Herbie's Game Read online

  “Well, for one thing, you’re barely holding yourself together. For another, you have a skeptic’s aura, rusty at the edges.”

  “Rusty?”

  “As an old shovel.” Handkerchief gave me a tiny shrug, as though to apologize for his perceptiveness. “You’re not as opaque as you fancy yourself.”

  “And I try so hard.” I pulled out my chair, sat down, and drew a deep breath. “But I would, actually. Like a reading.”

  “Ahh, well.” He sounded resigned. He seated himself and looked at the surface of the table as though trying to decide which piece of mumbo-jumbo apparatus would look best there, then shook his head. “Well. Well, let’s keep it simple. Both hands on the table, palms up. Open your hands, open your chest area—that’s right, pull your shoulders back, but don’t lift them—and open the Crown Chakra. That’s the one on top of your head. Keep your eyes open and look into mine.”

  I did everything I could manage. My control of my Crown Chakra comes and goes.

  Handkerchief looked directly into my eyes for a long moment and then his eyelids fluttered rapidly several times. He reached across the table and pressed his fingertips into the mounds at the base of my thumbs, and something like a jolt went through me. When I looked back up—I’d dropped my eyes to his hands when he touched me—his gaze was steady. He shook his head and pulled his hands back and folded them on the velveteen tabletop.

  “You have suffered a loss,” he said.

  “And what tells you that?”

  “Someone close,” he said, ignoring my question. “And recently.”

  “See,” I said, growing angry again, “this is where I get confused. The psychic tells me something I already know, and I’m not sure whether to applaud the parlor trick or ask for some information that might actually be valuable, you know? Like how to deal with it, how to get past it, stuff like that.”

  “You’re obviously thinking,” Handkerchief said comfortably, “that I can read you like this because of a lifetime spent reading people to find ways to part them from their money, and you’re right, in a sense. Few people are more sensitive than con artists. But that begs the question, doesn’t it? Did I learn how to read people by being a con artist, or did I become a con artist because I could always read people?” He tented his spidery fingers and regarded them with satisfaction, like a good third draft. “But how you should deal with it, how you should get over it? That’s in your territory. You’re a fully formed personality, Junior, some might even say over-formed. No matter what I say to you, you’ll deal with it your way.” His eyebrows drew together questioningly. “Something paternal? Not a father, but something on that order.”

  All traces of Great Britain had vanished from his speech; he sounded as American as a hot dog. He put his hands flat on the table, and all the communion between us vanished. “What actually brings you here?”

  “Do you know someone named Janice?”

  “No. Can’t say I do.”

  “Middle twenties, a knockout, shoulder-length brown hair, square glasses with black plastic frames.”

  Handkerchief pursed his lips. “Mmmm, might. Hard to say, from that descrip—”

  “You saw her just last week.”

  He wasn’t looking comfortable. “A client?”

  “No, not a client. Now come on, I know you can give her a name.”

  “Mollie,” he said. He looked at the center of the table and said, more softly, “Mollie.”

  “Good, Mollie. And your relationship with Mollie is—”

  “I have no idea what you’re getting at, old bean,” Handkerchief said, imitating someone who was thinking hard. “None at all.”

  “Let me put it into a context,” I said. “Did you hear ever the phrase, Tinker to Evers to Chance?”

  He relaxed slightly. “Can’t say I have. Rhythmic, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s from a poem, actually, a baseball poem by an early twentieth-century newspaper columnist, Franklin Pierce Adams. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were double-play artists, three-quarters of the infield of the Chicago Cubs way back there in the nineteen-teens—”

  “The things one learns,” Hankerchief said, linguistically edging back across the Atlantic.

  “Adams, as a New Yorker and therefore a Yankees fan, hated the Cubs, but even so, ‘Tinker to Evers to Chance’ was essentially shorthand for the perfect double-play—you did learn in England, didn’t you, what a double play is?”

  “Something about two outs, isn’t it?”

