Herbie's Game (2 page)

His hair would still be damp. His shave would be aggressively successful. He’d reek of Royall Lyme aftershave, forty bucks a bottle, with the little lead crown on the cap. As he would say, class stuff. Taken together, then: all these characteristics identified Wattles as he undid the cheap locks on the outer door to his office.

Identified him externally, that is. Wattles’s interior landscape, a column of dark, buzzing flies looking impatiently for the day’s first kill, was tucked safely out of sight.

Tiffany, the new receptionist, was, as always, at her desk, wearing her permanent expression: pretty in kind of a plastic way, happy, perpetually surprised enough at something to be
saying,
Oh!
A brunette this week, she was wearing her LaLa the French Maid costume, although Wattles actually preferred Nurse Perky. Still, change was good. He’d had to replace his first receptionist, Dora, when a truly lethal crook named Rabbits Stennet had nearly discovered her secret, which was that she had been modeled on his wife, Bunny, about whom Rabbits went all Othello whenever anyone even looked at her. Rabbits had once backed his car over a parking attendant at Trader Vic’s because the man had taken the liberty of turning on Bunny’s seat-warmer.

So Dora had been hastily shredded in bulk, all two hundred of her, and replaced by Tiffany: same latex blow-up doll, different nose, different eye color, different wigs.

Wattles had probably squinted at Tiffany as he went to the office’s inner door and its array of very
good
locks, because she was sagging a little. He might have heard the soft hiss of a leak, which meant that he would have to find the little battery-powered pump and top her off.

Or maybe just pop the valves and let her deflate, replace her with another one. After all, there were more than three hundred and fifty of her boxed up in the closet, waiting for the mail-order lovers who were the clientele of Wattles’s one legitimate business. $89.95 a pop, although Wattles wasn’t sure that was the best way to put it.

All the blow-ups leaked sooner or later, thanks to the low manufacturing standards of the Chinese factory where they were produced, which Wattles hadn’t complained about because it ensured re-orders. Maybe he’d put a new one at the desk. Nurse Perky again. Or maybe Venice Skater Girl, although that was kind of informal for the office, and the shoes were expensive.

So he was probably singing, full of illegal plans, thinking about blowing up a new Tiffany, and smelling all limey when he
tried to stick a key into the first of his
very
good inner locks and couldn’t. It wouldn’t go in. He leaned down, grunting a little as the movement squeezed his gut, and saw that the inner tumbler was upside down.

So were the others.

The door had been opened, and whoever had undone those very good locks hadn’t even taken the trouble to lock things up again.

He went inside, leaving Tiffany to hiss in desolate solitude, and got the TV remote that opened the panel in the wall opposite his desk, but when he turned to aim it, he put it back down. The panel was open. So was the door of the safe behind it. He didn’t even bother to go look.

The one thing that was sure to be missing was
absolutely
going to be the piece of paper that could kill him.

He wheeled his chair over to the window and plopped down, watching the San Fernando Valley work up its daily output of smog. Wattles knew whole battalions of crooks, but he could only think of one person who knew where his office was, could pop those particular locks, and was also enough of a smart-ass to leave them popped.

He could also only think of one person who could help him figure out whether he was right.

Problem was, they were the same person. And this, unfortunately, was where I came into the narrative, because both those people were me.

Trying to ignore all the birds on the wallpaper, I looked at the bird in the brooch with the kind of regret a farmer might feel just before he beheads the chicken his children have named Pookie. It was going to be hard to part with it.

