Criminal Carma

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Hallways went in two directions from the landing at the top of the stairs. Down one was a series of small, minimally furnished rooms, each with a bed, a chair, and a cheap dresser-and-mirror combo. The rooms were lit by white-glass globe ceiling fixtures that blinked on when I flipped the wall switch by the door. On one dresser there was a well-thumbed copy of the Kama Sutra. The drawers were empty.

The closets held bathrobes, flower-petal-strewing robes, scented oils, and a few miscellaneous devotional items such as velvet ropes and blindfolds. So. Baba was a rascal, after all-not that I thought sex was sinful or anything silly like that. But the context made me angry. In itself, Vedanta is pure good, the most accurate earthly map to enlightenment for those who seek it. The foolish prejudice it faces in the West comes mostly from people’s fear of the unknown and the entrenched resistance of rival philosophies, both religious and secular. But sneaky fuckers like Baba hurt the cause, too, periodically giving yoga a black eye by screwing dopey chicks or absconding with the funds. I had never heard of a legitimate yoga ashram where women were for sale.

At least there were no whips or handcuffs.

Down the other hallway were three larger bedrooms set up like dormitories with four bunk beds apiece, so that eight people could sleep in each room. Two were cluttered with girl stuff and had female clothes in the closets and dressers. The flower girls. The third was less cluttered, had men’s clothes in the closet.

A fourth bedroom, larger still, had a king-size bed and a view of the floodlit garden behind the house through tall casement windows that filled the exterior wall. Mary’s white jeans had been tossed negligently on the orange bedspread and her flimsy white T-shirt was balled up on the floor. I wondered if the massive guru had been in the room when she peeled off her pants and panties, then shooed that thought away like a bird from a rail. You can’t let your mind wander when you are perpetrating a cat burglary.

Aside from the evidence of Mary’s desirable presence, Baba’s lair wasn’t debauched. There was a meditation nook with a dusty altar, complete with candle, incense burner, and bell, and a bookcase full of paperbacks by a bewildering variety of spiritual teachers, the top shelf packed with books by Chogyam Trungpa, the controversial crazy wisdom master who founded Naropa Institute. A foot-tall antique ceramic Buddha in a niche beside the bed radiated an aura of holiness so tangible that I had to resist an urge to bow down before it.

Set end to end along the length of the wall opposite the windows was an oak banker’s desk, a computer desk with a new Macintosh, printer, and scanner, and a worktable piled with documents and blueprints. Some of the blueprints were street plans that showed the section of Pacific Avenue where Mrs. Sharpnick’s flophouse was located and blocks north of there. Others were construction drawings for a large hotel.

The papers were a complex mix-minutes of Venice City Council meetings, construction and real estate documents written in dense legalese, sheaves of letters to and from various individuals and city and state entities. Two names appeared frequently: Herbert Finklestein and Anthony Discenza. The second name was familiar, but I couldn’t think where I knew it from. Evidently, Finklestein and Discenza were principals in a limited liability partnership formed to develop a resort on the Venice shore, and that they were using the city’s power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire property over the protests of landowners and neighborhood groups. There was litigation pending. The closing date for the financing was on Wednesday. If the money wasn’t in place by then, the main twelve-acre parcel, which comprised more than half of the proposed resort, would fall out of escrow.

Turning from the worktable, I saw a small clock on the desk that showed eight forty-five. The position of the clock’s hands shocked me like a bare wire. I had either lost track of the time during meditation or spent longer scanning the legal documents than I realized. Satsang would be over at nine o’clock. Only fifteen minutes remained to look for the diamonds and get back downstairs before the adepts opened their starry eyes and stretched and looked around to see if Krishna had materialized.

I searched the room as fast as I could without making noise or a mess. If I had been sure the necklace was there, I wouldn’t have worried about the mess and could have worked more quickly. As it was, I didn’t want to put Baba on guard, in case I needed to come back for another visit. I looked under the mattress, under the rugs, behind the pictures on the walls, in every container and drawer I could open, and in the tank of the toilet in the attached bathroom. No one ever hides anything in the toilet tank, but you are supposed to look anyway.

The clock kept ticking.

There were size-two girl’s clothes in the closet along with an extensive selection of XXXL men’s street clothes, including half a dozen suits from mid-level designers, Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein, along with one navy-blue, three-button Armani. There was also a flashy selection of shirts, ties, and shoes.

Baba had a dual existence going.

The right-hand desk drawers held office supplies and ashram files. The left-hand drawers were locked. There was also a locked oak file cabinet stained the same golden color as the desk. I couldn’t find a key for the cabinet or desk and there wasn’t enough time to run out for a crowbar to crack them open, so I took a sturdy steel letter opener and tried to pry the top-left drawer open with that.

The lock had a steel tab that extended up into a steel-lined niche on the top of the drawer frame. I pried down with the letter opener at the same time as I pulled out and down on the U-shaped drawer handle, trying to open up enough space between the drawer and frame so that the lock would slip. I had the tab almost out of the slot when the letter opener split the wood it was dug into. My hand shot forward, knocking a lamp onto the wooden floor with a loud crash.

I froze, stiff as an aviator in a glacier. Baba’s room was in the back of the house. I didn’t think they would be able to hear the crash in the meditation room, but I wasn’t sure. After a few moments, I heard what sounded like feet pounding on a staircase. Quick as I could with shaky hands, I set the metal lamp back on the desk, then dodged into the bathroom, squeezing behind the door.

A few seconds later, the bedroom door was flung open and I heard someone breathing hard as if they had just run up a flight of stairs; then the door closed and aggressive footsteps went down the hall to the other bedrooms, more doors opening and closing.

When there was no more noise, I stepped out of the bathroom, holding the letter opener in my right hand, which hung down at my side, the tip of the dull blade pointing backward. It wasn’t a good weapon, but it was a weapon.

I looked at the clock. Meditation would be over in another minute or two if it wasn’t already. I had to get back downstairs. My hand was on the knob of the bedroom door when I heard voices in the hall.