Herbie's Game (5 page)

It was years before I got over hating my father. But in the meantime, I had Herbie.

The broken glass door told me everything I didn’t want to know.

It was a slider, and Herbie, like all good burglars, had put a steel rod in the track on the inside to prevent some amateur from jimmying the lock and trying to slide it open. Like all
very
good burglars, he’d also had the door triple-paned, but that hadn’t worked either. The large landscaping stone in the middle of the dining room floor, maybe 150 pounds’ worth, had gone through the three layers of glass as though they’d been wet Kleenex.

I knew what I’d find, but I had to go in anyway. I pulled off my shoes and slipped my feet into jumbo-size baggies, put on a pair of disposable food-handling gloves and tucked the Glock into my pants. I barely paid attention to the broken glass beneath my feet until I heard Herbie’s voice in my ear: “Don’t forget, kid, they got that DNA now.”

Out loud, I said, “Thanks, Herbie.” My voice was hardly shaking at all.

The glass door was at the back of the unit, where I’d gone when he didn’t answer the bell, and it opened into a dining room with a highly polished bamboo floor, in the center of which, like some interior decorator’s attempt at Zen, was that large smooth stone. At 1:30, the sun was angling in at about seventy degrees
to illuminate the floor, and it bounced in bright fragments off the shards of glass to make sharp shapes on the ceiling. My earliest memory is of rainbows on the walls of the room in which I slept, rainbows made by the sun breaking itself into colors through the cut-glass vases and goblets my mother put on shelves just inside the window. The reflections off the broken glass on Herbie’s floor brought that memory back for a moment, but then it was swept away by the smell of blood.

I stopped dead in the middle of the room, closed my eyes, and did what I should have done first. I listened.

What you’re listening for in a house when you don’t know whether it’s empty are short-lived or uneven sounds, sounds of irregular volume, sounds that begin and end sharply or arrive disjointedly: someone moving, the creak of a door, a quick breath. You tend to tune out sounds that are constant, sounds that flow from one moment to the next without variation; those are the sounds you’re trying to listen around. So it took me a minute or two—probably two—to hear the low, soft, unvarying whistle.

It was a middle D, I noted automatically. No tremolo, no dynamic variations: just someone with infinite lungs playing a soft, sustained middle D on a flute, a couple of rooms away.

I didn’t even know what caused the sound yet, but it made the hair on the back of my neck bristle.

The condo was one story: entrance hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, guest bath at one end and then a corridor leading to the so-called private areas: three bedrooms, one of which Herbie used as an office, and two more bathrooms.

The flute was coming from the far end of the corridor.

I took the gun out, wishing I’d racked it outside to put a shell in the chamber but unwilling to make that noise now. Holding it barrel-up in the approved movie-cop position, I started down the hall.

Herbie’s possessions, some of which I’d known for seventeen or so years, transformed the anonymous geometry of the rooms into a kind of album of things we’d done together, things we’d acquired together, things he’d taught me: a huge Navajo rug stolen from a mansion in the Hollywood hills, where we came in after some kind of fearsome scene had gone down, and we had to roll the body of a one-time TV cowboy across the room to get at the rug, which was worth it. A beat-up old hat that had been autographed by practically every major silent-film star, the only thing we took from the home of a faded B-list actress who’d spent her life savings scouring Hollywood for every piece of movie-related memorabilia she could find in the hope that one day she’d open a museum. We’d felt too sorry for her to take anything else. A painting of a seedy New York street, complete with a burlesque house, by John Sloan, the greatest artist among the New York Ashcan School, the first group to set up their easels on urban, working-class American streets. I loved the Sloane, and Herbie had promised me he’d will it to me. The rooms held dozens of things, all of them with Herbie imprinted on them.

Except for Herbie’s things, there was nothing of interest in the first two bedrooms. Just that fucking flute, playing its unchanging, impossibly sustained D, getting louder as I neared the master bedroom. And the smell was growing stronger along with the flute: damp and rubbery, and a little like meat. It took everything I had to keep me walking to, and then through, that door, and it took even more, pulled up from some unsuspected reserve, to keep me in the room.

Herbie was facedown and spread-eagled on the canopy bed, his legs wrenched wide and tied to the posts at either side of the head of the mattress. He’d been yanked so that he was draped over a corner of the bed at a diagonal, his head hanging down,
his hands dangling in big yellow rubber gloves. I knew those gloves; I have gloves like them. Herbie taught me to take meticulous care of my hands, pampering them, moisturizing them, using the finest sandpaper on the fingertips to increase the sense of touch, and protecting them from things like soap and hot water. When I had lived with my ex-wife, Kathy, and my daughter, Rina, I washed dishes, thanks to Herbie, using those very same gloves.

The flute sound was coming from the cap of a whistling teapot, sitting atop an electric hotplate that Herbie would use to melt wax so he could make impressions of keys. The hotplate had been turned low enough to keep the sound from getting too shrill, but not so low that the water wouldn’t boil.