While platinum has been the top of the hill for jewelers for decades, giving the ultra-rich an opportunity to sneer at gold, it’s still a relative newcomer to the vault. Unlike gold and silver, which have dangled from wrists and ears since the dawn of the two-syllable word, platinum didn’t become available in quantity until the early 1900s. In fact, when the Spanish conquistadors discovered lumps of it in the gold they were ripping from the earth of what is now Colombia, they tried to melt it and failed, and then tossed it away as a nuisance. They called it “platina,” meaning “little silver,” and one theory was that it might be unripe gold. In the nineteenth century, Lavoisier conquered the metal’s high melting point by using oxygen, which, conveniently, he had just discovered. So, by the end of the nineteenth century, there it was: an increasing supply of this beautiful, high-luster metal, brighter than silver and harder than iron, and no one knew what to do with it until Cartier, founded in Paris in 1847, figured out how to use it to support precious stones.

And boy, did they figure it out.

The object in front of me, perhaps an inch and a half in height, blazed with fifty to seventy tiny diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The stones decorated the platinum body of a bird—the rubies on the breast and the sapphires on the wings, with the diamonds adorning the head. The bird perched behind a graceful, curving grid of platinum in the form of a bird cage.

Which meant that I was experiencing one of those head-on environmental and temporal collisions that frequently remind me that every moment I live contains all the others I’ve experienced or even read about. I was sitting, surrounded by wallpaper birds, in a feverishly avian room—bird bedspread, bird lighting fixture, bird knickknacks, actual, somewhat depressed-looking birds caged glumly in the corner—in Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, certainly the north San Fernando Valley’s most obsessive motel—and staring at
another
caged bird, this one made of precious stones and platinum on a royal-family-quality brooch crafted in the late 1930s. I was also smelling nail polish, which I always associated with my mother, from a brush wielded by Ronnie Bigelow, who was emphatically not my mother. Ronnie, her knees tucked to one side, was adding production value to the almost-king-sized, almost-functional Magic Fingers massage bed labeled
THE BIRDY RUB
, its coverlet decorated in printed parrots the color of healthy lung tissue. Ronnie’s eyes took bites out of the brooch as she smoothed a tiny brush over the nail of her right baby finger.

“Why the cage?” she asked.

“It represents the imprisonment of France by Germany,” I said. “It’s liberation jewelry from World War II. The red, white, and blue bird stands for France, and the cage symbolizes the Nazi occupation. Cartier made these and sold them in Paris under the noses of the Nazis, which was pretty brave, considering the famous Nazi sense of humor.” I held it up to the light
from the window, and the stones caught fire. “Imagine a willowy French socialite with one of these gleaming on the shoulder of her gown, making small talk as she dances with some Heinrich from the Gestapo. After the war, Cartier changed the design by putting the bird on top of the cage.
Voilà
. Freedom.”

“How do you know she was willowy?” Ronnie said. “Socialites eat pretty good, and French socialites probably get their pick of the day’s baguettes.” She squinted at the brooch again and then held out a hand, elbow straight, to look at her nails. “I could wear it better than she did.” The sight of the hand prompted a frown. “The right hand is the one I always screw up.”

The late-morning sunlight was discovering 24-karat gold in Ronnie’s hair, which was in the kind of multidimensional tangle predicted by chaos theory, like a foam of whipped Mobius loops.

“If you always screw up the right,” I said, “then why start with it?”

“Always do the hard thing first,” she said.

“Whatever happened to warming up?”

“So, as I was saying, it would look better on me.”

“It won’t get a chance to. It’s going into Rina’s college fund. If I can figure out how to sell it.”

“Rina’s thirteen.”

“And?”

The tip of her tongue clamped between her teeth, she started to paint the thumb of her right hand. “Okay,” she said. “Rina’s college fund is not negotiable. Why don’t you sell it to that awful man with the teensy nose up in the hills?”

The awful man she meant was Stinky Tetweiler, one of LA’s prime fences for connoisseur goods and generally the first place I’d take a piece like this one. But Stinky had tried to have me killed a few weeks earlier, and while I don’t generally get personal about business, I wasn’t giving him anything as good as this brooch.

“It’s too nice for Stinky. Cartier made these things and brave women wore them while the Gestapo basements were squeezing out screams all over Paris.”

