Criminal Carma

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The lawyer must have stopped to dine in the desert, probably marking the meal up a couple of hundred percent and charging it to Evelyn’s account. He showed up at 10:30 p.m. and went into the building with an ex-NFL type in a suit carrying a briefcase. When they left, fifteen minutes later, without the briefcase, Reggie called me from the pay phone at Norm’s.

“Cat’s in the cradle,” he said.

“What?”

“Shyster showed up with ice.”

After he dropped out of school, Reggie had watched a lot of old gangster movies on daytime TV.

He picked me up at the flophouse at eleven and we cruised north on Pacific Avenue to Le Merigot, a boutique luxury hotel a couple of blocks south of the pier.

“Turn in here,” I said.

When Reggie pulled up at the brightly lit entrance, I waved off the valets and went in to rent a room.

“Whadaya want a hotel room for?” Reggie asked when I came out with the key card. “You got a date with Blondie later on?”

“No. It gives us someplace to go besides the house if there is any trouble.”

We continued north past the pier, hung a right on Santa Monica, and drove inland to Norm’s. Reggie planned to nap in the car while I went in and sat by the window to watch for the late-night patrol, but the cops showed up while we were still talking in the parking lot.

Ten minutes after the doughnut eaters circled behind Hildebrand’s building and moved on to the next block, we pulled out of Norm’s, rolled across Santa Monica Boulevard, and turned into the alley they had just checked. Reggie parked in one of the spaces behind the building and I got out and opened the trunk. There was a pair of lock snips I’d never seen before lying on top of the other tools.

“Where did these come from?” I asked Reggie.

“I boosted ‘em from the bed of a pickup down by the boardwalk,” he said. “Never know when you’re gonna need a church key.”

At least 10 percent of my affection for Reggie was based on his habit of referring to lock snips as church keys.

“They might come in handy,” I agreed.

We carried the packs, clanking with metal tools, to the back wall of the building. Reggie boosted me up so that I could grab the retracted stairs and drag them down. While I lugged the packs up the metal-grid steps, Reggie drove out the other end of the dark alley and circled back to park the car in Norm’s lot, which was still half full. By the time he returned, I had the tools on the top platform of the fire escape and had climbed up the ladder onto the roof.

The roof was an unobstructed rectangle, sixty feet wide by forty feet deep, sloped slightly toward the rear and dimly lit by ambient city light. The tar was covered with brown pea gravel. There was a low parapet along the sides and front of the building. As long as we stayed on our knees when we were near the edge of the roof, it hid us from the view of anyone below. At the front corners, the crowns of the two date palms gave additional cover. The two-and three-story buildings that backed up to the other side of the alley were all dark.

I pulled on a pair of brown cotton gloves and used a flat bar to pop the aluminum cover off a vent near the center of the building, exposing the top of a six-inch exhaust-fan pipe made of flimsy sheet metal and a jagged hole in the roof sheathing that was about ten inches square. While Reggie kept a lookout, I used the cordless reciprocating saw to enlarge the opening, cutting over to a joist, along it for twenty inches, over to the neighboring joist, back along that two-by-ten for twenty inches, then back over to the vent hole.

The saw made a racket, hacking through tar, sheet metal, and plywood, sending gravel flying, but the heavy demolition blade was sharp and the saw motor powerful and I was done in twenty seconds. It took another ten seconds to cut through the lath on the bottom of the joists and stomp the plaster out of the way, opening access to the interior of the building. When I was finished, dogs were barking on adjacent blocks but no lights had come on in any of the buildings around us.

“Goddamn, that was loud!” Reggie said, crawling over from the parapet.

“Anything on the street?” My ears were ringing. My gloves and the arms of my long-sleeve shirt were covered with sawdust and plaster.

“One car went by while you were cutting, but they had their windows up.”

“We’ll wait a few minutes to see if anyone comes. Keep watching the street.”

Crouching, I made my way to the back corner of the building and lay down in the shadow of the parapet, where I could see the alley.

I wasn’t too worried about the noise. People notice a strange noise at nighttime in a big city, it takes them a while to be sure they are really hearing it. They have to turn down the TV or wake all the way up and open the window, trying to tell where the sound is coming from. If the noise stops, they listen for it to start again to get a better fix on it. If it doesn’t recur, ninety-nine people out of a hundred will shrug and go back to what they were doing, picking up the plotline of the nighttime soap opera or sinking gratefully back into the oblivion of sleep.

But I wanted to play it safe. If someone more acute or suspicious than the average city dweller had heard the noise and called the police, I was giving them time to arrive. As long as we were on the roof, the only crime they could charge us with was attempted burglary of an unoccupied building, not a serious rap. Once inside, we would have committed actual burglary, which carried more time. We also had a better chance of getting away while we were on the outside. If the cops rolled because someone heard a suspicious noise, it would only be one car and we would see them before they saw us. If all they did was circle the building and check the doors, we could still do the job. If they made a move toward the fire escape, we might be able to shinny down the palm trees in front and make it back to Norm’s before they found the hole in the roof.

The dogs stopped barking after a few minutes. No one came into the alley. Several anonymous cars went by on Santa Monica, one on the cross street by Norm’s. After ten minutes, I crawled away from the low wall and crouched back over to the hole. Shining a flashlight down into the opening, I saw a typical office bathroom with a vanity and toilet but no tub or shower. The smashed exhaust fan was half buried beneath lath and plaster.

“Let’s go,” I whispered loud enough for Reggie to hear.

He crawled over and looked down into the room.

“Yer gettin’ good at this, bro,” he said.

“Practice makes perfect.”

Or, at least, hopefully, you get better.