Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I’m looking for shomeone, and I’m beginning to doubt that I have the right reshourshes to find him. Sho I’m going to get the copsh to find him for me, and firsht, I need to file a complaint.”

  Back at Bitsy’s that night—for the first time, despite wearing goggles made of painkillers—I managed to avoid most of the steps that tweeted and whistled, so I put that fact in the otherwise-empty mental column marked progress. At the door, I tapped lightly, opened it a few inches, and said, “Prepare yourshelf.”

  When I stepped in, the caged birds chirped in horror and Ronnie’s face more or less fell apart. She managed to keep her smile in place, but her eyes went enormous and her eyebrows leapt halfway to her hairline. “Baby, baby, baby,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  I said, “Have you eaten my pashtrami shandwich?”

  “Of course not. Do you want it?”

  “No. I jusht want to watch you take a couple of bites sho I can pretend you’re me.”

  “Do you want me to go yum and make noises to show you how much you’re enjoying it?”

  “Oh, shkip it. I’m pretty loaded, thanksh to Doc. I think maybe what I need to do is find a position I can shleep in before I fall over.”

  “Peeling back the parrots,” she said, folding the bedspread down and plumping the pillows. “Do you need help with your clothes?”

  “I thought you’d never ashk.”

  She managed to get me undressed, then brought over a couple of cushions from the peacock-feather couch and arranged them in the bed so I could get comfortable on my right side, which let me avoid rolling over onto the cast with my mysteriously sore ribs.

  I said, “I’ve had it with the motelsh. They’re not good enough for you. Let’sh go shomewhere better tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” she said. “We’ll see how you feel about it then.” She touched her nose to my cheek and whispered into my ear, “But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I really don’t care where I am, if I’m with you.” She kissed me lightly, just a breeze of a kiss. “Now count backwards from ten.”

  I was out before I got to seven. I found myself in a dark room of indefinite size, although it seemed to be enormous and also roofless. One corner, far, far away, was brightly lighted, and I waded through something thick and viscous to get to it, and when I was finally there it turned out to be Herbie’s bedroom, where I spent what seemed like a very long time trying to turn off the whistling kettle until it all rippled and went away.

  WOODLAND HILLS MAN MURDERED

  A Woodland Hills resident who did business as a psychic was killed yesterday afternoon at his place of business in the Vista del Cielo shopping mall on Ventura Boulevard, police said.

  Two police units, responding to a call from a customer, found the body of Henry Willifer in the back room of the shop. Willifer had been beaten to death, although police declined to disclose the specific nature of his injuries.

  Willifer, 53, had been convicted several times for confidence schemes under the alias Henry Harrison. Police said he was better known in the criminal world by a nickname, “Handkerchief,” which was derived from his characteristic sartorial style.

  “The criminal world,” I said. “They make it sound like it’s somewhere else.”

  Police were called by one of Mr. Willifer’s clients, RuthEtta deWoskin, who said that she showed up without an appointment and heard loud voices coming from the inner room, where Mr. Willifer saw his clientele. Ms. deWoskin said she thought at first that Mr. Harrison was performing a service he called an “afterlife group session” in which multiple deceased individuals who influenced the client’s life were called upon to account for themselves.

  “Those could get kind of hairy,” Ms. deWoskin said. “They’d get to arguing and like that. Sometimes stuff would get thrown.”

  “Group sessions of the dead?” Ronnie said. “He seems like someone I would have liked.” She sipped her coffee, the smell of which was tying me in knots. I’d let one mouthful pass over my shredded tongue, which felt a little like gargling fire ants. My cup was sitting on the table, mocking me as it cooled. The table had a little ceramic birdcage wired to it, the circular front opening of which had been used as an ashtray by many a weary traveler, with the expected fragrant result. I’d noticed when we moved in that one of the caged birds had a cough, and now I knew why.

  I stuck my finger in the coffee. Still too hot. “I probably didn’t like him as much as I should have,” I said. “But he just never told the truth.”

