Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  Except for his bushy beard, he looked like the original rube, a chunky wannabe who didn’t have a clue that his clothes were clownish, not cool.

  “You need a trim,” I said.

  I called housekeeping and asked them to send up a pair of scissors. A few minutes later there was a soft knock at the door. When I opened it, a slight young Mexican in a bellboy’s uniform bobbed his head and held out a pair of shears, handle first.

  “Thanks,” I said, and handed him a five.

  He bobbed his head again, grinned, and backed away from the door as I closed it.

  Resort protocol requires a one-dollar tip for someone who brings a small item to your room, but most of the rich people who patronize fine hotels don’t tip delivery boys at all, their gravitational attachment to their money having grown ever greater along with its mass. I gave the kid a five, not because I am a wonderful person, but, as with the valet, because it was an easy way to make someone smile, and because it made me another friend in Indian Wells.

  Reggie grumbled but sat still with a towel draped over his shoulders while I trimmed his beard and hair to make him look more middle-class. He didn’t like haircuts, and the fact that he let me shear him made me think he probably was guilty of abandoning his post after all. I used the Bactine and two small transparent adhesive strips to disinfect and close the gash at his hairline.

  After I showered in the miniature marble palace of the suite’s bathroom and changed into my crisp new clothes, we went down to dinner. I saw one woman in a turquoise St. John knit suit glance at Reggie and snicker. To the rest of the clowns with fat wallets and fairway dreams he looked like one of the crowd. Of course, none of them looked into his stony brown eyes. If they had, they would have clapped one hand on their wallets, the other over their mouths to keep from screaming, and hurried away at the speed of a golf cart driven by a defeated linksman racing for his first postgame martini.

  Reggie had a whiskey sour and three Budweisers with his New York strip steak, enough to send him through a period of feeling good, during which he jollied up our waitress, and then make him sleepy. He didn’t eat his asparagus. I had one O’Doul’s with my slab of sautéed halibut and did eat my broccoli.

  After dinner, Reggie went back up to the suite, while I strolled through the cool desert night to see what was happening at the Oasis Palms. There was a self-parking lot between the two hotels, built below grade and surrounded by philodendrons, banana plants, and elephant ear so that the limo set wouldn’t have to see it. I walked across the neatly stripped asphalt to a concrete staircase that led up to the level of the porte cochere.

  It was eight forty-five and there was activity at the hotel’s gleaming entrance, people going to or returning from restaurants, movies, and pre-tournament parties. Normalcy had returned to the resort. Almost. The black-and-white was gone but the unmarked car was still parked near the valet stand.

  I didn’t like the idea of trying to retrieve the Caddie while detectives were still sniffing around. The valets were busy, and I might have to stand in plain sight in front of the hotel for five or ten minutes. We’d spend the night at the Hyatt.

  I thought of circling around to the pool elevator and trying to get back into Evermore’s room to search for the necklace, but it seemed too risky, more reckless than bold. She might be there. The detectives might be there. And the room had probably been searched, the necklace found, and put someplace secure.

  When I got back to the suite, the lights were out. A cheerful plotless porno flick was writhing on the big-screen TV. Reggie was snoring on the bed. I watched the athletic sex for a few minutes, feeling voyeuristic in the dark, then switched it off and unfolded the Hide-Away bed. It was already made up, crisp and cool, with 300-thread-count sheets and a soft wool blanket. I found two goose-down pillows in the foyer closet.

  Once I had the bed ready, I realized I wasn’t sleepy and went out onto the balcony to soak up some of the mystic atmosphere of the desert night and think the situation over. Silver stars flickered above the date palms and a golden sliver of moon pulsed high up in the black sky. The Hyatt’s pool complex was spread out below me. Surrounded by paving stones and native desert plants, the half dozen round and oval pools looked in the moonlight like natural, not man-made, features.

