Herbie's Game Read online

  “Junkies might as well be furniture,” she said.

  This was new ground. “Do you have personal experience with junkies?”

  “No,” she said. “I watch the Heroin Channel.”

  “You haven’t mentioned a junkie in the rich and unreliable narrative of your life.”

  “If my life is a house,” she said, “you haven’t even gotten to the living room.”

  “You’re just grumpy because you can’t remember which town you told me you were born in.”

  “So, not to change the subject, what’s weird about the other thing you took?”

  I gave up. Morning chats with an attractive and potentially consenting member of the opposite sex always make me shift focus to one of the lower chakras, and getting Ronnie mad would lessen the chance of that chakra being allowed to go out to play.

  “Here,” I said. I got up from the chair and went to the bed. “Lift the brush so you won’t yell at me when you paint your knuckle.” When she did I plopped onto the bed. “Look. This is the Cartier. It’s perfect. Immaculate artistry: rubies, diamonds, platinum, the whole shmear. And then there’s this.” I held out my other hand. In it was a brooch, of a kind, with an irregular birdcage made of bent wire to house a carved wooden bird, clumsily painted red, white, and blue. The whole thing had been glued to a piece of low-budget metal which had, in turn, been glued to a rusty safety pin. The metal of the cage was tarnished and corroded, an uneven spiral that looked like it might have begun life as a watch spring. There was a hair in the glue, and the colors of the paint had faded. Neither the carving nor the painting of the bird was exactly skillful, but it had a certain raw attitude, an improbable vitality.

  She touched the tarnished cage and the bars wobbled. A self-respecting parakeet could have busted out in seconds. “Why would you take this?”

  “They were together in the box. I thought I’d take them together, try to figure it out.”

  “I like it better,” she said. “Want to give me this one?”

  “Would it affect the way we spend the next ninety minutes?”

  “Naw. You’ve been good enough. And, although I’ll deny this if you tell anyone I said it, we women experience the occasional meat-dance urge, too, when we’re in the company of a competent but not too dominant male who smells good and has nice manners and a knack for abstract thinking. In a pinch, forget the thinking. Let me look at that for a minute while my nails dry.” She extended her right hand, the one she’d done first, palm up, and I put the handmade birdcage into it. She brought it up close to her face, looking down at it, and said, “The fancy one is pretty. But this one is beautiful.”

  “You’ve got a fine eye.”

  “I already told you I’d honor your ticket.”

  “I need to get someone to look at it. Someone who’s not Stinky.”

  “Oh, just take him some flowers.”

  “He hired a guy to kill me.”

  “Orchids, then.”

  Somebody knocked on the motel room door. Not aggressive, but confident. I snatched the homemade brooch from her hand and dropped both of them into the jewelry box, which had a label from a chain of budget stores on it, and motioned to Ronnie to do one more button on her blouse, not because she really needed to, but because I wanted to watch. When the show was over, I went to the closet and got my Glock out of the holster that was dangling from the coat hook on the inside of the door. Then, holding the gun in the hand I kept behind the door, I pulled it open and felt my stomach sink.

  “Junior,” Wattles said in that voice of his, a torn speaker at the bottom of the sea. He looked out of place in the sunlight, like an animal that’s been unexpectedly yanked inside-out. What with his bum leg and us being on the third floor, his forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat. If the color of his face was an accurate indication of his blood pressure, it was a miracle he hadn’t exploded.

  “Wattles,” I said in welcome. “How the hell did you find me?”

  “Aaahh,” he said. “Lemme in.”

  I stepped aside and he pushed past me, short and tilting left, giving me a birds-eye view of a sparse floss of hair that was no advertisement for his colorist. It was a shade of orange a bee would scorn.

  “Didn’t know you had company,” Wattles said. “Pretty little thing, ain’t you?”

  “Oh, thank you, sir,” Ronnie said, tilting her head to the right and touching an index finger to her cheek, Sunnybrook Farm style. Then she put the top on the bottle of nail polish and gave all her attention to screwing it on.

