Herbie's Game Read online

  What they had done to Herbie had been simple, brutally, heartlessly effective, and even creative, making improvisational use of things they’d found in the condo. They had simply forced the rubber gloves onto Herbie’s hands, hung him over the edge of the bed like a sack of oats, and filled the gloves with boiling water. I took a closer look, but it didn’t last for more than a couple of seconds.

  I was suddenly aware of black flowers blooming in the air in front of me, like the malign blossoms that erupt on motion-picture film just before it burns. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the carpet, which was wet even six feet from the bed. They must have filled the gloves to overflowing many times. At some point during the questioning Herbie’d had a nosebleed, and the water had thinned the blood to a pink blush, like a watercolor wash, on the white carpet all around the bed.

  At God knows which refilling of the gloves, he also appeared to have had a heart attack. There weren’t any bullets, no head trauma, nothing.

  So there was one slender comfort. Herbie, as always, had followed Rule Number Three: He’d gotten out fast.

  There’s no way for me to know how long I sat there in that rose-pink, stinking damp. I don’t even remember getting up. By the time I was back inside myself again, I was driving south on Pacific Coast Highway with the hard blue line of the sea to my right, threading my way automatically between cars filled with beach-goers: bathing suits, beach-towel shawls, women in straw sun hats. It wasn’t until I turned left onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard that I realized I was still wearing the disposable plastic gloves, and when I saw them, I screamed.

  I pulled into the little shopping center where Topanga and Old Topanga intersect, ordered a pizza at Rocco’s, and let it cool. It was hot in the Canyon, and the sun sifted itself through the leaves of the sycamores, carving biblical beams in the dusty air.

  The pizza sat in front of me, neglected, as I tried to put myself back together.

  Crooks aren’t like orchestra conductors; we tend to die early. I’d personally known half a dozen criminals, including a couple of friends, who no longer walked among us—I’d actually directed one of them to the exit—but this was the first time I’d lost someone who was truly close to me, crook or straight. My parents were both alive, if emotionally distant, the friends and lovers I’d kept track of were above ground, and my daughter and ex-wife were thriving without me.

  But Herbie had crossed categories: he was a friend, a crook, a mentor, a surrogate father. He’d also been the first to warn me that friendships among those of us on the shady side of the street could end suddenly. He’d lost a friend to a meth addict with a broken bottle, who’d killed Herbie’s acquaintance for the $400 the two of them had scored in a liquor-store robbery. Several days later, the tweaker had gone down under a car with no plates on it. When you can’t get closure, Herbie had said to me, get even. I’d followed that advice once already, evening the score for a friend who got killed on a surveillance he was doing for me, a surveillance I hadn’t thought could get lethal.

  And now it looked like I was going to do it again. For Herbie.

  As soon as I could walk.

  Since I couldn’t manage that yet, I used the phone.

  “I can’t ask him anything,” Janice said. “He’s gone. He called to tell me the office would be locked up and that I should check his house every now and then.”

  I knew she and Wattles worked closely, but this suggested a new level of trust. “You have a key to his house?”

  “Sure. When he’s gone, I take in his paper, keep an eye on things.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the Wattles I know.”

  “Is there some perspective from which that might be my problem? Or even interesting to me? Because if there is, I’m missing it.”

  “He says you like me,” I said, since I couldn’t think of an answer to her question.

  “Yeah?” she said. “He told me you like me. Said you thought birds flew out of my butt.”

  I said, “I don’t really think about your butt much, but if I did, it would probably be something like that.”

  “It sounds uncomfortable,” she said. “Not to mention that it would ruin the line of my pants.”

  “So, do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Like me.”

  “I’m getting engaged,” she said.

  “Oh.” Janice was, putting it conservatively, science-fiction beautiful, and even in my numbed state, I experienced the brief pang of loss most men—even men who are in love with other women—feel when there’s one less really exceptional possibility out there. “Well, hell. But congratulations.”

  “You could have asked me out,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “Did you? Whoops. How fatally unforgivable of me.”

  “Come on. Make it up to me. Let me into his house.”

  “Pardon my mirth,” she said. “Wait, I’ll politely put my hand over the mouthpiece while I laugh.”

  “Okay, then answer three questions. First, what’s with him writing down a chain of disconnects? Is he really likely to forget who’s on it?”

  “He’s never forgotten anything that mattered in his life.” She paused, and I could feel her trying to figure out how much she could tell me without violating Wattles’s trust. “About eighteen months ago, something slipped his mind, one teeny detail out of the ten thousand or so he usually carries around in his head, and he completely lost it. Raving at the walls. He was certain it was the beginning of the end, you know, that his mind was going and he was months away from being totally senile, complaining about the food in the Criminals’ Retirement Home. So he started writing things down.”

  “But you think he actually knows who all the disconnects were?”

  “He knows that, how much he paid them, and when he used them last.”

  “Then why wouldn’t he tell me their names?”

  “You’re out of questions.”

  “I’m just getting started.”

