“Do that again,” I said. “Actually, though, the first time you saw me, I was facing you.”
“I am such a liar.” She reached across and got hold of my right hand, and I rolled onto my side to allow her to sit up straight as she worked on it.
“I’ve pretty much told you the truth,” I said.
“We’re different,” she said. She’d gotten to the ring finger and she slowed down when she felt the swelling around the middle joint. “Did you get this when you hit him?”
“Hit him?” I said. “I never even got close. I probably bent that one of the many times I fell on it. How are we different?”
“You’re open, especially for a crook. I tend to parcel out the truth while I try to figure out whether you and I are something real or just another low-level glandular seizure.”
“Well,” I said, “the way I look at it, it’s a low-level glandular seizure, too. In addition, I mean, to all the other stuff.”
“Let’s talk business,” she said. She looked very serious, maybe even a little frightened. “What I told you about Trenton—” and there was a knock at the door.
“Go into the bathroom,” I said. I meant to leap from the bed, but my leap wasn’t on call, and I unfolded myself so slowly I could practically hear my joints. Whoever it was knocked at the door again, and I heard male voices, two of them. “In there,” I said, trying to get my legs into my pants. “Now.”
“You sound so masterful,” she said, “and you look so silly.”
“It’s just barely possible,” I said, zipping my fly, “that this isn’t a joke.” My T-shirt would do; it was good enough to die in. I grabbed the Glock and handed it to Ronnie as she passed me on the way to the bathroom. “If you hear shots, stay in there with the door closed, and if anybody opens it shoot them over and over.”
“Over and over,” she said, shutting the bathroom door behind her.
I grabbed a table lamp in the shape of a rooster, the little shade pulled crooked on its head like a drunken Shriner’s hat, yanked the cord from the wall, and went to the door. I counted to three to focus myself, put my hand carefully on the doorknob and then turned it and yanked it open, backing up fast and almost pitching the lamp at my caller, which seemed to be an explosion of flowers.
“This is your house?” Ting Ting said, just barely not wrinkling his tiny, decorative nose. He looked at the bathroom door, which had just opened, and his expression cleared. “This is your girlfriend?”
“And this is his gun.” She let it dangle from her fingers as though it had been someplace nasty. “Who are you?”
“Um,” Ting Ting said. The basket of flowers was half as big as he was.
“He’s being diplomatic,” I said. “This is Ting Ting. The guy who beat me up.”
Ronnie said, “Look at me not laughing.”
“Mr. Stinky, he is sorry,” Ting Ting said, giving the basket of flowers a little shake in case we’d missed them. “Me, too, very sorry.”
“Well, thanks, but how the hell did you find me?”
“I brought him,” Louie the Lost said, stepping into the room. “He was blindfolded until he knocked on your door.” He took a quick look at my expression and said, “Don’t give me that. You want Stinky to stay mad? You want to get shot at again?”
“So,” I said, “just to reconstruct. Stinky called you to find out where I was and you volunteered to play peacemaker. And you kept an eye on your rearview mirror all the way over.”
“Better than that,” he said. “I had Eaglet following me about four cars back. Even Ting Ting didn’t know it.”
“Eaglet,” I said. “Is she outside, too?”
“Yup.”
“Is there anybody I know who’s not outside?”
“Bring her in,” Ronnie said. She grimaced at the giant bouquet. “Ting Ting, I’m so sorry. Please. Put those here.”
Ting Ting gave her his high-beam smile and put the flowers on the table in front of the combination birdhouse/ashtray, and began to rearrange the blooms, of which there were a great many. Fussing with them, he had his back to the door when Eaglet came in.
She’d traded the rainbow cape for a peach-colored Indian blouse, circa 1967, covered with bits of plastic mirror that would have made her, if she hadn’t been so young, look like a love-in attendee who had just gained consciousness after fifty years beneath a bush in Griffith Park. All she needed was a stick of incense in her hand, a press-on peace symbol tattoo, and a circlet of flowers in her hair. Instead, she had seashells woven into fifteen or twenty long braids. She looked at me, looked at Ting Ting’s back, and looked at me again. The shells in her braids clattered. She said, “Who totaled you?”
