Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Will do,” Louie said. “I think girls are a good idea in that neighborhood, whaddya think?”

  “I agree, but I wish you’d stop calling them girls.”

  “What’re we, on PBS? Haven’t got anything yet on the guys you asked me about. Nobody seems to have heard of Monty Carlo, and I can’t find anyone who’s heard from Ruben Ghorbani in a couple, three years.”

  “Maybe he’s dead.”

  “Uh-uh. Somebody would know. There’da been parties. People would have bought gift ribbon, shot off fireworks.”

  “Well, keep looking. I’ll come by later today and give you a wad of cash.”

  “I can front you for a couple days.”

  I was touched. Among crooks, this is the next thing to a proposal. “I’ll get it to you today, but thanks.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Burt the Gut, he’s retired now, but I got his address and talked to him, and he’ll be looking for you in, say, forty-five.” He gave me the address, which almost made me whistle. Burt the Gut had matriculated from the Valley to Hancock Park, home of some of Los Angeles’s very best houses, and he was on Hudson, my very own personal favorite street. In my infrequent mental fast-forwards to my Golden Years, should I reach them, I’m spending them in a 1932 Moorish castle of about 5500 square feet on Hudson. I break into it every now and then just to make sure the owners are taking care of it.

  Burt the Gut lived half a block from my castle, not bad for a guy who started out running a small betting parlor, turning two competing mobs against each other so he could do business among the falling bodies in the war zone, expanded into the numbers game, and then went into the kind of high-interest, short-term money-lending that no one but the very biggest and most prestigious banks can do legally. Burt, as Herbie once explained to me, had three rules: interest would compound daily, collateral would be worth triple the loan, and pain would be inflicted upon the careless and the tardy. And when pain was the mode du jour, Burt turned to Ruben Ghorbani, a man who apparently felt about hurting people the way Ronnie felt about chocolate, although from what I’d heard about him, she controlled her craving better than he did.

  I coasted past my castle, noted with distaste the new color of the trim, a sort of Postal Service bad-meat green, and pulled into Burt’s curving, sun-dappled driveway. Judging from the eye-ringing emerald hue of the lawn, the grass had never endured a dry minute since it was planted, about forty-five minutes ago. There are two schools of thought associated with good lawns: the British approach, which says you simply plant it and roll it for several centuries, and the Los Angeles nouveau-riche view, which says you just put in a new one whenever the old one gets a little ratty.

  Burt’s place was a hulking, broad-shouldered white Mediterranean with a red-tile roof and a front door twelve feet high. The woman in gray sweats who opened the door was a premature victim of plastic surgery; she looked to be in her early thirties, but she already had plump pillows of what might have been blancmange floating above her cheekbones and chin to reshape her face, and her eyes had that wind-tunnel pull at the outer corners that said facelift in every language on earth. Her hair had been bleached to fiberglass. Confronted in a mirror with the face she’d had at twenty, she probably would have burst into tears.

  “You’re that guy,” she said. “Ten-thirty.”

  “I am,” I said, but she had already turned her back and was heading for a curving stairway. Without looking back, she pointed to her left, toward an arch, and said, “It’s in there” rather than “He’s in there,” and did the stairs two at a time, her body young and lithe and individual, a terrible contrast with the mass-produced, department-store face.

  In there was the living room, vast and vaulted, with a stone floor and a beam ceiling. It was stuffed with bulging, overdressed furniture of vaguely Eastern European origin, enough for three rooms of its size. On the biggest couch, wearing a massive white bathrobe at 10:30 in the morning with the assurance of a guy who plans to wear it all day, was a powerful-looking, surrealistically tanned individual who had to be Burt the Gut. I’d been expecting stomach, but what I got was all of it: from his big square head to his shoulders to his bare feet, everything was outsized. He had to be pushing eighty, but there was none of the dwindling I sometimes associate with age. The leathery brown skin was firm, the body intimidatingly chunky, the hair as black as shoe polish. He looked like he could crack walnuts with his teeth, chew the shells into a paste, and glue somebody to the wall with it.

