Crashed

17

Crooks don’t get much opportunity to mourn, and that’s regrettable, since we probably lose friends more often than most demographic groups-water delivery men, for example, or the insurance actuaries who tell us which professions have the highest mortality rate. This is one reason that some of us are reluctant to make friends. You never knew when one of them might get hauled to the hospital with an incurable lead tumor or put away for life and a week.

But that night I did what I could. I spent most of an hour sitting on the bed at the Hillsider Motel, sending off whatever energy I could to accompany Jimmy wherever he was headed. At first I pictured someplace like Trey Annunziato’s yard, but bigger and less corny, with lots of incense, and then dismissed it as faux-Asian claptrap. Jimmy was headed East of Eden, where he could hang out with the other James Dean.

And I couldn’t call Theresa, Jimmy’s wife, because the cops would be knocking on her door in an hour or two, and they couldn’t see she’d been crying. Cops being cops, they’d regard her as a suspect, or someone who was shielding a suspect. She was going to have a rough enough time as it was.

And, of course, if the cops eventually got her to talk to them, she’d have to tell them that I was the one who’d called.

Back when I was a semi-pro, just a patzer who broke into houses on weekends and took things that interested him, I got to know a guy named Herbie, who became a mentor to me. At the time I met him, Herbie was already deep into a long and illustrious career, specializing in the houses of psychiatrists. He really had a burr under his saddle about psychiatrists. The operation was simplicity itself: he’d get their patterns down so he could identify the signs that announced that the house was really empty, as opposed to apparently empty when there was actually someone inside with ready access to a shotgun. When the place was verifiably vacant, Herbie would go in and take everything small enough to fit into a doctor’s valise-and he had a really exquisite eye for value, so he wasn’t bagging a kid’s stamp collection and a bag of garnets-and then he’d go through the doctor’s files, if they were kept at home. He was looking for two specific things: first, some sensational case notes, real headline-quality stuff, the kind of thing it takes a while for a patient to tell even his or her therapist; and second, evidence that the shrink was underreporting income to the IRS. To hear him tell it, two out of three were doing exactly that.

Then he’d blackmail them. He’d make a single phone call to announce what he had and to inform the doctor that the patient’s secrets would be made public and the IRS would get an anonymous package in the mail, followed by the reassuring news that these problems could be made to go away by a substantial wire transfer into a numbered bank account in Aruba. The payment was a whopper, and once he got it, Herbie shredded everything, and the doctor never heard from him again. Blackmailers get caught, Herbie said, because they don’t stop.

It was obvious to me that Herbie had been through a lot of therapy. He talked about complexes and conflicts and childhood traumas and invalid self-images and self-punishment and acting out, and all those other terms that shrinks use to mystify the way pretty much everyone acts. And one of the terms Herbie used most was closure. Sure, Herbie was getting rich when he held these therapists over the fire, but he was also obtaining ongoing closure for some unrevealed wrong that had been done to him while he was stretched out on an analyst’s couch.

One evening in Reseda, a blood brother of Herbie’s, a hapless, judgment-free skell named Willis, robbed a liquor store in the company of some meth-addled tweaker he’d met that night. They got away with $362, a bunch of full bottles, and a string of curses in Korean from the store’s owner, but they didn’t get all the way away; the next morning Willis was found in a vacant lot with a broken bottle stuck in his neck. No money, of course. A couple of days later, the tweaker went down under a dark sedan with no license plates that didn’t even slow down to let the driver take a look, and that night Herbie said something to me that I actually went home and wrote down.

If you can’t get closure, Herbie said, get even.

Before I turned off the bedside lamp for the second time that night, I made a promise to Jimmy, Ji Ming, Bai Chen, or whatever name he was going by now. I promised to get even.

I closed my eyes, and my cell phone rang. When I looked at it, it displayed Jimmy’s number.