Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Not Shoshana. She call fifteen minutes before my ‘pointment and say she can’t make it ‘cause her sister got a headache. What’s her motherfuckin’ sister’s headache got to do with anything? I was thinking about getting back with her, but after that shit she pulled yesterday, she’s gonna have to get by without my black ass. I mean, ain’t that some bullshit, Rob? Say she gonna come for sure and then don’t show up? She tell everyone else how to act but don’t act right herself. She getting fat, too.”

  He had worked himself up into a state of righteous anger, striding back and forth in front of the couch where Budge was sitting, waving his arms and looking from one of us to the other. Then, when he could see that we were about to agree with him that Shoshana was a bad actor, he reversed himself completely. As usual.

  “Course, you won’t find a better woman,” he said, stopping and looking at me with his eyes bulging as if I had asserted the contrary. “Do you know she sent me twenty dollars every week for six years I was in San Q so I could buy candy and cigarettes? And she’s always takin’ care of her family, her sister and her daddy.” He shook his head and gave me another confrontational look. “She’s a good woman, Rob. Bitch just don’t know how to show up.”

  Conveniently, since there was no rational response to his remarks, Pete and our landlady, Mrs. Sharpnick, chose that moment to enter the room from opposite sides. Pete came in from the kitchen with half a sandwich in his hand and the other half in his mouth. He was two steps into the living room when Sharpnick burst through the front door. She was a tall, skeletal woman with a terrible temper who dressed in men’s work clothes. Underneath it all, I’m sure she was a very nice woman. But it was way underneath. The only person I’d ever seen her be kind to was the street kid, Ozone Pacific, who she let camp in the house next door, which was too run-down to rent out. Pete wheeled and dodged back toward the kitchen as she came in, but she froze him with a harsh cry.

  “Where’s my rent check, you son of a bitch?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sharpnick addressed her inquiry to Pete, but Budge got a stricken look on his face. He had been homeless several times and dreaded going back on the streets.

  Pete turned around, gulped down the wad of white bread and bologna in his mouth, and counterfeited a smile with his thin lips.

  “Ahoy, Mrs. Sharpnick, I didn’t see you come in. We’ll have that particular check for you by the close of business on Monday.” He handled the rent for the downstairs trio, keeping a portion of Budge’s and Candyman’s wages when they worked.

  “It was due on the fifteenth,” Mrs. Sharpnick said in a cold, threatening tone. “I want the money now.”

  “Negative,” Pete said. “No can do. Don’t have it. But you have my personal guarantee you’ll get it on Monday.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. “I saw you going in Antonio’s yesterday at dinnertime. A meal in there costs twenty. If you got the money to eat there, you got the money to pay me my rent.”

  Budge shifted his gaze from Sharpnick to Pete, his expression changing from fear to suspicion.

  “I wasn’t eating in there,” Pete said, as if that was the most ridiculous suggestion he had ever heard. “I was talking to Gianni about some work he wants done. Reference to the rent you’re requesting, we’re still waiting to get paid for that demolition job we did last week. The man says he’ll have our money on Monday for sure.”

  Mrs. Harriet Sharpnick did not answer. She had just noticed the mess in the living room and was swiveling her head slowly, taking in the details of the disarray with a furious expression on her face.

  “What’s this?” she said. “You dirty bums had another party, didn’t you? What did I tell you about that?” She looked at Budge, who licked his lips and tried to grin.

  “It whudn’t a party, Miss Sharpnick, just a couple of—”

  “This is a respectable house,” she screamed, cutting him off. “And you bums have it looking like a pigsty. I’ve got the city on my back about this place twenty-four hours a day, complaining about the condition of the building, and you bindle stiffs go and make it worse.”

  “I don’t know what they were thinking,” Pete said, shaking his head. “You two know Mrs. Sharpnick doesn’t allow any parties.”

  “Wait a minute, now …” Candyman started to object.

