Herbie's Game (16 page)

I looked back at the field and said, “I’ll take that as a no.”

“I am either in a meditative state or helping someone penetrate the veil,” Handkerchief said. “But your problem is as important to me as it is to you. Please leave a number, and I’ll be with you as soon as we’re on the same plane of existence. And don’t forget, if you’re tight for time, our telephone readings are quick and relatively inexpensive. Or, in an emergency, write your question on a piece of paper and send it to me mentally, and then burn it. When the answer arrives in your mind, a check for thirty-five dollars will clear the karmic imbalance. The All-Seeing Eye is as close as your ear.” There was a beep, and I disconnected.

The school where Louie and I had met was only a few miles from the All-Seeing Eye, and I had about ninety minutes before I was supposed to meet Ronnie in West Hollywood, so I tabled the idea of seeing Stinky about the birds and pointed the car in Handkerchief’s direction. I was feeling guilty that I hadn’t been more emphatic about the precariousness of being a part of Wattles’s latest chain.

I’d dialed Hankie, as Dippy had called him, the moment I wheeled out of the parking lot and this was my second try, so the obvious conclusion was that he was scanning someone’s palm or putting her in touch with the Egyptian princess she’d been back in the days of King Tut. Or maybe, I thought a bit self-critically,
just demonstrating the kind of sensitivity and perception he’d shown me.

But way down deep inside, I didn’t think he was. Perhaps it was something I’d picked up from him, a kind of spiritual contact high, but I didn’t like it at all. I was getting a kind of formless dark thing, a psychic ink spot as amorphous and as potentially toxic as an amoeba, that had crowded into the space between my lungs, and it was changing shape and weight as I drove.

I tried to push it away with good, old-fashioned cynicism, since I definitely didn’t believe in any of it, but it sat there, sloshing around unevenly and uncomfortably, and just when I thought I’d finally dismissed it I found myself shouting and pounding my steering wheel and trying not to accelerate straight through the driver in front of me, who waited the duration of a long red light before flicking on his turn indicator. The fact that I didn’t believe in woo-woo of any kind didn’t mean I could fight the conviction—carried through the air like a djinn on some evil wind from the
Arabian Nights
to take up residence in my chest—that something had gone badly wrong for Handkerchief Harrison.

It was close to six, and traffic was clotting in all directions by the time I got to Ventura and made the right that would take me to Handkerchief’s awful little mall. As it was, I got there in time to see the red lights flashing, the police cars and the yellow tape and the waiting ambulance. The blue cluster of cops drinking coffee in a formal-looking semicircle around the wide-open door. I pulled past all of it, past the All-Seeing Eye and the first Thai restaurant and Dixie’s Duds, swearing silently at myself. In the empty Thai restaurant at the rear of the mall, I ordered a Thai iced coffee at a table by the window, and before I could take the first sip they wheeled out the gurney with the body on it, oddly collapsed and diminished beneath the blanket that draped it from head to foot.

I called Louie, and the instant he answered I said, “Put the two new girls on Kathy and Rina right now,” and he was saying, “But wait a—” and then the phone buzzed for a call waiting, and the display said
RONNIE
, and I hung up on Louie and answered it, and she said, “Junior, someone is following me,” and then the phone buzzed again and I put Ronnie on hold because the display said
RINA
, and when I answered it, she said, “Daddy, somebody’s following me.”

To Rina, I
said, “Where are you? Are there cars around? People?”

“We’re on Reseda Boulevard, heading toward home.”

“You and Tyrone?”

“
Daddy
, he got his learner’s permit.”

“Are you with Tyrone?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, keep driving. Hold on a second.” I put her on hold. “Ronnie, where are you?”

“On Fountain, in Hollywood.”

“Keep driving. Stay on busy streets. I’ll be right back to you.” Switching lines, I said, “Rina?”

“I’m here.”

“How far back is the car?”

“Two cars. But it’s been with us for a while. Tyrone’s not supposed to drive without somebody with him, somebody with a license? so he’s always checking the mirror for cops.”

“Still back there,” I heard Tyrone say.

“Is there a police station anywhere near?”

“A police station? Tyrone’s on a
learner’s
permit.”

“Look, stay calm. Look for a McDonald’s, this time of night they’ll be jammed. Go in, order something, and stay there, inside, under the nice fluorescent lights. Do you know where there’s—?”

“One coming up,” she said.

“Well get your asses inside. See what the car does when you make the turn, check what make and color it is, and see if you can get the beginning of the license plate. And
don’t leave that restaurant
until I’m there, got it?”

“Okay.” She sounded younger than usual. Fear will do that, strip right away all our imitation of maturity and misplaced certainty that the world is actually safe.

“Ronnie,” I said, “where are you now, and where’s the other car?”

“We’re just cruising down Fountain. Fairfax is coming up. He’s a couple, three cars back.”

“Turn south. Go down to Cantor’s Delicatessen and pull into the parking lot. Then go inside and stay there until I call you back.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“Someone who might want to get at me.”

“You, you, you,” she said. “Everything’s about you.” She laughed, but it didn’t have much support.

“I’ll call you right back.”

I hung up and sat motionless until, in my mind’s eye, they were all in their respective restaurants. Then I called Louie back.

“I already did it,” he said, before I could even say hello. “I put the second girl on them, before I even asked you.”

“Well, thank you. Call and see whether one of them is following Rina right now.”

“I just did, and she is. Says Rina’s with this great-looking black kid, and—”

My lungs practically collapsed, and all the breath I hadn’t known I was holding rushed out of me. “Good, good, good.

Who is it?”

“Debbie.”

“I thought she was mad at me.”

