Herbie's Game (27 page)

He held her gaze for a moment and then said, “I know you from somewhere?”

“I’m impressed. Some time ago, my husband was killed, and you—”

He nodded. “Derek Somebody. Bigelow. Jesus, Bender, you don’t waste an opportunity.” He pressed a hand to his side and said, “Ahhhhh,” and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he registered Ronnie’s expression and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’s nothing I haven’t gotten through before.”

Ronnie said, “I’m so very sorry.”

He blinked so heavily I was surprised I hadn’t heard it, then turned and shuffled through the doors with the two of us in tow, and I found myself pierced by a bolt of something—pity or fear or both of them, in a cold and thorny knot, no way to pick it apart and get a better look at it. Instead, I said, “I appreciate this.”

“It’s not for you,” he said. “It’s for that nice young lady you got there, Mrs., uhh, Bigelow.” He stopped again and said, “Gimme a sec.”

We kept a respectful and somewhat cowardly distance from his pain until Ronnie said, “Oh hell. Let me help.” She went up and checked her height against his. Then she bent her knees just a tiny bit. “Just put your arm over my shoulders. We’ll make everybody jealous.”

“Was a time,” DiGaudio said, pushing himself off the wall. To my surprise, he let her drape his arm around her and leaned into her. “Was a time,” he said again as we began to walk,
“pretty girl like you would have looked at me and seen somebody who was, you know, okay. I never been as good-looking as Junior here, but I done—I did—okay. With the ladies. Had a wife almost as pretty as you.”

“I’m sure you do,” Ronnie said.

DiGaudio said, “Did.”

“Well, she was a lucky woman. There’s something in you, something really solid. Women like that. We like it more than we like some vapid face.”

I said, “Vapid?”

“Not really my experience,” DiGaudio said, “but nice of you to say so.” He let go of her and stepped away, just barely not panting. “I can make it. The big part of that one’s gone past.”

“You’re a brave man.”

“You got a more comfortable alternative, tell me about it,” DiGaudio said. “Not
that
one, though, I’m not going near that one. Too many cops do that. Okay, here we are.” He stopped at a pair of doors leading into a dimmed corridor. “Second window on the left,” he said. “Just take a look and say yes or no.”

A small room: a table, three chairs, and a door on the opposite wall. Sitting at the chair nearest the door, with his back to it so he faced the window, Ruben Ghorbani packed a lot of physical presence. I could feel it even through the pane of glass. He either sensed us or saw our shadows through the mirror, because the big face lifted toward us and the green eyes looked almost straight into mine.

His skin was more deeply pitted than the mug shot had suggested, so rough it qualified as a disfigurement. His hair may once have been naturally black, but now it was dyed, and the dye had been applied so long ago that there was a white half-inch of hair between his scalp and the black. It created a kind of 1950s two-tone effect. The nose was thick and blunt, as though
it had been hit many times, the mouth surrounded by deep lines and pulled down sharply at the corners, the
nyet
-mouth I associated with pictures of Cold War Soviet prime ministers.

But there was also something diminished about him. The steroid-pumped muscles had gone slack and softened into fat beneath his polo shirt, and the eyes, despite their fierce greenness, weren’t as energetic as I’d expected. Maybe I’d just built him up too much in my mind. I gave him a long look, trying to seem puzzled, and then stepped away and said to DiGaudio, “No.”

He nodded slowly, looking at me as though I’d just drawn an inside straight and it confirmed what he’d known all along: the fix was in. “I’m telling you,” he said. “Anything happens to this guy, I’m coming after you.”

Ronnie said, “He’s not the man.”

“ ’Kay, honey,” DiGaudio said to her. To me, he said, “Just so’s you know.”

“He’s on foot,”
Louie said on the phone. “Heading for the parking lot.”

“Okay.” I kissed Ronnie and said, “Thanks.”

She said, “That poor man.”

“We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got to get—”

“You’re all heart, Junior.”

