Herbie's Game Read online

  “No. I’m just getting the eye, and I mean that literally, one eye, from a pigeon.”

  “I woulda come over,” Louie said. “You don’t have to hang with pigeons.”

  “First, Wattles,” I said. “He’s disappeared, within the past few hours, and nobody, by which I mean Janice, knows where he is. Second, Dippy Thurston.”

  “Nice kid, but keep an eye on your wristwatch. What about her?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Probably home. Encino, I think. Hang on a minute.”

  “Before you go,” I said. “Monty Carlo.”

  “In Monaco. That poor Princess Grace.”

  “No, it’s a person.”

  “Gambler?”

  “Good idea. Maybe.”

  “I’ll ask around. Hold on while I get Dippy’s address.”

  The pigeon had gotten bored with me and waddled back down the hood. I wondered why it pushed its head forward every time it took a step and how it saw the world in three dimensions when it could only look forward with one eye at a time. It seemed like being able to see in three dimensions would be important to a bird, what with flying and landing and all.

  “Damn, I’m good,” Louie said into the phone. “Encino. Got a pencil?”

  I wrote it down—a surprisingly nice area for a pickpocket, south of the Boulevard, next door to the sitcom second bananas and the bank branch managers and the cameramen and the mouse-level Disney execs: ivy and ice plant, rambling one-story houses set far enough back from the street to make mowing the lawn something to dread. I knew this from personal experience, since I’d grown up mowing lawns about three blocks from Chez Dippy.

  “So,” I said, putting the pen away, “Wattles and Monty Carlo.”

  “Got it.”

  “Wait. Have you heard anything lately about Herbie?”

  “Pretty much retired,” Louie said. “Up in Malibu or something, got his toes in the sand. Why would anybody want his toes in sand?”

  “Listen, be a little careful about checking on Wattles and this Carlo guy. I think Herbie may have done a job on Wattles’s office, and he’s dead.”

  Hearing myself say it out loud again really sealed it. I lost whatever Louie was saying for a moment or two. When his voice finally came through, he was saying, “—killed?”

  “Not quite. He, uh, he died of a heart attack, is my guess. But they were working him over, and as far as I’m concerned that’s what did him in.”

  “Well, you know,” Louie said, “not to sound cold or nothing, but do you think they got what they wanted out of him?”

  “No,” I said, recognizing the conviction as I said it out loud. “If he’d told them what they wanted to know, they would have killed him.”

  I had an index finger extended to ring the bell when the door was yanked inward and a short thick man, a cross between a fireplug and a football center, barreled through it, shoved me to one side, and shouted over his shoulder, “When I’m finished with you, you won’t be able to get a booking on an Indian reservation.” He gallumphed across the lawn and got into a very nice-looking black BMW sedan and took off, leaving about forty bucks’ worth of rubber on the street.

  As I turned back to the open door, something whistled past my nose. It hit the lawn and tumbled a couple of times, and when it came to rest, it turned out to be a Plexiglas case with a trophy in it.

  “I’m sorry about this welcome,” a female voice said from behind the door. “Could you get that for me, please?”

  I said, “Sure,” and went after it. It was a bowling trophy, a woman holding a bowling ball to her chest with a look of severe concentration and that ten-mile stare you see in old Chinese propaganda posters. “The case is cracked.”

  “Did it hit him?” the woman said.

  “Not even close.”

  “Oh, well, he’d just have sued me. Can you bring it in?”

  I said, “I thought you’d never ask.” I toted it up to the porch, and the door opened the rest of the way.

  The word that came to my mind when I saw Dippy Thurston up close for the first time was elfin. She looked like a new human-pixie hybrid, a genetic shuffle that might get patented and bred commercially for its cuteness quotient. Her eyes were uptilted and greenish-hazel above fine, angular cheekbones, and she had a tiny nose, not much bigger than Stinky Tetweiler’s, although this one looked like it might be its original size, unlike Stinky’s, which surgeons had been planing down for decades. Add a short, raggedy haircut pulled into a careless ponytail, and you had an elf, Southern-California south-of-the-Boulevard style.

