Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  “If you’re Lilli and me,” Anime said.

  “We hit half a dozen of those.”

  “You and these girls.”

  “Who do you think? Okay, the turn’s coming up.”

  I made a left onto a residential street: nice one- and two-story houses set well back, mailboxes standing at attention at the curb. “How much can you get out of something like that?”

  Monty said, “You don’t want to take so much that all the alarms go off. You want them to think the discrepancy might be on their end, a rounding error or something. For a while, anyway, at least until you’ve got the money in your hands.”

  Lilli said, “Lots.”

  Anime said, “Lilli and I have made eighty grand so far this year.”

  Lilli said, “Each.”

  “It’s been a good year,” Monty said, sounding modest.

  “How much have you made?”

  “Somewhat more,” he said, “but I have other business interests.”

  “Then why did you accept forty-five hundred to set up a hit?”

  “Show you in a second. Here, slow down. There, on the left, see that mailbox? The one shaped like the house behind it?”

  “It would be hard not to.”

  “Well, that’s what I had to do: see that mailbox. The message Dippy sent me said, ‘Forty-two comma three.’ ”

  I said, “Is there a punch line?”

  “A year ago I got a postcard in the mail. It had fifty addresses on it, each numbered. That mailbox is address number forty-two. I’ve done this five times. The addresses haven’t been used in numerical order: it’s been like random—twelve, four, thirty-eight, you get it. All the addresses are within a ten- or twelve-mile radius, all in single-family-home neighborhoods with mailboxes set out front where the delivery person doesn’t have to get out of the truck to stick the mail in. All I had to do was find address number forty-two, right there, and then drive by at three A.M.—that’s what the three stood for—and put the envelope into the mailbox. Then I went home and got into bed, forty-five hundred dollars richer. My guess is that the envelope was picked up about two minutes later.”

  “What was in the envelope?”

  He turned and looked at me for at least thirty seconds. “Why do you think I know?”

  It was my turn to look at him, and I slowed the car down to do it, until he blinked and turned to the girls in back. “Take him to the office, or not?”

  Anime said, “Sure.”

  Monty said, “Lilli?”

  Lilli said, “I guess.”

  Monty shrugged and said, “Two to one.”

  Oui, STORE WHAT YOU WANT, the sign said. The words, topped by a four-foot high plastic Eiffel Tower, gleamed mustard-yellow above a dark, short block of body shops, tire shops, and metal-plating businesses, all closed and lighted at this hour mostly by a crescent moon a quarter of the way up. The little pollution zone ended abruptly in a row of back fences that blocked the noise and hid the ugliness from the modest houses on the other side.

  “Oui?” I was driving through the sliding gate. “Kind of obscure for a storage joint.”

  “I bought it,” Monty said. “The person who built it was French.”

  Anime said, “Really? How surprising.”

  “And it’s not worth changing. It’s around four point seven percent of my income.”

  I said, “Around four point seven?”

  “Okay,” Monty said, “Four point seven two five, maybe six.”

  Anime emitted a ticking, mechanical sound from the back seat, and Monty made a waving motion with his hand, indicating go right. “Around this building here.”

  The building was one of five parallel structures that I could see as we pulled in, all low and flat-roofed, maybe two double garages wide and six long. Corrugated, segmented slide-up doors, a king-size twentieth-century industrial variant on the roll-top desk, had been inset at even intervals, six on each side of each building. Cold, waxy light came from low-wattage fixtures placed high on the wall above and between the corrugated doors. A few of the bulbs were out, so most of the property was moonlit, which was to say, dark. The entire facility was protected by a nine-foot fence of vertical metal bars that bent outward at the top and had been filed into points. I rejected instantly the notion of climbing it, or anything like it, ever.

  “Third door,” Monty said. “You can pull up to it.”

  I did, and Monty was out before I’d stopped moving. He darted in front of my headlights, something bright glinting in his hand. They turned out to be keys, which he used to undo two locks on the latch that secured the door.

