Herbie's Game (25 page)

He made a sound that might have been a snort. “Well, isn’t this a riot? Hope you parked close, because if you didn’t you’ve had a walk for nothing.” He crumpled the twenty in his hand and turned to go.

I put a hand on the sleeve of his sport coat. It felt thin and slightly greasy, and it released a faint reek of tobacco. “Eddie.
You can either give me five minutes in your office, or I’ll make a stink they’ll be asking you about for weeks.”

He yanked his arm away. “Stink all you want. Get out of here.”

“Do they know about your convictions?” He stopped walking, and I made a note to slip Rina an extra twenty. A man whose job put him in close proximity to half a million dollars’ worth of new cars every day wasn’t supposed to drive under the influence.

“Those records are sealed,” he said. The emotionless little eyes were all over the room. “I was a juvenile.”

“They’re not sealed very well,” I said. “Come on, five minutes. Don’t you owe your father that much?”

“I don’t owe my father shit,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Then do it because I’ll fuck you up with the management if you don’t.”

The look he gave me brought his eyes alive for the first time; I felt his gaze perforate me and keep right on going. His mouth was screwed up as though he was going to spit, but what he said was, “What a guy, but that’s what I should expect. Come on, asshole, let’s get it over with.”

I followed him past six ethereally gleaming cars, too immaculate ever to have burned gasoline. Separating them from the heat and noise of the day was a curved plate glass window that ran the entire front of the building. Through it, if they’d been looking, the cars would have seen their future: dirty, dented, trailing fumes, packed full of questionable people, jammed grille to tailpipe at one of Ventura’s infinite stoplights, and heading mile by dreary mile toward the point where they’d be pulled off the road and chopped for parts.

It didn’t take much energy to see the parallels with our own lives, although it took a little more to push it away. I’d managed
to do it by the time Eddie led me into a tiny office, just an anonymous cubicle with a desk, two chairs, and white walls blank except for an enormous electric clock. The outer wall was made of glass so the management could make sure he wasn’t playing solitaire or slicing his arms open or weeping helplessly into his hands when he should be out there selling.

Solitaire
. The Monte Carlo Method. Where was Monty Carlo right now?

“Do it,” he said. He was standing in front of his desk with his hands in his pockets—usually a defensive posture—and started to jingle some coins. The muscle beneath his eye tugged once and then again.

“To begin with,” I said, “I assume you know about your father.”

“Sure. Got a call from his lawyer, even before the cops told me.”

“Guy named Twistleton?”

“A.
Vincent
Twistleton. Uncle Vince.”

“Really?”

“Don’t be silly. But he might as well have been, since Twisteleton was the way my father talked to us. Through ‘Uncle’ Vince.” He made the first air quotes I’d seen in a decade to set off
Uncle
. “Easier than face-to-face, I guess, if you can’t look anybody in the eye.”

“Talked to you, or to your mother?”

“My mother and I were on the same
side
,” Eddie said, his lips pulling back from his teeth. “The side my father addressed through his lawyer.”

“Really. Well, your dad wrote me a letter—”

“To you personally? Why should that surprise me?”

“He asked me to come and see you.”

“And now you’ve done it. I’m sure you have things to do, so I—”

“He wanted me to try to make you understand.” The words felt surprisingly empty to me, and I realized that some of the things I’d been told about Herbie were making me question what I felt about him. How could I assume that I knew anything about what Eddie’s experience had been?

“Oh, I understand,” Eddie said. “I’ve understood for decades. It’s not so complicated.”

“He thought about you, talked about you, all the time.” This wasn’t literally true, but I figured,
so what? Maybe it’ll make him feel better, if only for now
. “This was his last letter, the one he wrote me, and it’s about you.”

He glanced up at the clock and then, reflexively, at his wristwatch, a gesture with years of practice behind it, and said, “I’ll bet you that twenty you saved Michael at the desk that it wasn’t
only
about me.”

“No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t.”

The nod he gave me had a kind of satisfaction that made me want to look away, the satisfaction of someone who’s enjoying his pain. “It was mostly about
crook shit
, wasn’t it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“See, that’s it, in a nutshell.” He was leaning his butt against the desk, trying to look at ease but the hands in his pockets were balled into fists. “Nothing about this is hard to understand. That’s the way it always was.” He looked down at the floor for a second and then back up at me. “It was just more important for him to be a crook than it was to be a father.”

And there it was, like getting hit in the face with a bucket of bolts: the one short, blunt, unequivocal sentence I’d never allowed myself to put together without qualifiers and justifications, the baldest possible description of my relationship with my own daughter, and here was Eddie, the barely-functioning adult casualty of precisely the same kind of treatment. I must have
stood there without replying longer than I’d thought because suddenly he was leaning forward, studying me and saying, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said, but I was responding to the tone, not the words, because I hadn’t actually focused on the words. “Yeah, fine, I’m—”

The electric clock on the wall went
chuck
very softly and the minute hand took another leap.

“Maybe you ought to sit down. Who banged you up, anyway?”

“A chorus boy,” I said, still feeling fogged in. “Misrepresenting himself.”

Then I was in a chair, and he was sitting on the desk in front of me, although I didn’t actually remember either of us moving.

“Sorry,” I said. “I—I just got kind of sidetracked.” I wanted to talk to my daughter, I wanted to talk to Kathy, but all I could think was,
And say what?

“Yeah,” he said. “I noticed.”

I needed to change the subject, but I couldn’t manage to change it very much, and I certainly couldn’t bring the subject around to Rina. “My own—uhh—my own father left me,” I said. “I mean, he left my mother and me.”

“Well, of course, he did,” Eddie said. “So wasn’t it lucky that you got mine?”

