nails. “I could wear it better than she did.” The sight of the hand prompted a frown. “The right hand is the one I always screw up.”

  The late-morning sunlight was discovering 24-karat gold in Ronnie’s hair, which was in the kind of multidimensional tangle predicted by chaos theory, like a foam of whipped Mobius loops.

  “If you always screw up the right,” I said, “then why start with it?”

  “Always do the hard thing first,” she said.

  “Whatever
happened to warming up?”

  “So, as I was saying, it would look better on me.”

  “It won’t get a chance to. It’s going into Rina’s college fund. If I can figure out how to sell it.”

  “Rina’s thirteen.”

  “And?”

  The tip of her tongue clamped between her teeth, she started to paint the thumb of her right hand. “Okay,” she said. “Rina’s college fund is not negotiable. Why don’t you sell it to that awful man with the teensy nose up in the hills?”

  The awful man she meant was Stinky Tetweiler, one of LA’s prime fences for connoisseur goods and generally the first place I’d take a piece like this one. But Stinky had tried to have me killed a few weeks earlier, and while I don’t generally get personal about business, I wasn’t giving him anything as good as this brooch.

  “It’s too nice for Stinky. Cartier made these things and brave women wore them while the Gestapo basements were squeezing out screams all over Paris.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Twenty, twenty-five K. At the burglar’s rate, I might get twelve.” I’d probably get more from Stinky, but the hell with him.

  “Was it the only thing you got last night?”

  “No,” I said. “The other thing is kind of weird.”

  “Thing, singular? You go to all the trouble to break into that house and you only take two—?”

  “What’s the first rule of burglary?”

  “Don’t get caught.” She was staring at the partially painted hand as though she was having second thoughts about the color.

  “And how do we avoid getting caught?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

  “Herbie’s Rule Number Three. In and out fast, right? Every minute over twenty or twenty-five that you’re in the house—”

  “I know, I know. Get out fast. But still, only two—”

  “That’s why junkies get caught. They take everything. The mark gets home and the whole house is missing and the TV is in the front yard, and he calls the cops and, junkies being junkies, the guy who hit him is probably nodding out at the wheel of his car two houses down.”