“What’s it worth?”

“Twenty, twenty-five K. At the burglar’s rate, I might get twelve.” I’d probably get more from Stinky, but the hell with him.

“Was it the only thing you got last night?”

“No,” I said. “The other thing is kind of weird.”

“Thing, singular? You go to all the trouble to break into that house and you only take two—?”

“What’s the first rule of burglary?”

“Don’t get caught.” She was staring at the partially painted hand as though she was having second thoughts about the color.

“And how do we avoid getting caught?”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

“Herbie’s Rule Number Three. In and out fast, right? Every minute over twenty or twenty-five that you’re in the house—”

“I know, I know. Get out fast. But still, only two—”

“That’s why junkies get caught. They take everything. The mark gets home and the whole house is missing and the TV is in the front yard, and he calls the cops and, junkies being junkies, the guy who hit him is probably nodding out at the wheel of his car two houses down.”

“Junkies might as well be furniture,” she said.

This was new ground. “Do you have personal experience with junkies?”

“No,” she said. “I watch the Heroin Channel.”

“You haven’t mentioned a junkie in the rich and unreliable narrative of your life.”

“If my life is a house,” she said, “you haven’t even gotten to the living room.”

“You’re just grumpy because you can’t remember which town you told me you were born in.”

“So, not to change the subject, what’s weird about the other thing you took?”

I gave up. Morning chats with an attractive and potentially consenting member of the opposite sex always make me shift focus to one of the lower chakras, and getting Ronnie mad would lessen the chance of that chakra being allowed to go out to play.

“Here,” I said. I got up from the chair and went to the bed. “Lift the brush so you won’t yell at me when you paint your knuckle.” When she did I plopped onto the bed. “Look. This is the Cartier. It’s perfect. Immaculate artistry: rubies, diamonds, platinum, the whole shmear. And then there’s this.” I held out my other hand. In it was a brooch, of a kind, with an irregular birdcage made of bent wire to house a carved wooden bird, clumsily painted red, white, and blue. The whole thing had been glued to a piece of low-budget metal which had, in turn, been glued to a rusty safety pin. The metal of the cage was tarnished and corroded, an uneven spiral that looked like it might have begun life as a watch spring. There was a hair in the glue, and the colors of the paint had faded. Neither the carving nor the painting of the bird was exactly skillful, but it had a certain raw attitude, an improbable vitality.

She touched the tarnished cage and the bars wobbled. A self-respecting parakeet could have busted out in seconds. “Why would you take this?”

“They were together in the box. I thought I’d take them together, try to figure it out.”

“I like it better,” she said. “Want to give me this one?”

“Would it affect the way we spend the next ninety minutes?”

“Naw. You’ve been good enough. And, although I’ll deny this if you tell anyone I said it, we women experience the occasional
meat-dance urge, too, when we’re in the company of a competent but not too dominant male who smells good and has nice manners and a knack for abstract thinking. In a pinch, forget the thinking. Let me look at that for a minute while my nails dry.” She extended her right hand, the one she’d done first, palm up, and I put the handmade birdcage into it. She brought it up close to her face, looking down at it, and said, “The fancy one is pretty. But this one is beautiful.”

“You’ve got a fine eye.”

“I already told you I’d honor your ticket.”

“I need to get someone to look at it. Someone who’s not Stinky.”

“Oh, just take him some flowers.”

“He hired a guy to
kill
me.”

“Orchids, then.”

Somebody knocked on the motel room door. Not aggressive, but confident. I snatched the homemade brooch from her hand and dropped both of them into the jewelry box, which had a label from a chain of budget stores on it, and motioned to Ronnie to do one more button on her blouse, not because she really needed to, but because I wanted to watch. When the show was over, I went to the closet and got my Glock out of the holster that was dangling from the coat hook on the inside of the door. Then, holding the gun in the hand I kept behind the door, I pulled it open and felt my stomach sink.