Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  Thrusting his head in between his wife’s plump shoulder and the doorjamb, the bald man made a mean face. “Yeah, what gives?” He was wearing a hotel robe, too. It was way too big for him.

  “I’m the head of hotel security,” I said, suppressing a nauseating surge of vertigo as I stood up, grabbing the couch to steady myself. “We caught this punk robbing a guest room. I apologize for the disturbance. Everything is under control now. Why don’t you go on back to your room and let us take care of this?”

  “Don’t order me around!” the lady said. “My husband isn’t paying four hundred dollars a night for this malarkey!” Her suspicious little eyes were darting around in her head, cataloguing the disorder in the room. “Who’s he?” She nodded sharply in Reggie’s direction.

  “He’s my associate, ma’am. I am very sorry you were disturbed. There won’t be any more trouble. But you are going to have to go back to your room and let us take care of this.”

  The man’s bald head and big ears poked into the room on the other side of his wife. “Don’t order her around!” he said.

  “I’m ordering both of you to get the hell out of here, right now!” I shouted, walking toward them, crowding them out of the doorway. “Go back to your room before I arrest you for interfering with a crime scene!”

  The man’s shiny head disappeared, and the lady drew herself up with a look of outrage on her frying pan of a face.

  “How dare you talk to my husband like that!” she yelled. “Come on, Dickey! We’ll see what the manager thinks about this. I’ve never been so insulted in all my born days. I’ll have that man’s job or know the reason why.” Her commentary trailed off as she sailed back down the hall to the open door of 569, a battleship with a dinghy in its wake. Her robe was stretched tight across her ass and shoulders. It stopped just below her knees and elbows, leaving massive calves and beefy-red forearms exposed. The husband looked like Dopey from the Seven Dwarfs in his robe, sleeves covering his hands to his fingertips, hem dragging the floor. Just before he went into their room and slammed the door, the little man looked back at me and made his mean face one more time, pulling his lips back and baring his teeth like a lap dog snarling at a German shepherd through a rolled-up car window.

  “We got to get out of here,” Reggie said.

  “No shit,” I said, passing him on my way into the bedroom. “How did he get by you?”

  “He didn’t come past me, man.”

  The jewelry case was lying twisted and broken by the bed. Someone had stepped or rolled on it during the fight. I saw one of the earrings near it and snatched it up. The necklace was nowhere in sight.

  I looked under the bed and on the closet floor, then started searching through the broken dishes and debris.

  “What the hell yuh doing?” Reggie said.

  “I’m looking for the goddamn necklace,” I said. “Help me find it!”

  The jewels were crystallized bliss, emotionally potent as pure rock cocaine. I was desperate to find them. But there were voices in the hall.

  “I’m not sure, sir,” I heard a woman’s voice say. Then Tawny came into the room. She was wide-eyed but calm, keeping it together. Her blouse was buttoned crookedly, each button one hole off.

  “I don’t know who you guys are or what you’re doing,” she said, her voice low and intense, “but you better haul ass. The security guys are coming up the elevator!”

  “Fuck!” I said, and grabbed the black bag from the bed. Pulling out the Beretta, I stuck it in my belt beneath my shirttail, where I could get to it fast. Reggie was following Tawny out the door, wobbling a little as he walked. Crossing the living room, I spotted the other earring and snagged it without breaking my stride, slipping it into my right pants pocket with its mate. Jimmy Z was still out cold. I resisted the urge to kick him in the head on my way out of the room.

  There were several people standing in front of their doors along the hallway that led back to the atrium. Rodriguez, the golf pro, was leaning against his doorjamb, wearing a pair of black satin boxer shorts and smoking a cigarette, looking mildly curious. The bellboy the weightlifter had abused was hurrying away from Rodriguez’s room in the direction of the elevators, trying to tuck in his shirt and put his jacket on at the same time.

  “This way,” Tawny said, leading us down the hall away from Rodriguez, the elevators, and the atrium. I thought she was heading for the fire exit, but she turned right down the short hallway I’d seen earlier, then jogged left into terra incognita.

