Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  “I think in a case like this I’ll give a sliding rate.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “If I bring Rosemary home and the cops don’t come after her I’ll ask twenty-five thousand. If I bring her back in one piece and she has to go to court but gets off easy I’ll ask fifteen. If the courts slam her then it’s only ten.”

  “And if you can’t save her?”

  “Then you won’t owe me a thing.”

  These last words seemed like a pronouncement; so much so that Lenore Goldsmith lowered her head for a moment. But when her face raised up it was clear and strong.

  “What do you need from me?” she asked.

  “Some basic information about where she lived in Santa Barbara and the names of any people who might have some knowledge of her whereabouts, habits, and the like.”

  “You will have it,” she said by way of agreement. “Teh-ha will be my contact with you.”

  “Good. I like him.”

  30

  After maybe forty-five minutes of questions and note-taking, Lenore called out, “Teh-ha.”

  A minute and a half later the rich woman’s wrangler appeared.

  “Make sure that Mr. Rawlins, Easy, can reach you at any time. Give him anything he needs.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The man calling himself Redbird walked me to the front door of the penthouse suite and handed me a business card on which was printed four Los Angeles–area code phone numbers, one from the Bay Area, and another from Boston.

  I was surprised that this man had a business card. This I realized was a kind of adopted chauvinism that had been inculcated in me by American TV, books, newspapers, and a deeply flawed education. I mean, why wouldn’t Teh-ha Redbird have a business card?

  I scribbled what numbers I had on the back of one of his cards.

  “I’ll be here in Los Angeles unless I get in touch,” he said and then he hesitated. He looked at me for a moment, gauging something. Coming to an unspoken conclusion, he held out a hand for me to shake.

  This gesture felt like the unasked-for absolution from a bishop in a religion I had never heard of.

  There was a huge tentlike open-air marketplace on Florence at that time. They sold fresh vegetables, fruit, and fish. It was out of my way but I had standing plans for Wednesday nights, and so I went there and bought eighteen filleted sand dabs, a pound and a half of cranberries, and a bag of oranges.

  I got home by six. Feather was there reading some magazine in the living room.

  “Jackson call?” were my first words to her.

  “Him and Jewelle will be here at seven thirty.”

  “And Bonnie?”

  “She had to take a friend’s place on an overnight flight.”

  “How about your brother?”

  “He’ll be early as usual unless Bennie has trouble with Essie.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned toward the kitchen of the house that was yet to be a home.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we find out where my mother’s mother and her son are?”

  “You mean your grandmother and uncle.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Just as soon as I’m through with this case, baby.”

  Carrying the load of thoughts both pedestrian and deep, I started cooking.

  First I put the cranberries in a pot of boiling water with a cup filled with equal portions of white and brown sugar and the grated peel of two oranges. Then I took out a two-quart plastic container of cooked collard greens, garnished with salt pork, from the freezer. (I had moved the entire contents of the freezer from the old house to the new in a Styrofoam cooler.) I used a butter knife to wedge the greens out of the container and put them in a pot on a low heat. I put three cups of white rice in another pot, added five cups of water, a teaspoon of salt, and three tablespoons of sweet butter.

  While the side dishes were cooking, I cracked six eggs into a Pyrex bowl, mixed them a bit, and threw in the fish. Then I dredged the dabs in seasoned cornmeal and melted a big dollop of lard in my largest cast-iron skillet.

  After all that, I sat down in the dinette and breathed a sigh of relief. Cooking calmed me. I was waist-deep in murder and kidnapping, my daughter was asking for knowledge that might break her heart, more cops than I had ever dealt with were looking into my life, and that wasn’t all of it. But making a simple dinner for my family and friends put it all at bay for the moment.

  Poor men understood that a brief respite now and again was the best we could hope for. Modern-day, university-trained philosophers studied existentialism; we lived it.

  I sat in the little eight-sided room and Feather stayed where she was, knowing instinctively when I needed to be alone. Now and then I tended my pots and pans, appreciating how the steam and scents were in their own way seasoning the house for me and my girl.

  The doorbell rang after that long span of quiet.

  “It’s Juice,” Feather called out as she opened the front door.

  “Set the table in the dining room,” I said to my daughter for the first time ever.

  “Okay,” she replied as if it were a request I had made every day of her life.

  By the time Jackson Blue and Jewelle had arrived, the sand dabs had fried to a golden color. I served the plates in the kitchen and Jesus carried them into the first dining room that I ever had.

  The long room was somewhat bare except for the twelve-foot cottonwood table and chairs that I had bought years before and stored in my garage. It was a good deal but my little house hadn’t been big enough to accommodate the length.

  Feather had poured Jackson a shot of whiskey from a bottle that he’d brought with him. There were two strawberry rhubarb pies that Benita brought from a bakery I liked down in Venice.

  “How’s it goin’, Easy?” Jackson shouted when I came into the room.

  “The wrong direction down a one-lane, one-way street,” I replied.

  He laughed so loudly that little Essie got scared and began to cry.

