Herbie's Game (9 page)

“One reason I’m here is to tell you to find somewhere else to be, because this one has gone wrong. The guy who started the chain has taken off, and he’s hard to scare.”

“I was gonna have my floors redone this week.”

“They look fine. You’ve got to think about this. This chain probably ended in an order for a hit, and here I am, asking you about Handkerchief. Maybe the hit went wrong, or maybe the hit went right, and either way the hittee’s friends are trying to climb the chain.”

She said, “Oh,
man
.”

“How many of these have you done?”

She squinted at her cigarette as though it had challenged her.

“Five? Six?”

“Who recruited you?”

“Girl who said her name was Laurel.”

“Dark hair, shoulder length? Square black glasses? Kind of a head-turner?”

“Yeah.”

Our girl Janice. I said, “I think she’s rolling the sidewalks up behind herself, too. She told me she just got engaged and they were going on a trip together.”

Dippy said, “I knew it was too easy.”

“How thick was the envelope you passed on?”

“Compared to what?”

“Compared to the other times.”

“Jeez.” She took a drag off the cigarette and studied the coal as though to make sure it was burning evenly. “A little thicker than usual. Given what my own envelope felt like, I’d guess there were three inside the one I passed along. Maybe two if one of them was really thick.”

“And did you pass it on?”

“I did.”

“To whom?”

She looked at me over a ribbon of smoke. “Do you really need to know that?”

“Let me give you a hint,” I said. “Monty Carlo.” She just kept looking at me, as though she was trying to X-ray my clothing for weapons. “If you’re worried about me, call Louie and ask him if I’m dangerous. The point is, this isn’t the secret you thought it was, and you might be in the way of some people who are really, really pissed off.”

She looked at me and then past me, and then down at the cigarette, all the while chewing on her lower lip. Then she said, “Okay, okay. He’s a—a wirehead. Never washes his hair, looks like he lives under a grow-light. Got tats all over his arms, but they’re like algebra and that other thing, with co-signers or whatever they are.”

“Cosines? You mean, algorithms? Calculus?”

“I guess, yeah, sure. Calculus. And he’s strange. Like Doctor Forgetto or something, the absent-minded braniac.”

“And he’s a crook?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get his bio, I didn’t look him up on IMDb. But he’s in this chain, right? So he’s probably not, like, an insurance salesman. I’d guess he’s a techno-crook. Computers, coding, puzzle stuff. You know, some crooks, some dips especially, they’re like magicians? Pickpockets, magicians, techno guys, they’re always working a trick in their minds. Look right through you, thinking about some palming move or a new way to travel a card to the top of the deck. Techno guys, they’ve got the same thing. But Monty, I mean, he’s not weird compared to magicians.” She shrugged. “Nobody is.”

“So other than Handkerchief and Monty Carlo, you don’t know any other links.”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? I knew it was coming from Hankie and I was supposed to give it to Monty, but other than that … no, no way I’d know them. It’s like a party I wasn’t invited to.”

“Where does Monty live?”

She shook her head, her lower lip poked out. “Uh-uh,” she said. She dropped her cigarette to the pavement, leaned over it, and spat on it to put it out. When she straightened up, she had the little gun in her hand, aimed at the pocket of my T-shirt. “For that, I think I need to check you with Louie.”

Three glasses of
lemonade later, the last two of them enlivened with a moderate shot of vodka, I was back in the car, which was pulled to the curb about two miles from Dippy’s house. The last hour or so of our conversation had been a lot more relaxed than the first one. Through my windshield the houses’ shadows stretched into the middle of the street, so with Daylight Savings Time in effect, it was getting late, a little after seven. I had the address where Dippy had left the envelope for Monty
Carlo—she claimed they hadn’t actually met this time—and the note that had been in Dippy’s envelope, which contained the phone number she had used to reach Monty.

The day felt twenty-four hours long, even though it had only been eight hours since Wattles had barged into Ronnie’s and my room, interrupting what had looked like a very promising day. Since then, I’d driven probably sixty miles and found my adoptive father dead.

