Criminal Carma Read online

  Being a criminal was my karma, and I wasn’t complaining. The hours were flexible, the money was good, and freebooting was way more interesting than swinging a hammer or sitting on a numb ass in front of a computer screen eight hours a day.

  There were some moral issues, for sure, but I’d dealt with most of them. What I did hurt people sometimes, but so did the actions of most other professions, one way or the other. Bankers with their loan-shark interest rates and foreclosures, lawyers with their sharp practices and subpoenas. The worlds of business and government were packed like a college student’s Volkswagen with crooked connivers who, unlike me, topped their sundae of sins with the pickled cherry of hypocrisy. I knew I was a bad guy, and tried to be as nice about it as I could. They thought they were good, which gave them license to be ruthless as hell.

  There was danger, too, of course. The claustrophobic specter of prison, where I had spent a couple of memorable years in my early twenties, was a lurking nightmare. I’d been shot at three times, hit once, and I’d killed one person. To be fair, he deserved it.

  Did I ever wake up at 3 a.m. horrified at the texture and trajectory of my existence? Sure. But I don’t think that kind of dark-night-of-the-soul despair is unique to stickup guys. Everyone in contemporary society carries a layer of anxiety under their bullshit and bluster. With some it’s fear of getting fired and losing the house in which they’ve invested their identity. Others are afraid that Barbie will find a fatter wallet or a bigger schlong to suck, or that Ken will take off with an intern who wears a thong over skin as smooth as satin. Old ladies are afraid that a less-deserving size sixteen will be tapped to sing the solo in the church choir, or that the neighbor’s daughter will get married first.

  “Are you checking in, Mr. Blake?” the valet asked. Built like a compact welterweight who lacked reach but made up for it with inside punching power, he had the outlaw aura common to dedicated surfers, with hard eyes and a marijuana leaf tattooed on his right forearm.

  “No, we’re here for dinner,” I said.

  “Call us on a house phone a few minutes before you are ready to leave and we’ll have your Seville waiting.”

  “Thanks.” I traded him a ten-dollar bill for a claim check. “Take good care of it.”

  “You can count on it, sir,” he said, giving me a little salute. “And thank you, sir.”

  It’s so easy to make people happy. If I had given him a dollar, it would have been emotionally neutral, a routine transaction. Two dollars would have given his heart a little lift. A ten-dollar bill, which was nothing to me in pursuit of a quarter million, made him happy. It was just a piece of paper, but it put a spring in his step and made him feel a little bit better about himself, his job, and the human race. If a conflict of any kind broke out between me and another guest, he would be on my side.

  “Little prick better be careful or he’ll run out of ‘sirs,’” Reggie said as the kid wheeled the Caddie crisply out of the line of parked cars, squealing the tires just enough to show he knew where the edge of the power was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A dignified old doorman grasped the brass handle with a white-gloved hand and swung one of the glass slabs open with a whoosh, air-conditioned atmosphere pouring out into the desert afternoon.

  “Welcome to the Oasis, gentlemen,” he said in a B-movie baritone.

  When I was a kid, most of our family vacations consisted of driving five hundred miles through the summer swelter of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to stay with my grandmother for a week or two in her big boxy frame house by the railroad tracks. On the rare occasion when we went someplace besides a relative’s house, we stayed in the kind of roadside motel where you park in front of your room and the amenities consist of a phone and a shower stall. Even after several years of patronizing them as a crook and customer, doing my part for the GDP by putting stolen money back into circulation, luxury hotels still gave me soul satisfaction, made me feel like I’d accomplished something that my father never did.

  Reggie gave a whistle as we entered the marble-floored lobby. Ahead of us, two wide stone staircases curved down around a fountain to a lounge half as big as a football field with scattered groupings of couches and armchairs upholstered in expensive fabrics. Above us, an atrium rose eight stories, ringed at each floor by a continuous balcony, polished maple with vines hanging over. Beyond a three-story glass wall at the far end of the lounge, the turquoise Jell-O of a swimming pool jiggled in the slanting light.

