Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  He hesitated then pushed the money away. “You don’t have to give me any more money,” he said. “I hate the fucking cops. They are always hassling us about drinking and getting high at the beach. Just get the hell out of here before somebody sees you. I need this job.”

  “We’re gone,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  “Da nada.”

  By the time I closed the door and shifted into gear, he had disappeared up the steps.

  As we pulled out of the parking lot onto the driveway that led to the highway, it seemed like we were in the clear. The tension that had stiffened my muscles began to dissolve. But there was a line of cars at the stop sign where the Oasis’s drive merged with the drive from the Hyatt. As we edged toward the intersection, a blue Taurus with rental plates turned off the main drive, heading up to the hotel. The little man behind the wheel looked over at us as it passed. His fierce eyes swept over me without recognition, then snapped back. He slammed on his brakes and let out a yelp, made silent by two layers of auto glass, then bared his teeth at me. Beyond him, I saw his wife turn her big face in our direction.

  We were at the stop sign by then, so I smiled and waved like they were old friends, and pushed the gas pedal toward the floor.

  There are four ways out of Indian Wells and I took the least traveled, heading straight up into the San Jacinto Mountains on the Palms to Pines Highway. The Seville’s power train pulled the car’s four thousand pounds of metal and plastic, plus my and Reggie’s combined four hundred pounds of muscle, bone, and memory, up the steep incline as easily as if gravity had been turned off. The RPMs stayed between two and three thousand, same as on a flat road, and the red temperature-gauge needle dozed at dead center, showing no strain on the engine.

  At the first side road, I pulled over and ditched the stolen plates and put mine back on, then pointed the dark-blue nose of the car back toward the light-blue sky. Centrifugal force shifted us back and forth like slow windshield wipers as I navigated the sequence of hairpin curves that led to the top of the mountain, our torsos leaning one way and then the other. Indian Wells dropped away behind us, resorts, roads, and golf courses shrinking and flattening until the valley floor looked like the etched surface of a computer chip. Up among the pines, near the log-cabin Christmas village of Idyllwild, we ran into a snowstorm.

  “Where’d this come from?” Reggie said.

  “It’s the elevation, man. Indian Wells isn’t much above sea level. We’re at seven thousand feet here.” The dreamlike blend of environments—a wintry world in such close proximity to the palmy world of the desert—was one of the things I loved about Southern California.

  “That’s wild,” Reggie said, an uncharacteristic note of wonder in his voice.

  I looked over. “You want to stop and make a snowman?”

  “Fuck you,” he said. “What’s your next great plan, anyway, since this was a bust? You got anything lined up, or are we shit out of luck?”

  “I’m going to get that necklace.”

  “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Here we go.”

  We took Highway 74 all the way to Orange County, over the top of the San Jacintos, down into and across the wide Moreno Valley, with its endless pastures and vast herds of dairy cattle, then up and over the southern part of the Santa Ana Mountains to hit I-5 at San Juan Capistrano. Ninety minutes later, at 1 p.m. on Saturday, we exited the interstate at Venice Boulevard and cruised seaward between the double row of royal palm trees that lined the avenue.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I parked in a gravel lot with a chain around it where I rented a space by the week. The skinny old black man who ran the lot nodded as we walked past his hut.

  “Genamuns.”

  “How are you, Mr. Parker?” I said. He had an ironic name, too. He thought it was funnier than most of the people to whom he mentioned it repeatedly.

  “Superior,” he said. “It’s a bee-you-tee-full day at the beach.”

  Which it was. Seventy-eight degrees with 45 percent humidity according to the static-filled weather update playing on his portable radio. The tangy breeze blowing in from the bay was soft as a cotton ball on the skin. Above us, the sun poured out an endless stream of radiance that bathed the toy buildings and tiny palm trees along the coast with cheerful photons. The snowy mountains had receded into dreamland.

