The second message was DiGaudio, who said, “Your guy will be here tomorrow afternoon at four. Just come in and ask for me.” Then he coughed a few times, said, “Ohhh, shit,” and disconnected.
The third was from Dippy Thurston. “Just seeing how you are,” she said, “and wondering if there was any news.” Even her voice was elfin. “This is a throw-away phone and I’m throwing it away, so don’t call me back. And don’t bother looking for me, either. I’ll call tomorrow.”
Well, at least someone was alive, or had been in the last eight hours. My watch volunteered the information that it was 10:44. I called Rina anyway.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just this second fell asleep.”
“If you were asleep, how do you know it was just this second?”
“The same song is on Spotify.”
“What the hell is Spotify? Sounds like an acne treatment.”
“It’s an Internet music channel. I created a bedtime station called SNOOZE.”
“Speaking of the Internet, how hard is it to find a hacker?”
“Too many variables for a decent answer,” she said. She yawned. “Is he like a stealth hacker or a showoff? Two completely different types. Stealth hackers are totally hard to trace. They’ve got names behind names and they’re browsing through a whole series of proxies, one proxy strung to another, probably on different continents so they can mimic IP addresses from anywhere in the world.”
“If you say so. You want to give it a try?”
“Sure, it’s money. What have you got?”
“A name, but probably not a real one. Monty Carlo.”
“Gee, you think? Monty with an e or a y?”
“Y.”
“Very brand-name. What else?”
“He’s got tattoos.”
“Whoa. Maybe you haven’t seen any bare arms lately.”
“I mean, unusual tattoos. Math. Cosines and stuff.”
“Calculus,” she said. “Huh, that’s modestly interesting. The Monte Carlo Method, spelled with an e, is a pretty famous piece of calculus. It’s a way of predicting the outcome in a situation with a large number of apparently random variables.”
“Do tell.” If I said something every time she amazed me, she’d become impossible.
“It was invented in the 1940s by a physicist who was sick and couldn’t go to the office, which was like Los Alamos, since he was working on the atomic bomb? Do you remember any of this?”
“The atomic bomb,” I said. “These days it sounds almost quaint.”
“So he was sitting at home, probably in bed, playing solitaire, and he wondered how he might go about predicting the probability of any specific game’s being winnable. What I like about people like this is that he really didn’t care how the game would come out or whether he could win or what the odds were. What he cared about was how he might approach a solution.”
I said, “My turn to say huh.”
“Yeah, huh. So, to continue my story, which I’m pretending interests you, when he got back to the lab, he showed his algorithms to his boss, who named the solution after the famous casino in that little micro-country, and later someone else programmed it into this, like, ice-age computer called ENIAC so he could run it.”
“That’s extremely helpful,” I said. “I wish I’d been making notes.”
“It’s still used for certain kinds of calculations. Monte Carlo, not ENIAC. ENIAC had about as much power as an alarm clock and it was as big as the Pentagon, and I’m talking about all this because I think I may have heard of this guy, Monty Carlo I mean, not ENIAC. I think he could be right out here somewhere, here in the Valley. Some kid was talking about him.”
“He may work with kids,” I said. “He sent one, I think, to break into my car.”
“Yeah? Scan the frequency on your remote?”
“Why does everyone know about this but me?”
“You know lots of things the rest of us don’t,” she said. My own daughter, soothing my ego. “Really. Lots of things. Lots and lots.” She yawned again, in my ear this time. “Is that it? Can I back go to sleep now?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “This is gonna cost you.”
She hung up. I sat in my car, running my own probabilities. If I was right, if Monty Carlo had dug up that info to frighten me rather than to threaten me, I could give myself permission to relax, just a little. Of course, I had no way of knowing whether I was right. There could be a bullet streaking for my head at that very moment.
I ducked, just in case, and then started the car back up and headed for West Hollywood and Ronnie.
The last thing my father said to me before he left for good, with his car idling in the driveway, full of his clothes and books, was, “You’ll understand all this when you’ve grown up.”
The last thing I said to Rina before I left her for good, with my car idling in the driveway full of my clothes and books, was, “You’ll see. It’s not going to be so different.”
The last thing Herbie said to me before I left for good, my car idling in his driveway, waiting to take me to whatever long-forgotten thing was more important than spending time with him, was, “See you later, kid.”
We’d all been wrong.
People are wrong so often, and things break so easily.
Leaving for good. What a concept.
When I asked at the dealership for Edward Mott, the guy at the front desk said into his microphone, “Eddie, Eddie Mott, come to check-in.”
I said, “Eddie, huh?”
“Eddie here, Eddie probably everywhere in the world,” the desk guy said. His nametag read MICHAEL, so he had the credentials to turn up his nose at nicknames.
Behind me, someone said in a reedy tenor, “Help you?”
