Herbie's Game Page 3

  After that, I became a theoretical burglar to whom any empty house represented a challenge that I sometimes accepted, thrilled with the sheer effrontery of breaking and entering, minus the breaking, which was for thugs. I never took anything; I was just sharpening my skills. I practiced on an enormous collection of locks for hours at a time; I taught myself how to tell when a house was really empty; I learned how to avoid the kind of behavior that draws attention from the neighbors. When I went inside, it was mainly to wander through the little museums people create as the setting for their lives. Sometimes a house reflects its occupants, but just as often it’s wishful thinking: it’s the kind of place a person puts together because it would appeal to the person he pretends to be. Or because it would impress the visitors he or she imagines entertaining.

  Houses can be sad, happy, manic, dysfunctional, serene, frantic. Once you learn how to look at them, they reveal the strength and fault lines in a relationship. By the end of that summer I flattered myself that I could tell when a marriage was in trouble within five minutes in a house; I had a whole checklist of indications. I was pretty pleased with myself.

  Except that I missed those same changes in my own house over the next three years, as my parents’ marriage frayed in slow motion and then snapped. And all that smugness went out the window, along with the marriage, the summer I was seventeen.

  That was the summer my father drove away for good in order to move in with his secretary—or, as my mother called her ever after, “Your father’s tramp.” Before that, there had been three of us, and now there were two, and the one who was missing was the one who had always reigned me in. As though his departure had set me free, I got serious about my hobby and started working it into something approaching obsession.

  And I had learned, the hard way, something I wouldn’t fully appreciate for years: that it’s always good to be brought up against the limitations of your talent. It’s the only way you learn that it needs expanding.

  So I broke into more houses and better houses, and began to refine my interests. There was, for example, the endless fascination of what people find valuable. I’d been in a house where thousands of dollars were scattered like leaves on top of a dresser and a triple-keyed safe held four well-worn pairs of women’s shoes. Or where good second-class jewelry was jammed into cheap boxes in plain sight while, hidden in a bundle of sheets in the dryer, was a first edition of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, with the author’s spiky signature. The Recognitions would later become the first of several novels I would use as the basis for my self-education. If I saw a signed copy today, I’d snatch it and run, but at the time, it was just a thick book with no quotation marks to indicate the dialogue and, on the title page, an angular autograph, and I put it back. Back then, it was worth maybe $1,500, but it would go for $7,500 to $10,000 today. If I had one, I’d hide it better than that guy did.

  By then, I was figuring out, without actually stealing much of anything, some of the logical rules of intelligent burglary. One of them, I thought, was to delay as long as possible the moment the mark realizes that his stuff has been boosted. But Herbie, whom I would meet, taught me the exception to the rule, the times you actually want the theft to be noted instantly—when, in fact, an immediate reaction is part of the plan. He even had a name for it; he called it “leaving tracks.”

  The person who burglarized Wattles’s office had left tracks.

  At the end of September in the year my father left, I was a seventeen-year-old kid taking advantage of a moonless night to do a shrubbery creep on a house just below Mulholland on the Valley side. I’d had my eye on it for a couple of weeks because one day there had been three copies of the LA Times inside the gate. Since then, I’d driven past it a dozen times at all hours, never seeing a car, and no lights other than the same five, one over the front porch, one in the living room, and one each in three rooms upstairs. They went off at different times, but like clockwork: living room, 10:27; left bedroom, 10:44; and so forth. Timers, in other words.

  Whoever owned the place had enough money to buy a couple of lots on either side and the one below, and enough disregard for the neighbors and their micro-managed lawns to let the vacant lots revert to the indigenous San Fernando Valley snaggle of chaparral, creosote, puncherweeds, and those semi-invisible dirt-brown, ankle-high grasses that propogate by sticking the tufted, sharply barbed, one-way-only seeds called foxtails into the weave of people’s socks. As I eased my way closer to the house, I was feeling a swarm of them trying to work their little points into the skin of my ankles.

