Herbie's Game (41 page)

Leaving everything unlocked, I didn’t say, so he could scare Wattles into paying more for it than Dippy would. I said, “Is your friend inside?”

She turned her head slowly against my pull on her hair, giving me the elfin profile, now speckled with blood. “I told you, he’s home. I came alone. I thought Wattles would let me in if I was alone, and maybe even talk to me.”

I said, “Uh-huh.”

“He might have told me without having to get all mangled. Why not?”

“You didn’t care,” I said. “The point was to hurt him. Just like it was the point with Handkerchief. There was nothing
Handkerchief could have told you. He didn’t know where the chain started.”

“You’ve gotta understand,” she said. She put a hand on my arm, and I shrugged it off and took a step back. “Willie was everything. Everybody who helped to kill him had to go. And Wattles, he not only ordered the hit, he
put me in the fucking chain
. You
must
understand. You and me, we’re in the same position. You could be me.”

“No,” I said. “There’s that boiling water and those gloves.”

“He wouldn’t tell us where the paper—” Her voice trailed off.

“Come on,” I said. “Stay in front of me, and don’t try to be clever. Right now I’d shoot you for a nickel and then I’d probably give the nickel back. So just move.”

“Where?”

“Inside,” I said.

“You don’t—you don’t want to go in there.”

“I know, but I’m going.” I was angry enough to shove the gun barrel against her spine, hard. “Look at us,” I said. “Revenge is so
stupid
.”

“It is, I know that now. I feel the same way. Please, let’s just leave.”

“Inside.”

“But you just said that revenge was—”

“Yes, I did, and I meant it. But I’ll tell you, Dippy, me feeling bad about myself doesn’t mean I feel any better about you. Get in there.”

I kept her hair in a tight knot as we neared the door, but my eyes were all over the place, checking window after window. It distracted me to the point that, when she suddenly stepped up, I almost shot her.

“Holy cow,” she said. “I felt that. Two steps here.”

“I’m right behind you,” I said. “No reason to shout.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“You afraid Frank won’t hear you?”

“I told you, he’s—”

“Fine. Now listen. You open this door slowly. Take the handle in your right hand and pull, and hold it open as you go through. Don’t do anything cute with it. There’s going to be a moment when I have to let go of your hair to take the door, but if you try to run I’ll shoot you straight through the neck as many times as it takes to bring you down. Clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Here goes.”

We got the door open and up the two steps, and I had her ponytail in my hand again before we were inside. Going through the door, I smelled it, and I said, “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Stinks, don’t it?” She’d regressed to pure Texas.

I said, “Stop.”

Hanging from the ceiling was a heavy rococo chandelier with about forty small candle-light bulbs in it. It was obviously on a rheostat that was turned up high, because the room was dazzlingly bright. There were big gouges in the wooden floor made by the legs of the massive dining-room table, which had been dragged over to the window. Wattles was spread-eagled in the center of the table, his wrists and ankles tied to the table legs. There was blood everywhere, and from one corner of the table rose a byzantine squiggle of smoke with its base at the tip of a soldering iron that had fallen over. The room smelled like a barbeque.

“It looks worse than it is,” Dippy said in that same flat Texas voice.

“You, um, pulled the table over to the wall why?”

“You know why,” she said.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“So I could plug in the soldering thing.”

“Kitchen,” I said, and I followed her.

The kitchen was bright, too. It had been ransacked for knives and other useful implements, and they’d left the lights on, so it was easy to see that no one was there. The pantry and the utility room were empty, too. The utility room opened into the back yard, and the chain lock was on, so no one had gone out that way.

“Turn around,” I said. “Living room.”

