Authors: Steven M. Thomas
“Tell her to help me,” he said, conspiratorially. “I promise no one will know of your involvement in any of this. It is in your interest to let me go.”
“I don’t think so, Baba.”
Pete was stirring on the floor and Namo had pulled himself together. Only Jimmy Z was still incapacitated. He was in shock, his leg bleeding badly, despite the tourniquet.
“Get up,” I said to Pete and Namo. They got to their feet slowly, wincing and cursing, and stood unsteadily beside the bulk of Baba Raba, looking like his abused children.
According to the Seth Thomas wall clock, it was 5:10. Baba was late for his meeting with Discenza and the appraiser. Budge was standing behind the three upright bad guys, looking at me, waiting for instructions. Pointing the Tomcat at them to keep them still, I raised my other hand and brought it down, a judge passing sentence. Budge grinned and nodded.
Like a man playing an oversize xylophone, he went down the row, cracking first Namo and then Pete on top of the head with the broad edge of the billy. As they collapsed in sequence onto the bloody floor, I was moving Mary, Evelyn, and Oz into the hall, Reggie bringing up the rear. He looked back from the doorway as Budge raised the billy above Baba’s cannonball head.
“Hey, Baby Huey,” he said, thrusting out his hip and slapping his broad ass, “meditate on this.” Baba’s eyes got wide with what looked like fury, then snapped shut as Budge rapped his thick skull. The house shook when his body hit the floor.
On the street, we piled into the Cadillac—me, Mary, and Reggie in front, Budge, Oz, and Evelyn in the back. We had only gone a block toward the ocean when a black Cadillac limo turned off Seventh and pulled up in front of the ashram. In the rearview mirror, I saw four men in suits getting out. One of them was Councilman Discenza. The malevolence on his beaked face etched the glass of the mirror.
“Where we going?” Reggie asked.
“The hotel.”
We made it back to Le Merigot without incident. I didn’t think anyone could trace us there. I was about to make a left into the hotel’s semicircular drive when a blue Taurus cut in front of me and pulled up at the entrance
ahead of us. When the valet opened the door, a giantess in a brown linen suit struggled out. Her big hash-slinger’s face was mottled with anger as if someone had just skipped out without paying the check.
It was a face that had launched, at most, a single rowboat. The guy at the oars, who had proposed to it after a dozen longnecks and his first hand job, probably wished by now that he had drowned himself in the lake instead of plunging into matrimonial fire. It was a face I knew.
“We want our luggage brought right up,” the snowbird said shrilly to the valet. “We left the last hotel because of poor service and we won’t stay here if things aren’t to our liking. My husband won’t stand for any malarkey. We have been driving around this cockamamie town for two hours trying to find this place and we’re starving. I hope you have good food in your restaurant and decent portions. They didn’t give you enough food at the last place.”
She was a lady who would always stuff herself and never be full, a spiritual cripple but a stellar consumer. Each expensive stop on her journey was an inevitable disappointment that took her nowhere but closer to the exit door of an oversize casket, lowered without emotion into a prepaid grave.
Reggie looked at me, making saucer eyes: “Ain’t that the lady from …”
“Yes,” I said. “It is. We’ll have to go someplace else.”
“What is it?” Mary said.
“Those people were at the hotel in Indian Wells. They saw us in Evelyn’s room after the fight with Jimmy.”
“I still can’t believe that was you,” Evelyn said, somewhat dreamily, stroking Oz’s hair.
As I pulled past the Taurus, the valet opened the driver’s door and the little husband popped out, making a mean face. I didn’t blame him.
“My wife has to have the best of everything,” he said angrily. “She is not easily satisfied.”
Several blocks south, I took a right, cutting over to the expansive beachfront lot on Nelson Way. I parked at the far edge, near the creaming waves, and turned around to look at Budge.
“Do you know where Candyman is?” I asked him.
“I think he went to Shoshana’s.”
“Can you get in touch with him?”
“Sure, I got the number.”
“Call him and warn him not to go back to the flop, and you stay clear of it, too. The Italians are going to be out for blood.”
After Baba spilled his guts, Discenza’s men would be fanning out to try and find the necklace. They would go to Evelyn’s, the flophouse, maybe even Hildebrand’s office.
“All right, Rob. I’ll let him know.”
“Thanks for your help, Budge,” I said, stopping him before he could ask any of the questions that were crowding onto the tip of his tongue. “Take this for your trouble.” I handed him a packet of ten hundreds.
