Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  Paying very close attention to what I was doing—check the mirror, turn the wheel, don’t hit the parked car—I pulled over to the curb, sat back, and did some deep, slow breathing as I watched dark sedans drive by with Koreans in them. Koreans like Hancock Park, in part because some of them can afford it, in part because it’s minutes from Koreatown, and in part because Hancock sounds like Hankook or Hanguk, which is what South Koreans call South Korea and—when the North Koreans aren’t looking—North Korea, too. So people from Hankook have moved into Hancock and have taken remarkable care of the houses they bought.

  Here I was, on this side of the hill for a change. The “hill” is the long line of highly flammable dirt mounds officially known as the Santa Monica Mountains, except in Hollywood, where they’re called the Hollywood Hills because Hollywood, being Hollywood, just needed its own mountains. Whatever they’re called, they divide greater Los Angeles from the southern edge of the valley, and “over the hill” means, essentially, whichever side you’re not on at the time you say it. Right now the Valley was over the hill, and on this side of the hill were the China Apartment Houses and my ultimate hiding place.

  On March 9, 2001, a Korean plausible named Winnie Park came face to face with the rapidly changing emotional landscape that always results when someone who has given all or most of his or her money to someone else realizes that he or she has bought real estate on Mars. In this case the he or she was a he, and he was armed. Winnie was great with blue-sky—she could have sold Bibles to the Taliban—but her people-reading skills weren’t as highly tuned as Handkerchief Harrison’s. The sucker Winnie was working was a former LAPD cop who’d made a fortune on the take before getting ever-so-discreetly fired, and he’d entrusted most of it to Winnie on the promise of a sixty-percent profit in eight weeks. When the ten-pound penny had dropped, he’d thrown down on her, and he’d had big hardware. I’d been in the room, not entirely innocently, and since he was less angry at me than he was at Winnie, I’d succeeded in talking him down over the course of ten very sweaty minutes. A week later, he was looking for both of us, and Winnie was in Singapore, where she was promptly caught and then jailed for a con scheme. She still faced seven more rent-free years in the tropics before she could hit the street again.

  Before she left, Winnie had paid me for my services by taking out a lease on Apartment 302 in the Wedgwood Apartments, once one of the art-deco glories of Los Angeles, and turned it over to me, with my name nowhere on it. Once the luxurious residence of directors, almost-stars, screenwriters, and mistresses, the Wedgwood and its sister buildings, the Lenox and the Royal Doulton, had seen property values plummet in the forties and fifties as money and the people who earned it moved west, toward Beverly Hills and Brentwood and the sea.

  The buildings, called the “China” apartments because each of them was named after a manufacturer of fine china, had peeled and leaked and opened their arms to rats and roaches until they were bought, all in cash, by a somewhat mysterious syndicate of Korean businesspeople. The syndicate had restored the apartments inside the buildings to their former glorious luster, while adventurously distressing the exterior walls and the corridors. The palatial spaces inside these three paint-peeling eyesores today housed some surprisingly wealthy and almost uniformly shady occupants, mostly people with several names, who made their payments in cash and parked their nice cars in the anonymity of the giant, connecting underground garage that stretched beneath all three of them. Since the China apartments were on a corner, that meant I could pull into the garage of an apartment house on one street and drive out of the garage beneath a different apartment house on a different street entirely. Crook’s paradise.

  Apartment 302 was my end-of-the-world hidey-hole, the place no one knew about, not even Rina and Kathy. Well, one person did. The world’s oldest still-dangerous mobster, Irwin Dressler, had found out about it by accident—he’d had a friend, a one-time starlet named Dolores La Marr, who had occupied the entire top floor. But I was on Dressler’s very small good side for the time being, and my secret felt reasonably safe.