“I feel terrible about DiGaudio, Ronnie, but there’s nothing I can do about him. I
can
do something about Ruben Ghorbani, but only if I get my ass moving.”

“It can take the rest of you with it,” she said, turning away. I watched her walk away, hoping she’d look back, and when she didn’t I did what any guy would do and sprinted for my car.

“He’s turning onto Victory,” Louie said three or four minutes later as I fought my way into traffic. It was four thirty, the
overture to rush hour, and it was starting off with a timpani bang. “Where are you?”

“Behind another Goddamned SUV. It’s like driving behind a movie screen for all I can see what’s in front of me. Okay, he’s signaling to turn right, so that’ll clear him out of the way, and in front of him is, Jesus save me, another one. Why are these things legal?”

He said, “You want an answer?”

“No.”

“He’s heading west, pretty much, on Victory, as west as Victory goes, anyway. He’s got his blinker on for a right, might be going to get on the 405.”

“North?”

“Yeah. South is a left.”

“Stay with him.” I zigged the wheel to the left just enough to see around the SUV and nearly experienced a head-on collision with another one, and zagged back into my own lane.

“Nice talk,” Louie said.

“Sorry. I thought I was just thinking it.”

“So maybe I’m a mind reader. Poor old Handkerchief, huh?”

“I’m going to find the person who did it, and did Herbie, too. And I’m going to neuter the sonofabitch, one nut at a time.” Herbie’s ball peen hammer, used on Ghorbani in the Angeles National Forest, popped into my mind. Not really the Herbie I’d known.

“You think it’s the same per—he’s taking the ramp onto the 405 North.”

“I’ll bet I know where he’s going.
Yeah
, I think it’s the same person. I think it’s some sick mo-fo who gets off on pain. What’s he driving?”

“Junker,” Louie said. “Old Plymouth Neon. Purple.”

I saw daylight to my right and cut into the lane, earning a
disciplinary blare from a horn loud enough for a cruise ship. “I thought the Neon was a Dodge.”

“It was a Plymouth first,” said Louie. “They started pretending it was a Dodge when they closed down Plymouth. 2001, that was.”

“The walking encyclopedia of automotive history,” I said, running a yellow and, arguably, getting through it legally. I suddenly remembered the Glock in the trunk and slowed down.

“Kinda sad,” Louie said. “He’s heading to the left lane, so he’s staying on the freeway for a while. First Plymouth hit the street in 1928, did you know that?”

“It will surprise you to know that I didn’t.” I made a right onto a residential street, heading north toward Sherman Way which, I thought, might be running better.

“First cheap car Chrysler ever made,” Louie said. “Chrysler was very hoity-toity, all limousine trade until then. So the first Plymouth rolls off the line just in time for the Great Depression, and it keeps Chrysler alive until people got money again, and how do they show their gratitude? They close it down with a really crap model.”

“Not with a bang but a Neon,” I said, watching the stoplight go green half a block in front of me and accelerating toward it. “Got any more sad car stories?”

“Anybody who likes American cars,” Louie said, “they got a lot of sad car stories. Poor little Neon, such a sad bag of crap. Trying to compete with the Japanese for twenty years and they still hadn’t figured it out.”

I made the left through the light, and Sherman Way opened up in front of me, traffic blessedly and improbably sparse. Just the other side of the stoplight was the overpass above the 405 freeway and the ramp that would drop me down onto it. “Figured what out?” I said, gliding through the green light, feeling
as entitled as a funeral procession and almost as stately. I don’t have a license for the Glock. For any of the Glocks.

“Making good cars,” Louie said. “After the Japanese started eating their lunch, they, and by
they
I mean Detroit, they made them cheap, they made them small, they made them outta metal so thin that when you hit a hundred thousand miles and it fell apart you could crumple it up like a beer can and throw it away. And in the meantime, people driving Sushis and Konnichiwas are getting a hundred and fifty thousand miles without a tune-up. Fucking tragedy, that’s what it was. All the Japanese were doing was what we used to do, make good stuff.”