  The Coachella Valley is the wettest desert in the West, with more swimming pools per capita than any other place in the country—not surprising since it routinely tops 110 Fahrenheit in the summer. There is abundant natural water, too. Away from sprinkler systems and maintained greenery, the valley floor is as dry and desolate as the most antisocial old prospector could hope for, but it is ringed by four mountain ranges—the Santa Rosas, the San Jacintos, the San Bernardinos, and the Little San Bernardinos, with the highest peaks over ten thousand feet. The mountains isolate the valley as surely as the sea isolates Catalina, giving it a far-off, Shangri-La feeling even though it is only a short drive from LA. The rocky, pine-clad peaks also provide an infinite supply of water, snowmelt that runs down underground to fill aquifers below the sand. Valley place-names—Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells—testify to the availability of this ironic water. Another example of things often not being what they seem.

  When I came to Southern California in 1992, I couldn’t understand why people would go to the desert for a weekend trip or weeklong vacation when they had available to them mountain resorts like Arrowhead and Big Bear and one of the most dazzling seacoasts in the world, with 150 miles of bright, misty beach stretching from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Over the past four years, though, I had fallen under its spell. I loved the dramatic rise of the mountains from the dry seabed of the valley floor, the date palm groves, and the glittering resorts. I liked the desert nights especially, the stillness and mystery, but on that night I felt cut off emotionally from the world around me. Everything looked flat and mundane, the way it does when you are depressed.

  The powerful charge of adrenaline that had gushed through me earlier in the evening as I burglarized the hotel room, fought with Jimmy Z, and then fled the scene had dissipated, leaving me listless as a speed freak crashing from a three-day run. I was depressed by the loss of the diamonds I had held in my hand, by Reggie’s almost fatal negligence, and maybe by the aftereffects of steel striking my skull. I still faced the problem of retrieving the Cadillac and getting out of town without a police escort.

  To revive myself, I tried a technique I learned from a medicine man I met in the Palm Valley on my first trip to the desert, several years before. The valley is a true oasis at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains, where a clear stream rushes down through fan palm groves before disappearing below the desert floor. The Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indians has lived there for more than a thousand years. Sitting beside me on the bank of the stream, the medicine man showed me how to look at the whole width and thickness of the flowing water, not just the surface, getting inside it in a magical way. I felt energy pour into me when I connected with his concept, a tiny circuit closing in the infinite universe.

  Since then I’ve found that the trick can work in any environment. Whenever I notice that the world has gone flat, the landscape looking like a mural painted on a factory wall, I know that I am too wrapped up in myself, cut off from the healing flow of reality around me. When that happens, I use my imagination to grasp the third dimension of depth, visualizing the twisting branches and twigs in each bushy treetop, seeing the shaped space between the leaves and the space between successive trees, and suddenly the world regains a subtle animation. In an urban environment, I visualize the texture of the bricks, the depth of the mortar lines, the segmented spaces inside the buildings and irregular spaces between them, and it has the same effect of pulling me out of myself and bringing the world back to life.

  Looking at the nearest palm tree, I let the twenty-foot spread of the crown take shape in my mind, imagining how the raspy, sharp-edged leaflets attached to the stalks of the frond
s, and how the fronds merged into the fibrous structure of the trunk. I thought about the roots branching into the sandy soil, drawing a steady stream of water molecules and minerals up through narrow ducts to feed the green fans and grow the sweet dates.

  That was all it took to bring depth and dimension back to the desert night. I sensed the lively, shifting distances between the first palm, swaying slightly in the breeze, and those around it, felt myself in specific proximity to the black mountains resting their unimaginable weight on the earth and to the massive balls of burning hydrogen flickering far out across the universe.

  The rose-tinted diamond earrings hidden in the hotel room behind me would fence for five or six thousand dollars. The thought of those beautiful gems with their highly compressed value lifted my mood further. I stood up and gripped the rail of the balcony, fully inflating my chest with cool night air.