  Still, I’d driven the smoggy, eye-stinging streets, taking my habitual evasive moves and making needless stops, all with one eye on the mirror. And after I’d ridden up in the battered elevator and paced the dingy third-floor hallway, when I undid the superlative locks in the cheap-looking door (thin, brittle fiber-board over half an inch of iron), I entered the world of gracious living and Gloria Swanson, fourteen-foot ceilings and built-in bookcases, silver nitrate film and Barrymores, the age when orange blossoms dappled the trees behind the silent-film cameras while, just out of shot, high, squarish cars spooled billows of red dust from the unpaved surface of Hollywood Boulevard. A world that had a lot of injustice and inequality in it, but also a world filigreed with touches of grace that we’d tossed overboard as we sailed through time. We had, however, retained the injustice and inequality.

  The Wedgwood cleaning crew, required by the building’s owners, had buffed everything to a high gloss since I’d been there last, and as the door closed quietly behind me, I let out the sigh the place always seems to wring from me. The building’s walls are three feet thick. The city would have to be on fire for it to get hot inside my living room.

  I went into the kitchen and filled a very nice Baccarat glass with ice water and carried it into the big living room, with its art-deco windows that faced east toward downtown. The window framed only a fragment of the usual view, since the top floors of our relatively small collection of skyscrapers disappeared abruptly into a line of yellow-brown smog as hard and sharp as the stripe on a shirt. I had a three-person leather couch pulled in front of the window, with its back to the rest of the room since I was the only person who was ever in it, and I sat there and just looked at my city.

  Yesterday it had had Herbie in it, and now it didn’t, but it didn’t look any different. It was too big to cry. What it looked like was a good idea gone wrong over time, a metropolitan version of Seven’s successive plastic surgeries, created too fast and without any kind of long-term plan, nothing more forward-looking than put something shiny here. Seventy or eighty years later, most of the shine was gone and instead of a Paris or a Vienna, where some sort of shared fundamental aesthetic had shaped the city’s growth, what we had was a crow’s nest, where a thimble was next to a piece of tinfoil for no reason except that they had both briefly appealed to a crow.

  It was, however, a good city for burglary. People with money didn’t live in high, guarded apartment houses; they had big houses with lots of space and greenery shielding them from the presumably nosy neighbors. Once on the property, you could poke around for hours without getting spotted. Los Angeles people bought and trusted their insurance. There were several police forces, who weren’t always eager to share information. Lots of money, lots of easy doors and windows, lots of small, movable, shiny things to line the rich people’s crow’s nests.

  I used to like the city more than I did right then.

  Okay, drink some water. Think about Herbie and Wattles’s chain of disconnects.

  First item on the Herbie list—find Ruben Ghorbani. Louie was working on it, although it was odd that he hadn’t found even a scrap of information. Maybe Ghorbani was dead. But Louie would keep throwing out lines and tugging on them—and, I realized, it could give Rina a chance to exercise her online investigative skills.

  Hey, I texted, my thumbs way too big for the microscopic keyboard on the phone’s screen, fnd out about a clergyman, dont no wht denom, beat up bad in Valley, 2-4 yrs ago. I thought for a second. Also, guy nmed edwd mott, in valley. Gd to C U last nite. We text tatters to each other. I pressed SEND, or probably SND, and envisioned my daughter hearing her father beep at her in the middle of English class or Environmental Studies class or Inter-Species Sensitivity or whatever damn class she was in. I paid her twenty bucks an hour when I needed her, and she went for it because she enjoyed it and because she was enough like me to be fond of money and to know how it worked, where
as Kathy genuinely believed that $19.99 was less than $20 and that used-car salesmen worked to give you the best possible deal. So Rina would find both that battered clergyman, denom unknown, and Herbie’s unfilial son. She had billable-quality search skills.

  Another thought: Ruben had worked as a hitman. Ask someone else in the business. I pulled up a number on my phone, listened to it trill a couple of times, and then Debbie Halstead said, “Nothing happening, Junior.”

  I checked my watch. “You still there?”

  “The girl who’s taking over was in Solvang when Louie reached her. Imagine carrying a gun in Solvang. Probably made of gingerbread. She’s on her way. Anyway, your daughter got picked up at seven thirty this A.M. by a tall, skinny, extremely handsome black kid—”

  “That’s her boyfriend, Tyrone.”

