Herbie's Game Read online

  “Is it going to get you into trouble?”

  “If I’m not careful, it might.”

  “And will you be—oh, forget it.”

  “Rina,” I said, “I love you and your mother more than anyone else in the world. If I did anything right in my life, it was fathering you.”

  “Then try not to orphan me, okay?”

  “I’ll do that. And tell your mom it was just a goodbye letter, okay?”

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Like I know anything different.”

  As I pulled away from the house and made the left onto the long straightaway down to Ventura, a car pulled out behind me. That wouldn’t have engaged my attention for more than a second or two, but it didn’t turn on its headlights until I’d gone half a mile downhill.

  That engaged my attention.

  A little street called Santa Rita came up on my left, and I signaled and took it about two blocks east and then turned left again, into a little four-house circle. I made the half turn in the circle and sat there, facing out.

  Fifteen seconds later, a dark Nothingmobile, a generic sedan that might have been a Ford or a Kia or a Flahoolie for all I could tell, drove straight past me without even slowing. I gave it thirty seconds and then pulled out behind it, in time to see it belching smoke to accelerate away. I stomped the accelerator, and the 300 horsepower of Detroit iron that Louie the Lost somehow jammed under the hood of my Toyota punched me halfway into the backseat. But the other driver had already floored it and he’d reached the next cross street, where he swung left, almost losing the road, and I could hear the engine’s roar all this way, even over the noise of my own.

  If you’re chasing someone, the problem with the Tarzana/Woodland Hills area is that word “hills.” The roads have to get around the hills, which means that straightaways like Santa Rita are rare among the east-west streets. Most of them fork and circle around and join up again like spaghetti on a plate, following the ghost-impressions of the streams and arroyos carved into the landscape to provide footpaths for the Chumash Indians during the thousands of years when they had Southern California to themselves. I was planning to accelerate left onto the cross-street, hoping I didn’t spin out, but at the absolute last moment I saw the headlights coming up from the right and I hit my brakes. As I lurched to a stop I saw the car I’d been chasing make another left, into what I knew was an absolute snarl of streets, the kind of convoluted knot you’d probably have to cut out of your hair. I remembered that the driver hadn’t actually followed me into the circle, so my bet was that he was using a GPS unit and already had a route mapped out.

  A silver Rolls Royce, maybe twenty years old, glided by at the pace of a Rose Parade float, well below the 25-mile-per-hour speed limit, probably with five or six miles per hour to spare. This person knew where he or she was going, was in no hurry to get there, and had bought a living room on wheels to enjoy the trip. There was probably a hot tub in the back seat. As I made my left I considered chasing and passing it, but by the time I got up to the next left, the other car could already have looped around and be heading back north to any of a number of streets, toward Ventura.

  It could be taking Vanalden or Tampa or Topeka or Shirley, any of which would take it straight north to the Boulevard and into the 260-square-mile maze of the Valley. Or, if the driver was willing to run a couple of unpaved patches, he or she could follow Vanalden all the way up to Mulholland and, from there, go pretty much anywhere in North, Central, or South America.

  Hopeless.

  The Rolls honked elegantly, a contralto protest, to tell me I was tailgating. I gave up, pulled over, felt my pulse beating against the side of my throat for a moment, and hit speed-dial for Louie.

  “Back so soon?”

  “I need someone you’d trust to defend you personally, and I need him sitting in front of Kathy’s house within thirty minutes.”

  “Can it be a chick?”

  “It can be a dolphin if it can do the job.”

  “Got it. Thirty minutes.”

  “Call me back and give me a description of her car so I don’t kill her by mistake.”

  “A red little whatsit, one of those things that runs on sunlight and happy thoughts. A Leaf, that’s it.”

  “A red Nissan Leaf.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Tell her the guy in the white Toyota is me.”

  “Sure. She drills you, how you gonna pay me?”

  “Thirty minutes.” I cranked the wheel around and headed back to Kathy’s to wait for the gun to show. Twenty-two minutes later, as a red Leaf took the corner and blinked its lights at me, I left my real home to head for tonight’s home.

  The question was, where had they picked me up?

  I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything in the first hours after finding Herbie’s body. Which meant I could have been followed that whole time by someone who saw me come out of the house. So if whoever killed Herbie had been behind me ever since Malibu but had nothing to do with Wattles’s chain, well, that gave me one possible individual, or pool of individuals, to worry about. If, on the other hand, whoever killed Herbie did have something to do with Wattles’s chain—or if the follower had picked me up at Handkerchief’s or Dippy’s—that gave me a different individual, or pool of individuals, to worry about. In short, related to Wattles’s damn chain, or not?

  It would be nice, I thought, as I hauled myself up the stairs to our room at Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, to figure that out as soon as possible.

  Bitsy, or some demonic carpenter who worked for Bitsy, had built little pressure switches into some of the stairs, and when you stepped on one, it produced a bird call. When I found the place, I thought, cool, I’ll always know when someone is coming, but the bird calls proved to be so irritating that I’d already tuned them out. Wattles must have set off a whole aviary of squawks, whistles, chirps, trills, honks, and caws as he and Bones climbed the stairs, but I hadn’t heard a thing.

