Herbie's Game (23 page)

“Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m chasing my tail.”

She bent back my thumb and little fingers to open my palm and began to rub it deeply with both of her thumbs. “It’s worth chasing.”

I said, “Really.”

“That was the first thing I noticed about you, your tail.” She
finished rubbing the center of my palm and blew on it, and every hair on my body stood up.

“Do that again,” I said. “Actually, though, the first time you saw me, I was facing you.”

“I am such a liar.” She reached across and got hold of my right hand, and I rolled onto my side to allow her to sit up straight as she worked on it.

“I’ve pretty much told you the truth,” I said.

“We’re different,” she said. She’d gotten to the ring finger and she slowed down when she felt the swelling around the middle joint. “Did you get this when you hit him?”

“
Hit
him?” I said. “I never even got close. I probably bent that one of the many times I fell on it. How are we different?”

“You’re open, especially for a crook. I tend to parcel out the truth while I try to figure out whether you and I are something real or just another low-level glandular seizure.”

“Well,” I said, “the way I look at it, it’s a low-level glandular seizure, too. In addition, I mean, to all the other stuff.”

“Let’s talk business,” she said. She looked very serious, maybe even a little frightened. “What I told you about Trenton—” and there was a knock at the door.

“Go into the bathroom,” I said. I meant to leap from the bed, but my leap wasn’t on call, and I unfolded myself so slowly I could practically hear my joints. Whoever it was knocked at the door again, and I heard male voices, two of them. “In there,” I said, trying to get my legs into my pants. “
Now
.”

“You sound so masterful,” she said, “and you look so silly.”

“It’s just barely possible,” I said, zipping my fly, “that this isn’t a joke.” My T-shirt would do; it was good enough to die in. I grabbed the Glock and handed it to Ronnie as she passed me on the way to the bathroom. “If you hear shots, stay in there with the door closed, and if anybody opens it shoot them over and over.”

“Over and over,” she said, shutting the bathroom door behind her.

I grabbed a table lamp in the shape of a rooster, the little shade pulled crooked on its head like a drunken Shriner’s hat, yanked the cord from the wall, and went to the door. I counted to three to focus myself, put my hand carefully on the doorknob and then turned it and yanked it open, backing up fast and almost pitching the lamp at my caller, which seemed to be an explosion of flowers.

“This is your house?” Ting Ting said, just barely not wrinkling his tiny, decorative nose. He looked at the bathroom door, which had just opened, and his expression cleared. “This is your girlfriend?”

“And this is his gun.” She let it dangle from her fingers as though it had been someplace nasty. “Who are you?”

“Um,” Ting Ting said. The basket of flowers was half as big as he was.

“He’s being diplomatic,” I said. “This is Ting Ting. The guy who beat me up.”

Ronnie said, “Look at me not laughing.”

“Mr. Stinky, he is sorry,” Ting Ting said, giving the basket of flowers a little shake in case we’d missed them. “Me, too, very sorry.”

“Well, thanks, but how the hell did you find me?”

“I brought him,” Louie the Lost said, stepping into the room. “He was blindfolded until he knocked on your door.” He took a quick look at my expression and said, “Don’t give me that. You want Stinky to stay mad? You want to get shot at again?”

“So,” I said, “just to reconstruct. Stinky called you to find out where I was and you volunteered to play peacemaker. And you kept an eye on your rearview mirror all the way over.”

“Better than that,” he said. “I had Eaglet following me about four cars back. Even Ting Ting didn’t know it.”

“Eaglet,” I said. “Is she outside, too?”

“Yup.”

“Is there anybody I know who’s not outside?”

“Bring her in,” Ronnie said. She grimaced at the giant bouquet. “Ting Ting, I’m so sorry. Please. Put those here.”

Ting Ting gave her his high-beam smile and put the flowers on the table in front of the combination birdhouse/ashtray, and began to rearrange the blooms, of which there were a great many. Fussing with them, he had his back to the door when Eaglet came in.

She’d traded the rainbow cape for a peach-colored Indian blouse, circa 1967, covered with bits of plastic mirror that would have made her, if she hadn’t been so young, look like a love-in attendee who had just gained consciousness after fifty years beneath a bush in Griffith Park. All she needed was a stick of incense in her hand, a press-on peace symbol tattoo, and a circlet of flowers in her hair. Instead, she had seashells woven into fifteen or twenty long braids. She looked at me, looked at Ting Ting’s back, and looked at me again. The shells in her braids clattered. She said, “Who totaled
you
?”

I said, “He did,” and Ting Ting turned around and their eyes met, and even I could hear the long rippling arpeggio on the harp.

“Oh,” Eaglet said. “My gosh.”

Ting Ting said, “Who?” and then lost the rest of the sentence.

“Ting Ting,” I said, “this is Eaglet. And vice versa.”

Ronnie said, “And you were complaining about
Merle
,” but then she broke off and said, “Isn’t this sweet?”

There was a long silence, interrupted only by the sound of Eaglet and Ting Ting swallowing, and then Louie said, “Maybe you guys should give them the room.”

