Herbie's Game (40 page)

Despite all of Monty’s fancy algorithms, in the end it came down to simple subtraction. It was really just a question of who was left. The fact that the victim of Wattles’s hit had turned out to be a gambler iced it, even before Anime called me with the name I’d asked for. And the name tied the final knot.

But as neat and final as the knot was, the puzzle it solved comprised only one part of the problem. Wattles was the other part, and since Bones’s apartment was near Paramount, the shortest route to Herbie’s killer took me right past Wattles’s house in Benedict Canyon.

Of course, Benedict was at a crawl at that time of night, a little before seven, jammed with all the people who work on the LA side of the hill and sleep in the Valley. The sun was about thirty minutes down, and between the hills, as I inched northward up the canyon, I caught glimpses of the red glow in the west, punctuated by the silver gleam of Venus as it followed the sun down.

Wattles had never been a friend, but I’d never really thought of him as an enemy, either, and I supposed I’d been right about that since he hadn’t specifically told Bones to kill me. Still, it was hard to work up much sympathy for him at this stage, and
I couldn’t think of a reason to bother trying. This whole thing had to come to an end.

I pulled past his driveway and made the next right, about fifty yards downhill. Most of the houses here were tucked behind gates and invisible from the street, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t see me; security cameras sat on the fences, pointed at the members of the hoi polloi who were misguided enough to pay a call. I was stopping on this street precisely because there was a camera just like these above Wattles’s gates.

But I knew something Wattles had no idea I knew. I’d trailed Janice to his house the second time she’d hired me on his behalf because I like to know whose money I’m taking and where to find him or her if it turns out to be a setup. I’d driven past the house as the gates opened to admit her and then parked around the corner, pretty much where I was now, and about ten minutes later I’d learned that Wattles put a little too much trust in the steepness of the hill on which his house sat. The fence on either side of the gate went only about twenty feet up before it gave way to a ficus hedge, dense and scratchy, but permeable to someone who doesn’t mind getting all scraped up and tearing his clothes.

There was a lot of poison oak up there, and it was getting too dark to be comfortable about spotting it, but I couldn’t use a penlight, since I had no idea who might be on the lookout. This was a bad beginning, since I’m highly allergic to poison oak. But after a few moments standing about six feet up the hill from the street, just out of sight of the traffic, my allergies became an academic question because I heard a shot.

The shot put me in an interesting position. I very much doubted that Wattles had just committed suicide; it was impossible for me to imagine him feeling either the guilt or the fear that might lead him to put the gun barrel in his mouth. That left four
alternatives: a) someone had done it
for
him, and he was dead; b) someone had tried to do it for him, and he was alive; c) he had tried to do it for someone else, and the other person was dead; or d) he had tried, etc., and the other person was alive. Alternatives b) and d) would make themselves apparent in a moment, I figured, because there would be at least one more shot.

And there it was. Or, rather, there they were: one, followed closely by another one. This actually complicated my position, rather than simplifying it, since the way things were turning out, it seemed likely that I’d wind up finishing off the survivor, if there was one. It’s one thing not to have, as Herbie sometimes said, a dog in the fight. It’s quite another thing to be cheering for both dogs to lose.

Nevertheless, I ran up the hill, through clumps of stuff that bore a disconcerting resemblance, in the dark, to poison oak. I tripped once and went facedown in the center of one of those clumps, but I was immediately up and running again, as much to get away from it as to arrive anywhere in particular, since I had no illusions about my ability to make a difference in what was happening at Wattles’s house. Even if, by some miracle, I burst upon the scene at the moment when a decisive and survivable act on my part would make all the difference in the outcome, I wasn’t sure I was actually up to choosing a side, much less going all heroic.

The hedge bristled at me, spiky-looking and dead black, since all the light was behind it, pouring through the big windows of what was, if I remembered correctly, Wattles’s dining room. My face and hands weren’t covered against all the sharpness in that tangle, so I pulled on the food-service gloves, stretched my sleeves down over my hands, and used my forearms to force a head-high path through the hedge. It made a lot of noise and seemed to take a long time, but eventually I was through it. For a
moment, after the darkness of the climb, I had to squint against the light through the big window, so it took a few heartbeats before the window’s surface resolved itself into a Jackson Pollack abstract: frantic, kinetic drips and splashes of color, and the color was all red. My eyes went to the one identifiable form, a scarlet handprint in the lower right corner.

