Herbie's Game (8 page)

He was also the closest friend I’d ever had in the, um, criminal underworld.

Except for Herbie.

The thought of Herbie made me say, “
Fuck
,” just as Louie said, “Hello.”

“Yeah, sure,” Louie said. “Go ahead, just spit it out, don’t nurse it or it’ll give you ulcers. I’m sure I did something to deserve it. Hold on, it’ll come to me. Nope, nothing. Fuck you.” And he hung up.

I dialed again. “Sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t directed at you.”

“Hope to hell,” he said. “Two weeks you don’t call, the Missus is asking,
Hey, did you miss that nice young man’s funeral
? and I’m saying, naw, naw, he just made new friends he likes better than me.”

“Lots of them,” I said.

“Ouch. And here I been faithful to you.”

“So what’s happening?”

“You know, same stuff. Just pisher stuff, all the real action’s in Washington. Nine-figure, ten-figure crime, and they get to wear such nice suits. Boy, I gotta tell you, if I had it all to do over, I’d get elected to something, just belly up to the public trough—hey, is that pronounced
troff
, to rhyme with
cough
, or
tro
to rhyme with
though
?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Could be
troo
, like
through
, or
trow, like plough.”

“Or
truff
, like
rough
.”

I said, “I don’t think it’s
troo
. Pull up to the public
troo
? Uh-uh.”

“Well,” Louie said. “Good to have that settled. So why the sudden call? Get tired of your new friends?”

“What would it feel like,” I asked, “to have your eyes on the sides of your head, like a pigeon?”

“Am I supposed to be billing you for this information? Because if I am, I think you maybe oughta call the Smithsonian.”

“No. I’m just getting the eye, and I mean that literally, one eye, from a pigeon.”

“I woulda come over,” Louie said. “You don’t have to hang with
pigeons
.”

“First, Wattles,” I said. “He’s disappeared, within the past few hours, and nobody, by which I mean Janice, knows where he is. Second, Dippy Thurston.”

“Nice kid, but keep an eye on your wristwatch. What about her?”

“Where is she?”

“Probably home. Encino, I think. Hang on a minute.”

“Before you go,” I said. “Monty Carlo.”

“In Monaco. That poor Princess Grace.”

“No, it’s a person.”

“Gambler?”

“Good idea. Maybe.”

“I’ll ask around. Hold on while I get Dippy’s address.”

The pigeon had gotten bored with me and waddled back down the hood. I wondered why it pushed its head forward every time it took a step and how it saw the world in three dimensions when it could only look forward with one eye at a time. It seemed like being able to see in three dimensions would be important to a bird, what with flying and landing and all.

“Damn, I’m good,” Louie said into the phone. “Encino. Got a pencil?”

I wrote it down—a surprisingly nice area for a pickpocket, south of the Boulevard, next door to the sitcom second bananas and the bank branch managers and the cameramen and the
mouse-level Disney execs: ivy and ice plant, rambling one-story houses set far enough back from the street to make mowing the lawn something to dread. I knew this from personal experience, since I’d grown up mowing lawns about three blocks from
Chez
Dippy.

“So,” I said, putting the pen away, “Wattles and Monty Carlo.”

“Got it.”

“Wait. Have you heard anything lately about Herbie?”

“Pretty much retired,” Louie said. “Up in Malibu or something, got his toes in the sand. Why would anybody want his toes in sand?”

“Listen, be a little careful about checking on Wattles and this Carlo guy. I think Herbie may have done a job on Wattles’s office, and he’s dead.”

Hearing myself say it out loud again really sealed it. I lost whatever Louie was saying for a moment or two. When his voice finally came through, he was saying, “—killed?”

“Not quite. He, uh, he died of a heart attack, is my guess. But they were working him over, and as far as I’m concerned that’s what did him in.”

“Well, you know,” Louie said, “not to sound cold or nothing, but do you think they got what they wanted out of him?”