  “Nice locks,” I said. “Assa Abloy.”

  He popped the locks and hit the hasp with the key. “This is what people forget. They spend a fortune on a lock and the crook cuts through the hasp.”

  “I know,” I said. “I am the crook of whom you speak.”

  “Carbon steel, the hasps,” he said. “I replaced every one of them.”

  “That’s a lot of work,” I said.

  “This building only. The others are just storage units.” He bent down and yanked on the door, which whispered upward with none of the rumble and clatter I expected. A moment later we were inside, and the door glided back down. Only then did the lights go on. When they did, I nearly gasped.

  All the internal walls had been removed, only weight-bearing posts indicating where they’d been, to create a single, enormous room. Work stations, perhaps ten of them, had been set here and there, all chrome and thick glass, each equipped with its own laptop. Monty pushed a button, and all the screens began to glow.

  The back wall was a junk-food eater’s fever dream: vending machines of every imaginable kind offered soft drinks, chips, candy, ice cream, even bottled water. The vending machines were lined up on either side of a small but expensive kitchen: sink, stainless steel counter, vented four-burner stove, microwave, and a double-wide refrigerator-freezer unit, also in stainless. At the far end of the room, all the way to my right, was a sheetrock wall unit with three doors in it.

  “Bathroom,” Anime said, following my gaze. “Bedroom, bedroom.”

  “Bedroom,” I said.

  “For all-nighters,” she said.

  Lilli said, “Look at his face,” and laughed.

  “Not what you think,” Anime said. “None of that.”

  “They like each other,” Monty said. “I’ve got a partner, too.”

  “His name is Brad,” Anime said. She gave me very level eyes. “Do you have a problem?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s not so much love in the world that we can afford to toss any of it away.” I took a few steps into the room as the air conditioning kicked in. I said, “I know a woman who’s married to an oak tree. She bought the property because of the tree, she built her house around the tree so every room opens onto it, and she lives there, just her and her tree. Probably doesn’t make for exciting breakfasts or a lot of small talk, but it’s the love she wants, oak tree love, and she’s glad to have it.”

  Anime said, “That’s nice.”

  Lilli said, “He made it up.”

  “I did,” I said, “but I meant it.” To the left, four leather easy chairs had been pulled into a circle, the area lighted by vertical steel halogen lamps, 1930s futura-style with modern wiring. I sat in the fattest one. “Mexican food makes me sleepy.”

  Anime went to a vending machine and pushed a button. Something racketed into the slot below, and when she came over to the chairs she was peeling plastic off a Butterfinger. “Tell us what you think is happening.”

  “First, you tell me a few things. How you know when a chain is coming and that you’re part of it, how you know how much you’re going to get paid. Given the fact that everyone in the chain is a crook, there has to be a way for each of you to know how much money you’re supposed to get.”

  From the kitchen area, Monty glanced at Anime and then at Lilli. After a pause just long enough to be awkward, Anime shook her head impatiently and
jumped in. “We get an email, or Monty does, sent to an address we almost never use except for, umm, oddities. The email is based on the world’s most common spam, a message from a supposed-to-be-Canadian pharmacy, offering a deal on erectile dysfunction pills. A hundred million of them go out every day.”

  Monty, who had the refrigerator open, said, “The email usually announces a two-day sale, with dates, like the fifth and the sixth, and those are the days you’re supposed to get and pass along the envelope. The discount tells us how much we’ll be paid, in units of a hundred, so forty percent off means four Gs. Forty hundreds totals—”

  “I know,” I said.

  He smirked, a smirk so little that I knew he didn’t think I’d seen it all the way over here, and took out a bottle of Wham-O!, a highly caffeinated drink sweet enough to gag a bee. “If the discount has an exclamation point after it, it means units of one thousand, so forty percent would mean forty thousand. Got it?”

