Criminal Carma Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I took a coil of rope out of one of the packs and tied it to the cast-iron soil stack that pierced the roof a couple of feet from the hole and lowered myself into the bathroom. Reggie handed the tools down to me, then slid down the rope, dropping heavily to the floor. It was a quarter past twelve.

  “How we gonna get back out?” he whispered.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “If we are in good shape, we can climb back up the rope. If we aren’t in such good shape, we can move a piece of furniture in here, climb up on that like an old woman, and have someone pull our fat ass up onto the roof.” I was still in a bad mood because of the thing with Mary.

  “Excuse me for not being a fucking orangutan,” Reggie said, taking a wholly justifiable tone. “Where’s the safe?”

  “Put these on,” I said, handing him a pair of gloves, “and we’ll go find it.”

  Besides the bathroom, the darkened suite consisted of a reception alcove; a large open office area with copying machines, file cabinets, and half a dozen cubicles for secretaries and paralegals; a small kitchen with a sink and refrigerator; and six locked private offices. The name ARMAND HILDEBRAND SR. was engraved on a brass plate on one of the doors.

  The door gave way with a single stomp from Reggie’s size-ten boots and we were in the large and finely furnished office of Evelyn Evermore’s attorney. The blinds on the double-pane windows facing Santa Monica Boulevard were closed against the bright sunlight that would have poured into the room in late afternoon. Lawyers don’t like bright light.

  The wall safe was well concealed behind a hinged section of bookcase. It took us fifteen minutes to find it. The metal tag riveted to the front of the round steel door identified it as a Mosler, a classic brand that has been made in Hamilton, Ohio, since the nineteenth century. It had a class-A fire rating and an Underwriters Laboratories TRTL-30
security rating-a solid, well-made safe, but not impenetrable. For the first time that evening, I felt the happiness of the crime steal over me.

  “Can we crack it?” Reggie asked.

  “Yes.”

  There are dozens of ways to open safes, ranging from the stethoscope-and-sensitive-fingers method that predominates in the popular imagination to the use of high explosives. But the easiest way is to find the combination. People have a hard time remembering long sequences of numbers, and a surprising percentage of safe owners write the combination down someplace near the safe. We spent five minutes looking on the bottom of drawers and the backs of pictures and anyplace else that seemed likely. We kept our flashlights pointed straight down, careful not to shine them directly at the windows lest a glimmer of light leak through the blinds and alert the outside world that foul play was afoot in lawyerland.

  We didn’t find the combination.

  That meant drilling.

  I knew the Mosler had a hard-plate in the door to defeat attack from the front. The plate is made of special steel that takes a long time to drill through and may be embedded with chips of carbide that will shatter drill bits. The back of the safe would be ordinary high-tensile steel.

  The small kitchen was adjacent to Hildebrand’s office, with cupboards on the shared wall. One of the cupboards was a dummy, a matching door panel that didn’t open. When the door was pried off, the back of the safe was exposed.

  Before attacking the box, we took two file cabinets from the secretarial pen-one half-size, one full-size-and wrestled them into the bathroom, placing them side by side beneath the hole in the roof. Holding on to the dangling rope, Reggie had no problem climbing up onto the short cabinet, then onto the taller one and from there onto the roof.

  “Stay up there and keep a lookout,” I said.

  “No way,” he said, scrambling back down into the bathroom with an agility surprising in someone who had slammed into as many immovable objects on as many speeding motorcycles as he had. “I wanna see how you bust that Mosler.”

  Up to that night in late January 1996, Reggie’s extensive criminal career had not included safecracking. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to get some OJT, and we didn’t have time to waste arguing. We had not been detected entering the building. The noise we would make drilling the safe would not be audible from the outside. The cops would only come now if we tripped an alarm inside the office that we didn’t know about. If that happened, they would arrive in force and catch us whether we kept a lookout or not.

  “All right,” I said, giving the grizzled sergeant his due. “Let’s steal some jewels.”

  The windowless kitchen was an ideal work area. I closed the door to contain the noise and turned on the light. We laid our new tools out on the counter and wiped them down again to make sure there were no fingerprints, using the cotton gloves that would not come off until we were back on the ground behind the building. I needed two holes in the back of the safe, one for the borescope, so I could see what I was doing inside the box, the other for the long screwdrivers we had picked up that afternoon.

  Traditional safe locks operate via a set of notched wheels called the “wheel pack.” The little click that guys with five o’clock shadows and Lone Ranger masks hear when they slowly turn the combination dial in B-movies is the sound of a lever, called “the fence,” dropping into one of the notches. When all the notches are lined up, the lock bolt slides through a second set of notches and the safe pops open. Attacking from the rear, I would be able to see the wheel pack and move the wheels into proper alignment without using the combination dial.

  We hooked up both drills and carved two holes simultaneously, standing shoulder to shoulder and using a series of bits. It’s hard to drill a large hole in high-grade steel. It takes a long time and lot of muscular effort. It is much easier to drill a small pilot hole, then enlarge it with bits of increasing size. We started with bits three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, followed by three-eighths, three-quarters, and one inch. The oily-factory smell of electric motors straining and the whine of steel cutting steel filled the small room. Hot metal shavings piled up at our feet.