  Shortly, we came to a small elevator.

  “This goes down to the pool,” she said, jabbing the down button.

  There was a distant clunk as the elevator motor engaged. Shortly, the 1 above the door lit up. After several seconds that seemed like several minutes, the 1 went dark and the 2 lit up. It was a leisurely elevator, perfect for a resort, taking its time ascending to our floor.

  “Come on, come on!” Tawny said.

  I ran back to the corner and looked around. No one was in sight yet, but I could hear more voices in the main hallway, a loud, excited babble. The voices were coming closer.

  Back at the elevator, the 4 was yellow. Then it went dark and the 5 blinked on and the door finally slid open. Tawny punched the button for the third floor and a lower one that said POOL.

  “When you get off the elevator, go through the glass doors into the pool area and then go left,” she said. “Go out the gate and follow the path that goes around this wing of the hotel. It will take you to the side parking lot.”

  The elevator stopped at three and Tawny got off.

  “Thanks, babe,” Reggie said.

  She looked back at him. “If they find out I helped you, it’s my job.”

  “They won’t find out,” I said.

  “I’m in the book,” she said to Reggie as the door slid shut, moving her head to keep him in view. “Tawny Pulaski.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Downstairs, the elevator opened into an empty hallway with squishy indoor/outdoor carpeting. Reggie tossed the bloody napkin in a corner and we went through double glass doors onto a concrete patio that overlooked the Oasis’s pool complex. It’s one of the largest and most elaborate in the desert, four sparkling pools connected by waterfalls and chutes, with a sand beach and a thatched-roof bar on an island that you can swim up to when you are ready for a drink.

  The sun had sunk behind the black bulk of the Santa Rosa Mountains. Overhead, the desert sky was still a deep luminous blue brushed by the tops of swaying palm trees, but the valley was plunged into sudden twilight and the lounge chairs and pool decks were deserted. At the little tropical bar, a wrinkled woman in a white one-piece bathing suit sat hunched over a red drink with a yellow umbrella sticking out of it. The bartender was tidying up, getting ready to close.

  There was a rack of fresh white towels beside the door we came out of and I grabbed one as we started down the concrete path to the gate, hotel rising to our left, swimming pool to our right. Beyond the gate, the path curved through a stand of California fan palm trees, past tennis courts and a maintenance building, then looped left around the back of the hotel.

  The walkway ended at a set of concrete steps that dropped down to an asphalt parking lot full of valeted cars. The Seville was parked between a black BMW 720i and a silver Bentley, but the keys were at the valet station in front of the hotel.

  Beyond the parking lot, a golf course lay green and hilly, charmed here and there by small lakes.

  “Which way, bro?” Reggie said. His face and the front of his shirt were covered with his own blood. He had soaked up some of it with the napkin, but there was plenty left. My right hand and sleeve were stained with the weightlifter’s blood and I had knots on my head where he hit me with the .45 and his big-knuckled fists. There was no way either one of us could go to the valet stand and get the car without attracting the wrong kind of attention, especially with the hotel in an uproar.

  “This way,” I said, walking straight across the parking lot
toward the golf course.

  “Where we going?”

  “To that little lake over there to get you cleaned up, and then to the Hyatt.”

  The Oasis Palms is part of a resort complex that includes two golf courses and four hotels, the Oasis and Hyatt Regency Grand Champions on the north side of State Route 111, the Miramonte and the Indian Wells Resort Hotel, Ricky Ricardo’s old place, on the south side of the palm-lined highway. The Hyatt was about a quarter of a mile away, hidden by a hill that was topped with a dense stand of elephant-ear plants.

  “I ain’t taking a bath in a lake,” Reggie said.

  “Why not?”

  “Who knows what might be in the motherfucker—frogs and snakes and every other fucking thing.”

  “I don’t want you to take a bath,” I said. “But we can use the water to wipe the blood off your face so it doesn’t look like you just killed a family.”