  It was burglar-dark. All the lights in the house had gone off right on schedule. I was thinking about a bathroom window I’d seen that didn’t seem to have alarm tape running around the perimeter of the glass. As I pushed aside some shoulder-high ornamental bamboo to take a closer look, a hand fell on my shoulder, hard enough to bring me to my knees.

  I managed to turn my head and found myself inches from a face not much higher than my own even though I was kneeling. It was decked out in a Lone Ranger mask. A pang of shamed discovery went through me: as ridiculous as the mask was—he looked like a crook in a comic book—I’d never given a moment’s thought to hiding my face. I said, “Cool mask.”

  “Forget it, kid,” the masked man said. He was really short. “There’s nothing in there you want.”

  “How do you know what I want?”

  “Lemme rephrase,” said the masked man. “There’s nothing in there I wantcha to have.”

  I said, “And I’m supposed to care?”

  “Well,” the masked man said, “if it comes to that.” He stepped back and pulled out a short black gun, and I experienced a paralyzingly intense need to go to the bathroom.

  “Got it,” I said. “Just back up and point that at the sky, and I’ll be on my way.”

  The masked man scratched his chin with the barrel of the gun, and my heightened senses perceived a tiny, molded seam running up the underside of the barrel. Then he leveled it at me again. “Not so fast,” he said.

  I said, “That’s a squirt gun.”

  “ ’Course it is,” the masked man said, looking down at it. “You know what you get if they catch you going in strapped? It’s like life, even if you live as long as Noah.”

  I got up, which made me considerably taller than he was. “Then who are you to tell me to go away?”

  “Who told you to go away?” the masked man said. “I said, Forget it.”

  The difference in our height and the water in the gun made me get a little lippy. “Kind of a fine distinction.”

  “Not so fine. You go away, you get nothing. You do what I tell you, you get five bills.”

  “How much is a bill?”

  “Jeez,” the masked man said. “What is this, something you have to do for a Boy Scout badge? A bill is a hundred bucks.”

  “So …”

  “One times five, okay? Five hundred.”

  “For what?”

  He sighed. “Here’s what. Go get in your car, and park it at the intersection with Coldwater, since that’s where anyone who’s heading home would have to come from. You see a black Lincoln Town Car—you know what a Lincoln Town Car—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Like a Kmart Limo.”

  “You follow it in, go around the circle once, and honk one time as you leave. That’s it.”

  “Five hundred? For honking?”

  “Yes, no, up to you. If you’re waiting out at the intersection when I come out, I’ll give you the five whether anyone’s come home or not.”

  “Um,” I said. “What are you going in to get?”

  For a moment, I didn’t think he’d answer, but then he said, “Oh, why the hell not? Porcelain dogs, from China. Maybe seven hundred years old.”

  “That’s all?”

  He raised the barrel of the squirt gun in the air like a finger. “Rule Number One—no, no, not yet. You do this, kid, and we’ll maybe get to know each other better. I been looking for someone to pass th
ings on to. My kid will never do it, which is, I gotta tell you, like a stone on my heart.” He tapped his chest with the gun, in the general region of his heart. “You know, you get to be my age, you got a rich backlog of experience—like a tapestry, but without the unicorns. Seems like a shame I should die and it should get rolled up and dropped in the grave, a couple flowers and a handful of dirt, and everything I learned is down there with the worms.”

  “You’ve been doing this how long?”

  “Uhhhh.” He put a finger inside the mask and rubbed his nose. “Nineteen years.”

  “Have you been caught?”

  He said, “Surely you jest.”

  “And you’d teach me?”

  “What I said.”

  My heart was on a pogo stick, bouncing so high it was bumping my vocal cords. “Keep the money,” I said. “Just teach me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s Lesson Number One. It’s not Rule Number One, it’s Lesson Number One. Never, ever say, Keep the money.”