  The lot was at the corner of Horizon and Main, halfway between the Santa Monica and Venice piers, two blocks from the flophouse where we’d been staying for the past six weeks since leaving the Georgian Hotel. Walking to the house, I glimpsed a dark-blue slice of the Pacific sparking between two brick buildings and felt a glimmer of the excitement I always felt when I came to the edge of the continent.

  The flophouse was one of two big frame structures sandwiched in between commercial buildings on the ocean side of Pacific Avenue, the main north-south drag in Venice Beach. They were worn-out Victorians built in the teens or twenties as private residences, later converted to boardinghouses.

  Pacific Avenue ran parallel to the beach, a block inland from the boardwalk. It was a deep block, a world unto itself. The side streets that connected Pacific to the boardwalk had names like Zephyr, Wave Crest, and Sunset. They were packed with bars, tattoo parlors, hamburger stands, and souvenir shops selling seashells and funny T-shirts.

  Venice was founded early in the twentieth century by a tobacco millionaire from back east named Abbot Kinney, who modeled it on the famous Italian city, with miles of canals cut into the salt marshes, and marketed it successfully as a beach vacation destination, the Coney Island of the West, with a 1,200-foot amusement pier and seafront hotels. Kinney was a brilliant entrepreneur, and the resort thrived during his lifetime but fell on hard times after he died in the 1920s. A fire destroyed the first pier, and most of the romantic canals were filled in and converted to streets during the 1930s and ‘40s. Beatniks descended in the 1950s, followed by hippies a decade later, both groups attracted by the cheap rents and quaint atmosphere. The city hit its nadir in the 1980s, when rival gangs took over poor neighborhoods, gunning one another down along streets lined with shabby bungalows.

  Now Venice was on an upswing again. There was a Democrat in the White House and a bull market on Wall Street. Property values were rising as prosperity returned to Los Angeles in the wake of the post–Cold War recession. Gentrification was creeping down the beach from Santa Monica, old apartment buildings and arcades bulldozed to make way for luxury condos and cute boutiques.

  The flophouse would disappear beneath the tide of redevelopment in the near future. In the meantime, we shared it with a triad of down-and-outers who occupied the first floor while we rented two furnished rooms and a bathroom at the top of a creaky wooden staircase. Two other big bedrooms on the second floor were unoccupied.

  Going through the front door into the living room, we found Pete lying on a broken-down couch, reading a library copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, a good book that gave birth to an annoying industry of high-pressure happiness salesmen. There were empty wine bottles, beer cans, and fast-food containers scattered around the room, remnants of the usual Friday-night party that comprised card playing, drunk chicks, and arguments with the landlady.

  “Back from the desert already?” he said, sitting up with his habitual abruptness and placing the book, front cover down, on the wooden packing crate that served as an end table. “Why you guys dressed like that?”

  “Like what?” Reggie said, looking down at his vaudeville pants and sandals. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t recall telling Pete that we were going to the desert.

  “Where’s the other two stooges?” Reggie said.

  Pete’s face tightened. He didn’t like Reggie’s habit of referring to him and his roommates as the Three Stooges. Reggie knew it, which was why he kept doing it. It was part of his personality to always be stirring up a little trouble, whether there was a use for it or not.

  “They’re jacking off,” Pete said.

  Reggie made saucer
eyes. “Together?”

  “Negative. I don’t allow any grab-ass in the house.”

  Pete was the Moe of the group. When they worked, which wasn’t all that often, he was the one that organized the jobs, laboring at construction sites up the road or doing yard work in the canal district, a few blocks south, where expensive homes lined the few waterways that hadn’t been filled in. He was five feet seven inches tall, about 150 pounds, with short brown hair and a neatly trimmed Fu Manchu mustache.

  “How do you know they’re jacking off?” I said.

  “I saw Candyman heading for his berth with a stack of Hustlers.”

  “How about Budge?”

  “That particular individual is always jacking off,” Pete said. “Why you back so soon?”

  He was full of questions.

  “We got homesick,” Reggie said.