  There was a foursome playing far off on the other side of the course. Otherwise, the links were deserted as evening descended. We walked across the springy grass of a well-tended green, then down a sloping fairway to the edge of the water. Tree frogs were beginning to chirp as I knelt down and rinsed off my hands and forearms and folded my sleeves back to my elbows to hide the red cuff. Reggie took off his bloody shirt and hid it in some bushes. I dipped one end of the towel in the water and used it to wipe his arms and face. He used the other end to dry off with. His white T-shirt had a couple red spots where blood had soaked through, but it didn’t look too bad. No one would notice at a distance.

  We walked along the edge of the golf course in the shadow the Santa Rosa Mountains have cast each evening for millions of years to the top of the little man-made hill. From there, hidden among the elephant-ear plants, we could see the front of the Oasis and the back of the Hyatt, where a dozen or so people were scattered around a flagstone patio, eating dinner at glass-topped tables. The squeal of rubber on concrete made me look out toward Highway 111, where traffic was streaming by in both directions, a few cars with their headlights on, most without. A black-and-white had just skidded into the main entry drive shared by both hotels. A white Crown Victoria, the unmarked car of choice for cop shops from coast to coast, careened around the corner right behind it. At the Y, both cars veered right, racing up toward the Oasis’s porte cochere.

  “Little late, ain’t they?” Reggie sneered. He was feeling better.

  At the Hyatt, I left him sitting on a stone bench that overlooked the second hole and threaded my way through the diners on the patio, entering the hotel at the back side of the lobby. Crossing the quarry tile floor to the front desk, I was acutely conscious of the Beretta pressing against my belly.

  I wanted to get a room where we could lie low until things settled down at the Oasis. We could have hid out on the darkening golf course for a couple hours, but it would have been uncomfortable, and the fairways were probably patrolled by resort rent-a-cops. The last thing I wanted was a confrontation with hotel security. Likewise, we could have spent the evening in the hotel bar, nursing drinks and watching golf reruns on TV, but Reggie would have stood out in his T-shirt and if the detectives in the Crown Vic were any good they would stroll through the resort bars, looking for suspects who fit whatever description they got from the snowbird and her pet husband. I wasn’t worried about a description from Jimmy Z. With a mangled trachea and demolished nose, he wouldn’t be talking to the cops until after surgery. Recalling the crunching sound his nose made, I felt a little sick. I had murder in my heart when I hit him and it’s a poisonous emotion.

  A room would be perfect. We’d be out of the public eye. We could shower and patch up our wounds and think about what to do next. But the leather chairs and couches grouped on Mexican rugs here and there around the lobby were filled with weary travelers waiting beside mounds of suitcases and golf-club bags, and there were four lines at the front desk. The hotel was almost certainly sold out.

  I went to the end of the shortest line. When my turn at the counter came, ten minutes later, I smiled humbly at a young man behind a computer terminal who wore a white carnation in the lapel of his blue blazer and told him I needed a room and no I didn’t have a reservation and yes I knew it was their busy time and that there was a golf tournament starting on Sunday but anything he could do would be appreciated.

  He looked at his computer screen for a while, tapping keys and shaking his neatly barbered blond head, looking more and more mournful, despite the carnation. My head throbbed where the steel butt of the .45 had smashed into it and I felt half a dozen other twinges, aches, and sore spots coming into focus as the adrenaline of the fight and flight faded. A high-pressure stream of hot water pulsing from the kind of massaging shower-heads they have in luxe resorts would be heaven, but with each shake of the desk clerk’s head, the prospect of a safe, comfortable room receded.

  Then, suddenly, he brightened. “Well look at that!” he said. “You are in luck, sir. The hotel gods have smiled on us. We just had a cancellation come in this very moment. I can offer you a junior suite with a king and a fold-out couch if that is acceptable.” He gave me a smile that was happy for both of us.

  I paid cash, took the elevator up to the suite, and dropped off the black bag, then went back for Reggie, bringing him in a side entrance.

  “I got dibs on the first bath,” Reggie said, as we went into the suite.