  “Listen, Junior—”

  “As I said, how the hell did you find me?” My monthly motel moves have been keeping me alive for more than a year now, but people have been tracking me down lately with distressing frequency.

  “Junior,” he said. He glanced around the bird-saturated room, and his eyes doubled in size, making him look like a man who had gone to sleep in Pittsburgh and awakened in the Emerald City. “Jeez,” he said. “Does the restaurant serve anything but eggs?”

  Ronnie said, “Restaurant?”

  I said, “How did you—”

  Wattles made a sound I would, if pressed, spell tchssssss. “Awww, come on. There’s other people and then there’s Wattles. The day I can’t find you I should close my office. What’s that?” He was limping toward the table with the jewelry box on it.

  “Junk,” I said, zipping around him and picking it up. I put it into my pocket. “I’d be embarrassed to show it to you.”

  “You don’t usually got junk,” Wattles said. “Lemme see. And why the gun?”

  I looked down at the Glock. “This is in case someone undesirable knocks on the door. And speaking of that, what do you want?”

  “Look at this place,” Wattles said. “Looks like something Dreamworks burped.”

  “This may be difficult for you to believe, but I’ve got a day in front of me.”

  “So here you are, with a beautiful girl, way too good for you, and you’re grumpy?” He put his hands in his pockets. All the cheer left his face, and Ronnie sat back on the bed as though Wattles had suddenly sprouted spikes. “Junior,” he said, “when was the last time you were in my office?”

  “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.”

  “You need to convince me of that,” Wattles said. He went back to the door and opened it to reveal a six-foot-three skeleton of a man in a black suit and a pair of thick, crepe-soled work boots. The stovepipe pants had a thrift-shop shine on them, and their legs were far too short; white socks glimmered above the black boots. His narrow, bony face was asymmetrical and the color of old envelope glue, but the most disconcerting thing was that the whites of his eyes were the cheap, vivid blue of mouthwash. He’d trained dead-black hair down over his forehead and pasted it there, like Hitler’s. His shoulders were hunched, painfully and, it looked, permanently, up near his ears. The suit hung on him like it was waiting for someone to join him inside it.

  “Hey, Bones,” I said.

  Bones was looking at the floor about halfway between him and me, and he didn’t acknowledge the greeting.

  “Close the door,” I said to Wattles. “He sucks light out of the room.”

  Wattles pulled his right hand out of his jacket pocket and handed four or five red and blue capsules to Bones. “Have a party, but don’t invite no one,” he said, closing the door.

  “Tuinal?” I said. “Rainbows? I thought those were outlawed decades ago.”

  “Not in India,” Wattles said. “Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals, stepping into the void between Tuinal junkies and the danger of waking up.”

  “So you made a point of showing me Bones, and since you’re carrying his pet treats around, I suppose he’s working for you. I wasn’t in your office last night.”

  “Did I say anything about last night?”

  “No. But here you are, eleven-thirty on a beautiful Monday morning if you don’t count Bones, and you’re trying to push a burglar around. Sounds like something happened last night.”

&
nbsp; “I gotta sit down,” Wattles said. He turned to Ronnie. “If I sit on the bed with you, you gonna bite me?”

  “You wish,” Ronnie said.

  “I love the smell of nail polish,” he said, sitting down. He released an enormous whoosh of air and began to rub the small of his back.

  “Let me,” Ronnie said, and she began to work his back with her feet. Wattles emitted a humid-sounding sigh, like an old steam radiator, and closed his eyes. “Why haven’t I got one of you?” he asked.

  I said, “Can you just leave Bones out there in the sun? Won’t he melt?”

  “He don’t know where he is. He could be at the bottom of the pool and he’d be okay.” He opened his eyes and glanced back at Ronnie. “I don’t get it, Junior. You’re an okay-looking guy, or you would be if you cut your hair, and you always got fine, fine trim—no offense, Miss, just a figure of speech. Old Janice, you remember Janice, she thought birds flew out of your butt.”