  That night, with five hundred-dollar bills in my pocket for the first time in my life, I followed Herbie down the hill to the Du-par’s restaurant at Ventura and Laurel Canyon, open all night and deserted. Feeling like everyone behind the counter knew what we’d just done, with my heart rate at about 140, I let him lead me through the bright lights inside to a back booth. Over quarts of coffee and many slices of lemon meringue pie, I got the first of what I later came to think of as the Herbie Lectures, ten brilliantly organized disquisitions on the history, importance, economics, and aesthetics of burglary. At the end of the talk, he asked me five questions, sort of a pop quiz, and I got them all right.

  The man who faced me across the table looked out from bright blue eyes set into a face crowded to the margins by a nose that looked like it had been stolen from a much larger man. His hair was in retreat, I thought, although over the decades it never seemed to recede much further, and it was an odd color, neither red nor brown, a sort of genetic indecision. He looked at me for a minute, as though trying to see in the skinny seventeen-year-old the seed of someone who might turn out to be a reliable adult, and apparently he saw it, because he finally said, “You might do.”

  Feeling like I’d just gotten a job, I said, “Thanks.”

  “Why do you want to do this?”

  “I need it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I see everyone doing things they hate. My mother works part-time in a restaurant and hates it. My father—” I stopped talking and rubbed my eyes. The restaurant was too bright.

  “Your father.”

  “My father is a full-time asshole. And he hates that, too. His friends hate what they do, the way they are. They get drunk on the weekend and talk about when they were young and free and then go back to sucking it up on Monday. I’m not going to live that way.” My eyes were still bothering me, and I rubbed them again. “I want to feel alive. It’s like you’ve got the map to a place that’s a long way away from my parents’ world. And you’re offering to guide me, and I’m going to do whatever I have to that will convince you to do that.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Herbie said. “Two somethings. First thing, this can turn into a job, same as anything else. The people who need it to be a thrill for a long time are the people who get caught or killed.” He put both hands flat on the table and raised his eyebrows, waiting until I nodded to confirm that I’d gotten the point. “Second thing, don’t think you know everything about your father. You loved him at one point, I can tell, because you wouldn’t be so angry now if you hadn’t. Well, the father you hate now is the same person as the one you loved. Just don’t—put people in boxes like that. You have no idea whether you really know someone. You got all that?”

  I said I did, although I hadn’t really listened to anything he’d said after the word “father,” and three nights later I served as his lookout again and earned another five bills and the second lecture. Ten days after that he took me into the house of a best-selling female writer with a fondness for expensive costume jewelry and gave me my first lesson in sifting the wheat from the chaff. I picked it up quickly.

  It was years before I got over hating my father. But in the meantime, I had Herbie.

  The broken glass door told me everything I didn’t want to know.

  It was a slider, and Herbie, like all good burglars, had put a steel rod in the track on the inside to prevent some amateur from jimmying the lock and trying to slide it open. Like all very good burglars, he’d also had the door triple-paned, but that hadn’t worked either. The large landscaping stone in the middle of the dining room floor, maybe 150 pounds’ worth, had gone through the three layers of glass as though they’d been wet Kleenex.

  I knew what I’d find, but I had to go in anyway. I pulled off my shoes and slipped my feet into jumbo-size baggies, put on a pair of disposable food-handling gloves and tucked the Glock into my pants. I barely paid attention to the broken glass beneath my feet until I heard Herbie’s voice in my ear: “Don’t forget, kid, they got that DNA now.”

  Out loud, I said, “Thanks, Herbie.” My voice was hardly shaking at all.

  The glass door was at the back of the unit, where I’d gone when he didn’t answer the bell, and it opened into a dining room with a highly polished bamboo floor, in the center of which, like some interior decorator’s attempt at Zen, was that large smooth stone. At 1:30, the sun was angling in at about seventy degrees to illuminate the floor, and it bounced in bright fragments off the shards of glass to make sharp shapes on the ceiling. My earliest memory is of rainbows on the walls of the room in which I slept, rainbows made by the sun breaking itself into colors through the cut-glass vases and goblets my mother put on shelves just inside the window. The reflections off the broken glass on Herbie’s floor brought that memory back for a moment, but then it was swept away by the smell of blood.