As I worked up the courage to look at what remained of Herbie, I picked up the teapot—the handle was so hot I almost dropped it—and shook it. It was light. Most of the water had either been used on Herbie or had boiled away, but one way or the other, I hadn’t missed them by much. That thought was enough to take me out of the bedroom again and through the entire house, gun in hand, opening every closet, sliding aside every bath curtain, checking the garage, which opened into the kitchen and peering through the front windows at the curb for an idling car. I looked at the street for three or four empty minutes, just trying to locate the strength I needed, and then I went back into the bedroom.

What they had done to Herbie had been simple, brutally, heartlessly effective, and even creative, making improvisational use of things they’d found in the condo. They had simply forced the rubber gloves onto Herbie’s hands, hung him over the edge of the bed like a sack of oats, and filled the gloves with boiling water. I took a closer look, but it didn’t last for more than a couple of seconds.

I was suddenly aware of black flowers blooming in the air in front of me, like the malign blossoms that erupt on motion-picture film just before it burns. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the carpet, which was wet even six feet from the bed. They must have filled the gloves to overflowing many times. At some point during the questioning Herbie’d had a nosebleed, and the water had thinned the blood to a pink blush, like a watercolor wash, on the white carpet all around the bed.

At God knows which refilling of the gloves, he also appeared to have had a heart attack. There weren’t any bullets, no head trauma, nothing.

So there was one slender comfort. Herbie, as always, had followed Rule Number Three: He’d gotten out fast.

There’s no way for me to know how long I sat there in that rose-pink, stinking damp. I don’t even remember getting up. By the time I was back inside myself again, I was driving south on Pacific Coast Highway with the hard blue line of the sea to my right, threading my way automatically between cars filled with beach-goers: bathing suits, beach-towel shawls, women in straw sun hats. It wasn’t until I turned left onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard that I realized I was still wearing the disposable plastic gloves, and when I saw them, I screamed.

I pulled into the little shopping center where Topanga and Old Topanga intersect, ordered a pizza at Rocco’s, and let it cool. It was hot in the Canyon, and the sun sifted itself through the leaves of the sycamores, carving biblical beams in the dusty air.

The pizza sat in front of me, neglected, as I tried to put myself back together.

Crooks aren’t like orchestra conductors; we tend to die early. I’d personally known half a dozen criminals, including a couple of friends, who no longer walked among us—I’d actually directed one of them to the exit—but this was the first time I’d lost someone who was truly close to me, crook or straight. My parents were both alive, if emotionally distant, the friends and lovers I’d kept track of were above ground, and my daughter and ex-wife were thriving without me.

But Herbie had crossed categories: he was a friend, a crook, a mentor, a surrogate father. He’d also been the first to warn me that friendships among those of us on the shady side of the street could end suddenly. He’d lost a friend to a meth addict with a broken bottle, who’d killed Herbie’s acquaintance for the $400 the two of them had scored in a liquor-store robbery. Several days later, the tweaker had gone down under a car with no plates on it.
When you can’t get closure
, Herbie had said to me,
get even
. I’d followed that advice once already, evening the score for a friend who got killed on a surveillance he was doing for me, a surveillance I hadn’t thought could get lethal.

And now it looked like I was going to do it again. For Herbie.

As soon as I could walk.

Since I couldn’t manage that yet, I used the phone.

“I can’t ask
him anything,” Janice said. “He’s gone. He called to tell me the office would be locked up and that I should check his house every now and then.”

I knew she and Wattles worked closely, but this suggested a new level of trust. “You have a key to his house?”

“Sure. When he’s gone, I take in his paper, keep an eye on things.”

“Doesn’t sound like the Wattles I know.”

“Is there some perspective from which that might be my problem? Or even interesting to me? Because if there is, I’m missing it.”

“He says you like me,” I said, since I couldn’t think of an answer to her question.

“Yeah?” she said. “He told me
you
like
me
. Said you thought birds flew out of my butt.”

I said, “I don’t really think about your butt much, but if I did, it would probably be something like that.”

“It sounds uncomfortable,” she said. “Not to mention that it would ruin the line of my pants.”

“So, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Like me.”

“I’m getting engaged,” she said.

“Oh.” Janice was, putting it conservatively, science-fiction beautiful, and even in my numbed state, I experienced the brief
pang of loss most men—even men who are in love with other women—feel when there’s one less really exceptional possibility out there. “Well, hell. But congratulations.”

“You could have asked me out,” she said.

“I did.”

“Did you? Whoops. How fatally unforgivable of me.”

“Come on. Make it up to me. Let me into his house.”

“Pardon my mirth,” she said. “Wait, I’ll politely put my hand over the mouthpiece while I laugh.”

“Okay, then answer three questions. First, what’s with him writing down a chain of disconnects? Is he really likely to forget who’s on it?”

“He’s never forgotten anything that mattered in his life.” She paused, and I could feel her trying to figure out how much she could tell me without violating Wattles’s trust. “About eighteen months ago, something slipped his mind, one teeny detail out of the ten thousand or so he usually carries around in his head, and he completely lost it. Raving at the walls. He was certain it was the beginning of the end, you know, that his mind was going and he was months away from being totally senile, complaining about the food in the Criminals’ Retirement Home. So he started writing things down.”

“But you think he actually knows who all the disconnects were?”

“He knows that, how much he paid them, and when he used them last.”