Instinct shoved judgment aside and sent me running for the door, but then it banged outward and Dippy Thurston was propelled through it, as though shot from a gun. She was wide-eyed and screaming and splattered from head to toe with blood, even her hair clumped and clotted with it, and when she saw me she came at me at a run, her arms spread as though she expected me to pick her up and carry her away, but instead I waited till the very last moment, stepped to the side, stuck out a foot, and shoved at the small of her back. Dippy went down, hard.

She’d had the breath knocked out of her, but she started to roll over, so I stepped onto the center of her back and put my gun against her neck. I said, “Don’t move.”

“Junior,” she panted. “He’s—he’s trying to kill me. He’s right behind—”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said. It took me less than five seconds to find the little Barbie gun sticking out of the pocket of her jeans. She kicked out at me, and I put all my weight on the foot in the middle of her back and stepped over her, leaving her legs thrashing empty pavement.

I put my own gun back under my shirt and stuck Dippy’s into her ear. “Is Wattles dead?”

She stopped moving. After a moment, she began to cry, big gulping sobs. “I don’t know,” she said. “You have to help me. He’s crazy, he just went crazy trying to kill me.”

I pulled the gun away but kept my weight on her back, and sniffed the barrel. “How many shots did you fire?”

“Two.” She sniffled. “Can I get up?”

“Is he dead?”

“I think he’s in there, waiting to kill me. He probably saw you. He’ll—he’ll shoot us both.”

“Whose blood is all over the window?”

She said nothing, and her body went still.

“Whose blood is on you?”

“Please,” she said. “You’re hurting me.”

I said, “Good. Where’s your fat friend?”

“I don’t know who you—”

“The guy you pretended to kick out of your house the day I was there. The one who searched Herbie’s place this morning.”

She said, “Herbie? I don’t—”

“The one who held Herbie’s arms still while you poured boiling water into those gloves.”

For a long moment, I thought she wouldn’t answer. Then, in a completely different voice, a voice as calm as the one that tells you to be careful stepping onto a moving sidewalk, she said, “He’s at home.”

I pivoted around so I could keep my eyes on the windows. “What’s his name again?”

“Frank. Frank Lissandro.”

“Your boyfriend? Husband?”

She said nothing. No one seemed to be moving inside the house, but there was a
lot
of blood on the dining room window, and I supposed there could be someone crouching there, looking at me without my being able to see him. I said, “Frank’s at home?”

“That’s what I just said. You have my gun, you have your gun. Let me up.”

“Who was Willie Estes to you, other than your uncle?”

“How do you know—?”

“He was a card shark, and a card shark is just a close-up magician with a deck of cards. Your name, Thurston, is obviously a stage name; Thurston the Great is most magicians’ favorite magician, even if he did work more than a century ago. So I had someone look up your real name and then your mom’s maiden name, and there it was,
Estes
. As I said, who was he to you?”

A long sigh. I prodded her with the gun barrel, and she said, “Everything.”

I said, “It would take very little provocation for me to shoot you through the head right now. Explain to me why I shouldn’t.”

“Get your damn foot off my back.”

“Austin Willie, right? That’s the first time I’ve heard the Texas in your voice.”

“So? It took me long enough to get rid of it.”

I looked around. We were in the parking area, black asphalt ringed by rose bushes, about six feet from the hedge I’d come through. Wattles’s 1980s white Rolls Royce was parked next to the dining room door. In the carport, up the hill about twenty yards to our left, was what seemed to be a vintage Cadillac, maybe 1967, all gleaming tail fins. The moon was up, but not so bright that it dimmed the light that was streaming through the bloody dining room window. The light seemed to be confined mostly to the dining room, though; the light leaking through the windows in the living room, to my right, was pale and washed out. At a guess, I put the house, low and white, at about 6,000 square feet. The prospect of searching it for old Frank wasn’t very appealing.

