“Thanks,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to have met you.” I opened the door and held it with my foot. “So Ghorbani was brutal by nature and dragging a bunch of drugs around. But what was the reason he went after you? The cause, right there in that moment.”
He took out another cigarette and sniffed one end before slipping it back into the pack, and then he sighed. “He disapproved of the relationship between me and Felipe. He saw us together in West Hollywood, and he didn’t recognize it as love. But the way he was then, he wouldn’t have recognized love spelled out in blinking letters two stories high.” He glanced back through the door, toward the room that had Felipe in it. “A good definition of hell, I’d say.”
It was winking at me from across the parking lot as I approached, but I paid it no attention because it was obviously an optical illusion, a reflection on the windshield, since I’d locked the car. But when I unlocked it and climbed in, there it was, taped neatly to the center of the steering wheel. A small envelope, like one that would contain a greeting card.
I opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper, folded to fit. When I opened it, I was looking at laser printer output, one word and two combinations of numbers.
The word was STOP.
The numbers were 11/28/2000 and 3/12/1978.
Rina’s birthday and Kathy’s.
“Yeah, I seen him.” The man working in the surplus store looked like a GI Joe doll, but life-size and many, many cartons of beer later. “I was watching, ’cause sometimes the little shits around here, they like to carve things on windows or key the side of the car, you know?”
I allowed as to how I knew.
“But he whipped out a keychain, popped the door, got in, and got out a minute later. Locked it again and walked away like the whole world could be watching and he wouldn’t care.”
“Popped it,” I said. “With the key?”
“Uh-uh. A remote. Locked it the same way. Walking away, and the car beeped.”
“A little shit, you said.”
“A kid. Maybe thirteen, fourteen, probably Mex. Dark hair under a baseball cap. Real skinny.” His eyes dropped to his paunch for a second. “You know, the way kids are.”
“Did you see where he went?”
“That way,” he said, pointing to his left.
When I got outside, I found that “that way” led me to a street corner. At the far end of the street, I could see a stoplight, so the street could have been the first hundred yards of a trip to anywhere.
No kid. No waiting car.
Rina’s and Kathy’s birthdays.
STOP.
I hadn’t seen nearly enough of Herbie in the past few years. I’d been, I told myself, busy. It had caught me off-guard when people started asking me to tidy up certain kinds of situations, situations involving some kind of wrong done by a person unknown. Solving problems for people who weren’t comfortable, usually with good reason, about going to the cops.
The idea of investigating crimes on behalf of crooks hadn’t been mine, and much of the time it took a gun at my head, metaphorically and occasionally literally, to get me to go to work. Even though I kind of enjoyed figuring things out and it was mildly flattering to be asked, there was the drawback of my possible death every time I went to work. If I was successful in identifying the culprit, he or she might try to kill me, and if I wasn’t successful, my client might kill me. Staying alive ate into my time.
And there were Kathy and Rina and Ronnie, and the business of being a careful and somewhat successful burglar. And reading and watching baseball and getting my hair cut and staying in shape and doing all the things that made it possible for me to think of myself as a reasonably successful, reasonably personable, reasonably admirable human being.
I just had way too much on my plate to bother keeping up with the person who, over the course of almost nineteen years, had given me whatever I needed, within reason, without ever calling my attention to the score, which was as lopsided as the national debt. I’d known when Herbie more or less retired, I’d known when he moved to Malibu, I’d even known that he was probably lonely and bored up there. As Louie put it, why would anybody want his toes in the sand?
But I hadn’t had the spare time in my crowded life to go up and ask what I could do by way of repaying some tiny fraction of my debt. Why is spare time so often the only time we have for those who have done the most for us? He’d stood in as the attentive father, and I’d stood in as the ungrateful son.
And all I wanted at that moment was to talk to him.
If he’d known what I was about to do, he’d probably have chained me to my steering wheel.
It’s a terrible thing to see someone’s eyes as they realize that you’ve registered their approaching death. It’s another confirmation of what they’re trying, against all odds, not to believe.
The last time I’d seen Paulie DiGaudio, a little less than six months ago, his waist measurement probably exceeded his height. The man sitting behind the table when I was led into the interrogation room in the Van Nuys police station—and whom I hadn’t recognized for a blank, off-balance second that felt like taking a step down I didn’t expect—was as gray as a Confederate uniform, and diminished in that terrible, deflated way that happens when someone loses fifty or sixty pounds so fast you could almost watch it come off.
The skin hung in loose folds from his face and draped his neck like a scarf. Most of his hair was gone, almost certainly burned off by the fire of chemo, and a patchy, peeling red pattern over his otherwise colorless forehead and cheeks looked like the marks of splattering hot fat. The eyes were still pure DiGaudio, the frayed, seen-it-all-and-surprised-by-none-of-it eyes you see in cops everywhere, but sharpened and focused now by something that could have been fear or rage or pain or all of them at the same time.
I said, “Jesus, Paulie.”