  Jewelle and Feather were whispering to each other. Jesus was already eating.

  “Damn this fish smell good,” Jackson said. “You know only a Louisiana boy know how to fry fish like this.”

  I sat down to eat and Feather and Jewelle went out to the kitchen, where they prepared three pitchers of water with ice cubes and a slice of lemon dropped into each.

  When she put a water jug down in front of me I glanced at Jewelle and saw something odd in her face; not quite a grimace or a smile, a thought maybe—maybe not quite.

  The conversation, as usual on Wednesday nights, was dominated by Jackson regaling us with hilarious stories of the old days when we were struggling to make the rent. He didn’t tell the worst tales but there were some adventures.

  He was recounting the story of how a woman named Coretta got mad at her boyfriend for fooling around, but because he wasn’t there and Jackson dropped by the house she pulled a pistol on him. There was more to the story than just that but it was enough even to make Jesus smile.

  I was thinking about women and jealousy when it struck me.

  “Jewelle, are you pregnant?”

  The tiny real estate dynamo looked up in shock.

  “How did you know, Easy?” Jackson asked for her.

  “Something about the way she looks at things,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  Feather grabbed Jewelle and hugged her but Jewelle was still staring at me with something like fear in her eyes.

  The conversation was mostly about babies after that. Benita had a lot to say and Essie started laughing as if she understood that the topic had turned to her and her kind. We finished the meal and then did damage to the pies. Jackson, Juice, and I cleared the table while the women talked about motherhood, marriage, and men.

  I washed the dishes and Jesus rinsed and dried, as usual. Little Jackson jumped up to sit on the far end of the sink, where he kept us company.

  “What yo
u workin’ on, Easy?” he asked me. “For real.”

  I told him, with very little editing, about Rosemary, Uhuru-Bob, and all the various players in the confounding case.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know Mantle, would you, Jackson?”

  “Only to see him box. You know he was a man just wouldn’t stop comin’. I never met ’im but I bet I know how you could find him.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a black man hooked up with a white girl, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you bettah believe that there’s a black girl somewhere mad as hell. She knows things about Bobby that nobody else do and she’s willin’ to talk about it too. You know I’m right.”

  And I did, too.

  After the dishes were done, Jackson took a filtered Kent cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket.

  “Not in the house, Jackson,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I decided I wouldn’t smoke in a house where I was raising a child. I don’t know. It just seems kinda dirty.”

  Jackson stared at me a moment and then sighed.

  “Okay,” he said, “but I need me a smoke, so I guess I’ll go out in the street.”

  “Me too, Blue, me too. But let’s go out in the backyard. You comin’, Juice?”

  “No, Pop. I’m going to take Essie from Bennie for a little while.” He glanced at Jackson and then turned full to me and asked, “Are you all right?”

  He asked because if I was in trouble he would do anything to help me; he was just that kind of man—had been since he was six or seven. His concern meant more to me than a loaded gun. It was knowing how close we were that had kept me alive through many a bad time.

  “Yes I am, son,” I said. “It’s a tough case but after that shooting I’m workin’ it from the sidelines.”

  “You sure?”

  I clapped my son’s shoulder and said, “Come on, Jackson, let’s go fire up some cancer sticks.”

  31

  There was a wide round white table cast from some kind of synthetic concrete on the lawn of the backyard. Jackson found an outside switch and flipped on the floodlight I hadn’t known was there. Three curved white benches made from the same artificial material surrounded the table. I took the bench facing the house but Jackson sat on the tabletop. He lit our cigarettes with a single match and for a moment we both experienced the elation of that first drag after a few hours.

  “Congratulations,” I said to my brilliant, cowardly, endlessly funny friend.

  “Yeah,” he replied, as if I had asked if his condition was terminal.

  “You don’t sound too happy.”

  Jackson sighed again and swiveled around to look down at me.

  He had never been a handsome man. Skinny and scared for most of his life, Jackson had had the look of some kind of abused animal whose survival was dependent on the creatures that tortured him. But as the years rolled by a certain something, a kind of character, had formed where before there was only abject fear.

  I knew a man in Houston who used to tell me, It’s true when they tell ya a man don’t change. But he do get older and sometimes he grow into who he is and becomes a man don’t look nuthin’ like he used to.

  “What’s wrong, Jackson?”

  He sighed and took a drag off his cigarette, exhaled the smoke like some minor demon, and groaned again.

  “ ’Bout three months ago Jean-Paul aksed me to come out to the marina to talk business on his boat. He do that pretty often. We was out there drinkin’ good wine and talkin’ ’bout how satellites one day might be able to transfer computer data at high speeds an’ he wanna get into that. Because you see, Easy, all computer information is in what they call a binary format and you could translate anything into that simple language. And so we was—”

  “What about why you so sour, man?” I asked to cut him off. When Jackson started talking about the technical side of his job he could go on for hours.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “You right. You right. Jewelle always say that she can tell when I’m bothered by somethin’ ’cause I start talkin’ physics and math.”