I said, “He did,” and Ting Ting turned around and their eyes met, and even I could hear the long rippling arpeggio on the harp.
“Oh,” Eaglet said. “My gosh.”
Ting Ting said, “Who?” and then lost the rest of the sentence.
“Ting Ting,” I said, “this is Eaglet. And vice versa.”
Ronnie said, “And you were complaining about Merle,” but then she broke off and said, “Isn’t this sweet?”
There was a long silence, interrupted only by the sound of Eaglet and Ting Ting swallowing, and then Louie said, “Maybe you guys should give them the room.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said for the second time that evening. We were in an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant not far from Bitsy’s, and I was talking mainly to Ronnie and Louie because Ting Ting and Eaglet were in their own separate book at the end of the table. “I started all this because Wattles asked me to find out who stole the info about his chain, and I took it because of the money and also because the way the locks had been left open made me think it might have been Herbie, leaving tracks, as he used to say, and I could earn the other five K without popping a sweat. But Herbie is dead and Wattles and Janice have vanished, so even though he paid me a first installment, I don’t feel particularly compelled to keep looking, especially since I can’t find the next link in the chain, this guy named Monty Carlo. I’ve been keeping at it mainly because Herbie got killed, and number one, he asked me in a letter to figure out who did it, and number two, although he said in the letter that he knew who was most likely to kill him, I figured the odds were close to even that he was wrong. That he got murdered because someone hired him to burglarize Wattles’s office, and then Herbie either wouldn’t give them the information he stole, so they killed him, or they killed him because they didn’t want to pay him, or for fun, or I don’t know why. And then somebody killed Handkerchief—”
Louie said, “You’re shitting me.” He looked like something had just exploded in his face.
“I always think you know everything,” I said. “I should have told you.”
He pushed his plate away. “Killed him how?”
“Same way as Herbie, although maybe not down to the details. Herbie’s details were pretty terrible. But they beat him to death.”
“Aawww,” Louie said. “Handkerchief wasn’t that bad.”
“That should be on his tombstone,” I said. “Handkerchief Harrison: Not That Bad.”
Ronnie said, “That’s mean.”
“Yes, it is.” I said to the air, “I’m sorry, Handkerchief,” and I meant it.
“So there you are,” Louie said. “You’re doing it for Herbie.”
“And now,” I said, my eyes on Louie, “I’ve been hearing some things about Herbie.”
Louie found something to look at in the parking lot. I let him look at it for a minute, and then Ting Ting and Eaglet laughed softly, and I said to Louie, “You’re not interested in learning what I’ve heard about Herbie?”
“People talk,” Louie said dismissively, but there was a lot of color in his cheeks. “Especially about the dead. It’s easy to talk about the dead. They can’t get even.”
“You know all about Herbie and me.”
“Well, sure,” Louie said. He had an open Mediterranean face made more open b
y an expanse of forehead that registered everything that went through his mind. He was rubbing his forehead as though he had the beginning of a headache, but he was doing it because he’d long known I could read his forehead like skywriting. “Everybody who knows you knows about Herbie.”
“No one has ever said anything bad about Herbie to me before.”
“Who would?” he said. When it became clear I wasn’t going to answer him, he said, “So who did?”
“DiGaudio.”
“Oh, well,” Louie said, sitting back. “He probably just saw a way to poke a hole in your day. He’s that kind of guy.”
“He’s dying,” I said. “It was my impression that he’s on a mission to tell the truth while he still can.”
“He’s a cop.”
“He said Herbie was a pipeline.”
Louie looked across the table at Ronnie, the only person in our group who was eating, although she was eating enough to make up for the rest of us. “Good, huh?” he asked her.
Ronnie said, “Mmmph.”
“I need to know, Louie,” I said.
Louie gave the tablecloth a sharp tug. “Why? Why do you need to know? When Herbie was with you, he was who he was to you. Why do you care who he was to other people?”