Dippy led me back through the bright kitchen and the dazzling slaughterhouse of the dining room and toward a wide doorway that opened into a large, dim room. Just as we passed through it, from behind me Wattles made a loud rattling noise deep in his throat and Dippy, panicking, tried to pull away. At the same time, I saw movement to the right and I yanked Dippy around in front of me again as Frank rose from behind the couch, which he’d pulled away from the wall, and leveled a gun at me. I felt the impact twice as the shots banged against the walls and ceiling, the shells pushing Dippy back against my hand, and I emptied her little gun at the center mass of Frank’s body. He fired again, and Dippy shuddered and went down as Frank folded in half over the back of the sofa, facedown on the cushions with his legs still on the floor behind it. Then I guess his legs let go because he was dragged up the back of the couch, leaving a red smear on the upholstery, and he disappeared behind it with a sound like someone dropping an armload of books.

Dippy was on her back, one arm thrown outward as though to catch something. Her eyes were open in an expression that looked like surprise, as though she’d just recognized someone at a distance. She wasn’t breathing. I pocketed her gun and pulled the Glock and eased my way across the room. Behind the couch, Frank had both hands clenched across his middle and he glared up at me, and I stood there and watched the intensity evaporate and the eyes roll back, and when I absolutely knew he was dead, I still leaned down and felt for his pulse.

And didn’t find it. I have no idea how long I stood there. What brought me back to myself was the ticking of an antique pendulum clock on the wall above the couch. I found myself astonished that it was only a little after eight o’clock.

It took a minute to put Dippy’s gun back into her hand. The crime scene told a story even a rookie could read: a falling out between killers, each shot with the other’s gun, powder burns on both hands, all the wounds entering from the front. I hadn’t left much of anything as far as I could recall, but even if I had, my DNA still wasn’t on file.

So I was free and clear. I held that phrase in mind,
free and clear
, like a mantra as I backed out of the living room. I repeated it over and over as I slowed for a look at the huge cut of meat that had been Wattles just to confirm that he was dead even though I’d heard the rattle of his final breath, and I repeated it as I went through the back door. I followed the thought like a guiding light while I fought my way downhill in the dark. I took it hand over hand like a safety rope that led me to my car, and it didn’t desert me until I’d climbed in and pulled the door safely closed behind me.

And then I burst into tears. If you’d asked me who I was crying for—whether it was for Herbie or Wattles or Dippy being brutalized in that trailer or Handkerchief or Bones getting beat up in those schoolyards or Eddie Mott and me—the two abandoned boys—or even my own failures to be there for Rina, I couldn’t have told you. I couldn’t have said whether it was for the chain of revenge that Dippy had followed to get to Willie’s murderer, or the one I’d followed to get to Herbie’s, or the new one that Dippy’s death might set into motion. I just know that I sat there at the wheel, crying like I hadn’t cried since the day my father left for good.

The first person I saw in the little circle of chairs drawn up in front of A. Vincent Twistleton’s desk was Ruben Ghorbani, who looked as surprised to be there as I was to see him. Next to him was the pastor, Father Angelis, who gave me a sliver of sanctified smile as I came in.

Also present were Eddie Mott and a woman who had to be his mother. From the way Herbie had talked about her, I half-expected her to have scales and a forked tongue, but she was a nice-looking woman in her late fifties, slightly faded and a little worn away, as though she’d been washed too hard and too many times. There were also a couple of mugs I knew in passing, but even if they’d been strangers it was obvious from the look of them that they were in Herbie’s Game. The bigger one made me the moment I walked in and gave me an assessing look, as though I were more competition for Herbie’s treasure.

On the desk in front of Twistleton were some envelopes. Behind him, leaning against the window and hard to see clearly with the light behind it, was the John Sloane painting.

“Good,” Twistleton said. “We’re all here.” He rubbed his hands together and then flexed his fingers as though he were about to play an especially difficult bit of Liszt. “I’m not going to be formal, because Herbert Mott wasn’t a formal guy, and
we’re departing from procedure by having some of the material aspects of the bequest here in the room, to be handed out as we go, but nobody here should be confused about whether all this is legal and binding, because it is. Oh, and the bigger pieces will be available for pickup beginning on Monday.”

