Criminal Carma

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

At Le Merigot, I gave the valet a five and told him to keep my car in front, then took Mary in through the lobby and up to the room I had rented the night before.

“Very nice,” she said when she saw the marble whirlpool tub and the large luxurious room with a balcony and a view of the ocean. “Is this to impress chicks, too?”

“No,” I said. “This is a hideout.”

“I was right about you!”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“That’s cool!” she said. “What are we going to do now? How are we going to get Baba?”

With no discussion, it was understood between us that we were a team now, in the situation together. Briefly, I filled her in on what was at stake besides revenge-the jewels and gold and my and Reggie’s freedom.

“I heard someone tried to steal that necklace in the desert,” she said. “That was you guys?”

“Yeah.”

I finished telling her about what had happened in Indian Wells, at the lawyer’s office the night before, and at the flophouse that morning. Most people would say it was foolish of me to take her into my confidence, but I was sure I could trust her. You don’t stay free as a criminal as long as I had without accurate intuition.

“Do you think they found the necklace?” she asked.

“We’ll know soon enough.”

She knew Evelyn from the ashram and was riveted when I explained the rich lady’s part in the story-the picture in Ozone Pacific’s magazine, the missing daughter, Baba’s extortion scheme.

“How does he know all that stuff about her daughter?”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. Maybe he read Evelyn’s mind. Maybe he actually came across someone who knew the girl. Maybe a combination of things.”

Mary asked a couple more questions, then nodded decisively.

“I like the safecracking,” she said, treating me to a radiant smile. “I knew you weren’t small-time. How can I help?”

“Stay here until I get back, then we’ll see. As long as Baba hasn’t found the diamonds, we won’t have to worry about getting even with him. When the resort deal falls through and the Italians’ half million goes up in smoke, they’ll skin him alive.”

“Sounds good,” she said, looking around the suite with pleased anticipation. Its decor contrasted favorably with the ashram’s faded ambiance. “Maybe I’ll take a bubble bath while you’re gone.”

“Don’t say things like that. It puts thoughts in my head.”

“I know.”

Checkout time was noon, so I stopped in the lobby and paid for another day, then jumped in the Caddie and drove south on Pacific. The flophouse was quiet as I rolled by, no cops or gangsters in sight.

I parked at a meter several blocks farther south and walked over to Chavi’s booth on the boardwalk, searching for my partner.

He was standing near the fortune-teller, looking a tall thin black man up and down. There was an electronic bathroom scale on the asphalt in front of him and a sign tacked to the palm tree behind him that said “Guess Yer weight for five Dollers.”

“Reggie,” I said.

He held up a stubby forefinger to put me on hold, then punched the black guy lightly on the shoulder and tapped him on the chest with two fingers a couple of times.

“One fifty-seven,” he said.

A furtive look of surprise flashed across the man’s face before he veiled it with an expression of bored skepticism.

“You way off, man. I weigh one sixty-five.”

“Step on the scale.” Reggie pointed at the bathroom appliance.

“Why I wanna step on the scale?” the man extemporized. “You probably got it rigged.”

“How else we gonna know if I’m right?” Reggie said. “You got a scale with you?”

“What you talkin’ about, do I got a scale? Who carries a scale around with them?”

“Then cough up the five bucks, chump.”

“Oh, so now you don’t even want me to weigh in on your scale?”

“Be my guest,” Reggie said.

The man stepped up on the scale and all three of us looked down at the digital readout, which flickered to 158 and froze.

“See? You off by a pound!”

“Said I’d guess within two pounds. Cough up the dough.”

“Aw, shit, I don’t care about no lousy five dollars.” The man pulled a crumpled bill from his pocket and handed it to Reggie, then walked off with an air of disgust.

Stone-faced but with the hint of a smirk, Reggie straightened the bill out, snapped it once, then folded it and put it in his pocket.

“When did you come up with this brilliant idea?” I asked.

“This morning. Chavi’s been telling me I ought to have a hustle, so I borrowed her scale and made me a sign. What’s up?”