  I stopped dead in the middle of the room, closed my eyes, and did what I should have done first. I listened.

  What you’re listening for in a house when you don’t know whether it’s empty are short-lived or uneven sounds, sounds of irregular volume, sounds that begin and end sharply or arrive disjointedly: someone moving, the creak of a door, a quick breath. You tend to tune out sounds that are constant, sounds that flow from one moment to the next without variation; those are the sounds you’re trying to listen around. So it took me a minute or two—probably two—to hear the low, soft, unvarying whistle.

  It was a middle D, I noted automatically. No tremolo, no dynamic variations: just someone with infinite lungs playing a soft, sustained middle D on a flute, a couple of rooms away.

  I didn’t even know what caused the sound yet, but it made the hair on the back of my neck bristle.

  The condo was one story: entrance hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, guest bath at one end and then a corridor leading to the so-called private areas: three bedrooms, one of which Herbie used as an office, and two more bathrooms.

  The flute was coming from the far end of the corridor.

  I took the gun out, wishing I’d racked it outside to put a shell in the chamber but unwilling to make that noise now. Holding it barrel-up in the approved movie-cop position, I started down the hall.

  Herbie’s possessions, some of which I’d known for seventeen or so years, transformed the anonymous geometry of the rooms into a kind of album of things we’d done together, things we’d acquired together, things he’d taught me: a huge Navajo rug stolen from a mansion in the Hollywood hills, where we came in after some kind of fearsome scene had gone down, and we had to roll the body of a one-time TV cowboy across the room to get at the rug, which was worth it. A beat-up old hat that had been autographed by practically every major silent-film star, the only thing we took from the home of a faded B-list actress who’d spent her life savings scouring Hollywood for every piece of movie-related memorabilia she could find in the hope that one day she’d open a museum. We’d felt too sorry for her to take anything else. A pain
ting of a seedy New York street, complete with a burlesque house, by John Sloan, the greatest artist among the New York Ashcan School, the first group to set up their easels on urban, working-class American streets. I loved the Sloane, and Herbie had promised me he’d will it to me. The rooms held dozens of things, all of them with Herbie imprinted on them.

  Except for Herbie’s things, there was nothing of interest in the first two bedrooms. Just that fucking flute, playing its unchanging, impossibly sustained D, getting louder as I neared the master bedroom. And the smell was growing stronger along with the flute: damp and rubbery, and a little like meat. It took everything I had to keep me walking to, and then through, that door, and it took even more, pulled up from some unsuspected reserve, to keep me in the room.

  Herbie was facedown and spread-eagled on the canopy bed, his legs wrenched wide and tied to the posts at either side of the head of the mattress. He’d been yanked so that he was draped over a corner of the bed at a diagonal, his head hanging down, his hands dangling in big yellow rubber gloves. I knew those gloves; I have gloves like them. Herbie taught me to take meticulous care of my hands, pampering them, moisturizing them, using the finest sandpaper on the fingertips to increase the sense of touch, and protecting them from things like soap and hot water. When I had lived with my ex-wife, Kathy, and my daughter, Rina, I washed dishes, thanks to Herbie, using those very same gloves.

  The flute sound was coming from the cap of a whistling teapot, sitting atop an electric hotplate that Herbie would use to melt wax so he could make impressions of keys. The hotplate had been turned low enough to keep the sound from getting too shrill, but not so low that the water wouldn’t boil.

  As I worked up the courage to look at what remained of Herbie, I picked up the teapot—the handle was so hot I almost dropped it—and shook it. It was light. Most of the water had either been used on Herbie or had boiled away, but one way or the other, I hadn’t missed them by much. That thought was enough to take me out of the bedroom again and through the entire house, gun in hand, opening every closet, sliding aside every bath curtain, checking the garage, which opened into the kitchen and peering through the front windows at the curb for an idling car. I looked at the street for three or four empty minutes, just trying to locate the strength I needed, and then I went back into the bedroom.