“Wow! Thanks a lot, man.” He shoved the money into his pants pocket and got out of the car. “I’ll share this with Candy.”
“If anyone asks you what happened at the ashram, you weren’t there and you don’t know anything about it.”
“Gotcha.”
“Take care, brother.”
“You, too, Rob. Thanks again.” Leaning down, he reached in the window to clasp hands with Reggie, biker-style.
“Fly low,” Reggie said.
“You too, man. See ya, Oz.”
“‘Bye, Budge.”
He strode off across the lot with his head high and shoulders back, a valuable player returning to the locker room after a big game. Halfway across, he changed direction, slightly, angling toward the public restroom. I think it was a Teena Marie song that he was whistling.
“What now?” Mary said.
“We have to find someplace to regroup,” I said. I didn’t want to head for Mexico with Evelyn and Oz in tow.
“Why don’t we check into another hotel?” Reggie said.
I shook my head. “We’re too conspicuous. I don’t know what kind of network the Italians have around here. Discenza may put out the word to cabbies and hotel clerks to watch for us. What about your place in Bel Air, Evelyn?”
She had her arm around Oz. His head lay on her shoulder.
“We can’t go there,” she said. “It’s rented out.”
“Any other thoughts?” I asked the group.
“I have a cabin in Big Bear,” Evelyn said. “We could go there.”
“Does Baba know about it?”
“No.”
“Perfect.”
I took the 10 to SR-60, following the same route we had four days earlier
when Evelyn had been ahead of me in a white Lincoln instead of behind me in the backseat of my Caddie. As we passed through Pomona below the Chino Hills, Ozone cried out:
“Look! Cows!”
In a pasture that sloped up from the right side of the highway, Holsteins were chewing their cuds in the evening light. I took the next crossroad and circled back, winding along narrow lanes to a spot above the pasture where the shoulder was wide enough to pull over and park.
“Can I pet them?” Oz said, excited.
“I don’t know,” I said. There was a five-strand barbed-wire fence between us and the cattle and I didn’t want him to get torn up climbing over.
“Pop the trunk,” Reggie said.
I pulled the lever and Reggie got out and walked to the back of the car. The rest of us got out too, watching as he took his church key to the fence and cut the top four stands of wire, pulling them back out of the way.
“Go on down,” he said gruffly.
With a happy laugh, the boy stepped over the bottom wire and ran downhill toward the cattle.
“Be careful,” Evelyn said, following him.
Reggie leaned against the hood, lock snips hanging down in one hand, watching them cross the pasture.
Mary and I were standing next to the car.
“You’re pretty good,” she said. “You got the necklace and torpedoed Baba. You saved me and the kid and gave Evelyn back her grandson.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said. “You were awesome with that knife. You saved my ass.”
There was a tumbledown barn on the other side of the tar road. Taking my hand, Mary led me across the road and around the corner of the weathered building into a grassy area beneath an alder tree. Once we were hidden from view, her small hands with their heartbreaking nails went to the button that fastened her pants. Unzipping, she wriggled her butt free, pushing her jeans and panties down to her knees, then bent over, placing her delicate palms against the rough gray boards of the barn.
“I like it hard,” she said.
Curiously, I was not offended by this.
Afterward, as we walked down through the pasture to where Evelyn was sitting beneath a pine tree, watching Oz stroke the coarse hair of a drowsy dairy cow, Mary gave me a teasing look through her fairy eyelashes.
“That wasn’t very tantric,” she said.
“I felt close to you.”
“I felt close to you, too.” She squeezed my hand, making the chakras in my heart and throat swell. “But if it is tantra, the guy doesn’t come. And I am pretty sure you did!”
“You got me there, baby. It may take a lot of practice before I get it right.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
It was nearly dark by the time we pulled Oz away from his bovine friends and got back on the road. The world must have seemed magical that night to the homeless kid turned heir, his picture books and magazines coming to life around him. It was pretty sparkly for me, too, with the briefcase full of Benjamins and the tough blonde tight beside me, leaning hard against my shoulder and then away, as we switchbacked up Highway 330 into the San Bernardino Mountains. Above five thousand feet there were patches of snow, white among the black pines, and by the time we reached Running Springs the ground was blanketed with cold crystals. As we drove along the Rim of the World Highway toward Big Bear Lake, fresh snow began to fall, big flakes floating down through the headlight beams, carrying Christmas memories like candles and bringing smiles to all our faces.
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.