Criminal Carma

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

We found Mr. Parker napping at the lot, leaning back against his shack in an old kitchen chair, soaking up the morning sunshine. I woke him gently but he didn’t take it like a Christian.

“Lot of in-and-out for a weekday,” he muttered as he handed me the keys.

I drove to the library to see if the home phone and address of Armand Hildebrand, Sr., was listed in the Greater Los Angeles phone directory. Reggie stayed in the car. The antagonistic years he had spent in the public school system before punching out his junior high school principal and walking out the front door of academia for good halfway through eighth grade had made him allergic to learning environments. He avoided bookish places the way most people avoid dentists’ offices.

Hildebrand was listed, which was good. But I cringed when I saw his address. He lived on Laurel Way, just above Sunset behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was one of the most heavily patrolled neighborhoods in the basin.

We drove out Santa Monica Boulevard, past Century City Mall and the Los Angeles Country Club, and turned left on Beverly Drive. A few minutes later, we turned off Beverly onto Laurel Way. Hildebrand’s place was an impressive brick-and-clapboard Colonial, probably five thousand square feet. The landscaping harmonized with the architectural style. There were mature sweet gum and sycamore trees along with an abundance of azalea and rosebushes, the kind of plants you’d see in Connecticut or Virginia. A Brink’s Security sign by the driveway threatened an armed response.

I pulled over down the block and parked in the shade of a jacaranda tree to observe the house. This was where people with real money lived, the people who rich people called rich. The homes went for anywhere from two to twenty million, having doubled in value during the 1980s real estate boom and recovered from the early nineties crash in property values. If Hildebrand had hung his fedora here for a decade or more, he had made millions just waking up in the morning. Made we wonder what other valuables besides the necklace we might find in his house.

Before we’d been parked five minutes, a white Taurus with a Beverly Patrol decal drove past. The gray-haired security guard behind the wheel stared at us openly as he went by. While the exhaust from the Taurus still hung in the air, a Beverly Hills police cruiser rolled past in the opposite direction. Like the rent-a-cop, the real cop gave us a good looking-over as he went by. If we hadn’t been in a new luxury car, he probably would have stopped and asked us pleasantly if he could be of any assistance, wanting to know if we were lost or visiting someone in the neighborhood. As it was, he likely noted my license number.

“This is no good,” Reggie said. “Fuckin’ cops are crawling out of the woodwork.”

“You’re right,” I said. Between the armed Brink’s guards poised over the horizon, the grim-faced Beverly Patrol, and the alert city cops, it was a dangerous location. “We’ll focus on his office. If he doesn’t show up there tonight, we’ll rob him at the bank tomorrow morning.”

“Where’s it at?”

“On Wilshire, about a mile from here.”

We drove to the Bank of America and looked it over. Pulling an armed robbery in the parking lot on a Tuesday morning would be risky, with lots of traffic on Wilshire and a steady stream of people entering and leaving the bank. Success would depend a little bit on luck and a lot on clean, fast execution. The best thing about the location was its proximity to the 405 freeway. An entrance ramp a quarter mile west made for a great getaway route.

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon buying burglary and safecracking tools at scattered locations to hide our intention. We bought a hand sledge, a set of Mayhew cold chisels, and some hardened punches at an Ace hardware in Van Nuys. In Reseda, we picked up pry bars and two extra-long eighteen-inch screwdrivers, one flathead, one Phillips. I paid three hundred and forty dollars for the best cordless reciprocating saw at the Sears store in Northridge and another two hundred and seventy-five for the heaviest half-inch Craftsman drill. I still had the drill I had taken to the desert, but I wanted a backup.

We bought flashlights, rope, and two extra sets of titanium drill bits at another hardware store in the valley and stopped by a ski shop to pick up pullover masks and a couple of small backpacks to carry the tools in. All the stores were miles from Santa Monica. If we had to flee without the tools, the cops would never be able to canvass up a witness to identify us as the purchasers. We’d wipe them down before the robbery and only handle them with gloves after that. The power tools had serial numbers printed on heavy foil glued to their hard plastic housings. We peeled the foil off.

Later in the afternoon, I picked up a fresh set of fake ID, becoming Stephen Michaelson from Sacramento, and drove to LAX with my partner. Wearing the sunglasses and hat I bought at the Hyatt, I rented a nondescript white Chevrolet from Enterprise, giving the clerk a five-hundred-dollar cash deposit in lieu of a credit-card number.

If we had to do an armed robbery, I didn’t want to be squealing away from the bank in my own car. Even with stolen plates, having the model and color identified so close to where I lived would have been dangerous. If someone got the license number of the rental, the cops would trace the vehicle to Enterprise. They might even dig up a videotape that showed me signing papers at the rental counter. But they wouldn’t have my real name and they wouldn’t be able to identify me behind the hat and glasses. Driving a rental would make a burglary less risky, too.

Reggie drove my car back to Venice from the airport and parked in one of the big lots by the beach. I rendezvoused with him there, and we moved the tools from the trunk of the Seville to the trunk of the rental. Afterward, Reggie took the Caddie to Mr. Parker’s lot while I stashed the rental on a side street near the flop.

Reggie was sitting in the broken-down armchair in my room, draining the last swallow from a quart of Budweiser when I got back. I spread a map of West Los Angeles out on the bed and showed him where the lawyer’s office and the restaurant were.

Outbound traffic would be light on Monday evening, but it would still take Hildebrand two hours to drive to Indian Wells, at least half an hour to do his business and two hours to drive back. If he left at four, that would put him back in Santa Monica around 8:30 p.m. If he left at five and stopped to eat on the road, he wouldn’t be back until ten or eleven. I decided to stake out the office from 7:30 on.

Norm’s was ideal for our purposes, a big, busy restaurant with plenty of in-and-out traffic and yet one where denizens of the Los Angeles night hung out for hours on end. We could sit in a booth by the window for a long time over coffee and pie without attracting attention.

“Once Hildebrand comes and goes, we can leave too,” I told Reggie. “We’ll go back around midnight and wait for the cops to do their drive-by.”

The Santa Monica police patrol a given street every four hours. Once they put in an appearance, we’d have time to do the burglary and be long gone before they returned.

“We’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb if we sit in that coffee shop all evenin’ and then come back and start hanging around after midnight,” Reggie said. “They’ll probably think we’re getting ready to knock them off.”

“Good point. We’ll split the surveillance up. One of us can watch until Hildebrand shows with the diamonds and the other one watch for the cops later.”

“I got dibs on the early shift,” Reggie said.

“Suits me.” There was something I wanted to do that evening.

“What’s this chump look like, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he drive?”

“Don’t know that either.”

Reggie made saucer eyes. “How am I supposed to spot the son of a bitch?”

“It shouldn’t be a problem. The office and parking lot will be empty after six or seven o’clock. If guy in a suit shows up with a security guard between eight and eleven and goes inside for a little while and comes back out, that’s him.”

“How am I supposed to see all that in the dark?”

“There are lights in the parking lot.”