Criminal Carma

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Up early on Monday, I met Chavi in the hall as I headed downstairs. She was on her barefoot way back to Reggie’s room after using the bathroom. Her face was glowing and I knew that Reggie wouldn’t have to worry about doing his own laundry for the next week or so and that he would probably be coming in for a new shirt or pair of pants.

Chavi smiled when she saw me.

“Who is the lucky lady?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She held my chin and turned my head, her eyes roving over my face.

“You look like someone who is falling in love.”

“You’re good,” I said. “What do you and Reggie have planned today?”

“I’ll be at my booth,” Chavi said. “We both know what Reggie will be doing.” She shrugged, smiled good luck with the girl, goodbye, and see you later, then went on down the hall.

The Santa Anas had blown again during the night, whisking away the smut of expended sighs and sad memories, leaving the seaside world sparkling. It was still windy, palm trees thrashing. The front door of the abandoned house next door had blown open. I stepped into the littered living room and called Ozone Pacific’s name. I wanted to ask him something. When he didn’t answer, I went down the hall to the room where he camped out, following an orange extension cord that Budge had run over from the flophouse and spliced to an old mechanic’s drop light that he hung from the ceiling. The light operated with a pull string and held a forty-watt bulb, bright enough for Oz to see what he was doing after dark.

His sleeping bag was empty. Already out panhandling. The lining of the child-size bag was decorated with cactuses, bucking broncos, and cowboys with whirling lariats. His conglomeration of homeless-person junk-magazines, a few old books, some canned goods, and a gallon container of water-was piled in a corner. Looking at his living quarters, I wondered again how he had ended up this way. He had been an infant once, held in someone’s loving arms. There had been people who cherished him and dreamed of a different future for him than the one he had found. Or maybe not. Maybe he had been born unlucky to someone who didn’t want a child or who lacked the emotional or financial resources to raise one.

A short walk down Pacific Avenue, lively with people plunging into the workweek after the fantasy of the weekend, took me to the lot where the Seville had been parked since our return from Indian Wells.

Mr. Parker had a young black guy in a double-breasted beige suit cornered by his shack.

“Parking lot ‘tendant,” he said to the young man, scanning his face for any sign of amusement. “Mr. Parker. Get it?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s funny,” said the guy, who looked like the manager of a men’s boutique or a small hotel. “I’ll see you this evening, then.”

“Some people got no sense of humor,” Mr. Parker said as I walked up.

“Nice car, though,” I said, nodding at the gleaming black Maxima pulled up in front of the shack.

“Yes, sir!” Mr. Parker said, forgetting his disappointment at the man’s failure to appreciate his perennial joke. “She’s slick all right. Not as slick as your Caddie, though. You need your keys?”

“Yes, please.”

“Nice day for a drive,” he said when he came back out of the shack. “This wind dies down in a little while it’ll be another bee-you-tee-ful day at our beach.”

“Sure will,” I said. “Have you seen that kid Oz this morning?”

“Not this mornin’. That young man don’t come this far over. I only see him afternoons when I eat lunch, or evenings after I close the lot.”

“What do you mean he doesn’t come over this far?”

“Don’t you know ‘bout him?”

“No.”

“He don’t come this side of Pacific or go beyond Ozone, up yonder. That’s how he got his name, you know? Ozone Pacific? He stay right on the beach.”

“Why?”

If Mr. Parker was right, Ozone was confined to a strip of real estate no more than a quarter-mile wide and at most two miles long, if he ranged all the way south to the Marina del Rey channel, where Venice Beach ended.

“Guess he juss like it down there.”

“How long has he been there?”

“Ain’t sure, Mr. Rivers. I don’t like to pry too much ‘bout a man’s bidnis. He was hanging ‘round down by that palm tree of his when I opened my lot eight years ago.”

“He hasn’t crossed Pacific Avenue in eight years?”

“Not that I heard of.”

I wheeled the Caddie out onto Horizon, jogged through the neighborhood to Lincoln, then took Lincoln north to Wilshire. When I thought of Ozone trapped in his tiny world I felt pity as sharp as panic and turned my mind away from his strange plight, focusing on the present moment, a remedy for mental and emotional distress recommended by spiritual teachers in all traditions.

I was on my way to an exciting meeting. It was a beautiful morning, if a little windy, and I was driving a new Cadillac. With its smooth leather, silky ride, and rocket-ship power, the Seville made every trip a pleasure, and I relaxed into the sensation of piloting the car along Wilshire through Brentwood and Westwood, past sidewalks crowded with UCLA coeds, serious and sexy, to the ultimate name-brand city of Beverly Hills. A bronze Bentley pulled away from the curb on Crescent Drive just as I turned off Wilshire, and I slid into the convenient spot. Most of the stores along Beverly and Rodeo wouldn’t open for another hour or two, but I knew Fahim would be in his shop.

When I rapped on the glass door at the corner of Beverly and Brighton, he looked up from a catalogue and came around from behind the glass case to let me in.