  Looking at me, Ronnie said, “Janice?”

  “A go-between,” I said. “Works for Wattles.”

  Wattles said, “Thought birds flew out—”

  “Yes, we’ve heard that part. And no,” I said to Ronnie, “she and I never—”

  “They didn’t,” Wattles said. “Janice has a boyfriend who breaks noses.”

  “And then there was me,” I said, “not chasing her or anything.”

  “Someone was in my office last night,” Wattles said. “Waltzed through my inner locks like they were bobby pins.”

  “What are those?” I said. “A Rabson, a Heilmacher, and—”

  “A Steenburg. And that kind of smart-ass attitude is why I thought of you.”

  “Not the talent?”

  “He didn’t bother to re-lock anything.”

  I said, “Oh,” not liking the feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “And just in case it is you and you’re shitting me,” Wattles said, “there’s Bones out there.”

  “Sort of cut-rate for you, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t take a high IQ to pull a trigger.”

  “At the rate he processes information, I could shoot him five or six times before he remembers where his gun is.”

  “Yeah,” Wattle said, “but he wouldn’t notice.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it. I know that’s a cliché in our trade, but it’s true.”

  “Fine. I believe you. Find out who did.”

  “You believe me?”

  Wattles said, “Who gives a shit? You either took it or you didn’t. I’m offering you money to get it back to me either way.”

  “How much money?”

  “Ten K.”

  “Gimme.”

  Wattles leaned back to get into his pocket, and Ronnie lifted her feet in the air and rolled onto her side, knees drawn up in her favorite sleeping position. My lower chakra gave out a whimper of denial.

  “Here’s five,” Wattles said. “Five more when you deliver it.”

  “You have no idea,” I said, “how reluctant I am to take this.”

  “Yeah, but you’re crossing the room. You got your hand out.”

  “Don’t push it,” I said.

  Ronnie said, “You don’t know what he’s giving up to do this for you.”

  “Maybe not,” Wattles said, “but there’s Bones out there, too. Gotta have some weight in your decision.”

  I took the money from his hand and made a big show of counting it. Then I counted it again as Wattles fidgeted. After I’d folded it and put it in my pocket, I said, “What’d they take?”

  Wattles glanced over at Ronnie, who was reading the label on her nail polish bottle, and leaned toward me. In a very low voice, he said, “My disconnects.”

  I said, and I’ll admit it was the stupidest thing I’d said in days, “Disconnects are people. How could—?”

  After two false starts and some lip-licking, Wattles said, “I wrote them down.”

  “You wrote them down? Your disconnects? On paper?” All those italics are justified, because this went to the very heart of what Wattles did. He liked to describe himself as a full-service crook, but what he was, really, was a contractor. He’d arrange anything, from a cautionary faceful of knuckles or a modest supermarket fire all the way up to a whack, for the right fee. The art of what Wattles did was what he called disconnects—a chain of intermediaries between him and the crime.

  Let’s say you paid Wattles to hit someone and sponge up afterward. Wattles would put together a chain of disconnects—all crooks of various kinds—and he’d use a go-between, usually, the very Janice we’d just been discussing, to pass a big thick envelope to the first disconnect in the chain, who, having no idea who Janice actually was, didn’t know she’d been sent by Wattles. Disconnect number one would take the money inside and pass a somewhat smaller envelope, still sealed, to the disconnect to whom the envelope was addressed, who hadn’t even seen Janice, so he or she was one more step in the dark from the point of origin. This little relay would continue, a smaller sealed envelope at each link in the chain like Russian nesting dolls, until the smallest one reached the far end of the chain: the talent, who would know nothing about who hired him or why—nothing at all, in fact, but the name of the corpse-in-waiting. Each envelope was complete, including payment, for the person whose name was written on it, and the guarantee that each disconnect would pass along the ones inside, without opening the others and pocketing the cash, was that old underworld standby: pure, cold fear. Wattles knew who they were, but all they knew about him was that he was someone who had people killed. By the time the hit was carried out, there was no way in the world to connect it to Wattles.