  “Pretty fucking fancy,” he said.

  Standing at the railing, looking down at chattering groups of vacationers laughing and drinking wine and cocktails in the lounge, I felt a pulse of ecstasy pass through me. The thrill meter had been turned up to three as we followed the Lincoln out Highway 60, powered by thoughts of diamonds, deception, and theft. When we arrived at the sparkling resort, it edged up to five. Now it jumped all the way to ten, banging against the peg, as the whole happiness of the crime descended on me like a blessing, sharpening my eyesight and hearing, bringing adrenal clarity to my mind.

  This was what I lived for.

  It was a busy Friday afternoon at the peak of the season in one of the nicest hotels in the Coachella Valley. There was wealth all around me-in the expensive shops that lined the upper lobby, in the pockets and on the wrists and fingers of the guests, in the registers behind the front desk, and in the hotel safe-and I had the guts and know-how to take whatever I wanted.

  Dressed in Italian walking shoes, brown gabardine slacks, and a finely woven silk shirt-tan with ivory buttons-I blended into the environment so perfectly that I was functionally invisible, which was, of course, my goal. None of the people walking through the lobby, smiling and nodding, could tell by looking at me that I was different from them. Not one of them would have guessed at the gear I had in the black leather bag slung over my right shoulder.

  Reggie was getting scruffy again, his inner biker emerging in the hiatus between the barbershop visits he had such strong resistance to. But his clothes were up to par-new khakis and a dark-blue aloha shirt the fortune-teller on the promenade had given him the previous week-so he blended in, too, sort of.

  He wasn’t an ideal partner for this kind of job-no luxury-resort manners, and too apt to freelance something on the side that might interfere with the main plan. But he had criminal virtues, too. Besides being a skilled driver, he was a good mechanic, a decent alarm guy, and a tricky, explosive street fighter. They didn’t come any tougher when there was blood in the water.

  He’d shown up at the right time in my personal Kabuki play, too, motoring out from St. Louis on a broken-down trike eight months before, just when Switch, my former partner, decided to get out of the high life, swayed by a beautiful young Mexican woman who was about to give birth to their first child.

  And Reggie was fun to be around when he wasn’t fucking up. Coming up on fifty, with a droopy bearded bloodhound face and sizable gut, he still exerted the same old mysterious pull he always had on the opposite sex. For as long as I’d known him, women had been drawn to his gruff, monosyllabic charm like lookie-loos to a car wreck. The fortune-teller was sub-par, chubby and in her forties, but she was constantly buying him gifts and cooking him meals and doing his laundry. In between banging surfer girls he picked up on the Venice boardwalk, he afforded her a casual fuck every week or so to keep her cheerful, putting about as much into it as a big-leaguer playing catch with a kid at a charity event.

  After craning his head to look up into the atrium and swiveling it to take in the expanse of the upper lobby, Reggie shrugged. “What’s it cost to crash in a dump like this?” he asked. Part of his code was never letting anything impress him-unless he was flattering you to get something he wanted-and now he was trying to retract the admiring whistle and the tone of his earlier comment.

  “High season, rooms start around three hundred and go up to five grand.”

  “Five grand! People must be fucking crazy. You could buy a cherry scooter for that.”
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  “I know,” I said and smiled. “They’ve got more money than they know what to do with.”

  The lady was standing in line at the front desk, off to our right. I didn’t see the ex-con.

  “Get a cup of coffee and sit where you can see the entrance and front desk,” I told Reggie. “Keep an eye out for the driver. I’ll go see what room she’s checking into.”

  “Coffee?”

  The lobby bar was next to the coffee shop. “All right,” I said. “Have a beer. But keep your eyes open. I don’t want that muscle-bound prick sneaking up behind me. And take this.” I handed him the black leather shoulder bag, which was the size of a large briefcase and heavy as a concrete block.