“No,” I said, recognizing the conviction as I said it out loud. “If he’d told them what they wanted to know, they would have killed him.”

I had an index finger extended to ring the bell when the door was yanked inward and a short thick man, a cross between a fireplug and a football center, barreled through it, shoved me to one side, and shouted over his shoulder, “When I’m finished with you, you won’t be able to get a booking on an
Indian reservation
.” He gallumphed across the lawn and got into a very nice-looking black BMW sedan and took off, leaving about forty bucks’ worth of rubber on the street.

As I turned back to the open door, something whistled past my nose. It hit the lawn and tumbled a couple of times, and when it came to rest, it turned out to be a Plexiglas case with a trophy in it.

“I’m sorry about this welcome,” a female voice said from behind the door. “Could you get that for me, please?”

I said, “Sure,” and went after it. It was a bowling trophy, a woman holding a bowling ball to her chest with a look of severe concentration and that ten-mile stare you see in old Chinese propaganda posters. “The case is cracked.”

“Did it hit him?” the woman said.

“Not even close.”

“Oh, well, he’d just have sued me. Can you bring it in?”

I said, “I thought you’d never ask.” I toted it up to the porch, and the door opened the rest of the way.

The word that came to my mind when I saw Dippy Thurston up close for the first time was
elfin
. She looked like a new human-pixie hybrid, a genetic shuffle that might get patented and bred commercially for its cuteness quotient. Her eyes were uptilted and greenish-hazel above fine, angular cheekbones, and she had a tiny nose, not much bigger than Stinky Tetweiler’s, although this one looked like it might be its original size, unlike Stinky’s, which surgeons had been planing down for decades. Add a short, raggedy haircut pulled into a careless ponytail, and you had an elf, Southern-California south-of-the-Boulevard style.

She gave me a smile that melted my socks with pure, unadulterated adorableness, and said, “My trophy, please. Do I know you?”

“Just barely,” I said, handing it to her. “We have friends, or at least acquaintances, in common.”

She put the trophy on a table near the door, where it would be handy the next time she wanted to throw it, and tilted her head winningly. “I didn’t hear our mutual acquaintance’s name.”

“Well, that’s the problem,” I said. “Handkerchief Harrison.”

The eyes got a bit more alert and the smile went a little stale. “And would you describe him as a friend?”

“If it would clarify things, I just finished threatening him.”

She pulled her mouth an inch or so to the left, not an expression of unreserved approval. “That helps a little.”

“How about Louie the Lost?” I said.

“Oh,
well
,” she said. “Come on in.” And she opened a drawer in the table she’d put the trophy on and pulled out an adorable little automatic, the kind of thing Gangsta Barbie might pack. She tucked it into the pocket of her cut-off jeans. “Don’t take the
gun personally,” she said. “But also, don’t assume I can’t get to it whenever I want to. Is that going to stifle your spontaneity?”

“Not at all. If you’re keeping one hand on the gun, my watch is probably safe.”

She said, “That old thing?” without even glancing at it and shut the door behind me.

We were in a spacious, arched entry hall, saltillo tile studded here and there with smaller tiles of a saturated blue deepened with just a hint of gray. I said, “Delft?”

“Sorry? Oh, the tiles, yes, Delft. You’ve got a good eye.”

“I’m a burglar.”

“And an interesting-looking burglar at that. How come Louie hasn’t introduced you to me? He knows I’m usually looking. Come on in, I’ve just made some lemonade.”

After the conversation about birds and butts, I was primed to notice her derriere, and it was, well, elfin. I followed it through a shadowy living room, pale gray drapes shouldering aside the sun’s heat, then a dining room centered on a hand-planed hardwood table that looked like it weighed a thousand pounds, and into a bright, butter-yellow kitchen. The perfect California swimming pool gleamed a perfect California blue through the window. By that time, I was no longer studying, or thinking about, her butt. Something about the whole place was stirring ripples in my already agitated emotional state.

“So,” I said, pushing it aside, “who was the guy who just left?”