  “He and I would have gotten along fine, then,” Ronnie said.

  Ms. deWoskin said she went to wait in a restaurant in the mall because she “didn’t want to eavesdrop” and became concerned when she had been there more than an hour. “He kept those spirits on the clock,” she told reporters. “They just toed the line for him.” After another half an hour she called the police.

  LAPD sources said that Ms. deWoskin, who lacked a cell phone, left her table at the window to make the call, and they believe that was when Mr. Willifer’s assailants left the business location and slipped away.

  Mr. Willifer had done business in the mall under the name The All-Seeing Eye for a little less than four months. All-Seeing Eye for a little less than four months.

  I said, “Beaten to death. I wasn’t all that fond of Handkerchief, but he didn’t deserve that.”

  “It seems to be a theme,” Ronnie said. She’d been reading the paper over my shoulder. “First your friend Herbie and now, uh, Handkerchief.”

  “Somebody wants really badly to know something,” I said. “Maybe you ought to get out of Los Angeles.”

  “Maybe you got your brains addled. How’s the tongue?”

  “It hurts,” I said. “But at least I don’t sound like a bad ventriloquist.”

  “You look awful.”

  I said, “Good. That’s exactly what I need. To look awful.”

  I gave myself a parting look in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car. Everything Ting Ting had done to me the previous night had swelled, ripened, and deepened into the palette of colors that signal biological distress: grays with red beneath them, a hemoglobin purple like the blood that’s pulled to the skin by a really energetic hickey, and a kind of nameless yellowish darkness like the glass a water-colorist has been dipping his brush into for days. My nose was twice its usual width, and my lips were fat enough to cushion a bumper car.

  What with its grand name, the First Church of the Eternal Redeemer was a bit of a letdown. Decades ago a Los Angeles bakery called Vandekamp’s built itself a chain of stores, white stucco buildings that were distinguished by having at one end a Dutch windmill, often with the blades outlined in neon. Today these buildings are architectural fossils, usually with the windmill long gone but the towers still pointing heavenward, and the First Church of the Eternal Redeemer had repurposed the tower by putting a cross on it, giving the impression of a church that baked its own communion wafers.

  One story high except for the holy windmill, with a painted-over display window, the building stood in a somewhat weedy lot at the center of what, thirty or forty years ago, had been a medium-level mini-mall. The stores immediately on either side had been bulldozed and cleared away, making the church stand out like a lonely tooth, but the structures at both ends of the mall were still standing: a donut shop, a Mexican restaurant specializing in menudo, an Army-Navy surplus store, and a shuttered, dusty shop front with the word ADULT fading from the stucco above the window.

  The Redeeming, such as it was, was being done where Pacoima shaded indistinguishibly into Sylmar, the northernmost town in greater Los Angeles. The “mar” in Sylmar is Spanish for sea, suggesting that the town fathers were bad judges of distance, since the Pacific is at least thirty miles away and on the other side of the hill, but geography has never been allowed to get in the way of land values in Southern California.

  I hurt in places where I couldn’t even remember getting hit, so I was w
alking clumsily, but that wasn’t why I turned my ankle the moment I got out of the car. The parking lot was rippled and torn from beneath by the roots of the big ficus trees that lined the street. The roots had broken right through the asphalt in places. The entire mall, the church included, had the depressive air of a property developer’s tax write-off, a loss allowed to fester on some spreadsheet by way of balancing the picture for the IRS.

  I was limping toward the church on my newly turned ankle when a man came out of the Mexican restaurant with a large foil tray of take-out that was almost buckling beneath the weight of the food, and made the right that put him directly in my path. He was dark-haired and buzz-cut, slight and skittery looking, a natural lightweight without an extra ounce on him and the bright, deep-set eyes that often announce the furnace-like metabolism of someone who could live on donuts and not gain an ounce. This characteristic is common, I’ve noticed, in preachers. Since I’m an instinctive atheist, I always wonder whether they mistake their elevated internal processes for some sort of divine energy. For all I know, high metabolic processes are responsible for religion itself: the persistence of easily-available ecstasy and all that obsession with food—what you can and can’t eat, when you can and can’t eat it, the demonization of gluttony, all those starving sojourns in the desert, all that fasting to rattle up all those visions, all those holiday feasts. The man stopped, looked back to the church as though to verify that I was on a course for it, and said, “Yes?”