  At the front desk, I joined the line next to the one the lady was standing in. Up close, she was spectacular, with flawless, lightly tanned skin, delicate features, and thick, silken blond hair that was cut straight all the way around. She had lovely hands, with perfectly manicured nails the same red as her outfit and lipstick. It crossed my mind that it would be nice to have those soft, strong sportswoman’s hands gripping the shaft of something other than a golf club. The thought surprised me because I’m not usually attracted to older women, and I believed her to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty, five to ten years older than me. Her red lips were parted, showing the tip of her pink tongue. While I watched her without appearing to watch her, she turned and looked around the lobby with a anxious air.

  The glittering space was filling up as the Friday-evening rush came on, well-heeled people from Los Angeles, San Diego, and points around the globe jostling for position in the check-in lines. The bobbing faces ranged from doughy-white to dark brown, flaccid to eagle-sharp. Twenty conversations in several languages competed for decibel space around us. As the lady reached the desk, I edged in as close as I could without being conspicuous.

  “We have you in a Catalina Suite, Mrs. Evermore,” the pretty young Latina desk clerk was saying, focusing on her computer screen. “Room 589, overlooking the pool with a view of the Santa Rosa Mountains. How many keys will you need?”

  “Two,” the lady said unhappily, glancing around the lobby again.

  The clerk ran two key cards through the coding machine and inserted them in a paper folder. “You go left when you come out of the elevator on the fifth floor, left again and then follow the hallway to your suite. A bellman will be right up with your luggage.”

  “Can’t someone bring it now?” the lady said.

  “We’re very busy,” the clerk said. “It will be just a few minutes.”

  “Please,” the lady said. “I’d much rather have the luggage go up with me.”

  Her words caught my heart like the toe of a punter’s shoe, sending it soaring into the blue sky above the stadium. She didn’t want that Samsonite out of her sight.

  “Let me see what I can do,” the Latina said, and walked away to the end of the counter, where there was a traffic jam of laden luggage carts and harried bellboys. She spoke to a plump black man with a goatee, who nodded and pointed to the red suitcases. As the clerk came back, the goatee maneuvered the cart into the clear.

  “John will take you to your room, Mrs. Evermore.”

  “Thank you so much. What is your name, dear?”

  “Loretta, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Loretta.”

  “My pleasure, ma’am.”

  You don’t get that kind of service at Motel 6.

  As the lady and the black bellman moved toward the elevators on the far side of the lobby, a hulking matron in a green tweed outfit more suitable for wintertime Chicago than Indian Wells charged past them in the opposite direction, bearing down on the front desk as if it were a buffet. Barging through the resentful crowd, she leaned her bosom across the counter to address the clerk next to the one who had waited on Evermore.

  “Where are my bags?” she screeched in a falsetto that was comical coming from her pro lineman’s body. She was six feet tall, probably 275 pounds, with a big fry cook’s head and what looked like size-twelve feet squeezed into size-ten brown leather traveling shoes. “We’ve been waiting half an hour and we can’t even change our clothes to go out to dinner. What kind of hotel is this? My husband isn’t paying four hundred dollars a night to be treated like this. We’ve been on a plane for six hours and we’re starving to death!”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the clerk, flustered by the onslaught. “Where are you-what room are you in?”

  “I’m in room 569, and I want my luggage now!”

  While all eyes were fixed on the drama of the bitchy snowbird and the beleaguered desk clerk, I reached over the counter and took a blank key card from the stack beside the coding machine and murmured my way through the crowd to sit on a tan leather couch against the wall.

  After about ten minutes, the Latina who had waited on Evermore disappeared through a doorway behind the front desk. I made my way back to the counter.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a woman arguing with two children at the front of one of the lines, then spoke to the clerk, holding out the stolen card: “There’s something wrong with this card. My wife forgot her medication in our room and when we tried to get back in the door wouldn’t open.”

  The clerk glanced from the woman to me and back.