I turned to see a man who looked like the Herbie I first knew, if he’d been freeze-dried for a couple of decades. He was small, although on him it was the kind of smallness that can seem precise and fussy, while Herbie, once I’d gotten to know him, had always seemed to be about my height, even though he wasn’t. He had the same receding hair, neither red nor brown, and the same four-pound nose, which the rest of his features had gathered to worship. But where Herbie’s eyes had always given me the unsettling impression of being slightly closer to me than the rest of his face, as though he were wearing strong reading glasses, Eddie’s were distant and underpowered, the kind of eyes that didn’t consider anything very closely and probably didn’t remember much of what they’d looked at.
Or they might have been the eyes of someone who just didn’t give a shit.
“Eddie,” I said. “Can I get a minute of your time?”
The left eye tightened for an instant, just a little pull on the muscles beneath the lower lid, and he said, “Maybe trade it to you for your name.”
“Eddie,” the man behind the desk said, “the gentleman is looking for a C-A-R.”
Eddie reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty. He slapped it on the desk and said, “Twenty bucks says you’re wrong. Want to match it?”
I said to the man behind the desk, “Save your money.” To Eddie, I said, “My name is Junior Bender.”
He made a sound that might have been a snort. “Well, isn’t this a riot? Hope you parked close, because if you didn’t you’ve had a walk for nothing.” He crumpled the twenty in his hand and turned to go.
I put a hand on the sleeve of his sport coat. It felt thin and slightly greasy, and it released a faint reek of tobacco. “Eddie. You can either give me five minutes in your office, or I’ll make a stink they’ll be asking you about for weeks.”
He yanked his arm away. “Stink all you want. Get out of here.”
“Do they know about your convictions?” He stopped walking, and I made a note to slip Rina an extra twenty. A man whose job put him in close proximity to half a million dollars’ worth of new cars every day wasn’t supposed to drive under the influence.
“Those records are sealed,” he said. T
he emotionless little eyes were all over the room. “I was a juvenile.”
“They’re not sealed very well,” I said. “Come on, five minutes. Don’t you owe your father that much?”
“I don’t owe my father shit,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Then do it because I’ll fuck you up with the management if you don’t.”
The look he gave me brought his eyes alive for the first time; I felt his gaze perforate me and keep right on going. His mouth was screwed up as though he was going to spit, but what he said was, “What a guy, but that’s what I should expect. Come on, asshole, let’s get it over with.”
I followed him past six ethereally gleaming cars, too immaculate ever to have burned gasoline. Separating them from the heat and noise of the day was a curved plate glass window that ran the entire front of the building. Through it, if they’d been looking, the cars would have seen their future: dirty, dented, trailing fumes, packed full of questionable people, jammed grille to tailpipe at one of Ventura’s infinite stoplights, and heading mile by dreary mile toward the point where they’d be pulled off the road and chopped for parts.
It didn’t take much energy to see the parallels with our own lives, although it took a little more to push it away. I’d managed to do it by the time Eddie led me into a tiny office, just an anonymous cubicle with a desk, two chairs, and white walls blank except for an enormous electric clock. The outer wall was made of glass so the management could make sure he wasn’t playing solitaire or slicing his arms open or weeping helplessly into his hands when he should be out there selling.
Solitaire. The Monte Carlo Method. Where was Monty Carlo right now?
“Do it,” he said. He was standing in front of his desk with his hands in his pockets—usually a defensive posture—and started to jingle some coins. The muscle beneath his eye tugged once and then again.
“To begin with,” I said, “I assume you know about your father.”
“Sure. Got a call from his lawyer, even before the cops told me.”
“Guy named Twistleton?”
“A. Vincent Twistleton. Uncle Vince.”
“Really?”
“Don’t be silly. But he might as well have been, since Twisteleton was the way my father talked to us. Through ‘Uncle’ Vince.” He made the first air quotes I’d seen in a decade to set off Uncle. “Easier than face-to-face, I guess, if you can’t look anybody in the eye.”
“Talked to you, or to your mother?”
“My mother and I were on the same side,” Eddie said, his lips pulling back from his teeth. “The side my father addressed through his lawyer.”
“Really. Well, your dad wrote me a letter—”
“To you personally? Why should that surprise me?”
“He asked me to come and see you.”
“And now you’ve done it. I’m sure you have things to do, so I—”
“He wanted me to try to make you understand.” The words felt surprisingly empty to me, and I realized that some of the things I’d been told about Herbie were making me question what I felt about him. How could I assume that I knew anything about what Eddie’s experience had been?
“Oh, I understand,” Eddie said. “I’ve understood for decades. It’s not so complicated.”
“He thought about you, talked about you, all the time.” This wasn’t literally true, but I figured, so what? Maybe it’ll make him feel better, if only for now. “This was his last letter, the one he wrote me, and it’s about you.”
He glanced up at the clock and then, reflexively, at his wristwatch, a gesture with years of practice behind it, and said, “I’ll bet you that twenty you saved Michael at the desk that it wasn’t only about me.”
“No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t.”