His face went red enough for the splotches to disappear. “Since when am I Paulie, you fucking crook? And what are you doing, waltzing in here and asking to talk to me like a real person? You think people here don’t know who you are?”
“I’m sorry.” I started to sit, but looked at him for a moment instead and said, “And I’m sorry about—about this.”
“Aaahhhh,” DiGaudio said. He looked down at his lap. “I had it when we—you know, that thing with Vinnie, I had it then. But back then, they thought—oh, who gives a shit what they thought? Like they know fucking anything. What do you want?”
“I know what you’re going to say, but is there anything I can do for you?”
“You?” he said. “Yeah, you can hop over to France, to the Loover Museum, and steal me the Mona Lisa. Give me something nice to look at. For the second time, what do you want?”
“Somebody beat me up,” I said.
“No shit.”
I pulled out the chair and sat down. “And he stole a lot of money from me.”
“Poetic justice, is that what they say?”
“I got a really good look at him, and so did two other people.”
“So?” He put both hands low on what remained of his belly, and I watched his face twist into a different face.
I said, “Should you even be here?”
“As opposed to what?” He brought his chin all the way down to his breastbone, squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened both them and his mouth as widely as he could and breathed out. “Sitting around and groaning all day?” He blotted sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, the gesture uncharacteristically delicate. “Taking my pants in? I’ll tell you, since we probably won’t see each other again, avoid cancer, okay? It’s like target practice for poisoners. You ever watch The Borgias?”
“No, but I know who they—”
“They woulda gone straight to the top of the heap in a cancer hospital. Everybody mixing up poison, like kids playing with clay. ‘Here, let’s try this one, it’ll only kill part of you. Whoops, wrong part.’ Do not get cancer.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder
. So, some crook ripped off the crook, huh? And we’re supposed to go out and pound the pavement. Gotta right this wrong. You know what they say about two negatives?”
“They make a—”
“They make a positive. Would you want your tax dollars, assuming you pay tax dollars, spent tracking down crooks who make life rough for crooks?”
“I see your point.”
“So go away.”
I said, “No. I did you a favor once, and I want one in return.”
“And if I don’t? What, you gonna tell people I got a relative who’s mobbed up? Look at me, Bender. Do you really think I give a rat’s ass?”
“No threats,” I said. “I’m not dumb enough to threaten you. No better way to lose the argument. It’s just—I guess it’s just fair play.”
He winced again, pushing himself back against the chair, and then he laughed a little air with no voice behind it. “You got cojones, I’ll give you that. Whaddya want? So I can say no, I mean.”
“I want to fill out a complaint or whatever I’m supposed to do and describe him to you, and look at a bunch of likely hits on the computer and then, if I think I see him, I want to look at him in person.”
“A line-up. Do you know what a pain in the ass that is?”
“If I’m right, the guy I’m looking for has been in here so often it’s like going out to pick up the paper in the morning. If he starts yelling for a lawyer, we’ll forget it.”
“Three witnesses,” he said.
“And he’s a bad guy. Look at me.” I stuck my tongue out, and DiGaudio recoiled. I said, “What kind of a guy would do that?”
“Are the other two witnesses crooks?”
“No. Cross my heart.” I didn’t.
“Well, shit.” He drummed his fingers in the table. “Okay,” he said. “You helped Vinnie stay outta jail, even if the rest of it didn’t work out so good. I’ll let you take a look and we’ll see who you come up with. Then I’ll think about it.”
It was all on computers. I gave the guy at the keyboard the best description I could of Ghorbani and we identified what he’d supposedly done to me as assault with intent to cause grievous bodily injury and grand theft, and he did his magic.
For eight to ten minutes I looked at the worst-looking bunch of mutts I’d ever seen, a parade of dim eyes, hanging jaws, missing teeth, facial tattoos, and bottled fury, all adding up to an absolute bar code to designate criminal stupidity. All of them were photographed head-on and in profile, all of them looking straight through the camera, none of them suggesting a really high skill set, and then there he was. I flagged him and two others as possibles, and went back to the interrogation room.
“Two of them, forget it,” DiGaudio said as he came back in. He walked as though the floor might ripple and pitch beneath him at any moment. “One of them is inside and the other one has disappeared. But the one with the funny last name, the one from Eye-ran or wherever, him I can bring in.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“But no lineup, nothing official. I’ll haul him in for questioning, and you and your witnesses can look through the one-way glass for about thirty seconds, and that’s it. If he’s the guy, you fill out the complaint, got it?”
“Got it.”
He leveled a finger at me. It was shaking, and I watched him watch it shake. “And if you tell me he’s not the guy, and anything happens to him—I mean anything at all, like he stubs his toe or anything—I’ll have you in here so fast your shoes will still be on the pavement.”
“Fine.”
He sat back in the chair and trained the eyes on me. Normally cops’ eyes made me feel like my skin was transparent, but this was more along the lines of an assessment than an X-ray. “So,” he said, and there was a kind of reluctance behind it. “Somebody did Herbie Mott.”
“Yes,” I said. Hearing him say it, it felt like my heart had doubled in size.
