Criminal Karma (3 page)

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.”

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 Mexican 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.

“Your friend’s pretty funny,” she said to me as I climbed up the two shallow steps into the bar.

“Don’t encourage him,” I said.

“Shall I charge this to your room?” she said, holding the leather folder poised between us.

“Sure, sweetheart, why not,” Reggie said, reaching out to take the check. He scrawled a name and room number, added 25 percent, and handed the folder back to Tawny.

“Why thank you, Mr. Delmonte,” she said, her eyes lighting up when she saw the tip. “You’re on the fourth floor, huh?”

“Yeah,” Reggie growled, “I’ll be home later if you want to come up.”

Tawny’s jolly face got serious. She looked plainer and older without the smile. “You mean it?” she said.

Reggie winked and nodded. Cryptic. Her smile came back but it was sad. “You’re just kidding,” she said.

Reggie gave the slightest of shrugs, shoulders going up a quarter inch and then back down, as if to say, “I made the offer.”

“Oh, you!” Tawny said and walked away with a little extra swish, glancing back once over her shoulder.

“Did you make that name up?” I asked.

“No! Thad be too risky. Old codger was leaving as I came in. I snuck a peek at the check on his table and got his name and room number. He went out the front with his old lady and got in a limo while you were ripping off the key card.”

Over at the register, the waitress was looking closely at the check.

“What if Tawny notices your name is the same as the old guy’s?” I said, looking around to see if there was anyone between us and the nearest exit, thinking that I was going to leave Reggie at a rest stop in the desert if he fucked up this score.

“Shift changed right after he left. She just came on.” Smug.

“Yeah, well, here she comes again,” I said. Tawny was walking across the floral rug toward us, check in hand, funny look on her face. Halfway to our table, another customer tugged on her sleeve, asking a question. She spoke with the man briefly, then continued on toward us.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Delmonte,” she said to Reggie, her manner hovering between apology and coquetry, “but I can’t tell if that is a seven or a nine on your room number.”

“Nine,” Reggie said.

“That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”

“No bother, babe,” Reggie said, gruff but genial.

He looked at me as she walked back to the counter. “See? No sweat.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but it was still a stupid chance to take for a twenty-five-dollar bar bill when there’s a couple hundred grand on the table.”

I couldn’t blame him too much. Both of us were as full of larceny as a slot machine is of quarters.

We rode up to the fifth floor in an elevator lined with mahogany and padded brocade. The elevator floor was covered with a carpet that had the word
FRIDAY
woven into the wool pile. They changed the carpet each day for the benefit of travelers who had lost their place in the continuum of time.

Coming out of the elevator alcove, we stepped onto a carpeted walkway that went continuously around all four sides of the atrium, numbered doors on one side, railing on the other. At the corners, hallways led to the wings of the gigantic hotel. Standing at the railing, looking down five stories, we had a clear view of the entrance and front desk. The lobby and lounge were crowded with miniature people, and the murmur and clatter of their self-absorbed oblivion rose up to us like faithless prayers to an empty heaven.

Tawny was clearing a table in the bar, looking girlish in the distance. Glancing up the way people do when they sense someone watching them,
she saw us and waved, stretching her arm up high and waggling her hand. Reggie gave her a little salute.

I left him at the railing to watch the entrance and started down the wide hallway that led to 589, heavy black bag hanging from my shoulder. Anyone who has ever read the numbers on a lottery ticket over and over, feeling the realization that they have actually won spreading like an orgasm through their bones and belly, knows how I felt approaching the room of Evelyn Evermore in Indian Wells on the last Friday in January 1996. The adrenaline pump had kicked on like an air-conditioner compressor, flooding the spongy tissue of my brain with epinephrine, bringing a fresh surge of exhilaration. I had felt alien and out of place in normal society for as long as I could remember, but I was at home in the world of crime, happy as a soldier at the end of a war he never expected to survive as he crosses the bridge back into the town he came from.

The hallway was illuminated by crystal chandeliers that sparkled above my head. The rose-colored carpet was springy beneath my feet. I passed one dark-skinned housekeeper who snubbed her cart against the wall and stood with downcast eyes as I passed, and one room-service tray piled with dirty dishes and wadded cloth napkins outside the door of a suite.

I walked past 589, which was near the end of the long hallway. At the very end, there was a fire exit. The door opened into a bare steel and concrete stairwell that I could descend in a hurry if I had to. To my right as I faced the fire door, a narrow hallway extended for twenty feet, then jogged out of sight. I didn’t explore it.

Back at the door to the lady’s suite, I slid the key card into the slot. The green light blinked on, the lock beeped and, with a quick glance up and down the hallway, I stepped into a future far different than the one I imagined.

The living room
was furnished richly in desert brown and tan with umber and gold accents. Directly in front of me as I entered, a sliding glass door opened onto a large balcony. Through the door, framed by heavy gold drapes, I could see the orange disk of the sun half hidden by the Santa Rosa Mountains, which rose abruptly several miles to the west. Early in the morning when they are bathed in eastern light, the mountains glow red. But they turn black in the afternoon.