  Unless, of course, all the disconnects in the chain were all written down on a piece of paper somewhere.

  “I had to write it down,” Wattles said. “Something goes wrong, I need to know which disconnect to finger. I need to know who paid who what, you know?”

  “Holy Jesus,” I said. “I can see needing to remember it. But on paper?”

  He said, looking shame-faced, “I’m getting old. Memory’s not what it used to be.”

  “The disconnects aren’t going to be happy about this.”

  “They’re never going to know, because you’re going to get it back again.”

  “Even if I can figure out who the burglar was, so what? You know he stole it for a client, and that client will have it by now. So how the hell am I supposed to get it back?”

  “Here’s what you need to know.” Wattles leaned forward and his red face went into the tomato zone. “If you bring it back, I’ll never ask you how you got it.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “And if you don’t,” he said, “There’s Bones.”

  I felt my own face go red. “Don’t lean on Bones too much,” I said. “He’s a slender reed.”

  Wattles said, “He is what he is.”

  “Listen, why not do this the easy way?”

  “What’s that? And hey, if there’s an easy way and I take it, I want my five K back.”

  “We’ll split it. Fifty-fifty.”

  He said, “It better be really easy.”

  “Call off the hit.”

  “How do you know it’s a—?”

  “Because of how upset you are. Just call it off.”

  “May sound easy to you,” Wattles said, “but that’s ’cause of what you don’t know, which is the guy’s been dead for three days.”

  David Copperfield, with an assist from Charles Dickens, began his life story this way: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. If I were ever sufficiently misguided to write my own life story, the hero of most of Act One would be a burglar named Herbie Mott.

  Stuck behind the wheel of my invisible white Toyota, America’s most common car, as I joined the slow line of traffic up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Herbie’s Malibu condominium on a hot September Monday morning, I had lots of time to think about him. In fact
, I hadn’t been able to think about anything else since Wattles shared the informaton that the inner door of his office had been left conspicuously unlocked.

  Herbie was an established burglar of spotless repute and zero arrests, with a terrific trade in psychiatrists’ houses. Some shrinks practice at home and others take their records home, thinking anyone who breaks into a house is only looking for cash or diamonds. And they’re right, ninety percent of the time, although some of us specialize in one thing, say, Meissen china or historical documents. But for Herbie, psychiatric case notes were the jewel in the crown. A really incendiary set of case notes on even a D-list celebrity or a reality TV freak were solid gold. Shrinks make a lot of money, and they’ll yield up large quantities of it to get their notes back. Best of all, they never, ever go to the cops. The whole point of paying Herbie to get those notes back is to keep it secret from the client that they were ever out of the good doctor’s possession.

  So there Herbie was, committing burglary with a twist—not taking something from the mark, but selling something back to him or her. And that meant announcing to the mark that he’d been burglarized to get his internal thermostat set firmly at panic before calling the mark and setting a price. Leaving the place looking burglarized. Same setup as at Wattles’s place.

  Herbie had been with me—or maybe it’s more correct to say I’d been with Herbie—practically from the beginning, from when I was seventeen years old and began breaking into houses in earnest.

  I’d commmitted my first illegal entry at the age of fourteen as a way of making a point to the man who lived next door to us, a miserable son of a bitch whose idea of a good time was quietly opening the gate to our backyard and letting out Chowser, our big dumb mutt, and then calling animal control to come and get him. One day while he was at work, I’d gone in through an open window, switched all the herbs and spices into new bottles, swapped the salt and the sugar, put a few ounces of plastic-wrapped animal waste in his refrigerator, and moved everything I could lift to a new and inconvenient location. I superglued all of it in place.

  It took him weeks to discover all of it, and every time I heard him shouting or swearing, I’d run next door, ring the bell, and ask whether there was anything I could do to help. The fourth or fifth time, I could see the change in his eyes, and from then on, Chowser stayed in our yard.