Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  Back in the alley, I took another look at the fire escape. If we pulled the retracted steps down, it would get us to the third floor. From there, we could climb onto the roof, using the short steel ladder that was bolted to the wall to give maintenance workers access to the top of the building.

  I liked it. Going through the roof, we would avoid the alarm systems. There might be a vent opening large enough to squeeze through once the cover was pried off. If not, I could use a cordless reciprocating saw to enlarge a smaller opening.

  Buildings like this one weren’t constructed with security in mind. The roof was nothing but tar and plywood atop two-by-eight or two-by-ten joists with lath and plaster underneath. The saw would be noisy for twenty or thirty seconds, but it was a commercial district. There wouldn’t be anybody around at 2 a.m. We could find a place to watch from, wait till the cops did their midnight drive-by, then drop down into the lawyer’s office with a pack of safecracking tools.

  If the safe stymied us, we could put on masks and jump the lawyer when he showed up the next morning. Heroically self-sacrificing attorneys are as rare as virgins in Vegas, and I didn’t think it would take too many light taps on the forehead with a pry bar to convince Hildebrand, junior or senior, to cough up the combination. Once we had the diamonds, we could tie up the lawyer, his security guard, and any of the office staff who came in early, then take the elevator down to the lobby. If we brought our tools into the building in a couple of sturdy shoulder bags, we could carry them out the front door without attracting attention. All we needed was a place to park the car that wasn’t too far away and wouldn’t attract the attention of the police.

  Well-dressed pedestrians passed in both directions on the sidewalk in front of the building. The boulevard was busy with cabs, passenger cars, and local delivery trucks. Looking up and down the street, I saw a Norm’s one block west of the lawyer’s building. Norm’s restaurants, scattered across Los Angeles and Orange County, are all-night eateries that bustle until two or three o’clock in the morning. It was a gift.

  I walked down to the diner-style eatery, got the morning paper from a machine, and went inside and sat down at a booth by the front window. Looking through the plate glass, I had a clear view of the lawyer’s Eisenhower-era office building. When the uniformed waitress slouched over, I ordered a western omelet with rye toast and hash browns, feeling cozy and in control.

  There was an article in the paper about the fire on Pacific Avenue that we had seen on Saturday night. Three structures had been badly damaged and would have to be demolished. The fire chief was quoted as saying that the buildings had been unoccupied and dilapidated and that tearing them down would help clear the way for new development. The cause of the fire was unknown—to the authorities, at least.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I took Santa Monica west to Ocean Boulevard and turned south, driving along the edge of Palisades Park above the Pacific. The choppy blue water was frosted with whitecaps, the blustery beach deserted. Turning left at Westminster, away from the water, I made my way to Mr. Parker’s lot.

  When I walked through the front door of the flophouse a few minutes later, Budge and Candyman were standing by the kitchen door with worried expressions, talking to a Asian man with a clipboard who glanced over at me as I came in.

  “What’s all that mean?” Candyman said with a touch of belligerence.

  “All these violations have to be corrected or the house will be condemned,” the man said patiently. He wore thick glasses with heavy black frames. His blue suit looked like it had come off the rack at Sears.

  “How long we got to fix ‘em?” Budge asked in a frightened voice.

  “Fourteen days.”

  “Fourteen days!” Candyman said. “How we s’posed to fix all that in just two weeks?”

  “It will be very difficult,” the city inspector said.

  “What’s going on?” I said. All three of them looked over at me.

  “They’re gonna condemn the house, Rob,” Budge wailed.

  “Are you a resident here?” the inspector asked me.

  “I live upstairs.”

  He nodded. “Acting on a tip from a concerned citizen, I inspected the premises with these gentlemen’s permission and found numerous serious violations of the housing code, starting with the plumbing and electrical systems and including the structural integrity of the building. There’s also a serious health hazard from rodent infestation. If the violations aren’t corrected within fourteen days, the city will move to condemn the property.”

  “Who was the concerned citizen?” I said.

  “I don’t know, sir, and even if I did know, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “This have anything to do with the resort Councilman Discenza is building up the beach?” I asked.

  The man’s intelligent face seemed to close up and contract. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Where we s’posed to go if you condemn the joint?” Candyman asked angrily. “There ain’t no place else ‘round here we can afford to live.”

  “I hear you, man,” the inspector said. “I hope you don’t lose your home. But there is nothing I can do about it, one way or the other.”

  He tore a pink sheet off the form on his clipboard and held it out to the two stooges. They looked at it like it was radioactive.

  “You best give that to Miz Sharpnick,” Candyman said. “She the owner.”

  “She’ll get a copy, too,” the inspector said. “This copy is for the tenants.”

  Candyman and Budge kept their hands at their sides, as if they could hold the reality of impending homelessness at bay by refusing the form.

  The inspector raised his eyebrows at me and I walked over and took the sheet. It was crammed with check-marked boxes and scrawled comments. By the looks of it, the house would have to be rebuilt from the foundation up and then have a new foundation put under it in order to fix all the violations.

  I walked out onto the front porch with him.

  “Would a thousand dollars do anything to bring us up to code?” I asked, showing him one of the packets of hundreds I got from Fahim.