  “You meet Seven?” he said without getting up. He had his right hand jammed into the pocket of the robe, which made me a little nervous.

  “I guess.”

  He shook his head in what seemed to be commiseration. “Talk your arm off?”

  “You must pay her by the word.”

  “Heh,” he said. He squinted at me as though I were standing in front of a spotlight. “Why am I seeing you?”

  “I haven’t got any idea,” I said. “I’m seeing you because I’m looking for someone.”

  “Oh, yeah. Ruben.” He used the hand that wasn’t in his pocket to indicate an armchair big enough for two. “Sit. I got a stiff neck.”

  I sat. The chair was upholstered in something prickly. “Is her name really Seven?”

  “Don’t be silly. How many people you know named Seven? She’s my seventh wife, right? And I’m old enough and rich enough that I can call her what I want. Let me give you a tip. If you’re going to marry a lot of women, make sure they all got the same name. Otherwise, some night at one of them intimate moments when you’re expected to say something like, ‘Oh, Maria,’ sure as shit her name won’t be Maria.”

  “Not a problem I’m likely to face.”

  “You never know. So, like I said, I ain’t seen him.”

  “Ruben? You haven’t actually said that.”

  “I said it to your travel agent, whoever it was that called to ask if you could come.”

  “Louie.”

  “Him. I told him. Told him I ain’t seen Ruben for two, maybe three years.”

  Burt’s right eye was off-center, wandering over my left shoulder, and I kept feeling like I should lean over to meet it, but then I wouldn’t be meeting his other eye, so I stayed where I was. But then I found myself wanting to look back over my shoulder. I said, “What was he doing, last time you saw him?”

  “Why would I know? I didn’t hoist shots with the guy. He was busting heads, right? Somebody needed his head busted, I called Ruben. He didn’t come over after and watch the game or nothing.”

  “So after you stopped using him, you never saw him again?” He opened his mouth, and I said, “Or heard from him?”

  “Had a couple calls. Nothing much. Looking for work.”

  “Hear anything about him?”

  This time, both eyes were looking over my shoulder, and I gave up and turned around.

  Seven was leaning up against the side of the archway as though it took the entire resistance of the house to keep her upright. “I’m going to the cheese store.”

  “Stop the presses,” Burt said.

  She gave the keys in her hand an impatient shake. “You want anything?”

  “The cheese store? Gee, I don’t know. Cheese?”

  Seven said, “I don’t know why I bother,” pushed off from the wall, and turned to go.

  “Go over to Viktor Benes, get me some alligator.”

  “That’s not on the way.”

  “What’s not on the way? Santa Monica Boulevard, for Chrissakes.”

  The skin over her plumped-out cheekbones turned dark red. “Century City, I’m not going into Century City.”

  “Then don’t fucking ask,” Burt said. “Just go get your fucking cheese.”

  Seven flipped him a finger, shook her head, wheeled, and disappeared. A moment later, the door was closed with some force.

  “Don’t get married,” Burt said.

  He didn’t seem like the kind of person to discuss my failed marriage and my daughter with, so I just said, “Y
ou were going to tell me whether you heard anything about Ruben after you stopped talking to him.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He took a couple of breaths and focused one of his eyes on me. “Last I heard, he beat the shit out of some priest, some kind of pastor or something, in the Valley. That’s the kind of story that gets around, beating on a priest.”

  The hand in the pocket of his robe was clenched into a fist. I kept my eyes on it and said, “A priest. Why would he punch out a priest?”

  “The ’roids,” Burt said. “He took them like a kid chews gum. Lotta coke, too, didn’t make him any easier. This is a guy, tore one of his shoes apart with his teeth when a lace broke. Did it in my living room—another one, not this one. A real leather shoe, just sank his teeth into it like it was roast beef and ripped a big chunk out. While it was still on his foot. Spit it on my carpet. Practically dislocated his own leg, hauling his foot up to his mouth like that. Damnedest thing I ever saw. So no, I wasn’t hanging with him when I didn’t need him.”