“He used to be my manager. Lemonade?”

“Until when?”

“Just before you arrived.” She leaned against the counter, and I observed neutrally that her legs were tanned and very muscular, and that she was barefoot.

“You really made lemonade?”

“Sure,” she said. “Too wholesome?”

“No, it’s just—” I realized what it was, and why the house was troubling me. “I grew up near here, with a pool outside the kitchen window, and we had a lemon tree. On a day like this, my, um, my father always made lemonade.” I smiled, just a general, all-purpose, budget smile, and looked around the kitchen. “Sorry, skip it. I’m having kind of an emotional day.”

“I’m not, except for Frank, who just left,” she said, “and he’s more than enough. I hope it doesn’t sound unfeminine if I ask you to keep the emotion to yourself.”

“Lemonade would be fine,” I said. “I’d love some lemonade.”

“Attaboy. You like my legs, or what?” She went to the refrigerator and pulled open the door.

“The light didn’t come on.”

“And it shouldn’t,” she said. She pulled out a big pitcher, using two hands, and kicked the door closed. “Suppose there’s someone out there with a gun in his hand. Suppose I get up in the middle of the night and want a drink, and there I am, in the spotlight.”

“Hadn’t thought of it that way.” She put the pitcher on the counter and turned her back to open a cabinet. She went up on tiptoe, revealing a set of highly developed gastrocnemius muscles. “About your legs,” I said. “You’ve done a lot of work on them.”

She twisted around, one heel still in the air, and looked down. “Too much? Getting a little prison-yard?”

“No, just very nicely toned.”

“I run eight miles a day and do an hour in the pool with a kickboard. I should have used them to kick Frank.”

“What was the problem?”

“He was getting fifteen percent of me, and he wanted all of it.”

“Well, he’s lost a good client. I saw you perform once, in Reno at the Four Aces.”

“Yeah? What did you think?” She was pouring into two thick French water glasses.

“I thought you were great. I especially liked the trick where the playing card some woman had signed wound up in a sealed envelope in her husband’s wallet.”

“I liked that one, too. Can’t do it any more, though. The hotel told me, nothing involving the customers’ wallets.”

“Really.”

She picked up the glasses and handed one to me. “They said they were worried about some mug saying there had been a couple of thousand bucks in his wallet, and after the trick it wasn’t there. Insurance problem, according to them.”

“Well, maybe—”

“Come with me,” she said. “We’ll sit in the dining room.” She kept talking, without looking back, as I tagged along into the room with the giant table in it. “What I figure is that the LA Sheriffs, who can be very Chatty Cathy, told the Reno cops that I’d once been stopped with quite a lot of property that wasn’t exactly mine, according to the traditional definition.”

“Cops can be stuffy,” I said. I sat at the table, the top of which was about ten inches thick, and looked for a coaster.

“Just put it down. This wood has more marine varnish on it than the
Queen Mary
. Listen, you’re a very interesting-looking burglar, but you came looking for me, and that can’t be a hundred percent good, right? And the person you mentioned when I asked you who we both knew was Handkerchief. Double not-good, since he couldn’t tell the truth if he’d had a year of lessons. Drink your nice lemonade and tell me what you want.”

The lemonade was cold but way too sweet. “Handkerchief gave you something last week.”

“I take it back,” she said. “He can tell the truth, at least when he shouldn’t.” She looked at her glass and then brought her eyes up to mine. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”

“How often have you been a disconnect in one of these chains?”

“Chains?” She lowered her head a bit, giving me the uptilted eyes from what she probably knew was their best angle. It made me think for a second about my pigeon. Then she said, “Well, fuck a bagful of Handkerchief Harrisons. You stay where you are.” She got up and went to the double doors that opened from the dining room onto the backyard. She shoved one of them ajar, sat on the step, and fished in her blouse for a second. Then she came up with a pack of Marlboro Reds and fired one up. She blew smoke out her nostrils and waved it away from the dining room. “This shit is supposed to be secret.”