  “So, even now that you know who, say, Tinker was, you might not know which Tinker someone is referring to, minus the rest of the phrase, which is to say, ‘to Evers to Chance.’ It’s like a chain. See what I mean?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, my fault for not completing the chain. That name, Mollie? You might not recognize the name’s significance, distinctive though it is, stripped of the whole double-play parlay, which is Mollie to Handkerchief to X.” One of Handkerchief’s eyelids had drooped in anticipation of the coming punch, but I gave him a two-penny smile in encouragement.

  “To X?” I watched as the confusion cleared miraculously from his eyes, replaced by a dawn of false recognition—pretty well done and, I figured, pure habit since we both knew he was lying through his teeth. “Mollie,” he said at last, as though correcting my pronunciation. “Yes, of course, Mollie. Lively girl, probably quite attractive to the susceptible. Wears those awful glasses. Mollie, yes, Mollie.”

  “Gave you something.”

  He swallowed loudly.

  “An envelope. With your name on it. With another envelope inside it. To give to X. Who is X? To whom, Handkerchief, were you supposed to give the envelope inside yours?”

  He was already shaking his head. “No idea, no idea where you’re taking this.”

  “Handkerchief. Your nose, unlike most, is long enough to break in multiple places.”

  A sort of cold front slid in behind his eyes, and I reminded myself that Handkerchief was reputed to be quite skillful with a knife. He let me look at the dip in temperature for a moment and then said, “What’s today?”

  “The All-Seeing Eye doesn’t know what—?”

  “All time for the All-Seeing Eye is the present.”

  “The present’s name is Monday.”

  “I saw Mollie last Tuesday.”

  “What was the deal?”

  “The usual. I’ve done this before.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well aren’t you the smarty boots. She’d already called to make sure I was at liberty.”

  I said, “To do …”

  “To be part of a chain. Of disconnects. To give me an envelope that I could give to someone who would give it to someone else.”

  “And one more time, to whom were you supposed to give it?”

  He gave it a half-second, probably to consider and reject a lie. “Do you know Dippy Thurston?”

  “I’ve seen her, but we haven’t met.” Dippy Thurston was a close-up magician who worked minor lounges in Las Vegas a few months a year and, the rest of the time, picked unusually full pockets in elaborate setups. She was famous for one stunt in particular, a little dazzler in which she would chat with three people for less than two minutes, and at the end of the talk they’d all be wearing one another’s wristwatches. “Did you give it to her?”

  “That same day.”

  “Tell me about the envelope.”

  “The usual size. Manila, ten-by-twelve, pretty thick, sealed quite decisively.”

  “So you were to call Dippy, meet her, give her the envelope, and not tell her you got it from Mollie. And you did all that.”

  He watched me as though to make sure there wasn’t more to the question, then nodded. “And she wouldn’t tell whomever she passed it to that she’d gotten it from me.”

  “Had you given envelopes to Dippy before?”

  “I had.”

  “And did Dippy ask where it came from? This time or any time in the past?�
��

  “Of course.”

  “And you told her?”

  “This is good money for doing essentially nothing,” Handkerchief said. “Why would I endanger it?”

  “Because Dippy’s cute.”

  “She’s not that cute. In this economy, no one is that cute.”

  “So did you open the envelope?”

  “Junior,” Handkerchief said, wrapping the word in aggrieved patience. “It was unopenable. I mean, obviously, it could have been opened, but Dippy would have spotted it.”

  “Sealed how?”

  “Glue, fibertape that had been wrapped around the envelope three times before a big letter M had been embossed into it, through the tape and both sides of the envelope. Staples in four places, that I would literally have had to put back into exactly the same holes, even if you could manage to get the fiber tape off without shredding the envelope, melt the glue, and then re-seal and rewrap it somehow with the same fibertape so the M was aligned exactly with the impression on the envelope. Plus matching up the staples. Impossible.”

  “So you opened the envelope. How would you know otherwise that the fiber tape was three layers deep?”