  “Your turn,” Anime said, displaying chocolate teeth.

  “Fine. I think that three or four days ago, whoever picked up the envelope Monty left in that mailbox went out and killed someone. Someone else, maybe a friend of the victim, got mad about that and thought it might be nice to get back at whoever whacked his friend and, while he was at it, whoever supplied a helping hand. For some reason, that person, the hittee’s friend, had a hunch about the identity of the guy who put together the chain, the guy who hired me. And I think the victim’s friend commissioned Herbie to break into the office of the guy who hired me—”

  “The guy, the guy, the guy, the friend,” Monty said. “This would be a lot more coherent if you used the name of the person who hired you.” He dropped down into the chair beside Anime’s. Lilli had seated herself at a workstation beneath a life-size color poster of Selena Gomez wearing something wet, and was apparently paying no attention to us, hitting the keys as fast as Rina did.

  “No. He paid me, half in advance, and one of the things he’s buying is that I don’t use his name. I’ll call him Roger, if you want. To take it from the beginning, a client paid Roger for the hit, and Roger set up the chain. The message went down the chain, the hittee got whacked, some friend or associate of the hittee hired Herbie to break into Roger’s office to find something that would associate Roger with the hit, and Herbie found the piece of paper with the chain on it. Then the hittee’s friend or friends went to Herbie to pick up the paper, and Herbie refused to give it to them—”

  “Why?” The last inch of the Butterfinger was poised in front of Anime’s mouth, but her eyes were on me.

  “Maybe they didn’t want to give him his money. Maybe he looked at the piece of paper and realized what it was and tried to hold out for more. Maybe—” I broke off and swallowed.

  “Maybe?” Lilli still hadn’t slowed her keying.

  “Maybe he—maybe he thought he could get more money for it by double-crossing his client and selling it to someone else,” I said. “Herbie’s Game. One of Herbie’s Games. He went out of his way to make it obvious that Roger’s office had been burglarized, left the safe open and everything. Maybe left it that way—like a blinking sign saying, You’ve been robbed!—because he wanted to try to sell the list of names back to Roger at a higher price.” Anime said, “Would he do that?”

  “I’m learning that there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do. And the people who hired him to steal it tortured him, but they got overenthusiastic, and he died. And then I get confused.”

  “About what?” Monty said.

  “Okay. There were several people who might have wanted to kill Herbie, one in particular, a guy named Ghorbani. Herbie even named Ghorbani in a letter he left for me with his lawyer. So I thought, well, just maybe Herbie’s murder didn’t have anything to do with the chain. Are you following this?”

  “I think so,” Anime said.

  “It’s not complicated,” Monty said impatiently. “You’ve got essentially one question. Was your friend killed by the people who want the names in the chain, or by this other guy with the Persian name? What’s so hard about that?”

  Anime said to Monty, “Sometimes I hate you.”

  I said, “This is what’s hard. The day after Herbie was killed, the second person in the chain, Handkerchief Harrison, was murdered. Beaten to death, and very unpleasantly, according to the papers. Sounds like the same person who killed Herbie, and Ghorbani was a steroid rager, so it looked right. But I just found out, five minutes before you picked me up outside that church, that it wasn’t Ghorbani.”

  “You’re a hundred percent certain?” Anime said.

  “I think it’s immensely improbable.”

  “Probability,” Monty said. “When we say ‘probability,’ what we think we’re doing is making an objective assessment of the variants of what might happen, or might have happened, within a situation, but we always distort it with what we want or hope happened, which is a completely different kind of integer. The Monte Carlo method—”

  “I’m not using the Monte Carlo method,” I said, admiring my calm. “I’m using my gut, which told me even before I learned that Ghorbani was out of the picture that the people who killed Herbie also killed Handkerchief. So that leaves me with a question. If those people didn’t get the list from Herbie, how did they know about Handkerchief? And that’s why I’ve been worried about you and Dippy and the first person in the chain, Roger’s back-and-forth.”