I stepped back, keeping my eyes on the door into the dining room, thinking it might be better to make him come to me. “Sit up. Do you have another gun?”

“Nope.”

“Anything? Because when you’re standing I’m going to pat you down—”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“—and if you’ve got anything, I’ll break one of your arms.”

“Am I wrong about this,” she said, “or is this something personal?”

“It is. Austin Willie was, what, your mother’s brother?”

She rolled over onto her back and pushed herself into a sitting position. For just a moment, her eyes went to the windows, which was all I needed to know. “He taught me everything,” she said. “He taught me magic, he taught me dipping. He taught me how to live.”

“He was a dip?”

“Not a pro, just a sideline. But he could do anything with his hands. He could deal a five-card hand with every card coming from a different part of the deck, and nobody would even blink. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be living in some trailer park in west Texas, killing scorpions and getting beat up every Friday by my husband.”

“So you were married. Before old Frank, I mean,” There was, as far as I could see, no movement inside the house.

“Three years, two broken noses, a broken jaw, and one fist-in-the-stomach abortion’s worth. And some teeth.” She smiled at me, but it was just a display. “Implants,” she said. “When Jason—every guy born in the seventies was named Jason—when Jason was done with me, I could spit out chunks of watermelon with my teeth pressed together. Uncle Willie took care of my teeth.”

“And Jason?”

“Took care of him, too. Uncle Willie pret’ near beat him to death,” she said, all Texas. “He
woulda
beat him to death, but he got tired and finished him off with a gun. Uncle Willie and I put him under, ’bout two miles from the trailer park, and we took off.”

“You can stand up now, and put your hands on top of your
head. Lace your fingers together and turn your back. Don’t even think about running. How’d you get the blood all over you?”

“Splashback,” she said. “I guess Wattles had high blood pressure.”

I maneuvered her between me and the windows and, standing behind her, patted her down. She said, “Whee,” when I got to her hips. I stepped back and knotted her short pony-tail in my hand, pushing the barrel of her gun against the base of her spine, dead center between her shoulders.

“So Wattles is dead.”

She said, “And then some.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Name of the shooter who got Uncle Willie.” She shrugged, felt the gun, and stopped moving. “No one I ever heard of.”

“Who was it?”

“Don’t even remember. Danny something,”

“And the client?”

“Some other dude I never heard of. Someone who lost his boat to Uncle Willie in a game of Texas Hold’em and then found out he got sharked. From what Wattles said, Uncle Willie middle-decked him the whole game. So,” she said, and she sighed. “All for nothing. Couple of nobodies.”

“Anyone who thinks God doesn’t have a sense of humor isn’t paying attention,” I said.

“Yeah?” She looked at the house again. “You want to explain the joke?”

“I’m thinking about killing you for the same reason you killed Wattles and Handkerchief and Herbie. Because Herbie did for me the same things Willie did for you.”

“Then you understand,” she said, letting her voice soften. “When I heard that phone message, my blood turned solid. I thought I’d die.”

I was looking past her head, scanning one window at a time and not getting a very good view through any of them. “Which message?”

“On the number the hitter got, the one they were supposed to erase. I wrote it down when I opened all the envelopes, and then, two days later, I learned Uncle Willie had been shot, and I dialed it, even though I knew there was no chance that I’d—” She swallowed. “That I’d passed along the money to kill my own Uncle. But there it was: ‘Hi, you’ve reached William Estes.’ And it said he’d be at this address in North Hollywood for the next three days, which told the hitter, this guy Danny, where he was and how long he had to do the job.” She began to turn to face me, but I yanked her hair against the movement, and she stopped. “You have to know how I felt, I mean you
obviously
know how I felt, because that’s why you’re here, because you feel the same, right? I was just trying to get whoever did Uncle Willie. I didn’t know for sure that Wattles was the start of the chain, so I hired Herbie Mott to hit the offices of four guys who might be it, and Wattles was his second stop. He saw the paper with my name on it and went home.”