  There were things I didn’t understand about the situation. Why was an elegant, wealthy woman like Evelyn Evermore traveling with a homicidal hood? Who was Baba Raba—one of the celebrity gurus California was famous for? Why had the lady carelessly left the necklace in an unlocked drawer, and where was it now? Why had Jimmy Z come back, and where had he left Evermore? They were the same questions that had been nagging me when I sat down, but now they were intriguing instead of unsettling, exciting instead of depressing.

  I went to bed the way a criminal should, scheming.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next morning, I was up in time to see the Santa Rosa Mountains stained red by the sun as it peeked over the Little San Bernardinos on the opposite side of the flat thirty-mile-wide Coachella Valley, horizontal rays skimming over the desert to fire the western peaks. While Reggie and I ate scrambled eggs with thick crispy strips of hickory-smoked bacon on the terrace overlooking the golf course, I leafed through the local newspaper. An account of the burglary and attempted theft of the diamond necklace was buried on page 6, where it wouldn’t frighten the millionaires. The paper mentioned Evermore’s name and reported that the jewels were worth half a million dollars. Any time the cops seize drugs or recover or prevent the theft of property, they inflate the value of the goods outrageously to make themselves look good. The article noted that the police were looking for two suspects. I hoped Tawny hadn’t talked.

  The paper also reported that James Zerotski, who was injured in the attempted robbery, had been taken to Eisenhower Medical Center, where he was in serious condition. It didn’t mention the earrings.

  I showed the article to Reggie. His lips moved silently as he read through it.

  “Maybe we should go over an have a powwow with the punk,” he said when he finished.

  “About what?”

  “Maybe he knows where the rocks are.”

  “I doubt it. He was out cold. It would be too risky, anyway.”

  “Whadaya wanna do, then?”

  “I want to get the Caddie and get the hell out of town.”

  Back upstairs, I stuffed our bloody clothes and our shoes, which might have left identifiable footprints in blood or mud, into two plastic dry cleaning bags, then went down the back stairs and buried them in a Dumpster by the hotel kitchen.

  At 8 a.m. we sallied out the main entrance of the Hyatt Grand Champions Resort and Spa like typical tourists with more cash than common sense, off to enjoy a day in wonderful wintertime Palm Springs. The front of the hotel was bustling with Saturday-morning arrivals and departures, bellboys wheeling suitcases into the lobby and hauling bags of golf clubs out to Mercedes idling with their trunks open.

  “Have a grand day, gentlemen,” the doorman said.

  You don’t get that at Motel 6, either.

  A five-minute walk past hibiscus bushes with papery-red blossoms as big as dinner plates and flower beds full of yellow cannas and orange-flowering birds-of-paradise took us to the front of the Oasis, which was a mirror image of the busy Hyatt, cars two deep at the curb, laden luggage carts squeaking into and out of the hotel.

  I spotted the kid with the pot-leaf tattoo coming through the oversize glass doors and went up to him.

  “We’re in a hurry,” I said, trying to hand him the claim ticket and a ten-dollar bill. He was distracted, looking away from me at the line of cars to see how far it stretched.

  “You have to go to the valet stand,” he said, pushing the ticket and money back at me.

  “We’re in a hurry,” I said again, putting something in my voice.

  “So is everyone else,” he said, annoyed, turning back toward me. When he recognized me, his expression changed from exasperated to dead serious in a flash. “Oh, it’s you guys,” he said, looking us over from top to bottom. “I didn’t recognize you in those clothes.” After glancing over at the valet stand, which was unoccupied, he jerked his head. “Follow me.”

  Reggie raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. We followed him. He led us behind a planter full of tropical greenery where we were hidden from the valet stand and most of the people in front of the hotel.

  “The cops were asking about you guys,” he said.

  “What did they want to know?” I kept my voice calm and light despite the cold bolt of fear his words plunged in my gut.

  “They—it wasn’t just you, not at first—they were asking about everybody who valeted a car last night who wasn’t registered here. They crosschecked our list against the front desk list and were looking for anyone who wasn’t a guest. They found most of them in the restaurant and bar. It was just you and a couple of others they couldn’t find, so they wanted to know more about you.”

