I called Louie, and the instant he answered I said, “Put the two new girls on Kathy and Rina right now,” and he was saying, “But wait a—” and then the phone buzzed for a call waiting, and the display said RONNIE, and I hung up on Louie and answered it, and she said, “Junior, someone is following me,” and then the phone buzzed again and I put Ronnie on hold because the display said RINA, and when I answered it, she said, “Daddy, somebody’s following me.”
To Rina, I said, “Where are you? Are there cars around? People?”
“We’re on Reseda Boulevard, heading toward home.”
“You and Tyrone?”
“Daddy, he got his learner’s permit.”
“Are you with Tyrone?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay, keep driving. Hold on a second.” I put her on hold. “Ronnie, where are you?”
“On Fountain, in Hollywood.”
“Keep driving. Stay on busy streets. I’ll be right back to you.” Switching lines, I said, “Rina?”
“I’m here.”
“How far back is the car?”
“Two cars. But it’s been with us for a while. Tyrone’s not supposed to drive without somebody with him, somebody with a license? so he’s always checking the mirror for cops.”
“Still back there,” I heard Tyrone say.
“Is there a police station anywhere near?”
“A police station? Tyrone’s on a learner’s permit.”
“Look, stay calm. Look for a McDonald’s, this time of night they’ll be jammed. Go in, order something, and stay there, inside, under the nice fluorescent lights. Do you know where there’s—?”
“One coming up,” she said.
“Well get your asses inside. See what the car does when you make the turn, check what make and color it is, and see if you can get the beginning of the license plate. And don’t leave that restaurant until I’m there, got it?”
“Okay.” She sounded younger than usual. Fear will do that, strip right away all our imitation of maturity and misplaced certainty that the world is actually safe.
“Ronnie,” I said, “where are you now, and where’s the other car?”
“We’re just cruising down Fountain. Fairfax is coming up. He’s a couple, three cars back.”
“Turn south. Go down to Cantor’s Delicatessen and pull into the parking lot. Then go inside and stay there until I call you back.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“Someone who might want to get at me.”
“You, you, you,” she said. “Everything’s about you.” She laughed, but it didn’t have much support.
“I’ll call you right back.”
I hung up and sat motionless until, in my mind’s eye, they were all in their respective restaurants. Then I called Louie back.
“I already did it,” he said, before I could even say hello. “I put the second girl on them, before I even asked you.”
“Well, thank you. Call and see whether one of them is following Rina right now.”
“I just did, and she is. Says Rina’s with this great-looking black kid, and—”
My lungs practically collapsed, and all the breath I hadn’t known I was holding rushed out of me. “Good, good, good.
Who is it?”
“Debbie.”
“I thought she was mad at me.”
“Junior, she kills people. They don’t get mad the same way we do. They save it up until they need it. It’s like an anger piggy bank.”
“Well, tell her to stay with them. Rina and Tyrone are in McDonald’s. In fact, tell her if she’s hungry to go in and say hi, have a burger with them.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Your daughter and Debbie, having a burger.”
“Thanks again, Louie. Thanks a lot.”
I did the call-shuffle again and said, “Rina, the person who’s following you is okay.”
“What do you mean he’s okay?”
“I mean, first, he’s a she, and second, she’s there because I sort of asked her to be. She may be coming in and sitting with you—really, really cute-looking woman in her mid-twenties. Her name is Debbie Halstead.”
“Is she nice?”
How was I supposed to answer that question? “She’s on your side.”
“On my side against what? Am I in a fight of some kind? What’s the other side?” She covered the phone and said something to Tyrone, and she came back, she said, “Is this something that’s going to piss Mom off?”
“I’ll tell you in an hour or so. At the house. Just eat and go home. Let Debbie follow you home.” I hung up and dialed Louie. “I need to hire you as a driver. Somebody’s following Ronnie, and I’ve got her sitting at a table in Cantor’s waiting for someone to come and get her out of there.”
“And you’re going to pay me for this.”
“That’s what I just—”
“Fuck you, I’m your friend, remember? Where am I supposed to take her?”
“To Kathy’s place.”
“Can I go in with her?” he asked.
“Why would you want to?”
“I don’t know. I just never seen anyone commit suicide before.”
Handkerchief had been a plausible, and most crooks—as I think I already said—don’t really like plausibles. Burglars, car thieves, even hitters—whatever their dealings with the straight world, they tell the truth to one another, probably about as often as orthodontists and cosmeticians and insurance actuaries do. But plausibles never tell the truth, at least not on purpose. Their skill in creating a successful con is based not only on assuming a plausible identity, with a persuasive and harmless-sounding agenda, but also believing it, and Handkerchief believed it all the way to his bones. I once heard it said about English people that if you woke them up in the middle of the night, they’d talk like the rest of us. But I knew a burglar who’d surprised Handkerchief, then in his tweedy Antony Mosely-Fenwick role, in a dark and supposedly empty house in the middle of the night, and the burglar said that Handkerchief, terrified or not, sounded like Winston Churchill.