  The stairs that chirped and nattered had been chosen at random, and in the twelve days we’d been there I still hadn’t found the pattern. So I just tweeted my way upstairs, feeling heavier, sadder, and more useless with each cheerful chirp. By the time I opened the door, it was all I could do to smile at Ronnie, looking expectantly up from her book on the parrotscape of the bedspread.

  “Oh, baby,” she said. She dog-eared the book—a habit I’d failed to break her of—and got up and crossed the room and wrapped long arms around me, giving me the warmth of her body and the faint fragrance of the lavender-scented face cream she used (she said) to delay the day men would stop bothering her on the street. “I’ve been worried about you ever since you called.”

  I put my arms around her and closed my eyes and let her just draw the sadness out of me. After a minute or two, I blew out a huge sigh, unwrapped her, and followed her, like a puppy, over to the bed.

  I said, “Did you eat?”

  “I always eat. What about you?”

  “At Kathy’s.”

  She plumped up one of the pillows she’d brought from her apartment and put it on top of one of the bran sacks or whatever they were that Bitsy put on the beds. “What did she fix?”

  The moment my head hit the pillow, the iron bar in my neck melted. “I don’t remember.”

  “Sure, you do.”

  “Some kind of meat. One of the tough cuts, cooked for a long time. With, you know, stuff.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Don’t take this wrong, but it tasted like home.”

  “I’m not going to take it wrong. I sneaked back to West Hollywood tonight and ate at the French Marketplace. First real restaurant I ever ate at in LA, a friend of mine who ate there seven days a week took me when I’d just gotten here, and that’s what tastes like home to me, the French Marketplace.”

  “That’s kind of sad,” I said.

  “Aaaahhh,” she said. “Toughen up.”

  “I don’t feel ver
y tough.”

  “I know. Losing a parent, even a symbolic parent, can do that to you.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Do I get to answer?”

  “Yeah. I mean, ideally, it should be a conversation.”

  “Okay.” She began to knead the muscle at the top of my shoulder nearest to her. “Will this distract you?”

  “From what?”

  “Very funny.”

  I said, “I have no idea how to put this.”

  She got a thumb under the muscle and pushed up and it hurt really great. “Just dive in.”

  “I don’t feel like we’re going anywhere.” She stopped massaging me. “And I’m wondering whether it’s my fault.”

  “Where are we supposed to be going?” She went back to work on the shoulder.

  “I don’t know. But it’s feeling—static.”

  “Do you still like me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you like me more, less, or the same?”

  “More.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Everybody’s asking me that tonight. It means I know you better than I did three months ago, with some exceptions—”

  “Aahhhh,” she said. “The exceptions.”

  “Wait. It means, even with the exceptions, the better I know you, the closer I feel to you. I’ve given you ample opportunity to bore me, and you never have, and I don’t seem to bore you. It means—”

  “Are you falling in love with me?”

  “Jesus,” I said as an ice cube slid up my spine. “Is that what this is?”

  “I can’t answer that for you.” She folded her hands over her stomach and lay back against the pillows. “It would be presumptuous.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s put love to one side for a minute.”

  “Oh, let’s.”

  “Let’s look at the small picture and work our way up to the big stuff.”

  “That sounds safe.”

  “The way we live, for starters. I’ve been kind of dragging you from place to place—”

  “And what places.”

  “And all the while, you have a really nice little apartment over in WeHo, and I—I haven’t even asked you whether me hauling you around like this is—is—”

  “This is very sweet,” she said. “But you have to trust me to complain when I feel like it.” She rolled over on her side, facing away from me. “But then, you don’t know what I’d be likely to complain about, do you? Because you don’t know who I was before I met you. The exceptions we were just talking about.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder, and she put one of hers on top of it, but she didn’t turn to face me. “I’m going to take a deep breath here and then make a short speech, and if you’re not totally tone deaf, you’ll let me finish it.” She took a deep breath, as promised. “I do realize that I haven’t told you much about myself, and I know it bothers you. There are things I can’t talk about. I don’t even talk about them to myself. It’s not that I did horrible things,” she said. “It’s that some horrible things were done to me and they didn’t make me a better person. That is not a play for sympathy.”

  I said, “Want me to rub your shoulders?”

  “You lack talent.” She squeezed my hand. “Okay, counting down.” She took another breath. “When I was seventeen I stopped secretly cutting slices into the skin on my forearms and began to behave in a way that a shrink would describe—has described—as ‘acting out.’ Running away from home, getting involved with the wrong guys—crooks, some of them violent crooks. When you leave a violent home and hang with violent guys, you develop a set of skills. You learn how to laugh at things that don’t amuse you and how to look like you admire stupidity, you learn that no argument, no matter how good, is going to open a closed mind. You learn how to get way down into your center and hide there in a little ball while things happen to your body. You learn how to find the place in the room where you’ll be least conspicuous.” She licked her lips. “You learn, eventually, how to get even.” She rolled onto her back, sat forward, took one of the pillows that had been behind her, and hugged it to her chest. She leaned back against the headboard, but immediately sat up again. “Are you using that pillow?”