“I have to tell you, that’s not an encouraging reaction.”
“I mean, come on. All of us, you, me, all of us, we got people who’ll say we’re terrible. Hell, we got people we been terrible to. Why should Herbie be different?”
“He shouldn’t,” I said. Across the restaurant, the waitress was watching me with concern; I wasn’t eating. I gestured to the food with an open hand and smiled to reassure her, then said, “But from your perspective, Louie, just between us, who was Herbie, on balance?”
Ronnie put both hands up, a plea for a pause, swallowed, and said, “You said to me once that when you met Herbie, you told him you hated your father, and that Herbie said it would take a long time for you to understand who your father really was. You’re doing the same thing to Herbie that you were doing to—”
“Why is everybody so fucking eager to protect me?” Even Eaglet and Ting Ting broke it off and looked at me. “Herbie was a—a signpost in my life. Burning desert this way, Emerald City that way. I chose, I thought I chose, the Emerald City. But now—”
“You’re who you are,” Ronnie said. “Nobody made you who you are except you.”
“Louie,” I said, and paused, trying to find an avenue of approach, and then I had it. Louie had volunteered to front money for me this very week, to pay Eaglet and Debbie, and he was one of the very few crooks I knew who would lend money to other crooks when they were in trouble. “Louie, tell me honestly. How much money would you have loaned to Herbie?”
Louie got up, pushed his chair back, and folded his napkin and dropped it on the table. “None,” he said. “You happy now? I wouldn’t have loaned him a dime on a hot day if he was ten cents short for a Popsicle. You want to worry about something real? Worry about those two.” He nodded toward Ting Ting and Eaglet. “Stinky loves that kid. Loves him like he never loved anybody. The other boys, they were like furniture, but this one—this one, if Stinky loses him and he thinks it’s your fault, I’m telling you, Stinky will kill you. No figure of speech, Junior. He’ll kill you.”
He shoved the chair in, hard, and stomped halfway to the door, his shoulders hunched high, as though fighting a weight. The waitress watched him go, her mouth open. Even Eaglet and Ting Ting were paying attention. Halfway to the door, he turned back around. “Piece of advice, okay? Don’t look too close at blessings. You’re thirsty and somebody hands you half a glass of water, don’t get all bent out of shape about that it wasn’t full. Just drink it and say thanks and go do something that makes you feel good.”
I said, “I’ve already slept. I slept for hours. You sleep.”
“Then what’ll you do?”
“Go drive around.”
“We’ll both go drive around.” She got up, leaving me alone on the peacock-print couch. “Do you really think Stinky will try to kill you?”
“I don’t know why not. He’s already tried once.”
“I thought he and Ting Ting were a couple.”
I got up, too, although I didn’t know why. “I’m sure they are, in Stinky’s mind. But Ting Ting is a poor, probably very poor, Filipino kid who’s suddenly living in a mansion. There could remotely, just possibly, be an element of fiscal calculation in his affection for Stinky. I mean, come on, he’s Stinky. The world’s most hydraulically streamlined face, a heart you couldn’t find with an electron microscope, and an endless lust for stuff. One long gimme gimme gimme.”
“I’ll bet Ting Ting found his heart.” She effortlessly picked up her purse, which I could hardly lift. “What happens if Stinky tosses him out?”
“I suppose he’ll move in with Eaglet, which should be interesting. Anyway, she can protect him if Stinky gets vindictive and sends someone to—you know. Louie says she’s good with that gun.”
“He could teach martial arts,” she said.
“Well, by now Stinky should be sitting in the living room, tapping his foot and looking at his watch. Hey, you were going to tell me about Trenton.”
“Was I?” She stepped back, putting physical distance between herself and my reminder. “Let’s not just drive,” she said. “Let’s drive to my place. Just in case. I feel like this place is lighted up in fuchsia on Google Maps with the legend JUNIOR’S HERE.”
“Fine. Go ahead. I’ll, uh, I’ll meet you.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Nothing is less attractive than a moping man.”
“Well, then,” I said energetically, “how about this? You drive and I’ll meet you later.”