  Working silently with tratakum-like concentration, changing bits quickly and efficiently, leaning on the drills to make the whirling blades dig deep, it took us less than ten minutes to drill two one-inch holes in the “safe.”

  Inserting the lighted borescope in the top hole, I saw the metal plate that covered the back of the lock mechanism. It was secured to the inside of the safe door with four Phillips screws. Turning the scope, I saw the blue jewelry box on a side shelf.

  I used the long Phillips screwdriver to undo the plate, working alternately from both holes. The safe was only sixteen inches deep, so the eighteen-inch screwdriver was plenty long enough. When the plate was out of the way, I studied the wheel pack through the borescope for a while, using the standard screwdriver to probe the action. After letting Reggie take a look, I began to painstakingly nudge the wheels into alignment. It was no picnic getting the entire set into position and I got stuck on the last one. I thought for a while that we were going to have to drill another hole to get a better angle to work from.

  “Let me try,” Reggie said, back to whispering.

  Resolutely ignorant of history, politics, geography, and most other academic subjects, Reggie was a quick study in all things criminal, and a talented mechanic. After peering through the borescope for a minute or so, studying the mechanism, he took the screwdriver and with a flick of his thick wrist managed to pry the final wheel into place. The safe’s spring-loaded bolt retracted with a loud click.

  “Got it!” Reggie said.

  We raced for the door. I squeezed out first, and ran around into Hildrebrand’s office. Mysteriously unhampered by his limp, Reggie was right on my heels.

  The heavy safe door swung open smoothly on concealed hinges, and I had the blue velvet box in my hand again. Taking it to Hildebrand’s desk, I opened it and shined my flashlight on the rose-colored stones. A lot had happened in the eighty hours since I had last seen the necklace. The world had rolled on, becoming a new place each day as it always does. I had met Mary, Baba Raba, and Evelyn. But the diamonds hadn’t changed. More than almost anything else in the material world, they defied the yogic dictum and resisted decay, staying stable in the midst of the flux, like the still point around which the earth revolves. That genuine characteristic went a long way toward explaining why they were able to carry the artificial value that hucksters assigned to them so effectively. Diamonds were beautiful, certainly, refracting light into heavenly rainbows. But their deepest hold on the human heart was that they touched eternity.

  Reggie lifted the necklace from the white satin interior of the box, letting it dangle from his stubby index finger. “Nice merchandise,” he said.

  Both of us were grinning. I could feel my cheeks begin to ache. Taking the necklace off his finger, I put it back in the box and snapped the lid shut.

  “See if there is anything else worth taking,” I said. “I’ll pack up the tools.”

  I had just put the new drill back in its case when Reggie popped in the kitchen door, his eyes as wide open as they could get.

  “You musta been good this year,” he said. “Look what Sanny Claws left.” He held out both hands. There was a canvas bag in his right hand, a thick five-by-twelve-inch manila envelope secured by a rubber band in his left.

  The bag, delightfully heavy, was full of Krugerrands, bearded geezer on one side, antelope on the other. The lawyer was hoarding gold.

  The envelope was stuffed with series EE U.S. Savings Bonds in denominations of $100, $200, and $500, inscribed to various little Hildebrands. Passing his ill-gotten gains on to the next generation-if they were lucky enough to ever actually get their hands on the cash. I could imagine a typical birthday party at the house on Laurel Way:

  “Oh, look, Richard, your grandpa got you another hundred-dollar savings bond!”

  “Can I have it, Mommy?” />
  “No, Grandpa will keep it in his safe for you along with all your other bonds.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  We waited in the shadow of a palm tree at the front corner of Hildebrand’s building until there was no traffic on Santa Monica, then started across the wide, well-lit boulevard, heavy packs bouncing on our shoulders.

  “How much is the gold worth?” Reggie asked, hurrying beside me.

  “Depends on the number of coins,” I said, swiveling my head back and forth, looking in all directions. “Gold’s somewhere between three and four hundred an ounce. Each Krugerrand is an ounce. If there are fifty coins that would be fifteen or twenty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s good money,” Reggie panted.

  “Icing on the cake.”

  “Can we fence the bonds?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’ll they bring?”

  “Depends on the maturity dates. We’ll check it out when we get home.”

  There were ten or twelve cars but no people in Norm’s parking lot as we headed to the rental. We put everything in the trunk except for the Tomcat, which stayed in my belt. I slid in behind the wheel while Reggie took shotgun.

  “Good job, Robby,” he said in his serious mentor voice.

  “You, too, brother.”

  The pistol was digging into my side so I pulled it out of my belt and put it in the glove compartment. I had started the engine but not put the car in gear when a black-and-white swooped in out of nowhere and pulled up beside us, rubber barking as it jolted to a halt. It was such a shock that if I had been in the Seville I might have peeled out as a reflex. The Cadillac was faster than the cop car and I knew the terrain and we might have been able to get away. But I didn’t trust the rental car’s power and I wasn’t used to driving it around corners on two wheels, so I turned off the engine and put my hands on the steering wheel.

  They popped out of their cruiser like they were spring-loaded, the driver circling behind us to check our license plate and get an overview, the ride-along tapping on my window with his club-light. They didn’t have their guns out, which meant they hadn’t made us for the burglary, at least not yet.