“Junior, she
kills
people. They don’t get mad the same way we do. They save it up until they need it. It’s like an anger piggy bank.”

“Well, tell her to stay with them. Rina and Tyrone are in McDonald’s. In fact, tell her if she’s hungry to go in and say hi, have a burger with them.”

“Sure, whatever you say. Your daughter and Debbie, having a burger.”

“Thanks again, Louie. Thanks a lot.”

I did the call-shuffle again and said, “Rina, the person who’s following you is okay.”

“What do you mean he’s okay?”

“I mean, first, he’s a she, and second, she’s there because I sort of asked her to be. She may be coming in and sitting with you—really, really cute-looking woman in her mid-twenties. Her name is Debbie Halstead.”

“Is she nice?”

How was I supposed to answer that question? “She’s on your side.”

“On my side against what? Am I in a fight of some kind? What’s the other side?” She covered the phone and said something to Tyrone, and she came back, she said, “Is this something that’s going to piss Mom off?”

“I’ll tell you in an hour or so. At the house. Just eat and go home. Let Debbie follow you home.” I hung up and dialed Louie. “I need to hire you as a driver. Somebody’s following Ronnie, and I’ve got her sitting at a table in Cantor’s waiting for someone to come and get her out of there.”

“And you’re going to
pay
me for this.”

“That’s what I just—”

“Fuck you, I’m your friend, remember? Where am I supposed to take her?”

“To Kathy’s place.”

“Can I go in with her?” he asked.

“Why would you want to?”

“I don’t know. I just never seen anyone commit suicide before.”

Handkerchief had been
a plausible, and most crooks—as I think I already said—don’t really like plausibles. Burglars, car thieves, even hitters—whatever their dealings with the straight world, they tell the truth to one another, probably about as often as orthodontists and cosmeticians and insurance actuaries do. But plausibles never tell the truth, at least not on purpose. Their skill in creating a successful con is based not only on assuming a plausible identity, with a persuasive and harmless-sounding agenda, but also
believing
it, and Handkerchief believed it all the way to his bones. I once heard it said about English people that if you woke them up in the middle of the night, they’d talk like the rest of us. But I knew a burglar who’d surprised Handkerchief, then in his tweedy Antony Mosely-Fenwick role, in a dark and supposedly empty house in the middle of the night, and the burglar said that Handkerchief, terrified or not, sounded like Winston Churchill.

So we didn’t like them much, we relatively truthful crooks. They always make me think of how Superman—who, despite all the super-powers and that little curl on his forehead, must have had a sad and freakish inner life as a teenager, with no one to confide in, no one to jump tall buildings at a single bound with—how Superman, as I was saying, felt the first time he came up against the Bizarro Superman. I’d give odds that his immediate thought, when he saw that fractured, crudely assembled, bad-geometry reflection of himself, was, “That’s who I
really
am.” A lot of us—we
relatively
truthful crooks who lie all the
time to the cops, to the straight world, and to the people we love—we secretly feel the same way about plausibles. They’re a bad-day reflection of ourselves, and it makes us uncomfortable. They provide yet another unflattering angle, as if we needed one, on Herbie’s Game.

I was feeling deeply ambivalent about Herbie’s Game. Despite Louie’s pep talk, those of us who chose Herbie’s Game faced a lifetime of wearing a mask, of lying, of making—sooner or later—the kind of decision that had cost me my wife and daughter. I probably hadn’t even figured out yet all the things that choosing Herbie’s Game had cost me.

So maybe the main reason we relatively honest crooks looked down on plausibles was simply that we needed to look down on
someone
in order to feel better about ourselves. Had Handkerchief, with the empathy that made him a good plausible and an effective fortune-teller—the empathy that had shown him, in my eyes, the loss of a father-figure—known how I and the other relatively honest crooks felt about him? If so, he’d been nicer, more gracious, about it than I would have been, if I’d been in his empathic, intuitive shoes.

I felt like I could devote a little time to Handkerchief right then, I felt like I needed to. There was nothing I could do to deal with the emergency of the moment except wait for Rina to get home and Louie to get to Ronnie, so I sat and watched the ice melt in my coffee while I gave ten silent minutes to the passing of Handkerchief Harrison. There’d been something brave and a little sad in the way he’d flaunted those awful, cheesy handkerchiefs.

Maybe heaven for plausibles is a place where they’re always believed, where the purplest lies, the most desperate flights of fancy, land in the other person’s ears like the Testament they feel closest to. Or maybe heaven for plausibles is a place where there’s never a reason to tell a lie at all, where their
bona fides,
the people they actually are, are always good enough for everything. Where you could pass the brightest of lights straight through them, and it wouldn’t pick out a single area of darkness, not a shadow anywhere.

And it struck me that, all of a sudden, I was watching people die.

What they do in an ambulance after they load the meat into it is a mystery to me, but Handkerchief’s last ride was still sitting there with him in it when my phone rang and Kathy said, “Would you like to explain all this, Junior?”

It took her
a full minute to answer the door, and I had a vision of her stopping to choose and then reject something to throw at me. She was wearing the reserved expression that she usually offered me, but a
lot
more rigid, and her hair, normally abjectly under her control, had gone kind of fly-away so that two long, slightly curling wisps hung over her forehead. Not a good sign.

“You have someone following my daughter,” she said, without actually inviting me in.

“Our daughter,” I said.

A totally strange woman just ushered her and Tyrone through my own front door—and don’t you
dare
say ‘our’ front door—as though I had no say whatsoever in whether she could come in.”

“Speaking of which—” I tried to move forward.

She stepped to the side to block my way. “Do you remember what—whoever it was—said? That the only people who feel at home everywhere are kings and whores?”

“I do, and she’s neither. I’m coming in.”