Herbie's Game (22 page)

It’s a terrible
thing to see someone’s eyes as they realize that you’ve registered their approaching death. It’s another confirmation of what they’re trying, against all odds, not to believe.

The last time I’d seen Paulie DiGaudio, a little less than six months ago, his waist measurement probably exceeded his height. The man sitting behind the table when I was led into the interrogation room in the Van Nuys police station—and whom I hadn’t recognized for a blank, off-balance second that felt like taking a step down I didn’t expect—was as gray as a Confederate uniform, and diminished in that terrible, deflated way that happens when someone loses fifty or sixty pounds so fast you could almost watch it come off.

The skin hung in loose folds from his face and draped his neck like a scarf. Most of his hair was gone, almost certainly burned off by the fire of chemo, and a patchy, peeling red pattern over his otherwise colorless forehead and cheeks looked like the
marks of splattering hot fat. The eyes were still pure DiGaudio, the frayed, seen-it-all-and-surprised-by-none-of-it eyes you see in cops everywhere, but sharpened and focused now by something that could have been fear or rage or pain or all of them at the same time.

I said, “Jesus, Paulie.”

His face went red enough for the splotches to disappear. “Since when am I Paulie, you fucking crook? And what are you doing, waltzing in here and asking to talk to me like a real person? You think people here don’t know who you are?”

“I’m sorry.” I started to sit, but looked at him for a moment instead and said, “And I’m sorry about—about this.”

“Aaahhhh,” DiGaudio said. He looked down at his lap. “I had it when we—you know, that thing with Vinnie, I had it then. But back then, they thought—oh, who gives a shit what they thought? Like they know fucking
anything
. What do you want?”

“I know what you’re going to say, but is there anything I can do for you?”

“You?” he said. “Yeah, you can hop over to France, to the Loover Museum, and steal me the Mona Lisa. Give me something nice to look at. For the second time, what do you want?”

“Somebody beat me up,” I said.

“No shit.”

I pulled out the chair and sat down. “And he stole a lot of money from me.”

“Poetic justice, is that what they say?”

“I got a really good look at him, and so did two other people.”

“So?” He put both hands low on what remained of his belly, and I watched his face twist into a different face.

I said, “Should you even be here?”

“As opposed to what?” He brought his chin all the way down to his breastbone, squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened
both them and his mouth as widely as he could and breathed out. “Sitting around and groaning all day?” He blotted sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, the gesture uncharacteristically delicate. “Taking my pants in? I’ll tell you, since we probably won’t see each other again, avoid cancer, okay? It’s like target practice for poisoners. You ever watch
The Borgias
?”

“No, but I know who they—”

“They woulda gone straight to the top of the heap in a cancer hospital. Everybody mixing up poison, like kids playing with clay. ‘Here, let’s try this one, it’ll only kill
part
of you. Whoops, wrong part.’ Do
not
get cancer.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder. So, some crook ripped off the crook, huh? And we’re supposed to go out and pound the pavement. Gotta right this wrong. You know what they say about two negatives?”

“They make a—”

“They make a positive. Would you want your tax dollars, assuming you pay tax dollars, spent tracking down crooks who make life rough for crooks?”

“I see your point.”

“So go away.”

I said, “No. I did you a favor once, and I want one in return.”

“And if I don’t? What, you gonna tell people I got a relative who’s mobbed up? Look at me, Bender. Do you really think I give a rat’s ass?”

“No threats,” I said. “I’m not dumb enough to threaten you. No better way to lose the argument. It’s just—I guess it’s just fair play.”

He winced again, pushing himself back against the chair, and then he laughed a little air with no voice behind it. “You got
cojones
, I’ll give you that. Whaddya want? So I can say no, I mean.”

“I want to fill out a complaint or whatever I’m supposed to do and describe him to you, and look at a bunch of likely hits on the computer and then, if I think I see him, I want to look at him in person.”

“A line-up. Do you know what a pain in the ass that is?”

“If I’m right, the guy I’m looking for has been in here so often it’s like going out to pick up the paper in the morning. If he starts yelling for a lawyer, we’ll forget it.”

“Three witnesses,” he said.

“And he’s a bad guy. Look at me.” I stuck my tongue out, and DiGaudio recoiled. I said, “What kind of a guy would do that?”

“Are the other two witnesses crooks?”

“No. Cross my heart.” I didn’t.

“Well, shit.” He drummed his fingers in the table. “Okay,” he said. “You helped Vinnie stay outta jail, even if the rest of it didn’t work out so good. I’ll let you take a look and we’ll see who you come up with. Then I’ll think about it.”

It was all on computers. I gave the guy at the keyboard the best description I could of Ghorbani and we identified what he’d supposedly done to me as assault with intent to cause grievous bodily injury and grand theft, and he did his magic.

For eight to ten minutes I looked at the worst-looking bunch of mutts I’d ever seen, a parade of dim eyes, hanging jaws, missing teeth, facial tattoos, and bottled fury, all adding up to an absolute bar code to designate criminal stupidity. All of them were photographed head-on and in profile, all of them looking straight through the camera, none of them suggesting a really high skill set, and then there he was. I flagged him and two others as possibles, and went back to the interrogation room.

“Two of them, forget it,” DiGaudio said as he came back in. He walked as though the floor might ripple and pitch
beneath him at any moment. “One of them is inside and the other one has disappeared. But the one with the funny last name, the one from Eye-ran or wherever, him I can bring in.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“But no lineup, nothing official. I’ll haul him in for questioning, and you and your witnesses can look through the one-way glass for about thirty seconds, and that’s it. If he’s the guy, you fill out the complaint, got it?”