“You guys were kinda close, huh?”
“No,” I said. “Not particularly.” For a quick, over-my-head moment, I wondered whether he’d clicked on the connection between Herbie and Ghorbani, but couldn’t see any way it was possible.
“Not what I heard.” He seemed to be thinking, and while his mind was occupied he reached into his jacket pocket and found it empty. That was where he had always kept his Tootsie Rolls. “Can’t eat them anymore,” he said, seeing that I was watching his hand.
“I’d think you could eat anything you want,” I said.
“Just one of the bitches that come with this shit,” he said. “The stuff you like best? Tastes terrible. I’m living on Asian buffets because they got so much different crap that I can usually find one thing I can swallow. Big irony, huh? Me never much liking Asians. Still don’t much like Asians, as a matter of fact. But listen, I’m not trying to connect you to Mott’s death. That’s Malibu. Cutest cops in California, but they do their job. But I’m thinking there’s probably some stuff about Herbie you don’t know.”
“Like I said, we knew each other a little, but—”
“He dimed you once,” DiGaudio said, and then he pulled his head back the way a turtle will do and just watched me.
I said, “Sorry?”
“He dimed you.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a second, looking like he was deciding whether to continue. “For a job in Panorama City, maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago. Old woman, got a bunch of jewelry taken, got clobbered on the head. Herbie dimed you as the guy.”
I had to inhale twice before I could talk. “Bullshit.”
“But about half an hour later the jughead who clubbed her walked into a pawn shop with her jewelry and we just went and picked him up. So your record stayed nice and clean. No arrest.”
“Never happened.”
“That was one of the things Herbie Mott was,” DiGaudio said. “And maybe you ought to know it. Besides being a burglar and a scumbag, he was a pipeline. We busted maybe fifty guys because of Herbie.” I started to say something, but he held up a hand. “And Herbie skated. That was the deal, Herbie always skated.”
“Like I said.” My voice didn’t have much breath beneath it. “I didn’t know him that well.”
He grimaced and waited for it to pass. When he came back, the worn-out eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them. “How many times you been convicted, Bender?”
“Never.”
“Charged?”
“Never.” I saw where this was going, and it took all I had not to try to get out of the room before we got there.
“Arrested?”
“Never.”
“Junior,” he said. DiGaudio never called me by my first name. “Just ask yourself, back when I was forcing you to help Paulie, ask yourself how I knew you were a burglar. How every cop in this building knows you’re a burglar.” He laid his hands flat on the table, one crossed on top of the other, and watched them quiver. “Just think about it.”
What I didn’t want taken away from me was my sense of who Herbie was, who Herbie had been. It felt as though a big part of my life, the part of me that had chosen and then played Herbie’s Game, had been built on my sense of who Herbie was; by choosing Herbie’s Game I’d locked myself out of several alternative lives. I protected myself against what DiGaudio had said, for the time being, by surrendering to the beating Ting Ting had given me. First I stopped at Doc’s and had him improvise a long wire scratcher for the inside of the cast, which had been driving me crazy. He’d tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t even hold up my end of the conversation. Then, after half an hour of directionless driving, every possible direction feeling equally meaningless, I went to Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, stamping extra hard on the stairs that chirped, took off most of my clothes, ate six aspirin, turned off my phone, and got into bed.
When I woke up, the rectangle of the world framed by the window was dark. Ronnie was sitting on the peacock-print couch, reading something.
“What’s that?” I said. My voice felt unused, like it had been folded too long in a
drawer. I cleared my throat.
She held the book up. The title was The Deceived. “A thriller,” she said. “A guy named Brett Battles. He’s terrific.”
“What a masculine name,” I said. “Wonder what he’d be writing if his parents had called him Merle.”
“Not to mention Bender.” She dog-eared the page while I tried not to wince. “Means gay in British slang, did you know that? So your name is, basically, Young Gay.”
I said, “It’s been brought to my attention.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Terrible.”
“That kid would have beaten you up no matter what your name was. You could have been Biff Hardcase and you’d still be lying here, swelling.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “Well, okay, it is that. But it’s also what Sartre might have called malaise, and I call the heebie-jeebies.”
She put the book aside and got up, and I had the pleasure of watching five feet six inches of immaculately assembled womanhood cross the room, with the added savor of knowing she was heading for me. The pleasure of watching even the most interesting woman cross a room is dampened when they’re heading for someone else. She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up my left hand, which was resting on top of the covers, and began to massage as much of the hand as she could reach, given the plaster cast, focusing most of her attention on my fingers: taking them one at a time, smoothing them out, lengthening them, giving the tip a sharp tug and then moving on to the next. “Why do you have the heebie-jeebies?”
“Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m chasing my tail.”
She bent back my thumb and little fingers to open my palm and began to rub it deeply with both of her thumbs. “It’s worth chasing.”
I said, “Really.”
“That was the first thing I noticed about you, your tail.” She finished rubbing the center of my palm and blew on it, and every hair on my body stood up.
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