Herbie's Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

sharply or arrive disjointedly: someone moving, the creak of a door, a quick breath. You tend to tune out sounds that are constant, sounds that flow from one moment to the next without variation; those are the sounds you’re trying to listen around. So it took me a minute or two—probably two—to hear the low, soft, unvarying whistle.
    It was a middle D, I noted automatically. No tremolo, no dynamic variations: just someone with infinite lungs playing a soft, sustained middle D on a flute, a couple of rooms away.
    I didn’t even know what caused the sound yet, but it made the hair on the back of my neck bristle.
    The condo was one story: entrance hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, guest bath at one end and then a corridor leading to the so-called private areas: three bedrooms, one of which Herbie used as an office, and two more bathrooms.
    The flute was coming from the far end of the corridor.
    I took the gun out, wishing I’d racked it outside to put a shell in the chamber but unwilling to make that noise now. Holding it barrel-up in the approved movie-cop position, I started down the hall.
    Herbie’s possessions, some of which I’d known for seventeen or so years, transformed the anonymous geometry of the rooms into a kind of album of things we’d done together, things we’d acquired together, things he’d taught me: a huge Navajo rug stolen from a mansion in the Hollywood hills, where we came in after some kind of fearsome scene had gone down, and we had to roll the body of a one-time TV cowboy across the room to get at the rug, which was worth it. A beat-up old hat that had been autographed by practically every major silent-film star, the only thing we took from the home of a faded B-list actress who’d spent her life savings scouring Hollywood for every piece of movie-related memorabilia she could find in the hope that one day she’d open a museum. We’d felt too sorry for her to take anything else. A painting of a seedy New York street, complete with a burlesque house, by John Sloan, the greatest artist among the New York Ashcan School, the first group to set up their easels on urban, working-class American streets. I loved the Sloane, and Herbie had promised me he’d will it to me. The rooms held dozens of things, all of them with Herbie imprinted on them.
    Except for Herbie’s things, there was nothing of interest in the first two bedrooms. Just that fucking flute, playing its unchanging, impossibly sustained D, getting louder as I neared the master bedroom. And the smell was growing stronger along with the flute: damp and rubbery, and a little like meat. It took everything I had to keep me walking to, and then through, that door, and it took even more, pulled up from some unsuspected reserve, to keep me in the room.
    Herbie was facedown and spread-eagled on the canopy bed, his legs wrenched wide and tied to the posts at either side of the head of the mattress. He’d been yanked so that he was draped over a corner of the bed at a diagonal, his head hanging down,his hands dangling in big yellow rubber gloves. I knew those gloves; I have gloves like them. Herbie taught me to take meticulous care of my hands, pampering them, moisturizing them, using the finest sandpaper on the fingertips to increase the sense of touch, and protecting them from things like soap and hot water. When I had lived with my ex-wife, Kathy, and my daughter, Rina, I washed dishes, thanks to Herbie, using those very same gloves.
    The flute sound was coming from the cap of a whistling teapot, sitting atop an electric hotplate that Herbie would use to melt wax so he could make impressions of keys. The hotplate had been turned low enough to keep the sound from getting too shrill, but not so low that the water wouldn’t boil.
    As I worked up the courage to look at what remained of Herbie, I picked up the teapot—the handle was so hot I almost dropped it—and shook it. It was light. Most of the water had either been used on