  “Well, the rude answer is that he doesn’t trust you enough to share it with you. The more diplomatic answer is that he didn’t ask you to investigate the people in the chain, he asked you to get the piece of paper back before someone used it to climb back up the chain and take him out.”

  “The person who stole it is dead,” I said, and saying it out loud made my voice go all wobbly. “So I think it might be a good idea to see whether the chain’s integrity is intact. Whether any of them might be connected to someone who would have, first, guessed Wattles would keep a written record, and second, sent someone to steal it.”

  “These people? Most of them have trouble finding their way home. And why would anyone they were connected with have known anything about the chain?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Suggest another place for me to start.”

  As I waited for her to make up her mind, I got up, picked up the pizza, and put it on another table. Someone might want it.

  “I can tell you who I gave it to,” Janice said reluctantly, and I could almost hear her wishing she could call Wattles and get permission.

  “Do you know any names beyond that one?”

  “Of course not. That’s the theoretical point of the chain. I don’t know where it’s going, and the people on the other end don’t know where it comes from.”

  “Okay. How big a job would you guess this chain was designed to fund?”

  “All I can go by is the thickness of the envelope. I’d say pretty big. The thicker it is, the more envelopes, the more stops along the way, the more money for everyone. I mean, something like getting you to rob Rabbits Stennett’s house, that was just Wattles to me to you. Something really big, let’s say a hit or two, might be five or six links and a good chunk of money in the last envelope.”

  “About as thick as this one was?”

  “Maybe a little thinner. I don’t know.”

  “Let’s say it was a hit.”

  “Let’s not, at least not on the phone. Let’s say it’s an extremely r
oundabout way to buy Girl Scout Cookies.”

  A Topanga creek rat, one of the Canyon’s rural homeless, cruised the table with the pizza on it, looking everywhere else. “What’s to prevent the person who’s actually supposed to get the cookies from just pocketing the money and going to the movies?”

  “The knowledge that the person who sent the money for the cookies knows who he or she is and that the person who sent the money is really, really, really serious about Girl Scout Cookies. So serious that blowing the errand off would have consequences.”

  “And what if the person who’s being sent to buy the cookies just doesn’t want to do it? Let’s say he’s on a diet and doesn’t want all that flour and sugar around.”

  “That’s what the throwaway phone numbers are for. There’s a different one in every envelope. He calls the number and the voicemail gives him a post office box where he’s supposed to send the money.”

  “A PO box?”

  “Rented about four days before the chain goes out and closed down immediately afterward. And opened with a really good ID, probably as good as anything you’ve got.”

  “Hmmm.” Mine was pretty good.

  The creek rat was back. He looked at the pizza and then at me. I shrugged, and he grabbed it and ran for the trees.

  “But you know,” Janice said, “when you get down to it, whoever is at the end of that chain knows there are only three or four people who might commission something like this, and most of them—if it’s a hit, I mean—will be able to make a good guess who it is. The point of the chain, in fact, is to set up a situation in which everyone who could possibly testify about a connection between, oh, let’s call him Mr. X, and the cookie buyer will be a convicted felon. And you know what defense attorneys call a case where the prosecution witnesses are all crooks, don’t you?”

  “No. What?”

  “They call it an acquittal.”

  “Got it.”

  “So,” Janice said. A moment went by. “Guess we won’t be seeing each other for a while,” Janice said. “What with Wattles hiding in Limpopo or wherever, and what with me getting engaged and so forth.”

  “Guess not.”

  “So you want to get together anyway? Hook up just once, just for the hell of it?”

  “I’m very flattered, but I’m with someone myself now.”

  “Bad timing, huh?”

  “I guess. I really did think birds flew out of your butt.”

  “Sweet mouth,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t have done it anyway.”

  I said, “Before you go. I need the name of the person you gave the big envelope to.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “An old friend of yours, in fact.”

  The All-Seeing Eye had set up shop on Ventura Boulevard, only about a mile east of Topanga, so the drive there barely qualified as a detour. The Eye surveyed its nominally infinite domain through a scratched reflective window in a vaguely Spanish stucco mini-mall that also housed a Mailboxes R Us, usually a sign of a dodgy neighborhood; one of those laundromats that provide brilliant lighting to illuminate the choices in your life that brought you to the point where you’re feeding a year’s worth of coins into machines to do your wash in front of strangers; and not one but two Thai restaurants. There are so many Thai restaurants in the Valley that it sometimes amazes me there are any left in Thailand.

  The strip mall would have been short on parking spaces if it had been doing any business, but as it was, mine was one of only three cars in the lot, and the other two were parked in front of the Thai restaurant closer to the Boulevard. The shopfront that hosted the All-Seeing Eye was a melancholy three parking spaces wide and sat next to a much larger store beneath a bright yellow sign that read DIXIE’S DUDS: FUN FASHIONS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS. It was closed for good, its windows sadly empty of fun fashions, and knowing who possessed the All-Seeing Eye at this point in its history, I was sure he missed the view through the wall into the changing rooms.