  Handkerchief pressed the side of his right index finger against his upper lip, a little mopping-up operation. “Suppose,” he said, “someone was hiring someone to remove me from the scene. Suppose whoever started the chain decided the view would be better without me and part of the joke was to make me part of the chain.”

  “What was in it?”

  “What you’d expect, given the nature of the dodge. Another envelope, smaller but still thick, and a wad of money for Dippy—more than I got, I’m sorry to say—plus a note with that same big M pressed into it, telling her how much she should find in the envelope.” He sniffed. “As though he thought I wasn’t trustworthy.”

  “She pockets the money and delivers the envelope to whoever’s name is on it, and then he or she does the same.”

  “I assume. I didn’t open the other envelope. It presented difficulties of another magnitude entirely.”

  “But you remember who it was addressed to.”

  “Let’s slow things down for a moment.” He tapped his robe, on the left side of his chest. If he’d been wearing his usual duds, the gesture would have been a checkup on his handkerchief. He did it when he smelled money. “What’s your interest? You wouldn’t be bobbing if there wasn’t an apple. How big an apple?”

  “It’s personal.”

  Eyebrows lifted in ninth-generation, well-bred skepticism. “Not pecuniary?”

  “Not a penny’s worth.”

  “But there must be a value, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “If you tell me, I’ll give you five hundred—”

  “Peh.”

  “—and if you don’t, I’ll tell the person who initiated the chain that you opened the envelope.”

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “You see, it’s not a name that is likely to go down easily.”

  “Try me.”

  “First name, Monty,” he said. “As in Monty Python. Last name, Carlo.”

  I nodded, thinking about picking up the table and hitting him with it. “Monty Carlo.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t go down easily.” He tidied his nonexistent handkerchief again.

  “It’s too stupid for you to make it up.” I got up and reached into my pocket for the money. “But just so we’re clear, Handkerchief, if it turns out that Monty Carlo is, let’s say, an improvisation on your part, you’ll be hearing from the man himself, or maybe from a guy named Bones, who’s running his errands these days. You know Bones?”

  Handkerchief said, “I,” swallowed, and said, “do.”

  “Well, if Monty Carlo turns out to be your idea of a joke, you might want to keep the All-Seeing Eye on full scan for the next week or two.”

  I made a right on Ventura and then the next right. The street was lined with old pepper trees, green, cool, and lacy, gracefully drooping their bright little pepper-spheres almost to the ground. There used to be thousands of pepper trees, lining streets all over the Valley, but they’re mostly gone now, traded for wider roads, uglier for their absence. I parked in the shade and sat there, waiting for the tears that had been threatening to make me a lot less intimidating during my last five minutes or so with Handkerchief. I’d been feeling the tightness in my chest, the pre-sting in my eyes, and I’d really thought I was going to lose it.

  And now that I was alone, now that I could lose it, it wouldn’t come.

  I worked on it. I summoned up Herbie’s face, I listened to his voice in my ear, I remembered times when we’d laughed till we couldn’t stand up, times we’d been certain we were both dead—on one memorable occasion, on the same night. I ran over the phrases from his lectures, phrases that came to me almost every time I was in an empty house, almost every time I decided to take this instead of that. I knew so many of Herbie’s lines by heart that he’d become a burglar’s Kahlil Gibran, but funnier.

  I did everything I could think of to break my heart.

  But all I did was get mad.

  So I decided that the thing to do was follow Wattles’s start-and-stop trail as best I could and then, when I got to the end of it, kill someone.

  There was a green pepper-tree dangle resting on my windshield, the little peppercorns proudly displaying their pastel colors beneath the frilly green leaves. The air stirred the branch, so I put down the window to feel the breeze, which turned out to be 102 degrees.

  A pigeon landed on the hood of my car.

  So. Next steps.

  The pigeon looked at me sideways.

  I turned my head and looked at the pigeon sideways.

  The pigeon winked at me, although it might have been a blink since I could only see one eye.

