Criminal Carma

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 with 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?”

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?”