Herbie's Game (36 page)

“Gee,” I said. “A mess.”

“Is it possible that you won’t know before then?”

“It might be. Just out of curiosity, how would my identifying the murderer simplify the what-do-you-call-them, the bequests?”

He spread his huge hands, looking like someone who was being reasonable but saying nothing.

“I see,” I said. “You think I’m going to—
remove
—whoever it is, don’t you?”

“Well, well,
well
,” he said quickly, “we have moved far afield, haven’t we? I am, I’ll remind you, an officer of the court.” He lifted the sunglasses in his hand. “These are my officer of the court glasses.” He put them on the desk, pulled his hands away from them and made a little motion, shooing them away. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t I what?”

He gazed toward the ceiling, a man requesting patience from above, and put the glasses on again, low on his nose. “Herbie made an enormous difference in my life,” he said. “I don’t want to give anything of his, even temporarily, to someone who harmed him. Coffee?”

“Sure, thanks. Black.”

He pushed a button on the desk and said, “Joe? Two coffees, one black and one for me. And some donuts.”

“Sorry, sir, donuts are gone,” someone who was presumably Joe said.

Twistleton closed his eyes and pursed his lips. He had long, luxuriant eyelashes, long and thick enough to make a shadow on his cheeks. “Please,” he said, “tell me this is not a problem I have to help you solve.”

“No, sir.”

“Good.” He released the button. “He’s still afraid of me, Joe is. I asked him to go down and get my car a couple of days ago, bring it up to the front of the building, and he took off like he’d been shot out of a gun. About eight minutes later he came back in and asked me for my keys.”

I said, “I usually go get my own car.”

He grinned at me. “Herbie said you were a pisser.”

“How did he make an enormous difference, I think that was the phrase you used, in your life?”

“Mmmmm,” he said. “This isn’t something I usually talk
about. In fact, Herbie may have been the only person I did talk to about it.” He looked around the office, as if seeking something that would prompt him, provide an opening. “I wasn’t exactly born to this.”

“I sort of got that. All that precision mechanical work.”

“I never met my father. My mother, single, like a lot of moms in South Central, supported three kids by working two jobs for a total of four hundred dollars a week. I make a hundred times that, more or less. When I was twelve, I set my eye on that figure, a hundred times what my mother made, and I went twenty hours a day to get it.” He rocked in the chair a couple of times. “And for quite a while it didn’t look like I was going to get it.”

“And this leads to Herbie?”

“It did, but it takes a minute or two. I got into a pretty good firm, worked longer and harder than anyone in the history of the company, and became a really expert white man. I dressed white, sounded white, thought white. If the dominant race had six fingers, I would have had an artificial one sewn on. If they’d had chrome foreheads, I would have had a chrome implant.”

“Just for the money?” I asked.

He smiled again, the smile of someone who’s been caught and doesn’t care. “No. There was power, too, of course. As a kid I didn’t have any power. My mother didn’t have any power. We lived at the whim of others. If one of my mother’s employers had let her go, we’d have been homeless. So power was part of it, too.”

I said, “Makes sense.”

He sat back and gave me an assessing look. “Are you actually interested in this?”

I said, “I am.” I was still looking for what Herbie had seen in him.

“Fine. School was awful, typical South Central in those days,
rundown building, not enough books, too many kids, and most of the teachers were there because they couldn’t get themselves sent anywhere else. But then there was third grade, and third grade was Mrs. Ridgely. Thanks to my mother, I was reading way ahead of grade level. Until third grade, my teachers were too busy to notice, just trying to manage the classroom. By first day in Mrs. Ridgely’s class, I was reading at junior-high level and writing about the same. The minute we sat down that morning, she had us take fifteen minutes to write about what we wanted to get out of school. The kid next to me was done in about one minute, and he took his paper up and put it on her desk. That started it. Every fifteen seconds, someone would get up and drop their page on her desk.”

“While you beavered away,” I said.