Marking, I supposed, the end of one phase of my life.

I was on a street only a few blocks away from Kathy and Rina’s house—once mine, too. If this was an appropriate time to think about the phases of my life, I was in an appropriate place to do it, because that house, so close and so unrecoverable, encapsulated one phase, maybe the happiest. The way I saw it, sitting there, my life had gone through four phases, with the fifth beginning with the discovery of Herbie’s body: first, a generic childhood, just freckles and stepping barefoot on sharp stuff, like everyone else; second, the development of my career, when I broke into the house next door and later met Herbie and began to get good at Herbie’s Game; third, the years when Kathy and I were in love and trying to make it work—she trying harder than I, I’m afraid—culminating in Rina’s birth and the first ten years of her life, the only perfect thing I ever had a part in. Fourth, the Unhappily Solo Years, after Kathy and I gave up in despair. That period finally culminated in my shuttling from one temporary uncomfortable bed to another, recently while holding hands with Ronnie; and now, the Post-Herbie period, which had dawned, as far as I was aware, a little after one that afternoon.

Even though I hadn’t seen much of Herbie lately—an omission that sat on my conscience like a weight—life without him was feeling pretty damn empty. It felt empty enough to draw me close to Kathy’s house because I derived a kind of dull comfort
from being in the neighborhood, even if I couldn’t actually see her and Rina. So it was almost a woo-woo moment when the phone rang and the display said
RINA
.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said as my heart filled with helium and floated to the top of my chest. “Can you come by? Some messenger just dropped something off for you.”

Kathy had met me at the door, taken one look at me, and said, “What’s wrong?” and I’d told her, and she’d thrown her arms around me and said, “Come in, come in. You poor thing.”

I’d underestimated her again.

Now I was in the living room—a room I hadn’t sat in since the day I toted my suitcase to the car—and Rina was at the other end of the couch, her hands clasped, palm to palm, between her knees, a glass in front of her. To my amazement, I’d been invited to dinner. Kathy was rattling things in the kitchen, refusing offers of help so Rina could work her magic on me, and I’d already blinked away tears twice.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Rina said. In front of me, on the marble-topped coffee table, was a thick envelope made of a heavy, creamy paper so swell that trees probably competed to be pulped for it. The upper left-hand corner proclaimed in incised type that the envelope had sailed proudly into the world from the offices of Wyndham, Twistleton, & Pine, Attorneys at Law, in Century City.

“No hurry,” I said. “Lawyers, even lawyers named Wyndham, Twistleton, ampersand Pine, never send you good news. Jesus, I wonder which of them wears the whitest shoes.”

Rina said, “I just read a book in which a poor young girl gets
a letter from a lawyer telling her she’s inherited half the world and a castle, too.”

“The castle is a nice touch.”

“It’s a dumb book. But it’s got a kindly lawyer in it. Sort of grandfatherly, but not like my grandfathers.” Neither Kathy’s father nor mine was likely to be shortlisted for Grandfather of the Year.

“That’s a fictional lawyer. They’re different from real lawyers.”

“How?” She was drinking something made with tomato juice. I averted my eyes because tomato juice has always given me the creeps. It’s just too arterial.

“Let’s say you’ve been hurt,” I said. “A fictional lawyer, say a TV lawyer, would comfort you, maybe fold his suit jacket under your head as a pillow and murmur eloquent encouragement to keep you going until the ambulance comes. A real lawyer would represent the ambulance company when it sues you for payment.”

“You think that might be a little sweeping? People say bad things about burglars, too.”

I said, “And they’re right.”

A brief pall settled over us. Rina dispelled it by asking, “How’s Ronnie?”

I looked around my old living room, everything pretty much where I’d left it three years earlier, although the pictures had changed. I wasn’t in them. “You want the truth? I have no idea how she is.”

“How who is?” Kathy had a Bloody Mary in her hand. More tomato juice.