  “Come on,” Pete said, bustling around the room, picking up beer cans and empty wine bottles. “Let’s get this place shipshape. Budge, look alive and help me clear the deck.”

  Pete’s identity centered chiefly on his concept of himself as no-nonsense businessman and his supposed service in the U.S. Navy. He told me when we met that he had retired as a chief petty officer after twenty years at sea, but Candyman later contradicted that in a stage whisper, telling me that Pete had been dishonorably discharged for selling government supplies on the black market during his second term of enlistment.

  Budge lumbered into action, picking up a full ashtray and the newspaper he had just thrown down and heading for the kitchen.

  “Everything’s under control, Mrs. Sharpnick,” Pete said briskly, giving her a series of quick nods meant to drive her out of the room. “I’ll have that check for you by seventeen hundred hours on Monday.”

  “You better,” she said, then stalked out the front door, banging it shut behind her.

  Pete went over to the front window and peeked through the curtains for a few seconds. When he turned around, the earnest expression he had used on the landlady was replaced by a contemptuous smirk. He dropped the beer can in his hand on the floor and walked over to the couch, where he flopped down, clasping his hands behind his head.

  “That bag of bones is messing with the wrong seaman,” he said, nodding. “She’ll get what she’s got coming to her before long.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I said.

  “Nothing. It’s just business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Not yours,” Pete said.

  His rude remark surprised me. During most of the six weeks Reggie and I had been in the house, Pete had been friendly and respectful, always trying to buddy up and find out where our cash came from. But in the past week or so he had become more careless and self-confident, taking a higher hand with the other two stooges and showing less deference to me and Reggie. Now he was being downright confrontational.

  “Aw, come on, Pete,” Budge said. “She’ll have a shit fit if we don’t get it cleaned up before she comes back.”

  “That bitch ain’t coming back,” Pete said. “She’s got three other houses to check on. We’ll clean up when we’re goddamn good and ready.”

  “You sure that eye-talian hadn’t paid you yet?” Candyman said to Pete.

  “What do you mean, am I sure? Didn’t you hear me tell Sharpnick he’s going to pay us on Monday?”

  “I heard you all right. Like I heard you tell her me and Budge was the ones had a party you didn’t know nothing about, when it was you pulled a case of wine off a liquor truck and got the whole thing started. Where’d you get the money to eat in Antonio’s if you didn’t collect that check?”

  Reggie’s nickname for our housemates caught the tricky blend of companionship and hostility that linked them. Like the original Stooges, Pete and his pals, while inseparable, were never far from bonking one another on the head with a monkey wrench or gouging an eye.

  “I wasn’t eating in there,” Pete said. “I was conducting business, trying to keep you two swabbies off the streets. I only said that about the party to confuse the bitch. One of us has to stay on her good side or she might evict us.”

  “You’re trying to confuse someone, all right,” Candyman said. “I’m going with you to get that check on Monday.”

  “No problemo,” Pete said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I was thinking diamonds as I emerged into the sparkling seaside air. Where were they? Would we be able to find them in time? What was the next step if the
re was nothing about Baba Raba at the library?

  I swung down to the boardwalk to get a Coke before heading inland, hoping the effervescent sugar and caffeine would give me some chemical inspiration. The boardwalk was not actually a walkway made of boards but an asphalt path lined with stalls and storefronts and old hotels on the inland side. Street performers and artisans set up booths and spread blankets to display their wares along the other side of the path, at the edge of the sand that stretched down to the ocean. Heading south, drinking from my twenty-ounce bottle of cola, I saw Ozone Pacific sitting cross-legged beneath his palm tree. It seemed like he was always around. I seldom went to the beach without seeing his blond head bobbing in the crowd. He was playing with his plastic gold coins, holding them in a stack in one hand and then dribbling them into the open palm of the other. He had nice hands, unusual for a homeless guy. They looked like a girl’s hands, with long shapely fingers and neatly trimmed nails. When he saw me, he waved and smiled.