  “Why were they asking questions?” I said. “What happened?”

  The surfer shot me a sharp look from his hard blue eyes. “Some jerk-off with a bad attitude got beat up on the fifth floor. Someone tried to rob him or something.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, keeping his eyes locked on mine. “You probably saw him. He pulled up with a foxy rich lady in a Town Car just about the same time you arrived. You were right behind him, in fact.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he continued: “The cops were real interested in you and your car. They wanted to know what time you arrived and what you looked like and if anyone had seen you since then. They took down your license number and numbers of the other people they couldn’t find. They said they were going to come back this morning to check on those cars.”

  I suddenly found myself standing on a razor’s edge, thoughts flashing like tracers through my mind as I tried to decide how much danger we were in.

  I always used stolen plates on my car during a job, and I had been lucky this time in a way that gave me some extra protection. Any stolen plate protects you in a situation where a victim or bystander writes down the number as you disappear around the corner. They give the number to the cops, the cops find out it is a stolen plate, and they can’t identify the getaway car or its owner. But the protection vanishes if a squad car is cruising behind you and runs the number. There are computers in every police car nowadays, and it takes only a few moments to find out the type of car the plate goes with.

  That’s where I had rolled sevens. Cruising the parking lot at the Century City Mall on Friday morning, looking for a set of plates to steal, I spotted another new, dark-blue STS. It was the plates from that car that were on my Caddie now. If the cops ran the number the night before, it should have come back A-okay, except for the fact that Peter Blake wasn’t the registered owner. But there is no law that says a friend couldn’t drive the car and valet it in his name. The plates wouldn’t have been reported as stolen because we replaced the ones we stripped off the parked Caddie with a spare set so the driver wouldn’t notice his were missing.

  Still, the cops were looking for us and had examined my car.

  “Oh shit,” the valet said, jerking my attention back into the moment.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “One of the cops that was here last night just pulled up.”

  I peeked around the
foliage in the planter and saw a detective with white hair and a Marlboro Man face climbing out of a Crown Vic. He was wearing a tan suit with burgundy shoes, and his eyes were hidden by aviator sunglasses so I couldn’t tell which way he was looking as he sauntered over to the valet stand. Finding it unoccupied—all the valets were busy parking or retrieving cars—he went into the lobby.

  “Exit stage right,” Reggie said, making saucer eyes.

  “Agreed,” I said, then to the surfer: “Can you get the car for us?”

  He looked down at the ticket and the ten in my hand, closed his eyes briefly, and nodded. “I’ll drive it around to the self-parking lot,” he said. “Go down those steps over there.” He pointed to the ones I’d come up the night before, when I was reconnoitering. “I’ll meet you at the bottom in, like, five minutes.”

  Taking the ticket and the ten, leaving us behind the planter, he walked briskly to the valet stand, leaned over the counter, and snagged a set of keys from the pegboard and trotted out of sight.

  Nonchalantly, bag of burglary tools hanging over my shoulder, pistol in my belt, I strolled over to the stairs. Reggie followed thirty feet behind. As I started down the steps, I glanced back to see the detective come out of the hotel with an annoyed-looking assistant manager type and go over to the valet stand.

  We waited at the bottom of the steps for a very long couple of minutes, leaning against the concrete retaining wall that formed the end of the sunken parking lot. Several people came down the steps and walked past us to their cars, slightly hunched with embarrassment that they had been too cheap to valet-park. Reggie’s eyebrows were up at his hairline.

  “What if that kid turns us in,” he said tersely, keeping his mouth still the way he did when he was in gangster mode. “Maybe we ought to car-jack one of these jokers.”

  “He won’t turn us in,” I said, and as I spoke my STS wheeled into sight and pulled up in front of us with a bark of rubber on asphalt.

  “Thanks, bro,” I said, handing the kid a hundred as he jumped out of the car.