  “And so?”

  “Pretty Smart and her girlfriend Tanya Anika come out to the boat in the afternoon. JP had give Pretty a free pass to get on his boat anytime she wanted and I guess she come out with her girlfriend to get a tan.

  “JP likes good-lookin’ women. You know what Pretty look like and Tanya even finer than her—figure like a maple brown Playboy model and face that old boy Adonis might get distracted by.”

  “And?” I said to keep the story going.

  “We was up near the wheelhouse talkin’ and drinkin’ and the girls went down on the lower deck right below us. Nobody could see in, so they took off all they clothes to lie in the sun. You know I was sweatin’ but I had made up my mind to be good. Then Pretty called up for JP to bring ’em some wine. He brought me down to the wine cellar he got on the boat—”

  “There’s a wine cellar on his boat?”

  “It’s a big boat, man, almost a ship. Anyway he had four choices and so aksed me to help him bring ’em to the girls. Shit. Before you know it JP and Pretty was down in his cabin and Tanya sidled up next to me.…”

  “Nobody could hardly blame a man for that, Jackson,” I said. “I mean, damn. On a yacht drinkin’ wine and a beautiful naked girl come up on ya?”

  “My uncle Reynard used to tell me,” Jackson said, “that there wasn’t nuthin’ in life for free. He was right about that. I got together with Tanya a couple’a times but when it started to get serious I explained about Jewelle. I told her that I would not leave my woman. But you know, Easy, when a black woman meet a brothah on a yacht and finds out that he brings down a hunnert and fi’ty thousand dollars a year—”

  “That’s how much you told her you made or that’s really how much you make?”

  “That’s the base. I didn’t even tell her about my bonuses.”

  Damn.

  “And so she was mad about Jewelle?” I asked.

  “She knows a woman who knows another girl that works for Jewelle. Somehow through that pipeline they let JJ know what I been up to. I tried to explain. I was halfway successful ’cause she didn’t th’ow me all the way out the house. It took me a week to move back in our bed, though.

  “But in the meantime she was so mad that she had a thing with that Percy Bidwell. She don’t know I know but when she got together with him it was at a Hollywood hotel I know pretty good ’cause JP go there sometimes. JP’s driver was in there with a business client and he saw ’em.”

  “What you gonna do?” I asked.

  “It ain’t that, Easy. I get why she did it but now she’s all upset and Percy pushin’ on her to get you to help him. I’m pretty sure he’s threatenin’ to tell me about them bein’ together.”

  “But you already know.”

  “But she don’t know that and I’m afraid that if I tell her she’ll get all crazy again just thinkin’ ’bout what happened. An’ this time she might just leave my stupid ass.”

  I would have laughed but I could see how torn up my friend was.

  “Jackson?” Jewelle called from the back door.

  “Yeah, baby?”

  “Easy out there with you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Jewelle, when she was younger, was a plain Jane kind of girl: basic brown and round-featured, she had a slight figure and no outstanding attributes. But as she aged there got to be something alluring about her.

  “Feather tells me that she’s been workin’ part-time for the Japanese people across the street,” she said to me.

  “Yes.”

  “I told her that maybe she’d like to see what it was like workin’ in an office. I invited her to spend the night and come to work with me in the morning. Is that okay?”

  “Sure it is. And you could get some mothering practice in.”

  Jewelle kissed me on the cheek. There was a tender spot in our hearts for each other.
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  “Thanks, Easy,” she said. “Jackson, we should go. I want to make sure that Feather gets to bed on time.”

  “I’ll be right in, honey.”

  After Jewelle was back in the house I asked, “The baby?”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t care. Anything that comes from Jewelle is fine by me.”

  “You want me to do what Percy wants?”

  “I cain’t tell you what to do, Ease. I just want him off’a Jewelle and things to be back like they was.”

  32

  Staying alone in the big house was yet another step toward me claiming the new place as my home. The little yellow dog scrabbled around my feet as I wandered the floors. I went through all the rooms, taking mental inventory of space and the things I’d need to make it work. I’d sit on beds and chairs, the stairs, and even on the floor now and then—trying to get different views of the spaces and their potentials.

  At one point I sat on the living room couch, then reclined to take in the space from that point of view. I must have been more tired than I knew because I fell asleep there. It was a comfortable rest with only one brief dream of me driving over the side of the ocean cliff.

  When I awoke I was sleeping on my side facing the backrest of the sofa. Frenchie had jumped up and over me to nestle between my chest and the cushion. When I got up the dog cracked his eyes at me and decided that the best course of action was to go back to sleep.

  After my third cup of coffee and one trip to the backyard to smoke I walked up to the pay phone at Pico and Point View. There I dialed a number.

  “Yes?” she said with a sweetness that was laced with fear.

  “Belle?”

  “Detective Rawlins.”

  “Have you heard from your son?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I was wondering something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know who his last girlfriend was?”

  “There’s been a few but the one he always went back to was Sister Godfreys.”

  “Come again?”