Criminal Carma

EPILOGUE

We spent a week at Evelyn’s lodge, a five-bedroom timber-frame overlooking the frozen lake. It snowed all through the first night and most of the next day, so there was fresh powder for sledding and skiing and snowball fights. Mary turned out to be a daring downhill racer, beating me to the bottom of the mountain two times out of three. Oz made a cow out of snow. It was hard to recognize if you didn’t know what it was supposed to be, but it made him happy. He used a piece of rope for the tail. In the evenings we burned cedar logs in Evelyn’s big stone fireplace.

We followed developments in Los Angeles on TV and in the newspaper. The ashram burned down the night we left town. It was a big, lurid story on the next day’s evening news. Police found five bodies in the ruins, including those of Herbert Finklestein, who ran the ashram, and Pedro Sanchez, who was under investigation for arson in connection with several recent fires in the neighborhood. The Krispy Kremes were treating the ashram fire as arson and the deaths as homicides, in part because the victims had fresh knife and gunshot wounds. Oz had been prescient when he’d called Baba’s place an ash farm.

With the guru and his amateur gangsters gone, the link between me and the Center for Enlightened Beings was broken. Nobody else except for Evelyn, who had seen me there, knew who I was. With Evelyn on our side, the link between Reggie and me and the safe job was broken, too. Hildebrand didn’t know who had knocked off his office, so he was no threat. The cops who had questioned us the night of the robbery only knew us by our aliases, and we couldn’t be traced through the rental car.

On Thursday, our second day in the mountains, a story in the local section of the Los Angeles Times reported that the controversial Pacific City resort plan had collapsed when the main parcel of land fell out of escrow on Wednesday. The article noted in passing that Herbert Finklestein, a.k.a. Baba Raba, who was killed in the Murshid Center fire, had been a partner in the resort deal.

Two days later, when I went down to the snow-covered Times paper machine in the village, there was a dramatic headline on the front page: CAR BOMB KILLS VENICE BEACH COUNCILMAN. Discenza’s Cadillac had turned into a fireball when he started it in his garage on Friday morning. Police estimated that ten or twelve sticks of dynamite were used. Evidently, the other Italians had been irritable about the loss of their half million.

I was glad to hear that Discenza had gone to the Big City Council Meeting in the Sky. Even though I hadn’t struck at him directly, those guys have vendetta in their DNA, and he might have made a career of trying to track me down for something other than a friendly warning. He might have bothered Evelyn, too, trying to take up where Baba left off, extorting money from a likely rich lady.

I broke the news about Christina’s death that evening. Evelyn and I were sitting in the leather armchairs in front of the fireplace. She was drinking chardonnay from a brandy snifter. When I told her how her daughter had died and how Pete had found her remains and given the diary to Baba, she bowed her head and closed her eyes.

“At least I have Kelly,” she said.

I was surprised that she wasn’t taking it harder.

“I guess I knew she was dead.” She bunched the fingers of her left hand together and touched the center of her chest. “I felt it here. But I didn’t want to admit it to myself. At least now I know for sure.”

She was leaning forward with her head down over her glass and after a little while the surface of the chardonnay began to pucker like a pond at the start of a rainstorm. Her shoulders shook and the hand that held the alcohol trembled.

Oz came in from the TV room then and asked her what was wrong. She took a deep breath, wiped her tears, and told him that nothing was wrong, everything was going to be okay.

That was her last drink. She called her old sponsor later that night and went to an AA meeting in Big Bear the next afternoon.

We split up when we left the mountains the following week. Reggie went to Las Vegas, where he won twelve grand playing craps and got gonorrhea from a redheaded lounge singer. Mary and I drove to San Diego and then flew to Cabo, where we checked into a resort like the one Baba and Discenza had hoped to build in Venice Beach. It had fancy restaurants and swimming pools and a spa and cabanas on the clean beach, but we didn’t see much of it. Evelyn took Oz north to her in-laws’ ranch. Her former husband’s parents were both still living. Weathered and wise and nearing the end of their time on earth, they pushed aside past grievances and welcomed the boy, who was both their grandson and great-grandson. He lives there now in the rural Eden of his mother’s memory, riding around with his grandfather in his pickup truck, supervising and working with the ranch hands, bucking hay and rounding up cattle. He has his own chickens and pigs to take care of in a barn near the main house and two horses. Evelyn says he has become a fine rider.

Evelyn sold her bungalow in Venice Beach and divides her time between the ranch and her sister’s mansion in Bel Air. As soon as the lease is up on her house, she plans to move back in and make that her home. She has never wavered on the bargain we made. When the cops eventually questioned her about the robbery, seeking clues, she feigned ignorance and indifference. She had no idea who had stolen the diamonds and didn’t really care. The necklace was insured and could be replaced. When they got around to her again, weeks later, going through a list of ashram students in the long, drawn-out investigation into what happened at the Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings, they pricked up their ears at the coincidence, but she froze them out. How should she know if the robbery and fire/homicides were connected? She couldn’t talk to them at the moment. She had to get ready for a fund-raiser for her friend Senator Feinstein. They would have to talk to her lawyer if they had any more questions about the burglary or anything else.

When Mary and I returned from Cabo, she found us a fantastic apartment on the water in Redondo Beach with a huge two-story living room and big balcony where we sit and watch the boats entering and leaving the marina and occasionally do other things. Reggie moved in with Chavi. He guesses people’s weight on the beach when we aren’t on a job. He has a push-button electronic gadget that adjusts the scale to match his predication if it happens to be off by more than a pound. Most of the time, he doesn’t have to use it. He is as good at sizing people up physically as his girlfriend is at sizing them up psychically.

Overall, things are great. Mary and I are a good fit in every way. She makes me happier than I deserve to be. She seems happy, too. She’s back in school at City College and plans to transfer to Cal State next fall to get a B.A. in comparative religion. When she doesn’t have homework, she helps out in the family business.

Sometimes I get to thinking about Baba’s demise, both spiritual and physical, and about all the dead bodies we left behind in Venice Beach, and wonder what kind of karma we incurred there. We didn’t actually kill anybody, but we left them to be killed. I wonder if I have gone off track like Baba and just don’t realize it. Sometimes I even think about getting out of the life. Stealing has an honorable history and isn’t necessarily a spiritual dead end. Among other things, it supports the dictum that people shouldn’t get too attached to their stuff. But it is a high-stakes gamble, practically and morally. It is a form of living by the sword, and everyone knows what that is supposed to lead to.

I have a lot to lose now with the waterfront digs and the sublime babe and all the cash in my safety deposit box. But I can’t imagine doing anything else. Not with the world the way it is today. Chavi told me a gypsy saying shortly after we met last December that sums it up in my mind. Reggie had told her what he and I do for a living and we were talking about our career choices-she an open-air fortune-teller, me a thief. I was trying to explain why I thought it was okay to be a criminal and she held up her hand to silence me with the gesture the swamies call “fear not,” hand open, palm toward me.

“I understand, Robert,” she said. “You can’t walk straight when the road curves.”

I think the gypsies are right about that.