  “Hi, Rob!” he said when I walked over. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  “This would be a good day to get out into the country for a while, don’t you think, Rob? Wouldn’t you like to see all those animals? I just love cows and horses and all those other animals they have on farms.”

  He was dressed, as always, in filthy white sneakers, worn-out blue jeans, and a long-sleeved white-and-brown cowboy shirt with pearl buttons. He often talked about getting out into the country.

  “Did you used to live in the country?” I asked him.

  “I thought I did, but now I’m not too sure,” he said, serious for a moment. “I know my mom used to tell me about it.”

  He was an exceptionally childlike young man, someone who had never grown up for some reason and probably never would. I wondered what had become of his family and how he had ended up here.

  “Don’t you love cows and horses and roosters and stuff?” he said, smiling again.

  “I do, actually.”

  “Me, too,” he said, smiling still more broadly in a way that made me smile with him.

  “What are you in such a good mood about?”

  “I’m rich,” he said, ecstatic, dribbling his coins again and then tossing them up in the air so that they rained down around him.

  I had an urge to practice some unlicensed reality therapy and point out to him that the coins were plastic, but I bit my tongue as he gathered them up. He was probably mildly retarded. If the plastic disks made him feel rich, what was the harm? He was no more deluded than people who bought into the artificial value of diamonds with thousands of real dollars or built their identities out of the fool’s gold of brand names, department store clerks and Hollywood stars who wouldn’t have been able to see themselves in the mirror if they weren’t looking through Ray-Bans or to believe in their own reality if their bodies weren’t wrapped in designer duds.

  I took a long, searing drink of my Coke, the only kind of cola I ever buy, then screwed the top back on and held the half-full bottle out to Ozone.

  “You want the rest of this?”

  “Sure, Rob. Thanks!” He put the bottle in his Batman backpack.

  “See you later,” I said.

  “Where you going?”

  “To the library.”

  “Can I walk over that way with you?”

  “Of course you can. What kind of books do you like?”

  “Books about the country,” he said. “Ones with pictures of cows and horses.”

  As we went south along the boardwalk toward the terminus of Venice Boulevard, where it stops, awestruck at the sight of the Pacific, shopkeepers and street performers shouted out friendly greetings to my companion. Some called him by his strange name, Ozone Pacific. Others called him Oz. Despite his limitations and lack of resources, or maybe because of those limitations, he was a popular character in the carnival world that clung to the edge of the continent. He seemed to know everyone.

  “Have you ever heard of a guy named Baba Raba?” I asked him as we passed a body-piercing booth sandwiched in between a Thai takeout place and a shop that sold incense and statues of Buddha and Shiva.

  “Do you know Baba Raba?” he said, excited.

  “No. But I’ve heard of him. Do you know him?”

  “Yes. He’s a nice man. He talked to me before and made me feel better when I was sad.”

  “Really? Does he live around here?”

  “He has an ash farm over that way.” Ozone waved his rayon-clad arm toward the east, toward Lincoln Avenue and the 405 and the whole Los Angeles basin. “What is an ash farm, anyway, Rob?”

  “It’s not an ash farm, Oz, it’s an ashram.”

  “What’s that?”

  We had come to Venice Boulevard and turned inland between the brightly painted fronts of the restaurants and bars that lined the block between the boardwalk and Pacific Avenue. The street was colorful as Bob Marley’s cap, and reggae music blasted from speakers on a patio where people were eating rice and beans with jerk chicken.

  “It’s a place where people go to meditate and pray,” I said. “Kind of like a church. Do you know where his ashram is? Is it near here?”

  “I don’t know, Rob.”

  “Do you know when he is going to be down here again?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him for a while. I wish he’d come back.”

  The soothing sound of the surf crumbling on the beige sand a hundred yards behind us gradually blended with the sound of traffic as we approached the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Pacific Avenue.

