Herbie's Game (42 page)

“ ‘And finally, to my friend and companion, my second son, Junior Bender, I leave the painting
Ninth Avenue Evening
by John Sloane, with my fervent hope that he can find a way to beat the tax man on the—’ ”

“It’s duff,” I said. My heart was pounding so heavily I could see my shirt bouncing at the bottom of my field of vision.

Twistleton said, “Excuse me?”

“It’s a phony. It’s not even a good phony.”

“I assure you—” Twistleton began.

“It’s a Chinese copy,” I said. “It’s painted okay, but whoever did it doesn’t read English. Mr. Twistleton, will you read the sign on the building in the upper left corner of the painting?”

Twistleton said, “Burlesque.”

“Would you spell it, please.”

“Certain—oh.
Oh
. Oh, my.” Twistleton leaned back to take in the whole canvas and then forward to scrutinize the letters. “Yes, I see. B-U-R-L-E-K-S.” He shook his head sharply. “No,
no, that won’t do, not even accounting for phonetic spelling, which I gather was a bit of a rage when Sloane was painting. But perhaps it’s Sloane’s mistake?”

“I’ve been looking at it for years. It says—it
said
—‘Burlesk’—E-S-K.”

“My, my,” Twistleton said. “How distressing. Well, there’s no sense in your claiming it if, as you say, it has no value. Could cause tax problems for nothing. We’ll keep it here, just in case the estate tax people—Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said. “I guess I should have known.”

“Known what?”

“That it wouldn’t be straight. Not with all I’ve learned about Herbie this week.”

“Don’t leap to conclusions,” Twistleton said, but by then the door was closing behind me. In the outer room, Ronnie, who hadn’t felt like she belonged at the reading, looked up from one of those magazines you only see in offices—
Façade
or
Country Lawns
or
Gentile Living
or something like that—and said, “Through?”

“I certainly am.”

The hallway door opened, and Joe came in. “Here you go,” he said, handing her something.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Keys,” Joe said. “I brought your car around to the front.”

“Thank you, Joe,” Ronnie said. She gave him a smile that drove him back a step.

In the elevator, she said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing new,” I said. “Skip it.”

“Skipped it is,” she said, and we rode the rest of the way down in silence, which lasted until she opened the door of the car, when she said, “What’s that?”

I looked into the back seat. On the floor, leaning against the
seat, was a large rectangle of a familiar size, wrapped in brown paper and twine. Whatever it was that had been pummeling my heart backed off and went looking for somebody else to bother.

“It’s a present from Herbie,” I said, feeling the smile take charge of my face. “And an incredibly elaborate tax dodge.”

“He’s not here,” the cop on the other end of the line said. “Didn’t come in today.”

“Is he—I mean, I know he’s sick, but is he all right?”

The cop said, “Compared to what?”

“Right. Okay, look, do me a favor. Does he call in?”

“Sometimes, sometimes not. He a friend of yours?”

I said, “I guess he is. Listen, if he calls in, ask him to call Junior.” I gave him my number, and he wrote it down with a slowness that surprised and even angered me; if there’s one skill you’d think a cop would have, it’d be writing down a phone number.

I hung up. Ronnie and I were in a booth at Musso and Frank, the first place we’d ever eaten. We’d spent a nice evening being ignored by waiters who’d had decades to perfect the skill. In between being unseen and unheard, we’d been served the food that almost makes it worth it.

Ronnie sighed happily and studied the wreckage of dishes on the table. She said, “Restaurants were illegal in Paris until after the revolution, and then there were hundreds of them. They changed the city’s whole culture. Balzac practically lived in them. Do you know he sometimes ate a hundred oysters at a single sitting?”

“He was making up for Proust,” I said.

“Balzac was before Proust.”

“I know,” I said. “But it seemed like such a literary remark, I was hoping it would impress you.”

She looked at the cell phone in my hand. “Why do you want to talk to that cop?”

I shrugged. “Just tidying up, I guess.”

My phone rang. Before I could say anything, he said, “DiGaudio.”

“How you feeling?”

Ronnie looked up. She was tearing the last piece of bread in half, not to share it but just to give herself the pleasure of picking it up twice.

“You’re not stupid, Bender. Don’t waste my time with stupid questions.”

“Right.” I inhaled to loosen the band around my chest. “You had Herbie once as a person of interest in a murder.”

“Yeah?”

“An actor,” I said. “Up in the hills.”

“I know who you’re talking about. Mott was only ever on the edge of one murder I know of.”

“Was he guilty?”

“Are you shitting me?” He sounded almost like the old DeGaudio. “If the sonofabitch was guilty, we’d have—oh,” he said, the energy deserting his voice. “I get it. No, no, there’s no way we’d let a guy, just because he’s a pipeline, float on a murder one charge, which is what that woulda been, murder during the commission of a felony. No, we got the guy pretty quick, and he’d have gotten the chair if there was a single full pair of balls anywhere in Sacramento.”

“Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You really cared about him, huh?”

“I guess I did.”

“Well, here’s a piece of advice for you, from someone who’s realized he’s not gonna have time to fix any of the ways he fucked up his life. You sitting down?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’m only gonna say this once. You never really know anybody. Cops, we learn this real fast. You get a guy who kills twenty-three people and feeds them to his fish, and when the news trucks come along, people who knew him for years are shocked. ‘Such a nice guy,’ they say. Every time, you see it over and over. Or, I don’t know, take that homeless guy who kicked in the door where all those kidnapped women were chained to the walls. You know what I’m saying?”

