“Okay. If you got a warrant or I committed some kinda crime, you got to do your duty. But I’m a citizen and I will not be bullied by the loose talk of strangers.”
“This case involves kidnapping and national security,” Bruce said because it was his turn. “You have a duty here.”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“We got your address from the LAPD.”
“Really?” I was sure that neither Frisk nor Manning had given them my address.
“May we come in?” Sorkin asked.
“No.”
“Have you been in contact with a man named Robert Mantle?”
Robert.
“I have not.”
“Who hired you to look for Miss Goldsmith?” Bruce asked.
“I didn’t say that I’m looking for her, and even if I was I have no idea of any supposed client’s name. I don’t even know if you’re really FBI agents.”
“You don’t want to run afoul of the government, Mr. Rawlins,” Agent Sorkin told me.
I figure that he and his partner were in their early thirties, college graduates who had a taste for law enforcement but didn’t like doughnuts. Sorkin’s flat pronunciation marked him as coming from the nation’s heartland, and his consternation told of a deeply held belief that his culture was the true America whereas mine was that of Other. He, and Agent Bruce, would never understand how I might rightfully refuse their superiority, their official status, or their birthright.
“Is there anything else?” I asked.
“Are you going to answer my questions?”
“I am not.”
The FBI agents, who never showed me their ID, turned their heads to regard each other. Should they arrest me? Should they push me into the house and force me to answer their questions? I had no doubt that they might utilize such tactics. And if I was another kind of man in a different profession I might have tried to placate them.
But I was who I was and what I was by choice and inclination—and then there was history. Maybe if they had shown me their identification, asked for help, or at least smiled, I might have been persuaded to accommodate them. But the freedom I had to refuse had its own story. Millions of people had died, and there were those who were still dying for my freedom to say no.
Maybe one day Agents Bruce and Sorkin would understand that simple fact.
“This isn’t some kind of game, Mr. Rawlins,” Agent Bruce said. “We have to ask you to stop any activity you’re involved in that has to do with Rosemary Goldsmith or Robert Mantle.”
I gave him a wan smile and a crooked nod, then closed the door in his face.
19
There was a quarter cup of cold coffee left in the white diner mug. I took my time drinking the strong, bitter dregs, making plans as well as I could. I was almost completely in the dark about what case I was working on and exactly what crime had been committed. I’d been paid and paid well for this confusion.
The involvement of the FBI was a sign that I had strayed into some kind of minefield. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Rosemary Goldsmith. Was she dead, tied up in a closet and scared to death, or laughing with her friends?
Because I couldn’t answer any one of those questions I decided to take a walk.
There was no evidence of a surveillance team keeping watch on my new home, not that I would be able to tell if Uncle Sam really wanted to keep tabs on me. I didn’t think that I was that big or that expensive a threat. Every pair of eyes used to watch a suspect had an hourly rate that went into time and a half before you knew it.
I couldn’t imagine that I was being watched, but the world I lived in was quite a bit larger than my imagination.
So I grabbed a handful of change from a jar that survived the move, then sauntered up to Pico, took a left turn, and stopped at a phone booth outside of a Winchell’s Donuts store near La Cienega.
“Hello,” he said, answering the phone on the twelfth ring.
“Hungover again, Melvin?”
“What do you want?”
“I thought we had an agreement.”
Suggs groaned.
“I asked about your guy and the girl too,” he said. “Nobody knew anything more than what I already told you. For whatever reason the top brass seems to be holdin’ this one close to the vest.”
“That’s not a surprise. Them comin’ to my home on Sunday says that. But I was thinkin’… maybe I could be a little proactive.”
“Pro-what?”
“Preemptive.”
“Say again?”
Melvin knew what the words meant. He just liked to fuck with me sometimes.
“I’d like you to call your contact and find out if there’s anything in the files about Bob’s closest relatives,” I said. “Maybe one of them knows something. Somebody said that he lives with his mother, at least he did until recently.”
“I could do that.”
“If you called ’em now then you could get back to me at this pay phone.” I rattled off the number printed on the pay phone’s dial. “My phone at home just might be bugged.”
“Now?”
“Why not? The sun is up and the FBI just told me that the sands are already runnin’ out.”
“FBI?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I haven’t finished vomiting yet this morning, Easy.”
“And here I am sober, out on the street looking for your wayward girlfriend.”
Suggs paused then. He didn’t like me calling him at home and giving orders, but the chain of command was wrapped around his desire to find Mary Donovan.
“Gimme that number again,” he said.
I did.
“Okay, Easy. You sit tight and I’ll see what I can see.”
I stood there inside the modern, three-walled phone booth feeling as if I was at least in the game. I had always been a man of actions. I liked reading and thinking and making plans, but it was when I was on the move that I felt most balanced.