“Got it.”

He leveled a finger at me. It was shaking, and I watched him watch it shake. “And if you tell me he’s
not
the guy, and anything happens to him—I mean anything at all, like he stubs his toe or anything—I’ll have you in here so fast your shoes will still be on the pavement.”

“Fine.”

He sat back in the chair and trained the eyes on me. Normally cops’ eyes made me feel like my skin was transparent, but this was more along the lines of an assessment than an X-ray. “So,” he said, and there was a kind of reluctance behind it. “Somebody did Herbie Mott.”

“Yes,” I said. Hearing him say it, it felt like my heart had doubled in size.

“You guys were kinda close, huh?”

“No,” I said. “Not particularly.” For a quick, over-my-head moment, I wondered whether he’d clicked on the connection between Herbie and Ghorbani, but couldn’t see any way it was possible.

“Not what I heard.” He seemed to be thinking, and while his mind was occupied he reached into his jacket pocket and found it empty. That was where he had always kept his Tootsie Rolls. “Can’t eat them anymore,” he said, seeing that I was watching his hand.

“I’d think you could eat anything you want,” I said.

“Just one of the bitches that come with this shit,” he said. “The stuff you like best? Tastes terrible. I’m living on Asian buffets because they got so much different crap that I can usually find one thing I can swallow. Big irony, huh? Me never much liking Asians. Still don’t much like Asians, as a matter of fact. But listen, I’m not trying to connect you to Mott’s death. That’s Malibu. Cutest cops in California, but they do their job. But I’m thinking there’s probably some stuff about Herbie you don’t know.”

“Like I said, we knew each other a little, but—”

“He dimed you once,” DiGaudio said, and then he pulled his head back the way a turtle will do and just watched me.

I said, “Sorry?”

“He dimed you.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a second, looking like he was deciding whether to continue. “For a job in Panorama City, maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago. Old woman, got a bunch of jewelry taken, got clobbered on the head. Herbie dimed you as the guy.”

I had to inhale twice before I could talk. “Bullshit.”

“But about half an hour later the jughead who clubbed her walked into a pawn shop with her jewelry and we just went and picked him up. So your record stayed nice and clean. No arrest.”

“Never happened.”

“That was one of the things Herbie Mott was,” DiGaudio said. “And maybe you ought to know it. Besides being a burglar and a scumbag, he was a pipeline. We busted maybe fifty guys because of Herbie.” I started to say something, but he held up a hand. “And Herbie skated. That was the deal, Herbie always skated.”

“Like I said.” My voice didn’t have much breath beneath it. “I didn’t know him that well.”

He grimaced and waited for it to pass. When he came back, the worn-out eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them. “How many times you been convicted, Bender?”

“Never.”

“Charged?”

“Never.” I saw where this was going, and it took all I had not to try to get out of the room before we got there.

“Arrested?”

“Never.”

“Junior,” he said. DiGaudio never called me by my first name. “Just ask yourself, back when I was forcing you to help Paulie, ask yourself how I knew you were a burglar. How every cop in this building knows you’re a burglar.” He laid his hands flat on the table, one crossed on top of the other, and watched them quiver. “Just think about it.”

What I didn’t want taken away from me was my sense of who Herbie was, who Herbie had been. It felt as though a big part of my life, the part of me that had chosen and then played Herbie’s Game, had been built on my sense of who Herbie was; by choosing Herbie’s Game I’d locked myself out of several alternative lives. I protected myself against what DiGaudio had said, for the time being, by surrendering to the beating Ting Ting had given me. First I stopped at Doc’s and had him improvise a long wire scratcher for the inside of the cast, which had been driving me crazy. He’d tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t even hold up my end of the conversation. Then, after half an hour of directionless driving, every possible direction feeling equally meaningless, I went to Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, stamping extra hard on the stairs that chirped, took off most of my clothes, ate six aspirin, turned off my phone, and got into bed.

When I woke up, the rectangle of the world framed by the window was dark. Ronnie was sitting on the peacock-print couch, reading something.

“What’s that?” I said. My voice felt unused, like it had been folded too long in a drawer. I cleared my throat.

She held the book up. The title was
The Deceived
. “A thriller,” she said. “A guy named Brett Battles. He’s terrific.”

“What a masculine name,” I said. “Wonder what he’d be writing if his parents had called him Merle.”

“Not to mention Bender.” She dog-eared the page while I tried not to wince. “Means
gay
in British slang, did you know that? So your name is, basically, Young Gay.”

I said, “It’s been brought to my attention.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Terrible.”

“That kid would have beaten you up no matter what your name was. You could have been Biff Hardcase and you’d still be lying here, swelling.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “Well, okay, it is that. But it’s also what Sartre might have called malaise, and I call the heebie-jeebies.”

She put the book aside and got up, and I had the pleasure of watching five feet six inches of immaculately assembled womanhood cross the room, with the added savor of knowing she was heading for me. The pleasure of watching even the most interesting woman cross a room is dampened when they’re heading for someone else. She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up my left hand, which was resting on top of the covers, and began to massage as much of the hand as she could reach, given the plaster cast, focusing most of her attention on my fingers: taking them one at a time, smoothing them out, lengthening them, giving the tip a sharp tug and then moving on to the next. “Why do you have the heebie-jeebies?”