“Sabaah al-kheir,” he said. The morning is good.

“Sabaah an-noor,” I replied as he had taught me. The morning is light.

He was a Lebanese immigrant jeweler in his fifties with whom I had been doing business for several years. Medium height and build, short gray hair, gray goatee and rimless glasses.

“What can I do for you, Robert, my friend?” he asked, his gray eyes sparkling.

“Let’s go in the back.”

When he saw the pink diamond earrings his face shone.

“You always bring quality, Robert,” he said, inclining his handsome head. Dressed impeccably in Brooks Brothers threads, possessed of the excellent manners typical of Middle Easterners educated in Europe, he was a pleasure to do business with. He had plenty of legitimate customers, but he took special pleasure in illicit deals, partly because of the Bedouin currents deep in his blood, partly because those deals were the most profitable.

Fahim examined the diamonds lovingly, using a loupe, a microscope, and some kind of scanner to make sure their rare rose color had not been enhanced by radiation or heat. After his technology had backed up his jeweler’s eye and intuition, we haggled for a few minutes for form’s sake, arriving at the price he had in mind all along. He paid me in cash, six bank-banded packets of crisp hundreds, a neat and generous 30 percent of the likely retail value of the two stones. I wasn’t sure what he did with the jewels he fenced but suspected that he sold them overseas through family connections, eliminating the chance of any blowback from the local cops.

At the door, he laid his neatly manicured hand on my shoulder. “Go in safety, Robert,” he said in his formal way. “Return soon.”

“Back at you, bro,” I said, getting him to grin.

I cruised toward the ocean on Wilshire, cutting over to Santa Monica Boulevard at Twentieth Street and continuing west to the address on the card I had taken from Evelyn’s desk. Her lawyer was ensconced in a small 1950 s-vintage office building. It was three stories, with a handsome limestone-and-glass veneer. Two flourishing date palms at the corners added a tropical touch.

I parked down the street and walked back along the alley behind the building. There were steel bars over the ground-floor windows and a metal fire escape with the first set of steps retracted. Around front, I walked in the entrance and looked at the directory in the unattended lobby. The offices of Hildebrand & Hildebrand took up the entire third floor. Apparently the nepotistic bastard had taken his son into business with him.

Access to the third floor was by a tiny four-person elevator and a set of service stairs. The building’s front and back doors were both alarmed. The lawyer’s office door would be, too. It would be tricky ghosting through multiple alarm systems without disturbing the doughnut eaters but we could probably do it. Jail time for breaking and entering an unoccupied building is much less than for armed robbery, and in a burglary you don’t have to worry about hero complexes and heart patients.

Back in the alley, I took another look at the fire escape. If we pulled the retracted steps down, it would get us to the third floor. From there, we could climb onto the roof, using the short steel ladder that was bolted to the wall to give maintenance workers access to the top of the building.

I liked it. Going through the roof, we would avoid the alarm systems. There might be a vent opening large enough to squeeze through once the cover was pried off. If not, I could use a cordless reciprocating saw to enlarge a smaller opening.

Buildings like this one weren’t constructed with security in mind. The roof was nothing but tar and plywood atop two-by-eight or two-by-ten joists with lath and plaster underneath. The saw would be noisy for twenty or thirty seconds, but it was a commercial district. There wouldn’t be anybody around at 2 a.m. We could find a place to watch from, wait till the cops did their midnight drive-by, then drop down into the lawyer’s office with a pack of safecracking tools.

If the safe stymied us, we could put on masks and jump the lawyer when he showed up the next morning. Heroically self-sacrificing attorneys are as rare as virgins in Vegas, and I didn’t think it would take too many light taps on the forehead with a pry bar to convince Hildebrand, junior or senior, to cough up the combination. Once we had the diamonds, we could tie up the lawyer, his security guard, and any of the office staff who came in early, then take the elevator down to the lobby. If we brought our tools into the building in a couple of sturdy shoulder bags, we could carry them out the front door without attracting attention. All we needed was a place to park the car that wasn’t too far away and wouldn’t attract the attention of the police.

Well-dressed pedestrians passed in both directions on the sidewalk in front of the building. The boulevard was busy with cabs, passenger cars, and local delivery trucks. Looking up and down the street, I saw a Norm’s one block west of the lawyer’s building. Norm’s restaurants, scattered across Los Angeles and Orange County, are all-night eateries that bustle until two or three o’clock in the morning. It was a gift.

I walked down to the diner-style eatery, got the morning paper from a machine, and went inside and sat down at a booth by the front window. Looking through the plate glass, I had a clear view of the lawyer’s Eisenhower-era office building. When the uniformed waitress slouched over, I ordered a western omelet with rye toast and hash browns, feeling cozy and in control.

There was an article in the paper about the fire on Pacific Avenue that we had seen on Saturday night. Three structures had been badly damaged and would have to be demolished. The fire chief was quoted as saying that the buildings had been unoccupied and dilapidated and that tearing them down would help clear the way for new development. The cause of the fire was unknown-to the authorities, at least.