He gave me a stainlessly white grin. “I guess I tuned everything out, because as I was finishing up I felt eyes on me and the whole class was watching. Mrs. Ridgely was at her desk, her glasses pushed down on her nose, looking over them at me. I got kind of flustered, I guess, because I left my last sentence unfinished and took the paper up to her. She just watched over those glasses, and when I got there she pushed them up and read my name on the front page and said, ‘Vince or Vincent?’ I said, ‘Vincent.’ Even in third grade I knew I wasn’t a Vince.

“She said, ‘Well, Vincent, you must want quite a lot.’ Then she looked down at the page and her eyebrows went up as she read the first few words—I mean, I guess that’s why they went up, because when she looked back at me her eyes were narrow and she was chewing her lower lip. She said, ‘We’ll have to see what we can do for you.’

“I said, ‘Thank you,’ but I didn’t think she’d really do anything.”

“What did you write?”

“Idealistic kid stuff. My mother had taught me that language was the most powerful weapon. I used a lot of words to say I wanted to learn to read and write well enough so I could help people. Ask a hundred kids what they want to do in life, and they’ll say
help people
. It’s enough to make you wonder why most of them turn out the way they do.”

“And what did she do for you?”

He held up an index finger and touched it with the opposite one. “First thing she did was put me near the kids who could barely read but wanted to, and I helped them, right there in class.” He touched the next finger. “Second thing she did was design a whole year’s worth of study, just for me, reading seventh grade books, and not just textbooks, either, but novels and even nonfiction. Third, at the end of the year she passed me off to the dreaded Miss Willis. This was still the era of ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs.’ Anyway, Miss Willis had quit being a nun for reasons that everyone wondered about, but she was still capable of taking a ruler to the back of your hand when she thought you needed it.” He laughed a little and rubbed at his left eye. “This was, of course, a less enlightened age when you could still rap a kid’s knuckles without going to jail. Miss Willis picked up where Mrs. Ridgely had left off and handed me in fifth grade to Mr. Lee, Mr. Johnnie Lee. Mr. Lee was famous in the school because for years he used his summers to go down south and get hit on the head by cops and bitten by police dogs. Had a big pink scar in the center of an actual dent on the left side of his forehead.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Some brave people back then.”

I just nodded, not wanting to slow him down.

“So Mr. Lee showed me a piece of paper and said, ‘Do you mean this?’ and when I looked at it, it was the thing I’d written for Mrs. Ridgely. I said I did, and for the rest of the year Mr. Lee talked to me about the law and gave me books about lawyers.
The one I remember best was
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial stood out, too. So, to condense things a bit, I skipped sixth and seventh, went into eighth before my voice had begun to change, and wound up in pre-law at UCLA at sixteen. By then, I could practically hear the trumpet fanfares in my ears.” He raised his hand, miming stairs. “I was going to come out of South Central and
climb
.”

“And you have.” I said.

“Well,” he said, his face tight, “this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I started out in advocacy law, but it burned holes in me. The system was so big and so slow, and people’s lives were so short, and I’d go home and not sleep and not eat, actually banging my head against the wall at times, and a few years later, when I got an offer from these folks, I took it. I got to do some pro bono cases I cared about, and I still do them, but the office game got into my blood, and I decided to play it for all I was worth. And, yeah, I made a little progress. I talked white and I watched baseball and even played a little golf—whitest game ever invented, who but a white man would come up with a sport that requires a hundred acres of mowed lawn? Played golf, talked baseball, dressed right, worked eighty hours a week, but it wasn’t really happening, I wasn’t getting there. I was stalled, doing and being everything I thought these folks wanted in a prospective partner and not making the progress I felt I deserved.”

He swiveled the chair and looked out the window at Century City, all money and no taste, until he’d exhausted the view’s interest value and then turned back to me. “I’m telling you this because of Herbie, of course. I’m not in the habit of going Chaucerian on people, boring them with my tale while I run up the billable hours.”

“I’m interested,” I said. “A guy in my position doesn’t hear a lot of lawyers’ life stories.”

