Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  He didn’t flush, either, the pig. Nor, to my disappointment, did he catch himself in his zipper. What he did do was come back into my field of vision, six or eight feet away—giving me a quick glimpse of some pendulous pectorals—and kick the phone again, toward the door this time. He vanished from sight to my left, toward the hallway. I heard him kick the phone again, bouncing it off the hallway wall, booting the phone in front of him as he went, and I figured out what he was going to do: maneuver the phone to the top of the two steps down into the sunken living room, go down the steps, and pick it up there, where he wouldn’t have to bend so far.

  I was sopping wet. I listened for the grunt as he finally stooped for the phone and then I heard his awful shoes as he crossed the dining room’s hardwood floor toward the back yard. In the silence of the house, I sat there, weak and wet, and waited until I was sure he wasn’t going to come back in, and then I backed out as quickly as I could and double-timed it to Herbie’s bedroom, where I yanked open he door, intending to peek between the curtains, just to confirm what I thought I knew, given the sound of the man’s voice and the partial glimpse I’d had of him: the identity of the person driving the car.

  Pulling the door open like that, without thinking, was a mistake. It had been closed tightly, probably by Twistleton and his troops, and when I opened it, the stench almost took my feet out from under me. With no circulating air, the damp carpets had stayed damp, and the blood had gone way, way south. I backed up to slam the door but instead I stopped and forced myself to breathe deeply three or four times, just putting a seal on the fury in my heart.

  That was what was left of Herbie, and someone was going to pay.

  The door closed almost too easily, and I stood there, looking at its blemish-free surface and waiting for the spots in front of my eyes to clear. I heard a car accelerate down the hill and still I stayed there, trying to breathe regularly and clear my head. When I felt a little clearer, I turned and crossed the hall into the office, both to search it more carefully and to clean up the mess that Mr. Short Wide Deep Voice had made. At the very least, to flush the damn toilet.

  So I spent a couple of minutes on my hands and knees, picking up the crap he’d spilled on the carpet and shoveling it into the drawer. Then I turned to put the drawer back and found myself looking through the open door into the bathroom.

  I couldn’t figure out at first what had caught my attention, so I softened my gaze and tried to see all of it at once. My eyes went over all the shapes and surfaces and settled on the toilet-paper roll. It was full enough to protrude out from the little inset in the wall the roller occupied, and it seemed warped, as though the paper had gotten wet and swelled unevenly as it absorbed water. I said, out loud, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and got up and went into the john and gave the roll a spin.

  The tissue unspooled onto the floor, and out fell a single sheet of paper, folded vertically into equal thirds. I opened it and saw Wattles’s printing, all block capitals. I read it with no surprise, but with disappointment: the name of the hitter wasn’t on it. That, Wattles figured he could remember.

  I tore the list, the thing that started all this, into little pieces and flushed them along with the goon’s urine, the smell of which suggested that he ought to cut back on the asparagus. I went out into the hall and put my hand flat against the open bedroom door, spreading my fingers and just feeling its cool, smooth surface.

  I said, “Goodbye, Herbie.”

  “So you’re the man.” A. Vincent Twistleton treated me to a wide view of a splendid set of choppers, breathtakingly white although they may have gained in whiteness through contrast with his face, which was very dark indeed. I couldn’t see his eyes through the wire-framed sunglasses, but as I failed to respond the smile went a little professional and he extended a brown, long-fingered hand across the desert of his desk and said, “Give.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The pic, the proof. Something that says you’re really Herbie’s top guy.”

  “Was I?” I pulled out my wallet and leafed through four driver’s licenses until I came up with the one with my real name on it, and I handed it to him, our fingers just barely meeting across a desk half the size of a skating rink.

  Twistleton pushed the shades down on his nose and looked over them at the stack of licenses in my hand. His eyes were a startling blue; I never expect blue eyes in black people. “How many people are you?”

  “Only one at a time,” I said.

