Herbie's Game (38 page)

I said, “Give it back,” but he’d hung up, and as he did, my cell phone buzzed to announce a text. I brought it up, and I was looking at this:

“Austin Willie,” I said the moment she answered. “Think he got that from Willie Nelson?”

“From who?” Anime said.

“I give up,” I said. “The things your generation has been denied.”

“We’ve got computers,” she said. “You guys had like electric frying pans and hammers and stuff.”

“Get me more on Austin Willie. All you can. And one more thing, fast as you can do it. I’ve got someone on my own list who’s using an alias and I need a real name.”

“Better be an unusual name.”

“It’s not that common.” I gave her the name. “Start with IMDb, the Internet Movie Database,” I said. “And I want the mother’s name, too. Maybe a birth certificate.”

“Birth certificates have gotten pretty tough,” she said. “Since 9/11, those things are like twelve layers deep.”

I said, “On 9/11, you were one year old.”

“Everything’s present tense online,” she said. “Happens every day, as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, if I can find a birth town I can probably find a birth announcement and that’ll have the parents’ married name and then I can find a wedding announcement and that’ll have the wife’s maiden name.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Is my money safe?”

“As long as we like you.”

“And you do?”

“Lilli, do we like him?”

I heard Lilli say, “But of
course
,” in a Dracula accent and Anime said, “You might want to keep your balance under ten thousand.”

“I need all of this soon,” I said. “I don’t want anyone else to get killed.”

Louie struck out.

“All I know is what I already told you,” he said. “The guy who gave it to me isn’t answering the phone, and he only went there once, like anybody would go more than that. So it’s what I said. Bones has a view of Hollywood Forever and he lives in a crappy apartment-house.”

It sounded like a total waste of time until I got there. Hollywood Forever is bordered by Santa Monica Boulevard on the north, Gower on the west, and Van Ness to the east, respectively. To the south it butts right up against Paramount, as Louie had told me, so that left me with only three streets. Santa Monica Boulevard was all businesses, and the other two were a mixture, with a few post-production facilities that had fastened themselves limpet-like to Paramount. The only apartment houses of any description that had a direct view of Rudolf Valentino’s final resting place were clustered together on the east side of Van Ness.

Four buildings, to be precise, lined up like giant bricks, narrow end facing the street. Faded aqua and watermelon and plum over stucco, once probably eye-catching, flat-roofed, two stories, with louvered windows that suggested no air conditioning. Maybe twelve, fourteen units in each. I drove by twice, the heavy
late-afternoon traffic allowing me to take my time. It was ideal; I could look practically as long as I wanted without standing out.

No driveways, which probably meant that there was a back entrance. I made a right on Santa Monica and another on the first street to the east, and there it was, a single driveway behind the apartment buildings, but there were four more behind the ones I’d seen, making eight buildings in all, the complex running the full distance between the two streets. Eight buildings times fourteen apartments gave me too high a number to go from one to the other knocking on doors, even using my well-creased issue of
Watchtower
.

At the far end of the driveway, in a doleful patch of scrub grass and some of those awful flowers that look like big pompoms or the front ends of poodles, a group of Hispanic kids were playing noisily and in Spanish, trying to avoid a big sprinkler pipe standing in the middle of the grass. I parked in someone’s spot, grabbed the paper bag I’d picked up at Doc’s, and got out of the car. I was getting some attention from the kids because, parking being what it was in that area, those spaces were probably defended with violence when necessary.

The game, which had involved a lot of pushing and falling down, plus some crying, frittered to an end as I approached. Ten brown eyes watched me come, their owners ranging in age from five to ten or eleven. They backed up and sidled a little closer together as I neared them.

“Hey,” I said.

No one said a word, and in a couple of faces I could practically see the words
Never talk to strangers
zip through their heads, probably in Spanish.

“
Habla Inglés
?” I asked.

One of them, a bigger girl, said, “No,” and the quicker-witted ones laughed, since the word is the same in both languages.

“I’m looking for a friend,” I said. One of the little ones began to pick his nose with total concentration, but the others just looked at me. “
Un amigo de
, uh, me,” I said, pointing to myself. “
Un hombre
.”

Now a couple of the kids were snickering, and I mean openly, not politely behind their hands.

“
Es
, uhhh, big,” I said, holding my hand higher than my own head. “
Y muy
, oh, boy, thin.” I mimed a very narrow person, my hands close together.

“
Flaco
,” one kid said helpfully, and another said, more or less in English, “Eskinny.”

“Yes,” I said, “
Si
. Eskinny, I mean
flaco. Y
, uh,
vestido
?” I tugged at my shirt as I said the word, and two kids nodded. “
Es
,
es
, uh,
negro
.” No one said anything, but a couple of the kids’ eyes went watchful.

“Looks, um, like this,” I said, having failed to find the translation, and I raised my shoulders almost to my ears. “And, uh,
y ojos azul. Azules?”

The littlest kid, the one who’d been picking his nose, said, “
El monstro
,” and a girl promptly kicked him in the thigh, and he started to cry. One of the other kids gave me big honest eyes, pumped full of childish innocence, and said, “No, mister. Nobody like that here.”