So we didn’t like them much, we relatively truthful crooks. They always make me think of how Superman—who, despite all the super-powers and that little curl on his forehead, must have had a sad and freakish inner life as a teenager, with no one to confide in, no one to jump tall buildings at a single bound with—how Superman, as I was saying, felt the first time he came up against the Bizarro Superman. I’d give odds that his immediate thought, when he saw that fractured, crudely assembled, bad-geometry reflection of himself, was, “That’s who I really am.” A lot of us—we relatively truthful crooks who lie all the time to the cops, to the straight world, and to the people we love—we secretly feel the same way about plausibles. They’re a bad-day reflection of ourselves, and it makes us uncomfortable. They provide yet another unflattering angle, as if we needed one, on Herbie’s Game.
I was feeling deeply ambivalent about Herbie’s Game. Despite Louie’s pep talk, those of us who chose Herbie’s Game faced a lifetime of wearing a mask, of lying, of making—sooner or later—the kind of decision that had cost me my wife and daughter. I probably hadn’t even figured out yet all the things that choosing Herbie’s Game had cost me.
So maybe the main reason we relatively honest crooks looked down on plausibles was simply that we needed to look down on someone in order to feel better about ourselves. Had Handkerchief, with the empathy that made him a good plausible and an effective fortune-teller—the empathy that had shown him, in my eyes, the loss of a father-figure—known how I and the other relatively honest crooks felt about him? If so, he’d been nicer, more gracious, about it than I would have been, if I’d been in his empathic, intuitive shoes.
I felt like I could devote a little time to Handkerchief right then, I felt like I needed to. There was nothing I could do to deal with the emergency of the moment except wait for Rina to get home and Louie to get to Ronnie, so I sat and watched the ice melt in my coffee while I gave ten silent
minutes to the passing of Handkerchief Harrison. There’d been something brave and a little sad in the way he’d flaunted those awful, cheesy handkerchiefs.
Maybe heaven for plausibles is a place where they’re always believed, where the purplest lies, the most desperate flights of fancy, land in the other person’s ears like the Testament they feel closest to. Or maybe heaven for plausibles is a place where there’s never a reason to tell a lie at all, where their bona fides, the people they actually are, are always good enough for everything. Where you could pass the brightest of lights straight through them, and it wouldn’t pick out a single area of darkness, not a shadow anywhere.
And it struck me that, all of a sudden, I was watching people die.
What they do in an ambulance after they load the meat into it is a mystery to me, but Handkerchief’s last ride was still sitting there with him in it when my phone rang and Kathy said, “Would you like to explain all this, Junior?”
It took her a full minute to answer the door, and I had a vision of her stopping to choose and then reject something to throw at me. She was wearing the reserved expression that she usually offered me, but a lot more rigid, and her hair, normally abjectly under her control, had gone kind of fly-away so that two long, slightly curling wisps hung over her forehead. Not a good sign.
“You have someone following my daughter,” she said, without actually inviting me in.
“Our daughter,” I said.
A totally strange woman just ushered her and Tyrone through my own front door—and don’t you dare say ‘our’ front door—as though I had no say whatsoever in whether she could come in.”
“Speaking of which—” I tried to move forward.
She stepped to the side to block my way. “Do you remember what—whoever it was—said? That the only people who feel at home everywhere are kings and whores?”
“I do, and she’s neither. I’m coming in.”
“What is she? Who is she?”
“She’s a professional trick shooter,” I said. “In a lot of demand, too. Listen, as bad as the last twenty minutes have been for you, that’s the way the whole day has been for me, so why not just let me come in?”
She blew one of the wayward wisps from her forehead and gave the door a little lick with the side of her foot. “As though you have nothing to do with how bad your day has been, as though that bad day was just floating around, looking for someone to land on, and it picked poor blameless, spotless you.”
I said, “Do you know this house has been under guard since last night? Do you want to know why I was having Rina followed?”
She lowered her head to look up at me, and the wisp fell back where it wanted to go. “What do you mean, under guard?”
“You’ve driven past them several times.”
“I don’t believe it. And how could I possibly know why you were having Rina followed?”
“Well, if you don’t let me in, I’m not going to tell you.”
“Will it frighten Rina?’
I gave it a moment’s thought. “I think it’s more likely to frighten you.”
She stood aside. “Come in, but keep your voice down.”
“Where is she?”
“In her room with Tyrone and—that woman.”
“Debbie. Her name is—”
“I don’t care what her name is. In the living room.” She held the door for me and then, when I was through it, shoved it shut and stayed on my right as I moved so I couldn’t make the turn up the hallway to Rina’s room. As we passed the hall, I heard Rina and Tyrone laughing.
“She sounds okay.”
“She’s a child, Junior. It’s all a movie to her.”
I went to the couch and sat down for the second time in two nights. Kathy sat in her special chair and said, “I’m waiting.”
“And I’m thinking. Did you know she was driving with Tyrone, and he’s only got a learner’s permit?”
“Are you seriously suggesting that her riding around with Tyrone with his permit is anything like as dangerous as whatever you’ve gotten her—us—into, with guards on the house and people following her to protect her?”