“Where are you now?”

“Past Roscoe, still going north. He’s not changing lanes. Thing is, the Brits, you know the Brits?”

“I’ve heard of the Brits.” I merged left and stamped on it. Everyone else was doing 70, 75, trying to put some miles between them and the 5
P.M.
tsunami that would stop the whole freeway dead in its tracks.

“The way Brits made cars, they’d break if you scowled at them. Jaguar?
Forget
about it, those things needed five thousand bucks’ worth of work every time you put them into reverse. But people bought them, because the Brits made out like it was good breeding to break down, it was
sensitive
to break down, and that was because the car was a thoroughbred, and it had to be a thoroughbred because it
cost
so much. Good and cheap, the Japanese got. Bad and expensive, the Brits got. What we got was bad, cheap, and ugly. Not the best formula, huh?”

“Where are you?”

“What, you’re not interested? This is the Great American Decline we’re talking about here.”

“There have been several,” I said. “Where are you?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded sulky. “Still going north.”

“It’s okay, I know where he’s going.”

“You gonna tell me?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to preserve my air of mystery. But I’ll tell you what offramp he’s going to take.”

Ten minutes later, Louie said, “How the hell did you know that?”

Ghorbani was out of sight ahead of me in his purple Neon, but when he’d gotten off at Roxford, I’d felt certain enough about his destination to send Louie home. What with the shooters guarding Kathy’s and Rina’s house and what I’d already paid Louie, I was most of the way through Wattles’s deposit, and since Wattles was in Limpopo and I was absolutely not going to sell those two brooches to Stinky, the only additional money was in my
necessities
box. People don’t usually picture crooks worrying about their alimony and child support, but I had never missed a month since the divorce, and I was committed to keeping it that way. There was no way I was going to do anything that might suggest to Rina that she wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me.

I’d done that already.

The parking lot for the half-bulldozed shopping center was empty except for the purple Neon, a bruise on wheels, in the slot right in front of the surplus store. I parked in the same space I’d taken before, in obedience to the ancient and mysterious imperative that makes us sit in the same place at the table every night or always choose the left-hand row in a theater, perhaps something as primitive as a few cells in the oldest part of the brain saying
We did this before and we didn’t get killed
. I pulled the Glock
from the trunk and tucked it into the center of my back. With the righteousness of someone doing something he knows is futile but which is the right thing to do anyway, I pushed the button on my remote and heard the little toot that told me that my car was now locked down and fully alarmed and absolutely defenseless against anyone with a little electronics know-how and twelve dollars’ worth of junk from Radio Shack.

When I pulled open the door of the church, seven old folks sitting around an empty table looked hopefully up at me. It was barely five, but no one seemed to be competing for their free time.

I said to the people at the table, “Dr. Angelis?”

“In there,” said a lady with very bright blue eyes and immaculately waved white hair. She was wearing fire-engine red coral earrings, and I hoped someone had told her how nice they looked. She pointed a curved index finger, all swollen knuckles, at the dark curtain. The hand didn’t shake at all.

The curtain parted, and Dr. Angelis came out. He said, “You’re not welcome here.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, “but I’m going to talk to Mr. Ghorbani anyway, unless you and Felipe carry me out of the building, and even then I’ll just sit on the hood of his car in the parking lot, which would probably dent it.” I spread my arms, holding them well away from the sides of my body. “I’m not armed.” It was a lie, but worth trying. “You can check.”

Angelis closed his eyes and lowered his head, but I thought he was considering rather than praying.

“Tell you what,” I said. “You and Felipe take me in there, and put Ghorbani in the bathroom. It locks, right?”

“Of course.”

“Fine. Put Ghorbani in there and lock the door. You two stay with me, keep an eye on me, and I’ll talk to him through the door.
Five minutes. At the end of five minutes, he can come out or not, and if he does I’ll talk to him a little more. If he doesn’t, I’ll go away. Better still, put
me
in the bathroom and lock the door.”