  “Do you remember the priest’s name? The church? Anything?”

  “No. But I can call somebody maybe. Gimme an email address.”

  I tore a sheet off the little pad in my wallet and wrote my email address on it and leaned forward to hand it to him. He pulled the hand out of the robe’s pocket and then looked down at it and tried to hide what was in it. He jammed it behind him and took the note. If he hadn’t been so tanned, he would have been blushing. He looked up at me and said, “Aaahhh, shit,” and reached behind him, and took out the toenail clippers and put them back in his pocket. “Gotta take care of my feet,” he said. “Even though I can barely reach them. She’s not going to do it.”

  I got up. “So that’s it, right? You haven’t seen him, you heard he beat up a priest, you’ll email me if you learn anything.”

  He blinked a couple of times and said, “You gotta go?” He hiked up the sleeve of his robe and looked at a big gold watch. “Not even eleven. Want some coffee? I could make some coffee.”

  The house was soundless. It could have hidden twenty people, but I knew, from decades of expertise in empty houses, that he and I were the only people in it. “Seven will be back soon,” I said.

  “No, she won’t,” he said. “Cheese store, my ass.”

  I had nothing to say, and I didn’t say it.

  “Lemme tell you something,” he said. “You’re a young guy, a nice-looking guy. Things pretty much okay with you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He raised both hands, palms facing me, and then let them fall onto his thighs with a smack. “Well, appreciate it while you got it. Just say thanks all the time. ’Cause you know what? It’ll average out. Every day you stay lucky, every day you stay happy, your personal supply of bad luck gets bigger. It’s like a rock hanging over your head, the luckier you are, the bigger and heavier it gets. Listen, things go a little wrong? You got some problems? Your teeth hurt? Say thanks, because that’s whittling away at the rock hanging above you. Me, I went years and years, everything fine, lots of money, no real work, cops left me alone, I had a great time with One through Six. Happy as a pig in shit because I didn’t know.” He raised his hands again, palms toward the ceiling this time, elbows bent, Atlas waiting for the world to be lowered into his grasp. “Every time I found a four-leaf clover, that thing up there got bigger and colder and heavier. And then, here I am, eighty, and bam—” He brought his fist into his palm with a sound like a pistol shot. “—that fucker falls on me and everything turns to earwax. Just, you know, take it easy with the good times and say thanks for all the good stuff and the not-so-good stuff, too, ’cause otherwise that shit’s gonna land on you like Mount Everest.”

  I said, “This is all Seven?”

  He said, “Biggest mistake ever. It’ll be night forever. Never be happy again.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “You think eighty sounds like fun?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You think it would be more fun to be eighty and married to someone who hates you, who won’t divorce you, who knows so much about you that you can’t divorce her without spending your final decade in the jug, who’s going out to the cheese store or the nail parlor every day, who’s just waiting for you to die?”

  “No,” I said. “Doesn’t sound like fun.”

  “Come on,” he said. He tried to get up and failed. Put both hands under him to try again. “Just one fucking cup of coffee.”

  Most of a cup of very strong coffee later, he said, “You like this house?”

  “It’s a swell house,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to live on Hudson.”

  “I’d give it to you in a second,” he said. He extended his arm and moved his coffee cup left to right in a long arc to take in all we could see of the house. “All of it, furniture and all. I’d move to whatever dump you live in—you live in a dump, compared to this?”

  “That’s a safe way to describe it.”

  “Got a girl in it?”

  “It does.”

  “I’d take her sight unseen,” he said.

  I said, “She’s not available.”

  “You know what I mean. I’d take the dump you live in, take the girl without even looking at her, give you this place, my bank account, Seven, whatever you want. Just to be your age. Shit, to be halfway between my age and your age. You could have the pool, the fucking Mercedes, everything.”

  “Yeah, but neither of us could deliver.”

  He screwed up his face in concentration. “Dog years, you know dog years?”