“I don’t know
what I’m doing,” I said for the second time that evening. We were in an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant not far from Bitsy’s, and I was talking mainly to Ronnie and Louie because Ting Ting and Eaglet were in their own separate book at the end of the table. “I started all this because Wattles asked me to find out who stole the info about his chain, and I took it because of the money and also because the way the locks had been left open made me think it might have been Herbie, leaving tracks, as he used to say, and I could earn the other five K without popping a sweat. But Herbie is dead and Wattles and Janice have vanished, so even though he paid me a first installment, I don’t feel particularly compelled to keep looking, especially since I can’t find the next link in the chain, this guy named Monty Carlo. I’ve been keeping at it mainly because Herbie got killed, and number one, he asked me in a letter to figure out who did it, and number two, although he said in the letter that he
knew
who was most likely to kill him, I figured the odds were close to even that he was wrong. That he got murdered because someone hired him to burglarize Wattles’s office, and then Herbie either wouldn’t give them the information he stole, so they killed him, or they killed him because they didn’t want to pay him, or for fun, or I don’t know why. And then somebody killed Handkerchief—”

Louie said, “You’re shitting me.” He looked like something had just exploded in his face.

“I always think you know everything,” I said. “I should have told you.”

He pushed his plate away. “Killed him how?”

“Same way as Herbie, although maybe not down to the details. Herbie’s details were pretty terrible. But they beat him to death.”

“Aawww,” Louie said. “Handkerchief wasn’t that bad.”

“That should be on his tombstone,” I said. “Handkerchief Harrison: Not That Bad.”

Ronnie said, “That’s mean.”

“Yes, it is.” I said to the air, “I’m sorry, Handkerchief,” and I meant it.

“So there you are,” Louie said. “You’re doing it for Herbie.”

“And now,” I said, my eyes on Louie, “I’ve been hearing some things about Herbie.”

Louie found something to look at in the parking lot. I let him look at it for a minute, and then Ting Ting and Eaglet laughed softly, and I said to Louie, “You’re not interested in learning what I’ve heard about Herbie?”

“People talk,” Louie said dismissively, but there was a lot of color in his cheeks. “Especially about the dead. It’s easy to talk about the dead. They can’t get even.”

“You know all about Herbie and me.”

“Well, sure,” Louie said. He had an open Mediterranean face made more open by an expanse of forehead that registered everything that went through his mind. He was rubbing his forehead as though he had the beginning of a headache, but he was doing it because he’d long known I could read his forehead like skywriting. “Everybody who knows you knows about Herbie.”

“No one has ever said anything bad about Herbie to me before.”

“Who would?” he said. When it became clear I wasn’t going to answer him, he said, “So who did?”

“DiGaudio.”

“Oh, well,” Louie said, sitting back. “He probably just saw a way to poke a hole in your day. He’s that kind of guy.”

“He’s dying,” I said. “It was my impression that he’s on a mission to tell the truth while he still can.”

“He’s a
cop
.”

“He said Herbie was a pipeline.”

Louie looked across the table at Ronnie, the only person in our group who was eating, although she was eating enough to make up for the rest of us. “Good, huh?” he asked her.

Ronnie said, “Mmmph.”

“I need to know, Louie,” I said.

Louie gave the tablecloth a sharp tug. “Why? Why do you need to know? When Herbie was with you, he was who he was to you. Why do you care who he was to other people?”

“I have to tell you, that’s not an encouraging reaction.”

“I mean, come on. All of us, you, me, all of us, we got people who’ll say we’re terrible. Hell, we got people we been terrible to. Why should Herbie be different?”

“He shouldn’t,” I said. Across the restaurant, the waitress was watching me with concern; I wasn’t eating. I gestured to the food with an open hand and smiled to reassure her, then said, “But from your perspective, Louie, just between us, who
was
Herbie, on balance?”

Ronnie put both hands up, a plea for a pause, swallowed, and said, “You said to me once that when you met Herbie, you told him you hated your father, and that Herbie said it would take a long time for you to understand who your father really was. You’re doing the same thing to Herbie that you were doing to—”

“Why is everybody so fucking eager to protect me?” Even Eaglet and Ting Ting broke it off and looked at me. “Herbie was a—a
signpost
in my life.
Burning desert this way, Emerald City that way
. I chose, I thought I chose, the Emerald City. But now—”

“You’re who you are,” Ronnie said. “Nobody made you who you are except you.”

“Louie,” I said, and paused, trying to find an avenue of approach, and then I had it. Louie had volunteered to front
money for me this very week, to pay Eaglet and Debbie, and he was one of the very few crooks I knew who would lend money to other crooks when they were in trouble. “Louie, tell me honestly. How much money would you have loaned to Herbie?”

Louie got up, pushed his chair back, and folded his napkin and dropped it on the table. “None,” he said. “You happy now? I wouldn’t have loaned him a dime on a hot day if he was ten cents short for a Popsicle. You want to worry about something real? Worry about those two.” He nodded toward Ting Ting and Eaglet. “Stinky loves that kid. Loves him like he never loved anybody. The other boys, they were like furniture, but this one—this one, if Stinky loses him and he thinks it’s your fault, I’m telling you, Stinky will kill you. No figure of speech, Junior. He’ll kill you.”

He shoved the chair in, hard, and stomped halfway to the door, his shoulders hunched high, as though fighting a weight. The waitress watched him go, her mouth open. Even Eaglet and Ting Ting were paying attention. Halfway to the door, he turned back around. “Piece of advice, okay? Don’t look too close at blessings. You’re thirsty and somebody hands you half a glass of water, don’t get all bent out of shape about that it wasn’t full. Just drink it and say thanks and go do something that makes you feel good.”

I said, “I’ve already slept. I slept for hours. You sleep.”

“Then what’ll you do?”

“Go drive around.”

“We’ll both go drive around.” She got up, leaving me alone on the peacock-print couch. “Do you really think Stinky will try to kill you?”