“There’s a phase two,” he said, “but you didn’t hear it from me. I have to get going now.”

I wasn’t actually going to give him the money. I only offered it to him to get a sense of where the corruption lay. It wouldn’t be beyond some city inspectors to take advantage of an atmosphere of redevelopment and the specter of eminent domain to extort money from frightened property owners.

Having the house condemned would actually be convenient for me and Reggie. If we took the necklace that night or the next morning, I planned to leave town afterward. But a sudden departure might attract attention. The threat of condemnation would give us a perfect excuse if anyone ever tracked us down and asked us why we took off.

“How’d Pete know this was gonna happen?” Budge asked Candyman as I walked back through the living room.

“He’s probably the sumbitch that sicced that tricky inspector on us,” Candyman said. “Mo’fucker made it sound like if we let him in he’d make Sharpnick fix the place up for us, but he’s really planning to put us in the street.”

Upstairs, I found Reggie standing in front of the wavy mirror in his bedroom, struggling to drag a plastic comb through his brassy curls, and not having much luck. Chavi was gone, leaving a neatly made bed and straightened-up room behind her.

“Word from the front, bro,” Reggie said, looking at me in the mirror.

“What?”

“Guess who I saw sneaky Pete talkin’ to yesterday afternoon?”

“Who?”

“Bubba Rubba.”

“The guru?”

“If that’s what you want to call him.”

“Where and when?”

“Half a mile north of here, where they were having that meetin’ on the beach. ‘Round five.”

“Anybody else with them?”

“A wop with a thousand-dollar suit who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.”

“What were they doing?”

“When I spotted em, they were a ways down the boardwalk, watching people walk away from the meetin’, like they wanted to see who was there. Then they went into a bar. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

“Baba went into a bar in his dhoti?”

“Nah-he was wearing street clothes.”

I was surprised that Baba would appear with Discenza in public. Maybe he thought no one would recognize him in an Armani. Or maybe he didn’t care. With the deal poised to go through, he might be ready to abandon the guru dodge and become an ordinary corrupt businessman. Pete meeting with the two of them fit like a puzzle piece.

“What are they up to?” Reggie asked.

“The Italian is a crooked city councilman named Discenza. He’s trying to develop a resort on the beach. That’s what the protest was about. I think Pete’s been helping him put pressure on property owners, coercing them to sell out. He probably met Discenza while him and the other stooges were doing demolition work up there.”

“How’s Baby Huey fit in?”

“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.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

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.