Herbie's Game (35 page)

I know that I don’t talk much about courage. In my description
of how Ting Ting tore me to shreds and picked his teeth with the splinters, I left out the fact that I was terrified. I am frequently terrified, and more power to it. And, of course, at that moment in Herbie’s house, I wasn’t armed. What all that meant, as Mr. Short Wide Deep Voice tromped down the hallway toward the room I was cowering in, was that I found a way to make myself even smaller. And a very sound strategy it seemed, too.

“Yeah, I’m doing it,” he said, and I realized belatedly that he and his partner, who was almost certainly outside at the wheel of a car, were doing the same thing I was. They were looking for Wattles’s chain. And since these were virtually guaranteed to be the two who had hurried Herbie toward his heart attack, my primary assumption had been correct: they hadn’t found the piece of paper.

Which meant, in turn, that I probably knew at least part of what was going on and who was behind it. Now all I had to do was live through the next ten or fifteen minutes so I could act on it. It was, I realized, a moral imperative: to avenge Herbie and untie a remarkably complicated knot, I had a responsibility right at this moment to be as cowardly as possible.

I could handle that.

Handkerchief Harrison used to claim that he had a kind of perfect pitch for voices. Once he heard one, he could pick it out of a room full of chattering people and mimic it, too; the voices of his various identities, a braid of three or four borrowed voices. I’d been paying more attention to voices since Handkerchief told me that, and I usually knew when I’d heard one before. And cowering under Herbie’s desk, I stretched my budding talent to its extreme and realized that I’d heard this man’s voice at some point in the recent past.

And here he was. Mr. Short Wide Deep Voice came into the room, muttering mutinously, and the first thing he did was yank
Herbie’s chair out of the well, which had an interesting impact on my heart rate. He stood in front of me, moving things around on the desk as I stared at the bottoms of a pair of plaid Bermuda Shorts and muscular calves so hairy I could have climbed up them hanging onto the fur. Below the shorts were a pair of yellow socks sticking out of black, scuffed loafers. This was a style of dress I was pretty certain I’d recognize, but I didn’t, although there was something familiar about his stance. And then two things happened: he pulled the drawer of Herbie’s desk all the way out, and he dropped his phone, which landed in the center of the well, not three feet from me.

He said, “Balls,” and ignored the phone to focus on the pulled-out drawer. I had been looking up at the underside of the drawer, and now that it had been yanked free, I could see the bottom four or five inches of a knit shirt in a green so vile that people would have thrown rocks at it even in Ireland. A shower of stuff landed on the floor as he flipped the drawer over to see whether anything was taped underneath it—paper clips, pens, reading glasses, packets of Kleenex, a couple of those pink rubber erasers I didn’t think people used any more. He yelled toward the phone, now at the bottom of a pile of office trash, “Told you. You watch too many movies. Anybody with a TV is gonna be too smart to tape something under a drawer, for Chrissakes.” He slammed the drawer home and then spread his feet, preparatory to bending down to pick up the phone.

And grunted. And said, “Damn back,” and lifted a foot and kicked the phone about six feet away, toward the window. Then he called to it, “That’s it. I’m taking a leak.” The feet went to my right, toward a door I had thought was a closet, and as I listened to it open I expected him to swear again and turn around, but instead there was a pause followed by a stream of water and a sigh. I hadn’t even heard him lift the seat.

He didn’t flush, either, the pig. Nor, to my disappointment, did he catch himself in his zipper. What he
did
do was come back into my field of vision, six or eight feet away—giving me a quick glimpse of some pendulous pectorals—and kick the phone again, toward the door this time. He vanished from sight to my left, toward the hallway. I heard him kick the phone again, bouncing it off the hallway wall, booting the phone in front of him as he went, and I figured out what he was going to do: maneuver the phone to the top of the two steps down into the sunken living room, go down the steps, and pick it up there, where he wouldn’t have to bend so far.

I was sopping wet. I listened for the grunt as he finally stooped for the phone and then I heard his awful shoes as he crossed the dining room’s hardwood floor toward the back yard. In the silence of the house, I sat there, weak and wet, and waited until I was sure he wasn’t going to come back in, and then I backed out as quickly as I could and double-timed it to Herbie’s bedroom, where I yanked open he door, intending to peek between the curtains, just to confirm what I thought I knew, given the sound of the man’s voice and the partial glimpse I’d had of him: the identity of the person driving the car.

Pulling the door open like that, without thinking, was a mistake. It had been closed tightly, probably by Twistleton and his troops, and when I opened it, the stench almost took my feet out from under me. With no circulating air, the damp carpets had stayed damp, and the blood had gone way, way south. I backed up to slam the door but instead I stopped and forced myself to breathe deeply three or four times, just putting a seal on the fury in my heart.

That was what was left of Herbie, and someone was going to pay.

The door closed almost too easily, and I stood there, looking
at its blemish-free surface and waiting for the spots in front of my eyes to clear. I heard a car accelerate down the hill and still I stayed there, trying to breathe regularly and clear my head. When I felt a little clearer, I turned and crossed the hall into the office, both to search it more carefully and to clean up the mess that Mr. Short Wide Deep Voice had made. At the very least, to flush the damn toilet.

So I spent a couple of minutes on my hands and knees, picking up the crap he’d spilled on the carpet and shoveling it into the drawer. Then I turned to put the drawer back and found myself looking through the open door into the bathroom.