  “Go ahead and help him,” the woman panted, trying to wrestle into submission a freckle-faced demon who was squealing and kicking a suitcase.

  “What room are you in?” the clerk asked me.

  “Room 589, Evermore,” I said.

  She looked at her computer screen, nodded, pressed a couple of keys, and ran the blank card through the machine. “Here you go, Mr. Evermore. Sometimes if you put them next to a credit card in your wallet, it messes them up. It should work now.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I found Reggie sitting in a green plaid easy chair in the bar, finishing his second Budweiser. The bag was on the floor beside him.

  “No sign of the punk,” he said after I sat down in the plaid chair next to him. “How’d it go?”

  I held up the key card. “We’re in.”

  A cocktail waitress stopped at my elbow. “Can I get you gentlemen anything?”

  “Perrier with lime,” I said.

  “Another Bud, sweetheart.” It was the kind of remark cocktail waitresses usually roll their eyes at, but the woman, who looked like she was in her mid-thirties and had a name tag pinned to her breast that identified her as Tawny, giggled and gave Reggie a lingering sidelong look as she bent over to pick up his empty bottles, grasping the necks with dainty hands. She was built like Bette Midler and looked like she’d know a good time if she saw one.

  “I bet she gives a mean one,” Reggie said, watching her walk away, swishing her hips. “What now?”

  “We might as well wait here. We can’t hang around in the hallway by her room, and she has to come out this way when she goes to dinner.”

  “What if she orders in?”

  “She didn’t bring three suitcases full of clothes to eat in her room.”

  I was beginning to think that the guy in the black leather jacket whom I’d taken for the lady’s escort was just a chauffeur who had dropped her off and gone back to town. I liked thinking that. But then he came into the lobby through the front entrance, talking on a cell phone, and crossed to the elevators.

  His weightlifter’s strut reminded me of high school athletes I’d known back when Reggie and I first met, loud-mouthed wrestlers and football players who sometimes made the mistake in freshman and sophomore year of shoving me in the hallway because I had long hair and smoked dope and didn’t come to games. They weren’t the brightest bunch of jockstraps that ever played grab-ass in the showers, but after I sent the second one home with shattered facial bones they grasped the concept that it might be smarter to pick on a less volatile hippie.

  Reggie doctored my hand after the second fight, pouring 100-proof vodka on my gashed knuckles to keep them from getting infected. He was moving ten pounds of Me
xican pot and an ounce of soul-satisfying brown heroin each month back then. He had a sky-blue Thunderbird convertible and 650 BSA chopper with a candy-red teardrop tank. Looking back, he was small-time, but he loomed big in the neighborhood. It was the peak of his criminal success prior to joining me in California, and a big chunk of his confidence still rested on that image of himself.

  They kicked me out of school for a month after that fight. Since I didn’t have anything else to do I started riding with him, learning the Mexican dope business, banging the little biker chicks who were left over.

  Reggie was on his fourth beer when the lady and the black jacket stepped out of the elevator. She had changed into a slinky midnight-blue silk dress and had a matching cashmere shawl draped over her bare shoulders. The two were so mismatched that it was jarring, an angel holding hands with an ape. She was a diamond carefully crafted by society to be one of its crown jewels while he was more like a pebble of windshield glass left on the bloody pavement after a fatal collision. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing together, if he was a gigolo or if something else was going on. As they crossed the lobby to the entrance, he held her arm more like she was his prisoner than his lover.

  “Pay the check,” I said to Reggie. “I’ll be right back.”

  I walked over toward the entrance where I could see out the big glass doors. The lady was already in the Lincoln, sitting stiffly in the front seat, looking straight ahead. The valet was handing the keys to the escort, extending his arm full length and keeping his distance, like someone touching a snake with a stick. There was no tip.

  When I turned back toward the bar, I saw Tawny standing beside Reggie’s chair with her right hand on a thrust hip. As I walked over, she burst out laughing and struck him on the shoulder with the leather check holder in a “Go on with you, now” sort of way.