“Hold on a minute.” I shook my head and rubbed at my face, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to bring myself back into that room with Eddie. “What do you mean, ‘of course?’ How much do you know about me?”

“Everything that matters, which isn’t much, because you don’t matter much to me. But I know the
essentials
. I know the
essentials
about all of you.”

I parroted, “All of us.”

“Well, well,” Eddie said. “Lookie here. He’s surprised, isn’t he?”

“What do you mean, all of us?”

“My father,” he said. “It was like the priest’s Boys’ Town, but for crooks. No, that’s not right. It was like—do you read books?”

“When there’s no bowling on TV.”

“He was Fagin, in
Oliver Twist
, that’s who he was. Wanted to make a whole lot of Little Herbies. Actually tried to name me Herbie, my mom says, but she wouldn’t let him.”

“No,” I said, feeling suddenly vicious, “
Eddie
is infinitely preferable.”

He jingled his change happily. He’d gotten under my skin. “And you thought you were the only one, didn’t you?”

I took a moment, stretching my legs out in front of me just to give myself something to do. “How did you know my father had left my mother?”

“They all needed fathers,” Eddie said. “That need was the socket he plugged himself into. He was
Daddy
to everybody except me.”

A part of me wanted to say,
Oh, poor you
, but there he was in front of me. The discard left behind by another clueless father, yet one more abandoned adult, trying to act as though it hadn’t mattered. So instead I said, “Okay,” and got up. “Sorry to bother you.”

“Are you going to make trouble for me with the boss?”

“Why would I make trouble for you, Eddie?” I asked, feeling a thousand years old. “We’re practically the same person.”

The clock went
chuck
again, and once more Eddie looked at it and then at his watch. “Lunchtime,” he said. He put a fingertip beneath the twitching eyelid. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“There were three
of you,” he said, ignoring the little white plastic stick in the glass and stirring his amber drink with his
forefinger. We were in an old-style steak place on Ventura—red leather booths, dark wood, and testosterone, the kind of place that should always be called
Bud’s
. The waitress had brought him the drink and put it on the table before she even said, “Hi, Eddie.”

The drink was a double from the look of it, and light on the water. I said, “Diet Coke, please,” and when the waitress was gone, I asked him, “Was I the first one?”

“Second,” he said. “The first one was a guy named Chris, who learned what he could from my father and then used it to break in to my father’s place and steal everything he could carry, ho ho ho. I guess he left town, but for all I know, my father killed him.”

“Your father never killed anyone.”

He gave me a long look, up from under his eyebrows, and drank.

“Did he?”

His lower lip popped out, as though the question wasn’t worth an answer. “Might have.”

I parked that for the moment and said, “Who was the third?”

“Girl,” Eddie said, almost spitting the word. “Name of Ellen. She finished off whatever politeness still existed between my mother and him.”

“How long did she last?”

“Couple of years.” He raised the glass and eyed me over it. “You mean, were you number one?” He laughed, the way I might laugh if someone I didn’t like tripped in front of me. “Yeah, if that makes you feel better. You were the favorite son.”

The silence stretched out until the waitress arrived with the Diet Coke and said, “The usual, Eddie?” and Eddie nodded.

I asked, “What’s the usual?”

The waitress, who was clearly not marking time until her
studio contract came through, said, “Spencer steak and fries, medium.”

“You have Caesar salad?”

“We do. Entree-size?”

“Fine. Thanks.”

“Want blackened spicy chicken on it?”

“Under no circumstances.”

“I shouldn’t be jumping on you,” Eddie said when she was out of sight. “He disappointed everybody. That’s what he did, he disappointed people.”

“Are you going to show up for the reading of the will?”

The question seemed to catch him off-guard. “Hadn’t thought about it. You think I should?” He tossed back the rest of the drink and then held the glass in the air and rattled the ice cubes.

“It’s, I don’t know, the last opportunity to show up for him.”

“Or to leave him waiting. That’s what he did to me, more often than not.”

“Seems kind of hollow, doesn’t it? It’s not like he’ll notice. Don’t you—sorry if this sounds mercenary—don’t you want to know what he left you?”

“I know what he left me. He left me the key to a safety deposit box and whatever is in it, which is probably cash, maybe some jewelry. Right to the end, he’s got to be cheating somebody. The box is in both names, his and mine, so he can put stuff in it without me around and I can go empty it out solo without the tax people gathering around. Not that I have the key yet, of course. Probably a reason to go to the will thing.” He rattled the glass again, this time earning a glance from the bartender. “Or maybe he’ll disappoint me again and leave me a pack of Life Savers. Pitch a perfect game. What’s he leaving you?”

“A painting by a guy named John Sloane.”

“Pricey?”

“Worth a fortune, probably, but it’s not like you could sell it at Sotheby’s.”

“Probably not.”

I took a deep breath and said, “So did he kill somebody?”

He let a good count of five go by before he answered. “He got arrested for a possible homicide once, but it didn’t go to a charge. For some reason, almost nothing ever went to a charge. Some cowboy actor from TV.”

“No,” I said, waving it off. I almost laughed with relief. “Forget it. I was with him. The man was dead when we got there. Scared the hell out of me.”

“He took a rug, right? That’s what the cops said, it was a big rug.”

“Yeah. An old Navajo. But I’m telling you—”

“I know, he was dead when you got there. Did you take anything else?”

“Couple of things, but the rug was what mattered.”

A new drink arrived, and Eddie did a two-finger salute to the waitress, who glanced at my mostly-full glass and retreated. “Could he have carried it out himself?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not.”

He raised the glass in a toast. “So what you actually
know
is that the actor was dead when you got there, but what you don’t know is whether my good old dad had been there, say, an hour earlier.” He sipped. “And just needed a hand with the rug.”