“His friend,” Rina said.

“Miss Motel?” Kathy sat in the chair she always sat in, which I noticed had been reupholstered in what had undoubtedly been
sold as natural leather, as though nature was rife with powder-blue animals. She put her Bloody Mary on the little square mahogany table that had belonged to her mother and said, “Sorry sorry. I’m sure she’s a very nice person.”

“She is,” I said. “And the motels are one of the things I like about her. Her name is Ronnie, by the way.”

“Short for Veronica,” Rina put in.

“I know, dear.” Kathy said with just a tiny edge. “And what do you mean, the motels are one of the things you like about her?”

“She doesn’t have to live in them. She’s got a perfectly nice apartment in West Hollywood, big and airy and full of books—”

“What does she read?” Rina said. Rina wanted to know what everybody read.

“Mostly history. A little science.”

“So she has an apartment,” Kathy prompted.

“Right. And she never goes there unless it’s to pick up some books or some new clothes.” I looked at their tomato juice and wondered why I wasn’t drinking anything and then remembered the vodka at Dippy’s house. “I mean it’s a really nice place, and this month she’s sleeping at Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest. A few months back, it was Valentine Shmalentine.”

“It
wasn’t
,” Kathy said.

“Afraid so. Before that, the North Pole. I don’t know why she does it.”

“Daddy,” Rina said, “it’s because she likes you.”

“I suppose,” I said, trying not to sound morose.

“You know what it is?” Kathy said. “You know why she likes you?”

I said, “Um.”

“I can say this because I was married to you,” Kathy said, with the certainty of someone who’d been asking herself a question for a long time. “It’s because you’re decent.”

“Me?”

“I?” Rina corrected me, making the lifetime Grammar Gotcha score 1,139 to one in my favor.

“That’s what it is,” Kathy said. She sometimes shook her head side to side, in the negative, when she was saying something positive, and she was doing it then. “There aren’t that many decent men around. Nice men, sure, funny men, always. You’ve got some of those things, too.”

Rina said, “Even hot men. There are plenty of hot—”

“Lots of them,” Kathy said, “even if so many of them are stupid. But decency, it’s something people don’t think about. The people who have it usually don’t even know it. You know if you’re smart, you
definitely
know if you’re handsome, but if you’re decent you never give it a moment’s thought. And you know why?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question, so I said, “Why?”

“Because decent people assume everyone else is decent. They don’t see it as anything special. Just like liars always figure everyone is lying.”

“No shit, Mom,” Rina said. “I mean, that’s totally true.”

“You’ve got it, too,” Kathy said, “despite your language. That’s one of the ways you’re his daughter.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “But thanks.”

“So if you don’t have any idea how—Ronnie—is doing, what do you think that means?”

“Oh. I don’t know.” I sat lower. “I’m just sour today.”

“Well, you’ve got a reason,” Kathy said. “But don’t duck it. You’re the one who opened the box.”

“We don’t seem to be
going
anywhere,” I said. “I don’t even know where she comes from.”

Kathy lowered her drink and shrugged. “Who cares?”

“Yeah, but you know, it’s sort of fundamental, like whether
she’s right- or left-handed.” I couldn’t believe I was talking about this with Kathy, but there was no stopping now. “If she can’t even tell me where she comes from, what else can’t she tell me?”

“Well. Apart from your conviction that she’s—I don’t know—keeping secrets from you about the past, and I can think of
lots
of reasons for that, how are things from day to day?”

“It’s—nice, okay? We get along, we like each other, we can be together in small rooms without bumping into each other or carefully stepping around each other. We
amuse
each other.”

“That’s important,” Rina said. “Tyrone can always make me laugh.”

“Doesn’t sound very thrilling, though,” Kathy said.

“You know, I’ve stopped asking for thrilling.” Kathy was looking straight at me, and I had to lower my eyes to continue. “I think
thrilling
is pretty exclusive to the first few months. After that, I’m happy with comfortable. And happy, I’m happy with happy.”