“Herbie,” he said. “Along came Herbie. He was up on a bunch of charges, all related to a single offense, but they were junk. One cop just wanted to put him down, and he wasn’t overly scrupulous about how he was going to do it, so it was easy to pick it apart. A kid—Joe, out there, for example—who’d read the law books carefully could have gotten him off, even if he was literally guilty of some of it. So I got him off, and we celebrated by going out and drinking. We smoked, too. Those were the days.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty-one, twenty-two years.”

I nodded. Just before I became Herbie’s apprentice.

“And about three in the morning and a gallon of gin down, he said to me, ‘You know, you’d do a lot better if you weren’t just a mirror.’ ”

I said, “A mirror.”

“He said I was giving my bosses themselves back, in a mirror. He said it was the wrong thing to do, for three reasons.”

“The famous three reasons,” I said. “Herbie had three reasons for everything.”

“First reason,” Twistleton said, “they actually didn’t believe I was like them. They were white, right? Deep inside, they knew I was just mimicking them, and you know what? It made them uneasy because in their souls they were sure I wasn’t really
anything
like them. Who knew? Maybe one day I’d snap and come in wearing African robes and calling myself
A. Vincent X
. How could they promote me when
that
was in the cards?”

I felt myself smile. “And the second reason?”

“The second reason, Herbie said, was that I wasn’t having any
fun
. You can rub away at work until you either disappear or you rule the world, he told me, and you’ll never get what you want. Because even if you think you want money and power,
what you really want is to have
fun
having money and power. And when people focus only on the money and the power, by the time they get it they’ve forgotten how to have fun. And that, he said, is when you develop Donald Trump Mouth.”

“He used to talk to me about Donald Trump Mouth.”

“And the third reason was that I wasn’t using my biggest advantage, which was that the other people in the company were afraid of me. They were all good liberals, all voted Democrat and contributed to the United Negro College Fund, they were all proud of having hired me, but if they’d seen me coming at night on a dark sidewalk, they would have thought about crossing the street. They wouldn’t actually have
crossed
the street, of course. They were too enlightened for that. They would have stayed on that sidewalk, possibly praying silently, and when we passed each other, they’d have said
Hi
or something, maybe lowering their voices to sound more formidable. When they were past me they would have resisted turning to look over their shoulder, and they would have silently congratulated themselves on that. Take advantage of that, Herbie said. Scare them a little.
Push
them. Make them cross the street.”

“And it worked.”

“It did. A little aggression, a little attitude, a willingness to say no to cases that affronted my sense of social justice and to tell them
why
I was saying no, no golf at all, ever, and those shades, which created quite a little stir among the staff when I started to wear them all the time. Plus, of course, eighty hours a week and being smarter than most of them, and here I am. And you know what? Even if I hadn’t gotten here, it was so much damn fun that I still would’ve been grateful.”

“Well,” I said, “he changed my life, too. I’m just not sure how grateful I should be.”

“That’s up to you,” Twistleton said. “Unless your relationship
with him was a lot different than mine, he didn’t force you to do anything. He just helped you to be more of what you were anyway.”

“I guess.”

“He said sometimes he felt more like your father than your friend.”

The word
father
almost made me flinch, I’d been hearing it and thinking about it so much lately. “It felt that way to me, too. Of course, that was before I knew he was kind of a serial father. Did you ever deal with the cops on his behalf?”

Twistleton’s eyebrows had constricted at the words
serial father
, and they didn’t relax when I asked the question. “What does that mean? I don’t
deal with cops
for anyone, but what in the world could you possibly mean?”

“I have it on good authority that he ratted people out. On a continuing basis.”

“I see,” Twistleton said, just as the door opened and a very thin, nocturnally pale young man in a monumentally inexpensive suit came in with a tray containing two cups of coffee and a mountain of donuts. The kid crossed the carpet as though he thought it might be mined, and when he got to Twistleton’s desk, he hesitated about putting the tray down.

“With the exception of my calendar book, the entire desk is empty, Joe,” Twistleton pointed out. “I’d say that the spot you’re looking for is a place both Mr. Bender and I can reach without having to get up and walk to it.”