Herbie's Game (13 page)

“No, she won’t,” he said. “Cheese store, my ass.”

I had nothing to say, and I didn’t say it.

“Lemme tell you something,” he said. “You’re a young guy, a nice-looking guy. Things pretty much okay with you?”

“Pretty much.”

He raised both hands, palms facing me, and then let them fall onto his thighs with a
smack
. “Well, appreciate it while you got it. Just say
thanks
all the time. ’Cause you know what? It’ll average out. Every day you stay lucky, every day you stay happy, your personal supply of bad luck gets bigger. It’s like a rock hanging over your head, the luckier you are, the bigger and heavier it gets. Listen, things go a little wrong? You got some problems? Your teeth hurt? Say thanks, because that’s whittling away at the rock hanging above you. Me, I went years and years, everything fine, lots of money, no real work, cops left me alone, I had a great time with One through Six. Happy as a pig in shit because I didn’t know.” He raised his hands again, palms toward the ceiling this time, elbows bent, Atlas waiting for the world to be lowered into his grasp. “Every time I found a four-leaf clover, that thing up there got bigger and colder and heavier. And then, here I am, eighty, and
bam
—” He brought his fist into his palm with a sound like a pistol shot. “—that fucker falls on me and everything turns to earwax. Just, you know, take it easy with the good times and say thanks for all the good stuff and the not-so-good stuff, too, ’cause otherwise that shit’s gonna land on you like Mount Everest.”

I said, “This is all Seven?”

He said, “Biggest mistake ever. It’ll be night forever. Never be happy again.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“You think eighty sounds like fun?”

“Not particularly.”

“You think it would be more fun to be eighty and married to someone who hates you, who won’t divorce you, who knows so much about you that you can’t divorce
her
without spending your final decade in the jug, who’s going out to the
cheese store
or the
nail parlor
every day, who’s just waiting for you to die?”

“No,” I said. “Doesn’t sound like fun.”

“Come on,” he said. He tried to get up and failed. Put both hands under him to try again. “Just one fucking cup of coffee.”

Most of a
cup of very strong coffee later, he said, “You like this house?”

“It’s a swell house,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to live on Hudson.”

“I’d give it to you in a second,” he said. He extended his arm and moved his coffee cup left to right in a long arc to take in all we could see of the house. “All of it, furniture and all. I’d move to whatever dump you live in—you live in a dump, compared to this?”

“That’s a safe way to describe it.”

“Got a girl in it?”

“It does.”

“I’d take her sight unseen,” he said.

I said, “She’s not available.”

“You know what I mean. I’d take the dump you live in, take the girl without even looking at her, give you this place, my bank account, Seven, whatever you want. Just to be your age. Shit, to
be halfway between my age and your age. You could have the pool, the fucking Mercedes, everything.”

“Yeah, but neither of us could deliver.”

He screwed up his face in concentration. “Dog years, you know dog years?”

I drained my cup, feeling my heart accelerate to keep up with the caffeine. “I’m familiar with the concept.”

“I used to think dog years was a way to, you know, figure how old a dog is in human years. But now I think dog years means how many more dogs I got years for. I figure right now, if I get a dog that dies young, I got a little less than one dog year left.”

I’d seen nothing in the house that indicated that a dog was present, and like all burglars, I’m keenly attuned to dogs. “You like dogs?”

“Not much,” he said. “But if I did, and if I got one, it would outlive me. Maybe I should do it, let it fight with Seven for a piece of the will.”

“What’s with the plastic surgery on Seven?”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, well.” He looked down into his cup. “Might have been a mistake. I wanted her to look more like One, so I paid for a little work. Doesn’t look so good, does it?”

“Might just conceivably be one reason she’s so pissed at you.”