  When I walked in, the opening door triggered a little soft-edged chime. I found myself in a waiting room, just big enough for a lumpy-looking two-cushion couch, a folding aluminum beach chair with faded nylon ribbing, and a Salvation Army table housing a bouquet of dusty plastic birds of paradise. Above the bouquet was a sign that said BE SEATED AND COMPOSE YOURSELF. I sat on the arm of the couch, glared at the door leading to the back of the store, and began to count to ten.

  When I reached four, a voice with what might have been a Transylvanian accent said through a small loudspeaker mounted above my head, “I am sorry. You are being affected negatively by Mercury’s retrograde and you are not clear enough for a reading. Please come back in three days.”

  I said, “Here’s what it is, Handkerchief. Either you let me in right now or I squeeze Superglue into all those locks, and you’ll be stuck there until you can get the door off its hinges. And Mercury’s retrograde is an optical illusion.”

  The voice on the loudspeaker said, “Shit,” and I heard the locks snapping open.

  The extremely huffy man who led me to the back of the store had fine, floppy, flaxen hair and the narrow face I associate with some of the horsier members of the British nobility. If his face had been much narrower it would have been a profile even from the front. Beneath an elongated nose was an almost equally lengthy upper lip that occasionally hosted an ill-advised pencil-line mustache, now mercifully absent. Most of us who want to downplay our most distinguishing features—if only to make life a little harder for police sketch artists—know that a pencil-line mustache on a long upper lip does nothing but make it seem longer. It looks like a fifty-yard line.

  He was draped in a loose, flowing white gown that looked like something Lawrence of Arabia might have worn to his prom, and his head was crowned with a complicated-looking turban. In his earlier incarnation, as one of California’s premier plausibles, or con men, he’d been noted for his fine British tailoring and the accent that sometimes came with it, as well as the elegant silk pocket handkerchiefs that gave him his nickname.

  But now Handkerchief Harrison was in psychic drag, and to my mind it was a big step down. I don’t like plausibles—no one anywhere on the metaphorical ladder of relatively honest crooks does—but fortune tellers would have to stand on tiptoe to brush the bottom rung with their fingertips.

  The passageway was swathed in black drapery. I said, “Velveteen was on special?”

  “It’s sensory deprivation,” he said, still walking. “It distances the clientele from the distractions of the day, makes it easier for them to slip into the pool of reflective consciousness.”

  We entered an egg-shaped space with walls of the same light-sucking velveteen, hanging down to a paper-thin, theoretically Oriental carpet in deep Victorian peacock-greens and blues. In the center of the chamber stood a round table about four feet in diameter, draped with yet more velveteen. Handkerchief walked around the table to put it between us, standing behind the larger of the two chairs.

  I searched the room for props or other telltales. “So what’s the modality?” I said. “Is that what you’d call it, the modality?”

  “I’ll call it whatever you’d like.” Handkerchief sounded British, so he was miffed. God only knew where he actually came from, although most bets were on Pittsburgh. “I can do Tarot or the crystal ball, interpret your aura, read your palm, the bumps in your head, your tea leaves. Astrology, either Chinese or Western, dream interpretation, including Freudian and Jungian. We could break out the old Ouija Board. I can dispel or redirect a curse or summon a blessing. If all these choices confuse you, I can conjure up your spirit guardians and consult them.” He sounded for all the world like a waiter who has recited the day’s specials so often he’s sick of them all. “I can uncover your past and reveal your future, read the color variations in the pupils of your eyes or the vertical lines in your upper lip.”

  “The vertical lines—?”

  “In the upper lip. Especially good for heavy smokers.”

  “I’m impressed.
These are new talents?”

  “Of course not,” he said, pulling an invisible cloak of dignity around his shoulders. “This is a lifetime’s worth of experience.”

  I was ambushed by a surge of fury: Handkerchief was alive and Herbie wasn’t. “And here I thought you were a con man.”

  “One should always have a fallback,” he said, going positively Buckingham Palace. He gave me a second look and backed up a couple of cautious inches, pulling the chair with him. “Being a plausible is an ideal life when times are good, since con games are, in essence, simply low-impact ways to get those with money to part with some of it in exchange for the hope of more. But when no one has money, it’s a bit like being a highly trained tenor in the land of the deaf. When no one has money, they’re not inclined to risk the little they’ve got. What they want is psychic guidance, a nudge in the direction of the horn of plenty. Cynics, of which you are one, act like it’s all baseless mumbo-jumbo, when actually it’s as practical, as down to earth, as a pair of glasses that simply enable people to see farther afield.”

  “Where the answers are.” It was just short of a snap.

  He regarded me for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “Do you frequently find that the answers you need most badly are close at hand?”

  “Good point.”

  “Thank you.” He rubbed his eyes with a pianist’s long fingers. Handkerchief’s claim to elegance arose mainly from the fact that he was as elongated as a Modigliani. “But I’m sure you haven’t actually come for a reading.”

  I said, “Why not?”