Herbie's Game (21 page)

“Reverend Angelis?”

“I am.” He blinked, but it was more than a blink. He slammed both eyes closed and then popped them open again. It was a flincher’s blink. “But properly speaking, it’s Doctor Angelis.”

“Apologies, Doctor. I’d like to talk to you for a moment.”

Two bang-shut blinks. He said, “If it’s about the rent—”

“It’s not. Oh, I’m sorry. My name is, um, Merle Bender.”
Junior
didn’t seem appropriate for a guy who insisted on being called “doctor.” And I’d have to explain it to him.

“Merle,” he said, going straight to the heart of the matter. Blink blink. “Unusual name for a man.”

“It was my father’s. You can call me Junior.”

“It’s hot out here,” he said, “and, paradoxical though it may seem, the food is getting cold. We can talk inside.”

He wheeled around and headed for the door, revealing a clearing of male pattern baldness at the top of his head that could have passed for a tonsure. I dragged myself along behind him, feeling like Igor and studying his not-very-white shirt, the frayed cuffs of his dark slacks, the rounded heels of his shoes. His gaze hadn’t lingered for an instant on my face, and he’d turned his back on me with complete faith that this absolute stranger who looked like he’d bobbed for apples in a bucket of lava was harmless and trustworthy.

“The rent,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s always a problem. Property is expensive but God should be free.”

I had no problem with the idea that God should be free, so I said, “Amen.”

He didn’t turn his head for a sincerity check. “And the Lord’s work can run up the bills, too.” He stopped at the door, which opened out. “Can you get this for me, please?”

Doctor Angelis side-stepped so I could open the door, and I followed him in.

The church’s origin as a storefront was obvious. The pulpit was a plywood riser with a banged-up podium on it, stuck at a forty-five-degree angle in the far right corner of the room. Metal folding chairs had been arranged in diagonal rows but many of them had been dragged out of place to surround a long plastic table that occupied the center of the room. Around it sat nine people, all in their seventies and above. Some were
well
above, perhaps in their nineties. Sylmar and Pacoima are largely Latino areas, but only four of the people at the table looked Latino; two others were black, and three were Caucasian. They all turned to face us expectantly when the door opened.

“Felipe,” Doctor Angelis called, and a slender young Latino man hurried from the back of the store to take the sagging tray and put it on the table. There was a pile of plastic utensils and paper plates at the table’s center, and Felipe began to parcel them out. No one said anything, just watched Felipe’s hands and occasionally glanced at the food.

“Taking a stitch,” Angelis said with a touch of acid, “in the social safety net.”

I said, “The deficit never seems to interfere with the legislators’ food chain.”

“Render unto Caesar,” he said, “pretty much everything these days.” He watched Felipe, who was expertly ladling
the food onto the paper plates. Angelis said, “Have we said grace?”

Without looking up, Felipe said, “Not yet,”

“Well, grace,” Angelis said. “Eat up, everyone.” He turned to me. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Bender?”

I absolutely could not lie to this man. “I’m looking for someone.”

The deep-set eyes regarded me as warily as lights in a cave. “Do you mean him harm?”

I said, “What a question.”

I got the flinch-blink. “That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been asked.”

“Let’s say no.”

He gave me a tight smile, astringent enough to sting the cuts on my face. “Let’s answer truthfully.”

“It depends on what I learn. A man has been killed, and I want to make sure this person had nothing to do with it.”

“Not a conversation for this room,” he said. “Follow me.” I tagged behind him as he headed for the back of the store, pushing aside a dark curtain that brought back the ones I’d scorned at Handkerchief’s, and then through a door into the open air.

Except for the building immediately behind us, we were surrounded by knee-high weeds, dry and dead and coated with dust, bordered by a high brick wall, over which more ficus trees spread their leaves, shading the houses beyond. Angelis emitted a sigh I remembered from when I was a smoker and pulled a pack of unfiltered Camels, kind of a butch smoke for a preacher, from the pocket of his shirt. “If this bothers you,” he said, “take a couple of steps back and hold your breath.” He lit up and blew the smoke away from me. “In your world, Mr. Bender, are people killed often?”

“People are killed in everybody’s world. Do you feed those people in there every day?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s twice that many. Dinner is the big meal. Don’t be Jesuitical with me. Are you in law enforcement?”

“A related field.”

“A private eye?”

“Are there really private eyes? I’m on a personal errand. The person who was killed meant a lot to me, and his lawyer gave me a letter in which my friend had written the name of a person who might eventually kill him.”

“How careless of the murderer, to reveal himself in advance to his victim. What was the name?”

“Ruben Ghorbani.”

The response, and a cluster of blinks, came so fast I was still pronouncing
Ghorbani
. “Never heard of him.”

“Really? What about the scar under your mouth? What about the skull fracture he caused? You must know that I’m not wandering around asking random people whether they know Ruben Ghorbani.”

Three more blinks. “Yes, of course, that was his name. I’ve—I know this sounds improbable, but I think I’ve erased it from my memory.”

I said, “Improbable doesn’t begin to describe it.”

He smiled, more sweetly this time. “Then let’s put it in a different light. If you intend to do him harm, my telling you where he is—if I knew where he was, which I don’t—would be akin to sending someone to take revenge on him, wouldn’t it?”

“So you do know where he is.”

“No,” he said, and I could have spotted the lie from twenty yards.

“Okay,” I said. “Just to be clear, if he didn’t kill my friend, I mean him no harm.” I reached into my pocket, using the hand that didn’t have a cast right above it, and pulled out some of the money I’d taken from the box in the Wedgwood.