  “Reverend Angelis?”

  “I am.” He blinked, but it was more than a blink. He slammed both eyes closed and then popped them open again. It was a flincher’s blink. “But properly speaking, it’s Doctor Angelis.”

  “Apologies, Doctor. I’d like to talk to you for a moment.”

  Two bang-shut blinks. He said, “If it’s about the rent—”

  “It’s not. Oh, I’m sorry. My name is, um, Merle Bender.” Junior didn’t seem appropriate for a guy who insisted on being called “doctor.” And I’d have to explain it to him.

  “Merle,” he said, going straight to the heart of the matter. Blink blink. “Unusual name for a man.”

  “It was my father’s. You can call me Junior.”

  “It’s hot out here,” he said, “and, paradoxical though it may seem, the food is getting cold. We can talk inside.”

  He wheeled around and headed for the door, revealing a clearing of male pattern baldness at the top of his head that could have passed for a tonsure. I dragged myself along behind him, feeling like Igor and studying his not-very-white shirt, the frayed cuffs of his dark slacks, the rounded heels of his shoes. His gaze hadn’t lingered for an instant on my face, and he’d turned his back on me with complete faith that this absolute stranger who looked like he’d bobbed for apples in a bucket of lava was harmless and trustworthy.

  “The rent,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s always a problem. Property is expensive but God should be free.”

  I had no problem with the idea that God should be free, so I said, “Amen.”

  He didn’t turn his head for a sincerity check. “And the Lord’s work can run up the bills, too.” He stopped at the door, which opened out. “Can you get this for me, please?”

  Doctor Angelis side-stepped so I could open the door, and I followed him in.

  The church’s origin as a storefront was obvious. The pulpit was a plywood riser with a banged-up podium on it, stuck at a forty-five-degree angle in the far right corner of the room. Metal folding chairs had been arranged in diagonal rows but many of them had been dragged out of place to surround a long plastic table that occupied the center of the room. Around it sat nine people, all in their seventies and above. Some were well above, perhaps in their nineties. Sylmar and Pacoima are largely Latino areas, but only four of the people at the table looked Latino; two others were black, and three were Caucasian. They all turned to face us expectantly when the door opened.

  “Felipe,” Doctor Angelis called, and a slender young Latino man hurried from the back of the store to take the sagging tray and put it on the table. There was a pile of plastic utensils and paper plates at the table’s center, and Felipe began to parcel them out. No one said anything, just watched Felipe’s hands and occasionally glanced at the food.

  “Taking a stitch,” Angelis said with a touch of acid, “in the social safety net.”

  I said, “The deficit never seems to interfere with the legislators’ food chain.”

  “Render unto Caesar,” he said, “pretty much everything these days.” He watched Felipe, who was expertly ladling the food onto the paper plates. Angelis said, “Have we said grace?”

  Without looking up, Felipe said, “Not yet,”

  “Well, grace,” Angelis said. “Eat up, everyone.” He turned to me. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Bender?”

  I absolutely could not lie to this man. “I’m looking for someone.”

  The deep-set eyes regarded me as warily as lights in a cave. “Do you mean him harm?”

  I said, “What a question.”

  I got the flinch-blink. “That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been asked.”

  “Let’s say no.”

  He gave me a tight smile, astringent enough to sting the cuts on my face. “Let’s answer truthfully.”

  “It depends on what I learn. A man has been killed, and I want to make sure this person had nothing to do with it.”