“The first time was good,” he said, sounding defensive. “She didn’t have no more chin than a goldfish, so we fixed it, and it looked okay. Then we did some more and it kind of went downhill. It was like, you know, when you’re cooking something, and you put too much of one thing in, like salt, so you figure add sugar or something, balance it out. And it just tastes worse and worse, but you keep trying. Like that.”

“So,” I said, unkindly, “does she look like One now?”

“You kidding me? One was beautiful.”

“And Seven?”

“Seven looks like one of them wooden puppets used to sit on a voice-thrower’s knee. More coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, and he pulled the pot off the burner. “I’d give you a hard time myself if you did that to me.”

“Look at me,” he said, pouring. “It ain’t like she fell for me at first sight. It was a deal. She marries the old guy, she does what he wants for a few years, he dies, she’s rich forever. No more cheese stores, she can have the boys brought in, in threes and fours if she wants. We just hit kind of a bad streak with the surgery.”

All I could think of to say was, “Strong coffee.”

“Why drink it,” he said, “if it don’t get your attention?”

“Did you ever meet a burglar named Herbie Mott?”

He didn’t give it a second’s thought. “I don’t mess with burglars. The more stuff you got, the less you like them.”

“In the old days?”

“Nope.” He sniffed his cup but didn’t drink. “Hey, you wanna be careful with Ruben. This is a guy who eats shoes—”

“You told me.”

“I did? Oh, yeah, I did.” He put the cup down. “Wish we could make that trade,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t tell you this before, I think, but Ruben did some hits. Not for me, ’cause it’s bad strategy to kill people who owe you money, but he did for other guys. I put him in touch with a couple of guys who needed somebody done.”

“Who?”

He made a sound that might have been a scoff, if I’d known what a scoff sounded like.

“Thanks for the tip,” I said. “You haven’t asked me why I’m looking for Ruben.”

“Why would I? I told you, we ain’t friends.”

I said, “Right.”

“But here’s a favor you could do me,” he said. “If you find Ruben and, you know, there’s anything left when you’re through with him and if he’s not as crazy as he used to be, tell him I said hi. Tell him he might drop around some day.” He pushed the cup aside and looked around his kitchen. “Have a cup of coffee or something.”

It was past noon and I was buzzing like a bag of hornets as I backed out of Burt’s driveway. I had the kind of caffeine high that replaces my normally orderly, even somewhat stately, mental processes with something I call the Flip Book, based on the old kids’ toy in which the reader fans through the pages to make a little animated dog run or dance or, I don’t know, lift weights. But when I get the Caffeine Flip Book, the pages speed up and slow down at random, whole groups of pages are missing or upside down or sideways, and what should be a progression turns into an uncontrollable stutter, skipping important connective material and slowing over the painfully obvious, as my little cartoon dog becomes a dwarf with a shovel over his shoulder, a rhinoceros, a spreading oil slick, finally resolving into those little airborne drops of water cartoonists sometimes use to indicate extreme anxiety. When I found myself wondering what the War on Drugs was for if Burt’s coffee was legal, and all the places I had to go seemed equally urgent and equally pointless, I called a time out.

Paying very close attention to what I was doing
—check the mirror, turn the wheel, don’t hit the parked car
—I pulled over to the curb, sat back, and did some deep, slow breathing as I watched dark sedans drive by with Koreans in them. Koreans
like
Hancock Park, in part because some of them can afford it, in part because it’s minutes from Koreatown, and in part because
Hancock
sounds like
Hankook
or
Hanguk
, which is what South Koreans call South Korea and—when the North Koreans aren’t looking—North Korea, too. So people from Hankook have moved into Hancock and have taken remarkable care of the houses they bought.

Here I was, on this side of the hill for a change. The “hill” is the long line of highly flammable dirt mounds officially known as the Santa Monica Mountains, except in Hollywood, where they’re called the Hollywood Hills because Hollywood, being Hollywood, just needed its own mountains. Whatever they’re called, they divide greater Los Angeles from the southern edge of the valley, and “over the hill” means, essentially, whichever side you’re not on at the time you say it. Right now the Valley was over the hill, and on this side of the hill were the China Apartment Houses and my ultimate hiding place.