  Monty was making invisible marks on the thighs of his trousers, writing out something only he could read. “Was Handkerchief—is that really a name?”

  “It’s what everyone called him the whole time I knew him. He probably had eight or ten names.”

  “Was he the kind of person people would want to kill?”

  “Absolutely. He was a con man who didn’t draw the line at widows and orphans.”

  “Maybe it is a coincidence,” Monty said. “Coincidence is just a relatively remote probability. Or maybe you’re wrong, and they did get the list of names from Herbie.”

  “Both possible,” I said. “But I don’t believe either of them.”

  “Belief,” Monty said, in the same tone he’d used for probability.

  “So to get anywhere, I need to know who the hit was set up to kill,” I said. “Operating on the assumption that this is revenge, I need to know who’s being revenged. What was in the envelope you put in that mailbox?”

  He tilted his head back and looked down his weasel nose at me. “How do you know I opened it?”

  “I don’t think you did,” I said. “I think Dippy opened it, and you reopened it.”

  He almost smiled for the first time all evening. “You saw her onstage.”

  “I did. The best bit in her act was the trick where the woman writes on a playing card and puts it in her purse, and later Dippy pulls it out of her husband’s pocket in a sealed envelope.”

  “You’re skipping the highlight,” Monty said. “It was subtle but it was the best part of the trick. The woman writes her husband’s name on the card and puts the card in the envelope, in front of all of us, and addresses the envelope—the night I watched, it was ‘to Bob’—and then she seals the envelope and puts it in her purse. She keeps the purse throughout the trick. When Dippy pickpockets the husband’s jacket, out comes the envelope the wife addressed, and when she opens it, inside is another sealed envelope, a new one, and that’s what’s got the card in it. There’s nothing Dippy can’t open.”

  “So you opened it, too. And inside it was?”

  “This is going to disappoint you,” he said. “A phone number.” He wrote on his thigh again. “This phone number,” he said, pointing at his trousers, which were blank. “Lilli, can you give me a pad and a pencil?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d hate for you to have to get up while you’re not doing anything.”

  When he had the pad, Monty wrote a number on it and handed it to me. His numerals were back-slanted, precise, and European, with crossed sevens. “This number is no longer in servic
e,” he said, parroting a phone-company recording. “It was a throw-away phone, probably used only one time, to receive the call from the hitter, and tossed a day or two later. My guess is that the name of the victim and maybe a couple of identifiers were in the voicemail message that answered the phone. Once it had rung and been answered, it probably got dropped off the end of a pier.”

  “So we don’t even know the hitter’s name,” I said. “Much less the victim’s.”

  There was no sound except for Lilli’s keyboard. I got up and yawned. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you back to your car.”

  “Sort of a letdown, huh?” Anime said.

  “Yeah.” I looked down at Monty, who was still tracing invisible digits on his pants. “Unless you’ve got another car here somewhere, you need to get into gear.”

  “Thirty thousand,” he said, getting up. “That’s how much the hitter got.”

  “Not bad,” I said. “Not absolutely first-rank, but not cut-rate, either.”

  “C’mon, Lilli,” Anime said. She reached both arms out and stretched. “Caught your yawn,” she said to me through her own yawn. “This has been kind of exciting.”

  Lilli rolled her chair back. “I think we might be able to get past South Dakota’s firewall.”

  “Tomorrow,” Monty said. To me, he said, “They’re the wizards. I can find the money and I know how to make it jump around, but I haven’t got the chops to get it away from the states.”

  “This is how we found you the first time,” Anime said. “You used your name on your first voice mail to Monte, and Lilli tracked down your address, where you don’t live any more, and found a back door into your Visa card, which you were using at that stupid motel. We also had your license plate, so we picked you up at the motel and followed you from there.”

  “I still don’t approve,” I said, knowing how old I sounded and not caring. “These girls shouldn’t be committing felonies.”