  She gave me a smile that melted my socks with pure, unadulterated adorableness, and said, “My trophy, please. Do I know you?”

  “Just barely,” I said, handing it to her. “We have friends, or at least acquaintances, in common.”

  She put the trophy on a table near the door, where it would be handy the next time she wanted to throw it, and tilted her head winningly. “I didn’t hear our mutual acquaintance’s name.”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” I said. “Handkerchief Harrison.”

  The eyes got a bit more alert and the smile went a little stale. “And would you describe him as a friend?”

  “If it would clarify things, I just finished threatening him.”

  She pulled her mouth an inch or so to the left, not an expression of unreserved approval. “That helps a little.”

  “How about Louie the Lost?” I said.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “Come on in.” And she opened a drawer in the table she’d put the trophy on and pulled out an adorable little automatic, the kind of thing Gangsta Barbie might pack. She tucked it into the pocket of her cut-off jeans. “Don’t take the gun personally,” she said. “But also, don’t assume I can’t get to it whenever I want to. Is that going to stifle your spontaneity?”

  “Not at all. If you’re keeping one hand on the gun, my watch is probably safe.”

  She said, “That old thing?” without even glancing at it and shut the door behind me.

  We were in a spacious, arched entry hall, saltillo tile studded here and there with smaller tiles of a saturated blue deepened with just a hint of gray. I said, “Delft?”

  “Sorry? Oh, the tiles, yes, Delft. You’ve got a good eye.”

  “I’m a burglar.”

  “And an interesting-looking burglar at that. How come Louie hasn’t introduced you to me? He knows I’m usually looking. Come on in, I’ve just made some lemonade.”

  After the conversation about birds and butts, I was primed to notice her derriere, and it was, well, elfin. I followed it through a shadowy living room, pale gray drapes shouldering aside the sun’s heat, then a dining room centered on a hand-planed hardwood table that looked like it weighed a thousand pounds, and into a bright, butter-yellow kitchen. The perfect California swimming pool gleamed a perfect California blue through the window. By that time, I was no longer studying, or thinking about, her butt. Something about the whole place was stirring ripples in my already agitated emotional state.

  “So,” I said, pushing it aside, “who was the guy who just left?”

  “He used to be my manager. Lemonade?”

  “Until when?”

  “Just before you arrived.” She leaned against the counter, and I observed neutrally that her legs were tanned and very muscular, and that she was barefoot.

  “You really made lemonade?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Too wholesome?”

  “No, it’s just—” I realized what it was, and why the house was troubling me. “I grew up near here, with a pool outside the kitchen window, and we had a lemon tree. On a day like this, my, um, my father always made lemonade.” I smiled, just a general, all-purpose, budget smile, and looked around the kitchen. “Sorry, skip it. I’m having kind of an emotional day.”

  “I’m not, except for Frank, who just left,” she said, “and he’s more than enough. I hope it doesn’t sound unfeminine if I ask you to keep the emotion to yourself.”
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  “Lemonade would be fine,” I said. “I’d love some lemonade.”

  “Attaboy. You like my legs, or what?” She went to the refrigerator and pulled open the door.

  “The light didn’t come on.”

  “And it shouldn’t,” she said. She pulled out a big pitcher, using two hands, and kicked the door closed. “Suppose there’s someone out there with a gun in his hand. Suppose I get up in the middle of the night and want a drink, and there I am, in the spotlight.”

  “Hadn’t thought of it that way.” She put the pitcher on the counter and turned her back to open a cabinet. She went up on tiptoe, revealing a set of highly developed gastrocnemius muscles. “About your legs,” I said. “You’ve done a lot of work on them.”

  She twisted around, one heel still in the air, and looked down. “Too much? Getting a little prison-yard?”

  “No, just very nicely toned.”