  He looked at the money like a dry alcoholic at a glass of Chivas Regal, rubbing the polyester lapel of his suit with the hand that wasn’t holding the clipboard. But then he shook his head.

  “It wouldn’t do any good, man. They are waiting for this report at city hall. If I said the place was up to code, they would just send somebody else out here to write it up. And this is one time they would be right. They’ve taken some houses north of here that really weren’t in bad condition, but this place isn’t fit for human habitation—no offense to you.”

  “None taken,” I said. “The place is a dump. What do they want the property for? I thought the resort ended a few blocks north of here.”

  “There’s a phase two,” he said, “but you didn’t hear it from me. I have to get going now.”

  I wasn’t actually going to give him the money. I only offered it to him to get a sense of where the corruption lay. It wouldn’t be beyond some city inspectors to take advantage of an atmosphere of redevelopment and the specter of eminent domain to extort money from frightened property owners.

  Having the house condemned would actually be convenient for me and Reggie. If we took the necklace that night or the next morning, I planned to leave town afterward. But a sudden departure might attract attention. The threat of condemnation would give us a perfect excuse if anyone ever tracked us down and asked us why we took off.

  “How’d Pete know this was gonna happen?” Budge asked Candyman as I walked back through the living room.

  “He’s probably the sumbitch that sicced that tricky inspector on us,” Candyman said. “Mo’fucker made it sound like if we let him in he’d make Sharpnick fix the place up for us, but he’s really planning to put us in the street.”

  Upstairs, I found Reggie standing in front of the wavy mirror in his bedroom, struggling to drag a plast
ic comb through his brassy curls, and not having much luck. Chavi was gone, leaving a neatly made bed and straightened-up room behind her.

  “Word from the front, bro,” Reggie said, looking at me in the mirror.

  “What?”

  “Guess who I saw sneaky Pete talkin’ to yesterday afternoon?”

  “Who?”

  “Bubba Rubba.”

  “The guru?”

  “If that’s what you want to call him.”

  “Where and when?”

  “Half a mile north of here, where they were having that meetin’ on the beach. ‘Round five.”

  “Anybody else with them?”

  “A wop with a thousand-dollar suit who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “When I spotted em, they were a ways down the boardwalk, watching people walk away from the meetin’, like they wanted to see who was there. Then they went into a bar. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

  “Baba went into a bar in his dhoti?”

  “Nah—he was wearing street clothes.”

  I was surprised that Baba would appear with Discenza in public. Maybe he thought no one would recognize him in an Armani. Or maybe he didn’t care. With the deal poised to go through, he might be ready to abandon the guru dodge and become an ordinary corrupt businessman. Pete meeting with the two of them fit like a puzzle piece.

  “What are they up to?” Reggie asked.

  “The Italian is a crooked city councilman named Discenza. He’s trying to develop a resort on the beach. That’s what the protest was about. I think Pete’s been helping him put pressure on property owners, coercing them to sell out. He probably met Discenza while him and the other stooges were doing demolition work up there.”

  “How’s Baby Huey fit in?”

  “He’s Discenza’s partner.”

  “What’s it mean for us?”

  “The financing for the deal is supposed to close on Tuesday, and Baba needs the necklace as collateral for his share of the equity. The way commercial real estate deals work, a bank puts up most of the money—tens of millions in this case—but the bankers want the developers to carry risk, too. Makes them feel more secure that the developers really believe in the project. If we take the diamonds and Baba can’t come up with his share, it might torpedo the deal. Hard to say exactly how much shit that would stir up with Discenza and his crowd, but there would definitely be some wild-eyed Italians in the vicinity.”

  “You been busy, bro. How’d you find all this shit out?”

  I told him about the documents in the guru’s bedroom and my conversation with Evelyn.

  He made saucer eyes. “You mean you took her out to dinner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “I was playing contractor when I met her at the ashram yesterday morning and she asked me to come over to her house to take a look at some work she needs done.”

  “That place by the canal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Slick! You got her liquored up and pumped her dry. Did you bang her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was too drunk.”

  “Aw, man—that’s what you want with a snooty piece like that. Lower her inhibitions and all that pent-up wildness comes out. She’d of let you do all kind of shit to her.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  Reggie made a sour face, annoyed by my failure to sodomize the rich lady.

  “When we gonna grab the rocks?” he said.

  “Evelyn’s lawyer is bringing the necklace back from the desert tonight. He’s supposed to take it to his office in Santa Monica. If he does, we’ll B and E the place later on. I looked it over. It’s a good setup.”

  “Prep work?”

  “We need to buy some tools and find out where he lives.”

  “Why we need to know that?”

  “If it’s late when he gets back from Indian Wells you got to figure there’s a chance he’ll go straight home and keep the jewels there overnight. If we can find it, we’ll case his house this afternoon and then stake out both places this evening to see where he takes the diamonds. You can watch his house while I watch the office.”

  “Speakin’ of sparklers, when we gonna cash in those earrings?” Reggie had an above-average ability to sense fluctuations in the underworld ether. He usually knew when money he had an interest in had changed hands.

