Herbie's Game (12 page)

She had six little moles on the side of her neck that looked a little like the Big Dipper, which is to say they looked slightly more like the Big Dipper than they didn’t. I traced the dipper with my forefinger for the hundredth time and said, “I’m getting off too easily.”

She pushed her shoulder into me, just getting closer, and said, “I tell myself that every day.”

The next morning—the beginning of my first full day in a world without Herbie in it—Wattles was still unfindable and Janice had apparently followed him. I wondered how Limpopo was this time of year.

It had to be better than the Valley, which was suffocating. It couldn’t have been hotter if the sky had been a big brown electric blanket set to high—brown because the inversion layer, which I understand intermittently, had slammed its lid on top of the mountains, sealing in the hydrocarbons and the stench and the little quick-shimmy cough-ticklers that smog plants in the back of your throat. It wasn’t that long ago that the Valley was all blue skies and orange trees and red tomato plants, but progress had had its way with us, and now for consolation we had a lot of pavement and a system of alerts to reassure us that suffocation was safely months away.

Louie had replaced the gunperson on Kathy’s street with another one, who would be replaced after six hours by yet another. They would park within fifty or seventy-five yards of the house, facing it, with the gun no more than a few inches from their preferred hand.

“Got you a bargain,” he said. “You know who’s out there right now? Debbie Halstead.”

“It better be a bargain. Debbie gets five figures, and the first figure is usually a seven.”

“One-eighty an hour, she said, special for you,” Louie said. “Girl last night was one-ten, but Debbie, Debbie could shoot out every other eyelash at fifty paces.”

“Well, say hi to Debbie for me.” Debbie was a hitperson with a big smile and an infectious laugh who cozied up to targets and stuck a tiny .22 into the nearer ear. She’d essentially saved my life eight to ten months ago. No, not
essentially
. She’d saved my life, period.

“Will do,” Louie said. “I think girls are a good idea in that neighborhood, whaddya think?”

“I agree, but I wish you’d stop calling them girls.”

“What’re we, on PBS? Haven’t got anything yet on the guys you asked me about. Nobody seems to have heard of Monty Carlo, and I can’t find anyone who’s heard from Ruben Ghorbani in a couple, three years.”

“Maybe he’s dead.”

“Uh-uh. Somebody would know. There’da been parties. People would have bought gift ribbon, shot off fireworks.”

“Well, keep looking. I’ll come by later today and give you a wad of cash.”

“I can front you for a couple days.”

I was touched. Among crooks, this is the next thing to a proposal. “I’ll get it to you today, but thanks.”

“Yeah, yeah. Burt the Gut, he’s retired now, but I got his address and talked to him, and he’ll be looking for you in, say, forty-five.” He gave me the address, which almost made me whistle. Burt the Gut had matriculated from the Valley to Hancock Park, home of some of Los Angeles’s very best houses, and he was on Hudson, my very own personal favorite street. In my infrequent mental fast-forwards to my Golden Years, should
I reach them, I’m spending them in a 1932 Moorish castle of about 5500 square feet on Hudson. I break into it every now and then just to make sure the owners are taking care of it.

Burt the Gut lived half a block from my castle, not bad for a guy who started out running a small betting parlor, turning two competing mobs against each other so he could do business among the falling bodies in the war zone, expanded into the numbers game, and then went into the kind of high-interest, short-term money-lending that no one but the very biggest and most prestigious banks can do legally. Burt, as Herbie once explained to me, had three rules: interest would compound daily, collateral would be worth triple the loan, and pain would be inflicted upon the careless and the tardy. And when pain was the mode
du jour
, Burt turned to Ruben Ghorbani, a man who apparently felt about hurting people the way Ronnie felt about chocolate, although from what I’d heard about him, she controlled her craving better than he did.

I coasted past my castle, noted with distaste the new color of the trim, a sort of Postal Service bad-meat green, and pulled into Burt’s curving, sun-dappled driveway. Judging from the eye-ringing emerald hue of the lawn, the grass had never endured a dry minute since it was planted, about forty-five minutes ago. There are two schools of thought associated with good lawns: the British approach, which says you simply plant it and roll it for several centuries, and the Los Angeles nouveau-riche view, which says you just put in a new one whenever the old one gets a little ratty.

Burt’s place was a hulking, broad-shouldered white Mediterranean with a red-tile roof and a front door twelve feet high. The woman in gray sweats who opened the door was a premature victim of plastic surgery; she looked to be in her early thirties, but she already had plump pillows of what might have
been blancmange floating above her cheekbones and chin to reshape her face, and her eyes had that wind-tunnel pull at the outer corners that said
facelift
in every language on earth. Her hair had been bleached to fiberglass. Confronted in a mirror with the face she’d had at twenty, she probably would have burst into tears.

“You’re that guy,” she said. “Ten-thirty.”

“I am,” I said, but she had already turned her back and was heading for a curving stairway. Without looking back, she pointed to her left, toward an arch, and said, “It’s in there” rather than “
He’s
in there,” and did the stairs two at a time, her body young and lithe and individual, a terrible contrast with the mass-produced, department-store face.

