Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

“He’s Discenza’s partner.”

“What’s it mean for us?”

“The financing for the deal is supposed to close on Tuesday, and Baba needs the necklace as collateral for his share of the equity. The way commercial real estate deals work, a bank puts up most of the money-tens of millions in this case-but the bankers want the developers to carry risk, too. Makes them feel more secure that the developers really believe in the project. If we take the diamonds and Baba can’t come up with his share, it might torpedo the deal. Hard to say exactly how much shit that would stir up with Discenza and his crowd, but there would definitely be some wild-eyed Italians in the vicinity.”

“You been busy, bro. How’d you find all this shit out?”

I told him about the documents in the guru’s bedroom and my conversation with Evelyn.

He made saucer eyes. “You mean you took her out to dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I was playing contractor when I met her at the ashram yesterday morning and she asked me to come over to her house to take a look at some work she needs done.”

“That place by the canal?”

“Yeah.”

“Slick! You got her liquored up and pumped her dry. Did you bang her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She was too drunk.”

“Aw, man-that’s what you want with a snooty piece like that. Lower her inhibitions and all that pent-up wildness comes out. She’d of let you do all kind of shit to her.”

“Maybe next time.”

Reggie made a sour face, annoyed by my failure to sodomize the rich lady.

“When we gonna grab the rocks?” he said.

“Evelyn’s lawyer is bringing the necklace back from the desert tonight. He’s supposed to take it to his office in Santa Monica. If he does, we’ll B and E the place later on. I looked it over. It’s a good setup.”

“Prep work?”

“We need to buy some tools and find out where he lives.”

“Why we need to know that?”

“If it’s late when he gets back from Indian Wells you got to figure there’s a chance he’ll go straight home and keep the jewels there overnight. If we can find it, we’ll case his house this afternoon and then stake out both places this evening to see where he takes the diamonds. You can watch his house while I watch the office.”

“Speakin’ of sparklers, when we gonna cash in those earrings?” Reggie had an above-average ability to sense fluctuations in the underworld ether. He usually knew when money he had an interest in had changed hands.

“They’re cashed,” I said, reaching into my pocket and handing him three of the bank-banded packets of hundreds.

Reggie’s bearded face took on an angelic look as he riffled the currency under his nose, breathing in the bracing scent of Treasury Department ink. Then he caught himself and scowled. He was delighted by the newly printed bills, but felt compelled to quarrel a little bit.

“This all you got for them?”

“That’s your cut.”

“So six grand’s all you got?”

“Shut up,” I said. “You’re lucky to get that after letting that goon sneak by you at the hotel.”

“Don’t start that shit again,” he said.

“I’m not starting it, bro. I’m finishing it. I talked to Evermore, remember? She told me. Jimmy went in the front.”

Reggie was silent for a moment, his face blank. Then he shrugged and grinned, officially retiring the lie.

We found Mr. Parker napping at the lot, leaning back against his shack in an old kitchen chair, soaking up the morning sunshine. I woke him gently but he didn’t take it like a Christian.

“Lot of in-and-out for a weekday,” he muttered as he handed me the keys.

I drove to the library to see if the home phone and address of Armand Hildebrand, Sr., was listed in the Greater Los Angeles phone directory. Reggie stayed in the car. The antagonistic years he had spent in the public school system before punching out his junior high school principal and walking out the front door of academia for good halfway through eighth grade had made him allergic to learning environments. He avoided bookish places the way most people avoid dentists’ offices.

Hildebrand was listed, which was good. But I cringed when I saw his address. He lived on Laurel Way, just above Sunset behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was one of the most heavily patrolled neighborhoods in the basin.

We drove out Santa Monica Boulevard, past Century City Mall and the Los Angeles Country Club, and turned left on Beverly Drive. A few minutes later, we turned off Beverly onto Laurel Way. Hildebrand’s place was an impressive brick-and-clapboard Colonial, probably five thousand square feet. The landscaping harmonized with the architectural style. There were mature sweet gum and sycamore trees along with an abundance of azalea and rosebushes, the kind of plants you’d see in Connecticut or Virginia. A Brink’s Security sign by the driveway threatened an armed response.

I pulled over down the block and parked in the shade of a jacaranda tree to observe the house. This was where people with real money lived, the people who rich people called rich. The homes went for anywhere from two to twenty million, having doubled in value during the 1980s real estate boom and recovered from the early nineties crash in property values. If Hildebrand had hung his fedora here for a decade or more, he had made millions just waking up in the morning. Made we wonder what other valuables besides the necklace we might find in his house.

Before we’d been parked five minutes, a white Taurus with a Beverly Patrol decal drove past. The gray-haired security guard behind the wheel stared at us openly as he went by. While the exhaust from the Taurus still hung in the air, a Beverly Hills police cruiser rolled past in the opposite direction. Like the rent-a-cop, the real cop gave us a good looking-over as he went by. If we hadn’t been in a new luxury car, he probably would have stopped and asked us pleasantly if he could be of any assistance, wanting to know if we were lost or visiting someone in the neighborhood. As it was, he likely noted my license number.

“This is no good,” Reggie said. “Fuckin’ cops are crawling out of the woodwork.”

“You’re right,” I said. Between the armed Brink’s guards poised over the horizon, the grim-faced Beverly Patrol, and the alert city cops, it was a dangerous location. “We’ll focus on his office. If he doesn’t show up there tonight, we’ll rob him at the bank tomorrow morning.”

“Where’s it at?”

“On Wilshire, about a mile from here.”

We drove to the Bank of America and looked it over. Pulling an armed robbery in the parking lot on a Tuesday morning would be risky, with lots of traffic on Wilshire and a steady stream of people entering and leaving the bank. Success would depend a little bit on luck and a lot on clean, fast execution. The best thing about the location was its proximity to the 405 freeway. An entrance ramp a quarter mile west made for a great getaway route.

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon buying burglary and safecracking tools at scattered locations to hide our intention. We bought a hand sledge, a set of Mayhew cold chisels, and some hardened punches at an Ace hardware in Van Nuys. In Reseda, we picked up pry bars and two extra-long eighteen-inch screwdrivers, one flathead, one Phillips. I paid three hundred and forty dollars for the best cordless reciprocating saw at the Sears store in Northridge and another two hundred and seventy-five for the heaviest half-inch Craftsman drill. I still had the drill I had taken to the desert, but I wanted a backup.

We bought flashlights, rope, and two extra sets of titanium drill bits at another hardware store in the valley and stopped by a ski shop to pick up pullover masks and a couple of small backpacks to carry the tools in. All the stores were miles from Santa Monica. If we had to flee without the tools, the cops would never be able to canvass up a witness to identify us as the purchasers. We’d wipe them down before the robbery and only handle them with gloves after that. The power tools had serial numbers printed on heavy foil glued to their hard plastic housings. We peeled the foil off.