  “They’re cashed,” I said, reaching into my pocket and handing him three of the bank-banded packets of hundreds.

  Reggie’s bearded face took on an angelic look as he riffled the currency under his nose, breathing in the bracing scent of Treasury Department ink. Then he caught himself and scowled. He was delighted by the newly printed bills, but felt compelled to quarrel a little bit.

  “This all you got for them?”

  “That’s your cut.”

  “So six grand’s all you got?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You’re lucky to get that after letting that goon sneak by you at the hotel.”

  “Don’t start that shit again,” he said.

  “I’m not starting it, bro. I’m finishing it. I talked to Evermore, remember? She told me. Jimmy went in the front.”

  Reggie was silent for a moment, his face blank. Then he shrugged and grinned, officially retiring the lie.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  We found Mr. Parker napping at the lot, leaning back against his shack in an old kitchen chair, soaking up the morning sunshine. I woke him gently but he didn’t take it like a Christian.

  “Lot of in-and-out for a weekday,” he muttered as he handed me the keys.

  I drove to the library to see if the home phone and address of Armand Hildebrand, Sr., was listed in the Greater Los Angeles phone directory. Reggie stayed in the car. The antagonistic years he had spent in the public school system before punching out his junior high school principal and walking out the front door of academia for good halfway through eighth grade had made him allergic to learning environments. He avoided bookish places the way most people avoid dentists’ offices.

  Hildebrand was listed, which was good. But I cringed when I saw his address. He lived on Laurel Way, just above Sunset behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was one of the most heavily patrolled neighborhoods in the basin.

  We drove out Santa Monica Boulevard, past Century City Mall and the Los Angeles Country Club, and turned left on Beverly Drive. A few minutes later, we turned off Beverly onto Laurel Way. Hildebrand’s place was an impressive brick-and-clapboard Colonial, probably five thousand square feet. The landscaping harmonized with the architectural style. There were mature sweet gum and sycamore trees along with an abundance of azalea and rosebushes, the kind of plants you’d see in Connecticut or Virginia. A Brink’s Security sign by the driveway threatened an armed response.

  I pulled over down the block and parked in the shade of a jacaranda tree to observe the house. This was where people with real money lived, the people who rich people called rich. The homes went for anywhere from two to twenty million, having doubled in value during the 1980s real estate boom and recovered from the early nineties crash in property values. If Hildebrand had hung his fedora here for a decade or more, he had made millions just waking up in the morning. Made we wonder what other valuables besides the necklace we might find in his house.

  Before we’d been parked five minutes, a white Taurus with a Beverly Patrol decal drove past. The gray-haired security guard behind the wheel stared at us openly as he went by. While the exhaust from the Taurus still hung in the air, a Beverly Hills police cruiser rolled past in the opposite direction. Like the rent-a-cop, the real cop gave us a good looking-over as he went by. If we hadn’t been in a new luxury car, he probably would have stopped and asked us pleasantly if he could be of any assistance, wanting to know if we were lost or visiting someone in the neighborhood. As it was, he likely noted my license number.

&nbs
p; “This is no good,” Reggie said. “Fuckin’ cops are crawling out of the woodwork.”

  “You’re right,” I said. Between the armed Brink’s guards poised over the horizon, the grim-faced Beverly Patrol, and the alert city cops, it was a dangerous location. “We’ll focus on his office. If he doesn’t show up there tonight, we’ll rob him at the bank tomorrow morning.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “On Wilshire, about a mile from here.”

  We drove to the Bank of America and looked it over. Pulling an armed robbery in the parking lot on a Tuesday morning would be risky, with lots of traffic on Wilshire and a steady stream of people entering and leaving the bank. Success would depend a little bit on luck and a lot on clean, fast execution. The best thing about the location was its proximity to the 405 freeway. An entrance ramp a quarter mile west made for a great getaway route.

  We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon buying burglary and safecracking tools at scattered locations to hide our intention. We bought a hand sledge, a set of Mayhew cold chisels, and some hardened punches at an Ace hardware in Van Nuys. In Reseda, we picked up pry bars and two extra-long eighteen-inch screwdrivers, one flathead, one Phillips. I paid three hundred and forty dollars for the best cordless reciprocating saw at the Sears store in Northridge and another two hundred and seventy-five for the heaviest half-inch Craftsman drill. I still had the drill I had taken to the desert, but I wanted a backup.

  We bought flashlights, rope, and two extra sets of titanium drill bits at another hardware store in the valley and stopped by a ski shop to pick up pullover masks and a couple of small backpacks to carry the tools in. All the stores were miles from Santa Monica. If we had to flee without the tools, the cops would never be able to canvass up a witness to identify us as the purchasers. We’d wipe them down before the robbery and only handle them with gloves after that. The power tools had serial numbers printed on heavy foil glued to their hard plastic housings. We peeled the foil off.

  Later in the afternoon, I picked up a fresh set of fake ID, becoming Stephen Michaelson from Sacramento, and drove to LAX with my partner. Wearing the sunglasses and hat I bought at the Hyatt, I rented a nondescript white Chevrolet from Enterprise, giving the clerk a five-hundred-dollar cash deposit in lieu of a credit-card number.