  Upstairs, I put the pink diamond earrings and the .32 in my stash, took a shower, and changed into Levis, black Reeboks, and a midnight-blue T-shirt, the same color as my Seville. Our rooms were in the back of the house. The oversize double-hung window in my bedroom had admitted unobstructed sea breezes at one time. Now it held a view of the metal fire escape on the back of a run-down apartment building ten feet away, across an alley.

  The house was a dump, lumpy plaster behind peeling wallpaper, Goodwill-store furniture. The bathroom smelled faintly of sewer gas and the kitchen was like a Club Med for rats. More than once, I’d heard them splashing around in the sink like drunk newlyweds in a hot tub. If you went down to the kitchen at night to get a snack and surprised them, they sat up on their haunches and gave you a dirty look. If their little arms had been long enough, I’m sure they would have put their paws on their hips.

  It was a dismal contrast to the marble-floored resort we had just come from, and to the Georgian Hotel, where we had been staying before moving to the flop. The Georgian was an architectural gem, an intimate Art Deco hotel erected a few blocks north of the Santa Monica pier at the height of the Roaring Twenties. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had an apartment there where they snuggled in secret, and most of the stars of the studio era had stayed there. The hotel faced Ocean Avenue, across from Palisades Park, the strip of green that runs along the bluff above the beach. We had a suite on the seventh floor that was furnished like a Fred Astaire movie and had a proprietary view that took in all of Santa Monica Bay from Point Dume to Rancho Palos Verdes. There was an excellent steak house with leather booths and dark wood paneling downstairs from the lobby. The staff was helpful and discreet.

  It was a great place to hide out, and we still would have been there except for a Newport Beach detective named Burris who happened to see me coming out the front entrance one day in mid-December. I was on my way to the beach to take a walk and he was driving by, northbound on Ocean, with a woman and two kids in a Chevrolet sedan.

  Probably his fucking family.

  Our eyes locked for just a second, then he looked away, as if he hadn’t noticed me. I went on down the steps of the hotel veranda and stood on the sidewalk until he was out of sight, then went back into the hotel, rousted Reggie from a six-pack nap, and checked out. Reggie had met Candyman on the boardwalk a couple of weeks before, so he knew about the flophouse. We could have moved to another luxe hotel, but I wanted to go someplace Burris wouldn’t be likely to look for me.

  Surveying my bedroom, I wished we had gone someplace else. I try to think of myself as a successful person, but here I was holed up in a rattrap that should have been condemned a long time ago, and no doubt would be soon. I had failed to snag the necklace and come perilously close to disaster. My partner was probably guilty of gross dereliction of duty. It was borderline depressing.

  Southern California suited me down to the soles of my feet. Most mornings arrived as hopeful as a high school beauty queen getting off the bus at the Hollywood station and marching down a palm avenue toward the gates of the movie studios, one wicker suitcase full of enthusiasm, the other bulging with ambition. I was out the door early, looking for likely scores, squinting in the dazzling light, breathing the salt air deeply, friendly to acquaintances, helpful to strangers. At that moment in the musty room, though, optimism deserted me.

  Losing the diamonds after holding them in my hand had left a bigger hole than I realized. Like an actor on the day after faltering in a big audition, I had an emotional hangover. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter. You’re a professional. Win some, lose some. But it hurts deep down. It screws with your self-image. Later, when you notice that you are feeling a little desolate and try to figure out why, it traces back to your failure.

  Rolling across the landscape between Indian Wells and the ocean, over mountaintops and through valleys, the exhilaration of motion had distracted me from the bone-deep disappointment. As soon as the motion stopped and I was stationary within the moldering house, the sense of loss I had fought off on the balcony the previous night rose up around me.

  But it wasn’t just the lost necklace making the room look like an antechamber to despair. The close call in Indian Wells had dredged something else up into emotional view. When you are gliding along a smooth highway on cruise control toward a desirable destination, nagging background pain is easy to ignore. After a crash, underlying issues rise to the surface. There was something missing in my life. Besides the necklace. Besides my daughter. I had been in love the previous summer and lost that girl, too. That was part of it. A lot of it, maybe.

