Herbie's Game (17 page)

“What is she? Who is she?”

“She’s a professional trick shooter,” I said. “In a lot of demand, too. Listen, as bad as the last twenty minutes have been
for you, that’s the way the whole day has been for me, so why not just let me come in?”

She blew one of the wayward wisps from her forehead and gave the door a little lick with the side of her foot. “As though you have nothing to do with how bad your day has been, as though that bad day was just floating around, looking for someone to land on, and it picked poor blameless, spotless you.”

I said, “Do you know this house has been under guard since last night? Do you want to know
why
I was having Rina followed?”

She lowered her head to look up at me, and the wisp fell back where it wanted to go. “What do you mean, under guard?”

“You’ve driven past them several times.”

“I don’t believe it. And how could I possibly know why you were having Rina followed?”

“Well, if you don’t let me in, I’m not going to tell you.”

“Will it frighten Rina?’

I gave it a moment’s thought. “I think it’s more likely to frighten you.”

She stood aside. “Come in, but keep your voice down.”

“Where is she?”

“In her room with Tyrone and—that woman.”

“Debbie. Her name is—”

“I don’t care what her name is. In the living room.” She held the door for me and then, when I was through it, shoved it shut and stayed on my right as I moved so I couldn’t make the turn up the hallway to Rina’s room. As we passed the hall, I heard Rina and Tyrone laughing.

“She sounds okay.”

“She’s a
child
, Junior. It’s all a movie to her.”

I went to the couch and sat down for the second time in two nights. Kathy sat in her special chair and said, “I’m waiting.”

“And I’m thinking. Did you know she was driving with Tyrone, and he’s only got a learner’s permit?”

“Are you seriously suggesting that her riding around with Tyrone with his permit is anything
like
as dangerous as whatever you’ve gotten her—us—into, with guards on the house and people following her to protect her?”

“See?” I said, “Those things are, as you said, to protect her, while letting her drive around with Tyrone—”

“Won’t fly, Junior.” She was picking at a button on the front of her blouse, and she had no idea she was doing it. “All this stuff, does it have to do with the death of your—your friend yesterday?”

I said, “Maybe. I can’t be sure yet. Let me tell it to you my way.” And she did let me, so I was able to present it all, every bit of it,
my
way: the robbery in Wattles’s office, the murder of Herbie, the possible problems with Wattles’s chain, the disappearance of Wattles and Janice, and the killing of Handkerchief. She listened patiently while I told it all my way, relating everything to everything else and carefully putting all in proportion, and it sounded just bloody awful. When I was finished, I said, “Maybe I should have let you ask me questions, the way you wanted to.”

She nodded and turned away from, me, apparently studying the familiar objects on the mantel above the fireplace they never used. She was still picking at the button. When she’d finished her inventory of the mantel, she nodded again slowly and said, “And I know, deep in your heart, that you don’t think you’re to blame for any of this.” She leaned back in the chair, her head back and her chin lifted, and gave me the down-the-nose gaze that had always meant that further argument was useless. “You had nothing to do with what happened to Herbie, nothing to do with that chain or whatever you called it. But ask yourself
this, Junior. If you weren’t a crook, would it have reached this house? Would we need guards? Would you be worrying about our daughter’s safety?”

I said, “No.”

“Do I get to hear any of this?” Rina said from the entry hall. Debbie was next to her, looking cute and chipper and as harmless as a hamster, while Tyrone, who had grown an inch in the month since I saw him, hung back, knowing he was in for it no matter what happened.

“I need to think about that,” Kathy said, and the doorbell rang, and a lot of things happened in a very short time. Rina disappeared to the right, going to answer the door; I jumped to my feet, slapping at the center of my back, where my gun wasn’t, since I’d left it in the car; out of sight, I heard Rina let out a loud gasp; Tyrone’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open, Kathy, terrified at the sound of the gasp, said,
“Rina;”
and Debbie grinned and said, “Hi, girlfriend.”

And Ronnie came into the room.

It was fully dark outside. The day—which had seemed endless, as though maliciously preserved in some sort of temporal amber—had moved on at last, finally towing its problems to a different slice of the globe. The glass back wall of the dining room was a shining, vertical sheet of reflective black, the pool and the cabaña and Kathy’s fig trees still there, presumably, but needing to be taken on faith, which was a quality I was very short on at the moment.

But I knew they were back there, just as surely as I knew that there was enough ill will in my former living room to pickle a saint’s heart.

The seating chart was improbable enough to make me wish I were dreaming. Kathy was in her chair across the room, and the matching chair to her left, the one I once sat in every night, was empty, as I suspected it had been for some time except for Kathy’s occasional home try-out for my potential replacement. The chair had a disconsolate air to it, like the horse in the stable no one ever saddled. I was on the far left end of the crowded couch, facing Kathy at what didn’t quite feel like a safe remove. Beside me was Rina; on the other side of Rina was Tyrone, his knees jackknifed in front of him—the kid really
was
getting tall; and jammed into the end of the couch, between Tyrone and the
arm, was Debbie, who had apparently used the time in Rina’s room to make friends. Debbie was good at making friends. She was a terrible shot, so it was an important part of her job description.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor a discreet eight or ten inches in front of me, having chosen to sit on the floor as though she hoped the bullets would whistle over her head, was Ronnie. Claiming two wooden chairs hauled in from the dining room were Louie and a person I’d never met before, a young, longhaired Asian woman who had based her personal style on the sixties, and who obviously wasn’t one to do things halfway, since she called herself Eaglet. She’d been the one sitting outside the house all afternoon, the one who’d been up in Solvang.

Seen from above by a neutral party, if such a thing existed, it would have looked like the five seated on and in front of the couch versus one in the chair, the one being Kathy, with two fence-sitters in the middle, Louie and Eaglet.