  “Well, with a face like that, Tyrone is going to be dodging women right and left until he gets married, and maybe after, too.”

  “Oh, good. Something else to worry about.”

  “I don’t mean to stir you up. Kid looked really upright even from here, maybe minister material.”

  I laughed, I hoped, just enough. I sort-of-almost liked Debbie, but it wouldn’t do to forget that she pushed gun barrels into people’s ears for a living. When I had allowed my mirth to subside appropriately, I said, “Did you ever hear of a guy named Ghorbani?”

  “Iranian?”

  “And Mexican. First name, Ruben. Mostly supplied muscle for loan sharks, but every now and then he did a hit, for variety, I guess.”

  “Got kind of weird eyes?”

  “Green, I think.”

  “I met him, once. At a party.”

  “Party full of hitters? What was that like?”

  “Not much dancing. Pickup lines were kind of grim. I only talked to him for a couple of minutes and then I just backed away, all the way into the next room. Didn’t seem like much of anything was holding him together. You ask Wattles about him?”

  My ears pricked up. “Why would I?”

  “Well, Wattles hires out hits once in a while. If you’re looking for a shoe salesmen, you check shoe stores, right?”

  “Right. Wattles isn’t available right now. He’s taken himself off the board.”

  “Isn’t that interesting? And I’ll bet you know all about it. Whoops, here comes the Missus.”

  “Toward you?”

  “No, getting into her car. Nice-looking woman. Her, Ronnie. You do okay, Junior.”

  I got up and went back into the kitchen. Just moving through the large, cool rooms calmed me. I said, “It’s my character,” and poured some more water. “Is that it? About Ghorbani? Any idea who used him?”

  “Not that comes to me. You know, he was the wrong kind of person for this job. He had emotions. He looked like he might enjoy it. Those things’ll get you killed. If he’s not around, maybe he’s dead. There she goes, the Missus, driving right past me without so much as a glance. Why do they make it so easy for us? Don’t they know we’re out here?”

  “Not usually,” I said. “Not till it’s too late.”

  “I could ask a few of my employers whether they’ve heard anything about him. What do I tell them when they ask me why?”

  “That he’s inherited a million dollars, and—”

  “You going to kill him?”

  “I don’t really kill people.”

  She didn’t say anything, which was tactful of her. I wandered into the library, maybe fifteen hundred books on the dark teak shelves, my favorite chair in the world in the corner with a beautiful art deco floor lamp from the mid-twenties standing behind it. Threw a nice yellow light, just like reading lamps are supposed to, not the vein-popping, iris-shriveling, soul-shrinking glare of the ones that are saving the world this year until it becomes public information that they’re full of mercury and people in China who live near the factories are developing Mad Hatter-disease delusions. I had a hundred now-illegal incandescent bulbs for my lamp, and I’d buy a hundred more in a minute if I knew where. The bulbs are jammed into my linen closet. See, the apartments in the Wedgwood had linen closets. And cold pantries. More lost filigree.

  I said, out loud, “Why don’t I just stay here?”

  Debbie startled me by saying, “Stay where, Junior?”

  “Where I am right now, someplace where no one would ever find me, where I could just read Proust or whoever the hell I want for the rest of my life.”

  “Proust?”

  “He’s a lot funnier than people expect, once you get past his not being able to sleep for sixty pages.”

  “Well, I’ll put it on top of both the books in my house. So I shouldn’t ask anyone about Ghorbani? I can’t unless you give me some kind of reason.”

  I sat in the chair and looked at the books. A wall of books makes civilization seem real, despite all the evidence to the contrary. “No, forget it. If I think of anything good, I’ll call you.”

  Debbie said, “Junior? Are you okay? You sound down.”

  “Me? What have I got to be down about?”

  “Fine,” she said crisply, backing right up. “We all chatted out here?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Did anybody talk to you about a job lately? A job in Malibu?”

  The silence stretched out as I turned my head sideways and read the titles of eighteen or twenty novels whose authors’ names began with G. I had reached Graham Green’s The Comedians when she said, “That’s over the line, Junior.”