  I took out my phone and looked at it, not actually having the energy to push the buttons. Instead, I put the window back up. That required only one button.

  The pigeon had walked up the hood of the car to the windshield and was really working its neck, giving me alternate eyes as though trying to figure out which one I looked better through. I wondered if pigeons divided other pigeons, and maybe people, for that matter, into left-eye and right-eye. Like, She’s a right-eye knockout, but left-eye, she’s all beak.

  What I wanted to do was go to Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, crawl beneath the parrot-festooned bedspread, and assume the fetal position until Ronnie came home from wherever she went in the daytime and decided to make me feel better. The other thing I wanted to do was go to my old house—not far away—where my daughter, Rina, lived with my former wife, Kathy, but they could both read me too well for that. Plus, Kathy had fifteen years’ worth of resentment filed under Herbie’s name because, in her version of our lives together, Herbie had led me astray, in spite of the fact that I’d followed him so eagerly. She’d be tiptoeing around in sensitive mode, trying not to say something negative about Herbie, and I’d probably end up having a fight with her.

  Herbie had referred to burglary as “the game.” When you’re in the game, he used to say; those of us who are in the game; you gotta learn the rules of the game. The game demanded fair play, at least from Herbie’s perspective. Don’t steal from the poor. Don’t take everything that matters from anyone. Always leave something on the table, something the mark values. “You gotta leave them their heart,” he used to say. “What you want is the ‘At least they didn’t take that’ reaction. They can live with it, especially if they’ve got plenty of other stuff.”

  My life, it suddenly seemed to me, was an extension of Herbie’s Game.

  Among the possible next steps, what I most wanted to do was fly away with that pigeon and check out the world from alternate eyes. If you looked at something bad through only one eye, would it be only half as bad?

  What I did was call Ronnie, to hear her voice and get some sympathy, which she provided in full measure. Then I grabbed two huge breaths and called Louie the Lost.

  Louie had managed a car
eer as a getaway driver for several years, until his nonexistent sense of direction caught up with him and put him at the wheel of a stolen Cadillac that was stranded in traffic in downtown Compton with four jacked-up jewel thieves in the front and back seats, a pound of diamonds in the trunk, and half the people in the street peering in through the windows while the crooks screamed four-part harmony at Louie. So the phone had stopped ringing with getaway offers, and he’d become a telegraph instead, scooping information up everywhere and parceling it out to those who could afford it.

  He was also the closest friend I’d ever had in the, um, criminal underworld.

  Except for Herbie.

  The thought of Herbie made me say, “Fuck,” just as Louie said, “Hello.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Louie said. “Go ahead, just spit it out, don’t nurse it or it’ll give you ulcers. I’m sure I did something to deserve it. Hold on, it’ll come to me. Nope, nothing. Fuck you.” And he hung up.

  I dialed again. “Sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t directed at you.”

  “Hope to hell,” he said. “Two weeks you don’t call, the Missus is asking, Hey, did you miss that nice young man’s funeral? and I’m saying, naw, naw, he just made new friends he likes better than me.”

  “Lots of them,” I said.

  “Ouch. And here I been faithful to you.”

  “So what’s happening?”

  “You know, same stuff. Just pisher stuff, all the real action’s in Washington. Nine-figure, ten-figure crime, and they get to wear such nice suits. Boy, I gotta tell you, if I had it all to do over, I’d get elected to something, just belly up to the public trough—hey, is that pronounced troff, to rhyme with cough, or tro to rhyme with though?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Could be troo, like through, or trow, like plough.”

  “Or truff, like rough.”

  I said, “I don’t think it’s troo. Pull up to the public troo? Uh-uh.”

  “Well,” Louie said. “Good to have that settled. So why the sudden call? Get tired of your new friends?”

  “What would it feel like,” I asked, “to have your eyes on the sides of your head, like a pigeon?”

  “Am I supposed to be billing you for this information? Because if I am, I think you maybe oughta call the Smithsonian.”