But Kathy didn’t know what it was to be outnumbered. As far as she was concerned, she was wrapped in the cloak of righteousness, and, what’s more, she had me dead to rights. With an audience, no less.

She’d run down the situation as I’d related it, but with a definite spin that positioned me—with some justice—as the heedless heavy, the one who had opened the door to the dark side and politely held it open to admit the orcs and gremlins who were now stalking an innocent family through the leafy streets of suburbia.

Ronnie said, “I don’t think that’s quite accurate.”

Eaglet tugged on the one of the feathers woven into her hair and said, “We’re taking care of them.”

Debbie contributed, “We’ve got your backs.”

Louie said, “These are some tough girls.”

Rina said, “
Mom
,” turning it into two aggrieved syllables.

Tyrone waited, long-fingered hands spread on his knees, for someone to bring up his learner’s permit.

Kathy said, “
Thank
you. It’s so reassuring to know that thanks to two Annie Oakleys and you,” she said to Louie, “whatever you are, and my husband’s paramour there, that my daughter and I are safe.”

“You should
know
,” Ronnie said. I squeezed her shoulder to shut her up, but she shrugged it right off. “You should know he’d never intentionally do anything to put you and Rina in danger.”

“We’re not focusing on
intent
,” Kathy said, showing many of her teeth. “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow didn’t mean to burn down Chicago, either. Junior just drags this kind of thing behind him.”

Rina said, “That’s not fair,” and Eaglet said, “Who’s Annie Oakley?”

“You,” Kathy said to Eaglet, “go clean your gun or something. Work on a frame of reference. And
you
,” she said to Rina, “you and I will talk when all these—interesting people are gone. You
and
Tyrone.”

Ronnie uncrossed her legs, got her feet under her, and said, “I’m not his paramour. I’m the person who takes care of him now, since you’ve decided that your marriage vows don’t apply.”

Kathy said, “
Hey
, you. You’ve got no idea, and no right, to—”

“You knew who he was when you
married
him. I mean, has he misled me about this? Did you think he was studying for the ministry?” She waited, but not long enough for Kathy to formulate a reply. “No? Then you knew he was a crook? Am I mistaken about this? And you figured he’d wear the ring around, what, his neck? And once there was a kid, you’d have him by the—”

Kathy was up. “Out,” she said. “Out right now. Go back across the tracks to wherever you—”

But Ronnie was just getting warm. “Once you had him glued down, or pinned to the display case or whatever—”

“Whoooo,” Eaglet said, raising a fist in the first Black Panther salute in decades.

“—you figured you could turn him into a substitute teacher or a male nurse, as though you’d promised—”

“That’s it, honey,” Kathy said, walking toward the kitchen.

“—promised to take in holy matrimony not
this
man, but whatever man you could turn him into. Was that the idea?”

“When I come back out,” Kathy called, “I want all of you gone. That means you, too, Tyrone.”

No one looked at anyone. The only sound was Ronnie’s breathing.

“Golly,” Debbie said. “That went well.”

Rina said to me, “She’s scared. She gets like this when you scare her.”

I looked at Rina, seeing in her still-half-formed face the ghost of Kathy as a teenager. I sighed and got up. “I’ll go talk to her.”

“Won’t do any good,” Rina said, and Tyrone said, “You
listen
to her.”

“They’re both right,” Ronnie said, getting the rest of the way up and following Kathy in the direction of the kitchen.

I said, “Hold it.”

“What’s she going to do?” Ronnie said. “Throw me out? She’s already thrown me out.”

“But—but what can you say to her?”

She put her hand on top of my head and pushed me back down. I hadn’t even realized I was getting up. “I can remind her why we both chose you and stayed with you, for years and years, in her case. Maybe I can make friends with her.”

“Let Ronnie go,” Rina said.

“Like I get a vote,” I said.

Ronnie said, “If I need you, I’ll break a window,” and followed in Kathy’s tracks.

I called after her, “The door right across the hall from the kitchen.” A door slammed. “That one,” I said.

We lapsed into the kind of silence that can end a party in its first ten minutes. It was broken by Debbie, ever the people-pleaser, saying to Rina, “Look at you, look how lucky you are. You got the best from both parents in your face. Your mom is beautiful, and you got her eyes and that tremendous mouth, and Junior passed along his cheekbones, which are too good for a man, anyway.”

“Thanks,” Rina said, rubbing her right cheek. “I’ll bet you look like your mom.”

“Do I ever,” Debbie said. “Caused problems with her, too.” She broke off and fanned herself as though the room had suddenly become warm. “But you don’t need to know about that.”

Rina bent forward to look at her around Tyrone, who leaned back. “Sure, I do.”

“Well, she drank a little. Not true, not true, she drank all the time. When I was about fourteen, she started looking at me and then looking in the mirror.” Debbie glanced around the room. “Feels like group therapy. So then she’d beat me up. She said it was like the worst part of being a movie star, without any of the good things. They’ve always got their young faces following them, no matter how terrible they look now, and she had me, just tagging around behind her with my face on.”

Eaglet said, “That’s, like, tragic,” and then her gun fell out from beneath the only tie-dyed cape I’d seen outside the movie
Woodstock
and hit the carpet with a thump. She said, “Far out,” and picked it up, doing an automatic and very professional quick-sight down the barrel and blowing some dust off it before putting it back.

“Anybody here,” Tyrone said, “not carrying?”

“I’m not,” I said.

“I saw that,” Tyrone said with a quick smile. “You slapping at your back like that.”

“Luckily for you,” I said, “we’ve got the girls.”

Louie said, “I guess we could do some business, for a minute, since the kids here know what’s happening. You’re gonna need four more.”

“I figured.”

Rina said, “Four?”