“Excuse me, mistah,” a woman said. She was young and black-skinned, five-two in flat shoes, and lovely in the hard way that poverty imparts to its denizens.
“Yes?”
“I need to make a collect call to my auntie down Galveston.”
“What she gonna say when the operator tells her that?”
“She gone be mad at me,” the young woman said with emphasis. “But I need to talk to her father ’cause I lost my job an’ been th’owed out my room.”
I reached in my pocket and came out with a handful of quarters, nickels, and dimes. These I held out, offering them to the young woman. She must have been about nineteen.
“I need this telephone,” I said. “I’m waiting for an important call. But take this money and call your aunt direct. There’s a whole bank of phones in the parking lot of the five-and-dime across the street.”
The woman looked at the money before taking it, and then she eyeballed the store and its parking lot. She turned back to me, peering deeply to perceive any catch to my actions or advice.
“Thank you,” she said when she could find no defect. “Thanks a lot.”
I was thinking that I should find out the name of Suggs’s contact and go straight to the police with Roger Frisk’s name, telling them that I’m on the case but a little confused.
“Pardon me,” another woman said. This one was older than I, white, and tall—maybe five-eight. She wore red and had coiffed brown hair that was streaked with gray.
“Yes?”
Instead of saying anything she moved her head in a somewhat intricate fashion, communicating quite clearly that I should move away from the phone.
“I am waiting for a call,” I said in Standard English.
“I need to use this phone.”
“This phone?”
She stared.
I shrugged and leaned back.
“You aren’t using it,” she reasoned.
“If you saw a man sitting down in front of a plate of pork chops,” I replied in the same co
ndescending tone, “but he wasn’t eating right then, would you just take his dish away?”
“Move,” she ordered.
“There’s a phone in the parking lot across the street.”
“I’m standing right here.”
“I know that,” I said. “And I’m standing in your way.”
The lady’s neck quivered. She was, I believe, considering pulling me out of that booth bodily when suddenly she turned on her high heel and stormed off.
“Hey, pal,” someone said as I watched the woman head east at a fast clip. “Let me get in there and make a quick call.”
This phone patron was also white, in his thirties, and dressed in a sky blue suit that would melt, not burn, if exposed to an open flame. He was wearing a straw hat that was rigid and well formed. One lock of blond hair had escaped the band and hung down next to his left ear. I remember thinking that he might have been a hippie in disguise.
“I’m waitin’ for a call.”
“I’ll just be a second and if they call while I’m on they’ll just call back.”
He was right, of course.
“I’m waiting,” I said anyway.
“But this is a public phone,” he argued. “You have to let anyone who wants use it.”
It struck me that if I was lonely all I had to do was go to a pay phone and wait for people to come up and engage me.
“I’m waiting,” I said again.
“I’ll only be a minute,” he said.
And then the phone rang.
“Easy?” Melvin Suggs said.
“Yeah, Mel.”
“You got a pencil and paper?”
“Right here.”
I took the small notepad and Bic pen from my breast pocket and wrote down an address on Hoover.
“That’s for Belle Mantle,” Suggs said, “his mother. She’s the only blood relative currently residing in Los Angeles, at least that the department has on file. He has a cousin that lives in L.A. sometimes but right now he’s overseas in the military.”
“Thanks, Mel,” I said. “You mind if I ask you to run a partial license plate past your friend?”
“Sure. But it might take some time.”
“California plates. A-X-I were the first three characters,” I said. “Then there was a two. I didn’t get the last two digits. But it was a gold Ford Fairlane.”
“Got it,” he said, and then he hung up; going off to continue with his morning vomit, no doubt.
“Excuse me,” a man said.
It was a policeman. He stood there with a partner and the angry white woman. The man in the straw hat was gone. I wondered, while taking in my latest visitors, if the young black woman had gotten in touch with her aunt.
“Yes, Officer?”
“This woman said you threatened her.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
I produced my detective’s photo ID from the outside breast pocket of my jacket.
“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m on the job for the LAPD. Call a man named Tout Manning in Roger Frisk’s office. He’ll vouch for me.”
“This call had to do with that job?” the freckle-faced and beefy policeman asked, pointing at the pay phone.
“Yes, sir.”
“Dwight,” the one cop said to the other.
“Yeah?”
“Call it in.”
“Okay.”
“What are you talking about?” the white woman said in a very stern, almost loud voice.
“We’re checking out his story, ma’am.”
“There’s no story. He assaulted me.”
“He hit you?”
“With words,” she said. “He assaulted me with words. He threatened me. He blocked my passage. I want you to arrest him.”
“Make the call, Dwight.”
“I want your name and ID number,” the woman demanded of the policeman not named Dwight.
“Can I see your identification, ma’am?” he replied.
“My, my …” She turned away again and stomped off.
The officer watched her for a moment and then handed me my PI’s license.
