Herbie's Game (26 page)

“Life,” a friend once said to me, “is a series of disappointments. And that’s when it’s going
well
.”

Back when I was a kid I learned that the best way—for me, anyway—to deal with disappointment, with dashed hopes, with disillusionment, with hitting the wall of life face-first, was to get angry. Getting angry not only put off the moment when whatever it was finally punched a hole in my heart; it also provoked a surge of energy that got me through the immediate aftermath, that kept me moving forward. Even if my action was meaningless, it was better than taking to my bed for days, stewing in adolescent malaise and too male to cry.

So my reaction to what Eddie Mott, DeGaudio, and Louie had told me about Herbie was to get furious. That was infinitely preferable to the paralysis of feeling orphaned or, even worse, knowingly betrayed for a second time. The person who was responsible for all the unwelcome information coming my way, the person who got me into all this, I decided almost arbitrarily, was Wattles. And although Wattles was in Limpopo or someplace equally inaccessible, his office was right where he’d left it, and might yield up an answer or two in his absence.

I had almost two hours before I was due to peer through the one-way mirror in DiGaudio’s interrogation room and fail
to recognize Ruben Ghorbani, if Ghorbani was really going to be there. Bud’s steakhouse, if that’s what it was called, was only about ten minutes west of the building from which Wattles spread his fat fingers over his empire of felony.

The guard at the desk didn’t look up from his iPad as I strolled past him to the elevators. He was wearing earphones, so two of his senses were off duty. As I passed him I tugged the visor on my baseball cap lower to frustrate the security cameras in the lobby and in the elevators. I knew from my last visit where the cameras were positioned in the hallway on Wattles’s floor, and I kept my head down as I passed beneath them, trying to look like someone who was lost in thought.

To my mild surprise, the front door to Wattles, Inc. was unlocked and open by about an inch. I pulled the Glock from under my shirt, listened for a second, and then pushed the door open fast and stepped aside, pressed against the wall just beside the door. There was no reaction—no hail of bullets, no breathy “Come in, handsome,” or anything in between. I counted fifteen, listening for all I was worth, using the first skill Herbie had taught me and the one I may have mastered best. Not a sound, not anyone whispering to anyone else or attempting to scurry out of sight, no rustle of nylons, although no one wears nylons any more, no closet door closing, nothing but my own heart, and even that was more felt than heard.

So I went in.

The place had been methodically turned inside out, but there was some evidence that the methodical approach had turned to irritation and then to full-out fury as the search progressed. The closet door was propped open by a cascade of brightly printed cardboard boxes saying TIFFANY L
OVES
O
NLY
YOU
!!! that had spilled out across the carpet. Some of them had been roughly torn open, and protruding from them were bright, fleshy pieces
of Tiffany herself. From the random bits on view, it seemed to me that plastic manufacturers still hadn’t got skin tone down. As far as I could see, Tiffany’s unclothed bits were the bleached dirty-bubblegum pink of flesh-colored bandages.

A couple of Wattles’s very good overcoats had been hanging in the closet, and they’d been pulled out and shredded with something razor-sharp, possibly a box cutter. Linings had been ripped out, pockets inverted, lapels slit open.

The Tiffany seated behind the desk was a two-dimensional nightmare, deflated and slashed to ribbons. Her left arm had been almost severed at the shoulder, and the way it hung was too real for me; I didn’t want to look at it. I took a quick glance at the inner room, just to make sure I was alone, and then went back into the reception area and locked the front door.

I’d burglarized Wattles’s office once, but that was in the middle of the night, and it had been in fast, grab one thing—a blow-up doll named Dora, Tiffany’s predecessor—and out again. This was the first time I’d been here alone in daylight. It looked smaller and dingier than I remembered it.

The inner office was intentionally uncomfortable, designed to put Wattles’s guests on edge. The furniture had been purchased at the endlessly popular sidewalk discount, except for Wattles’s chair, which was an ergonomic marvel covered in the skin of a griffin or something equivalently expensive, with controls that adjusted virtually every part of the body. Bouncing up and down on it, I found a button that heated the lower part of the chair’s back—good for Wattles’s spine, which was forever pulled out of shape by that gut—and a
vibrate
function that was quite different (I assumed) from Tiffany’s more intimate vibrate function, and which worked much better than the Birdy Rub back at Bitsy’s.

The point, of course, was that Wattles was the only one who
was
supposed
to feel at home. Everyone else was supposed to be as anxious as I’d been when I was dragged in here. Being off-balance like that probably explained why I’d missed the dinginess of the carpet, the cheap paint on the walls, the muzzy smudge of hand dirt around the doorknobs and light switches. The dust on the bookshelves, on his very up-to-date set of law books.

Was he not doing as well as he pretended, or did he just not care?

I sat in Wattles’s chair and tried to look at launching a hit from his perspective. He accepted a contract, undoubtedly in person, undoubtedly somewhere other than this office, took advance payment in cash, and he then chose a hitter. How many times a year would he do this? Not too often, was my guess. He’d be top-of-the line for a hit, considering the care he took to distance himself and his client from the crime, and the amounts of money he had to be shelling out to the links in the chain. Hits, I guessed, were an occasional but profitable sideline.

Wattles thought of himself as an entrepreneur first and a crook second. He had his hand in a lot of things, some of them only marginally illegal, some of them flagrant, but always run from behind a series of screens. While other people did the dirty work, he sat here at the center of a cloud of lime aftershave with his high-rent view of the Valley, intimidating people across his desk, managing misbehavior at a remove, working the phones like a talent agent, slapping away at the keys of—

—of his laptop. The first time I ever met him, when a crooked cop named Lyle Hacker dragged me in here after setting me up to burglarize the home of someone whose house I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near for a gazillion dollars if I’d known who he was, Wattles had given as much attention to his laptop as to me.