I said, “Fine, sorry to bother you,” and the girl who’d spoken first said, in unaccented English, “No problem,” and I turned to go back to my car, seeing out of the corner of my eye one of the boys race off toward the buildings on the left. I gave him about fifteen seconds to get where he was going and then turned and charged after him, the paper bag in my hand making a chittering sound, like a maraca. The kids saw me coming and emitted a unison scream so high it probably would have brought rain if it had been cloudy, but by the time it trailed off into a babble of
high voices and two languages, I was around the corner and I saw the boy on the second story, standing in front of a door and looking down at me with huge eyes.

I waved him away from the door he’d just knocked on, taking the stairs three at a time, and as I hit the walkway that ran in front of the second-floor doors, the one he’d been standing in front of opened inward, and I dove at it, the boy scurrying backward and bumping his back hard against the iron railing. The door, closing again now, hit me on the shoulder, but I shoved my way through and saw Bones backing away from me, the shoulders bunched even higher, looking even tighter, his hands slapping at his pockets. I was reaching for the Glock when I heard what he was saying.

“Please don’t hit me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me, please don’t—” He ran out of pockets and his legs bumped the edge of the couch behind him. He stopped, his lips still saying the words although he’d run out of voice, his hands swinging like pendulums at his sides.

I yanked the door closed, just missing the boy’s nose. Bones jumped at the sound, the eyes with their strange blue whites wide, wide open. He said again, “Don’t hit me.” He licked his lips and looked all around the room, as though he’d never seen it before.

I said, “I’m not going to hit you, Bones.” Pushing the cheap locking button in the center of the doorknob and throwing the chain, I leaned against the door, fighting for breath.

“I know you,” Bones said. There was a greasy sheen to his face, and from the smell of him it was clear he hadn’t showered in many days. “I saw you.”

“Last night, right?”

His eyes slid past me to the wall and scanned it for information, and his lips formed a few voiceless syllables before he said, “With Wattles.” He squinted into the past and added, “Girl.”

“Yeah, Wattles, girl. Sit down, sit down.”

He turned and looked behind him, which required him to twist his entire torso and seemed to hurt. Then, very gently, he lowered himself onto the couch. He moved as carefully as a glass figurine that had suddenly come to life and found itself on a very high, very narrow shelf above a stone floor. He bent his knees to lower himself and spread his fingers wide on the cushions, and this time I did bring the Glock out, thinking he might be digging for a gun, but all he did was push his hands carefully into the couch and use them to take most of his weight as he eased his long body into a sitting position. When he was all the way down he sighed as though he’d crossed a chasm on a tightrope and rested his hands in his lap.

“You don’t remember me from last night?” I said.

He said, “You?” He looked at the gun in my hand and pulled his head back as though he’d just registered it.

“Who sent you?”

He leaned against the cushions behind him and closed his eyes. “I missed.”

“Not by much.”

He brought his hands up in front of him, and I watched them tremble. “My hands shook. I’da got you but my hands shook.”

“Really,” I said. “Just out of curiosity, what happens if I haul off and hit you?”

“My bones break.” The eyes were moving beneath the closed lids, as though he were reading something written on them.

“Why’s that?”

“Disease,” he said. “
Osteogenesis imperfecta
. Means my bones break easy. I can break an arm lifting something that’s too heavy.”

“Never heard of it. What about gun recoil?”

“Have to be careful.” He opened his eyes and blinked slowly. “Shoot two-handed, small caliber.”

“Still. Why do something that could break your wrist?”

“Growing up,” he said. “When kids know your bones break, they break them. Nasty little fuckers, kids.”

“So you carried a gun?”

“I got a knife in fourth grade. No gun until high school.” His eyes went to the ceiling and stayed there, as though he were expecting it to clear away any moment and let the sun shine in.

While he was occupied, or whatever he was, I looked around the apartment, which had been efficiently darkened by tinfoil taped over the windows. Basically two rooms: out front, the hybrid space common to so many cheap apartments in which the living room is separated from the clutter and smells of the kitchen only by a chest-high counter that—
voila!
—becomes a dining room with the addition of a couple of stools, in this case stools with pillows plumped onto the seats; and, in the back, a bedroom, a dim slice of which was visible through the door in front of me, a bathroom certainly attached to it.

The floors were very thickly, even spongily, carpeted, and other than the carpet nothing at all was underfoot: nothing to trip over, nothing to slip on. Over and above Bones’s body odor, the place smelled of old socks with a high, raggedy note of fried fat. The temperature was in the high eighties, the air completely still.

“So you don’t like kids,” I said. There were two cheap overstuffed armchairs, no hard edges, against the wall behind me, and I pulled one up to the table in front of the couch and sat. The table was wood, and bubble-wrap, perhaps two inches thick, had been taped all the way around its edges. I rattled the bag a little and put it on the table, and his eyes snapped to it.

“No. Little shits, all of them.”

“Interesting effect,” I said, indicating the bubble-wrap. He was still looking at the bag, and when he pulled his eyes off it, I could almost hear the sound of a suction cup being pulled
free. He glanced at the bubble-wrap and shook his head a very little, as though he wanted to clear it. When his chin moved to either side, his shoulders went with it and his eyes ricocheted around the apartment. His pupils, surrounded by the indigo whites and the ale-brown irises, were pinholes.

I said, “What are you looking for?”

“Oh,” he said, and he ducked his head in a gesture that I could only read as shyness. “Nobody ever comes over.” He looked doubtfully at the tinfoiled windows behind me. “The place looks different when somebody else is seeing it.”