“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “When a civilian comes to us with a complaint we have to ask some questions.”
“That’s okay by me,” I said. “I got plenty of answers.”
20
“Excuse me, mistah,” a familiar voice said.
I was walking toward Point View.
The young woman who had to call her aunt wore a short, dark blue, one-piece dress. The tones of the dress and her dark brown skin were almost equal, suggesting the image of what she might look like naked. She carried a pink plastic purse and wore a thin silver band on the index finger of her left hand.
“Yes?” I said.
We had stopped there at the southwest corner of Crescent Heights and Pico.
“I wanted to thank you for givin’ me the money to call my Auntie Lee.”
“You already thanked me. Was she home?”
“She always home. Auntie Lee got arthritis in her legs an’ she hardly go nowhere.”
“Was it a good talk?” I had a soft spot for people from down home. Los Angeles was like the New World for Southern black immigrants as much as New York must have been for the Italians, Irishmen, and Jews at the turn of the century and before.
“Her father, Granddaddy Arnold, is in the hospital. I called her to ask him for help and she ended up askin’ me to go help him.”
Tears that refused to fall flooded her eyes. She was angry, sad, and lost all at once. For some reason I thought of the door labeled COMBUSTIBLES in Stony Goldsmith’s underground weapons research fortress.
“What’s your name?” I asked the young woman.
“Natalie,” she said. “Natalie Crocker.”
“My name’s Easy Rawlins,” I said.
We shook hands.
“Do you know how to clean houses, Natalie?”
“Of course.”
I took out my little wire-bound notepad and scribbled a number and a name. I tore out the page and handed it to her.
“Julie?” she said in an attempt at phonetically sounding out the word J-e-w-e-l-l-e.
“No,” I said. “Jewel like a diamond.”
“Who is she?”
“She owns an apartment building up in Beverly Hills where they let out the place by the week to businessmen and people in the movie business. After they move out she has people come in and clean up. Tell her that Easy Rawlins told you to call. And here,” I said, handing her two ten-dollar bills. “Use this to keep yourself together until you get the job.”
“Why?” she asked. The question didn’t need elaboration.
“It’s nice to find a little bit of down home in a new place.”
Her nostrils flared and once again she became wary.
“Call her,” I said. “If you don’t trust what you hear, buy a newspaper. There’s a thousand jobs listed every day in Southern California.”
I turned and headed for my new house.
Belle Mantle lived on South Hoover near Gage, down the block from the Good Shepherd Baptist Church. It was a single-story flat-topped bungalow, dirty pink in hue. It looked more like an incinerator building for some large manufacturing company than it did a residence. This industrial cottage consisted of two apartments; I could tell that by the two mailboxes standing on weathered posts at the outer edge of the barren lawn, that and the two front doors set side by side at the middle of the building—Belle was the door on the left.
I knocked and waited, knocked again.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Mantle?”
“Yes?”
“My name is Easy Rawlins and I’ve come to ask you some questions about your son.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. Her words could have been the first sentence in a French-existentialist monograph. I smiled at that.
“Please, ma’am, it’s just a few questions.”
“Who are you?”
“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”
“What do you want?”
“Do you attend Good Shepherd?”
“Yes,” she said. There was reluctance in her tone because with those words I was insinuating myself into her life.
“Is Wanda Bateman still Reverend Atkins’s aide?”
“You know Wanda?”
“Why don’t you call her and ask about Easy Rawlins. I know Wanda and Francis Atkins too.”
“You wait here,” she said through the closed door.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Wanda says that she didn’t send you,” the woman’s voice said a few minutes later.
“She didn’t,” I agreed, “but I bet she also told you that I’m a good man who doesn’t try to hurt my black brothers and sisters.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about your son.”
A few moments more passed and then the chain rattled and more than one latch clicked. The brown door in the dirty pink wall pulled inward. In the shadowy room stood a buttery brown woman in a full-length gray-green dress that had big yellow buttons down the front. She was barefoot and wore white-rimmed glasses.
“Do you know my son, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I only ever saw him box, Ms. Mantle.”
She couldn’t help but smile.
“His father should have never given him them boxin’ gloves,” she said. “He wasn’t meant to be no boxer but he sure did love it when he put them gloves on.”
“May I come in?”
The small sitting room was almost a perfect cube. It had only one small and heavily curtained window. Three padded turquoise chairs were set in a semicircle around a low walnut coffee table. There was a partially completed twelve-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the broad table. The box was on the floor.
“I don’t have nuthin’ to offer,” she said after we were seated.
“That’s okay. I’m only here to ask about your son.”
“I already talked to them other policemen, Detective,” she said. “I told them that I don’t know nuthin’ about where Bobby is but he didn’t do nuthin’ wrong.”
“LAPD has already been here?” I asked.
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