On March 9, 2001, a Korean plausible named Winnie Park came face to face with the rapidly changing emotional landscape that always results when someone who has given all or most of his or her money to someone else realizes that he or she has bought real estate on Mars. In this case the he or she was a he, and he was armed. Winnie was great with blue-sky—she could have sold Bibles to the Taliban—but her people-reading skills weren’t as highly tuned as Handkerchief Harrison’s. The sucker Winnie was working was a former LAPD cop who’d made a fortune on the take before getting ever-so-discreetly fired, and he’d entrusted most of it to Winnie on the promise of a sixty-percent profit in eight weeks. When the ten-pound penny had dropped, he’d thrown down on her, and he’d had big hardware. I’d been in the room, not entirely innocently, and since he was less angry at me than he was at Winnie, I’d succeeded in talking him down
over the course of ten very sweaty minutes. A week later, he was looking for both of us, and Winnie was in Singapore, where she was promptly caught and then jailed for a con scheme. She still faced seven more rent-free years in the tropics before she could hit the street again.

Before she left, Winnie had paid me for my services by taking out a lease on Apartment 302 in the Wedgwood Apartments, once one of the art-deco glories of Los Angeles, and turned it over to me, with my name nowhere on it. Once the luxurious residence of directors, almost-stars, screenwriters, and mistresses, the Wedgwood and its sister buildings, the Lenox and the Royal Doulton, had seen property values plummet in the forties and fifties as money and the people who earned it moved west, toward Beverly Hills and Brentwood and the sea.

The buildings, called the “China” apartments because each of them was named after a manufacturer of fine china, had peeled and leaked and opened their arms to rats and roaches until they were bought, all in cash, by a somewhat mysterious syndicate of Korean businesspeople. The syndicate had restored the apartments inside the buildings to their former glorious luster, while adventurously distressing the exterior walls and the corridors. The palatial spaces inside these three paint-peeling eyesores today housed some surprisingly wealthy and almost uniformly shady occupants, mostly people with several names, who made their payments in cash and parked their nice cars in the anonymity of the giant, connecting underground garage that stretched beneath all three of them. Since the China apartments were on a corner, that meant I could pull into the garage of an apartment house on one street and drive out of the garage beneath a different apartment house on a different street entirely. Crook’s paradise.

Apartment 302 was my end-of-the-world hidey-hole, the
place no one knew about, not even Rina and Kathy. Well, one person did. The world’s oldest still-dangerous mobster, Irwin Dressler, had found out about it by accident—he’d had a friend, a one-time starlet named Dolores La Marr, who had occupied the entire top floor. But I was on Dressler’s very small good side for the time being, and my secret felt reasonably safe.

Still, I’d driven the smoggy, eye-stinging streets, taking my habitual evasive moves and making needless stops, all with one eye on the mirror. And after I’d ridden up in the battered elevator and paced the dingy third-floor hallway, when I undid the superlative locks in the cheap-looking door (thin, brittle fiber-board over half an inch of iron), I entered the world of gracious living and Gloria Swanson, fourteen-foot ceilings and built-in bookcases, silver nitrate film and Barrymores, the age when orange blossoms dappled the trees behind the silent-film cameras while, just out of shot, high, squarish cars spooled billows of red dust from the unpaved surface of Hollywood Boulevard. A world that had a lot of injustice and inequality in it, but also a world filigreed with touches of grace that we’d tossed overboard as we sailed through time. We had, however, retained the injustice and inequality.

The Wedgwood cleaning crew, required by the building’s owners, had buffed everything to a high gloss since I’d been there last, and as the door closed quietly behind me, I let out the sigh the place always seems to wring from me. The building’s walls are three feet thick. The city would have to be on fire for it to get hot inside my living room.