“Much better.” She went to the closet and took out the Glock and slapped it into my hand. “Me and Eaglet,” she said. “Protecting our men.”
“From what?”
She opened the door. “From Trenton.”
We hadn’t been on the road for more than a minute, she a few car lengths ahead of me in her drab little Esoterica or whatever it was, built by the glum mechanics of the former Soviet bloc, when I remembered that I’d turned my cell phone off when I went to bed, much earlier that day. I powered it on, keeping it low in my lap so as not to attract the attention of a cop eager to write a big fat ticket to help offset the city’s burgeoning deficit. The screen said, THREE NEW VOICE MESSAGES, and then the phone rang.
Ronnie said, “So as not to waste the time it takes us to get there, why is this Monty Carlo so important to you?”
“Theoretically, Wattles’s chain ended in the hit man. I’ve followed it from Wattles to Janice to Handkerchief to Dippy Thurston, who has now vanished if she took my advice. Dippy handed it off to Monty, who in turn either delivered it to the hitperson or to the person who was supposed to deliver it to the hitperson.”
“It’s so low-tech it’s almost endearing.”
The words low-tech hung there in the air for a moment, shimmered and then disappeared like a shower of glitter. I said, “Wait a minute.”
“Sure.”
We maintained radio silence for a couple of blocks, and then she said, “You’re somewhere else, aren’t you? What are you thinking about?”
“Low-tech,” I said. “This morning someone got into my car with a jiggered remote and left a note on my windshield with Kathy’s and Rina’s birthdays on it.”
“There are car thieves who use scanners now. They wait in a parking lot until someone boops his car locked, and the scanner records the frequency of the signal, so they can duplicate it on their own remote and open the car.”
“How do you know about this?”
“So soon you forget. Donald, the guy who got me out of either Trenton or Albany and drove me as far west as Chicago, was a car thief. I helped him boost three of the cars we used on that run, and I kind of liked it. It was exciting in a not-very-enlightened way. I keep up with the field, I guess you could say. Anyway, that’s the
new thing, the boop scanner, but it’s not exactly low-tech.”
“No,” I said. “And those birth dates, getting those wasn’t low-tech, either.”
“And?”
“And I’ve been knocking on Monty Carlo’s door and he’s been ducking me. I suddenly remember that Dippy said he was some sort of brainiac crook. Maybe a hacker?”
“Could be.”
“And, who knows? Maybe my attempts to get in touch with him have scared him. He’s probably read about Herbie and Handkerchief by now, and Dippy isn’t answering his calls, and maybe he figures I’m the one who’s yanking all those links out of the chain, and he’s next. So he’s trying to scare me away.”
“Or maybe he’s the one who killed Herbie and Handkerchief. Maybe he was the hit person at the end of the chain, and since things have gotten out of hand, he’s decided to erase the chain.”
“Could be,” I said.
“But you don’t think so. I can hear it in your voice.”
“No. I think if he were the killer, he’d have arranged to meet me someplace where he could waste me without a lot of effort. Instead, he’s trying to chase me away. And he seems to have a helper who’s a kid, a Hispanic boy. Kids are natural hackers.”
“A kid?”
“Twelve or thirteen, according to the shopkeeper who saw him go into my car. Skinny, dark-skinned, baseball cap.”
“That gets it down to about two and a half million possibilities.”
“I need to make a couple of calls,” I said. “Do you want to pull over or just go ahead and meet me at your place?”
“I’ll stop and pick up some coffee, and replace some of the things that’ll be rancid by now, like milk. See you there.”
She rang off and I pulled over and brought up my voicemail. First was Rina with information about Edward Mott, Herbie’s estranged son, who was currently a salesman at a Toyota dealership in North Hollywood, so who says there aren’t second acts in American lives? He’d gone from Hondas to Toyotas, although he hadn’t been promoted to floor manager or whatever was above salesman. She gave me the address and told me she’d emailed me the URL for his Facebook page so I could see what he looked like, and that I owed her sixty-eight dollars, which seemed high to me.
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