  He laughed, a low collection of consonants and glottal stops that sounded like someone bowling a strike. “Lawyer’s answer,” he said, looking at the license I’d given him. “Looks good. Of course, they probably all look good.” He dealt my license back to me with a practiced flip of the wrist and it stopped obediently at the desk’s edge. “Still got it,” he said. “You think you can lose it if you ever really had it?”

  I said, “I hate to be stuffy, but I don’t know what it refers to.”

  “If we’re going to be literal,” he said, “I was talking about me, and I was referring to a skill I just demonstrated, a finely honed manual dexterity that I developed doing thousands of hours of small-scale mechanical assembly work as I put myself through college. Dexterity that also translated into a certain flair with a deck of cards. If we’re being figurative, I was referring to the skill each of us nurtures most and maybe even cares about most. In your case, according to Herbie, that was a sort of burglar’s sixth sense.”

  “Herbie said that about me?”

  “Herbie said a lot of things about you, all of them good.” He swiveled his chair to look out the window at a view of Century City, or perhaps I should say the view of Century City, since they all look alike. He was a big man, a couple of inches taller than I was, with a football lineman’s shoulders and a burgeoning, contented-looking gut straining at his $200 shirt. As huge as the desk was, the office made it look small. “You always answer a question with a question?”

  “Was it you who removed most of the valuables from Herbie’s place?”

  He used the tip of a blunt index finger to push the glasses back up over his eyes and turned his head toward me. “You’ve been there? Inside? Through the crime scene tape?”

  “I have.”

  “And may I ask why?”

  “You may.”

  He waited. Then he turned the chair back around to face me, shook his head, blew heavily through his nostrils, and said, “Why?”

  “Herbie asked me to figure out who killed him. I thought I might find something that would help me answer that question.”

  “I thought Herbie knew who was going to kill him.”

  “Yeah? You read the letter he wrote me?”

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk and lowering his head like a bull that’s considering using his horns. “I didn’t have to read the letter. Herbie and I talked about it, and he said he knew who was most likely to come after him.”

  I said, “He was wrong.” Twistleton kept the specs trained on me, and I said, “That man experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus.”

  “Then you don’t know who killed him.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “You really should have been a lawyer.”

  “Not only should I have not been a lawyer, but I live my life in such a way as to give employment to as few lawyers as possible.”

  He was determined to put up with me, so I got the grin and the bowling-strike laugh again, but it didn’t have much support. Then he put away the white teeth and said, “Yes, well, that seems to be consistent with the prevailing opinion. And yet here I am, the living exception.” He shook his head, I wasn’t sure at what, although it may have been an amused fondness for himself. Lawyers can get that way. He said, “A real conversion? Because I’ve got to tell you, I can’t count the number of convicted murderers who have found Jesus while their cases were on appeal.”

  “Real enough for me.”

  “But you do know who killed Herbie.
”

  “Ninety-five percent. When I have one more piece of information, it’ll be certain.”

  “Will that be before the will’s read on Saturday?”

  “Why Saturday?”

  “It’s going to be a somewhat unorthodox reading. It’ll go down better if there aren’t a lot of extra lawyers, officers of the court, around. So, will you know by Saturday?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Listen,” he said, leaning back in the chair so forcibly it squeaked. “Have I done something to upset you? If you were always such a jerk, Herbie would have mentioned it.”

  “I don’t know how your day is going,” I said. “But the last thing I did before I came here was spend a minute that felt like an hour standing in a bedroom that reeked of my friend’s blood, breathing it in. On purpose. Because I wanted to get mad. I succeeded, which probably makes me less vulnerable to your charm than I would usually be.”

  Twistleton said, “I’m angry, too.”

  “Then take off the shades so I can see your eyes, and talk to me.”