  “I wasn’t asking whether you were involved in the job. But you know, it’s a pond of a certain size, that world is, and I was wondering whether you’d felt the wake. So to speak.”

  “Here she comes,” Debbie said. “My replacement. Is Louie going to have my money?”

  “Sure.”

  She hung up. Cell phones have robbed an entire generation of the pleasure of slamming down the receiver, but she managed somehow.

  One more friend for life. I realized, in the wake of my apparent insensitivity, that Debbie had always been almost oddly nice to me. For a hit woman, I mean. I hadn’t been paying attention.

  I looked around the perfect room again: the polished floor, the high ceiling, the orderly ranks of books, obeying the rules of alphabetical order and letting the ideas that filled them permeate the air like the fragrance of intelligence. Herbie, I realized, had never been here.

  The thought made me feel like crying. I hadn’t really cried for Herbie yet, and I felt like I owed him that. But, knowing Herbie, he’d prefer it if I found whoever poured that hot water into those gloves and tattooed him or her with an acetylene torch for an hour or two before carving him like an Easter ham. So if I had all this grief-energy, Herbie would say, turn it into something useful, like fury.

  … If you can’t get closure, get even.

  Right. And get moving. I stood up, went into the living room, and reached up into the chimney above the generous fireplace to retrieve the flat metal box I kept on the recessed niche I’d carved there. I found the key where I always hid it, and no, I’m not going to say where that was, and unlocked the box. Beneath my best fake ID—passport, driver’s license, bankbooks, active credit cards—I pulled out some rubber-banded wads of cash. I counted out $5,000 for Louie and then thought better of it and took another $2,500. With the $5K Wattles had given me, I should be okay for a bit. Taken as a group, hired guns are reluctant to extend credit. Even the ones who might like you.

  Why would anyone like me?

  I put everything back and stood in front of the fireplace, blinking back tears and fighting down one of those dreadful moments when my life looked like one long dirty smudge on the surface of the world, just darkness and breakage behind me, thievery, dishonesty, broken promises, betrayed relationships, wasted love. Love, I mean, wasted on me by people who had the right to expect something in return, something I wasn’t able to deliver. This vision of myself is always tiptoeing along just behind me, but most of the time it’s as faint as my shadow on a cloudy day. As long as I keep movin
g forward, the attention that requires prevents me from looking behind me for too long, catching a glimpse of the past from the wrong—or perhaps, the right—perspective. Wasted love. Wasted love is the heart-breaker.

  Moving right along, moving right along. Wattles’s chain: Wattles to Janice to Handkerchief to Dippy to Monty Carlo to whom? How many whoms after Monty Carlo? One? Two? Three? Which one of them was the one with the gun?

  Just to do something, I checked my voice mail. Nothing from Monty Carlo, whom I’d called twice at the number that Dippy gave me. I thought about seeming pushy by calling him again and decided I could risk it.

  I once again got the worst robotic voice in the world, the audible equivalent of one of those old ransom notes in which all the words were snipped from different magazines and books. Not just every word, but even the occasional single syllable, was said by a different voice. On my first two listens I’d recognized, provisionally, James Earl Jones, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hilary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Margaret Cho imitating her mother. This time, I spotted Rihanna (singing) and what sounded like a bad impression of James Franco and Anne Hathaway, done by the same person. Listening to the message unspool felt like being in a small room in which 27,000 ping pong balls were bouncing at high velocity between the walls. It said:

  You may or may not have reached the right number. Do we even know whether the number we actually mean to dial is the right number when looked at from a broader perspective? Is it perhaps a good thing that we’re thwarted so often when we try to exercise free will? I will either call you back or not. If you wish to pursue this further, speak after the collision.

  Tires squealed and at least two cars crashed, head on, from the sound of it. I said, “It’s Junior Bender again. Do you know that three of the people who were in the chain that led Dippy Thurston to hand you that envelope have gone into hiding? If you’d like to confirm that, try to get in touch with Dippy. In the interest of self-preservation, you might want to talk to me about it. You may call me back after the cough.” I coughed into the phone and disconnected.