So where the hell was the laptop?

As I went through the office, I answered some of my own
questions and asked others. The safe—open and with some papers in it, but nothing that put him in the same league as Murder, Inc.
He doesn’t do more than four or five hits a year
. The desk, largely empty, most of the drawers thoughtfully left open.
So that means a small pool of hitters
. Nothing behind the books on the shelves.
Talk to Debbie about who he might use. What’s she going to do, shoot me?
Use the remote to open the panel on the far side of the room; no secret space behind the flatscreen monitor.
Eaglet is probably less dangerous than Debbie, and she’s in love, which might soften her: see whether she knows anything
.

Back in the reception area. Poor Tiffany’s desk contained nothing, and I mean not even a paper clip, although I don’t know what I thought I might find there. A steno pad? Nail polish? A self-help book? She was a blow-up doll.
Janice and Dippy are gone and Handkerchief is dead; the only other person I know of who was definitely part of the chain is Monty Carlo. Let’s poke him again
. I pulled out my phone and called the number Handkerchief had given me. This time, I got the echoing sound of a door opening on a rusty hinge and Orson Welles saying “The Shadow knows,” followed by the car crash, which had been extended with a large number of hubcaps rolling across the pavement and then spinning noisily to a stop.

I said, “I’m still here. I’ll be here until I talk to you. You’ve got my number. I have to tell you, though, if you want to keep the advantage and control our meeting, you need to get hold of me because I’m getting closer to you. Every minute. The next person who taps on your shoulder will be me. So call me.”

I disconnected, realized I was sitting on the eviscerated latex remains of Tiffany, and jumped to my feet. I instinctively said, “Excuse me,” before I could stop myself. She hissed slightly in reply, air flowing in or out of her somewhere. It creeped me out
enough to send me back into the other room and Wattles’s high-tech chair.

The chain of disconnects, I thought, as I let the unit in the seat massage me. First link, his primary back-and-forth, Janice; second link, a con man temporarily penetrating the veil of reality, Handkerchief; third link, one of the state’s premiere pickpockets, with a sideline in magic, Dippy; fourth link, a probable hacker, Monty Carlo.

All of them felons, Janice had said, although now that I thought about it, I didn’t remember that Dippy had been convicted of anything that might qualify as a felony. Monty Carlo, presumably, was young, so I made a note to ask Rina to look both for a mess involving Dippy and recent local busts concerning intelligence technology or data theft.

The chair stopped vibrating, and I looked at my watch. Time to get on the road for the Van Nuys station. I got up, and the idea hit me like someone breaking an egg over my head. I said, “Of course,” and picked up the chair, flipped it over, and put it on the desk. It took about a minute to figure out that the button that turned on the heat could also be twisted. I twisted it, and the panel popped off. Fitted neatly into a tray beneath the massage unit was Wattles’s little black laptop.

“Yeah, I’m here, right where you asked me to be,” Louie said on the phone. “You’re paying me, aren’t you?”

He was still a little raw from last night. I said, “Thanks, Louie. Sorry to have been such a jerk.”

“You gotta learn to tell when you’re lucky,” he said. “More guys get screwed up in the head because they’re pushing their luck than any other reason. Like marriage, you know? Get crazy about whether the little woman is knocking off a piece every three, four weeks, and break up something you can hardly live without. You find out she did it once and now she can’t stand the sight of the guy, but by then she’s gone, and you’ve traded the candy store for a lollipop. Truth,” he concluded, “is overrated. What matters is happiness.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Sure you will.” He disconnected. People were hanging up on me lately.

The Van Nuys Police Station is a blank-faced, brute-force building on Sylmar Avenue, and what have we learned, class, about the name Sylmar? Well, you couldn’t see the ocean from here, either. The building probably dated from the seventies and had all the charm I personally associate with that decade, which I think of as the antacid the world took to get over the sixties. It
was both plain and ugly, but someone had planted some dispirited little trees in front of it to wave their witchy twigs around in the zephyrs of car exhaust.

I parked a couple of blocks away since the designated lot was completely full of crooks, accused crooks, their family members, and their lawyers. It was hot enough that I was just as happy to walk slowly, one eye on my watch. I was two minutes early when I went in and asked for DiGaudio, and Ronnie was already there, sitting demurely on a bench and looking, in that atmosphere, like the sunbeam that pierces the darkness of the treasure cave to finger the gold.

The guy behind the welcoming pane of glass ripped his eyes off of Ronnie and said, with the charm of cops everywhere, “He know you’re coming?”

“He did yesterday, when we set it up.”

Ronnie came up and kissed the side of my neck, and the cop practically hissed in disappointment and picked up a phone. He said, “Sit.”

I sat. It took about eight minutes before DiGaudio pushed his way through the doors. He looked like he’d been dragged to the station behind a truck. His oversize jacket was wet beneath the arms and across the back, his face was dripping sweat, and he had the eyes of someone who’d just looked in a mirror and seen it go black. He’d pulled his mouth over to one side in a kind of tribute to the sheer magnitude of the pain that was staking claim to him. Even the cop behind the glass looked sympathetic.

I got up, but DiGaudio stopped and waved me back down. He leaned one shoulder against the wall and breathed hard at the floor for a minute. When he pushed himself away, he caught the cop behind the glass with his mouth hanging open and he said, “The fuck are you looking at? You got nothing to do?”

“Sorry.” The cop moved some papers around on his desk and then moved them back.

“You,” DiGaudio said to me, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, toward the door. “Now.” To Ronnie, he said, “You the witness, Miss?”

“I am,” she said.