The nod he gave me had a kind of satisfaction that made me want to look away, the satisfaction of someone who’s enjoying his pain. “It was mostly about crook shit, wasn’t it?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“See, that’s it, in a nutshell.” He was leaning his butt against the desk, trying to look at ease but the hands in his pockets were balled into fists. “Nothing about this is hard to understand. That’s the way it always was.” He looked down at the floor for a second and then back up at me. “It was just more important for him to be a crook than it was to be a father.”
And there it was, like getting hit in the face with a bucket of bolts: the one short, blunt, unequivocal sentence I’d never allowed myself to put together without qualifiers and justifications, the baldest possible description of my relationship with my own daughter, and here was Eddie, the barely-functioning adult casualty of precisely the same kind of treatment. I must have stood there without replying longer than I’d thought because suddenly he was leaning forward, studying me and saying, “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said, but I was responding to the tone, not the words, because I hadn’t actually focused on the words. “Yeah, fine, I’m—”
The electric clock on the wall went chuck very softly and the minute hand took another leap.
“Maybe you ought to sit down. Who banged you up, anyway?”
“A chorus boy,” I said, still feeling fogged in. “Misrepresenting himself.”
Then I was in a chair, and he was sitting on the desk in front of me, although I didn’t actually remember either of us moving.
“Sorry,” I said. “I—I just got kind of sidetracked.” I wanted to talk to my daughter, I wanted to talk to Kathy, but all I could think was, And say what?
“Yeah,” he said. “I noticed.”
I needed to change the subject, but I couldn’t manage to change it very much, and I certainly couldn’t bring the subject around to Rina. “My own—uhh—my own father left me,” I said. “I mean, he left my mother and me.”
“Well, of course, he did,” Eddie said. “So wasn’t it lucky that you got mine?”
“Hold on a minute.” I shook my head and rubbed at my face, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to bring myself back into that room with Eddie. “What do you mean, ‘of course?’ How much do you know about me?”
“Everything that matters, which isn’t much, because you don’t matter much to me. But I know the essentials. I know the essentials about all of you.”
I parroted, “All of us.”
“Well, well,” Eddie said. “Lookie here. He’s surprised, isn’t he?”
“What do you mean, all of us?”
“My father,” he said. “It was like the priest’s Boys’ Town, but for crooks. No, that’s not right. It was like—do you read books?”
“When there’s no bowling on TV.”
“He was Fagin, in Oliver Twist, that’s who he was. Wanted to make a whole lot of Little Herbies. Actually tried to name me Herbie, my mom says, but she wouldn’t let him.”
“No,” I said, feeling suddenly vicious, “Eddie is infinitely preferable.”
He jingled his change happily. He’d gotten under my skin. “And you thought you were the only one, didn’t you?”
I took a moment, stretching my legs out in front of me just to give myself something to do. “How did you know my father had left my mother?”
“They all needed fathers,” Eddie said. “That need was the socket he plugged himself into. He was Daddy to everybody except me.”
A part of me wanted to say, Oh, poor you, but there he was in front of me. The discard left behind by another clueless father, yet one more abandoned adult, trying to act as though it hadn’t mattered. So instead I said, “Okay,” and got up. “Sorry to bother you.”
“Are you going to make trouble for me with the boss?”
“Why would I make trouble for you, Eddie?” I asked, feeling a thousand years old. “We’re practically the same person.”
The clock went chuck again, and once more Eddie looked at it and then at his watch. “Lunchtime,” he said. He put a fingertip beneath the twitching eyelid. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“There were three of you,” h
e said, ignoring the little white plastic stick in the glass and stirring his amber drink with his forefinger. We were in an old-style steak place on Ventura—red leather booths, dark wood, and testosterone, the kind of place that should always be called Bud’s. The waitress had brought him the drink and put it on the table before she even said, “Hi, Eddie.”
The drink was a double from the look of it, and light on the water. I said, “Diet Coke, please,” and when the waitress was gone, I asked him, “Was I the first one?”
“Second,” he said. “The first one was a guy named Chris, who learned what he could from my father and then used it to break in to my father’s place and steal everything he could carry, ho ho ho. I guess he left town, but for all I know, my father killed him.”
“Your father never killed anyone.”
He gave me a long look, up from under his eyebrows, and drank.
“Did he?”
His lower lip popped out, as though the question wasn’t worth an answer. “Might have.”
I parked that for the moment and said, “Who was the third?”
“Girl,” Eddie said, almost spitting the word. “Name of Ellen. She finished off whatever politeness still existed between my mother and him.”
“How long did she last?”
“Couple of years.” He raised the glass and eyed me over it. “You mean, were you number one?” He laughed, the way I might laugh if someone I didn’t like tripped in front of me. “Yeah, if that makes you feel better. You were the favorite son.”
The silence stretched out until the waitress arrived with the Diet Coke and said, “The usual, Eddie?” and Eddie nodded.
I asked, “What’s the usual?”
The waitress, who was clearly not marking time until her studio contract came through, said, “Spencer steak and fries, medium.”
“You have Caesar salad?”
“We do. Entree-size?”
“Fine. Thanks.”
“Want blackened spicy chicken on it?”
“Under no circumstances.”
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