  “Not a conversation for this room,” he said. “Follow me.” I tagged behind him as he headed for the back of the store, pushing aside a dark curtain that brought back the ones I’d scorned at Handkerchief’s, and then through a door into the open air.

  Except for the building immediately behind us, we were surrounded by knee-high weeds, dry and dead and coated with dust, bordered by a high brick wall, over which more ficus trees spread their leaves, shading the houses beyond. Angelis emitted a sigh I remembered from when I was a smoker and pulled a pack of unfiltered Camels, kind of a butch smoke for a preacher, from the pocket of his shirt. “If this bothers you,” he said, “take a couple of steps back and hold your breath.” He lit up and blew the smoke away from me. “In your world, Mr. Bender, are people killed often?”

  “People are killed in everybody’s world. Do you feed those people in there every day?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s twice that many. Dinner is the big meal. Don’t be Jesuitical with me. Are you in law enforcement?”

  “A related field.”

  “A private eye?”

  “Are there really private eyes? I’m on a personal errand. The person who was killed meant a lot to me, and his lawyer gave me a letter in which my friend had written the name of a person who might eventually kill him.”

  “How careless of the murderer, to reveal himself in advance to his victim. What was the name?”

  “Ruben Ghorbani.”

  The response, and a cluster of blinks, came so fast I was still pronouncing Ghorbani. “Never heard of him.”

  “Really? What about the scar under your mouth? What about the skull fracture he caused? You must know that I’m not wandering around asking random people whether they know Ruben Ghorbani.”

  Three more blinks. “Yes, of course, that was his name. I’ve—I know this sounds improbable, but I think I’ve erased it from my memory.”

  I said, “Improbable doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  He smiled, more sweetly this time. “Then let’s put it in a different light. If you intend to do him harm, my telling you where he is—if I knew where he was, which I don’t—would be akin to sending someone to take revenge on him, wouldn’t it?”

  “So you do know where he is.”

  “No,” he said, and I could have spotted the lie from twenty yards.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just to be clear, if he didn’t kill my friend, I mean him no harm.” I reached into my pocket, using the hand that didn’t have a cast right above it, and pulled out some of the money I’d taken from the box in the Wedgwood.


  I got a tight, unpleasant grin. “Are you attempting to bribe me?”

  “No,” I said, surprised. “I’m attempting to give you some money to help you feed those people and pay the rent. How much is the rent?”

  “Eleven-fifty.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Begging your pardon, but the landlord’s doing okay, isn’t he?”

  “There’s a good reason that landlords are among the first targets whenever there’s a revolution.” He wasn’t even looking at the money; he was, instead, studying my face for the first time. “You got beaten up worse than I did.”

  “My skull’s intact,” I said. “Here’s twelve hundred.”

  “I do hope you realize you’re not buying information.”

  “Why did he do it? I’m not asking where he is, I just want to know why someone, anyone, would attack someone like you.”

  He pocketed the money and thought about the question. “He was living in hell. Do you believe we create hell?”

  “Was? Is he dead?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. He had no talent for lying. “Do you? Believe we create hell? For ourselves, if for no one else?”

  “How did he create hell?”

  “He was a violent, brutal man and he took drugs that made him more brutal and more violent. So I suppose you could say he was imprisoned by genetics and dope.”

  “So you believe we create hell.”

  “I do. I just wonder why so few of us create heaven, either for ourselves or for the people closest to us.”

  “I have a related question. Well, sort of. Do you believe in luck, or do you think a stroke of luck is a blessing?”

  “Luck is a tough one.” He inhaled the final quarter of the cigarette, dropped the butt, and stepped on it. “What I think is that I agree with Pasteur: fortune favors the prepared mind. Luck? I don’t have any idea. Maybe it’s something that kicks up spontaneously, like a breeze, and then it’s gone. I’m pretty sure that every time we find a quarter, it’s not a blessing in the way many people use the word. On balance, I believe that God is too busy to micro-manage, and that if you’re going to give Him credit for a coin toss, then you also have to blame Him for an earthquake.”