I said, “Probably.”

DiGaudio said, “You meet somebody, right? You don’t need to say yeah, you meet somebody and you think you get to know them. This could be anybody, your best friend, someone you forget in a week, your wife, your father. Doesn’t matter. When I say you get to know them, what I mean is that you see the bits and pieces they want to show you, and at a certain point you go,
Well, fine, that’s Herbie
or whatever the name is, and you put that version of whoever it is into a package and you seal it, like a loaf of bread, and you put it in the fridge. And from then on, when you think about Herbie or hang around with him, you don’t see Herbie, what you see is whatever you wrote on that package: Sourdough Rye or Sweet Potato Raisin or whatever. What you see is just the guy you knew he’d be. You with me?”

“Right here.”

“So that’s the first problem. You don’t know anyone for shit. And here’s the second problem. People change all the time. Every day they get up and they change. You probably figure you understand all there is about that knockout you tried to pass off
as a witness, even though you don’t really know her any better than you knew Herbie. And already she’s not the same girl she was when you met her. She changes every day, day after day. And she always will. You gonna marry her?”

“Maybe. If she’ll have me.” I could feel Ronnie’s gaze without even looking up.

“Well, by the time you do, she’ll be a different person. Name’ll be the same, same nice face, but inside, uh-uh. So here’s the moral, Junior. You listening?”

“I’m not doing anything else.”

“However people are to you, that’s how they are. Herbie was great to you, then I gotta tell you, unless you know he secretly did you dirty, Herbie was a great guy. Whatever he gave you, you still got it. You’ll have it until you fuck it up yourself, and when you do, you know what?”

“What.”

“It won’t be Herbie’s fault.”

He went silent, and I let it stretch out. I had nothing to say except
thanks
, and I didn’t know how he’d take it.

“So here we are,” he said at last. “I guess this is it, huh? Well, I gotta tell you, Junior, it’s been interesting knowing you.”

“Goes for me, too.”

“Ease up,” he said. “You got a long way to go, if you’re lucky. Just fucking ease up.” And he hung up.

Ronnie said, “If she’ll have me?”

I said, “Figure of speech.”

She put an elbow on the table and rested her chin on her palm. “If she’ll have me?”

“Well,” I said, “all things being equal, would you?”

“All things are never equal. If they were, we’d spend our lives trying to get from Point A to Point A.”

“Right,” I said. “I mean, no. They’re not.”

“But if they were,” she said.

“If they were?”

She lowered her eyes to the tabletop and looked at it as though the remnants of the meal were a code of some kind. “But they’re not.”

“I need to say something to you.”

She looked up at me again and swung her legs up onto the cushion of the booth, leaving her shoes under the table and giving me a clear shot at her elegant toes. Today she’d painted every third toenail and it made me think of a piano. She said, “Fire away.”

“That whole thing,” I said, “that thing about Trenton and Newark—”

“Albany,” she said. “I think.”

“Whatever it is. Youngstown, Ohio, I don’t care. Whatever it is, please do me a favor.”

She sat there and waited for me.

“Don’t tell me until you’re good and ready.”

She said, “I can live with that.”

It was a little after eleven when I let myself into the very nice house in the Beverly Hills Flats. The place was dark and the BMW SUV hadn’t been in the driveway, which was the pattern: the woman who lived there rarely came home before midnight, so I went in through the back, feeling fine.

Maybe it was because my heart was light. Maybe it was because I knew exactly where I was going and what I was going to do, and there was no question that I’d be in and out within two minutes.

Whatever it was, I didn’t follow two of Herbie’s rules. I didn’t listen first and I didn’t think it through backward.

So I really shouldn’t have been so surprised when I was just about to open the drawer in the bedroom and the woman said, “I am pointing a gun at your back.”

I slowly extended my arms, fingers spread wide, and rotated them so she could see that my hands were open.

“In my other hand is a cell phone,” she said. She had a faint accent that, I thought, was French. “I am going to take my eyes off you just long enough to do a speed-dial that will connect me with the police. If you move, I will shoot you.”

I said, “May I turn around?”

“Why not?” she said, and an edge came into her voice. “I
would like to see the face of a man who forces his way into other people’s lives and takes from them the things they love. Please. By all means. Show me your face.”

I turned, quite slowly, keeping my arms wide apart. She was in her fifties, beautiful in a kind of lit-by-sunset way, a fine pair of eyes below high-arching brows and the kind of bone structures that makes plastic surgeons despair.

“Disappointing,” she said. “Just another uselessly pretty American face. This is the land of the pretty face. Not the beautiful face or the interesting face, but the pretty face. Just hold still.”

I said, “Why do you think I’m here?”

“It’s obvious. You’re here to steal from me. First the other one, now you.”

“The pocket of my shirt, the one on the left. Can you see it?”

“Be quiet. I am phoning now.”

“It has a box in it.”

She lifted her chin, and it made her look like a woman who had given orders from childhood. “What is this to me?”

“The box belongs to you.”

She started to say something but stopped.

“Very slowly,” I said, holding up an index finger, “I’m going to put this finger at the bottom of the pocket, from the outside, and push the box up so you can see it.”

She said, “No. This is not amusing. Stop. I said, stop.”