  He took them off. The blue eyes surprised me all over again. They were a pale, transparent blue, but there was no looking in through them. A. Vincent Twistleton had kept his guard up for a long time. He said, “It matters whether you figure it out before the will is read because it will be a mess if the person who did it is a legatee.”

  “Gee,” I said. “A mess.”

  “Is it possible that you won’t know before then?”

  “It might be. Just out of curiosity, how would my identifying the murderer simplify the what-do-you-call-them, the bequests?”

  He spread his huge hands, looking like someone who was being reasonable but saying nothing.

  “I see,” I said. “You think I’m going to—remove—whoever it is, don’t you?”

  “Well, well, well,” he said quickly, “we have moved far afield, haven’t we? I am, I’ll remind you, an officer of the court.” He lifted the sunglasses in his hand. “These are my officer of the court glasses.” He put them on the desk, pulled his hands away from them and made a little motion, shooing them away. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t I what?”

  He gazed toward the ceiling, a man requesting patience from above, and put the glasses on again, low on his nose. “Herbie made an enormous difference in my life,” he said. “I don’t want to give anything of his, even temporarily, to someone who harmed him. Coffee?”

  “Sure, thanks. Black.”

  He pushed a button on the desk and said, “Joe? Two coffees, one black and one for me. And some donuts.”

  “Sorry, sir, donuts are gone,” someone who was presumably Joe said.

  Twistleton closed his eyes and pursed his lips. He had long, luxuriant eyelashes, long and thick enough to make a shadow on his cheeks. “Please,” he said, “tell me this is not a problem I have to help you solve.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good.” He released the button. “He’s still afraid of me, Joe is. I asked him to go down and get my car a couple of days ago, bring it up to the front of the building, and he took off like he’d been shot out of a gun. About eight minutes later he came back in and asked me for my keys.”

  I said, “I usually go get my own car.”

  He grinned at me. “Herbie said you were a pisser.”

  “How did he make an enormous difference, I think that was the phrase you used, in your life?”

  “Mmmmm,” he said. “This isn’t something I usually talk about. In fact, Herbie may have been the only person I did talk to about it.” He looked around the office, as if seeking something that would prompt him, provide an opening. “I wasn’t exactly born to this.”

  “I sort of got that. All that precision mechanical work.”

  “I never met my father. My mother, single, like a lot of moms in South Central, supported three kids by working two jobs for a total of four hundred dollars a week. I make a hundred times that, more or less. When I was twelve, I set my eye on that figure, a hundred times what my mother made, and I went twenty hours a day to get it.” He rocked in the chair a couple of times. “And for quite a while it didn’t look like I was going to get it.”

  “And this leads to Herbie?”

  “It did, but it takes a minute or two. I got into a pretty good firm, worked longer and harder than anyone in the history of the company, and became a really expert white man. I dressed white, sounded white, thought white. If the dominant race had six fingers, I would have had an artificial one sewn on. If they’d had chrome foreheads, I would have had a chrome implant.”

  “Just for the money?” I asked.

  He smiled again, the smile of someone who’s been caught and doesn’t care. “No. There was power, too, of course. As a kid I didn’t have any power. My mother didn’t have any power. We lived at the whim of others. If one of my mother’s employers had let her go, we’d have been homeless. So power was part of it, too.”

  I said, “Makes sense.”

  He sat back and gave me an assessing look. “Are you actually interested in this?”

  I said, “I am.” I was still looking for what Herbie had seen in him.

  “Fine. School was awful, typical South Central in those days, rundown building, not enough books, too many kids, and most of the teachers were there because they couldn’t get themselves sent anywhere else. But then there was third grade, and third grade was Mrs. Ridgely. Thanks to my mother, I was reading way ahead of grade level. Until third grade, my teachers were too busy to notice, just trying to manage the classroom. By first day in Mrs. Ridgely’s class, I was reading at junior-high level and writing about the same. The minute we sat down that morning, she had us take fifteen minutes to write about what we wanted to get out of school. The kid next to me was done in about one minute, and he took his paper up and put it on her desk. That started it. Every fifteen seconds, someone would get up and drop their page on her desk.”