  “I run eight miles a day and do an hour in the pool with a kickboard. I should have used them to kick Frank.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “He was getting fifteen percent of me, and he wanted all of it.”

  “Well, he’s lost a good client. I saw you perform once, in Reno at the Four Aces.”

  “Yeah? What did you think?” She was pouring into two thick French water glasses.

  “I thought you were great. I especially liked the trick where the playing card some woman had signed wound up in a sealed envelope in her husband’s wallet.”

  “I liked that one, too. Can’t do it any more, though. The hotel told me, nothing involving the customers’ wallets.”

  “Really.”

  She picked up the glasses and handed one to me. “They said they were worried about some mug saying there had been a couple of thousand bucks in his wallet, and after the trick it wasn’t there. Insurance problem, according to them.”

  “Well, maybe—”

  “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll sit in the dining room.” She kept talking, without looking back, as I tagged along into the room with the giant table in it. “What I figure is that the LA Sheriffs, who can be very Chatty Cathy, told the Reno cops that I’d once been stopped with quite a lot of property that wasn’t exactly mine, according to the traditional definition.”

  “Cops can be stuffy,” I said. I sat at the table, the top of which was about ten inches thick, and looked for a coaster.

  “Just put it down. This wood has more marine varnish on it than the Queen Mary. Listen, you’re a very interesting-looking burglar, but you came looking for me, and that can’t be a hundred percent good, right? And the person you mentioned when I asked you who we both knew was Handkerchief. Double not-good, since he couldn’t tell the truth if he’d had a year of lessons. Drink your nice lemonade and tell me what you want.”

  The lemonade was cold but way too sweet. “Handkerchief gave you something last week.”

  “I take it back,” she said. “He can tell the truth, at least when he shouldn’t.” She looked at her glass and then brought her eyes up to mine. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”

  “How often have you been a disconnect in one of these chains?”

  “Chains?” She lowered her head a bit, giving me the uptilted eyes from what she probably knew was their best angle. It made me think for a second about my pigeon. Then she said, “Well, fuck a bagful of Handkerchief Harrisons. You stay where you are.” She got up and went to the double doors that opened from the dining room onto the backyard. She shoved one of them ajar, sat on the step, and fished in her blouse for a second. Then she came up with a pack of Marlboro Reds and fired one up. She blew smoke out her nostrils and waved it away from the dining room. “This shit is supposed to be secret.”

  “One reason I’m here is to tell you to find somewhere else to be, because this one has gone wrong. The guy who started the chain has taken off, and he’s hard to scare.”

  “I was gonna have my floors redone this week.”

  “They look fine. You’ve got to think about this. This chain probably ended in an order for a hit, and here I am, asking you about Handkerchief. Maybe the hit went wrong, or maybe the hit went right, and either way the hittee’s friends are trying to climb the chain.”

  She said, “Oh, man.”

  “How many of these have you done?”

  She squinted at her cigarette as though it had challenged her.

  “Five? Six?”

  “Who recruited you?”

  “Girl who said her name was Laurel.”

  “Dark hair, shoulder length? Square black glasses? Kind of a head-turner?”

  “Yeah.”

  Our girl Janice. I said, “I think she’s rolling the sidewalks up behind herself, too. She told me she just got engaged and they were going on a trip together.”

  Dippy said, “I knew it was too easy.”

  “How thick was the envelope you passed on?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “Compared to the other times.”

  “Jeez.” She took a drag off the cigarette and studied the coal as though to make sure it was burning evenly. “A little thicker than usual. Given what my own envelope felt like, I’d guess there were three inside the one I passed along. Maybe two if one of them was really thick.”

  “And did you pass it on?”

  “I did.”

  “To whom?”

  She looked at me over a ribbon of smoke. “Do you really need to know that?”

  “Let me give you a hint,” I said. “Monty Carlo.” She just kept looking at me, as though she was trying to X-ray my clothing for weapons. “If you’re worried about me, call Louie and ask him if I’m dangerous. The point is, this isn’t the secret you thought it was, and you might be in the way of some people who are really, really pissed off.”