  It was a spacious room, segmented into sitting and sleeping areas by a louvered wooden screen. The carpet was thick, the furnishings luxurious. It looked like something a Hollywood set designer had concocted for a remake of Grand Hotel, and a few minor stars had probably slept in it.

  “Fine,” I said, “but before you get your rubber ducky out, I want to know what happened back there.”

  “What happened back there? At the hotel? Looked like you let that punk get the drop on you and we came away without the necklace.”

  “You’re right. He did get the drop on me. What I want to know is how he got past you.”

  “I told you, he didn’t get past me.”

  “Where the fuck did he come from, then?”

  “He must of come up that back way.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you were in a linen closet getting your dick rubbed and he did get past you.”

  Our relationship was like one between a grizzled staff sergeant and a younger first lieutenant. The lieutenant is in official command of the platoon but sometimes defers to the sergeant because of his longer experience in the service. Sometimes the sergeant may do something to show the lieutenant up because he thinks he should be in charge all the time. Power shifted back and forth between us, with Reggie willing to salute and take orders most of the time because I knew how to plan successful scores, but always trying to get his own way, too.

  “It’s a lucky thing Tawny did come up,” he said belligerently. “She didn’t want to make out by the elevators so we went down the hall and around a couple of corners. That’s how come I saw that punk going into the room and went down and saved your ass.”

  I was pretty sure Jimmy Z had slipped past him while his eyes were rolled back in his head, but there was no point arguing about it. He had saved me from a psycho, for the second time in six months.

  “I think you fucked up,” I said, “but we won’t fight about it right now. Go ahead and take your bath. I’m going to see if the resort shops are still open. If they are, I’ll get us some new clothes. What size pants and shirt do you wear?”

  “Forty-two waist, thirty length on the pants, extra-large shirt.” He sounded mad, which made me think maybe he was telling the truth, but I couldn’t be sure because he was a good actor when trying to cover his tracks. If you busted him cold in a lie, he would cop to it with a grin and shrug, but if he knew you weren’t quite certain, he’d keep lying with his dying breath for the satisfaction of deceiving you.

  The clock in the lobby said six-thirty. That shocked me. It seemed like it had been much more than two hours since we pulled up in fron
t of the Oasis Palms. The Hyatt’s main lobby shop was still open. It had everything from suntan lotion and postcards to romance novels and souvenir mugs, along with a fair selection of men’s and women’s resort wear. I bought Bactine, Band-Aids, and two complete outfits. Mine was khaki chinos and a yellow polo shirt, along with a fifty-dollar Panama hat and a pair of sunglasses. To aggravate Reggie, I bought him a big pair of brown plaid Bermuda shorts, an oversize aloha shirt with red hibiscus on an orange background, and a pair of those leather sandals with crisscross straps that guys with white legs wear over black socks. Both of us would look completely different than when we arrived in Indian Wells.

  Back in the suite, Reggie was lying on the bed with a towel wrapped around him watching a rerun of Hawaii Five-O, probably the worst TV cop show ever made, with laughable dialogue and acting, implausible plots, and bad guys with names like Big Chicken. Not coincidentally, considering the clichéd sensibilities of fin-de-siècle America, it was also the longest-running cop show in television history.

  “What are you watching that shit for?” I asked him.

  “Bikinis,” he said. Onscreen, two Polynesian girls in skimpy swimming suits were having a giggly conversation with the former Disney actor who played Danno. Reggie had a point.

  I took his new clothes from the bag and tossed them on the bed.

  “Oh, no,” he said when he saw the shorts. “I ain’t wearing those stupid things.”

  “Yes you are,” said the lieutenant, exerting his authority. “Think of it as a disguise. If anyone noticed you hanging around the Oasis lobby or saw us leaving the hotel, the cops will be looking for someone in long pants and a dark-blue shirt. They won’t spot you in this getup.”

  “How come you ain’t wearing short pants, then?”

  “I don’t want to look goofy.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Reggie came out of the bathroom in his costume, I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.