  “Are you going to be seeing him, Rob?”

  “I might be.”

  “Would you ask him if I can have my picture back?”

  We were standing at the intersection, waiting for the light to change, surrounded by a mixed crowd of local hipsters, homeless people, and tourists.

  “What picture?” I asked him, keeping an eye on the signal on the other side of the busy street. “The one of the lady?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Just then the light changed and the walk signal came on and I crossed the avenue with the herd.

  “Why did he want the picture?” I said, stepping up onto the far sidewalk. When Ozone didn’t answer, I stopped and looked back. He was waving to me from the other side of the street. “Come on,” I called out, “cross before the light changes.”

  “You go on,” he yelled over the sound of car engines idling. “I gotta get back down to the beach.” He turned his small, cowboy-shirt-clad back and melted into the crowd.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Abbot Kinney Memorial Library was six blocks straight ahead of me on Venice Boulevard, but I detoured a block south to walk along one of the city’s remaining canals. Gentrification had hit hard in the canal district. Most of the antique Victorians and prewar bungalows that lined the waterways had been restored with newly milled gingerbread, stained-glass windows, and lavish applications of pastel paint. Here and there, a shack that had moldered beyond repair was being replaced with a bulky modern structure that filled every cubic inch of its lot and airspace. Evelyn Evermore’s handsome yellow bungalow was two blocks farther south, along the Linnie Canal.

  I was happy to discover that Baba Raba frequented the neighborhood. If the necklace belonged to him, as Jimmy Z said, it was critical to case him as quickly as possible, and I was starting to get a bead on him. He was in fact a guru of some kind with an ashram in the area. He was not a secretive spiritual teacher who stayed hidden from public view, meditating the day away within a cloud of incense smoke, safe from the troubles and temptations of society, but a classic California swami who liked to get out in the sunshine and mingle with homeless kids and millionaires. He had the power to make sad people feel better and perhaps to charm money out of the pocketbooks of lonely ladies. I wondered if he had found out about Evermore and her necklace from Ozone’s picture, same as me, and if she had really given him the diamonds. And if so, why.

  Ozone had sh
owed me the picture less than three weeks before. If Baba had gotten his hands on it and wrangled a meeting with Evermore and managed to extract a twenty-six-carat donation from her in the short time since then, he must be one of the truly anointed, radiating the most inspirational energy imaginable. Or else a first-class charlatan.

  There was nothing about the guru in the library’s newspaper database, but there was a flyer on the cluttered bulletin board in the lobby announcing that free introductory meditation classes would be offered each Saturday night in January at the Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings, where seekers could bathe in the beneficent darshan of Baba Raba, head of the Magdalene Order, healer of the heartsick, frustrated, angry, confused, homeless, loveless, and depressed.

  I’d fit right in.

  If Baba stuck to his schedule, there would be a meditation class at eight o’clock that evening. The ashram was on Broadway between Sixth and Seventh, about ten blocks north of the library. I wrote down the address and phone number.

  Back at the beach, I found Reggie building a fire in a concrete ring behind Chavi’s fortune-telling stand. He was using a copy of the Los Angeles Times for tinder and a busted-up wooden chair for fuel. Nearby, on top of a Styrofoam cooler that undoubtedly contained cold Budweiser, there was a metal grill that could be laid across the fire ring and a stack of frozen T-bone steaks.

  The fire was coming along nicely. It was hard to imagine now, looking at the fiftyish biker with scarred knuckles and tattooed forearms, but he had been a Boy Scout once, briefly, long ago. When his parents were still in the psuedo-sophisticated cocktails-and-dancing stage of their joint alcoholism, before the filthy fights and car wrecks and court appearances, his father had been a jolly troop leader who taught his oldest son the ancient art of building a fire.

  “Hey, Rob,” Reggie said as I walked up.

  “Where’d you get the steaks?” I asked him.