  She looked at me and then past me, and then down at the cigarette, all the while chewing on her lower lip. Then she said, “Okay, okay. He’s a—a wirehead. Never washes his hair, looks like he lives under a grow-light. Got tats all over his arms, but they’re like algebra and that other thing, with co-signers or whatever they are.”

  “Cosines? You mean, algorithms? Calculus?”

  “I guess, yeah, sure. Calculus. And he’s strange. Like Doctor Forgetto or something, the absent-minded braniac.”

  “And he’s a crook?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get his bio, I didn’t look him up on IMDb. But he’s in this chain, right? So he’s probably not, like, an insurance salesman. I’d guess he’s a techno-crook. Computers, coding, puzzle stuff. You know, some crooks, some dips especially, they’re like magicians? Pickpockets, magicians, techno guys, they’re always working a trick in their minds. Look right through you, thinking about some palming move or a new way to travel a card to the top of the deck. Techno guys, they’ve got the same thing. But Monty, I mean, he’s not weird compared to magicians.” She shrugged. “Nobody is.”

  “So other than Handkerchief and Monty Carlo, you don’t know any other links.”

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? I knew it was coming from Hankie and I was supposed to give it to Monty, but other than that … no, no way I’d know them. It’s like a party I wasn’t invited to.”

  “Where does Monty live?”

  She shook her head, her lower lip poked out. “Uh-uh,” she said. She dropped her cigarette to the pavement, leaned over it, and spat on it to put it out. When she straightened up, she had the little gun in her hand, aimed at the pocket of my T-shirt. “For that, I think I need to check you with Louie.”

  Three glasses of lemonade later, the last two of them enlivened with a moderate shot of vodka, I was back in the car, which was pulled to the curb about two miles from Dippy’s house. The last hour or so of our conversation had been a lot more relaxed than the first one. Through my windshield the houses’ shadows stretched into the middle of the street, so with Daylight Savings Time in effect, it was getting late, a little after seven. I had the address where Dippy had lef
t the envelope for Monty Carlo—she claimed they hadn’t actually met this time—and the note that had been in Dippy’s envelope, which contained the phone number she had used to reach Monty.

  The day felt twenty-four hours long, even though it had only been eight hours since Wattles had barged into Ronnie’s and my room, interrupting what had looked like a very promising day. Since then, I’d driven probably sixty miles and found my adoptive father dead.

  Marking, I supposed, the end of one phase of my life.

  I was on a street only a few blocks away from Kathy and Rina’s house—once mine, too. If this was an appropriate time to think about the phases of my life, I was in an appropriate place to do it, because that house, so close and so unrecoverable, encapsulated one phase, maybe the happiest. The way I saw it, sitting there, my life had gone through four phases, with the fifth beginning with the discovery of Herbie’s body: first, a generic childhood, just freckles and stepping barefoot on sharp stuff, like everyone else; second, the development of my career, when I broke into the house next door and later met Herbie and began to get good at Herbie’s Game; third, the years when Kathy and I were in love and trying to make it work—she trying harder than I, I’m afraid—culminating in Rina’s birth and the first ten years of her life, the only perfect thing I ever had a part in. Fourth, the Unhappily Solo Years, after Kathy and I gave up in despair. That period finally culminated in my shuttling from one temporary uncomfortable bed to another, recently while holding hands with Ronnie; and now, the Post-Herbie period, which had dawned, as far as I was aware, a little after one that afternoon.

  Even though I hadn’t seen much of Herbie lately—an omission that sat on my conscience like a weight—life without him was feeling pretty damn empty. It felt empty enough to draw me close to Kathy’s house because I derived a kind of dull comfort from being in the neighborhood, even if I couldn’t actually see her and Rina. So it was almost a woo-woo moment when the phone rang and the display said RINA.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said as my heart filled with helium and floated to the top of my chest. “Can you come by? Some messenger just dropped something off for you.”