Criminal Carma

CHAPTER ONE

She was three cars ahead of us on Highway 60, headed east toward Palm Springs in a white Town Car driven by a guy who looked like trouble. We were in my new Seville STS, Reggie behind the wheel, slouched down in the leather seat, steering with one thick finger. I was almost but not quite sure she had the jewels with her, packed in one of the red Samsonite suitcases I’d seen her escort load into the Lincoln ’s cavernous trunk. People think gangsters drive Lincolns to show off their money, and they do, but they also like them because there’s room for multiple bodies in the trunk. Not that the lady was a gangster. That was us. Kind of.

We’d tailed her from the canal-side house in Venice, through downtown and East L.A. Ahead of us to the right, the Puente Hills bulked up in the golden light you get on winter afternoons after the Santa Ana winds have whisked the smog out to sea. With black-and-white dairy cattle grazing on the green slopes, the hills reminded me of an oil painting I’d seen while casing a Santa Barbara museum a couple of weeks before-a plein air vision of SoCal’s vanishing rural past worth $30,000, more than the rolling expanse of portrayed acreage was worth when the painter committed it to canvas in the 1920s.

“What’s the plan?” Reggie said.

I’d explained everything to him the night before. Either he hadn’t paid attention or he was just annoying me now because he was bored.

“We’ll play it by ear,” I said, annoying him back.

He turned his shaggy head and gave me a look, half exasperated, half disgusted, that I remembered from years before in St. Louis when he had been the tough mentor showing me, a teenage novice, the ins and outs of our suburban underworld.

Traffic was thinning as we left the city behind, the red needle of the Seville ’s speedometer edging up to 80 mph as Reggie kept close but not too close to the Lincoln. I didn’t know much about the lady other than what I’d read in the society pages of a slick coastal magazine where I first saw the pink diamond necklace reproduced on glossy paper, but I appreciated her judgment in leaving for the desert early in the afternoon.

On Friday evenings, the Los Angeles basin is like an ants’ nest that has been stirred with a stick. Whether you are heading north along the coast to Santa Barbara, south to San Diego, or inland to the mountain resorts or desert, every outlet is clogged with cars, fumes, and frustration as swarms of the basin’s ten million inhabitants rush for the exits of paradise.

One of the things about conventional people that annoys me the most is their tendency to do everything at the allotted time. If it is noon, they go to lunch-at exactly the worst moment, when restaurants are most crowded and the wait for tables and food is the longest. If it is Friday and by some unaccountable oversight they have one credit card left that’s not maxed out, then it is time for them to go away for the weekend; they cheerfully edge onto gridlocked highways after work, stubbornly oblivious to the stupidity of their timing. If we had left Venice at 5 p.m. instead of 2 p.m., we would have been part of a hundred-mile-long traffic jam, arriving in Palm Springs with red faces and sparking nerves after a miserable four-hour commute.

Instead, it was clear sailing as we crossed the 57, the 15, and the 215, and entered the Badlands that lurk like a fairy-tale barrier between Los Angeles and the handy Shangri-La of the Coachella Valley. I gave the lady credit for a sense of tradition, too. Instead of hurtling east on I-10, the soulless highway the monads take, she was following the route old Hollywood rolled along when stars first discovered the charms of Palm Springs in the 1920s and ‘30s. Dressed in flannel and furs, they left L.A. ’s gray rainy season behind in favor of warm winter sunshine in what was then a sparsely populated wilderness with old Indians trudging down dusty roads between scattered resorts that welcomed the rich and famous with small swimming pools and large drinks. Today the pools are huge, the drinks small, and the valley full of people who will never ever be famous, but an aura of celebrity lingers, locked in by savvy developers and city fathers who named the main thoroughfares after Hollywood royalty. When you pull up to the intersection of Bob Hope Drive and Frank Sinatra Avenue, it’s hard not to feel a little starstruck, if you go in for that kind of thing.

The Badlands take you by surprise. One minute you are speeding along a straight, level road; the next you are in the middle of a civil engineer’s nightmare, narrow highway curving and banking crazily through rugged hills. If you’re used to the route you can go through at 70 mph, but if it’s new to you, the Six Flags centrifugal forces on the steep curves scare most drivers down to about fifty. The tough guy steering the Lincoln must not have been in high society very long. He slowed abruptly as we entered the treeless hills, Galway green after the December rains. Reggie, a talented wheelman, gave a contemptuous snort as he trod on the brakes, keeping pace with the Lincoln.

In the guy’s defense, the Town Car isn’t nearly as agile as the Seville. With only 210 horses and weighing almost 5,000 pounds, it’s underpowered and tends to wallow in normal highway curves. It must have felt like a roller coaster with elastic bolts as it careened through the Badlands. Of course, the hills put some strain on the Cadillac, too-about as much as a politician feels pocketing a brick of hundreds for a favor that will slip his mind as soon as the cash has been converted to scotch and companionship. The Caddie held the road like it was on a rail, 300-horsepower Northstar engine quiet as a wooden top spinning on a wooden table.

I still missed the DeVille that I had lost on our last job down in Newport Beach -the consequences of which we were hiding out from in Venice -but I was starting to love this car, too. Midnight blue, with $2,000 worth of chrome wheels and an artist’s touch in its sleek lines, it was a beautiful piece of machinery to look at. More important, it accelerated like a rocket and handled at 120 mph. I liked knowing I had a getaway car that gave me a realistic chance of actually getting away, and that if the cop caravan and TV crews caught up with me, I would at least be branded into the public’s memory behind the wheel of the classic American success car.

The boulevards of Southern California are jammed nowadays with German and Japanese luxury cars that cost twice as much as Cadillacs and hold their value better, but the American car retains an aura of happiness and well-being that mere economics can’t dispel. Whether you are pulling up in front of a club on Saturday night or church on Sunday morning, you have to like yourself a little bit if you are driving a Caddie.

When we dropped down out of the Badlands onto the flat road below Banning, the lady’s driver tried to reinflate his ego by pushing the Town Car past ninety. As the Seville ’s needle edged up toward a hundred, Reggie glanced over at me, bushy eyebrows raised.

“Drop back a little bit but stay with them,” I said. “If there’s CHP, they’ll tag the Lincoln and we can slow down.”

“If you say so.”

I had no interest in being stopped by the highway patrol, but I didn’t know what hotel the lady was staying at so we had to stick close.

The Lincoln flashed past the 111 turnoff, which meant they weren’t going to Palm Springs proper but to one of the resort cities farther down the valley. Fifteen minutes later, their big right-turn signal blinked once at John Wayne Boulevard and we followed the Town Car up the swoop of the exit ramp. Half an hour later, we were turning into the elegant entrance drive of the Oasis Palms Resort in Indian Wells, passing between two fountains that mocked the desert with sparkling geysers.