I got a tight, unpleasant grin. “Are you attempting to bribe me?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “I’m attempting to give you some money to help you feed those people and pay the rent. How much
is
the rent?”

“Eleven-fifty.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Begging your pardon, but the landlord’s doing okay, isn’t he?”

“There’s a good reason that landlords are among the first targets whenever there’s a revolution.” He wasn’t even looking at the money; he was, instead, studying my face for the first time. “You got beaten up worse than I did.”

“My skull’s intact,” I said. “Here’s twelve hundred.”

“I do hope you realize you’re not buying information.”

“Why did he do it? I’m not asking where he is, I just want to know why someone, anyone, would attack someone like you.”

He pocketed the money and thought about the question. “He was living in hell. Do you believe we create hell?”

“Was? Is he dead?”

“I have no idea,” he said. He had no talent for lying. “Do you? Believe we create hell? For ourselves, if for no one else?”

“How did he create hell?”

“He was a violent, brutal man and he took drugs that made him more brutal and more violent. So I suppose you could say he was imprisoned by genetics and dope.”

“So
you
believe we create hell.”

“I do. I just wonder why so few of us create heaven, either for ourselves or for the people closest to us.”

“I have a related question. Well, sort of. Do you believe in luck, or do you think a stroke of luck is a blessing?”

“Luck is a tough one.” He inhaled the final quarter of the cigarette, dropped the butt, and stepped on it. “What I think is that I agree with Pasteur: fortune favors the prepared mind.
Luck? I don’t have any idea. Maybe it’s something that kicks up spontaneously, like a breeze, and then it’s gone. I’m pretty sure that every time we find a quarter, it’s not a blessing in the way many people use the word. On balance, I believe that God is too busy to micro-manage, and that if you’re going to give Him credit for a coin toss, then you also have to blame Him for an earthquake.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to have met you.” I opened the door and held it with my foot. “So Ghorbani was brutal by nature and dragging a bunch of drugs around. But what was the reason he went after you? The cause, right there in that moment.”

He took out another cigarette and sniffed one end before slipping it back into the pack, and then he sighed. “He disapproved of the relationship between me and Felipe. He saw us together in West Hollywood, and he didn’t recognize it as love. But the way he was then, he wouldn’t have recognized love spelled out in blinking letters two stories high.” He glanced back through the door, toward the room that had Felipe in it. “A good definition of hell, I’d say.”

It was winking
at me from across the parking lot as I approached, but I paid it no attention because it was obviously an optical illusion, a reflection on the windshield, since I’d locked the car. But when I unlocked it and climbed in, there it was, taped neatly to the center of the steering wheel. A small envelope, like one that would contain a greeting card.

I opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper, folded to fit. When I opened it, I was looking at laser printer output, one word and two combinations of numbers.

The word was
STOP
.

The numbers were 11/28/2000 and 3/12/1978.

Rina’s birthday and Kathy’s.

“Yeah, I seen
him.” The man working in the surplus store looked like a GI Joe doll, but life-size and many, many cartons of beer later. “I was watching, ’cause sometimes the little shits around here, they like to carve things on windows or key the side of the car, you know?”

I allowed as to how I knew.

“But he whipped out a keychain, popped the door, got in, and got out a minute later. Locked it again and walked away like the whole world could be watching and he wouldn’t care.”

“Popped it,” I said. “With the key?”

“Uh-uh. A remote. Locked it the same way. Walking away, and the car beeped.”

“A little shit, you said.”

“A kid. Maybe thirteen, fourteen, probably Mex. Dark hair under a baseball cap. Real skinny.” His eyes dropped to his paunch for a second. “You know, the way kids are.”

“Did you see where he went?”

“That way,” he said, pointing to his left.

When I got outside, I found that “that way” led me to a street corner. At the far end of the street, I could see a stoplight, so the street could have been the first hundred yards of a trip to anywhere.

No kid. No waiting car.

Rina’s and Kathy’s birthdays.

STOP
.

I hadn’t seen nearly enough of Herbie in the past few years. I’d been, I told myself,
busy
. It had caught me off-guard when people started asking me to tidy up certain kinds of situations, situations involving some kind of wrong done by a person unknown. Solving problems for people who weren’t comfortable, usually with good reason, about going to the cops.

The idea of investigating crimes on behalf of crooks hadn’t been mine, and much of the time it took a gun at my head, metaphorically and occasionally literally, to get me to go to work. Even though I kind of enjoyed figuring things out and it was mildly flattering to be asked, there was the drawback of my possible death every time I went to work. If I was successful in identifying the culprit, he or she might try to kill me, and if I wasn’t successful, my client might kill me. Staying alive ate into my time.

And there were Kathy and Rina and Ronnie, and the business of being a careful and somewhat successful burglar. And reading and watching baseball and getting my hair cut and staying in shape and doing all the things that made it possible for me to think of myself as a reasonably successful, reasonably personable, reasonably admirable human being.

I just had
way
too much on my plate to bother keeping up
with the person who, over the course of almost nineteen years, had given me whatever I needed, within reason, without ever calling my attention to the score, which was as lopsided as the national debt. I’d known when Herbie more or less retired, I’d known when he moved to Malibu, I’d even known that he was probably lonely and bored up there. As Louie put it, why would anybody want his toes in the sand?

But I hadn’t had the spare time in my crowded life to go up and ask what I could do by way of repaying some tiny fraction of my debt. Why is spare time so often the only time we have for those who have done the most for us? He’d stood in as the attentive father, and I’d stood in as the ungrateful son.

And all I wanted at that moment was to talk to him.

If he’d known what I was about to do, he’d probably have chained me to my steering wheel.