  “My head is.”

  “Well, give it to me anyway. Your head has been through worse.”

  I rolled over and she snatched the pillow, put it behind her, and resettled herself. “Better. Do you know how old I am?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “I’m twenty-seven. I even lied to you about that. From seventeen to about twenty-three, I just hung with wrong guys. I was on the sidelines of some pretty bad shit. It scared me senseless, but not bad enough to go home again. Whatever I was going through, home scared me more. When I was twenty-three, someone offered me a job tending bar. I grabbed it. I worked there every hour they’d let me, stealing a little every night, until I had enough to get out of Trenton or Albany and get a job where nobody knew me. You still with me?”

  “Sure. Wherever you were.”

  “Atlantic City. By then, it was Atlantic City. People who come to Atlantic City carry a lot of cash and they gave me a bunch of it as tips. I bought some of the books I’d refused to read in high school. I read all day and I worked all night. When we first met each other, you and I, once I got past the way you look, I watched the way you studied my bookshelves when you didn’t know I was watching. If you hadn’t looked at them that way, we probably wouldn’t be here.” She looked into my eyes and gave me a smile that was more thought than anything else. “So I read and read. I got a little less crazy, I stopped looking behind me all the time and jumping at every noise. I read some more. I still went out with bad guys because bad guys were what I thought I deserved, if that makes sense. And I got better in a lot of ways, although every time somebody would slap me around or punch me in the mouth I’d go right back into the what did I do to deserve this mode. Until one night I asked myself why the fuck I accepted it. And that was a real light bulb moment, you know? I’d kept getting hit without ever asking myself why, I’d kept climbing into the ring when there were perfectly good seats on the other side of the rope. And that was when I decided to come out here where the sun shines and I could take a shot at being somebody else, and I hooked up with those guys who brought me here in stages.”

  “As I remember, a car thief, a dope dealer, and a journalist.”

  She laughed. “Boy, does that sound bleak. But you know, they were all okay, except for the journalist, and he was the one who looked best on the surface.” She broke it off and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. “So I’m telling you all this because it’s like an imitation of being intimate. It’s about as close as I can get to it right now, and that’s probably one reason things feel static to you. But this is the deal: I met you, I fell for you, and I’ve gone wherever you went and I’ve appreciated it that you haven’t told me to get lost—wait, it’s not as abject as that. Let’s take your first question at face value, shall we? Would I rather be in my sunny little apartment with all my books than in this—this aviary, or whatever it is? You bet your ass, I would. But would I rather be there without you or here with you? Well, hell, you know the answer to that.”

  “But should you have to? I mean, thank you for what you just said. It’s, um, it makes me feel good for the first time in a really bad day. But shouldn’t I have asked you where you wanted to be? Shouldn’t I—”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But you know what? Who gives a damn? Maybe you could be marginally more sensitive, but you know, one of the things about this relationship is that we know how to leave each other alone. We’re not always touching each other’s moist noses to double-check whether every little thing is all right.”

  I said, “No.”

  “So, what I asked you before. Is this—this thing we’re doing—is it going, as far as you’re concerned, in the direction of love?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Then I don’t care,” she sa
id, and she rolled over and put her hand on my cheek. “We can sleep in the fucking car as far as I’m concerned.”

  She had six little moles on the side of her neck that looked a little like the Big Dipper, which is to say they looked slightly more like the Big Dipper than they didn’t. I traced the dipper with my forefinger for the hundredth time and said, “I’m getting off too easily.”

  She pushed her shoulder into me, just getting closer, and said, “I tell myself that every day.”

  The next morning—the beginning of my first full day in a world without Herbie in it—Wattles was still unfindable and Janice had apparently followed him. I wondered how Limpopo was this time of year.

  It had to be better than the Valley, which was suffocating. It couldn’t have been hotter if the sky had been a big brown electric blanket set to high—brown because the inversion layer, which I understand intermittently, had slammed its lid on top of the mountains, sealing in the hydrocarbons and the stench and the little quick-shimmy cough-ticklers that smog plants in the back of your throat. It wasn’t that long ago that the Valley was all blue skies and orange trees and red tomato plants, but progress had had its way with us, and now for consolation we had a lot of pavement and a system of alerts to reassure us that suffocation was safely months away.

  Louie had replaced the gunperson on Kathy’s street with another one, who would be replaced after six hours by yet another. They would park within fifty or seventy-five yards of the house, facing it, with the gun no more than a few inches from their preferred hand.

  “Got you a bargain,” he said. “You know who’s out there right now? Debbie Halstead.”

  “It better be a bargain. Debbie gets five figures, and the first figure is usually a seven.”

  “One-eighty an hour, she said, special for you,” Louie said. “Girl last night was one-ten, but Debbie, Debbie could shoot out every other eyelash at fifty paces.”

  “Well, say hi to Debbie for me.” Debbie was a hitperson with a big smile and an infectious laugh who cozied up to targets and stuck a tiny .22 into the nearer ear. She’d essentially saved my life eight to ten months ago. No, not essentially. She’d saved my life, period.