I couldn’t figure out at first what had caught my attention, so I softened my gaze and tried to see all of it at once. My eyes went over all the shapes and surfaces and settled on the toilet-paper roll. It was full enough to protrude out from the little inset in the wall the roller occupied, and it seemed warped, as though the paper had gotten wet and swelled unevenly as it absorbed water. I said, out loud, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and got up and went into the john and gave the roll a spin.

The tissue unspooled onto the floor, and out fell a single sheet of paper, folded vertically into equal thirds. I opened it and saw Wattles’s printing, all block capitals. I read it with no surprise, but with disappointment: the name of the hitter wasn’t on it. That, Wattles figured he could remember.

I tore the list, the thing that started all this, into little pieces and flushed them along with the goon’s urine, the smell of which suggested that he ought to cut back on the asparagus. I went out into the hall and put my hand flat against the open bedroom door, spreading my fingers and just feeling its cool, smooth surface.

I said, “Goodbye, Herbie.”

“So you’re the man.” A. Vincent Twistleton treated me to a wide view of a splendid set of choppers, breathtakingly white although they may have gained in whiteness through contrast with his face, which was very dark indeed. I couldn’t see his eyes through the wire-framed sunglasses, but as I failed to respond the smile went a little professional and he extended a brown, long-fingered hand across the desert of his desk and said, “Give.”

“Sorry?”

“The pic, the proof. Something that says you’re really Herbie’s top guy.”

“Was I?” I pulled out my wallet and leafed through four driver’s licenses until I came up with the one with my real name on it, and I handed it to him, our fingers just barely meeting across a desk half the size of a skating rink.

Twistleton pushed the shades down on his nose and looked over them at the stack of licenses in my hand. His eyes were a startling blue; I never expect blue eyes in black people. “How many people are you?”

“Only one at a time,” I said.

He laughed, a low collection of consonants and glottal stops that sounded like someone bowling a strike. “Lawyer’s answer,” he said, looking at the license I’d given him. “Looks good. Of
course, they probably all look good.” He dealt my license back to me with a practiced flip of the wrist and it stopped obediently at the desk’s edge. “Still got it,” he said. “You think you can lose it if you ever really had it?”

I said, “I hate to be stuffy, but I don’t know what
it
refers to.”

“If we’re going to be literal,” he said, “I was talking about me, and I was referring to a skill I just demonstrated, a finely honed manual dexterity that I developed doing thousands of hours of small-scale mechanical assembly work as I put myself through college. Dexterity that also translated into a certain flair with a deck of cards. If we’re being figurative, I was referring to the skill each of us nurtures most and maybe even cares about most. In your case, according to Herbie, that was a sort of burglar’s sixth sense.”

“Herbie said that about me?”

“Herbie said a lot of things about you, all of them good.” He swiveled his chair to look out the window at a view of Century City, or perhaps I should say
the
view of Century City, since they all look alike. He was a big man, a couple of inches taller than I was, with a football lineman’s shoulders and a burgeoning, contented-looking gut straining at his $200 shirt. As huge as the desk was, the office made it look small. “You always answer a question with a question?”

“Was it you who removed most of the valuables from Herbie’s place?”

He used the tip of a blunt index finger to push the glasses back up over his eyes and turned his head toward me. “You’ve been there? Inside? Through the crime scene tape?”

“I have.”

“And may I ask why?”

“You may.”

He waited. Then he turned the chair back around to face
me, shook his head, blew heavily through his nostrils, and said, “Why?”

“Herbie asked me to figure out who killed him. I thought I might find something that would help me answer that question.”

“I thought Herbie
knew
who was going to kill him.”

“Yeah? You read the letter he wrote me?”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk and lowering his head like a bull that’s considering using his horns. “I didn’t have to read the letter. Herbie and I talked about it, and he said he knew who was most likely to come after him.”

I said, “He was wrong.” Twistleton kept the specs trained on me, and I said, “That man experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus.”

“Then you don’t know who killed him.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“You really should have been a lawyer.”

“Not only should I have not been a lawyer, but I live my life in such a way as to give employment to as few lawyers as possible.”

He was determined to put up with me, so I got the grin and the bowling-strike laugh again, but it didn’t have much support. Then he put away the white teeth and said, “Yes, well, that seems to be consistent with the prevailing opinion. And yet here I am, the living exception.” He shook his head, I wasn’t sure at what, although it may have been an amused fondness for himself. Lawyers can get that way. He said, “A
real
conversion? Because I’ve got to tell you, I can’t count the number of convicted murderers who have found Jesus while their cases were on appeal.”

“Real enough for me.”

“But you
do
know who killed Herbie.”

“Ninety-five percent. When I have one more piece of information, it’ll be certain.”

“Will that be before the will’s read on Saturday?”

“Why Saturday?”

“It’s going to be a somewhat unorthodox reading. It’ll go down better if there aren’t a lot of extra lawyers, officers of the court, around. So, will you know by Saturday?”

“How would I know?”

“Listen,” he said, leaning back in the chair so forcibly it squeaked. “Have I done something to upset you? If you were always such a jerk, Herbie would have mentioned it.”

“I don’t know how your day is going,” I said. “But the last thing I did before I came here was spend a minute that felt like an hour standing in a bedroom that reeked of my friend’s blood, breathing it in. On purpose. Because I wanted to get mad. I succeeded, which probably makes me less vulnerable to your charm than I would usually be.”

Twistleton said, “I’m angry, too.”

“Then take off the shades so I can see your eyes, and talk to me.”

He took them off. The blue eyes surprised me all over again. They were a pale, transparent blue, but there was no looking in through them. A. Vincent Twistleton had kept his guard up for a long time. He said, “It matters whether you figure it out before the will is read because it will be a mess if the person who did it is a legatee.”