Criminal Carma

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.