Criminal Carma

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.

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.