He gave us a lawyerly eye, one eyebrow raised in a way I’ve always wanted to be able to do myself. When no one shrieked or fainted or argued with him, he nodded.

“Good.” He picked up the only piece of paper on his desk. “Herbie Mott wrote this himself, and it’s short and informal, but it’s legal.”

He leaned back in his chair, which squeaked, as I tried to get a better look at the Sloane.

“ ‘My current legal name is Herbert Arthur Elgar Mott,’ ” Twistleton read. He looked up. “I’ve always found four names to be reassuring. Is something wrong, Mr. Bender?”

“No,” I said. “Just looking at the painting.”

“You’ll have lots of time to look at it later. So, da-da, da-da, Herbie wrote, ‘—and I am as sane and healthy now as I’ve ever been. This is what I want to do with my stuff. To my only son, Edward Elgar Mott, I leave the envelope numbered one, which contains a list of the furniture he gets plus the key him and me talked about, and I’m sure he’ll be happy with it.’ ” Twistleton picked up a standard number-ten envelope that did indeed have a whopping number 1 printed on it in about 60-point type and handed it across the desk to Eddie. “I am bound to say,” Twistleton said, “that I have no knowledge of what this key opens or what impact it might or might not have on the value of Herbie’s estate, but I’m sure your tax people, if you decide to consult them, can get everything straightened out.”

“Sure,” Eddie said, folding the envelope and putting it into his pocket.

“ ‘To my former wife, Eloise Chandler Mott,’ ” Twistleton read in his ripest voice, “ ‘I leave the envelope numbered two, which is full of engagement and wedding rings I’ve been collecting for a while. In case any of you are thinking,
Herbie’s rules said no engagement or wedding rings
, let me remind you that according to my rules, a ring that ain’t being worn ain’t a link between two people any more, it’s just a piece of jewelry.’ ”

Twistleton handed the envelope, thick manila this time and obviously heavy, to Eddie’s mother, who took them with the expression the phrase
mixed emotions
was coined to describe. “I’m happy to tell you, just within the confines of this room, that the assessors Herbie informally consulted put the value of the stones and metals in here at a little better than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Eddie’s mother said, “And I earned it.”

“ ‘To Ruben Ghorbani, if he didn’t kill me—’ ” His eyes went to Ghorbani. “Do I need to explain that, Mr. Ghorbani?”

“No,” Ghorbani said, looking embarrassed.

“Fine, so … ‘To Ruben Ghorbani, if he didn’t
et cetera
, with apologies for the worst thing I ever did, I leave envelope number three, which has ten K in it for every year he spent inside and my wishes that it could have been more.’ ”

“Thirty K?” Ghorbani said, taking the envelope.

Twistleton shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. Ghorbani. I have no idea how many years you spent inside, whatever that means.” He held up a hand to cut Ghorbani off. “This is one of the reasons I’m afraid that we’ve vastly undervalued the estate.”

“Aahhh,” Ghorbani said. “Gotcha.” He gave the envelope to Angelis. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s going to a church.”

Whatever it was that was signaling me from the picture, I hadn’t identified it yet.

Twistleton said, “I’m sure Mr. Mott would be very pleased
to know that. To continue, ‘To my colleagues, Wide Fritzi Hummell and Merk Forbush, I leave—’ ” He pushed his sunglasses down on his nose and said, “Which of you gentlemen is Wide Fritzi?”

Wide Fritzi, who had earned his nickname one calorie at a time over multiple decades, raised a dimpled hand.

“Thank you. Mr. Mott goes on to say that he leaves you and Mr. Forbush, respectively, envelopes four and five, which contain, for you, Wide Fritzi, what Mr. Mott describes as his tools, and for you, Mr. Forbush, his map to the stars’ homes, annotated with the brand names and locations of, it says here, ‘many major locks.’ ”

“Bitchen,” said Merk Forbush.

I sat up. I’d spotted it, and it told me everything I’d been afraid of.