In there
was the living room, vast and vaulted, with a stone floor and a beam ceiling. It was stuffed with bulging, overdressed furniture of vaguely Eastern European origin, enough for three rooms of its size. On the biggest couch, wearing a massive white bathrobe at 10:30 in the morning with the assurance of a guy who plans to wear it all day, was a powerful-looking, surrealistically tanned individual who had to be Burt the Gut. I’d been expecting stomach, but what I got was all of it: from his big square head to his shoulders to his bare feet, everything was outsized. He had to be pushing eighty, but there was none of the dwindling I sometimes associate with age. The leathery brown skin was firm, the body intimidatingly chunky, the hair as black as shoe polish. He looked like he could crack walnuts with his teeth, chew the shells into a paste, and glue somebody to the wall with it.

“You meet Seven?” he said without getting up. He had his right hand jammed into the pocket of the robe, which made me a little nervous.

“I guess.”

He shook his head in what seemed to be commiseration. “Talk your arm off?”

“You must pay her by the word.”

“Heh,” he said. He squinted at me as though I were standing in front of a spotlight. “Why am I seeing you?”

“I haven’t got any idea,” I said. “I’m seeing
you
because I’m looking for someone.”

“Oh, yeah. Ruben.” He used the hand that wasn’t in his pocket to indicate an armchair big enough for two. “Sit. I got a stiff neck.”

I sat. The chair was upholstered in something prickly. “Is her name really Seven?”

“Don’t be silly. How many people you know named Seven? She’s my seventh wife, right? And I’m old enough and rich enough that I can call her what I want. Let me give you a tip. If you’re going to marry a lot of women, make sure they all got the same name. Otherwise, some night at one of them intimate moments when you’re expected to say something like, ‘Oh, Maria,’ sure as shit her name won’t be Maria.”

“Not a problem I’m likely to face.”

“You never know. So, like I said, I ain’t seen him.”

“Ruben? You haven’t actually said that.”

“I said it to your travel agent, whoever it was that called to ask if you could come.”

“Louie.”

“Him. I told him. Told him I ain’t seen Ruben for two, maybe three years.”

Burt’s right eye was off-center, wandering over my left shoulder, and I kept feeling like I should lean over to meet it, but then I wouldn’t be meeting his other eye, so I stayed where I was. But then I found myself wanting to look back over my shoulder. I said, “What was he doing, last time you saw him?”

“Why would I know? I didn’t hoist shots with the guy. He was busting heads, right? Somebody needed his head busted, I called Ruben. He didn’t come over after and watch the game or nothing.”

“So after you stopped using him, you never saw him again?” He opened his mouth, and I said, “Or heard from him?”

“Had a couple calls. Nothing much. Looking for work.”

“Hear anything
about
him?”

This time, both eyes were looking over my shoulder, and I gave up and turned around.

Seven was leaning up against the side of the archway as though it took the entire resistance of the house to keep her upright. “I’m going to the cheese store.”

“Stop the presses,” Burt said.

She gave the keys in her hand an impatient shake. “You want anything?”

“The cheese store? Gee, I don’t know. Cheese?”

Seven said, “I don’t know why I bother,” pushed off from the wall, and turned to go.

“Go over to Viktor Benes, get me some alligator.”

“That’s not on the way.”

“What’s not on the way? Santa Monica Boulevard, for Chrissakes.”

The skin over her plumped-out cheekbones turned dark red. “Century City, I’m not going into Century City.”

“Then don’t fucking ask,” Burt said. “Just go get your fucking cheese.”

Seven flipped him a finger, shook her head, wheeled, and disappeared. A moment later, the door was closed with some force.

“Don’t get married,” Burt said.

He didn’t seem like the kind of person to discuss my failed marriage and my daughter with, so I just said, “You were going
to tell me whether you heard anything about Ruben after you stopped talking to him.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He took a couple of breaths and focused one of his eyes on me. “Last I heard, he beat the shit out of some priest, some kind of pastor or something, in the Valley. That’s the kind of story that gets around, beating on a priest.”

The hand in the pocket of his robe was clenched into a fist. I kept my eyes on it and said, “A priest. Why would he punch out a priest?”

“The ’roids,” Burt said. “He took them like a kid chews gum. Lotta coke, too, didn’t make him any easier. This is a guy, tore one of his shoes apart with his teeth when a lace broke. Did it in my living room—another one, not this one. A real leather shoe, just sank his teeth into it like it was roast beef and ripped a big chunk out. While it was still on his
foot
. Spit it on my carpet. Practically dislocated his own leg, hauling his foot up to his mouth like that. Damnedest thing I ever saw. So no, I wasn’t hanging with him when I didn’t need him.”

“Do you remember the priest’s name? The church? Anything?”

“No. But I can call somebody maybe. Gimme an email address.”

I tore a sheet off the little pad in my wallet and wrote my email address on it and leaned forward to hand it to him. He pulled the hand out of the robe’s pocket and then looked down at it and tried to hide what was in it. He jammed it behind him and took the note. If he hadn’t been so tanned, he would have been blushing. He looked up at me and said, “Aaahhh, shit,” and reached behind him, and took out the toenail clippers and put them back in his pocket. “Gotta take care of my feet,” he said. “Even though I can barely reach them.
She’s
not going to do it.”

I got up. “So that’s it, right? You haven’t seen him, you heard he beat up a priest, you’ll email me if you learn anything.”

He blinked a couple of times and said, “You gotta go?” He hiked up the sleeve of his robe and looked at a big gold watch. “Not even eleven. Want some coffee? I could make some coffee.”

The house was soundless. It could have hidden twenty people, but I knew, from decades of expertise in empty houses, that he and I were the only people in it. “Seven will be back soon,” I said.