  I drained my cup, feeling my heart accelerate to keep up with the caffeine. “I’m familiar with the concept.”

  “I used to think dog years was a way to, you know, figure how old a dog is in human years. But now I think dog years means how many more dogs I got years for. I figure right now, if I get a dog that dies young, I got a little less than one dog year left.”

  I’d seen nothing in the house that indicated that a dog was present, and like all burglars, I’m keenly attuned to dogs. “You like dogs?”

  “Not much,” he said. “But if I did, and if I got one, it would outlive me. Maybe I should do it, let it fight with Seven for a piece of the will.”

  “What’s with the plastic surgery on Seven?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, well.” He looked down into his cup. “Might have been a mistake. I wanted her to look more like One, so I paid for a little work. Doesn’t look so good, does it?”

  “Might just conceivably be one reason she’s so pissed at you.”

  “The first time was good,” he said, sounding defensive. “She didn’t have no more chin than a goldfish, so we fixed it, and it looked okay. Then we did some more and it kind of went downhill. It was like, you know, when you’re cooking something, and you put too much of one thing in, like salt, so you figure add sugar or something, balance it out. And it just tastes worse and worse, but you keep trying. Like that.”

  “So,” I said, unkindly, “does she look like One now?”

  “You kidding me? One was beautiful.”

  “And Seven?”

  “Seven looks like one of them wooden puppets used to sit on a voice-thrower’s knee. More coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said, and he pulled the pot off the burner. “I’d give you a hard time myself if you did that to me.”

  “Look at me,” he said, pouring. “It ain’t like she fell for me at first sight. It was a deal. She marries the old guy, she does what he wants for a few years, he dies, she’s rich forever. No more cheese stores, she can have the boys brought in, in threes and fours if she wants. We just hit kind of a bad streak with the surgery.”

  All I could think of to say was, “Strong coffee.”

  “Why drink it,” he said, “if it don’t get your attention?”

  “Did you ever meet a burglar named Herbie Mott?”

  He didn’t give it a second’s thought. “I don’t mess with burglars. The more stuff you got, the less you like
them.”

  “In the old days?”

  “Nope.” He sniffed his cup but didn’t drink. “Hey, you wanna be careful with Ruben. This is a guy who eats shoes—”

  “You told me.”

  “I did? Oh, yeah, I did.” He put the cup down. “Wish we could make that trade,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t tell you this before, I think, but Ruben did some hits. Not for me, ’cause it’s bad strategy to kill people who owe you money, but he did for other guys. I put him in touch with a couple of guys who needed somebody done.”

  “Who?”

  He made a sound that might have been a scoff, if I’d known what a scoff sounded like.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said. “You haven’t asked me why I’m looking for Ruben.”

  “Why would I? I told you, we ain’t friends.”

  I said, “Right.”

  “But here’s a favor you could do me,” he said. “If you find Ruben and, you know, there’s anything left when you’re through with him and if he’s not as crazy as he used to be, tell him I said hi. Tell him he might drop around some day.” He pushed the cup aside and looked around his kitchen. “Have a cup of coffee or something.”

  It was past noon and I was buzzing like a bag of hornets as I backed out of Burt’s driveway. I had the kind of caffeine high that replaces my normally orderly, even somewhat stately, mental processes with something I call the Flip Book, based on the old kids’ toy in which the reader fans through the pages to make a little animated dog run or dance or, I don’t know, lift weights. But when I get the Caffeine Flip Book, the pages speed up and slow down at random, whole groups of pages are missing or upside down or sideways, and what should be a progression turns into an uncontrollable stutter, skipping important connective material and slowing over the painfully obvious, as my little cartoon dog becomes a dwarf with a shovel over his shoulder, a rhinoceros, a spreading oil slick, finally resolving into those little airborne drops of water cartoonists sometimes use to indicate extreme anxiety. When I found myself wondering what the War on Drugs was for if Burt’s coffee was legal, and all the places I had to go seemed equally urgent and equally pointless, I called a time out.