“Trouble. We need to move fast.”

Saucer eyes. “What?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

Engrossed in the palm of a bare-chested young man with blond dreadlocks, Chavi didn’t look up as we headed for the Caddie. Hurrying along the boardwalk and driving to the rental car, I told Reggie what had happened.

“That skinny kid in the orange nightgown?”

“Yeah.”

“Who killed him?”

“Probably Namo, the guy I cut with the razor blade.”

“How’d you happen to be packing a razor blade?”

“I got it from Ozone Pacific.”

“That squirrelly kid who lives next door?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d he give you a razor blade?”

I shook my head. “I’ll explain later.” I wondered what had become of Oz in the hubbub at the house, if he was around when they ransacked the place.

At the rental, I retrieved the Tomcat from the glove box and wiped down the wheel, dashboard, and door handles. I had planned to return the car to get my five hundred back, but that now seemed too risky. The detectives investigating the burglary at Hildebrand’s probably hadn’t had time to look at the previous night’s patrol reports and find out about the two Sacramento tourists who were questioned in Norm’s parking lot across the street from the crime scene-but they might have. If they had, they would have traced the rental to Enterprise and planted a plainclothes lurker near the airport return counter.

By the time I finished erasing our fingerprints, Reggie had moved the tools from the trunk of the rental to the trunk of the Seville. We climbed in the Caddie and headed north. There was still nothing unusual as we cruised back past the flop. Circling, I drove into the alley behind the house, alert for blue uniforms and black fedoras. My heart was pounding when I pulled up by the kitchen door.

“Keep the engine running,” I said, handing Reggie Baba’s.38. “If you hear me yell or guns start going off, come in blazing.”

Upstairs, my room and Reggie’s had been torn to pieces. They had cut the mattresses, smashed the furniture, scattered clothes everywhere.

But they hadn’t found the stash.

Besides the diamonds, gold, and bonds, the hiding place held several thousand dollars in cash, including two of the packets of hundreds from Fahim, two boxes of shells for the Tomcat, an extra clip (full), and my passport. I put everything in a shoulder bag and then looked around until I found a map of California in the debris on the floor. I opened it up and refolded it so that it showed the coast north of Santa Barbara, then circled the town of Pismo Beach with a pen, scrawled the following day’s date beneath the circle, and tossed the map back on the floor. After taking a last look around the place where I had lived for six memorable weeks, I picked up the shoulder bag and ran back to the alley with springs in my heels.

“We’re still in business, bro,” I said when I got in the car. “Head for Le Merigot, that hotel we went to last night.”

It was an overwhelming relief to have the diamonds back in my possession. If someone had dragged a bow across a violin, I might have wept for joy. I had spent four weeks and traveled hundreds of miles and been in three fights and committed at least a dozen felonies to get them and it would have been hard to remain detached if they had slipped through my fingers. I would have been bereft, as if I had lost a person dear to me, seeing the necklace in my mind’s eye like the afterimage of a candle flame, for years to come.

Now I could turn them over to Fahid in exchange for a small fortune and we would leave town, riding high, for the time being at least, with a bundle of cash and a charming new companion. I hoped.

The only blight on the rose was our legal jeopardy. It wasn’t clear exactly how much trouble we would be leaving behind us, but it didn’t look good. The doughnut eaters would be snuffing for whoever cracked Hildebrand’s safe. At some point my illustrious name would come up. Baba knew where I lived. Mrs. Sharpnick knew my identify. In the course of routine interviews, the cops would find out that I had had dinner with Evelyn and questioned her about the necklace. Two patrolmen had seen Reggie and me near the scene of the crime. With our mug shots, they would probably find people in the desert who could identify us, especially if the linebacker and her little man were still in town. Searching for me, the Santa Monica dicks would contact the Newport Beach police and get an earful from the family man. That would sharpen their interest. The two departments might pool resources to try and track me down. Warrants would be issued.

