Herbie's Game (37 page)

“Yes, sir,” Joe said, his face flaming. His ears stuck out like handles, and they were as red as the lantern on the back of an old caboose.

“Lot of donuts,” I observed.

“Joe overachieves,” Twistleton said. “Don’t you, son?”

“If you say so,” Joe said, putting the tray down.

“I like Joe,” Twistleton said to me as though the kid weren’t in the room. “He’s got a first-class mind and he’s a born organizer. You know what, Joe?”

“I don’t, sir, no,” Joe said.

“You’ll have this desk one day. Not until I’m gone in a blaze of glory, of course, but you’ll have it. Or one just like it. And then you’ll give the next Joe a hard time even as you envy him or her for being so young and not knowing yet how much everything fucking costs.”

I said, “Why don’t you share with Joe the three reasons he’s not making the progress he should be?”

“Good idea,” Twistleton said. “We’ll talk one of these days, Joe. Do you drink?”

“A little, sir,” Joe said.

“Well, we’ll work on that. Grab a couple of donuts and beat it.”

When Joe was gone, Twistleton popped the cap off his coffee and picked up a donut. “Yes,” he said. “Your mentor, your adopted father, the best friend you ever had in your life, Herbie Mott,
yeah
, he shopped some guys to the cops. It was part of the deal that got him off those charges I just told you about. But it wasn’t just that, just filing a few tips with the police. For two decades, from the first time I worked with him until the day he was killed, he had an understanding with the law. He worked both sides of the street, and very skillfully, too.” He took a bite, and powdered sugar sifted down onto his lapels. “So,” he said, “it looks like you’ll just have to learn to live with that, won’t you?”

I felt like I’d spent the past few days looking at the video of some stranger’s awful cruise. One face I didn’t know after another, one mask after another, masks I didn’t know how to penetrate. People who did things I hadn’t done, committed crimes I hadn’t committed, had consciences I couldn’t plumb, went places—emotional and physical—I hadn’t been: a tour of the circles of hell, but in better weather. Vacation videos of the damned, I thought. And every now and then the camera would hit the floor and the person who’d been holding it would disappear, beaten to death or shot at and wounded, and someone else would pick it up and point it someplace new. In the background at all times, partially hidden by the motion and the occasional violence, I could see, half-exposed and transparent, the face of someone I thought I’d known well, but looking very, very different.

I was parked behind the chain link fence that separated the parking lot from the acre of dark earth with its orderly green rows. New plants have a brighter green, a more optimistic green, than plants that have learned, to their surprise, that they’re not always going to get watered on time and that once in a while the plant next to them, the one they thought of as their best friend, is going to get yanked up by the roots, leaving nothing to mark its existence except a dry little dimple in the dirt.

The fence went all the way around, which explained, I supposed, why no one had stolen all the plants out of hunger or sheer meanness. The garden was intact, waiting for the return of its caretakers. Those women and girls pulling weeds had been the most optimistic thing I’d seen since Wattles barged into our room at Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, dragging his goddamn chain behind him. It seemed to me, sitting there, that the world—or perhaps just my world—was short on beauty and kindness.

And then I pulled myself up short and took another survey, this one beyond the perimeter of the fogged-in Valley of Perpetual Self-Pity. Kathy when she’d opened her arms to me on the night after Herbie was killed; Rina holding down her end of the couch, taking my emotional temperature and putting a figurative cooling hand on my brow; Louie the Lost telling me how he drove Alice to the garden in his meticulous Caddy so she wouldn’t get her own car dirty; Ronnie on the night I got home after telling her I loved her on the phone.

My God, I thought, that was just last night.

So I was wrong. My life had more, probably, than the share I’d earned of beauty and sweetness, even if it was tempered with the occasional cold faceful of sheer evil. It was time, I guessed, to do something about the evil, or at least the evil of the moment which, as the Bible tells us, is always sufficient to the day, whichever day it is. Even though evil seems to be an ever-present constant, we’re usually strong enough to take on a specific day’s allotment. And I could do that now. Even if I didn’t have all the pieces, I had enough.

I got out of the car and went around to open the trunk to get the Glock, and there it was, the cheap jewelry box. It had been in there ever since I left Stinky’s place, bleeding and humiliated by Ting Ting. Okay, it wasn’t urgent, I thought, picking up the box, but perhaps that was the very reason to do something about it. I couldn’t hurt, much less kill, anyone by learning a little more
about its contents. As an added benefit, I wasn’t likely to get hurt or killed myself. It might even occupy me while I waited for that last piece of information.

I leaned against the car and looked for a number among my contacts, and the phone rang.
ANIME
, it read.

“Hey, truant,” I said,

“Lilli and I have been talking,” she said. “Way too many people get shot. This world is full of guns. The person who did the shooting—no, I mean, the one we’re trying to find, the, um, the victim of the person Monty left the money for?”

“I’m following you.”

“Well, he or she, the shooter, got the envelope out of that mailbox, right? Right here in the Valley. And Monty said the pay was thirty thousand, right?”

“Right and right.”

“So, I mean, come on. Somebody who can set up a chain like that one, someone who can pay thirty thou, well, if that person wanted somebody killed in, geography’s not my subject,
Chicago
, wouldn’t he or she have gotten someone in Chicago?”