  I had rescued Song—that was her name—from a rich psycho in Newport Beach who brought her to California from Vietnam to be his captive plaything. We were together for a while afterward, but, despite her exoticism, she turned out to be conventional at heart. After she left me for a Vietnamese doctor with a profitable practice in Westminster, I swore off caring, decided to just do my crimes and enjoy the cash without getting tangled up emotionally with people along the way.

  Brilliant idea, huh?

  Whatever was bothering me, I knew better than to wallow in it. I didn’t have time. The house was a depressing dump. I was forty years old and pretty much alone in the world. But I had diamonds to find. Pink ones. And I needed to find them quickly. After the attempted theft in Indian Wells, whoever owned the necklace would be more careful. Our best bet for consummating the crime was to strike fast while the owner was still off balance, before new precautions could be devised and implemented.

  There was a rap-tap at the bedroom door and Reggie walked in. He was wearing a white wife-beater, faded khakis, and the strap sandals, sans black socks.

  “You need me for anything?” he said.

  “Not right now, but stay available.”

  “I’ll be around,” he said. “I’m gonna go see what Chavi’s doing. What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to the library to see if there is anything about this Baba Raba character in the newspaper database. If the necklace really is his, we need to track him down fast. I’ll look for you at Chavi’s booth if anything turns up.”

  Reggie nodded and started back out the door.

  “Hey,” I said, “did you say anything to Pete about us going to the desert?”

  “Negative,” Reggie said, mocking the ex-sailor by using one of his characteristic responses.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Downstairs, I found Budge flopped on the couch, reading a week-old copy of the Santa Monica Daily Press. He was a former high school defensive lineman who looked like the first Curley. Candyman had told me that he got his nickname from the coach at Venice High School, who always said that no one could budge him when he was dug in on the line. A big strong kid, he had played varsity his sophomore and junior years before dropping out of school to surf and work construction. At forty, his high school football career was still one of his two biggest claims to fame.

  “Hi, Rob,” he said gloomily, tossing the paper on the scarred pine floor with the rest of the debris and hauling himself up into a sitting position. He was wearing a pair of flowered board shorts and a T-shirt w
ith the letters AWOL on the front.

  “How’s it going, Budge?”

  He rubbed his fleshy face with large hands and shook his head. “I’m backed up,” he said. Jolly most of the time, he became morose when he was constipated.

  “You eat any of those apples I bought?”

  “I cain’t eat fruit, Rob. Gives me a stomachache. I’m gonna go down to Rite Aid here in a minute and get something to push all that old mess out of there.”

  I shrugged.

  “Robby, mah man!” Candyman came into the living room from the hallway that led to the stooges’ bedrooms. “You missed a first-rate affair lass night.”

  “What transpired?”

  “We had us a couple of the cutest little surfer girls you ever seen—Mexican surfer girls, if you ever heard of some shit like that—and a whole case of strawberry wine. It was certifiably fine.”

  Candyman had been a major heroin dealer in Venice during the 1970s—Cadillac, fur coat, condo, and all. Cured off smack in the penitentiary, he confined himself now to sweet wine and marijuana. His main obsession was his ex-wife, who divorced him while he was in the pen. She lived nearby in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica and the two of them maintained a complex love-hate relationship. Candyman was always on the verge of either suing her for something or getting back together with her.

  “Heard from Shoshana?” I asked, to see which way the wind was blowing.

  Candyman’s coffee-colored face, which had been relaxed and wreathed in smiles, making him look like the young boulevardier he had been twenty years before, sharpened and shrunk into the visage of a bitter old man.

  “That bitch,” he said. “She s’pose to come over and take me to the doctor yesterday afternoon and never showed up. Same old shit with her. Always callin’ a man no-count and shiftless if he don’t do what she thinks he should, and have three jobs like her daddy always did, but she can do whatever she feel like. When you s’posed to take a man to the doctor to see about some medicine, you goddamn well ought to show up, right, Rob? Don’t you think so?”