We were going to get away with the loot, but if there was electronic paper swirling in the slipstream, our lives would be forever less enjoyable and free. Crossing a state line doesn’t do much good anymore. International boundaries put distance and probability on the criminal’s side but don’t block pursuit. Except in a few remote countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the U.S., modern fugitives can never really relax. There is always the fear of a hand on the shoulder from behind.

Part of my mind started to catalogue which countries lacked treaties and how long a couple of hundred thousand dollars would last in a comfortable adobe. But I caught myself and shut down the mental travel agency to concentrate on the present moment. First things first: I had to make sure we did actually get away before worrying about the fugitive future.

Back at the hotel, we valeted the car to get it out of sight and went up to the room. It was perfumed with the bergamot scent of the hotel’s expensive shampoo and lotion. Wrapped in a fluffy white robe, Mary was curled up in an easy chair by the French doors that opened onto the balcony, bent over a book that lay open in her lap. She looked faintly mermaid-like with her long damp blond hair hanging down and the blue sea splashing on the shore behind her.

“Rob!” she said when we came in.

“What?”

“I found out how Baba knew all those things about Evelyn’s daughter.”

“How?”

“This is her diary!” She hurried across the room, holding out the leather-bound volume we found in Baba’s desk.

“Is her name in it?”

“No,” Mary said, “but look, it mentions the things you said Baba talked about-restaurants in San Francisco, a ranch where she used to go horseback riding with her mom… what her father did to her.”

She was standing close beside me, flipping through the pages to show me passages she had marked. The tops and bottoms of the pages were water stained and deteriorated but the middle sections were legible. The entries were in both ink and pencil. The handwriting was a loopy, girlish script that deteriorated in places to a scrawl.

“See there, where she mentions Kelly? Evelyn told you that was the name of her daughter’s baby, right?”

“That’s what she said.”

Turning the yellowed pages, I saw that she was right. The notebook, which looked like it had lain someplace damp and dirty for a long time, was the diary of Evelyn’s daughter and the source of Baba’s mysterious information.

“Who is this ‘he’ Christina keeps mentioning?”

“I think that’s the baby,” Mary said. “She says how beautiful he is and how much she loves him and wants to protect him.”

“But I thought Christina’s baby was a girl.”

“Kelly can be a boy’s name, too. Did Evelyn tell you it was a girl?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember her saying that, but she showed me a picture of a baby dressed in pink…”

“Who gives a shit what the baby was wearing?” Reggie interjected. “We can buy it a blue bonnet and a binkie on our way out of town. Right now we gotta figure out the next move.”

“It’s figured,” I said. “Just hold on a second.”

I turned to the last entry in the diary, dated July 4, 1984. Scanning the final few scrawled pages, I felt a seismic shift in my psyche. As the mental landscape re-formed, I saw a way out of our legal difficulties open up like a pass between two distant hills.

“What do you want to know?” I asked Reggie.

“How quick can we fence the loot?”

“I’ll call Fahim right now and let him know I’m coming. I doubt if he has enough cash on hand, but he should be able to get it within a few hours. We’ll drop the jewels and coins off there this afternoon.”

“We going back to the flop to get our shit or splittin’ from here?”

“Anything there you can’t live without?”

“Nada.”

“Then we leave from here. We’ll have plenty of money to replace anything we leave behind.”

“Where we going?”

“South of the border.”

“The cops gonna be on our tail?”

I looked my partner in the eye. “Right now, I’d say they are after two guys from Sacramento who are supposed to be staying at the Georgian, but by the time they get done with their interviews in a day or two they may be looking for me and you.”

Reggie gave me deadpan for a few seconds, then shrugged.

“We’ll be long gone by then,” he said and smiled a smile that reflected torchlight, tequila, and dark-eyed señoritas.

I turned to Mary. “I was hoping you’d come with us.”

She sprang into my arms. “I was afraid you weren’t going to ask.”

We kissed long and lusciously. When I slipped my hand beneath her robe, Reggie made an annoyed sound.

“All right, you two,” he said with a sour look. “That’s enough of the lovey-dovey routine. Get it in gear.”