  “While you beavered away,” I said.

  He gave me a stainlessly white grin. “I guess I tuned everything out, because as I was finishing up I felt eyes on me and the whole class was watching. Mrs. Ridgely was at her desk, her glasses pushed down on her nose, looking over them at me. I got kind of flustered, I guess, because I left my last sentence unfinished and took the paper up to her. She just watched over those glasses, and when I got there she pushed them up and read my name on the front page and said, ‘Vince or Vincent?’ I said, ‘Vincent.’ Even in third grade I knew I wasn’t a Vince.

  “She said, ‘Well, Vincent, you must want quite a lot.’ Then she looked down at the page and her eyebrows went up as she read the first few words—I mean, I guess that’s why they went up, because when she looked back at me her eyes were narrow and she was chewing her lower lip. She said, ‘We’ll have to see what we can do for you.’

  “I said, ‘Thank you,’ but I didn’t think she’d really do anything.”

  “What did you write?”

  “Idealistic kid stuff. My mother had taught me that language was the most powerful weapon. I used a lot of words to say I wanted to learn to read and write well enough so I could help people. Ask a hundred kids what they want to do in life, and they’ll say help people. It’s enough to make you wonder why most of them turn out the way they do.”

  “And what did she do for you?”

  He held up an index finger and touched it with the opposite one. “First thing she did was put me near the kids who could barely read but wanted to, and I helped them, right there in class.” He touched the next finger. “Second thing she did was design a whole year’s worth of study, just for me, reading seventh grade books, and not just textbooks, either, but novels and even nonfiction. Third, at the end of the year she passed me off to the dreaded Miss Willis. This was still the era of ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs.’ Anyway, Miss Willis had quit being a nun for reasons that everyone wondered about, but she was still capable of taking a ruler to the back of your hand when she thought you needed it.” He l
aughed a little and rubbed at his left eye. “This was, of course, a less enlightened age when you could still rap a kid’s knuckles without going to jail. Miss Willis picked up where Mrs. Ridgely had left off and handed me in fifth grade to Mr. Lee, Mr. Johnnie Lee. Mr. Lee was famous in the school because for years he used his summers to go down south and get hit on the head by cops and bitten by police dogs. Had a big pink scar in the center of an actual dent on the left side of his forehead.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Some brave people back then.”

  I just nodded, not wanting to slow him down.

  “So Mr. Lee showed me a piece of paper and said, ‘Do you mean this?’ and when I looked at it, it was the thing I’d written for Mrs. Ridgely. I said I did, and for the rest of the year Mr. Lee talked to me about the law and gave me books about lawyers. The one I remember best was To Kill a Mockingbird, but William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial stood out, too. So, to condense things a bit, I skipped sixth and seventh, went into eighth before my voice had begun to change, and wound up in pre-law at UCLA at sixteen. By then, I could practically hear the trumpet fanfares in my ears.” He raised his hand, miming stairs. “I was going to come out of South Central and climb.”

  “And you have.” I said.

  “Well,” he said, his face tight, “this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I started out in advocacy law, but it burned holes in me. The system was so big and so slow, and people’s lives were so short, and I’d go home and not sleep and not eat, actually banging my head against the wall at times, and a few years later, when I got an offer from these folks, I took it. I got to do some pro bono cases I cared about, and I still do them, but the office game got into my blood, and I decided to play it for all I was worth. And, yeah, I made a little progress. I talked white and I watched baseball and even played a little golf—whitest game ever invented, who but a white man would come up with a sport that requires a hundred acres of mowed lawn? Played golf, talked baseball, dressed right, worked eighty hours a week, but it wasn’t really happening, I wasn’t getting there. I was stalled, doing and being everything I thought these folks wanted in a prospective partner and not making the progress I felt I deserved.”