“Maybe. We crooks, we mostly know crooks in adjacent ZIP codes.”

“Not us. We know people just like us in China and Taiwan and Germany.”

“Well, you live in a different world. Listen, let me interrupt you for a minute, okay? I want you to think about quitting this thing with Monty.”

She said instantly, “Why should I care what you want me to do?”

“That’s a good question, and there are three reasons why.” I was surprised by how easily the old formula came to my lips. “One, I have only your best interests at heart. Two, there’s no way I can benefit from what I want to say. And three, I’m older than you and you should shut up and listen.”

“So there’s two good ones and that last one,” she said. “Hey, Lilli, Junior wants us to quit ripping off the states.”

Lilli, in the background, said, “Call the newspapers.”

My eyes ranged over the planted acre. I could hear in the background, at a constant level like the sound of running water, the sound of cars on the Ventura Freeway, half a mile south of me. “You could get caught,” I said. “The kind of thing you’re doing gets less safe by the minute, and I mean that literally. The governments, state and local, they’re spending a fortune on this. Those people you think you know in China or wherever it was, for all you know by this time tomorrow they’ll be working for the government or they’ll be in jail and someone else will be sitting at their computer, pretending to be them and trying to bring you down.”

“We know all that.”

“I really don’t think you should be a crook at all, but if you have to be, you should think about some area that’s not changing so fast. Burglary, to pick an example, it hasn’t changed in centuries.”

“Are you volunteering to show us how to be burglars?”

I rested my elbow on top of the car, which was about as hot as a white car gets. “No, not at all. That’s not something I’m going to do for anyone.”

“Okay. My turn. I’m sure you like burglary and that you’re, you know, talented at it. But I’m fourteen years old, okay? And I’ve got almost two hundred thousand dollars stashed, in cash, in a bunch of shoe boxes, and every penny of that plus everything else I make in the next couple of years, which should get me to a million easy, is going to put me through MIT in six years on a cash basis, and I’ll come out with two degrees and fearsome skills and I won’t owe anyone a penny. I’ll be set for life.”

I was shaking my head as though she could see me. “No one is ever set for life.”

“Oh, please. I know, people get cancer and die in car accidents or marry the wrong person or blah blah blah. But the things I can control, I’m going to control them.”

“And if you get caught?”

“Then I’ll be able to afford a really good lawyer. And anyway, like you say, the government will probably try to hire me.”

“I’m not going waste any more time arguing with you. But remember this, will you?”

“Wait while I plug in some memory. Okay, go.”

“If you get jammed, or you suddenly don’t know what to do, either you or Lilli, if it gets spooky, if you think maybe you need help or you should disappear—well, you’ve got my phone number.”

There was a silence, and then she said, “That’s really nice of you. You’re, like, not like an adult sometimes, you know?”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“That thing about knowing crooks who are mostly in the neighborhood?” It was a sentence fragment, but she turned it into a question.

“I remember,” I said. “I was the one who said it.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be true about whoever paid for the hit? Isn’t he probably here, and that’s why he knows about the guy who set up the chain, and isn’t the person who got killed probably somewhere around here, too?”

“It qualifies as a hypothesis.”

“Good, because we’ve been working on it. In a few minutes, Lilli is going to text you the names of five people in the LA area who got shot in the last five to seven days and who fit that—that list of things you gave us, about being interesting and the cops not knowing much about them and all that.”

“I’ll look for it. Will you think about what I said to you?”

“No,” she said. “But thanks for saying it.”

“This is Anthony,”
said the man on the other end of the phone. He sounded like he was on tiptoe, like he thought he might be talking to the president, and the customers he dealt with—movie stars and self-important multi-millionaires—undoubtedly felt it was appropriate.

“Tony,” I said. “It’s Junior.”

“
Anthony
,” Tony said, and I could almost see him sneaking looks around the store and covering the phone with his hand. “And I don’t buy from you guys no more. I’m on Beverly Drive, okay? Next door to a fur shop. I buy from people who actually
own
stuff.”

“I’m not looking to sell you anything. I just want to ask you for an opinion.”

“No,” he said. “You describe it, I’ll want it, and that’ll just get me upset.”

“I think it’s junk,” I said.

“Sure, sure. You always had an eye for junk. Herbie taught you better than that.”

“Liberation jewelry—”

“Nice stuff, but faked a lot. If it’s real, in great shape, eighteen, twenty. That’s retail. If you’ve got the legend—who owned it, maybe a picture of her, and if she’s got a title that people would kneel to, like duchess or princess, maybe twenty-five.”

“Well, I’ve got a nice one, and—”

“Not interested,” he said. “Not unless you can come up with a provenance, and I mean iron-clad. Liberation jewelry, that’s not junk. People ask questions about it.”

“I’ve got two of them. One is the one you’ve seen pictures of, right out of Cartier. The other one is a kind of Incredible Hulk version, made out of wire and nail polish and—”

“From the same person?”

“Well, I got them from the same person. In the same box.”

He said, “Yeah?”

I stood there and listened to him think. He said, “You know the story?”

“Whose story?”

“The person who had it, the person who made it.”

“No.”

“Well,” he said. Then he cleared his throat and then he cleared it again. “Tell you something you never thought I’d say to you,” he said. “You should probably give it back.”