“See?” I said, “Those things are, as you said, to protect her, while letting her drive around with Tyrone—”
“Won’t fly, Junior.” She was picking at a button on the front of her blouse, and she had no idea she was doing it. “All this stuff, does it have to do with the death of your—your friend yesterday?”
I said, “Maybe. I can’t be sure yet. Let me tell it to you my way.” And she did let me, so I was able to present it all, every bit of it, my way: the robbery in Wattles’s office, the murder of Herbie, the possible problems with Wattles’s chain, the disappearance of Wattles and Janice, and the killing of Handkerchief. She listened patiently while I told it all my way, relating everything to everything else and carefully putting all in proportion, and it sounded just bloody awful. When I was finished, I said, “Maybe I should have let you ask me questions, the way you wanted to.”
She nodded and turned away from, me, apparently studying the familiar objects on the mantel above the fireplace they never used. She was still picking at the button. When she’d finished her inventory of the mantel, she nodded again slowly and said, “And I know, deep in your heart, that you don’t think you’re to blame for any of this.” She leaned back in the chair, her head back and her chin lifted, and gave me the down-the-nose gaze that had always meant that further argument was useless. “You had nothing to do with what happened to Herbie, nothing to do with that chain or whatever you called it. But ask yourself this, Junior. If you weren’t a crook, would it have reached this house? Would we need guards? Would you be worrying about our daughter’s safety?”
I said, “No.”
“Do I get to hear any of this?” Rina said from the entry hall. Debbie was next to her, looking cute and chipper and as harmless as a hamster, while Tyrone, who had grown an inch in the month since I saw him, hung back, knowing he was in for it no matter what happened.
“I need to think about that,” Kathy said, and the doorbell rang, and a lot of things happened in a very short time. Rina disappeared to the right, going to answer the door; I jumped to my feet, slapping at the center of my back, where my gun wasn’t, since I’d left it in the car; out of sight, I heard Rina let out a loud gasp; Tyrone’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open, Kathy, terrified at the sound of the gasp, said, “Rina;” and Debbie grinned and said, “Hi, girlfriend.”
And Ronnie came into the room.
It was fully dark outside. The day—which had seemed endless, as though maliciously preserved in some sort of temporal amber—had moved on at last, finally towing its problems to a different slice of the globe. The glass back wall of the dining room was a shining, vertical sheet of reflective black, the pool and the cabaña and Kathy’s fig trees still there, presumably, but needing to be taken on faith, which was a quality I was very short on at the moment.
But I knew they were back there, just as surely as I knew that there was enough ill will in my former living room to pickle a saint’s heart.
The seating chart was improbable enough to make me wish I were dreaming. Kathy was in her chair across the room, and the matching chair to her left, the one I once sat in every night, was empty, as I suspected it had been for some time except for Kathy’s occasional home try-out for my potential replacement. The chair had a disconsolate air to it, like the horse in the stable no one ever saddled. I was on the far left end of the crowded couch, facing Kathy at what didn’t quite feel like a safe remove. Beside me was Rina; on the other side of Rina was Tyrone, his knees jackknifed in front of him—the kid really was getting tall; and jammed into the end of the couch, between Tyrone and the arm, was Debbie, who had apparently used the time in Rina’s room to make friends. Debbie was good at making friends. She was a terrible shot, so it was an important part of her job description.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor a discreet eight or ten inches in front of
me, having chosen to sit on the floor as though she hoped the bullets would whistle over her head, was Ronnie. Claiming two wooden chairs hauled in from the dining room were Louie and a person I’d never met before, a young, longhaired Asian woman who had based her personal style on the sixties, and who obviously wasn’t one to do things halfway, since she called herself Eaglet. She’d been the one sitting outside the house all afternoon, the one who’d been up in Solvang.
Seen from above by a neutral party, if such a thing existed, it would have looked like the five seated on and in front of the couch versus one in the chair, the one being Kathy, with two fence-sitters in the middle, Louie and Eaglet.
But Kathy didn’t know what it was to be outnumbered. As far as she was concerned, she was wrapped in the cloak of righteousness, and, what’s more, she had me dead to rights. With an audience, no less.
She’d run down the situation as I’d related it, but with a definite spin that positioned me—with some justice—as the heedless heavy, the one who had opened the door to the dark side and politely held it open to admit the orcs and gremlins who were now stalking an innocent family through the leafy streets of suburbia.
Ronnie said, “I don’t think that’s quite accurate.”
Eaglet tugged on the one of the feathers woven into her hair and said, “We’re taking care of them.”
Debbie contributed, “We’ve got your backs.”
Louie said, “These are some tough girls.”
Rina said, “Mom,” turning it into two aggrieved syllables.
Tyrone waited, long-fingered hands spread on his knees, for someone to bring up his learner’s permit.
Kathy said, “Thank you. It’s so reassuring to know that thanks to two Annie Oakleys and you,” she said to Louie, “whatever you are, and my husband’s paramour there, that my daughter and I are safe.”
“You should know,” Ronnie said. I squeezed her shoulder to shut her up, but she shrugged it right off. “You should know he’d never intentionally do anything to put you and Rina in danger.”
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