Free Herbie's Game by Timothy Hallinan Page B

left-hand corner proclaimed in incised type that the envelope had sailed proudly into the world from the offices of Wyndham, Twistleton, & Pine, Attorneys at Law, in Century City.
    “No hurry,” I said. “Lawyers, even lawyers named Wyndham, Twistleton, ampersand Pine, never send you good news. Jesus, I wonder which of them wears the whitest shoes.”
    Rina said, “I just read a book in which a poor young girl getsa letter from a lawyer telling her she’s inherited half the world and a castle, too.”
    “The castle is a nice touch.”
    “It’s a dumb book. But it’s got a kindly lawyer in it. Sort of grandfatherly, but not like my grandfathers.” Neither Kathy’s father nor mine was likely to be shortlisted for Grandfather of the Year.
    “That’s a fictional lawyer. They’re different from real lawyers.”
    “How?” She was drinking something made with tomato juice. I averted my eyes because tomato juice has always given me the creeps. It’s just too arterial.
    “Let’s say you’ve been hurt,” I said. “A fictional lawyer, say a TV lawyer, would comfort you, maybe fold his suit jacket under your head as a pillow and murmur eloquent encouragement to keep you going until the ambulance comes. A real lawyer would represent the ambulance company when it sues you for payment.”
    “You think that might be a little sweeping? People say bad things about burglars, too.”
    I said, “And they’re right.”
    A brief pall settled over us. Rina dispelled it by asking, “How’s Ronnie?”
    I looked around my old living room, everything pretty much where I’d left it three years earlier, although the pictures had changed. I wasn’t in them. “You want the truth? I have no idea how she is.”
    “How who is?” Kathy had a Bloody Mary in her hand. More tomato juice.
    “His friend,” Rina said.
    “Miss Motel?” Kathy sat in the chair she always sat in, which I noticed had been reupholstered in what had undoubtedly beensold as natural leather, as though nature was rife with powder-blue animals. She put her Bloody Mary on the little square mahogany table that had belonged to her mother and said, “Sorry sorry. I’m sure she’s a very nice person.”
    “She is,” I said. “And the motels are one of the things I like about her. Her name is Ronnie, by the way.”
    “Short for Veronica,” Rina put in.
    “I know, dear.” Kathy said with just a tiny edge. “And what do you mean, the motels are one of the things you like about her?”
    “She doesn’t have to live in them. She’s got a perfectly nice apartment in West Hollywood, big and airy and full of books—”
    “What does she read?” Rina said. Rina wanted to know what everybody read.
    “Mostly history. A little science.”
    “So she has an apartment,” Kathy prompted.
    “Right. And she never goes there unless it’s to pick up some books or some new clothes.” I looked at their tomato juice and wondered why I wasn’t drinking anything and then remembered the vodka at Dippy’s house. “I mean it’s a really nice place, and this month she’s sleeping at Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest. A few months back, it was Valentine Shmalentine.”
    “It
wasn’t
,” Kathy said.
    “Afraid so. Before that, the North Pole. I don’t know why she does it.”
    “Daddy,” Rina said, “it’s because she likes you.”
    “I suppose,” I said, trying not to sound morose.
    “You know what it is?” Kathy said. “You know why she likes you?”
    I said, “Um.”
    “I can say this because I was married to you,” Kathy said, with the certainty of someone who’d been asking herself a question for a long time. “It’s because you’re decent.”
    “Me?”
    “I?” Rina corrected me, making the lifetime Grammar Gotcha score 1,139 to one in my favor.
    “That’s what it is,” Kathy said. She sometimes shook her head side to side, in the negative, when she was saying something positive, and she was doing it then. “There aren’t that many decent men